"A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them" by Timothy Egan; Viking (428 pages, $30)
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Rich, famous and charismatic, D.C. Stephenson had everything in the world except shame.
He was a congenital liar and a perpetual grifter, a vicious bully and a sexual predator. And Stephenson regretted none of it.
Despite a litany of crimes, his lawyers kept him out of jail. His money kept politicians in his pocket. And his ability to intimidate kept him in power. Stephenson had serious plans to run for president.
Then one person brought him to justice.
Timothy Egan chronicles the chilling story in “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.” By 1924, the white terrorists had not only pushed their way into politics but had a plan to win the White House.
They came terrifyingly close.
“In the golden age of fraternal organizations, the Klan was the largest and most powerful of the secret societies,” Egan writes. “In Colorado, an open Klansman won the governorship … ‘Every Man under the Capitol Dome a Klansman’ was his motto. He joined another Klan-backed governor in the West, Walter M. Pierce, in Oregon. ‘Keeping America a Land for Americans’ was his slogan.”
By the mid-1920s, the KKK had nearly 6 million members and plenty more sympathizers. “The Klan claimed fifteen United States senators under its control, and seventy-five members of the House of Representatives,” Egan writes. When the Klan scheduled a rally in D.C. in 1925, 50,000 marchers showed up. Four times as many people turned out to cheer them on.
And much of the Klan’s growing success and influence was because of Stephenson.
The barely educated son of a Texas sharecropper, by the time Stephenson reached Indiana in the early ‘20s, he had left behind two wives and a string of jobs. He told his new neighbors he was a bachelor, a lawyer, and a war hero. Not true, but facts didn’t waylay Stephenson, whether he was selling the Klan or himself.
“He could talk a dog off a meat wagon,” Egan writes.
And in 1921, for $12 a week, the huckster took on a new product: the Ku Klux Klan.
At first, Stephenson was just an assistant recruiter, but he dreamed bigger than that. Under his leadership, Indiana became the Klan’s fastest-growing state in the North, adding 2,000 members weekly. Stephenson also helped promote the Klan in the Midwest and Northwest, railing against Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants.
Millions of people, it seemed, were willing to pay $10 to join ($6 extra for the hood and robe) just to get that license to hate. At one point, Stephenson estimated he raked in nearly $30 million in dues and fees. His cut was 40%.
He used that wealth. He paid ministers to persuade worshippers to join and support the Klan’s crusade for “good Christian values.” He bribed politicians to appoint Klan-friendly sheriffs. Meanwhile, he gave bootleg-fueled orgies in his Indiana mansion that, one observer wrote, “would have shamed Nero.”
Of course, the Klansmen’s old terrorism and intimidation continued. The difference was that under Stephenson, they began winning legislative victories, too. They helped push through the Immigration Act of 1924, restricting most new arrivals to Northern Europeans. Other laws they supported — from teaching creationism to forced sterilization of “the unfit” — were passed, too.
Not that they didn’t meet opposition. When Stephenson organized an all-out march on one of his chief enemies in Indiana, the University of Notre Dame, Irish-American undergrads chased the bigots down alleys, pelting them with potatoes. The Klan retreated in terror.
But it fell to an Indiana woman named Madge Oberholtzer to bring down Stephenson.
Oberholtzer had no sympathy for the organization. She had gone to college with Black students and supported female suffrage. Happily single, 28, and living with her parents, she worked for a state literacy program. But then the program was scheduled to be cut.
Oberholtzer disliked everything Stephenson stood for, but she knew he had helped elect the current governor. And Stephenson even lived in her neighborhood. One day, she wrangled an introduction.
Stephenson was receptive. He suggested he might find her another state job. The more they met about different career opportunities, the more uncomfortable Oberholtzer grew. Stephenson was always drinking and brandishing a gun. He was always talking about running for president — and about how much he liked her.
Finally, one night at his home, he demanded she accompany him on an out-of-town trip. When she refused, he had two henchmen hold her down and pour liquor down her throat. She was hustled into a car and, with a gun in her ribs, onto a train. She threatened Stephenson with the police.
“I’m the law in Indiana,” he snapped.
Once the train pulled out, Stephenson threw her into a compartment and raped her, biting her, even chewing on her, leaving open wounds. When the train stopped, he brought the dazed woman to a hotel. The next morning, she begged Stephenson to have someone take her to a drugstore, so she could at least buy bandages.
Instead, she bought poison.
Stephenson panicked when he found out she’d taken it. Refusing to stop at a hospital, his bodyguards drove them home. First, they held Oberholtzer captive in a garage, then dropped her at her home. Her parents called a doctor. Once their daughter told them what happened, they made another call — to a lawyer.
He took down her account.
On April 14, 1925, not quite one month after the attack, Oberholtzer died.
On Oct. 29, Stephenson went on trial for murder.
He remained as sure of himself as ever. How could he be guilty of murdering someone who died by suicide? His lawyers also blamed the victim, insisting the relationship was consensual.
But the prosecutor was smarter.
The prosecutor resisted the urge to put the Klan on trial. Who could tell if jurors had pointy hoods at home? And he focused on the crime. He produced doctors who swore the wounds had hastened Oberholtzer’s death. He had her dying declaration admitted as evidence.
“This case,” he insisted, “is to determine whether we are to protect the sanctity of the honor and chastity of womanhood.”
The jury found Stephenson guilty of murder in the second degree.
The judge sentenced him to life.
Meanwhile, coincidentally, other powerful Klansmen were being called to account. An Oregon leader was found guilty of raping his secretary and later killing her during a botched abortion. Three Colorado Klansmen were arrested for child molestation. The Klan’s claim that it promoted “moral values” was being revealed as the lie it was.
By the end of the ‘20s, membership had fallen by 90%.
Released from prison in 1950, Stephenson returned to wandering from small town to small town and seducing and abandoning women. In 1961, in Missouri, he was caught trying to force a teenage girl into his car. The 70-year-old pervert got a suspended sentence, provided he leave the state. He died in 1966.
He never expressed any regrets. Instead, years later, he remained proud of how powerful he had been and how close he came to ultimate power.
Still, “You wouldn’t have called it president,” he said later, correcting assumptions about his goal. A better word, he confided, was dictator.
