The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland 0253052181, 9780253052186

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Klan Arrives One
2 The Dangers to America
3 Three to Hell in a Handbasket
4 The Politics of Mediocrity
5 Stephenson Goes Down
6 The Klan’s Enemies Step Up
7 The Klan Returns
8 The Klan Is Dead
Notes
Time Line
Bibliography: Learning More About the Ku Klux Klan
Index

Citation preview

KLAN THE KU KLUX

IN THE HEARTLAND

Pr a ise for t h e fir st e dit ion “In examining the motivations and methods of the Ku Klux Klan, Madison’s lively, accessible and all-too-timely account explores how previous generations have grappled with the age-old question, ‘Who is an American?,’ a question vthat continues to defi ne and divide the nation today. Whether addressing politics, media, religion, or basketball, this meticulously researched and expansive work brilliantly illustrates how, through the Klan, we can better understand American history today.” —Tom Rice, University of St Andrews, author of White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan “‘Our democracy demands that we open all the pages in the book of history,’ James Madison writes in this important study of the Klan in Indiana. . . . Madison counters many of the common myths surrounding the origin, power, and appeal of the Klan to Midwesterners in the 1920s. Madison’s focus is on the robed men and women, neither naive nor particularly duped by a charismatic leader, who belonged to the organization, and on the political turmoil surrounding prohibition, suff rage, economics, and religion that caused them to join. The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland sheds much-needed light on the unread pages of our past that continue to reverberate into our present.” —Susan Neville, Butler University, author of Indiana Winter “James Madison, author of the classic A Lynching in the Heartland, gives a sweeping portrayal of the ugly role of the Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland and its blot on American history. He portrays its rise to power in Indiana in the 1920s and its current iterations in ‘graffiti of Nazi flags painted outside a Hamilton county synagogue in 2018’ and in ‘Klan recruiting notices that appeared across town’ in Bloomington in 2019. Th is book burns.” —Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fift ies and Going All The Way

JAMES H. MADISON

KLAN THE KU KLUX

IN THE HEARTLAND

India na Universit y Pr ess

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2020 by James H. Madison All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2020 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Madison, James H., author. Title: The Ku Klux Klan in the heartland / James H. Madison, Indiana University Press. Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020015921 (print) | LCCN 2020015922 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253052186 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253052193 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ku Klux Klan (1915- )—History. | Racism—United States—History. | United States—Race relations—History. Classification: LCC HS2330.K63 M227 2020 (print) | LCC HS2330. K63 (ebook) | DDC 322.4/2097709042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015921 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015922

To my family

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 1. The Klan Arrives 9 2. The Dangers to America 84 3. To Hell in a Handbasket 97 4. The Politics of Mediocrity 112 5. Stephenson Goes Down 127 6. The Klan’s Enemies Step Up 138 7. The Klan Returns 175 8. The Klan Is Dead 189 Notes 199 Time Line 229 Bibliography: Learning More about the Ku Klux Klan Index 237

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M y fir st th a nk-you goes to sever a l fr iends a nd experts who read an early draft of this book. More than once I returned to them for follow-up advice. They are Richard Nation, Allen Safianow, Jason Lantzer, Greg Sumner, Dan Carpenter, and George Hanlin. Additional colleagues who read or advised me on particular subjects include Joanne E. Passet, Eric Mundell, Nicole Etcheson, and Thomas Hamm. My research took me to libraries and archives where my appreciation deepened for the essential work these institutions do to gather and preserve our history. First is my home place in Bloomington, the Indiana University Libraries, including the Lilly Library and the University Archives. Important help elsewhere came from the Indiana Historical Society Library, Indiana State Library, Indiana State Archives, Ball State University Library, Eckhart Public Library, and the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Many kind friends and strangers assisted in locating images, checking facts, and adding details. I’m grateful to Suzanne Hahn, Eric Mundell, Susan Sutton, and Nadia Kousari (Indiana Historical Society Library); Justin Clark and Brittany Kropf (Indiana State Library); Claire Horton (Indiana State Archives); Stephen G. McShane (Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest); Elizabeth Hogan (Notre Dame University); Ron Morris, James J. Connolly, and Becky Marangelli (Ball State University); Thomas Hamm (Earlham ix

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College); Stephen Towne (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis); Paul McNeil (Hancock County Public Library); Leslie Behm (Michigan State University Libraries); Curt B. Witcher (Allen County Public Library); Thomas R. Lonnberg (Evansville Museum); Wesley W. Wilson (DePauw University); Dina M. Kellams and Bradley D. Cook (Indiana University Archives); and Alan Sweeny II (Eckhart Public Library). Thanks also to Michael G. Cartwright, Philip Amerson, Jana Barnes, Sue King, David Baird, Dellie Craig, Travis Childs, Peter Dekever, Matt Johnson, Steven J. Schmidt, Steve Barnette, Sarah Berndt, David Sigler, Patrick J. Furlong, Dave Broman, Jill Weiss Simins, Dawn Mitchell, Donald G. Boggs, Nanette Esseck Brewer, David Heighway, and David B. Johnson. A thank-you also to artist Bill Woodrow, who kindly allowed me to include the photograph of his Listening to History sculpture. I offer special thanks to Indiana University, including the Department of History, where colleagues and staff have been intellectual partners and friends for several decades, and to the many students in my classes who taught me. I’m grateful also to Thomas and Kathryn Miller for their generous contribution years ago that has facilitated my research. Indiana University continues to support an outstanding scholarly press. The talented professionals who helped make this book include director Gary Dunham and Anna Francis, Dave Hulsey, David Miller, Pam Rude, Ashley Runyon, and Stephen Williams. Caryl Boyer’s copyediting greatly improved the manuscript. Errors that remain are my responsibility. Of course, I’m most grateful to my family—to grandchildren Kaitlin, Anna, James, and Whitney, who give hope for the twenty-first century; to my children, Julia and John, and their spouses, Adam and Julie; and to my partner of many years, Jeanne.

KLAN THE KU KLUX

IN THE HEARTLAND

INTRODUCTION

The Ku K lux K l a n of the 1920s was as da r k as the night and as American as apple pie. More forcefully than any organization before or since, it pushed into the national conversation the question of who is an American. Klan answers came in voices of extraordinary power. Those voices ring into the twenty-first century even if the tones have changed. A central purpose of this book is to demonstrate that there can be no American history without a history of the Ku Klux Klan.1 The United States has had three Klan movements. The first began just after the Civil War, was limited to the defeated Confederacy, and used terror and violence to keep newly freed slaves in a subordinate position.2 The second Klan movement took place in the 1920s and is the primary subject of this book. National in scope and expansive in enemies and goals, the second movement grew to become the most popular of the three. The third Klan, which appeared in the 1960s and is the subject of chapters 7 and 8, was strongest in the South but organized also in northern states to turn back the movement for racial equality. Each of the three Klans is different in membership and objectives. Confusing them has caused large misunderstandings.

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The second Klan, of the 1920s, spread to every state. Although based in Atlanta, it grew to large numbers in northern states. Several million white, Protestant, native-born Americans paid their dues and donned their robes, from New York and Pennsylvania to Colorado, Oregon, and California, with strength especially in the Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. In the American heartland, the Klan found its best people. The 1920s Klan captured and exploited prejudices that divided Americans into “us” and “them” on the bases of nativity, race, ethnicity, and religion. “Who is an American?” became in Klan language “Who is 100 percent American?” In its elaborate answers, the Klan deployed the worst of the nation’s intolerance to make bigotry respectable among those who considered themselves the most decent of citizens. The Klan crusade built on centuries of struggle with differences but extended to other ingredients that make up the American story. Citizens in robes and hoods found causes in alcohol consumption, gender roles, law enforcement, political corruption, Hollywood films, backseat sex, family values, and the rapidly changing times of the 1920s. These issues created fear among many that the United States was heading in the wrong direction. The Klan burst forth at a particular time in American history. The Great War, later known as World War I, released anxieties that persisted into the 1920s. Wartime propaganda had created frightening images of the German Hun and the Russian Bolshevik. Many Americans decided to simplify the chaos overseas by identifying all outsiders as threats to the nation. After the Great War, they turned away from the troubles of a corrupt Europe to seek comfort in “America first.” Marching with American flags and Christian crosses, the Klan promised to redeem a nation in crisis. On a muggy summer day in 1925, thousands of robed men and women gathered near the nation’s domed Capitol. They removed their hoods to show their faces, lifted banners from their local Klaverns, and paraded proudly down

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Pennsylvania Avenue. They marched in “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known,” the Washington Post reported, as crowds lined the sidewalks six deep to cheer. Among the marchers in this deeply segregated city on the Potomac River were Hoosiers determined to remake America into their image.3 T h e I n di a na H e a rt l a n d The Ku Klux Klan is best understood at regional, state, and local levels. Although it was a national organization with a hierarchy of officers, regulations, and machinery, most members joined, believed, and acted at lower levels. Klan members shared nationally based values and objectives, but significant differences existed from place to place and especially between northern and southern Klans. Often, primary loyalty was to the local Klavern.4 Indiana is the perfect place to understand the northern Klan. The organization was as strong there as in any other state. The available documentation is unusually rich (a testament to the good work of libraries, archives, and historical societies). In the Hoosier State, details of membership and leadership combine with intriguing social and political contexts to create a rich narrative. Indiana’s Klan makes an enthralling story. And that story, while having its particularities, is also the American story. “Ain’t God Good to Indiana?” So wrote the poet William Herschell in 1919. Hoosiers prided themselves on being the most American of Americans—the friendly, commonsense, and good people of the heartland. They helped their neighbors, valued their individual freedoms, and rejected government interference in their personal lives. They took pride, one of their leading novelists wrote in 1928, in a reputation “for seeing life steadily and seeing it whole—good old Indiana, with an encyclopedia and a bath-tub in every farm house.”5 Yet behind the bucolic image were incongruities, captured in writer Irvin Cobb’s description of a state that “holds by the pioneering culture and its offshoots—old fashioned cookery, old-fashioned decencies,

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old-fashioned virtues, old-fashioned vices, old-fashioned bigotries, old-fashioned philosophies springing out of the soil and smelling of the pennryrile and the sassafrock.”6 For all their easygoing ways, Hoosiers could retain “old-fashioned bigotries” as they clung to their tribal attachments, ranging from extended family ties to small groups that shared religious, social, and political values. There were many such folks, since the state was more homogeneous than most, with a large proportion of white, nativeborn inhabitants and a small number of foreign-born and African American people, though that was changing. One of the prime affiliations for the majority of Hoosiers was the Protestant religion. There were smaller numbers of Catholics and few Jewish citizens.7 Among these people of “old-fashioned decencies” were some three hundred thousand who joined the Ku Klux Klan, as chapter 1 explains. Up to a third of the state’s native-born white Protestant men signed up, along with unknown numbers of women.8 “In some Indiana towns,” Cobb wrote, “there’s hardly an extra clean sheet on hand in case of accidents or company coming.”9 Behind those sheets, journalist Elmer Davis reported in 1926, were “hill-billies, the Great Unteachables.” An Indiana native who spoke with a Hoosier twang, Davis had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and then made a distinguished career in journalism in New York and Washington, DC. He was not the last elite to misread the Klan or, more broadly, the people of the heartland.10 Klan membership rosters, in fact, list few “Unteachables” but rather a wide range of people, most from the middle ranks of society. Respectable Methodists, lawyers, Masons, police officers, churchwomen, teachers, mayors, and businessmen joined the Klan in Indiana and across the Midwest. Among the Klan’s most popular speakers were Daisy Douglas Barr, a Quaker minister who traveled through central Indiana, and Aubrey H. Moore, the preacher at First Christian Church in Noblesville. Klan women and men saw themselves not as bigoted extremists but as good Christians and good patriots joining proudly in a moral crusade. As wrongheaded as it seems today, that conviction is essential to understanding the people of the Klan.

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There has long been a comforting myth that these good Americans were dupes of manipulators. If they simply fell victim to the poison peddled by Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson and others of his ilk, they are more easily pardoned. The historical evidence now requires a very different conclusion. Stephenson’s leadership is important, but many accounts have given him far more attention than warranted, as this book argues. Responsibility rests not only with a wicked leader but also in the hearts of Klan members in farm communities and cities, social clubs and churches, political offices and businesses. The men and women who pulled on their robes and hoods did so with knowledge and pride. They marched with purpose. They stood reverently as the burning crosses lit their pale faces. They knew that they were 100 percent Americans and others were not. They were not rubes. They were not manipulated. The Klan was not a fluke outburst to be dismissed as an unfortunate glitch in American history. White native-born Protestants were the Klan. They believed themselves to be 100 percent Americans as they claimed the righteousness of their religion, the purity of their race, and the sanctity of their patriotism. All others were suspect, even dangerous, as chapter 2 contends. To Hoosier Klan members, the most dangerous enemies were Catholics and immigrants. Less important were African Americans and Jews, though they, too, were certainly not 100 percent Americans. The Klan hierarchy placed pure, white Americans at the top with lesser peoples below—people Klan members believed were sending the nation to hell in a handbasket, as chapter 3 describes. Hoosier Klan members in the 1920s were seldom perpetrators of bloody violence. They did engage in vigilante enforcement of their moral code and occasionally administered a physical beating to an offender. Most victims of Klan discipline were white. Contrary to popular myths, there is no documented Klan lynching in Indiana in the 1920s. No murder of anyone, white or black, Catholic or Jew. Even at the national level in the 1920s, historian Thomas Pegram concluded, “Klan lynch mobs were rare, even in the violent South.”11 There were lynchings—many in the South and some in the North—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including one in Indiana in

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1930.12 But stories of the Indiana Klan of the 1920s armed with lynch ropes are distortions of history that can obscure deeper threats. If the Indiana Klan was mostly nonviolent, it nonetheless had immense power to intimidate others. Shrewd Klan members used the threat of violence to subdue their enemies. Robes, masks, and burning crosses instilled fear. Anonymous letters of hate caused unease. Vigilante law enforcement in the dark of night lent the group a sinister power. Such deliberate provocations mixed with stories of violence elsewhere to convey the Klan’s intended message of warning and exclusion and to create fear. The specter of violence was doubtless most traumatic for African Americans, all of whom had firsthand experience of white prejudice and many of whom carried stories of terror handed down across generations. Power came also from political action. The Klan created extraordinary chaos when it entered politics, as chapter 4 explains. The political agenda focused on the passage of anti-Catholic and antiimmigration laws and enforcement of Prohibition. So serious was the sin of drink that the Klan pushed toward unprecedented government intrusion into personal choices. Klan agendas also expanded to attack corruption in local government, improve public schools and libraries, and assist the poor. Such Klan reforms gained force from one of the nation’s most sophisticated political machines. For a time, it appeared that the Klan would take over Indiana’s state government. Grand Dragon Stephenson was a leader of unusual talent who boasted, “I am the law in Indiana,” but the indispensable source of Klan political power came from ordinary citizens who voted in free elections. An essential part of the Klan story is opposition, described in chapter 6. Contrary to later assumptions, most Hoosiers did not join.13 But neither did most speak out, preferring the comfort of silence. Opposition was slow to form as Klan intimidations increased. Dissenters rose, nonetheless, to accuse the Klan of overturning traditions of individual freedom, small government, and American ideals. Never was the Klan without enemies. Challengers employed the democratic machinery of law, courts, and ballot boxes. Some even began to speak of ideals of tolerance and pluralism. A Fort Wayne

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newspaper condemned the Klan as “the most un-American, vicious and impossible organization that ever insulted the nation.”14 In one of many ironies of Klan history, an organization dedicated to exclusion stimulated voices of inclusion and glimpses of progressive arguments that would not gain wide support until the late twentieth century. Here is one of the bright notes in the tragedy. It helped opponents that the Klan suffered internal divisions. As chapter 5 explains, not all members were committed to the cause. Among them were men and women on the make. Among them were charlatans who created a “saturnalia of corruption, malfeasance, mendacity, intimidation and double-crossing.”15 At the top was Grand Dragon Stephenson, who emerged as one of the all-time wicked Americans. It took the death of a young woman to bring him to justice. The Klan’s internal strife meant that fiery crosses, bigoted oratory, and political organizing did not lead to great victories. The Klan certainly helped impose immigration restriction on the nation and enforce Prohibition, but its record of concrete political achievement in state and nation was otherwise anemic. The Klan seemed dead as the Great Depression of the 1930s turned attention elsewhere. Yet in the 1960s, pointed hoods returned to the Midwest to cover heads filled with narrow, hate-filled racism, as the last two chapters explain. Small in numbers, a new generation nonetheless scratched old scars, especially among African Americans. Even in the twenty-first century, there are glimpses of the Klan legacy in the white nationalist outbursts that extend from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Washington, DC, and into the heartland. These new hate groups are radically different from the Klan of the 1920s. They do, in fact, include many “Great Unteachables,” but also among them are savvy political manipulators and ordinary citizens disdainful of the nation’s best ideals. With a tight focus on the Klan in the heartland, this book drills to the core of American history. Running through that history is racial, ethnic, and religious conflict and hatred. Some self-styled patriots have sought to sweep this kind of story under the carpet and replace it with myth.16 Out of ignorance, selfishness, or malevolence, they

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deny the past. They prefer to tell only comforting stories that celebrate American greatness. They manufacture bedtime tales suitable for frightened children. Such comfort history violates the craft of historical scholarship and enables Americans to sustain some of our worst traditions. More than any other part of our history, Klan-like beliefs connect our past and present with a venomous tenacity. We can never repay the damage done by white Americans to those of color, by Protestants to Catholics, by Christians to Jews, by native-born to foreign-born, by heterosexuals to those of different orientations. But we can learn, we can acknowledge. We can open our eyes and ears to the American past. Our democracy requires that we open all the pages in the book of history.17

ONE

THE KLAN ARRIVES

From the Ohio R i v er to L a k e Michiga n, bur ning crosses lit cornfields, hillsides, and courthouse squares. Mysterious robed figures marched—at first only a few, then more. Hoosiers were curious and sometimes frightened, unsure of the meaning and purpose of white robes and fiery crosses. Who was behind the masks? What was the purpose? Why would native-born white Protestants join the Ku Klux Klan? Bu r n i ng Crosse s a n d Hoode d M a rch er s With the Christmas season of 1922 came a surging Klan presence. On Christmas Eve, near the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, a cross burst into flames at exactly midnight. That same night, citizens in Fort Wayne to the north and Bedford to the south saw their first burning crosses. Rumors spread that a cross had burned in every Indiana county that Christmas season. The spectacles continued in early 1923. Crosses burned in Irvington and in Shelbyville on New Year’s Eve, on a hill above French Lick on January 4, and then in Noblesville, Bloomington, Vevay, and Mooresville. In the early months of 1923, every issue of the Klan’s new weekly newspaper, the Indianapolis Fiery Cross, reported on burning crosses.1 9

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Christmas 1922 also brought white-robed men delivering holiday gifts to needy neighbors. Selfless service to others and obedience to the teachings of Jesus was their mission, they said. “The Indianapolis Klan played Santa Claus to more than one hundred worthy but unfortunate families,” the Fiery Cross reported. A dozen trucks distributed “bushel baskets of groceries, candies, shoes and bed clothing.” Included on the delivery route were “several colored and Catholic families,” since “the Klan made no racial nor religious discrimination whatever.” The gift-bearing Klansmen greeted recipients only with the words “Merry Christmas.”2 Klan members also began to visit churches. Robed figures marched up the aisle on Sunday mornings and spoke not a word. Entering an Anderson church in early 1923, they silently presented the minister an American flag and an envelope with cash while the church orchestra played “Onward Christian Soldiers,” after which the congregation stood and sang “America.” At a Methodist church in Carmel, hooded men carrying American flags knelt at the altar and then presented Reverend K. R. Thompson a purse full of cash. In Windfall, in Tipton County, fourteen robed Klansmen joined a Quaker revival service led by Reverend Mildred Miller, who was preaching on 100 percent Protestantism and 100 percent Americanism. In White County, some members of the Chalmers Methodist Church debated whether to accept the Klan’s gift but eventually decided to do so.3 Parades were the grandest spectacles. Two hundred Klansmen with arms folded marched silently though Noblesville in late January 1923, as they did in Portland, in Jay County. Marchers in Frankfort’s first parade that February gathered at the Clinton County fairgrounds to watch a cross set ablaze. Two Klansmen then mounted white horses to lead the procession. The Muncie marching band (soon known as the best Klan band in the state) preceded a massive American flag carried by a dozen Klansmen, which was followed, in turn, by several floats. Hooded marchers carried signs reading “Separation of Church and State,” “Law and Order,” “Protection of Pure Womanhood,” and “Just Laws and Liberty.” The day ended with an initiation of several hundred new members. A parade on Main Street in Richmond in fall

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1923 included floats and ten marching bands, fireworks that outlined an American flag and the words “100 Percent,” while overhead an airplane circled trailing an electric cross.4 Parades were often preludes to initiation ceremonies, known in Klan language as “naturalizations.” Some two thousand citizens gathered in the cold night air on Marion’s baseball diamond in November 1922. In the crowd was W. A. Swift, a Muncie photographer whose three surviving photographs tell the story. On a temporary platform in front of a large wooden cross and an American flag, Klan officers stood, arms folded, ceremonial swords at their sides. At 10:00 p.m., a robed Klan band, complete with a tuba player, opened with “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The crowd sang along with the familiar words. Men in white robes and hoods surrounded the initiates, all of whom were white male Protestants. They were warmly dressed, their coat collars turned up against the night air. All wore hats, ranging from workingmen’s cloth caps to businessmen’s fedoras. On command they removed their hats and knelt to take an oath to God and country. Swift’s photographs show youthful initiates mixed with balding men. The newly naturalized Klansmen watched reverently as an officer set fire to a large cross. Flames rose, and the orderly crowd returned to their warm front parlors. The next day, the town’s two newspapers gave detailed accounts of a most exhilarating night.5 Patriotic displays were centerpieces of Klan gatherings. The American flag always flew and was matched with the Christian cross as twin symbols. At an initiation ceremony in Wayne County, new members knelt in front of an altar on which a Bible rested on top of a flag, with a cross above and another flag unfurled nearby. Initiates pledged to “perpetuate our great American country, the most dauntless lineage known to man.”6 Newspapers across the state in 1923 were full of stories about the new organization. The Huntington Herald reported that two newsboys sold five hundred copies of the Fiery Cross to Saturday afternoon shoppers. The Franklin Evening Star informed readers that the Klan provided flowers for a local funeral service. In Columbia City, citizens learned of a new Klan youth organization. A Richmond newspaper

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announced plans to erect a Klan headquarters building with an auditorium to hold sixty-five hundred people. The Seymour paper reported on Klan cross burnings in nearby towns, but not in Jackson County, leaving people wondering why the Klan was ignoring them. In adjacent Bartholomew County in mid-February, a local reporter noted another cross burning on a hill near the Newbern Christian Church, where Klan members had made a donation, “but the burning of these crosses is becoming frequent in the county and they have ceased to cause undue interest.”7 The grandest Klan spectacle in US history occurred in Kokomo’s Melfalfa Park on July 4, 1923. Thousands of Hoosiers joined visitors from neighboring states to contemplate the evils that threatened the nation and to enjoy old-fashioned summer entertainment of the kind featured at church picnics, county fairs, and summer family reunions. Food and games mixed with speeches and music. In the midst of this “Konklave in Kokomo,” an open-cockpit biplane circled overhead and then landed in a grassy field. Out stepped D. C. Stephenson, shortly to be anointed as Grand Dragon of Indiana. Known to his followers as Steve or “the old man,” he had emerged as showman and salesman extraordinaire, but that Fourth of July, he offered a calm and reasoned speech titled “Back to the Constitution.” Stephenson spoke of the nation’s founding ideals, the decline of democracy, and the rise of corruption and sin. It was a performance carefully designed to display a leader of wisdom, respectability, and charisma. Others spoke in less lofty terms, many of them Protestant ministers. In the evening, a parade of robed men and women featured nine bands and dozens of American flags. Among the floats were those depicting Klansmen protecting young women from black male aggressors, Catholic “papists,” and foreigners. Attendees enjoyed evening fireworks and popular songs and hymns, including “America” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” The long day ended as a sixty-foot cross, wrapped in burlap and soaked with kerosene, sent the fire of Christianity into the summer night.8 By Independence Day 1923, the Klan was at home in Indiana. Local units, called Klaverns, existed in every county, the New York Times

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reported.9 Klaverns met frequently to conduct serious business that always included a religious program of Bible readings and hymns. Local meetings were also social gatherings of good fellowship with like-minded neighbors. There was singing, especially of “old-fashioned gospel songs,” refreshments, friendly banter, and “wholesome entertainment.” Official guidelines instructed each Klavern entertainment committee to “make the programs snappy” with “all the joy possible.” A Klavern’s many standing committees included budget, civic, religious, entertainment, law enforcement, funerals, welfare, publicity, and education. Among the many Klavern officers were Klaliff, Klokard, Kludd, Klabeek, and Klokann. In a decade in which fraternal and social organizations proliferated, including Rotary, Lions, Masons, and women’s clubs, a Klavern’s organization, ritual, and good cheer were familiar and welcoming. Serving a growing market, vendors offered to sell Klan jewelry, including rings and necklaces with three Ks, and hats and balloons featuring images of fiery crosses.10 Among the social activities were Klan basketball teams, many organized for boys in the Junior Klan. A team composed “of fine redblooded, native-born, Protestant American boys” formed in Gibson County to prepare for the Klan’s state basketball tournament to be held in the Elwood Armory in April 1924. The two-day affair brought teams from Kokomo, Alexandria, Elwood, Terre Haute, Pendleton, Peru, Anderson, Knox, Princeton, Frankfort, North Vernon, and Logansport. In the state finals, Kokomo beat Elwood, after which the Ohio state champion defeated the Kokomo team. Musical entertainment accompanied the tournament. Local churchwomen prepared the food.11 There was baseball too. A Klan day in Crown Point included a game between the Junior Klan teams from Hobart and Hammond. The St. Joseph County Klan held its annual picnic at Lake Maxinkuckee with a basket dinner followed by “a baseball game between the fat members and the lean members,” with “the heavier Klansmen winning.”12 Indiana Klaverns were linked to a national organization based in Atlanta. There were elaborate rules and pronouncements from the Imperial Wizard and constant demands for money. Klaverns in

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Indiana did not always give the requisite attention and money to the national office, preferring to concentrate on local issues. Eventually local Klans sensed rivalry, selfishness, and corruption at the top of the organization. In the beginning, however, many felt the power of belonging to a nationwide movement.13 Within a few months, Indiana had become a hotbed of parades, speeches, church services, and Klavern meetings. Thousands joined up. Recruitment brochures spread the word, including on the campus of Indiana University.14 On the officially designated Klan Day at the Indiana State Fair, September 7, 1923, some ten thousand members followed instructions to leave their robes and hoods at home and gather inside the racetrack, where they proudly sang “America” and recited the Lord’s Prayer.15 Not all Hoosiers joined. For some, a chill was upon the state. They wondered who in their family, their church, or their Lions Club belonged. What were they up to? Claude Wickard (who served as US secretary of agriculture during World War II) recalled that in his Carroll County farming community, nearly everyone belonged. His father “resented more than anything else . . . that he couldn’t go talk to his neighbors openly and freely as he always had.”16 A Com m u n it y of 100 Percen t Prote sta n ts Burning crosses, waving flags, and marching bands offered more than great theater. They were essential steps in building a Klan culture of like-minded citizens. The bonds of an imagined community tied together people from big cities, small towns, and rural crossroads and from factories, downtown offices, and farms. Essential to creating this imagined community, this tribe of like-minded folks, was exclusion of those defined as different. With masterful marketing strategies, the Klan divided Hoosiers into us or them. By creating this rigid binary culture, the Klan left little room for ambiguity. Such twentyfirst-century notions as pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusiveness were alien. A melting-pot America was anathema. The Klan offered instead a hierarchy of humans. Americans were first in

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this hierarchy, of course, but some Americans were better than others. The very best were the “100 percent Americans”—those bound together in a triangle of native birth, Protestant religion, and white racial identity. Klan beliefs were not new. Earlier generations had heard messages of exclusion and intolerance. Many Americans could accept such commonsense notions, deeply rooted in venerable American traditions, but the Klan designed new packaging for old stories to make them more compelling than earlier versions. Klan critics then and later suggested a contradiction between Christianity’s God of love and the Klan’s intolerance of others. Hoosier Klan members in the 1920s did not see themselves as joining a “hate group.” Nor did they see themselves as “smug and self-righteous,” as one Indiana writer later claimed.17 Rather, their genuine religious faith combined with their cultural values to create confidence in the righteousness of their identity as white Protestants and the justice of their cause. They were convinced that the United States had always been and must always be a Protestant nation. Protestantism and patriotism were opposite sides of the 100 percent American coin. Not all Protestants shared such views. Some remained attached to the Social Gospel reform tradition of the previous generation and to the obligation to reach out to immigrants and the less fortunate, whatever their beliefs. But by the 1920s, this more liberal tradition had waned so that Klan messages were closer to the mainstream than the margin of American Protestantism.18 The Klan built its Indiana house on the rock of Protestant religion. “What church do you go to?” was often the beginning of conversation when meeting a stranger.19 Those who seldom attended were still “cultural Protestants,” swimming in waters similar to faithful churchgoers. In every community, Protestant ministers stood among the leading citizens. Newspapers regularly printed their sermons as well as Sunday scripture lessons.20 White robes clothed Klan members in the symbols of religious belief. White represented the purity of both faith and race. On the front of the robe was a white cross set in a red circle; a red mark in

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the center of the cross signified a drop of the blood that Christ had shed. A conical white hood included a mask, which not only hid the Klan member’s identity for protection from enemies but also denoted the subservience of the individual to the community. Photographs of Klan gatherings were usually of large groups; shapeless robes hid the bodies, and the faces were unseen behind masks. These like-minded Americans in white robes marched forward together against their enemies.21 The Klan’s ever-present cross proclaimed Christ’s sacrifice to save humankind. The fiery cross was the light of the world, the flame of truth, the purification of sin. It gave unity and comfort to those who gathered around it for a naturalization ceremony, followed it in a parade, or watched it burning atop a hill. And, of course, the burning cross gave Klan enemies a reason to fear as its flames sent a message of exclusion and intimidation into the dark night. Klan religion was not broadly Christian but rather militantly Protestant. The Klan gloried in being “the shock troops of Protestantism.”22 Members of the state’s largest denominations—especially Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ (Christian)— responded warmly. Presbyterians, Quakers, Brethren, and other Protestants joined, too, but were not always as certain of the Klan’s righteousness. Klan messages seldom addressed a specific denomination but included all Protestants and aggressively excluded other Christians and all non-Christians. Bible readings, the Lord’s Prayer, and familiar hymns marked Klan meetings. At the forefront were the teachings of Christ, including service to others. Robed Klan members joined in church baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The Klan had its own guide for funeral services, including the order of procession, scripture readings, designs for floral arrangements, and instructions that the deceased might be interred with robe and hood. In Columbus, the Women’s Klan conducted the service for one of their departed. Dressed in white robes, the women provided music, served as pallbearers, and led the graveside ritual, which featured a remnant of a sacred cross that had burned the evening before.23

The Klan Arrives

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Protestant ministers shoveled the coal in the powerful Klan locomotive. Many received complimentary membership fees. The Klan hired the best of them to speak. Minsters became active recruiters, even though the Klan message of a united Protestantism might diminish denominational loyalty.24 Few publicly denounced the organization. An early and forceful Klan supporter was Reverend A. H. Moore, of First Christian Church in Noblesville, who welcomed to his altar robed Klansmen bearing gifts and who claimed the largest church membership in Hamilton County. Moore agreed with Elwood minister H. R. Gebhart, who wrote that “the Protestant churches have lacked unity, but through this wonderful movement they are becoming united in a common cause.”25 W ho Joi n e d? Klan members were Protestant, white, and native-born. Their tripart identity was essential to forming their worldview and defining their enemies. Many were serious and committed, true believers. Others joined because, as one later recalled, “It seemed a fun thing to do with our friends.” This former Klanswoman from Greene County remembered also, “What a thrill when we were told to assemble at a certain place wearing our robes, then march with others also unknown to us.”26 Religion, race, and birth defined Klan members. Yet within the Klan community were varieties of identities: urban, small-town, and rural; male and female; old, young, and middle-aged; working class, middle class, and business class; lawyers, factory workers, ministers, teachers, postal workers, farmers; college graduates and high school dropouts. Within the diversity of occupation and class, however, generalizations are now possible because historians have linked Klan membership lists to socioeconomic data. Leonard J. Moore made the first major contribution in his book Citizen Klansmen, published in 1991. Subsequent studies by others have added sufficient evidence

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to overturn earlier assumptions about Klansmen. No longer can we dismiss them as the ignorant or the unwashed. They were not marginal people. Moore studied Klan membership lists in several Indiana communities, including Indianapolis, Richmond, and Crown Point. Most Klansmen came from the middle ranks of white-collar and skilled workers who could afford the ten-dollar initiation fee and the monthly dues. Some blue-collar workers joined, but more members were lawyers, physicians, government employees, and owners of small and medium-sized businesses. Moore found that local elites joined in smaller numbers. Top businessmen and public officials tended to fear the disruption the organization caused to traditional institutions, including churches and political parties. Nor did membership lists contain many names from the lowest socioeconomic levels. In Richmond, for example, 41 percent of native-born white men joined, including 30 percent of the city’s physicians and 26 percent of the city’s attorneys. Few of the wealthiest and most powerful men joined. Their home was the Rotary Club, where only 4 percent became Klansmen. Historian Allen Safianow’s analysis of membership in the small town of Tipton revealed similar patterns.27 Best estimates of the total Klan membership are about one-third of native-born white men in Indiana. Membership fluctuated as some left and others joined, often depending on changing local issues and leaders. The peak years were 1923 and 1924, when the Klan likely had more members than any other organization in the state. Some communities had immense numbers, reaching nearly half the native-born white males. Membership extended across the state but was slightly larger in northern Indiana than in southern Indiana (where the Democratic Party was stronger and where there was less support for the strict prohibition of alcohol that the Klan so favored). T h e Wom en W ho Joi n e d Women joined the Klan, but historians so far have discovered no membership lists. Reasonable assumptions are that they were similar

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to the men in terms of socioeconomic background.28 Denied membership in the male Klan, women formed several separate organizations, with the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) emerging as the primary one.29 Their principles, structure, and stated goals were similar to the men’s organization, but gender always made differences. Recruiters claimed that “The Fate of the Nation Is in the Hands of Its Women.”30 The WKKK held its first state convention in a picnic grove near Mooresville in July 1923, just a month after the national women’s organization had been chartered. The summer day began with local churchwomen serving breakfast, followed by speeches, entertainment, and an evening parade. In full regalia, women on horseback led the procession, followed by several marching bands and floats. A float depicting “Liberty” garnered the most generous applause, perhaps suggesting to some the possibility of full freedom for women. The long day ended with an initiation ceremony, fireworks, and the lighting of a cross.31 Local women’s units sponsored their own meetings and rallies. In Hamilton County, four women’s groups gave Bibles to schools, organized funerals, and marched in parades. In Marion County, the WKKK organized a “Grand Pageant of Protestantism” in summer 1924, with “Sack Race, Tug o’ War, Food Races, Horse Shoe Pitching Contest,” and “Plenty of good things to eat.” Also on the agenda were “moving pictures taken of the crowd,” so that attendees could “See yourself in the movies.” The event began at 11:00 a.m. and concluded with a “Grand Pageant” in the evening. “Kum, Kum, Kum,” the advertisement said.32 Klanswomen engaged in charity and put on their robes to attend Klan weddings and baptisms. They gathered for teas and picnics, for group singing of popular songs and hymns, and for entertainment provided by women’s quartets and groups such as the Ladies AllAmerican Orchestra of Indianapolis. In parades they often marched under banners of home and family. They worked in political campaigns. In St. Joseph County, Klanswomen formed teams of two; they would drive to a mother’s home, where one would stay with the

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children while the other took the voter to the poll. Klanswomen were particularly active in the fight for Prohibition and other issues close to family, including delinquent girls, interracial sex, vice, and immorality in entertainment. Their vigilance extended to personal lives. The Logansport WKKK wrote to an unfaithful husband to warn him that “you will be punished” and urged him to “go to church. Take your wife and family, spend your money for their comfort and leave women and whiskey alone.”33 The Indianapolis Fiery Cross editor welcomed the “fair damsels of the women’s movement” and expressed gratitude that “the ‘rights’ of women will no longer be a strange sound to American ears.” Among Klanswomen were veterans of the recently victorious suffrage fight who continued to push toward gender equality. As welcoming as Klansmen might be, they were generally unprepared to embrace such equality and more inclined to assert male authority. In this, as in many other ways, the men of the Klan were not unlike the men of Indiana generally. Klan leaders understood that women in robes added to the respectability of the organization by featuring the best of America’s family values. And they understood that women offered another opportunity to collect dues and sell robes. Genuine equality was not on their agenda.34 In their own organizations, women found possibilities of independence and power, but in the larger Klan movement, expectations of traditional gender roles remained. Women were “the consciencekeepers of the race.” It was feared, the Fiery Cross noted, that “giving her the ballot would foster masculine boldness and restless independence, which might detract from the modesty and virtue of womankind.” The WKKK, however, provided “a new path” that will maintain the “womanly dignity and modesty we all admire.”35 The WKKK was often seen as an auxiliary, subordinate to the male Klan. Klansmen protected women in a manner that meant second-class status. As they lauded the sanctity of mothers and the home and praised the moral force women brought to public life, Klansmen restricted women’s choices. In an editorial titled “Our Business Girls,” the Fiery Cross claimed that “the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan stand four square

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for ‘The Protection of Our Pure Womanhood.’” The writer reported on Indianapolis businessmen who threatened their stenographers with dismissal if they refused to date them. “The practice is general,” the editor reported. “The modern girl in the business world has a hard enough time resisting temptations without having to be repelling advances of vultures in human form.” Although the writer deplored such sexual harassment, his remedy was for these “girls” to return to the home, “one of the most sacred institutions in the land.” “Every girl that works in an office is the potential mistress of an American home and the potential mother of future generations of Americans.”36 Some Klanswomen did leave the home in pursuit of a public career, none more notable than Daisy Douglas Barr.37 A mother married to a schoolteacher and businessman, Barr converted from Methodism to become a Friends minister, serving in several central Indiana communities. A skilled religious revivalist and eloquent speaker, she traveled the state as a reformer and preacher. Barr advocated for women’s suffrage as she attacked prostitution, corruption in public office, and alcohol. Prohibition and religious belief led her to the Klan, where she became head of the Indiana Women’s Klan in the early 1920s. Protestantism, Republican politics, and the Klan joined in a perfect match when, in 1922, Governor Warren McCray appointed Barr vice chair of the Indiana Republican Party, the first woman to hold that position (which in both parties would soon be set aside for women). Barr was a frequent speaker at Klan rallies and naturalization ceremonies. She spoke at the Mooresville women’s kickoff and the Kokomo Konklave and was the headline speaker at the women’s rally in Marion on Labor Day 1923. She combined charismatic leadership qualities with sophisticated organizational skills and immense energy. Barr had an eye for the main chance when it came to fundraising—so much so that her enemies in and outside the Klan accused her of keeping Klan collections for her own. George Dale, the fervently anti-Klan editor of the Muncie Post-Democrat, was her most vicious enemy, labeling her “Daisy Doodle Barr” and the “Quakeress Fakeress.” Others joined the attacks, which included legal charges that garnered unfavorable publicity. Barr remained innocent before the

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law, but jealousy and controversy ended the career of a woman who, for a time, was one of the Klan’s brightest stars.38 Daisy Douglas Barr likely began her religious life as a true believer, a mainstream Protestant of faith and action. Whether those beliefs still flourished during her heyday with the Klan is unknown. She would not have been the only Klan member who seized the chance for personal profit. Women and men saw the Klan as an opportunity for good work, new friendships, and self-interest. Some were corrupt. Some who called themselves Protestants had never prayed earnestly to any God. Some recited the Klan creed without conviction. Some were charlatans. And, as an observant contemporary wrote, “in every community excellent and sincere citizens were on its secret roster.”39 The hearts of individual Klan members remain unknowable. Within many, likely most, beat a genuine commitment to their God, the American flag, and other white, native-born Protestant Americans. Within Klan hearts, too, was a conviction that there were enemies determined to destroy all things right and good.

British artist Bill Woodrow titled his 1995 sculpture Listening to History. The work shows a book tied to a head with eyes and ears covered to keep out the past. Bill Woodrow and Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park.

24

The Klan had two massive parades on Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital. The 1925 parade turns the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. In the distant background is the capitol. Library of Congress.

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Proud marchers carry flags in the second big Klan parade in Washington, DC, 1926. Library of Congress.

26

The Klan attracted Hoosiers in cities, towns, and rural areas. Democratic Party strength in southern Indiana made the Klan slightly less popular there than it was in the more Republican-leaning central and northern portions of the state, but the Klan was everywhere. Johnson Cartographic LLC. MICHIGAN LAKE MICHIGAN

Michigan City Valparaiso ON GI RE T CALUME

South Bend

Gary

Fort Wayne

North Judson

RIVE

R Marion

SH Kokomo BA A W Lafayette

Tipton

Elwood Muncie Anderson

Noblesville Indianapolis Mooresville

OHIO

ILLINOIS

Logansport

New Castle

Greenfield Irvington

Richmond

Greenwood

Terre Haute Martinsville

Nashville

Columbus

RIVER

Bloomington

Madison Paoli New Albany

Evansville

OHIO

KENT

50 mi

0

R IV ER

WABA SH

Vincennes

0 Y UCK

27

50 km

Frank M. Hohenberger’s photograph of cornstalks and pumpkins in a field in Brown County in 1926 captures the bucolic image many Hoosiers celebrated even as factories, cities, and Klan tensions rose. Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

Facing, Nashville photographer Frank Hohenberger captioned this image, “A fiery cross, photographed on a hillside north of town when the Ku Klux Klan held sway.” Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

28

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The Klan’s iconic hood and mask sends the message of secrecy and terror. Indiana Historical Society.

30

The front page of a Klan brochure prompts the question who is an American, which the Klan frequently answered in the narrowest terms. Special Collections and Archives, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge.

31

32

Above, Form K-115, a Klan “application for citizenship,” specifies criteria for membership and payment of dues of $10 (equivalent to about $140 in the early twenty-first century). Indiana Historical Society. Facing, A Klan recruiting pamphlet explains the reasons to join. Indiana Historical Society.

33

A winter baptism in southern Indiana shows an earnest religious culture. Indiana Historical Society.

34

Klan members frequently interrupted Protestant church services with financial contributions. This group departs the Christian Church in Knox, doubtless after placing an offering on the altar. Indiana State Library.

35

Men huddle in the cold as an initiation ceremony proceeds in an unknown location on November 16, 1923. This ceremony features a cross with electric light bulbs. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

Facing, A cross burns and flags fly as a Klan “naturalization” ceremony in Marion attracts a large number of new members, November 26, 1922. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

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Klan marchers carry a large American flag at the front of a parade in Anderson, October 28, 1922. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

38

Crowds gather for a Klan parade in Muncie, June 2, 1923. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

39

The Muncie Klan band, one of the nation’s best, prepares for a big parade in their hometown, June 2, 1923. Among the musical instruments is a saxophone, sometimes considered a wicked instrument. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

40

An all-girl band poses as a parade begins in New Castle, 1922. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

41

A Ku Klux Kiddie’s float with masked children joins a 1923 parade in New Castle to celebrate the little red schoolhouse and public education, as distinct from Catholic parochial schools. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

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The Klan celebrates victory in the Republican primary in May 1924 with a parade through downtown Indianapolis that was among the largest in the capital city’s recent history. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 23, 1924. Indiana State Library.

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This broadside announces the Konklave in Kokomo in 1923, one of the largest Klan rallies in US history. Indiana Historical Society.

45

An arrogant D. C. Stephenson poses, at the height of his power, ca. 1924. Indianapolis Star.

46

A Labor Day Klan picnic in Vincennes offers a day of entertainment, food, and speeches, as advertised in the Indianapolis Fiery Cross, August 31, 1923. Indiana State Library.

47

A robed Klansman guards the gate to the Porter County Fairgrounds in Valparaiso as a Klan rally begins on May 19, 1923. Porter County Museum.

48

Two robed Klan members walk among the crowd at the Interurban Terminal in Fort Wayne, 1926. Special Collections, Allen County Public Library.

49

Klanswomen gather in New Castle in 1923. All but one lift their masks for the photographer. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

50

Three proud leaders of the Hartford City Women’s Klan, joined by a Klansman, pose proudly between an American flag and a Christian flag in 1924. Indiana State Library.

51

Daisy Douglas Barr was one of the Klan’s top speakers and organizers. A Quaker minister, she also served as vice chair of the Indiana Republican Party. This image is from her book Springs That Run Dry (1919). Special Collections Library, Earlham College.

52

A sheet music cover, dedicated to Klanswomen, depicts the Statue of Liberty with a fiery cross standing against the dangerous immigrant. John Martin Smith Collection, William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a service of Eckhart Public Library.

53

The cover of this sheet music shows three robed Klanswomen in front of a public school as part of their fight for morality through education. One of many Klan songs, this one was the work of Roy Metz of Muncie. Alamy Limited.

54

Graveside services with Klan attendance at Ridgelawn Cemetery in Gary. Masons stand to the left of the Klansmen. Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

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Klansmen with arms folded form a Christian cross as they prepare to participate in a funeral in Sullivan. Indiana State Library.

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Several dozen Klansmen and Klanswomen gather for funeral rites at Spring Vale Cemetery in Lafayette, 1925. Indiana State Library.

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Klan members with a floral cross prepare for funeral services at Aikman Cemetery in Daviess County. Indiana State Library.

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Klanswomen gather for a funeral. Atop the casket is a Klan robe. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

59

A recording of “Midnight’s Roll Call” with a fiery cross label and the assertion “Best in Klan Music,” includes a post office address in Indianapolis. This was one of many Klan recordings made at Gennett Records in Richmond. As recently as 2019, the white nationalist website Stormfront included a digitized version of the recording. John Martin Smith Collection, William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a service of Eckhart Public Library.

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Sheet music for a popular Klan song sold by an Indianapolis business. Based on the popular hymn “The Old Rugged Cross,” the song was also recorded in Gennett Records in Richmond. John Martin Smith Collection, William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a service of Eckhart Public Library.

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Klan sheet music for a fox trot, published by the 100% Publishing Company of Indianapolis. Indiana Historical Society.

62

This 1925 Klan manual contains detailed regulations and procedures for each local Klavern. John Martin Smith Collection, William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a service of Eckhart Public Library.

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An Indianapolis merchant offers Klan jewelry. John Martin Smith Collection, William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a service of Eckhart Public Library.

64

This advertisement for The Traitor Within, showing at Cadle Tabernacle, a major venue in downtown Indianapolis, appeared in the Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 21, 1924. D. C. Stephenson and other Klan leaders created the Cavalier Motion Picture Company to make the silent film, which included images of a Klan parade in Fort Wayne. Indiana State Library.

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Above, The Klan film The Toll of Justice played across the Midwest. This advertisement for a showing in Greenfield appeared in the local newspaper, the Daily Reporter, May 21, 1924. Daily Reporter and Hancock County Library. Facing, A Hollywood film plays in Logansport with the risqué attributes that shocked traditional Americans and prompted the Klan to make its own films. Logansport Pharos-Tribune, February 1, 1924.

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This anti-Catholic propaganda shows Klan members chopping down the tree of Rome, which hosts priests, vultures, and snakes. The image appeared in a popular Klan book, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, written in 1925 by Bishop Alma White. Wikimedia.

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Students at St. Bavo Catholic School in Mishawaka’s West End, shown here in the 1920s, were largely of Belgian and Italian in ancestry. The Klan directed intense antagonism toward Catholic schools, nuns, priests, and immigrants. St. Bavo Catholic Church.

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Children representing the diverse ethnic population of Gary gather at the Bailly Branch Library in 1922, just as the Klan in the Calumet region was beginning its crusade against immigrants. Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

Facing, After a successful raid on an illegal bootlegger in 1920, Indianapolis police officers display the still and associated items, including the “white mule” whiskey. Bass Photo Co. Collection, Indiana Historical Society.

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An Indianapolis Fiery Cross editorial cartoon, May 16, 1924, shows Uncle Sam protecting the nation from undesirable immigrants. Indiana State Library.

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Klan enemies included the Bantz family, standing in front of their saloon in Hartford City, ca. 1910. The “real German brew” they sold disappeared when Prohibition closed all legal saloons as well as the Berghoff Brewery in Fort Wayne. Blackford County Historical Society, Indiana Historical Society.

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Elected governor in 1920, Warren McCray was caught embezzling state money, which led to a prison sentence that caused him to resign his office in 1924. His disapproval of the Klan might have had consequences had he remained in office. Indiana State Library.

McCray’s successor, Governor Edward Jackson, 1925–29, was an ally of the Klan and Indiana’s most disgraced governor. Bass Photo Co. Collection, Indiana Historical Society.

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Above and facing, The weekly newspaper Tolerance attacked and mocked the Klan in every issue. The front page on April 8, 1923, shows Klan members marching to the Indiana state prison. On June 6, 1923, the paper published the names of Klan members in Marion County. And the cover for June 24, 1923, shows an American flag sullied by Klan prejudice. John Martin Smith Collection, William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a service of Eckhart Public Library.

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William Foohey was among the Notre Dame students who protested the Klan gathering in South Bend in May 1924. Foohey, class of 1926 and from Fort Wayne, proudly wears a Klan hood and robe taken as a trophy of an event the Klan labeled a “riot.” University of Notre Dame Archives.

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An American flag flies from the third-floor window of this downtown South Bend building, marking the headquarters of the local Klavern and the site of the Notre Dame “riot.” Indiana State Library.

77

Klan antagonism sparked active political engagement from Indiana branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Th is poster for the Indianapolis NAACP branch challenges the Klan’s defi nition of 100 percent Americanism. Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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An outspoken opponent of the Klan, Indianapolis Rabbi Morris M. Feuerlicht helped bring about the Klan’s downfall. Bretzman Collection, Indiana Historical Society.

79

Muncie Post-Democrat newspaper editor George Dale stands between two fellow prisoners in the Delaware County jail. Judge Clarence Dearth sentenced Dale for naming the judge as a Klansman. In 1929, Muncie voters elected Dale as their mayor. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

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A large audience gathers in Campbell Hall in downtown Muncie in April 1924 to form a breakaway Klan organization, the Independent Klan of America. Friction and fracturing within the Klan was part of the cause of the organization’s downfall. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

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Young girls dress up in a backyard in Irvington. Madge Oberholtzer sits in the front row, with the dog. Irvington Historical Society.

82

Convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Madge Oberholtzer, D. C. Stephenson stops for his mug shot on his way to a cell at the Indiana state prison in 1925. Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration.

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TWO

THE DANGERS TO AMERICA

In churches, tow n ha lls, a nd public par ks, Hoosiers heard the warnings. People not like us were tearing down our religion and our country. Enemies were rising up. The Klan could identify them. The Klan could show 100 percent Americans who they should fear and how they should fight. A Klan spokesman told an Indianapolis congregation that the African American was “a servant of humanity,” the Jew “an un-American parasite,” and the Catholic “a curse to humanity and the freedom of conscience.”1 At a Klan gathering in Whitley County, a speaker said, “I want to put all the Catholics, Jews, and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft.”2 The presenter at a meeting in Warren focused on the theme of “America for Americans” as he identified the enemies: “The greatest force for good in any town is its newspapers, yet sixty per cent of all newspapers are owned by the jews and catholics. I love the catholics, I love the foreigners and I love the black man but I want them to keep their place.”3 That recruiter in small-town Warren captured common features of the Klan message: inaccurate statements, mixed with bigotry and exclusion, wrapped with bright ribbons of righteousness. Such prejudices were common in Indiana and across the United States. In the 1920s, Eli Lilly and Company moved into the first ranks of scientific 84

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pharmaceuticals while maintaining restrictive hiring practices for Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and women.4 Businesses, country clubs, law firms, and many other institutions and organizations tended to be 100 percent American even if they did not shout out the message of exclusion. The Klan shouted. Cat holic T h r e ats There were many to exclude, but to Indiana Klan members, Catholics were by far the most dangerous. In their passionate anti-Catholicism, Klan members gathered up widely believed prejudices. Seventeenthcentury Protestants arrived on America’s shores with a certainty that Catholics were different. Native-born Protestants grew more fearful as immigrant ships from Ireland and Germany carried more Catholics across the Atlantic and as numbers of priests and nuns increased along with parochial schools and political activism. By the early twentieth century, anti-Catholicism was deeply rooted in Protestant culture as a commonsense belief that needed little examination. In Sunday school classes, Protestant children learned of the German monk, Martin Luther, who created his heroic Reformation to destroy the corrupt Church of Rome. That foreign, hierarchal church denied its faithful the freedom and democracy so proudly claimed by Protestants. Indiana’s Methodist bishop wrote in 1924 that “Roman Catholicism in Europe is the same narrow and intolerant ecclesiasticism it has always has been.” On the other side of the divide, Catholics expressed negative beliefs about Protestants, particularly when they threatened to close their parochial schools or marry their daughters and sons.5 The Klan nourished this religious bigotry by constant reminders of Catholic conspiracies. Returning to his native state in 1926, reporter Elmer Davis heard tales that “the lease on the Vatican had expired, and the Pope . . . is now living in Cincinnati, ready to cross the frontier the first dark night, seize Indiana by a coup d’état, and turn it into a papal satrapy.”6 In Muncie, a minister told his congregation that people said Catholics were building a cathedral in the nation’s capital

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for the pope to take up residence. Protestants in Kokomo heard that guns were hidden in Catholic church basements. Everyone knew that Catholics followed church dictates and voted in a bloc. A story in the Noblesville newspaper reported that 61 percent of United States Department of State employees were Catholic, and 73 percent of the Department of Justice workforce was Catholic.7 The Indianapolis Fiery Cross used much of its ink to argue that “the Roman hierarchy is bent on making America Catholic.”8 The first point of takeover was public schools. Like generations of American reformers before and since, the Klan saw education reform as necessary for the nation’s revival. Improvements in public education depended first on removing supposed Catholic infiltration. A front-page headline in the Klan newspaper warned of the “Movement . . . to Place Control of Schools under Catholic Influence.” The stakes were high. In public schools, children learned to read so that they could study the Bible for themselves rather than follow blindly the commands of a priest. They learned US history and civic values, including respect for the founding fathers and for the flag and nation. Not only were Catholic parochial schools expanding, but Catholic teachers were penetrating public classrooms. A correspondent to the Fiery Cross claimed that “two-thirds of the teachers in our public schools owe allegiance first to the Vatican on one of the seven hills of Rome, and our country, second.”9 In Evansville’s 1925 mayoral campaign, the local Klan leader attacked Democratic candidate John Jennings as “Roman Catholic Jennings,” who would “do all that he could to supplant Protestant teachers with Roman Catholic teachers.”10 History textbooks used in the state’s public classrooms, a Fiery Cross headline proclaimed, “Insult Martin Luther and Co-Founders of Great Protestant Movements.”11 Rather than the truth of the Protestant Reformation, textbooks glorified “all the pomp and splendor, the rites and ceremonies, the gorgeous vestments and the burning of incense, the observance of feast days and the superstitions and customs of heathen religion.”12 This “international, ecclesiastical despotism” has removed from Indiana schools all history books that “speak the plain

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truth concerning the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, her tyrannies, greed and corruptions.”13 Education was frequently on the Klan agenda. A massive parade through downtown Indianapolis in late 1924 featured several floats with school themes and the words “One School, One Language, One Bible”—a reference to the dangers of allowing the Catholic rather than Protestant Bible in schools.14 Often Klan parades featured a float with a “Little Red Schoolhouse” representing the essence of public education and the rejection of parochial schools.15 Anti-Catholicism pulled the Klan into other reforms. One example was the campaign to build a hospital in Kokomo, where the only hospital was operated by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Another was the Klan’s attempt to purchase Valparaiso University in northwestern Indiana. Introducing a Klan curriculum and recruiting a faculty and student body of native-born Protestants would further Americanism and give legitimacy to the organization.16 Anti-Catholic stories often appeared in print in the form of lurid “escaped nun” tales. A modest Indiana version published in 1925 was titled Awful Revelations of Life in Convent of Good Shepherd. Minnie Morrison wrote that in the convent on the south side of Indianapolis, she lived “a life of misery” and had “seen some of the Sisters die from overwork and exhaustion.” Morrison escaped in 1921, she claimed, married a Protestant, and refused any connection to the Catholic Church.17 Her condemnation of Catholicism was harsh but not nearly as harsh as stories of wicked Catholic priests and nuns whose unnatural vows of celibacy led to promiscuous sex and unwanted births. Among the most salacious accounts was that of a former nun, Helen Jackson, who escaped the debaucheries of a convent, she asserted. Jackson’s book, Convent Cruelties, was a Klan favorite, frequently advertised in the Fiery Cross. Her travels across America included three talks in Noblesville’s Olympic Theater.18 Indiana women interviewed six decades later still had vivid memories of these tales of sexual immorality. One recalled hearing that priests “ripped the stomachs of the nuns open and would take the baby.” Another remembered

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hearing that behind the convent in Huntington was a “graveyard to bury their dead from the babies that was born to the girls there in that thing.”19 Among the fantastical Klan claims was that the Catholic Church was recruiting “100,000 negroes to become Catholic priests.”20 Catholic schools also recruited Protestant boys. Indianapolis Cathedral High School enrolled students who had been expelled from public schools, according to the Klan newspaper, especially if they were good football players who might join the University of Notre Dame’s “ruthless football team.” Notre Dame–trained priests at Cathedral chewed gum with the boys, a vice prohibited in public schools, in order to entice the boys to Catholicism. All this is “only one phase of a deep laid plot of the Vatican to control the educational institutions of America.”21 To fight the enemy in public education, the Klan worked to place Protestant Bibles in classrooms, to require daily Bible readings, and to remove Catholic teachers. The Women’s Klan in Anderson campaigned successfully to have two Catholic teachers fired. From Delphi, the Methodist wife of a local businessman wrote the school superintendent in Gary to ask about teacher vacancies: “I have in the schools here a very dear young friend who is a Catholic. At present the Ku Klux Klan is very active in our little city and are making her work most unpleasant for her.”22 The Klan also organized campaigns to boycott Catholic-owned businesses. The Fiery Cross in 1923 published a list of such businesses in Indianapolis that were, by definition, unworthy of Protestant patronage.23 In speeches to Indianapolis Klanswomen, Quaker minister Daisy Douglas Barr read aloud names of Klan-owned businesses and urged women to shop only at those and to avoid Catholic- and Jewish-owned stores. “There will be no Jewish business left in Indianapolis,” she promised.24 In the small town of Brookston, a Catholic veterinarian closed his practice and moved away. In Indianapolis, a Klan official wrote Marion County treasurer John Duvall, soon to be the city’s mayor, to report there were Catholics working in his office and that even his chief deputy was married to one. Duvall replied

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that he had removed them all and that his staff were all Protestants committed to the Klan, including his deputy’s wife.25 A li en T h r e ats A favorite Klan label was “alien,” and it was used to mark “them,” those “others.” American-born Catholics were aliens, and immigrants even more so. Stopping the flood of immigrants became a first-order national policy issue. American birth became an essential definition of the best people. Like anti-Catholicism, nativism ran deep in the culture of the 1920s. The connection of birthplace to Protestantism and patriotism was so powerful that it caused some foreign-born Hoosiers to deny their heritage—a tendency strongly exacerbated by the Great War. A Republican legislator from Lake County, James Nejdl, born in Bohemia, was “proud to say that neither of my children can speak a word of any language except English.” Novelist Kurt Vonnegut later recalled that his Indianapolis German American family felt obligated to turn their backs on the culture “my ancestors had loved.”26 Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson explained the growing dangers of foreigners in a speech in fall 1923. The first immigrants “were of our kin the Anglo-Saxon, the Teutonic, the Scandinavian from northern and western Europe.” But near the end of the nineteenth century came a “‘new Immigration,’ greater in numbers, from the races of southern and eastern Europe.” The new immigrants, Stephenson warned, were not only physically and mentally inferior but “also inferior in moral character.” Thus, “there is no assimilation to American standards and ideals.” These “masses of human beings of inferior races, ignorant of the laws which Americans hold dear, are poured into our factories as so much raw material and they are not ‘digested.’” This “great army of unfit must be excluded at any cost.”27 Stephenson’s immigration speech was carefully argued and packed with detailed evidence, but it was old news. Americans had always struggled with the question of who belonged, of whether a melting pot could incorporate people from all nations and especially people

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whose skin color was not white or not white enough. By the early twentieth century, as numbers of immigrants reached unprecedented levels, such questions acquired stronger potency than at any time in the nation’s history. Notions of otherness and belonging revolved around more than just the large numbers of newcomers and their visible cultural or physical differences. Scientists in the late nineteenth century announced biological differences that enabled them to construct what they thought was a hierarchical ranking of the human race. Measuring head shapes to create cephalic indexes and conducting new intelligence tests with apparent analytical precision, some of the nation’s best minds at Yale, Princeton, and elsewhere calculated quantities of “white blood” in the peoples of the world. Their research was nonsensical, a sophisticated incorporation of popular prejudices into scientific literature. They placed at the top a superior white race of Anglo-Saxon and Northern Europeans (excluding Irish), often labeled the Nordic race. The hierarchy drifted downward from white to darker shades and from Northern and Western Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe and then to continents beyond. These were innate differences, unchangeable after birth. This so-called scientific racism spawned a related eugenics movement that in Indiana in 1907 led to the passage of a state law authorizing sterilization of those deemed “defective.” “No farmer,” a medical specialist at the Indiana State Board of Health wrote, “would be so foolish as to allow his poorest animals to be the most prolific in the reproduction of his flock.”28 Scientific racism and popular prejudices offered the Klan a worldview of us and them, of native-born white Americans besieged by foreign and nonwhite people. Race became a bucket in which to place all who were not of the pure white race and a powerful weapon to preserve the privileges long available to whites. A commitment to “white supremacy” was essential, a 1925 Klan manual asserted. Over centuries, the guidebook advised, “the Race” has migrated from east to west, and now “here in America the Race must make its last stand.” “To Europeanize our institutions is to kill them.”29 The white race was already in steep decline. Klan preacher Daisy Douglas Barr warned

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a crowd in Rushville that white Protestants were so overwhelmed by foreigners that “it will be only a few more generations until whites will be in the same position as the Indians today.”30 Kokomo’s chamber of commerce noted proudly in its 1923 annual report that it was a “city of Americans” with “less than 3% of foreign element.”31 Concepts of pluralism were unacknowledged as people in pure white robes marched under the banner of whiteness. The Great War had advanced suspicions of the foreign-born—not just German Americans and Irish Americans who might be supportive of the enemy but anyone not judged 100 percent American. It was foreigners, many believed, who were the labor agitators and socialists who supported Russian Bolsheviks as they attacked business owners. Labor strikes in 1919, from Gary to Evansville, added to tensions. In 1920, the Indiana Board of Education adopted a resolution pushed by the Rotary Club to create “systematic education in Americanism,” in response to “the social and industrial unrest now spreading . . . and constituting a serious menace to our institutions.”32 Too many Hoosiers were hyphenates, less than 100 percent American. Irish Catholics were among those who were less worthy, even dangerous. A meeting in 1923 in Indianapolis of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal group, brought a gush of outrage from the Fiery Cross. “These garrotters of freedom and assassins of liberty, driven from other countries by the tyranny they help perpetuate, would drive a knife in the breast of America that suckled them, bite the hand that feeds them and turn America over to the forces of ignorance, unholy greed, tyranny, superstition, avarice and ecclesiastical servitude.”33 America’s distrust of immigrants culminated in 1924 with national legislation that one historian has written “depopulated Ellis Island as if by epidemic.”34 The Johnson-Reed Act not only reduced total numbers of immigrants but also assigned quotas that reflected scientific and popular racial, ethnic, and religious hierarchies. Larger numbers could enter from Great Britain than from Italy, more from Sweden than Poland. From Japan and China the quotas were zero. The national origins quota system remained in force until 1965. It

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designated who was deemed white, or might possibly become white, and who was unlikely ever to join the “pure” race. The act affirmed, one historian has written, the “racial in-between-ness” of the new immigrants.35 Jews and Italians, for example, were not pure white and perhaps unlikely ever to become true Americans. The Klan claimed victory. A Fiery Cross editorial gloated that “America has, through Congress, served notice on the rest of the world that she is no longer to be used as a dumping ground for the unfit of other nations.”36 Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, the national Klan leader, stated in a speech in Hamilton County soon after the law’s enactment that the United States had now built “a stone wall around the nation so tall, so deep and so strong that the scum and riff-raff of the old world cannot get into our gates.”37 In 1930, as a logical next step, the United States Census Bureau began to count Mexicans as a separate race, enabling white Americans to add them to the unassimilable races and, during the Great Depression, to forcibly remove many Mexican Americans from northwest Indiana. In a speech in 1930, Indiana’s lieutenant governor Edgar D. Bush pushed for removal by asserting, “It is high time that the people of Indiana reaffirm . . . that America is for Americans.” The transcript of his remarks then reads: “They ought to be sent back across the Mexican border, (Applause) where they will at least be able to enjoy sunshine.”38 J e w ish a n d A fr ica n A m er ica n T h r e ats The Klan’s first enemies were Catholics and immigrants. Among the least desirable immigrants were Jews. Antisemitism’s history is, of course, older than anti-Catholicism, though it tended to be weaker in Indiana than elsewhere. There were fewer than twenty-five thousand Jews in the state in the 1920s, all living in intensely Christian communities. As they moved toward engagement with gentiles, some drifted away from practicing Judaism. Some even sent their children to Christian summer camps. Still, there was sufficient antisemitism in small towns and larger cities to spark Klan attention, including boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses.39

