Yeah, the one about not knowing it and being doomed to repeat it? Well, here’s exhibit number bajillion, Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. This likely sounds familiar to you: a man of ill repute, shady origin, and gross appetites seeks to capitalize on the population’s racist and xenophobic impulses by becoming the head of a large organization; along the way he makes a lot of money by extorting government officials and breaks a ton of laws because the entire legal apparatus is in his pocket. And, oh yeah, he has designs on absolute power:
Late in his prison term, Stephenson was visited by Will Remy. His old adversary asked him if he’d been serious about running for the White House. Steve said his plan was real. “You wouldn’t have called it President,” he said. “The form of government might have changed. You might have had a dictator.”
Egan’s book details the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan as racists took the template provided by the earlier iteration of the group in the South and took it nationwide in the early twentieth century. There was a strong Klan presence in nearly every state, but Indiana in particular was gripped by the KKK. Egan clearly explains the economic and demographic reasons that the Klan was able to have such an awful presence in Indiana communities. (Both of my parents were born and raised in Indiana, and I went to graduate school there; those reasons remain.) But the Klan may not have been what it was without the demagoguery and charisma of DC “Steve” Stephenson, who drew thousands of Hoosiers to KKK rallies featuring his long harangues against POC, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, the mentally ill–anyone not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Stephenson was a bad guy, using false piety and advocating eugenics to Make America White Again. He sexually assaults several women in full knowledge of his associates, knowing that the Indiana legal system will not do anything because he owns them and their careers.
Content warning: Egan does not shy away from describing the crime that precipitates Stephenson’s–and the Klan’s–downfall, and it is shockingly brutal. But the crime is so base that the white male jury has to pay attention.
This book is great–clearly written with a great sense of drama and pacing. But the story itself makes me angry, not just because we allowed the KKK to be such a force for evil not once but twice, but also because Stephenson’s rise is a template for what we are dealing with now. The only difference is that our Stephenson has evaded any meaningful punishment and is rapidly working on that dictator part.
