RECCOMMENDED READING: A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND
The scene, in some ways, could not have been more commonplace. On July 4, 1923, in a creekside park in Kokomo, Ind., families celebrated Independence Day with flags and bunting, watermelon and pie, patriotic songs, a parade. Commonplace — except that these families, many thousands in number, wore the white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
Banners insisted that “America is for Americans”; floats portrayed Klansmen defending women from Black people and Catholics. As the day’s featured speaker — David C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana — stepped out of the rear cockpit of a Klan-branded biplane, members
of the crowd dropped to their knees and, in rapture, reached out their arms. “My worthy subjects,” Stephenson exulted.
D.C. Stephenson, the central figure in the Klan’s expansion across the American Midwest of the 1920s, its chokehold on civic life and political
power, and its ultimate collapse, is the focus of “A Fever in the Heartland,” a powerful new book by Timothy Egan.
The 1920s marked what the historian Linda Gordon, calls “the second coming of the K.K.K.” The new Klan drew on the same deep reservoir of racial
animus, the same mythology of white victimhood, as its 19th-century antecedent...READ MORE