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The Indiana Klan caught the wave of antisemitism that flooded across the nation in the 1920s. Popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post were full of it. Henry Ford used his wealth and fame to promote rabid tirades and absurdly false news in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, which had a large national circulation. Antisemites portrayed Jews—especially those from Eastern Europe—as a separate and inferior race. They were antagonists of Christianity. They had caused the Great War, advocated bolshevism, and encouraged migration of African Americans from the South, Klan propaganda asserted. Distinguished universities, led by Harvard, began new quota systems to keep Jewish student numbers at minuscule levels. The mail-order company Sears, Roebuck, headed by Julius Rosenwald, attracted antisemitic prejudice from Henry Ford and from small-town newspapers such as the Waterloo Press in northeastern Indiana, which used Klan imagery to build community loyalty: “Talk about being one hundred percent, the fellow who sends to a big Jew mail order house for his merchandise in order to keep some local fellow from selling does not look very loyal.”40 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Martin D. Schwartz, a Jewish businessman in Muncie, later recalled, there was less prejudice. “My father was an Elk. He had been in the Masonic Lodges and everything back around the 1900 to 1910 era. Then the restrictions began to come in and it became very difficult, if not impossible, for Jews to enter these organizations.” Schwartz remembered also that the Klan “didn’t really have strong anti-Semitic overtones in this area.” He recalled sitting as a boy on his father’s shoulders to watch Klan parades and thinking that the Klan’s “idea of Americanism was to have a big fat gal seated on a white draft horse with the American flag draped over its rump.”41 For Schwartz, the passage of time might have softened the sting. Or perhaps his parents had protected him from the prejudices of their neighbors. Or perhaps the bigotry was less pointed than in some other parts of the country. Still, the Klan revived and deepened antisemitism. African Americans joined Jews and Catholics on the Klan list. Here, too, the Klan scooped up generations of intolerance, stereotyping, and ignorance. From the beginning, majority Hoosiers had insisted

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on white racial supremacy. The state’s first constitution (1816) denied African Americans legal equality, including the right to vote. The 1851 constitution included a provision approved by a large majority of voters that excluded African Americans from taking up residence in the state. Although changes in the law came in the late nineteenth century, including a weak state civil right act in 1885, black Hoosiers remained second-class citizens. Pseudoscience strengthened concepts of a pure white race and an inferior black race as ordained by God and tradition. Intermarriage of the races was seen as especially destructive to the white race and a particular threat to the purity of white women. State law prohibited marriage between a black person and a white person until 1965.42 When African American boxer Jack Johnson came to Lake County, the local Klavern wrote the governor to protest this “famous Negro white slaver . . . who’s [sic] open boast . . . is that he can get any white woman he wants.”43 Anxieties about racial mixing extended to immigrants as well. A Kokomo newspaper admonished readers that “marriages in which American-born girls become wives of foreign-born men are fruitful not only of unhappiness but of tragedy.”44 As black southerners moved north, African American numbers in the state increased by 39 percent in the 1920s. White Hoosiers became more insistent on racial separation. African Americans were less than 4 percent of the state population by the end of the 1920s, yet many whites thought that Jim Crow lines needed strengthening. Many schools had long been segregated, but in the 1920s in Indianapolis, Gary, Kokomo, and Evansville, white Hoosiers built new, separate high schools for black students. In Indianapolis, citizens organized the White Supremacy League to keep African Americans from purchasing homes outside the tightly drawn black neighborhoods—a goal the Klan supported but did not lead. Classified newspaper ads for home sales listed “For Colored.” White neighborhoods adjacent to expanding black neighborhoods attracted large numbers of Klan members.45 In Bloomington in 1927, developers of a new neighborhood near the university promised that “the ownership and occupancy of lots or buildings in this sub-division are forever restricted to members of the pure white race.”46

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Challenges facing black Hoosiers included intense discrimination in employment, education, and everyday life. Except for a few middleclass blacks, available resources to overcome Jim Crow realities were few. Energy and talent necessarily focused on the struggle to care for families. Accommodation or quiet resistance seemed prudent choices. Klan pressure did spark some protest, particularly with the formation of Indiana branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but Klan leaders could trust that most African Americans knew their place and would not present the kinds of dangers that Catholics and immigrants did. Unlike black people, who were visibly marked by their skin color, those other aliens might someday claim to be white, to deserve full participation in American life, to be 100 percent Americans.47 African Americans and Jews, then, were unquestionably seen as aliens, but they were never considered as dangerous as Catholics. Returning to his Indiana hometown in summer 1923, distinguished journalist Lowell Mellett visited with old friends and concluded, “Very clearly the crux of the Klan problem in Indiana is the Catholic Church.” Jews were scattered and few in number. Excepting a few agitators, black Hoosiers remained cautious in openly challenging racial restrictions. Newspaper reports of Klan speeches and the pages of the Fiery Cross were full of references to Catholics but contained fewer references to Jews and African Americans. Unusual is a Fiery Cross account of a political rally in Terre Haute that lumped together all three enemies. The reporter described an anti-Klan candidate for state office who “headed a parade given by enemies of the Klan. Five automobiles carrying Jews followed a brass band, and in the wake of the Hebrews came four automobiles filled with negroes. A negro band also had its place in the procession which ended at the Knights of Columbus hall.”48 Writers in the Fiery Cross and Klan orators advocated love and service to all, in the manner of Jesus. Good, respectable Christians did not hate, at least not rabidly in public. Hugh (Pat) Emmons, a hardworking Klan leader in South Bend, recalled that in closed meetings speakers often said “that the Jew was getting control of the money and the Catholic was going to take over the religion.” In public meetings,

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however, Klan speakers were more careful to tailor the message to the audience in order to “sell them the things they want.”49 Pointing to enemies enabled Klan messengers to whine that their members were victims. Nearly every issue of the Fiery Cross contained stories of assaults and outrages. Headlines such as “Klansmen Beaten by Mob” ran at the top of the first page.50 Thugs attacked the newspaper’s salesmen, threw bricks through Protestant merchants’ windows, disrupted rallies, and tossed tacks on streets before marches began. The Klan was the innocent casualty, never the antagonist. A full page in the Klan newspaper outlined the organization’s principles under the headline, “There Is Glory in Oppression! There Is Victory in Persecution!”51 Enemy attacks on the Klan’s cross and flag demonstrated clearly who was 100 percent American and who was not. “Who are behind these outrages?” the Fiery Cross asked. The answer was them, those people, the others. “That big class which makes up those who are not eligible to membership in the Klan is composed of foreigners, Catholics, negroes, Americans of bad repute and Jews.”52 Jews and blacks were dangerous, but immigrants and Catholics were the core enemy. They constituted “the foreign scourge that has been the real cause of the drop in moral standards in America,” according to a Fiery Cross editorial.53 These aliens brought to the United States not just religious and racial difference but moral decline. That supposed decline became a cornerstone of the Klan message.

THREE

TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET

Begin ning w ith sev enteenth-centu ry Pu r ita ns, generations of Americans have listened as preachers, politicians, and neighbors warned of decline. Hearing prophets of doom, reformers rose up. On the banks of the Wabash River in 1823, a resident of Vincennes lamented “the moral climates of this country,” where flourished “all the gradations between simple knavery & downright villainy.”1 An unusually intense fear of declension swept across the United States in the 1920s. The so-called Roaring Twenties brought technological, social, and cultural transitions hardly imagined a generation earlier. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Booth Tarkington wrote at the end of the decade of “an overturning thorough enough to bear the aspect of revolution to middle aged and elderly people.” We are living, the Indiana novelist claimed, through the “swiftest moving and most restless time the world has known.”2 From the distance of the twenty-first century, the overturning Tarkington feared seems less revolutionary and more evolutionary. The 1920s were new times, to be sure, exemplified in moving pictures, the Ford Model T, and syncopated music. Yet there were still family reunions, Saturday shopping on the courthouse square, sugar cream

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pies, and Sunday church services. Traditions remained, but they were mixed with enough change to arouse fears of spiritual, cultural, and political decay. Times were right for the Klan’s crusade. Sophisticated leaders could frame change as a descent into crime, immorality, and godlessness. Everyone could see that young people had rejected their parents’ ways. Sexual sins were rampant. Alcohol fueled the fires of wickedness. New kinds of leisure darkened minds and hearts. Immigrants, African Americans, Catholics, Jews, profit-seeking entertainers, corrupt businessmen, and shady politicians threatened traditional decency. Accompanying such anxieties were the dangers of European and domestic enemies identified by the Great War. America was going to hell in a handbasket. Enemies were at the gate. The Klan promised to identify them, to make them fear the power of the cross and the flag, to redeem America. T h e Crusa de aga i nst A lcohol The evil driving the fear of declension was alcohol. Here, as elsewhere, the Klan jumped on a bandwagon that for generations had bumped over rocky roads. Protestants joined the temperance crusade in the 1840s. Led by Methodists, Indiana’s largest denomination, temperance advocates struggled for decades to achieve only partial victories. In the late nineteenth century, middle-class Protestant women emerged from kitchens, parlors, and Sunday school classrooms to join a more energetic Prohibition movement. Convinced that working-class women and their children paid the price for alcohol and determined to uplift morals, reduce crime, and create a more orderly society, reformers organized first in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Later came the Anti-Saloon League, a mixed gender, one-issue organization that emerged as the political arm of the Prohibitionist movement. The league was entwined with Protestant churches and was particularly skillful in pulling clergymen into the crusade. Led in Indiana for nearly a quarter century by Edward S. Shumaker, a Methodist minister, the Anti-Saloon League skillfully mobilized voters and lobbied politicians.3

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Victory came with a statewide Prohibition law in 1917 and then ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. The national Volstead Act that same year created enforcement tools to shut down the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcohol. It was, one historian concluded, “one of the boldest and most radical social efforts to alter personal behavior in the nation’s history.”4 Most Hoosiers were delighted, but for some Prohibition was an assault on democracy. Indiana’s tradition of individual freedom and weak government flourished in the pioneer era, along with a fondness for corn liquor. That tradition now crumbled against the higher necessity of Prohibition. Most Hoosiers obeyed the new dry laws. Many did not. Bootleggers learned that crime paid. Klan leaders learned that Prohibition gave them a cause of immense value. Prohibition was a natural fit with the culture of the Indiana Klan. Indeed, without it, the Klan would have been a far weaker force in Indiana. Alcohol was the work of the devil, pious Hoosiers firmly believed. Claude Wickard, honored as Master Farmer of Indiana in 1927, recalled that in Carroll County, “I didn’t drink publicly. In rural areas you didn’t do those things openly.”5 Evil included the crime and corruption of Prohibition violators. The laws must be obeyed, the Indianapolis Fiery Cross asserted: “We insist that illegal distilleries, liquor-selling drug stores, hidden fruit-stand saloons, soft drink beer joints, back-alley bootlegger grog shops and ‘speakeasies,’ be hunted out and suppressed, and that the offenders be brought to unsympathetic justice.”6 Klan leaders expanded the crusade for a dry nation by helping Hoosiers link alcohol to Catholic immigration, waves of crime, and the nation’s decline. Too many German and Irish Catholics drank, even on Sunday afternoons. They brewed beer and distilled whiskey in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and Evansville and in countless small towns and rural hideaways. They operated dark, putrid, and illegal saloons and speakeasies where men abandoned their families and where upstairs or next door a brothel added sexual evils. They engaged in crimes fueled by profits from booze. Of course, immigrants were always plotting to undermine Prohibition. “Records show,” the Fiery Cross editorialized in 1924, “that the greatest fight against the

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Volstead act has been carried on by foreign societies and lodges. . . . Without the influence created by persons who cannot, in a strict sense of the word, be called Americans, the continued upheaval arising from the passage of the Volstead act would be practically negligible.”7 Worse, “organized gangs” were now bringing into America “the dregs of humanity.” It was “these degenerates” who were “selling narcotics, peddling poison liquor . . . and committing every law violation.”8 The Klan was partially right. Although not a drop of legal booze was consumed in the United States after January 1920, sharp entrepreneurs stepped up to create a bountiful network of illegal production and distribution. Bootleggers developed supply routes from Canada. Entrepreneurs made their own in cellars, bathtubs, and barns. Terre Haute’s Arthur Zamberletti, sometimes known as “The King of Indiana Bootleggers,” began with his own stills but soon moved up to organizing caravans of cars with concealed panels to haul whiskey and rum from Chicago. Bootleggers like Zamberletti often joined gangs that expanded to other criminal pursuits. It was not difficult to find a drink in Indiana in the 1920s, from one-room blind tigers and speakeasies, to American Legion posts, to downtown hotels, including the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis, where members of the General Assembly and lobbyists adjourned in early evenings for a drink or two. In cities with immigrant communities, including Fort Wayne, South Bend, Indianapolis, Evansville, Terre Haute, and the Calumet region, the Klan discovered evidence of wide-open booze and the corruptions it spawned. So, too, in rural communities, including Dubois County in southern Indiana, where large numbers of Catholics still conversed in German as they enjoyed beer and sausage. Across the state, police officers, elected officials, and respectable businessmen not only enjoyed a drink but profited from the business. Vigo County’s sheriff and three of his deputies were among those jailed for taking money to protect bootleggers. For many ordinary Klan members, these illegal and immoral acts in their own communities were the driving force in paying their Klan dues.9 Nearly every issue of the Fiery Cross reported on Prohibition raids. In Fort Wayne, “the Sodom of Indiana,” massive raids came “after

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the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had turned over to federal officers affidavits involving eighty-three persons and a big quantity of liquor.” Klan members even provided authorities “clerical help in compiling data and affidavits.”10 Raiders often discovered other crimes. Klansmen joined Mishawaka police to raid a “notorious roadhouse known as the Bird’s Nest Inn,” where they found “three women habitues, among them a golden-haired girl yet in her teens.”11 Much of the Klan’s fight for Prohibition focused on inadequate law enforcement. The federal government offered little help. Indiana’s long tradition of weak government and lax law enforcement extended to the Eighteenth Amendment. Police were not professionals. They had little or no training and depended on political connections for their jobs. Some did not resist the temptation of bribes and kickbacks. John Dillinger’s criminal successes exemplified feeble law enforcement, but the famed bank robber began with failure. His attempted robbery in Mooresville in 1924 was thwarted, some said, because his intended victim had a special whistle to summon help from the Klan.12 The hooded order was the remedy for inadequate policing, the Klan frequently pointed out. Citizen Klansmen were readily able to identify businesses and homes serving alcohol, direct law enforcement toward the scene of the crime, and even join in raids. The Klan’s role in law and order moved to vigilante justice, which had a long history in Indiana. The traditional justice system was too often corrupt and slow. If the police and courts would not do the job, then the men in hoods would. An Indianapolis Methodist minister told his congregation that he opposed mob rule, but “when judges and other officials fail to demand redress for wrong through orderly process, then I welcome the Ku Klux Klan.”13 As vigilantes had always done, the Klan claimed to stand on the right side of the law and to represent the will of the people. Especially when it came to Prohibition, the Klan was eager to act more forcibly than the Anti-Saloon League or the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The seriousness of alcohol’s destruction of family life, good morals, and law and order demanded extraordinary measures. One remedy was the revival of Indiana’s nineteenth-century

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Horse Thief Detective Association (HTDA), a state-authorized volunteer constabulary. City and county officials deputized members of the HTDA and gave them badges, guns, and no training. The HTDA and the Klan in St. Joseph County coordinated raids, all focused on liquor, none on horse thieves. Members of the voluntary association led a raid on a farm north of Crawfordsville in 1923 and claimed to have confiscated “100 gallons of ‘white mule,’ 3,000 gallons of mash, 1,200 pounds of sugar, 400 feet of coil and a copper container, with a capacity of 1,500 gallons.” Sometimes volunteer zeal became excessive. After a raid in Auburn, a DeKalb County grand jury scolded the local HTDA for “the conduct of some of the members of the raiding party in the use of abusive language and in the unnecessary use and display of firearms.”14 Klan crusaders gloried in boasting of victories that would reverse the decline of the nation. In the fight against alcohol, the Klan won a few battles but not the war. This failure to destroy demon rum was likely among the greatest disappointments of earnest members. Si n a n d Fu n Klan reformers pointed relentlessly to the consequences of alcohol. Drink could ruin anyone, man or woman, but young people were most susceptible. For many Hoosiers, the Roaring Twenties meant not a new age of dazzling pleasure but an age of wickedness in unprecedented varieties, all fueled by alcohol. The Methodist church labeled it “the youth problem.”15 Especially worrying were the young women who defied their parents and the traditions of a righteous people. An Indianapolis News editorial regretted that women were wearing shorter skirts, using profanity, and smoking in public. Even schoolteachers were bobbing their hair, a practice prohibited by some township trustees who oversaw rural schools. In the small town of Tipton, a probation officer discovered “a shocking and almost unbelievable delinquency among certain young people of the city,” while the local newspaper reported that teenage girls spoke “with the knowledge and hardness of confirmed prostitutes.” Too many women

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were beginning to practice “coarseness of expression and vulgarity” as “evidence of intellectual freedom,” a leading Catholic newspaper asserted.16 The sins of the decade came together in rural roadhouses and dance halls, city saloons, and upscale social clubs. To analyze leisure patterns in Indianapolis, a straitlaced investigator visited local dance halls and reported disapprovingly of the “use of intoxicants,” “dancing of the vulgar variety,” and girls “without any escorts.” Such places, the Klan newspaper revealed, were in the forefront of a “concerted and well-planned campaign . . . to lower the standard of morals.”17 These alcohol-soaked dens of evil jumped with wild music, vulgar talk, and scanty dress. Traditionalists imagined flappers gyrating on the dance floor, smoking cigarettes, throwing back gin, and engaging in premarital or adulterous sex. They knew what was happening in the backseat of a Ford or Studebaker parked near a dance hall. Terre Haute’s popular Bungalow Dance Hall offered private rooms for amorous couples. And sometimes the fun led to tragedy, as in the murder of a visiting Shriner looking for good times in another Terre Haute roadhouse.18 Automobiles were poignant examples of changing times. They could be used for good Klan purposes, such as parades in which they were adorned with flags and crosses, often lit with battery-powered light bulbs. But the new machines also emancipated young women from the front parlor and the sharp eyes of chaperones. An automobile pulled up to the house, the horn tooted, and the girl ran out the door to jump onto the seat close to her boyfriend. Automobiles were nothing but a house of prostitution on wheels, thundered a Muncie judge (who likely was a Klan member).19 New music offered another mixture of fun and sin. Jazz tunes wailed with syncopated rhythms and loud trumpets and saxophones. This was “the music of barbarous and semi-civilized peoples,” a Hammond editor warned.20 A South Bend newspaper cautioned, “Infectiously the epidemic of jazz spread over the country, evolving from jazz music to a form of jazz life characterized by fatal indifference, recklessness, and immorality.”21 The Klan warned repeatedly that the

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new music was “inflaming the animal passions of romance-seeking youth!” The consequences were dire, the Fiery Cross cautioned, and included premarital pregnancy. “Is the young girl and the young boy, with unformed minds and with parents whose mentalities are obscured by the insidious assertiveness of a Jazz-filled world to be made to suffer for life for a mistake they made at the irresponsible age?”22 Some locations of Jazz Age fun were particularly threatening. In the heart of Indianapolis along Indiana Avenue was the state’s largest African American neighborhood. It included the site selected for the new segregated high school, Crispus Attucks, and the homes of most of the city’s African American population, including the small black elite. In addition to Madam C. J. Walker’s multimillion-dollar cosmetics and hair-care company, retail shops, law offices, bars, and clubs served the neighborhood. Syncopated rhythms and good times filled the avenue at night and attracted young white Hoosiers eager to experience alcohol, music, and sex. The evil brew on the avenue outraged the Klan. The Fiery Cross urged city leaders to “devote your time to cleaning up the dives of ‘black and tan’ on Indiana Avenue, where, the purity of Indianapolis Anglo-Saxon young womanhood is nightly being defiled under the very eyes of the city administration.”23 Segregated neighborhoods in other Indiana cities offered smaller versions of Indiana Avenue. Also on the Klan’s list of dangerous pastimes were moving films, too many of which made “sly sport of all the worthwhile things of life—motherhood, matrimony, temperance, honesty, purity, sex relations,” according to the Klan newspaper.24 Hollywood invaded Indiana’s main streets and courthouse squares in the 1920s. Although African Americans were excluded from many theaters, white Hoosiers packed the new movie houses. A survey in Indianapolis ranked the “it” girl Clara Bow second in appeal only to cowboy star Tom Mix.25 There were comedies as well as westerns, but also “society films,” such as Alimony, featuring “brilliant men, jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp.”26 A local theater in Greencastle promoted a New Year’s Eve showing of

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Runaway Girls, “full of petting, jazz and wild pranks.”27 Logansport’s newspaper advertised the movie Flaming Youth, with “its jazz, its flapperism, its petting parties, its reckless disregard for conventions.”28 In darkened theaters, according to the Klan newspaper, couples sat close together to watch “sex filth, distorted history and vicious and degrading phases of immorality.” Hollywood “producers have blazoned before the American youth putrid stories of unfaithful wives, faithless husbands, greasy sheiks, licentious ‘lovers’ and immoral ‘shebas,’ together with manless tea hounds and harebrained flappers.”29 Particularly repellent were interracial and international romances as depicted in such films as Bella Donna (1923), where Pola Negri, known as the Polish vamp, engaged in romance with a dark-skinned Egyptian sheik. Negri’s character was an independent woman who challenged racial and sexual mores. “The revolting spectacle of a white woman clinging in the arms of a colored man simply is beyond words to express,” the Fiery Cross fumed. Such “propaganda for social equality” was “an affront to the white people of the city of Indianapolis and the state of Indiana.” The newspaper admonished Negri to return to Poland, “where she could associate with some of the ancestry of the depraved clothing merchants who would foist this picture upon the people of Indianapolis and America.”30 Those were Jewish clothing merchants, of course, and Jews ran Hollywood, the Klan warned. Alien influences included Catholics as well, so that “the screen today is alive with Catholic propaganda.” One example was Ashes of Vengeance, a costume drama insufficiently critical of the Catholic massacre of Protestant Huguenots and far too sympathetic to Catholic French royalty, making it unequaled “in giving to the world Catholic propaganda.”31 Popular magazines also spread evil. They filled “a girl’s mind with thoughts that should not be there,” the Klan cautioned. Pages and pages featured “sex adventure stories,” with titles such as “The Primitive Lover (She wanted a caveman husband).” There were stories about new Hollywood films and actors, with Motion Picture Magazine telling readers that “making love divinely is one of the best things [Hollywood actor] Monte Blue does.” When “combined with the

