A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan

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'A Fever in the Heartland' by Timothy Egan

A woman is raped by a brutal man, who while holding no office, has command over office holders, the Republican Party and the loyalty of a significant bloc of citizens. Despite his blustery threats, he’s convicted by a jury. A Fever in the Heartland describes events of the 1920s that sound familiar in the 2020s. The brutal man, slinging insults and recriminations, was D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of Indiana, a stronghold of the populist movement called the Ku Klux Klan. During the 1920s they gained millions of members outside the South by mobilizing anxiety and resentment against elites and minorities.

The Klan’s control a century ago over state and local governments through much of the U.S., and its influence in Congress, is both shocking and instructive when compared to the current political situation. Like their 21st century descendants, the Klan drew support from white Evangelicals for their culture war against the Other—in the 1920s this meant Roman Catholics, Jews, Greeks and Eastern Europeans as well as Blacks, Hispanics and East Asians. A Fever in the Heartland’s author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan, sketches that history in broad strokes.

The book’s good news is that, although Stephenson’s victim, Madge Oberholtzer, died from self-inflicted injuries as she tried to escape from him, she gave a statement that was admitted in the court trial that followed. Despite attempts to smear her, other women came forth. A courageous Republican attorney took her case, supporting by a courageous Republican prosecutor. Death plots against them were thwarted by Irish cops (the Klan hated their Catholicism). Egan’s subtitle is hyperbolic. Oberholtzer’s much-publicized case did not singlehandedly stop the Klan but was one in a parade of infamy that shocked the public and made Klan membership, corporate sponsorship and political endorsements disreputable. The white sheets retreated to the South but, alas, the problem of race didn’t recede with them.

A Fever in the Heartland mentions James Cameron, a Black teenager miraculously pared from an Indiana lynching. He survived, moved to Milwaukee and founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum.