Hubris can be difficult to resist, no matter how well one appreciates the danger. Foremost, in his new book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them”, Timothy Egan indicates just how self-destructive hubris can be.
It led to the downfall of David C Stephenson, a sadistic, grifting, backstabbing, vengeful, womanizing grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the center of Egan’s story of extremism and white rage, a tale with many parallels to our own time. Similar overconfidence might yet bring down Donald J Trump. For sure, reading Egan’s gripping book, my own hubris nearly waylaid me.
At first, it seemed no writer could possibly offer anything different from what had already been compellingly presented on TV. In 1989, I was among rapt multitudes introduced by the miniseries Cross of Fire to this lurid tale from the second rise of the Klan.
The KKK was born at the close of the civil war, in resentment of burgeoning African American independence. By the 1890s it was fading, with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, but the first world war “birthed” a more virulent second coming. Determined to keep Black people in their place, klansmen were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Native American, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-abortion and anti-communist.
Cross of Fire, made 70 years later, concerned a rape and murder. Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old educator, unmarried and living with her parents. Stephenson, her assailant, led the Indiana branch of the Klan. Armed with a private force, 30,000-strong, wielding graft and bribes, he reigned supreme, the governor and many other officials firmly under his thumb. When he was brought to trial, he was in no doubt he would get off.
Cross of Fire was shown in two segments, two hours each, and reached about 20 million viewers. Back then, I think, a certain optimism was still alive in America. With most social struggles behind us, it was broadly imagined, we were well on the way to rectifying our worst problems. In that context, a televised account of the Klan’s insidious rise across 1920s America seemed almost hard to believe.
But the truth is chilling. At one point, the Klan reached millions of white Americans. Feeling threatened by newly enfranchised women, growing numbers of immigrants and African Americans made restive by commendable war service, many such white men felt certain they had been robbed of the position their fathers and grandfathers knew. Stevenson was a crusading would-be strong man. If not plain-spoken, he was at least an ignorant man’s idea of a wise one. Seemingly amiable, seemingly much like those who followed him, to some he felt like an answered prayer.
If this is starting to sound familiar, back in 1989 it seemed outrageously implausible. Weren’t the 1920s the Roaring Twenties, the rebellious, modernizing Jazz Age? Was it not an era of prosperity and wellbeing? The problem is a matter of nuance. Setbacks or backlash attendant to progress are seldom acknowledged with the same emphasis as advancement. That’s why it is imperative to teach all American history, good or bad.
The idea of making America great again is an old one, rooted in a nativist embrace of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy. A hundred years ago, many were throughly taken in by nationalist rhetoric and circus-like spectacle.
Stephenson had no education beyond high school. He was an ardent fan of Mussolini. He claimed he had studied psychology and knew how to play on people’s emotions. Klan rallies whipped up followers, as frenzied as any at Nuremberg, into ecstatic orgies of cheering. Some called beseechingly for Stephenson to become president. In the flickering light of flaming crosses, large banners insisted: “America is for Americans.” It all planted a seed in a man convinced that everything – and anyone – could be bought.
In his book, Egan explains how, much as with African Americans and the Black church, to many whites, Klan membership “gave meaning, shape and purpose to the days”.
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From neo-Confederates to hardline Brexiters, how perplexing is the malfeasance, the villainy, the rank hypocrisy of those who preach law and order and freedom and justice the loudest? It all brings to mind Churchill’s observation about Stalin and Russia after the pact with Hitler in 1939: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
Undaunted, Egan examines and sorts out the complexities and contradictions of the rise of Stephenson and the Klan. In doing so, unlike a writer for TV, he has no need for dramatic license.
In Cross of Fire, Oberholtzer marries Stephenson – or so she thinks. It turns out the officiant is a henchman. This detail is important. It sets into motion a supposed honeymoon, a joyride on a private railway car to Chicago, a wedding trip that facilitates Stephenson’s crime.
Dealing in fact, Egan reveals that not even a pretend wedding took place. Oberholtzer believed Stephenson could keep her state job from being cut but she never trusted him to the extent of getting married. She was drugged and taken by force.
On her deathbed, she summoned the will to give an account of her ordeal. A transcript was presented in court. So was a doctor’s testimony. As much as the poison Oberholtzer ingested, the doctor said, sepsis, from deep bites on her face, breasts, tongue and elsewhere, resulted in Oberholtzer’s death. With timely attention, her life might have been saved.
Another fact absent from Cross of Fire but featured in Egan’s account is yet more disturbing. Stephenson was found guilty of Oberholtzer’s murder and sentenced to life, but he was never chastened. He broke parole and was re-imprisoned but he ultimately died a natural death, in 1966, aged 74. He tricked, cheated, married and sexually assaulted many times more. It is this learning of the limits of the wages of sin that distinguishes A Fever in the Heartland as an honest look at what really happened.
A Fever in the Heartland is published in the US by Viking