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movies depicting ‘sheik love’ and thereby furnishing ‘thrills’ for the young women of today,” these magazines were “undermining the very moral fabric of our country.”32 Changing cultures of entertainment, sex, and gender in the 1920s challenged old-fashioned values and befuddled many thoughtful Americans. Even reading could be dangerous. For their classic book, Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd studied the daily lives of Muncie residents, including their reading habits. The local public library offered 225 weekly or monthly periodicals, many focused on popular culture. The Lynds concluded that “it is noteworthy that a culture which traditionally taboos any discussion of sex in its systems of both religious and secular training and even until recently in the home training of children should be receiving such a heavy diffusion of this material through its periodical reading matter.”33 A Klan manual admonished each Klavern’s religious committee “to watch public libraries for deceitful and questionable literature.”34 Fight i ng Mor a l Decli n e To lead people back to decency, the Klan relied not only on familiar tools such as rallies and parades but also on sophisticated techniques of modern communication. Klan propaganda was not the work of an old-fashioned organization. Music filled Klan gatherings. Marching bands were everywhere. The Junior Klan Band of Evansville traveled across the Midwest on a thirteen-week tour in 1925. Muncie’s first-class band was frequently on the road. Some musicians wore the regulation Klan band uniform, with embroidered gold lyres and purple capes. Some groups included the saxophone, even though this instrument was associated with the devil’s music. Vocal groups entertained with Klan songs, such as the “Fiery Cross,” available from the American Company in Indianapolis as sheet music or on a phonograph record sung by “a 100% male quartet.” The same company also offered a recording of “Midnight’s Roll Call,” with a fiery cross label and “a 100% orchestra.”35 Klan musicians recorded popular music and traditional hymns with revised

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lyrics. The Rinehart Brothers in Muncie published a selection of 100% Red Hot Songs. Among them was “Yes, the Klan Has No Catholics,” sung to the tune of “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”36 Gennett Records in Richmond happily took Klan cash to make thousands of discs with gold lettering and red labels offering tunes such as “The Bright Fiery Cross” and “Onward Christian Klansman.” (Gennett also served African American jazz musicians, including trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who recorded his first solo in its studio along the Whitewater River in 1923.)37 The Klan arrived simultaneously with radio. This new technology helped create the imagined community of like-minded Americans separated by distance. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans addressed the “Klansmen of the Nation” from a station in Kansas City, Missouri, reaching as far as Indiana. Local Klan broadcasts included programing such as a Sunday Bible lesson from Bloomington. Klan enemies also used radio, as the Fiery Cross warned when it reported that the Vatican was planning to broadcast the pope’s messages. Protestants must catch up. Planning began in 1925 for a national chain of Klan stations called the Protestant Broadcasting System, just as radio was taking off and as the Klan began its decline.38 Klan leaders also understood the power of film. Because movies such as Bella Donna threatened traditional values, the organization made its own films to counter Hollywood’s supposed Jewish and Catholic propaganda. Audiences had thrilled at the powerful messages conveyed in The Birth of a Nation, the most popular film of the silent era. Set in the post–Civil War South, the film helped build the Klan of the 1920s. It showed across Indiana and enthralled white audiences with harsh racial stereotypes that depicted black men as rapists and the Klan as protectors of white supremacy and particularly of white women.39 The Klan produced two films that played in the Midwest: The Toll of Justice, made in Columbus, Ohio, and The Traitor Within, produced in Indianapolis by Cavalier Productions, with Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson as a major shareholder. Both films portrayed the Klan as a nonviolent moral reform organization that protected traditional

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womanhood and family values as it fought to enforce Prohibition. The Fiery Cross boasted that The Traitor Within was “a well-sustained love romance” as well as a stirring demonstration of Klan power as depicted in scenes of robed marchers in Fort Wayne. An advertisement for a showing in Anderson claimed it was a film of “good will” and “a clean American picture.”40 The ardently anti-Klan Muncie PostDemocrat reported that “klan boobs went in droves” to Anderson’s Starland Theater, where they “paid out good money to see a moving picture of amateurs draped in sheets.”41 Mainstream theaters showed both Klan films, but more frequently the films were shown in schools, churches, and community venues. A screening of The Traitor Within at Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis was a fundraiser to support a new community building for the Lawrence Methodist Church.42 In Noblesville, Klan members opened their own American Theater to counter “Jewish controlled” films. Located near the Hamilton County courthouse, the American Theater advertised its films as “100% American”; its venue as “Kool, Kozy, and Klean”; and its management as “home people,” not outsiders. The American Theater showed The Traitor Within as a fundraiser for the Hamilton County Klan charity fund.43 Traditional roads to moral reform remained important. Bible reading in schools became a priority. Township trustees in Cass and Wabash Counties voted to require daily readings in all schools.44 The Women’s Klan was especially attentive to schools. Klanswomen in Sheridan and elsewhere gave free Bibles to those schoolchildren who had memorized the Ten Commandments.45 Godliness extended to recreation. The Junior Klan baseball team in Emison required that “Every player attends Sunday School and has pledged not to smoke, swear, or argue with umpires.” In Tipton, the Klan organized a drive to keep young people from purchasing cigarettes and entering poolrooms. Preserving the Sabbath led to campaigns for blue laws to close movie theaters, golf courses, and swimming pools on Sundays and to move auto races, baseball, and other entertainments to Saturdays. The patriotic campaign to outlaw sports on Memorial Day, including the Indianapolis 500 auto race,

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was defeated only by Governor Warren McCray’s veto. In an attack on gambling, the Anderson Horse Thief Detective Association confiscated forty-four slot machines and smashed them to pieces with a sledgehammer while a large crowd gathered to applaud. In South Bend, the HTDA continued to stop cars to search for liquor.46 The Klan’s determination to define and repress immorality extended to people’s private lives. Klan enforcers patrolled lovers’ lanes to roust amorous couples in parked cars. Robed men entered homes of domestic abusers, adulterers, and wayward teenagers. Sinners might receive a verbal warning, or a bunch of sticks placed on the porch, or a burning cross—occasionally even a whip applied to naked skin. Righteous people knew that even 100 percent white Protestants might need reminders of the moral order necessary to turn the United States back to its God and flag. K l a n V iol ence Contrary to tales handed down over generations, the Indiana Klan was seldom violent. Klan violence occurred elsewhere—especially in the South, with serious cases also in the West and in some northern locations. One of the best recent historians of the Klan, Thomas Pegram, offers a detailed survey of Klan violence across the nation. Notable is how little evidence he reports from Indiana.47 There were exceptions. One was in North Judson, a small town in northwestern Indiana with an immigrant and Catholic population large enough to support a sizable church and a parochial school along with a very active Klan. Protestants and Catholics had seemed to get along well. Kids belonged to the same Boy Scout troop, played baseball, and worked together in the summer pulling weeds in the nearby onion fields. Among the respected Catholic businessmen were the owners of the general store and the Chrysler dealership. The town marshal was an Italian American Catholic. In summer 1924, however, two crosses burned in front of the nuns’ residence. A few days later, robed Klan members paraded down Main Street, and then a bomb exploded at the priest’s residence, shattering windows and tearing off

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the front door. When combined with the parade and cross burnings, this North Judson bombing was doubtless an act of Klan terrorism.48 The North Judson bombing was reported in local newspapers. It was certainly not a unique event, yet despite much searching, no historian has yet discovered reliable sources to present a picture of an intensely violent Indiana Klan. There was intimidation, to be sure—direct, clear, and essential to understanding the Klan. Unidentified “night riders” in Sheridan forced an Asian immigrant to leave town.49 The Klavern in French Lick wrote on its official stationery to the president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ordering him to leave town because he had claimed that he was as good as any white man.50 In Clinton, an African American attorney, J. F. Henry, received a typewritten letter from the Klan threatening “drastic action” after he filed suit against a local drugstore that refused service to a black friend.51 In Muncie, a black man who refused to lift his hat when the Klan marched by was run out of town, one neighbor remembered years later.52 In his memoir of growing up the son of an anti-Klan congressman in Evansville, William Wilson recalled that “no violence befell on me or anyone in my family” and that “not even a fiery cross was burned in our yard.” Yet, home from Harvard College in the summer of 1924, Wilson witnessed “petty annoyances” such as when “our window screens were soaped with the three K’s.” Most important, in Evansville and across the state, Wilson remembered, “There was always the threat of violence around us in the hot and humid air.”53 That threat of violence gave power to the Klan. Burning crosses and hooded marchers created fears that remained long after the Klan was gone. In African American families especially, any sign of Klan presence could spark traumatic memories that had formed across generations of white intimidation and violence. A black man whose family moved to Muncie from Kentucky recalled in 1980, “My grandmother used to sit down on the floor and tell me about it, tell us all about it . . . that they’d ride up on horses, go in colored people’s homes and shoot ‘em down like dogs.”54

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Indiana Klan members might have been tempted by the lure of violence. But the organization’s zeal to conform to ideas of respectable Protestantism and patriotic citizenship created boundaries that in most communities kept harsh violence in check. A 1925 Klan manual advised against vigilante violence, because “a thinking hard-working Klansman is much better for the Klan than a brainless night-rider.”55 This generalization of limited violence extends to lynching. There are more than sixty known lynchings in Indiana history, most in the late nineteenth century, when so-called white cappers enforced local codes of conduct.56 No reputable historian has yet found a single documented lynching of anyone by the Klan in Indiana in the 1920s. The lynching of two African American teenagers on the courthouse square in Marion in 1930 was not the work of an organized Klan, although the Klan’s venomous mindset thrived among the murdering mob that hot August night.57 Always there were Klan rallies, parades, and cross burnings. Always there were Klan newspapers, pamphlets, films, and music. Always there was the threat of violence, if seldom the reality. Always there were robed Hoosiers determined to force all citizens to walk the road to moral and spiritual revival. Always there were lines of hooded men and women marching together with their placards reading, “Bootleggers We Have Our Eyes on You” and “White Supremacy.” Always there was praise for a God and nation that required vigorous intimidation and exclusion of others.58 Indiana’s citizens were mostly peaceful, law-abiding, religious, and patriotic. So, too, in their own eyes, were the women and men who donned white robes. So important was their cause that they had no choice but to enter the established political arena.

FOUR

THE POLITICS OF MEDIOCRITY

“W e a r e gover ned by sw ine,” Indi a na author M eredith Nicholson lamented in 1926.1 Hungry pigs had frequently eaten at the political trough, but Indiana’s culture in the 1920s was a particularly fertile environment. The scent of a dung heap blew across Hoosier cornfields and through downtown office windows—or perhaps it was only the challenges of democracy. Self-interest and modest commitment to the public well-being drove political careers. Successful politicians mastered the game of avoiding substantive or divisive issues. Citizens were complicit, with low expectations of government and a high tolerance for political shenanigans. Many thought politics a harmless game, almost as much fun as basketball. Small-scale corruption was an acceptable part of everyday politics, even though a few embarrassed politicians did go to jail. Mediocre leaders and apathetic citizens created a void that left space for single-issue advocates, true believers, and charlatans. That vacuum was the primary cause of the Ku Klux Klan’s rise to political power in Indiana. Like no organization before or since, the Klan invaded the political arena as it mobilized the hopes and fears of white native-born Protestants.

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T h e Polit ica l Se e dbe d The first governor of the decade was Warren McCray. A Republican farmer and banker from Kentland, McCray addressed the Indiana General Assembly in 1923 with a tepid call for less government. “What the people of Indiana want is a season of government economy and a period of legislative inaction and rest.” Therefore, McCray advised, “Pass a few important and constructive laws, repeal many that now cumber the statute books and then adjourn.”2 Democrats shared the Republican vision of do-little government. Resting on pioneer traditions, they remained determined to protect individual freedom and to keep limited power close to local communities. Occasional outbursts of reform brought moderate changes, including such progressive regulations as requiring children to attend school and prohibiting them from working in factories. Distrust of powerful government endured, however, matched only by a loathing of taxation. In a contradiction rarely acknowledged, proponents of limited government moved to force their own particular moral and religious beliefs on all Hoosiers. Such inconsistency was not new. The General Assembly from its beginning in 1816 considered bills regulating marriage, divorce, adultery, and the observance of Sabbath.3 Few such measures passed, however, due to a distrust of government power and a commitment to individual choice. Lax divorce laws, for example, made Indiana a mecca in the nineteenth century for visitors seeking a quick divorce. Laws that did pass were often not enforced, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1885. In the sweep of more than two centuries of Indiana history, the early 1920s stand out as a time of exceptional enthusiasm for government regulation of Hoosiers’ moral and personal lives.4 Democrats and Republicans differed little on issues but fought bitterly for office. The two parties built sophisticated political organizations in the late nineteenth century that tightly controlled elections from county levels to the statehouse. Party loyalty was necessary to a

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political career. Voters identified strongly with one party and seldom crossed over. To grease their engines, the parties injected massive quantities of patronage. Jobs, government contracts, and ordinary business relationships depended on which party one supported. Most leaders were stand-pat conservatives, determined to avoid rocking the boat. Behind the facade of party unity were intraparty factions organized around individual ambition rather than policy differences.5 The political culture tended to produce leaders like James E. Watson. A US senator and an exemplar of old-guard Republicanism, Watson’s priority was controlling his faction of the party and getting reelected. “Anything Republican was all right with him,” a reporter later said.6 If that meant supporting the Klan, so be it. Watson’s counterpart in the Democratic Party was former governor Samuel M. Ralston, who campaigned to keep divisive issues out of public debate. In his 1922 bid for the United States Senate, Ralston responded to a request for his views on Prohibition with the statement, “I am not discussing the Volstead Act in this campaign.”7 Neither did his Republican opponent, despite the probability that voters were talking more about Prohibition than any other political issue. Political leaders in the 1920s showed few profiles in courage but plenty of corruption. Political skullduggery was usually accepted as the spoils owed to victors. Some of this activity was more serious, as when Governor McCray was convicted of using his office to borrow money to pay personal loans brought on by the farm depression of the early 1920s. The governor resigned in April 1924. With a federal marshal at his side, he departed Indianapolis Union Station for the long trip to the Atlanta federal penitentiary. The irony is that McCray was known to be unsympathetic to the Klan. The Klan was not only delighted with his conviction but, some thought, had plotted to cause it.8 His short-term successor, Emmett Forrest Branch, had a reputation among political friends as a decent fellow but one afflicted by “an unfortunate habit of maybe imbibing a little too strongly” (and also as the son of a father who named his children for trees).9 Branch’s successor, Edward Jackson, only escaped jail on a technicality. Jackson became the undisputed holder of the title of the worst governor

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in Indiana history.10 Indianapolis mayor John L. Duvall was among several local officials who served prison terms for corruption. So many politicians went to jail that some joked the word Hoosier derived from hoosegow and that prison wardens were building special Indiana rooms. There were few jests about the most notable Indiana prisoner, the socialist Eugene V. Debs, whose courage in opposing the Great War had earlier landed him in the same federal penitentiary that Governor McCray would enter. T h e K l a n Goe s to t h e Pol l s In early 1922, a still-fledgling Klan failed in an attempt to hold a public rally in Indianapolis. The local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its allies prevented it.11 Two years later, some five thousand Klan members marched victoriously through downtown streets, attracting “one of the largest crowds to witness a parade in recent years.”12 Parades and cross burnings across the state brought members and money to build a sophisticated political organization. By the time of the 1924 spring primaries, the Klan was ready to jump full speed into the political arena. An anti-Klan newspaper in Chicago reported that “Indiana is the first Northern state to wage a state-wide Klux and anti-Klux campaign. It is the first Northern state where the members of the hooded organization have openly entered the political field along state-wide lines and made a bid for votes for a Klux candidate for governor.”13 The 1924 elections would make Indiana a Klan state, many hoped and some feared. From an office suite in downtown Indianapolis, D. C. Stephenson ran the campaign. Arriving in the city from Evansville in 1922, the Indiana Grand Dragon had a nose for opportunity, a salesman’s charm, and organizational skills that enabled him to build a grassroots campaign in all ninety-two counties. Local Klan workers screened candidates to identify friends and enemies and then to prepare voter guides. Klan workers distributed these information sheets to friendly organizations, including Protestant churches, sometimes placing

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them with the Sunday school lessons. The slates identified each candidate’s religion, position on Prohibition, and degree of “readiness to assist in all Americanization measures.” A final item listed the candidate’s position on the Klan: “He is favorable,” or “He is unfavorable.”14 Democratic candidates sometimes received favorable rankings; Republicans usually did. The Horse Thief Detective Association joined the political work. Klan organizer Charles F. Lowe wrote Stephenson to request his weekly paycheck and to report that in Petersburg he had just formed an HTDA company of “40 men, all Klansmen and all for Ed Jackson.” “We had a wonderful machine in 1924,” one Klan leader recalled, adding that he deployed two hundred automobiles to get voters to the polls in St. Joseph County. According to a New York Times reporter, Indiana’s Klan “had a machine that made [New York’s] Tammany seem amateurish.”15 The machine required money. The Indiana Klan had lots of it. Two economic historians recently analyzed the business operations and concluded that “the Klan’s true genius lay in its remarkable ability to raise revenue.” They estimated that, “at its peak, initiation fees, dues, and profits from robes in the state of Indiana alone generated nearly $4.4 million (in 2011 dollars) annually.” Members paid a $10 initiation, plus $6.50 for a robe (a required purchase), and an annual membership fee of $5 to $10. The businesslike organization included bureaucratic efficiency, such as Form K-114, which was used to order robes, with instructions that forms and checks should be sent directly to the Indianapolis office and not the Atlanta headquarters. A Klansman spent roughly $23.30 the first year (about $250 in 2011 dollars). A sophisticated sales force, working on commission, recruited new members as it peddled the Klan message.16 The 1924 campaign brought an outside and disruptive force seldom, if ever, seen in Indiana’s traditional two-party politics. Predictable voting patterns that extended back to the Civil War era gave way to chaos. Anxious party leaders gathered in offices and smoke-filled rooms, whispered on sidewalks, and exchanged hundreds of letters to find the best path to electoral victory. This “mess . . . is the worst we have ever had,” one lamented. “There never has been any such effort

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as there is now not only to arouse religious prejudice but to rely upon it,” he asserted.17 Another politician regretted that “ideas of race and religion now dominate political thought” so that “agencies and influence that were once powerful now are without influence.”18 The Klan became the third rail of state politics. Both parties were careful to keep a public distance for fear of alienating anti-Klan voters, but attentive citizens knew well the close relationship of most Republican candidates to the Klan. The partnership became clear in the 1924 spring primary. The two leading Republican gubernatorial candidates were Lew Shank, Indianapolis mayor and one of the Klan’s severest critics, and Edward Jackson, one of its warmest supporters. Jackson was a self-taught lawyer, a member of the Disciples of Christ, a hero of the Great War, and ambitious to become governor. In summer 1923, Jackson joined Stephenson on his Lake Erie yacht.19 The two men formed a partnership for victory. Among the errands Jackson carried out was to offer a bribe to Governor McCray to appoint a Klan sympathizer to a Marion County office—a bribe that McCray refused. Stephenson aggressively supported Jackson and the Republican ticket. He sent mailings to his field workers framing the election as a fight “to determine our right to existence in the State of Indiana.” Klansmen must, he urged, adopt “a militant Americanism,” with no “pussy-footed patriotism.”20 The Jackson-Shank contest made the primary “an out-and-out Klan and anti-Klan fight,” the Indianapolis News reported.21 The Marion County Republican chairman, a Shank supporter, told a campaign rally that the election was about one issue: “Are you a KKK or not?”22 In a landslide victory for the Klan, Jackson carried all but three of the state’s ninety-two counties.23 The defeated Shank told the press, “It seems the people want klan rule so we’ll give it to them. The bars are down and they can parade all they please.”24 Parade they did, in a massive march through the capital city. And they gathered at Indianapolis’s Cadle Tabernacle, a favorite venue for religious revivals.25 With a Klan-Republican fall election victory now in sight, Stephenson abandoned his moderate style of public speaking for partisan combativeness. “We must put over Jackson to prove our very right to

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existence,” he told the Cadle audience as he called on “the ministers of Indiana to do the praying for the Ku Klux Klan and I’ll do the scrapping for it!” He promised the faithful that “the fiery cross is going to burn at every crossroads in Indiana, as long as there is a white man left in the state!”26 As Stephenson promised, in Monroe County alone, back-to-back rallies in Ellettsville, Harrodsburg, and Smithville began with parades and ended with burning crosses.27 The Republican strategy was to ride the Klan whirlwind yet still hold the party’s traditional base, including even African American voters. Delegates to the Republican state convention in Indianapolis’s Tomlinson Hall watched Stephenson and his associates work the floor. Steve, as friends called him, claimed privately that 811 of the 1,300 delegates “supported me” and that 85 percent of the party were Klan members.28 Party conventions had customarily been great spectacles of amusement and camaraderie. Not this one. Cowered delegates dutifully nominated the Klan’s candidates but acted “as if under restraint” and “showed not much of a whoop-em-up spirit,” one journalist wrote a friend.29 The Klan was a tougher challenge for Democrats. The state party leader, Senator Ralston, was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. To keep up with rapidly changing politics back home, Ralston wrote from his Washington, DC, office to Democratic friends. They replied with accounts of the turmoil the Klan had created and suggested possible responses. One correspondent wanted the party to condemn the Klan and “fight the question out to its last analysis.”30 By spotlighting the unholy Klan-Republican alliance, Democrats could win with a coalition of Catholics, African Americans, and good-hearted Hoosiers. A Democratic newspaper editor in southern Indiana agreed and assured Ralston, “We will get a large percent of the protestant vote who are at heart against the principles of the Klan.”31 Opposing these optimists were correspondents who estimated that “at least 40 of the 92 [Democratic] county chairmen in the state belong to that organization.” Attacking the Klan would alienate enough voters to sink the party in November.32 The Democratic state and national conventions featured behindthe-scenes maneuvering with “rabid people on both sides” of the Klan

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issue, according to Indiana party boss Tom Taggart.33 There were certainly Klan members and sympathizers among the 1,293 delegates to the state convention, with estimates ranging from 240 to 400. Delegates eventually agreed to reject as their gubernatorial candidate an ardent Klan critic, Lafayette mayor George R. Durgan in favor of Carleton B. McCulloch. (Durgan had wryly suggested that the two state universities establish an academic “chair of tolerance.”34) McCulloch had briefly criticized the organization but then reverted to silence. Debate then focused on the party platform. Catholic Democrats introduced a “radical plank” that condemned the Klan by name. Many delegates argued such a direct attack would alienate the party’s Klan sympathizers. “If it is a Klan fight we are licked,” one wrote.35 Some also argued that the threat “will fizzle out in a very short time.”36 To the “very pious people of our faith,” the Indiana Catholic and Record advised, “Let the Klan alone. It will die out. Don’t dignify it by mentioning it.”37 It was understandable that many Catholics would push the issue, one Democrat concluded, but an antiKlan plank would mean Republican victory, and then “let them feel the real sting of the Ku Klux.” Some even suggested that the adoption of an anti-Klan plank was a shrewd Republican plot to divert attention from GOP humiliations that included Governor McCray’s jail sentence and President Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal.38 As was the traditional Indiana way, the Democratic Party took a middle course. To avoid a nasty floor fight, delegates rejected the radical anti-Klan plank and adopted instead a moderate statement. To keep Klan Democrats in the fold, the platform did not mention the organization by name. Seeking Catholic and African American votes, however, the party agreed to “condemn the efforts of our opponents to make religion, race, color or accidental place of birth a political issue.” The platform also charged that the Republican Party had been “delivered into the hands of an organization which has no place in politics and which promulgates doctrines . . . repugnant to the principles of government advocated by [President Abraham] Lincoln and [Indiana Civil War Governor Oliver P.] Morton.”39 The Indianapolis News concluded that “no one . . . can fail to understand what it means.”40

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In the fall general elections, both parties remained silent about the white-robed enthusiasts in their ranks. Both hoped to retain their traditional supporters and still attract as many Klan voters as possible. McCulloch said nothing. Nor did Jackson. Campaigning across the state in a chauffeured Lexington touring car lent by Stephenson, who had also donated money to his campaign, Jackson promised full liberties to Catholics, Jews, and African Americans.41 The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette attacked Jackson frequently as a “klux-Republican.” The editor of the anti-Klan Indiana Catholic and Record condemned “the abject cowardice of the two ‘great’ political parties in their attitude toward the infamous un-American organization.”42 The Klan was not silent. Klan literature urged members to vote Republican and enumerated Klan principles, including “white American supremacy,” “exclusion of Foreign immigration,” and the necessity that “only native born White American citizens be eligible to elective public office.”43 The Indianapolis Fiery Cross warned that Catholic priests were raising money in every Indiana county for McCulloch’s gubernatorial campaign and that “at the coming elections the millions of Roman Catholic voters will be directed in the casting of their ballot by the pope of Rome.” Headlines just before election day proclaimed, “Rome Dictates to Indiana Voters” and “Attempt Is Made to Stampede the Negro Voter.”44 Labeling it “the Protestants’ battle,” the Klan newspaper printed a list of Catholic-supported candidates. All were Democrats except one.45 Catholic and Jewish voters retained their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party in 1924. The Indiana Jewish Chronicle abandoned its nonpartisan position to urge a Democratic vote. African Americans were more uncertain. Since the Civil War, the great majority had always voted Republican. But now, the Indianapolis Freeman editorialized, “the Ku Klux Klan has captured, boot and breeches, the Republican Party in Indiana and has turned what has been historically an organization of constitutional freedom into an agency for the promotion of religious and racial hate.”46 When the Republican Party organized a barbecue for black voters in Kokomo, supplying several hundred pounds of beef, only forty-seven people showed up.47

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Newly formed NAACP branches in Indianapolis, Muncie, Gary, and elsewhere payed close attention to Klan activity and organized antiKlan publicity and meetings. On October 19, 1924, several thousand African Americans attended an NAACP rally in Tomlinson Hall to build opposition to Republican candidates. The following day, delegates from ten Indiana branches created a statewide NAACP.48 The national head of the civil rights organization advised that it was “the plain duty of all colored voters in Indiana to vote against the Republican candidate for Governor.”49 Black voters stood in long lines on election day to abandon for the first time the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. The Indiana Catholic and Record congratulated black Hoosiers, who “had the splendid courage and intelligence to rise above party and vote against the enemies of their race and those who would violate their rights under the Constitution.” With a slap at Democrats who voted for Republican Klan candidates, the editor added, “We wish we could say the same for some of the ‘superior’ white citizens of Indiana.”50 There were, in fact, good-hearted white Protestant Hoosiers who had traditionally voted Republican and now turned against the party of the Klan. But there were also pro-Klan Democrats who crossed over to vote Republican, ignoring the plea of a Democratic legislator who told them their party “is burned deeper into your hearts than is the fiery cross.”51 One Republican worker reported that on the west side of Indianapolis, where Democrats always had won large majorities, “there was a Jackson picture in nearly every window.” In solidly Democratic working-class wards in Evansville, voters switched to Republican candidates.52 Democratic optimists who had expected tolerant Hoosiers to turn against the Klan were disappointed. A party leader in southern Indiana, where Democrats were usually victorious, predicted that congressional incumbent William E. Wilson, “a man of the high type,” would defeat the Klan candidate for Congress, Republican Harry Rowbottom. Rowbottom was a youthful salesman who boasted of his Klan membership and “never went beyond the eighth grade [and] is regarded as a joke.” Wilson’s son remembered Rowbottom as a

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“bombastic and platitudinous speaker.” Voters selected Rowbottom, who remained in Congress for the remainder of the decade. (Rowbottom’s political career ended with a term in Leavenworth penitentiary for taking a bribe to appoint a rural mail carrier.)53 The Klan-Republican alliance achieved decisive victories in 1924. Jackson carried sixty of Indiana’s ninety-two counties. Among the state’s major cities, only Fort Wayne, with a large Catholic, Lutheran, and German population, rejected Jackson, although some local Klanbacked candidates won.54 The candidate most closely identified with the Klan did not lead the total vote, however, as several other statewide Republicans polled larger numbers, and three state offices went to Democratic candidates. The next General Assembly would seat 116 Republicans and thirty-four Democrats. The Klan was entitled to proclaim victory. Fiery Cross headlines announced, “Protestant Ticket Sweeps State” and “National Papal Machine Smashed.”55 Stephenson’s joyous moment came with the inauguration of Jackson as governor in January 1925. At the reception following the ceremony, Stephenson stood next to the new governor to greet guests, slap them on the back, and whisper a word or two. It would turn out to be his premier moment in the spotlight. At the inauguration dinner, Indiana poet William Herschell recited his beloved “Ain’t God Good to Indiana?” Stevenson sat near a young statehouse employee and later danced with her. Madge Oberholtzer was one of many young women who attracted the Klansman’s eye and lust. T h e So-Ca l l e d K l a n L egisl at u r e of 1925 Republican victory in 1924 led to expectations that the Klan majority sitting in the next General Assembly would work its will. In early 1925, two women and 148 men from across the state gathered in the legislative chambers. Nearly all were native-born white Protestants. Four were foreign-born, four Catholic, and none African American or Jewish. A large majority of the 150 listed on their biographical questionnaires their membership in Methodist, Baptist, Christian, Presbyterian, and other mainline Protestant churches. Many added affiliation

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with patriotic and fraternal organizations (especially Freemasons). None listed Klan membership, though most were likely members of or sympathetic to the Klan.56 Some Democrats also supported the order. One Republican political operative was distressed by the chaos that the “hoard of inexperienced men” in the “Ku Klux legislature” might cause. They will “not be responsive to party advice or control,” he feared.57 The legislative session featured calls for harsh enforcement of Prohibition and more intense Americanism and anti-Catholicism. To enact these core Klan principles, Stephenson’s associates invaded the ornate 1888 statehouse. Some legislators made friendly calls on Stephenson in his downtown office, as did Governor Jackson.58 The 1925 legislature achieved its major triumph in the Wright Bone Dry Law. Frank E. Wright of Randolph County presented the bill as the tool to hammer the last nails into the coffin of alcohol. Severe penalties for a first offense of possession of alcohol included a fine of one hundred dollars and thirty days in jail. Evidence sufficient to convict included possession of empty containers that only smelled of alcohol. Wright’s bill offered prosecuting attorneys an extra fee of twenty-five dollars for each conviction. The Bone Dry bill passed the Senate 35–4 and the House 89–1. The historian of the General Assembly, Justin Walsh, labeled it “possibly the most repressive bill ever introduced.” Not all legislators in the voting majority were committed Prohibitionists. The night of final passage, a newspaper editor later testified, some lawmakers “celebrated in drunken debauchery at the Claypool Hotel.”59 The Bone Dry law was the culmination of the long Prohibition crusade and, more broadly, of legislating morality. Not until the end of the twentieth century would so many Hoosiers again endorse such severe restrictions on individual freedoms. Stephenson claimed credit for the new law, but victory was the work of many hands, particularly Edward S. Shumaker and his Anti-Saloon League, the Protestant churches, and several women’s organizations.60 The Indiana Catholic and Record called the law “the production of the mentality of fanatics.”61 Doubtless there were fanatics as well as hypocrites among the

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supporters, but also among the elected representatives of a democratic majority were many who believed that alcohol was the cause and symbol of America’s decline. In addition to harsh Prohibition enforcement, Klan supporters introduced bills to advance patriotism and Americanism. Some were innocuous, such as one that required all schools to fly the American flag. More perilous was a bill that mandated all noncitizens “to register with the county clerk and carry a registration card at all times.” The flag bill passed; the registration bill failed.62 More threatening was the Klan’s aggressive education agenda, which focused on the Catholic threat. Legislators introduced education bills to make Bible reading mandatory in all schools, to require religious instruction, to authorize a state commission to approve all textbooks in parochial as well as public schools, to permit only graduates of public schools to qualify for a teaching license, and to prohibit wearing of “religious garb” in public schools. The Fiery Cross and Klan orators had long advocated these anti-Catholic measures to ensure Protestant-based instruction. The most contentious was the religious garb bill directed against Catholic nuns who taught in some public schools in small communities with teacher shortages and sizable Catholic populations. Their presence, critics believed, was a form of religious recruitment and an assault on the separation of church and state.63 The Klan’s anti-Catholic agenda generated intensive deliberation, but none of the bills passed. Opponents argued that the proposed restrictions were best left to local communities, a deeply honored practice in Indiana and much of the nation. A few courageous legislators reminded colleagues of traditions of individual freedom and separation of church and state. Herbert Kenney, a Protestant Democrat from New Albany, attacked the anti-Catholic bills and asserted the constitutional right of parents to choose to educate their children in parochial schools.64 A major reason the so-called Klan legislature of 1925 was a flop was division within the Klan. Internal differences and personal

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self-aggrandizement spawned two competing organizations.65 The egotistical Stephenson balked at taking direction from Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, the national leader based in Atlanta. The two met to settle their differences at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, in early summer 1923 but failed to find compromise. In late 1923, Stephenson quietly split with Evans and formed an independent Indiana Klan. The feud continued, with Stephenson pursuing an investigation of his opponent that focused on charges of financial corruption in taking money from Indiana sources, dictatorial decisions from Atlanta, and a sympathy toward Southern-style Klans, with their propensity for violence.66 Evans appointed as his Indiana Grand Dragon Walter F. Bossert, a Republican State Committee member and small-town lawyer from Liberty in eastern Indiana. Bossert seemed eager to build Klan principles into law, but his own political ambition, which necessitated pushing Stephenson from power, likely trumped that. There is no doubt that Stephenson was more eager to discredit the Bossert-led Klan than pass bills on Prohibition, religion, or patriotism. As he fought with Bossert and Evans, Stephenson also worked to increase his personal wealth and political power with such schemes as modifying insurance regulations and controlling the Indiana Highway Commission. Automobile owners demanded more paved roads, and Stephenson saw a bonanza in patronage and construction contracts. Among several examples of ways in which his narrow interests hurt the Klan’s legislative program was the fight over the election of James J. Nejdl as pro tempore of the Senate. The Bossert faction strongly opposed the senator from Lake County because he was foreign-born and had voiced opposition to the Klan. Stephenson instructed his legislative loyalists to vote for Nejdl as a slap at Bossert. Nejdl won and also became chair of the education committee, where he helped defeat the anti-Catholic school bills. A smaller challenge came in Delaware County, where Klan members disillusioned with both Stephenson and Bossert formed the Independent Klan of America. Their initial gathering in Muncie in

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April 1924 attracted several hundred people. Perhaps ingrained in Klan leadership was a propensity toward self-aggrandizement and internecine conflict.67 The so-called Klan legislature adjourned without passing a significant piece of Klan legislation, except the Wright Bone Dry Law. Stephenson’s personal bills failed as well. The state’s major Catholic newspaper concluded that “the honor of Indiana, as a home of religious liberty has been redeemed.”68 Many thought the Klan would return at the next session, but the failure to deliver in 1925 likely caused a falling away among Hoosier citizens. So did glimpses of feuding and corruption among selfish Klan leaders and their distraction from core Klan issues. As one local Klan officer later recalled, members began to “holler” that it was all “just politics.”69 The drift intensified as stories emerged of the wickedness of Stephenson, the charlatan who had boasted, “I am the law in Indiana.”

FIVE

STEPHENSON GOES DOWN

Crosses bur ned, fl ags wav ed. Indi a na, it seem ed, would be a Klan state. The Ku Klux Klan would infiltrate Protestant churches, replace the two traditional political parties, and protect white native-born Hoosiers from immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans. The Klan would reverse the moral decay evident in booze, sex, music, and film. The Klan would redeem Indiana and America. That future, so eagerly anticipated by so many, was not to be. By the end of the 1920s, the Klan was finished. “Nobody wanted to admit he’d ever belonged,” one reporter recalled.1 Two sources caused the downfall: Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson revealed to all his criminal wickedness. And, more slowly, Hoosiers stood up to the organization’s politics and ideology. The rise of the Klan had been rapid. The downfall seemed far too slow for the Klan’s critics. Even after a sensational trial exposed Stephenson’s venalities, many Hoosiers remained reluctant to condemn the organization he had led. Gr a n d Dr agon, Ch a r l ata n Most popular accounts of the Klan devote too much attention to Stephenson.2 He is irresistible, but shining the spotlight on this one leader leaves in the shadows those ordinary Hoosiers who joined the 127

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movement. The popular notion persists that Stephenson was an evil genius who manipulated unsophisticated Hoosiers into joining his political organization. Seeing Klan members as rubes diminishes the agency of ordinary people as actors. Blaming a wicked Grand Dragon absolves all others and makes the Klan a fluke occurrence that arrived and disappeared along with the Stephenson. In this version of history, little of consequence is to be learned beyond Stephenson’s lurid story. This comforting myth spins out iniquitous consequences that persist to the present. Although the central story of the Klan is with those thousands of Hoosiers who knowingly joined, Stephenson cannot be ignored. He enthralls not simply because he was extraordinarily selfish and evil. He was neither the first nor last such leader on the historical stage. He fascinates because of the unanswerable questions. Without him, what would the Klan have been? Without his personal crimes, would the Klan have continued to flourish? Born in 1891, Stephenson grew up in Houston, left school after the eighth grade, and drifted from place to place and job to job, often working as a salesman. He spent some time in Oklahoma employed by a newspaper and speaking for the Socialist Party. He married in 1915 but soon abandoned his pregnant wife to drift, drink, and carouse. He joined the army during the Great War. After service, he traveled as a salesman, married again in Akron, Ohio, and then settled in Evansville with a new job selling typesetting equipment and then coal. In southwestern Indiana, he began connecting with other veterans and telling false stories of his wartime heroism in France (he never served overseas). He made friends quickly. His blond hair, blue eyes, good looks, and charm attracted many people, including young women. For a short time he dallied in Democratic Party politics. He soon glimpsed the financial gain from selling Klan memberships rather than coal. In Evansville in May 1922, as the Exalted Cyclops, he signed the new charter creating Klavern 1 in the Realm of Indiana. Issued from the Imperial Palace in Atlanta and resting today in the Indiana State Archives, the charter is full of purple ribbons, gold seals, and the word honor in large type.3

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In the summer of 1922, Stephenson moved to Indianapolis to work as a Klan recruiter, set up the Fiery Cross newspaper, and rise to head the state organization. Formal induction as Indiana Grand Dragon came at a massive rally in Kokomo’s Melfalfa Park on July 4, 1923. It was a rapid ascent. The money rolled in. Recent calculations put Stephenson’s annual income at $2.5 million at a time when baseball star Babe Ruth earned $613,000 and President Calvin Coolidge earned $885,000 (all in 2006 dollars).4 In the Kresge Building in downtown Indianapolis, Stephenson opened a suite of book-lined offices staffed by secretaries and assistants and with more telephones in one place than most Hoosiers had ever seen. On his desk, the Grand Dragon placed a bust of Napoleon. He bought a house in Irvington, a pleasant suburb, added four columns to the front, and remodeled the interior to create an ostentatious mansion staffed with assistants, a cook, and several armed bodyguards. With rising income from membership fees and sales of Klan regalia, he purchased a ninety-eight-foot yacht, which he kept on Lake Erie. The yacht and the Irvington home provided space to combine Stephenson’s business and personal pleasures. Hoosiers liked him. Stephenson was still in his early thirties. He deployed his salesman’s talents in friendly banter and bold promises. His assistants eagerly helped build a cult of personality, featuring a leader manly and commanding yet compassionate to the people. The Indianapolis Fiery Cross praised “his unselfish devotion, sterling integrity, honor and loving personality, together with his tireless energy and magnetic force.” By the mid-1920s, he had gained weight, but an expensive suit, vest, and watch chain provided masculine style to distract from his paunch. There was endless fascination about the man who was the “personification of the principles of Klancraft.”5 What most followers did not see were his parties fueled by alcohol and graced by young women. Stephenson was a heavy drinker and a philanderer. He had a harsh temper. His second wife left him soon after the couple moved to Indianapolis, no longer willing to tolerate his rage and abuse. Several women claimed he had attempted to assault them. “He was a beast when he is drunk,” one of his lovers

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testified. His biographer, William Lutholtz, identified a “pattern of guns, intoxication, biting, and attempted rape.”6 Some women were happy to be in his company. His papers at the Indiana Historical Society Library and the Indiana State Library contain several letters from adoring women. One wrote to thank him for the roses he gave her and to remind him that she was sending him “a little note every day or so.” Another wrote that she still had the engagement ring he had given her and that, “even though you lied to me about getting married,” she was willing to take him back.7 On a summer night in 1923, a deputy sheriff approached a Cadillac parked along a country road—“a place,” the officer later testified, “where immorality was practiced.” In the backseat, the deputy found Stephenson with “his trousers unbuttoned and he himself showed every indication of immorality.” His twenty-year-old secretary was with him. “The lady’s dress was up around her waist.” Stephenson failed to talk his way out of the situation and eventually pleaded guilty to parking without headlights and to indecent exposure. He paid his $17.50 fine.8 The Indiana Grand Dragon was the exemplar of the moral decline Klan members so abhorred. Stephenson was arrogant, corrupt, selfish, and more eager to make money and gain power than to save white native-born Protestants. Others in the great crusade emulated his pursuit of the main chance. Court Asher was a Muncie bootlegger who served jail time and was a white supremacist and fervent antisemite. Asher recalled later that when he “saw what a hell of a political organization the Klan could become” as well as being a great place for “makin’ good dough,” he signed up as one of Stephenson’s bodyguards and political organizers. Asher may have brought more genuine conviction to the Klan than Stephenson, but joiners like him were pale imitations of their leader’s hucksterism.9 The sexual assault and murder of a woman revealed the Grand Dragon’s extraordinary wickedness. T h e De at h of M a dge Ober holtzer Madge Oberholtzer lived with her parents in Irvington, where she attended the Irvington Methodist Church and studied at Butler College

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(then located in that east-side Indianapolis suburb). She left college after three years to take a variety of jobs, moving eventually to the Indiana Department of Instruction to manage a lending library for schoolteachers. At Ed Jackson’s gubernatorial inauguration dinner in 1925, she danced with Stephenson and then began to accept his invitations for dinner and parties at his Irvington home, just a few blocks from hers. During the 1925 legislative session, Oberholtzer helped carry messages from Stephenson to his friends in the statehouse. And she agreed to help him write a book on nutrition to be sold to Indiana public schools, one of his many financial schemes. Late in the evening of March 15, 1925, Stephenson sent word to Oberholtzer that he needed to see her. His bodyguard, Earl Gentry, came to the Oberholtzer home to escort her on the short walk in the dark evening. On the morning of March 17, another bodyguard, Earl Klinck, carried a badly injured Oberholtzer upstairs to her bedroom, claiming that she had been hurt in an auto accident. The family physician, John Kingsbury, soon arrived to conclude that “she was in a state of shock”; her clothing was disheveled, and she had lacerations on her chest and bruises on her face. She told the doctor “she wanted to die.”10 Madge Oberholtzer did die, on April 14, 1925. On her deathbed, Oberholtzer signed a statement that, along with Kingsbury’s notes and other evidence, told a damning story. Forced to drink at Stephenson’s home the evening of March 15, Oberholtzer said, she unwillingly joined Stephenson and two bodyguards on a Monon train headed to Chicago. In the lower berth of a private compartment, Stephenson ripped off her clothing and sexually assaulted her, viciously biting her body. The group left the train in Hammond and checked into the Indiana Hotel, where a drunk Stephenson soon fell asleep. The next morning, Oberholtzer claimed to need cosmetics and, with a bodyguard, walked to a drugstore, where she purchased mercury bichloride tablets, which she later swallowed in a suicide attempt. A panicked Stephenson and his bodyguards sped back to the Irvington mansion, drinking along the way and arriving late in the night on March 16. They carried Oberholtzer to the bedroom above the garage and then returned her to her home the next morning.

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Oberholtzer’s parents called a young Irvington lawyer, Asa J. Smith. Along with Kingsbury, Smith took careful notes of conversations with the young woman. When Kingsbury concluded that she would not recover, Smith prepared a written statement with full details of Oberholtzer’s account. Madge Oberholtzer listened to and then signed the document. It would become a massive blow to the Klan in Indiana and across the nation. Marion County prosecutor Will Remy was the official who Stephenson and Jackson had earlier tried to keep from office by their attempted bribery of Governor Warren McCray. Smith presented his evidence to Remy, and by April 2 the prosecutor had a warrant for Stephenson’s arrest along with his two bodyguards. With Oberholtzer’s death two weeks later, charges were raised to second-degree murder. Although some of the Indianapolis officials handling the case were or had been Klansmen, publicity and public sentiment made it impossible for Stephenson to escape a trial. Newspapers printed details from Oberholtzer’s deathbed statement. Authorities began a thorough investigation, gathering evidence from employees at the Hammond hotel and the Monon train. Several women came forward to report Stephenson’s brutality. Public meetings condemned Stephenson and demanded justice. Crowds waited to see the spectacle unfold in the courtroom. Klan members turned away from Steve. In August 1925, children swimming in the White River in southern Hamilton County retrieved two burlap sacks floating downstream. Inside were letters, canceled checks, telegrams, membership lists, and field reports, likely dumped into the river by anxious Klavern officers.11 T h e Gr a n d Dr agon Goe s to Cou rt Stephenson’s attorney requested a change of venue. The trial moved from Indianapolis to nearby Noblesville, in Hamilton County, site of many Klan rallies. The county courthouse, built in 1878, had a second-floor, 176-seat courtroom that became the arena of a national show trial. Spectators jammed the room, some bringing their

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lunches so they could keep their seats. Crowds filled the courthouse square. Newspapers around the state and across the nation offered details of the crime, although reporters struggled for appropriate words to describe Stephenson’s brutality. Meredith Nicholson wrote that “even Roget’s usually helpful Thesaurus lacks words fitly to describe the concatenation of scandals in Hoosierdom that have kept the state’s name on all the first pages.”12 Finding a judge and jury proved difficult. Only after 260 citizens were called did the court seat twelve jurors, all men. Several potential judges refused to serve, but eventually from Rush County came Will Sparks—a Republican, a Mason, and a Methodist, but known as unfavorable to the Klan. Inside the jail on the courthouse square Stephenson was treated well. The sheriff, Charles W. Gooding, was likely a Klan member and turned away when bootleg liquor was delivered to his star prisoner. With fellow prisoners Earl Gentry and Earl Klinck, Stephenson walked each day to the nearby courtroom. On opening day of the trial, October 29, 1925, the three prisoners listened as prosecutor Charles Cox asserted, “This case is to determine whether we are to protect the sanctity of the honor and chastity of womanhood.” Stephenson, he said, was a Jekyll and Hyde—a “sympathetic, cultured, attractive man of the world” and “a drunkard and a persistent destroyer of women’s chastity.”13 Stephenson employed the state’s finest defense attorneys. They attempted to prove that Oberholtzer committed suicide from a self-administered poison. That poison, and not the infections from Stephenson’s attack, was the cause of her death. The defense also attempted to keep her dying declaration from admission as evidence, but Judge Sparks ruled otherwise. As the prosecution read aloud the deathbed statement, “the ghost of the girl seemed to hover, terror stricken, over the courtroom.”14 Witnesses from the Oberholtzer home testified, as did employees from the Hammond hotel and the Monon Pullman car. The trial adjourned the first Sunday to allow jurors to attend services at First Christian Church in the morning and another religious service in

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the evening, with Sunday dinner and a country walk in between. Resuming the week of November 2, the prosecution presented testimony that Oberholtzer had died not from poison but from infections on her breast caused by Stephenson’s vicious bites. She was a “nice girl,” an innocent victim. The defense countered that Oberholtzer was a woman of low character and that she was having an affair with a married man—rumors spread by Klan defenders—but the judge refused to allow most of these assertions. Blaming-the-victim stories stuck with some, however. As late as 1987, an oral history informant wondered “why was she shacking up with him,” and another commented, “This girl might have been a party girl, I suppose she was or she wouldn’t have been on that train.”15 Defense lawyers hit hard on the claim that it was a political trial created by Stephenson’s enemies, inside and outside the Klan, who were “trying to rush this man to the electric chair to get rid of him.” Prosecuting attorneys reiterated the claim that Stephenson, Gentry, and Klink were brutes and that Stephenson took from Oberholtzer “that which she held dearer than her life—her chastity.”16 On November 14, 1925, the jury returned a guilty verdict of seconddegree murder for Stephenson. Those who had been holding their breath began to exhale. He had been “a man of singular power,” the editor of the Indianapolis News wrote. “For a moment he nearly controlled the state.”17 Stephenson insisted he had been framed. It was not over, he said. Indianapolis reporter Harold Feightner knew Stephenson well. He later recalled, “Of course, Steve could never understand why a man of his stature should even be accused, let alone imprisoned. He confidently expected a pardon, there is no doubt about that.”18 Departing the Noblesville jail, Stephenson rode with Sheriff Gooding in his Studebaker to the state prison at Michigan City. There he worked in the prison laundry and waited for a pardon from his friend, Governor Jackson. No pardon came. The former Grand Dragon began to mention his “little black boxes.” In July 1927, Prosecutor Remy began to open them. They overflowed with ten thousand letters, receipts, canceled checks, signed photographs of notables (including a

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large portrait of Governor Jackson), Stephenson’s Bible, and his list of names for sending Christmas cards. Newspapers began to report the details. Among those incriminated were Indianapolis mayor John Duvall, six members of the city council, and Jackson—all Republicans and all affiliated with the Klan. Indiana had never sunk so low, some said.19 Investigations began at local, state, and federal levels. In September 1927, a Marion County grand jury indicted Jackson on charges of attempted bribery. Stephenson told the grand jury that he had given Jackson $227,000 in the 1924 campaign and offered details about canceled checks and other documents he had saved in his boxes.20 The financial record included a canceled check written by the governor to Stephenson for $2,500, which the governor claimed was payment for a saddle horse. Asked to produce the horse, Jackson claimed it had died after swallowing a corncob. A “storm of ridicule” followed, the Indianapolis News reported. Newsboys shouted the headlines as they peddled extra editions on street corners. “Indiana hangs its head in shame,” the Indianapolis Star reported.21 The spotlight moved to Jackson’s trial in early 1928. Stephenson’s little black boxes gave prosecutors solid evidence that Jackson had attempted to bribe Governor McCray on instructions from Stephenson. McCray, now released from federal prison, testified convincingly. Technicalities, including the statute of limitations, kept Jackson out of jail, but his political career was over. Scheduled to speak at the Republican state convention in May 1928, leaders adjourned early in order to keep Jackson off the platform. Jackson stubbornly insisted on serving out the remainder of his months in office.22 The Republican Party’s ties to the Klan became increasingly embarrassing. Democrat Meredith Nicholson gloated that for the GOP, it was “like a boy with an all-day sucker who goes into a grocery and doesn’t know where to place it.”23 The federal government also began investigations. The United States Senate sent Department of Justice agents to Indiana to interview leaders and associates. Public testimony on the Senate floor in early 1928 included a long statement from Maryland senator Millard

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E. Tydings that cataloged Klan corruption and rehearsed “all the old story of shame so familiar to Indiana.”24 Senator Tydings emphasized Jackson’s bribery attempt and trial. “All these matters,” he said, “are hard to understand for one who has not been trained in the peculiar polities of Indiana.” Tydings charged that Stephenson, “whose name is sufficient to soil the lips of him who utters it,” was “the unquestioned dictator of the Republican organization in Indiana.” Linking Indiana senators James Watson and Arthur Robinson to the Klan, the Democrat Tydings was surely playing for partisan advantage. The two Indiana Republicans dismissed Tydings’s evidence as “very malicious campaign lies.” They “had seen nothing and knew nothing,” one critic wrote. The senators testified simply that Indiana was “the brightest jewel in the American diadem of States.”25 Perhaps the most positive contemporary spin on the downfall of the Klan came in a brief historical account published in 1933. “If there is little to Indiana’s credit in her Klan history, it is to be remembered in her favor that she proceeded relentlessly but with due process of law to prosecute the corrupt and avaricious politicians.” There was truth in the conclusion that the machinery of justice did prevail, but it was hardly relentless. And it came after the death of a young woman.26 Stephenson did not go quietly into the prison night. He hired attorneys and become an energetic jailhouse lawyer who filed petitions and appeals. He wrote hundreds of letters from his Michigan City cell, mixing a pretense of legal knowledge and pomposity with smartalecky humor. He was an innocent victim of “the criminal element in the Klan,” he claimed.27 His sentence was punitive. He tried all the angles, including an unsuccessful appeal to exhume Oberholtzer’s body for autopsy.28 A 1932 petition, “as usual,” the press reported, “abounded with vituperative, flowery phrases and accusations.”29 Stephenson’s appeals prompted newspapers to repeat his alleged boast that “I am the law in Indiana” and to rehearse details of the Oberholtzer case and Klan corruptions. The state spent immense amounts of legal talent keeping him in jail. The mud stuck to Stephenson and to Indiana.30

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In 1950, Governor Henry Schricker offered Stephenson a parole on condition that he leave the state. Stephenson violated the parole and returned to prison. Finally, in 1956, Governor George Craig granted executive clemency to a “pudgy 63-year-old man.” Stephenson settled in Seymour in southern Indiana, where he married his third wife. A few years later, he disappeared. Only after his death in 1966 did a reporter find his widow, his fourth wife, living in Tennessee. She claimed to know nothing of the old man’s career in Indiana.31 Hoosiers remembered, often inaccurately,32 the short career of the Grand Dragon—the man who claimed to be the law in Indiana, the murderer whose guilt offered innocence to all others, the ghost that haunted the state and its people into the twenty-first century.

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THE KLAN’S ENEMIES STEP UP

M a dge Ober holtzer’s de ath a nd D. C. Stephenson’s conviction did not alone bring down the Klan. There was opposition even as the first embers fell from fiery crosses, but these early voices were weak and scattered. Opponents struggled against the ardor for 100 percent Americanism and against the Klan’s skillful tactics of community building and intimidation. Principled resistance required unusual courage and an appreciation of racial, ethnic, and religious differences that was in short supply in the 1920s. Many citizens who opposed the Klan remained silent as their neighbors waved their flags and praised their God. “The opposition,” the New York Times reported in late 1923, “appears leaderless” and added, perhaps in exaggeration, “in no state in the Union, not even in Texas, is the domination of the Ku Klux Klan as absolute as it is in Indiana.”1 Even as damning evidence of Stephenson’s wickedness flooded out of the Noblesville courtroom in fall 1925, Hoosiers went to the polls and elected Klan candidates. In Indianapolis, the Klan swept not only the mayor’s office but also the city council and the school commission. At the end of the year in Greensburg, the local newspaper printed an invitation to a cross burning east of town to celebrate the Christmas season. In Rushville, Klanswomen delivered seventy-four Christmas food baskets.2 From Richmond in late 138

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1926, longtime reformer William Dudley Foulke wrote to women’s rights activist Alice Stone Blackwell to lament, “Here in Indiana the subordination of our governor to the Ku Klux Klan is something inconceivable and I can see no evidence of any public spirit adequate to resist the abuses which surround us.”3 As late as October 1927, when a profusion of sordid details had circulated, the New York Times published an extensive report concluding that “the Klan is broken,” yet “one sees few signs of a great and united population wave that will sweep all the bad and stupid men out of office.”4 Heroes were few, novelist Meredith Nicholson regretted. “In the vast company of rogues, cowards, villains and plain crooks,” he wrote, “the spectator almost despairs of finding even one figure representing virtue.”5 Some did resist. The Klan newspaper reported with derision that standing among the crowd watching white-robed marchers in one of the first parades in Elwood was a veteran of the Great War nicknamed “Red,” who “refused to uncover his empty head to the greatest of all flags,” because it “was carried by men such as the Klan.”6 A century later, we can celebrate Red and others who refused to bow before the Klan flag. Their stance of opposition meant that Indiana never was a 100 percent Klan state. En e m y “A li ens” Early challenges were sporadic. In Hartford City, supervisors of the community building, all Protestants, refused in late 1922 to permit the “escaped nun,” Helen Jackson, to voice her anti-Catholic lies because she “would create enmity between the citizens of the community.” A few months later, Clinton County circuit judge Earl Stroup, a Republican, spoke critically about the Klan at a Kiwanis Club meeting. In Michigan City, the police chief publicly charged that he had been removed from his job because he refused to join the Klan. “I am eligible,” he wrote in his affidavit, “but the organization is against my principles.” City leaders in Logansport, Portland, Lafayette, Indianapolis, and Jeffersonville proposed antimask laws on the assumption that revealing identities would shrink memberships. The Indianapolis

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Fiery Cross objected but urged marchers to lift their masks, as some proudly did when they marched or posed for photographs. Indianapolis mayor Lew Shank was among the most visible of Klan enemies. He sought to prohibit masked parades, ordered the arrest of Fiery Cross newspaper boys for inciting riots, and restricted cross burnings as a public safety measure. Voters soundly defeated Shank’s gubernatorial bid in 1924. His successor in the mayor’s office, elected in 1925, was a leading Klansman.7 The strongest challenges came from Americans the Klan labeled as enemies. First were Catholics, the primary object of Klan intolerance in Indiana. Catholics had always known bigotry, but the Klan presented a new level at a time when US Catholics were changing. Those with roots in Ireland and Northern Europe were moving toward the middle class, away from their outsider status, and toward militancy in protecting their rights as Americans. That transition was anathema to the Klan. Ironically, Klan hostility may have provoked a more aggressive Catholic combativeness in asserting rights enjoyed by Methodists or Baptists. Catholics resisted, for example, when they decided to boycott the Tipton County Fair in 1923 after the announcement of “Klan Day,” at which Ed Jackson would speak, or when the Knights of Columbus organized a large Indianapolis protest of nearly eight hundred Catholic men. There were individual acts. A Catholic farmer in Shelby County was driving his team of horses home after a day in the fields. Noticing Klan members assembling outside a country church, the farmer unhitched his horses, smacked them on the rear, and watched with delight as they ran straight to the barn and right through the Klan gathering. For years, that farmer retold his story with a chuckle.8 The most consistent opposition came from the Indiana Catholic and Record, a statewide weekly. The Irish-born editor, Joseph Patrick O’Mahony, was a sharp-minded newspaper veteran. O’Mahony jumped into the 1924 political campaigns to denounce Klan-Republican candidates. He also charged Democrats with spinelessness. By ducking the issue, he asked, “Are they looking for the support of the KKK?” O’Mahony partnered with the Catholic Information Bureau,

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formed in Indianapolis in summer 1924, to buy ads in newspapers across the state to counter Klan propaganda. When Governor Jackson spoke in Noblesville, the bureau placed an ad in the local newspaper denouncing him. The bureau also focused on rebutting the lies told by the phony Helen Jackson when she spoke in Indianapolis just before the 1924 elections.9 Another challenge came from the American Unity League (AUL), which was based in Chicago but had widespread operations in Indiana. The Indianapolis AUL chapter formed after the Ancient Order of Hibernians sponsored a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in 1923. The keynote speaker was AUL president Patrick O’Donnell, a feisty lawyer who vigorously attacked the Klan and reveled in his moniker “Mad Pat.” Under O’Donnell’s leadership, the AUL pushed for city ordinances to prohibit marchers from wearing masks, sponsored its own speakers, and kept up steady reporting on Klan activities. Although Catholics were predominant, AUL activists included African Americans, Jews, and white Protestants. The organization moved toward positions that would later be labeled “multicultural” as it advocated for full rights and respect for all Americans. President O’Donnell told a large Fort Wayne audience that the “fight against the klan was not a Jewish fight or a negro’s fight or a Catholic’s fight, but an American fight.”10 AUL’s newspaper was titled Tolerance. Harsh criticism, satire, and humor filled its pages as it mocked those it labeled “Koo Koos” and attacked dupes, fools, and knaves posing in “the shroud of the terrorist and the mask of the highwayman.”11 Tolerance‘s most sensational tactic was to obtain and publish lists of Klan members under headings such as “Who’s Who in Nightgowns.” On April Fool’s Day 1923, thieves broke into Klan offices in Indianapolis and departed with the names of 12,208 local Klan members. Tolerance began printing the names, adding business affiliations and addresses. Later the organization sold a separate printing of the roster for twenty-five cents.12 The publication also revealed names of Protestant ministers who had become Klansmen. As names from other towns were added to the Indianapolis list, some embarrassed Hoosiers quietly dropped their

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membership. Fiery Cross editors expressed outrage and attacked Tolerance‘s reporting as evidence of Catholic deceit.13 The large Catholic and immigrant population in South Bend made the northern Indiana city one of the most hostile to the Klan. A chapter of the American Unity League was active in distributing Tolerance and organizing speakers. The heads of the local American Legion and the Masons publicly denounced the Klan, as did the South Bend Tribune.14 The most remarkable event in South Bend came when the Klan gathered on May 17, 1924, to celebrate victories in the spring primary election. News spread to the Notre Dame University campus, and students began to stir. Reverend Matthew Walsh, the university president, ordered students to remain on campus, deploying the caution that often marked university administrators in such situations. Students disobeyed. Hundreds sprinted toward downtown, where robed Klansmen were directing traffic toward the rally site at Island Park. Students began to send cars in the wrong directions. They marched to Klan headquarters at the corner of Michigan and Wayne Streets, where the Klan’s third-floor office window displayed a large electric cross with red light bulbs. A barrel of potatoes sitting in a street-level grocery provided the ammunition to throw at the cross. An oft-told story, likely apocryphal, is that when only one red bulb remained, the Notre Dame quarterback, soon to be famous as one of “the four horsemen,” grabbed a potato, took aim, and threw a touchdown pass. Raucous cheers erupted. As D. C. Stephenson arrived to complain about violence, students proudly displayed tattered robes and hoods they had pulled off Klan members. Perhaps Father Walsh smiled as he decided not to punish his rowdy students. There was some embarrassment over the stereotypes of young Irish men fighting in the streets with potatoes, but Walsh in 1927 approved the university’s new official nickname, “the fighting Irish.”15 For weeks afterward, the Fiery Cross featured the Notre Dame “riot” as a prime example of Catholic violence. It was “rancid hatred in its worst form,” performed by a “cursing mob of students who showed no respect for age or sex.” A large headline shrieked, “Trampling of Flags and Tearing Clothes from Protestant Women.”16

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Other than the Notre Dame incident, there are few known instances of violence directed against the Klan in Indiana. Elsewhere in the North there was violence. One historian has concluded that in some communities, “anti-Klan forces used far more violence— and quite often very effectively—than the Klan had ever employed.” Perhaps Hoosiers really were friendlier, or perhaps Klan opponents concluded that violence was an impractical response when so many fellow citizens owned white robes.17 Far fewer in numbers, Hoosier Jews had fewer weapons than Catholics. The Indiana Jewish Chronicle was traditionally apolitical, but the Klan’s antisemitism pushed it toward sharper reporting that included urging readers to vote Democratic in the 1924 elections. There were acts of resistance and protest across the state. In Terre Haute, Rabbi Joseph Fink refused the Klan’s demand that he resign from the community welfare league. Fink went so far as to charge cowardice against Klan members who hid their faces as they claimed the high ground of American patriotism. Fort Wayne’s rabbi Aaron L. Weinstein spoke of America’s founding ideals as he read from hate letters sent to him by Klan members. In Hammond, where the Klan was very active, a Reformed Jewish congregation organized a public lecture series that often focused on tolerance. One speaker, a Lutheran minister from Chicago, called out the Klan as he dismissed claims of a pure white race and asserted that “America always has been a great melting pot.”18 Responding to Klan boycotts of their businesses, Jews and Catholics in Muncie agreed to cooperate among themselves.19 In Indianapolis, when threatened with a Klan boycott of their south-side American Grocery, Louis and Rose Shapiro defiantly changed the name to “Shapiro’s Kosher Foods” and attached a large Star of David on the storefront.20 Morris Feuerlicht, a widely respected Indianapolis rabbi, became one of the most outspoken adversaries of the Klan, using wit and satire to make eloquent strikes against hatred and exclusion. Two Jewish attorneys were among leaders of the Indianapolis chapter of the American Unity League, and attorney Bess Robbins started a campaign to ban sales of the Fiery Cross on city streets. Other Indianapolis Jews decided against such public protest and instead intensified displays of their commitment

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to American ideals. They checked to make sure that Jewish donations to the Community Fund were at high levels, that sacramental wine was distributed only to synagogue members (not to outsiders seeking a drink), and that the B’nai B’rith lodge ended meetings with singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Jewish Welfare Association of Indianapolis made Americanization a primary goal, urging proper behavior of young immigrants tempted to visit dance halls and poolrooms.21 African Americans had their own newspapers to report on Klan activities. In Indianapolis, the Freeman and the Recorder frequently attacked the organization. Of long-term importance were the black lawyers, ministers, club women, and other community leaders who organized branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. NAACP branches across the state used the Klan threat to spur membership recruitment. In Indianapolis and Muncie, branch leaders sought to keep the Klan from meeting or parading. In Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Gary, and South Bend, NAACP branches began legal action to challenge segregation. And they began to question the decades of voter commitment to the Republican Party, now so closely identified with the Klan. The Indianapolis branch published a special newspaper during the 1924 political campaign, which, for example, advertised an “Anti-Klan Meeting” with several ministers speaking. The national NAACP also got involved and urged black Hoosiers to vote Democratic in 1924, which they did. Such glimmers of light did not signal a new dawn. Not until the late 1940s did the NAACP make significant progress toward legal equality in Indiana.22 “M a i nst r e a m” Ch a l l enge s Most of Indiana’s Protestant denominational organizations did not publicly condemn the Klan. In their state conventions, Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ chose silence.23 The Indianapolis Episcopal Diocese did approve a resolution strongly critical of the Klan, as did the city’s Christian Ministers Association. Some congregations were deeply divided. Some individual minsters stood

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up. Robert Little of Fort Wayne’s First Presbyterian Church spoke against the Klan at the local Optimist Club and received hearty applause. In Tipton County, Presbyterian minister J. J. Ashenhurst accused the Klan of un-American and un-Christian behavior. In Kokomo’s First Christian Church, lay leaders refused to participate in a Klan funeral unless attendees lifted their masks. At Indianapolis’s Englewood Christian Church, Frank E. Davison opposed the decision of lay leaders to allow the Klan to meet in the church. Davison was among several ministers forced to resign. In rural Parke County, an anti-Klan group calling itself the Protestant Committee of One Hundred planned a public discussion of the issues that angered local Klan members.24 Labor unions were split as well. The Indianapolis Central Labor Union voted to condemn the Klan, which caused the carpenters and typographical unions to withdraw from the body.25 The head of Evansville’s Central Labor Union urged members to “abandon religious prejudices and racial hatred.”26 The United Mine Workers gathered at their 1924 convention in Indianapolis to debate whether to allow members to join the Klan. More than thirty local miners unions in Indiana petitioned to permit membership. Although the majority of delegates voted to continue to bar Klansmen, miners in southwestern Indiana joined in large numbers, especially after Stephenson organized a formal recruiting initiative in the mining communities.27 Military veterans shared the Klan’s emphasis on intense patriotism but were less committed to other goals—particularly Prohibition, considering the alcohol consumed at American Legion posts. Still, up to 50 percent of legionnaires may have joined the Klan. The legion’s annual state convention in 1924 turned down a censorship resolution. Some local legionnaires did repudiate the Klan, but most were like Paul V. McNutt. An Indiana University law professor who was elected state legion commander in 1926, McNutt remained silent even though he believed the Klan was “pernicious.” Silence was the road to victory. Democrat McNutt was elected governor of Indiana in 1932.28 Lawyers were potential Klan adversaries, because they had a sense of the rule of law and the eyes to see corruption in local politics. Still,

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lawyers worked in hometown environments where rocking any boat could be costly. The most important action came from the Indiana Bar Association. At its annual meeting at West Baden on July 6, 1923, delegates debated a resolution to denounce the Klan. A Kokomo lawyer, Conrad Wolf, argued to enthusiastic applause that “we must get rid of the spirit of hate. What family or what community can exist where every member hates each other?” The lawyers unanimously adopted a resolution of condemnation of the Klan and its “decrees of secret tribunals the members of which conceal their identity behind robes and masks.” Always eager to play the victim card, the Fiery Cross charged the bar association with “condemning 400,000 Anglo-Saxon Protestant residents of Indiana.”29 Most literary notables remained silent. Indiana had a deserved reputation as a home of writers—a proud Hoosier Athens where, in the late nineteenth century, there began a “golden age of literature.” In 1928, one of the best-known Indiana writers called out his peers. Meredith Nicholson was widely respected as a best-selling novelist and essayist (and a Democrat). His attack was gently written, in the Hoosier tradition, but he named names of the “poets, tellers of tales, and philosophers who had fled from the turmoil to the peace of the hills,” including Booth Tarkington, George Ade, Theodore Dreiser, and William Herschell. About the time of Nicholson’s challenge, Tarkington turned away from an opportunity to condemn the Klan when he told a Boston reporter that “the rank and file of the Indiana Klan were good honest citizens.”30 N e wspa per s Mov e towa r d Light Like their readers, newspapers were mostly supportive or silent. Many editors, according to distinguished Indiana-born journalist Lowell Mellett, “content themselves with careful avoidance of the issue.”31 Almost a year after Madge Oberholtzer’s death, Nicholson lamented privately, “Our newspapers have been markedly timid about denouncing it. There’s a fear upon the state.”32 The state’s press offered few profiles in courage.

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Exceptions to press sluggishness included the South Bend Tribune, the Vincennes Commercial, the Indianapolis Times, and the Muncie Post-Democrat. Both of Fort Wayne’s two largest newspapers, the News-Sentinel and the Journal-Gazette, attacked the Klan. JournalGazette editor Jesse Green was especially vigilant. A Republican, Methodist, and Mason (like many Klan members), Green consistently condemned the Klan as “un-American.” Also writing critical editorials in the Journal-Gazette was Claude Bowers, who would become a popular historian and leading Democrat. In fall 1923, Bowers wrote that “when race is arrayed against race, and religion against religion, when neighbors become enemies because they worship in different churches, and when our people cease to be a people and become a miserable hotch-potch of quarreling factions we cease to be the America that was born of the Revolution.”33 The Indianapolis News also criticized the Klan early on. An editorial in April 1922 called out the Klan as “adult boys in grotesque masks who seek to exploit a primitive fear of ghosts.”34 But as the Klan gained strength, the paper backed off, as did most others across the state. Aware of the importance of good press, the Klan followed up on damaging reporting by organizing phone calls from members to threaten cancellation of subscriptions and removal of advertising. One can imagine the deliberations in smoke-filled newspaper offices about how to cover the story. Many papers offered only short factual accounts of a Klan rally or parade. Some, such as the Greencastle Herald, did not mention the Klan even in reporting Stephenson’s trial. Many reported Klan events as just another aspect of normal daily life.35 The Klan twisted any criticism toward playing the role of victim. The Fiery Cross offered readers detailed reports of the outrageous lies in the mainstream press. When, during the 1924 fall election, the Indianapolis Times ran a front-page editorial titled “Stop the Klan,” the Fiery Cross reprinted the entire page of “anti-Protestant venom.”36 In a critical essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell Mellett reported that Hoosier friends told him that when a Catholic baby boy was born, a rifle was hidden in the church, ready for the uprising to come. The

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Fiery Cross dismissed Mellett’s article as “a direct assault on Hoosierdom” from the “effete east.”37 The most cutting attacks came from the Muncie Post-Democrat. Editor George Dale was a left-leaning Democratic crusader who attacked bootleggers and corrupt politicians as he advocated for labor unions in a Republican-dominated city. He made enemies enthusiastically. A showman not always committed to fact, Dale wore a hat with a hole he said had been made by a Klan bullet. Klan members bumped him on the sidewalks, and women spit on him, he claimed. He mocked the Klan with scathing front-page stories. Dale called out presumed members by name, labeling them “kookoos.” He identified Klan brothels, saloons, and other businesses. He named Klan gathering spots, such as the Colonial Pool Hall in Fort Wayne. He accused members of cowardice and un-American behavior. Among Dale’s targets was a local judge, Clarence W. Dearth, a likely Klan member who taught the adult Bible class in the largest Methodist church in town. Judge Dearth had Dale arrested and jailed for contempt.38 Stephenson’s trial and conviction gave newspaper editors an immense amount of evidence and some courage. The prominent voice was that of Thomas H. Adams, editor of the Vincennes Commercial. After the Republican Editorial Association met in spring 1926 to deliberate on the Klan question, Adams led an investigation that uncovered and publicized damning evidence of corruption. Nicholson described Adams as “a broad-shouldered Saul of a man, flinging aside the frightened citizens who try to stop him,” as he “lifted his voice and began saying things of profoundly disturbing import.”39 Old Guard Republicans tended to support Adams in hopes of ending the chaos caused by the Klan. He won accolades from some press and party colleagues, but not all were admirers. His opponents called him a “sorehead,” driven by political ambition to upset the established Republican leadership. His own Knox County Republican Committee expelled him from the party. A leading Republican newspaper in Hamilton County, the Ledger, asserted in early 1928 that, contrary to Adams’s assertions, the “Hoosier state has nothing for which to apologize.”40

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Adams’s investigative journalism did not begin until a year after Madge Oberholtzer’s death, yet even at that late date some editors ignored troubling news. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch employed a correspondent in Indianapolis who surveyed the city’s newspapers in fall 1926. He concluded that the Indianapolis Times gave full coverage to Klan corruption, but the Star and News, both affiliated with the Republican Party, only slowly reported the details with “a tone of pronounced skepticism toward the accusations” against Stephenson, Jackson, and others. Out-of-state newspapers gave more coverage to the investigation, the Post-Dispatch reporter concluded.41 As evidence grew, Harold Feightner at the Indianapolis News began more detailed reporting. Eventually the Star editors had little choice but to praise Adams for his “initiative and relentlessness that turned the light of day into the dark corners.”42 Simultaneously with Adams’s investigation, the Indianapolis Times ramped up coverage by printing incriminating documents and blasting the organization and its allies. In 1928, the paper and its progressive editor, Boyd Gurley, received the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service.43 That national recognition remains a source of Hoosier pride to the present. Pride was deserved. There was courage, but much of it was limited and late. Publishers had to sell as much advertising and as many papers as they could. Taking a stand on issues involving deep differences in the religious, political, and social fabric was not the road to profit. Like lawyers, storekeepers, churchwomen, and factory workers, some newspaper editors and reporters were genuine believers who saw the Klan as the way toward a better America. Slow-Steppi ng Polit ici a ns Political leaders feared that an attack on the Klan would be the path to electoral defeat. Many Republicans agreed with Klan objectives. Many Democrats were less enthusiastic, but they lacked the courage or power to bring down the organization. Following the Klan legislature of 1925, the 1927 session of the Indiana General Assembly offered

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silence, with neither denunciation nor identifiable Klan bills.44 As Stephenson opened his “little black boxes,” the New York Times reported in July 1927, “you can hear a pin drop in Indiana.” Change came slowly. By fall 1928, a New York Times reporter claimed, “Public sentiment against the Klan is so strong in Indiana that affiliation with it is now regarded as a liability.”45 That optimistic judgment was premature, as the November elections would demonstrate. One of the few Republican state officials to attack the Klan was Attorney General Arthur L. Gilliom, a lawyer from South Bend. Gilliom had pushed to prevent Klan parades in his hometown but still won state office as attorney general in 1924. In early 1928, he filed suit to revoke the Klan’s state charter and then began to gather testimony from Stephenson and his associates. Running for a US Senate seat in 1928, Gilliom increased his attack on both the Klan and the Indiana Anti-Saloon League, charging both as “secret and super-government dictatorships.” Voters soundly rejected Gilliom’s Senate bid.46 The Democratic state platform of 1928 did point to the “debauchery of those in power” and promised that the party would “purge the state government of the slime and corruption that has caused self-respecting Hoosiers to hang their heads in shame.”47 Voters were unconvinced. Republicans won overwhelming victories in congressional and state elections. The 1928 campaign released another round of anti-Catholicism directed at Democratic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith, a wet Catholic from New York City. Some communities witnessed cross burnings in protest of Smith’s candidacy. When the candidate entered Indiana from Ohio, he looked out the train window to glimpse a fiery cross welcoming him. One Democratic leader complained to a Columbia City audience that “the people who are decrying Al Smith’s religion have none of their own, or they would not be intolerant.”48 If there was a Klan political death notice, it came with the municipal elections in 1929. National columnist Bruce Catton concluded that the vote “marked the final passing of the Ku Klux Klan as a power in Indiana.”49 Voters finally seemed to have had enough as they turned away from candidates with any taint of Klan connection and from

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Republicans generally. Two-thirds of Indiana towns voted Democrats into office. Eight of the state’s largest cities replaced Republican with Democratic mayors, even electing newspaper crusader George Dale in Muncie. In Evansville, where Republicans had won earlier in the decade with hefty Klan support and where, despite Klan-Republican promises, brothels, saloons, and corruption continued to flourish, Democrats finally gained office. Experts claimed the 1929 local elections gave “the first open opportunity of Hoosier voters to register their sentiments concerning the wave of political corruption that followed the Ku Klux Klan regime.”50 Perhaps Smith’s absence made it easier to vote Democratic; perhaps Hoosiers at long last had had enough of the Ku Klux Klan. De a d a n d Gon e? Anxiety remained that a revived Klan would march again around courthouse squares. Rallies and meetings did continue in Kokomo, for example, where the local Klavern, named in honor of Nathan Hale, purchased Malfalfa Park to hold rallies into the mid-1930s, but there was never again anything like the great spectacle of the Konklave of 1923.51 If by 1930 the Klan seemed dead in Indiana, the beliefs that built it remained. Returning to Muncie in the mid-1930s for a ten-year followup to their classic book Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd found divisions of race and religion less sharp than in 1925 but still sufficient to constitute “tinder ready for kindling if and when Middletown wants a bonfire to burn a scapegoat.”52 Across the state and nation, immigrants remained a threat, even if the 1924 national quota act had severely restricted entry into the country. Jews and Catholics were still the “others,” not 100 percent Americans and perhaps not pure white. African Americans remained second-class citizens. Hollywood movies continued to lure good people toward bad choices fueled by alcohol, even with a bone-dry law on the books until the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt ended that battle. Schools still needed more Protestant religious instruction and more American

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flags. White native-born Protestants needed to remain vigilant and militant. As the 1920s ended, men and women dumped their white robes onto burning trash piles or into attic trunks to be found years later by perplexed children and grandchildren. Indianapolis newspaper reporter Harold Feightner recalled, “As the lights were turned on again, few would admit, even sheepishly, they ever had belonged to the Klan.”53 A silence fell in the 1930s as Hoosiers pretended the Klan had passed away and left behind no meaningful consequences. One of the Klan’s leading ministers was Aubrey H. Moore, pastor of First Christian Church in Noblesville. Reporting his death in 1938, the local newspaper had nothing to say about the Klan. Rather, laudatory accounts of the popularity of Moore’s ministry included a resolution by the Noblesville Ministerial Association praising his “lofty moral dignity and character, high ideals, and worthy conceptions of his duty toward God and man as a citizen, a Christian gentleman, and a preacher.”54 Across Indiana the story of the Klan was willfully forgotten in gestures toward healing. Forgetting might bring a peace and absolution that made apologies unnecessary.55 Occasional voices of acknowledgment tended toward sentiments such as “we didn’t know” or “we could not see” the bigotry behind the many good and godly purposes that fueled the Klan. Some on the Klan enemy list had sharper memories and even told their children and grandchildren stories of the time of intimidation and fear. The Indiana Catholic and Record concluded, “When the worst is said it was only a passing nightmare inspired by a circus parade of dupes led by artful dodgers.”56 Dupes and artful dodgers became the standard memory. In this widely accepted myth, the Klan never represented the real Indiana. It was unfair that the state’s reputation suffered. Gestures toward polishing that reputation accompanied denials. One of the more ironic came from Governor Jackson. He appointed an all-star commission to commemorate Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home in southern Indiana—a deliberate effort to purge the state of Klan odors. Soon there was “A Civic Awakening in Indiana,”

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the Indianapolis correspondent for the New York Times reported in 1930, evidenced in new highway construction, schools, parks, and a memorial to Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark. The Klan days were gone: “A new era has dawned.”57 But the odors never really went away. Into the twenty-first century, one could hear the question, “Isn’t Indiana a Klan state?” The answers remain complicated. “It never was a Klan state” is a reasonable response, since the Klan never fully controlled Indiana. Another answer is, “Sort of.”

The downfall of the Klan in the late 1920s was not an end to prejudice and discrimination, as the career of Indiana University basketball star Bill Garrett demonstrates. Here Garrett scores on a fast break against the University of Illinois in 1950. As in all his Big Ten games, Garrett was the only African American on the court. Indiana University Archives.

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African Americans protest near the Indianapolis hotel of segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in 1964 as a young white man expresses opposition with a Confederate flag. Bob Daugherty / Associated Press.

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Five robed figures hand out leaflets in Muncie in 1967 as the Klan begins to revive, largely in opposition to the civil rights movements. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

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A Christmas postcard from William Chaney, early in his career as Grand Dragon. Chaney was the leader most responsible for the Indiana Klan’s revival. Indiana State Library.

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A Klan recruiting flyer, ca. 1977, appealing to white racism with a touch of antisemitism. Indiana State Library.

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Above, The boarded-up Black Market in Bloomington soon after two Klansmen firebombed it on December 26, 1969. Indiana University Archives.

Facing top, Klan members, some in military-style dress, march in Anderson, 1979. David Baird. Facing bottom, Two robed Klansmen and one in military-style dress march in Kokomo, 1980. The sign stating “I’ts nice to be white” contains an uncommon grammatical mistake. This rally attracted far more demonstrators than marchers. Howard County Historical Society, Kokomo.

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An African American woman holds field glasses and embraces a child as the Klan marches in Kokomo in April 1980. Like many black Midwesterners, the two older spectators likely had heard stories of Klan terror. Doubtless the youngster would have, too. Donald Boggs.

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Above and facing, A photograph of police and another of media at this Kokomo Klan gathering in 1980 shows the large interest that robes and hoods created. Donald Boggs.

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A robed Klansman joins African American leaders on Dick Wolfsie’s Indianapolis television talk show, 1985. Indianapolis Recorder Collection, Indiana Historical Society.

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A Klan recruiting card placed on a car windshield in Auburn in 1999. Eckhart Public Library.

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Facing, Photographer Dave Repp discovered this Klan poster nailed to a tree in Monroe County in the late twentieth century. Indiana University Archives. Above, This button marks one of the early lesbian/gay pride celebrations in downtown Indianapolis. Such events attracted the ire of Klan-like traditionalists. Indiana State Library.

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On the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, this mural panel titled Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press, painted by Thomas Hart Benton in 1933, has attracted criticism because it depicts Klan marchers and a burning cross. Benton actually intended his mural as a condemnation of the Klan. Indiana University Campus Art Collection.

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Matthew Heimbach in full performance dress at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which the Paoli resident helped organize in 2017. Mykal McEldowney / Indianapolis Star.

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Typical of the response to Klan gatherings in recent decades, hundreds gather to protest when twenty Klan members showed up in Madison in 2018. Michelle Pemberton / IndyStar.

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THE KLAN RETURNS

The ca mer a sna pped to m a k e the mug shot of Indiana’s most famous prisoner. D. C. Stephenson was now in the Michigan City penitentiary. Indiana’s dance with the politics of exclusion was over. The Klan was dead—or so it seemed. A Kokomo newspaper editor concluded in 1964 that “big Konklaves” in his town in the 1920s “reflected a stupid bigotry and childishness on the part of white robed adults who should have known better,” and then added, “but nothing of lasting damage came of it.” A year later, an astute writer in Bloomington claimed, “Since those ugly days . . . Indiana has proved herself time and again, at the polls, by her laws, and by the practices of her people, emancipated from those old hates and fears.”1 In 1972, an Indiana state police investigator dismissed the Klan as “meatheads.”2 Yet, in the mid-1960s, the Klan came back to life in Indiana. And remnants persist into the twenty-first century. Many observers mistakenly connect the revived Klan with its predecessor of the 1920s. The two are different in membership, methods, and goals. Robed Hoosiers of recent years are mostly deluded malcontents. Few in number, their racism and hatred has grown in viciousness to focus mostly on African Americans. Their professions of Protestant faith have diminished. No one claims they are in the mainstream. Rather 175

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than the weak opposition of the 1920s, the recent Klan has attracted disdain across the state and nation. R ej ect i ng t h e K l a n In the mid-twentieth century, Hoosiers seldom talked about the Klan. Textbooks and teachers avoided the subject. Historians did not help. Not until the 1980s did scholars begin to publish the books and articles that explained who joined and why.3 It was necessary to plan cautiously, for example, before the museum at the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society could open an exhibit in 1980 that dared to include a Klan robe. One common form of avoidance was to believe that those kindly grandparents who joined in the 1920s were simply ignorant of the harsh side of the Klan. Or perhaps they joined because it was good for business or just because others did and it looked like fun.4 Seeking comfort by avoiding the tangled subject of intolerance and hate remained common. At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, few references to the Klan are found on the nearly five hundred official historical markers around the state.5 The discovery of a white robe in an attic or a faded membership list sets off warning bells. In a barn in Noblesville in 1995, a resident found a trunk containing names of local Klan members. The story attracted national media attention and local embarrassment. Some thought the damning records should be burned. The Hamilton County Historical Society took possession of the list but decided that the names of Klan members from seventy years earlier would not be published without the approval of their descendants.6 Reminders of the Klan were awkward but sometimes sparked a determination to never again tolerate such nonsense. Coming home in 1945 from a war for the Four Freedoms, veterans, especially African Americans, led the first serious attacks on Indiana’s long traditions of racial segregation. One black veteran told an interviewer, “I decided I wasn’t going to take this shit anymore.” Progressive black and white Hoosiers joined to revitalize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They began to talk and act. By 1946,

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these modest efforts were sufficient to spark rumors that the Klan was coming back and would put down the NAACP’s challenges to the status quo.7 Unlike the generation after World War I, this generation would have none of it. The Indianapolis Star began reporting on Klan rumors. Political leaders quickly denounced the Klan. Governor Ralph Gates ordered the Indiana state police to investigate. Police authorities reported in late 1946 that “organized activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana are very limited, and for the most part, are only recognizable on the front page of the Indianapolis Star.”8 Nonetheless, a coalition of religious, labor, and civil rights activists responded to the rumors by organizing a mass meeting in Indianapolis. They took their fears to the Indiana General Assembly, which in 1947 passed one of the strongest antihate bills in the nation. Two years later, the state, at last, banned school segregation.9 Here were official steps toward redemption for the sins of the 1920s. Hoosiers rejected the organization that a generation earlier claimed to rule the state. It was, it seemed, only apparitions in robes that remained. Ch a ngi ng Ti m e s i n t h e 1960s The 1960s brought sociopolitical change that seemed as revolutionary as that of the Roaring Twenties. Young people again challenged the traditions of their parents. Rock and roll, sexual freedom, drugs, hippies, feminists, and antiwar protestors signified a new generation of large numbers and loud voices.10 African Americans became particularly aggressive in demanding justice and equality, as in the 1972 National Black Political Convention held in Gary—a city that in 1967 had elected Richard Hatcher, one of the nation’s first African American mayors.11 And again there was the question: Who is an American? Again, space opened for a new Ku Klux Klan. The civil rights movement threw down the basic challenge. African Americans had been excluded from democratic citizenship from the state’s beginning in 1816. Jim Crow segregation flourished after

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the Civil War. In the twentieth century, whites closed doors to black Hoosiers at restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Separate seating persisted in many movie theaters, from Gary to Bloomington. Sundown towns existed until the late twentieth century, not in actual law but in practice. By the 1950s, Indiana’s NAACP had expanded challenges to segregation in legal suits and with protests and sit-ins. Many white Hoosiers joined, but many others refused to acknowledge a problem. Growing up in Shelbyville in the 1950s, a former resident later recalled, “No teacher, no peers, and almost no adults ever talked about the way we treated black people. It was just the way things were.”12 Some believed that the times would never change. White resistance to civil rights came in many forms. When in 1954 African Americans in Marion decided that they should have the right to swim in the city’s public pool, they set off determined white resistance. The Grant County sheriff deputized and armed fifty citizens to guard the swimming pool. The NAACP and the Urban League took the case to federal court and won, but the pool incident opened old wounds of racial division and hatred, including scars of the town’s lynching of two black teenagers in 1930.13 Perhaps the most visible displays of white resistance played out on Indiana’s basketball courts. To keep children segregated, whites in the 1920s created in Gary, Evansville, and Indianapolis all-black high schools whose teams were not allowed to play in the state basketball tournament until 1943. Indianapolis’s Crispus Attucks High School gloried in its all-black championship teams in the 1950s, perhaps the greatest teams ever to play the state’s sacred sport. For decades after, many white Hoosiers preferred to hear instead the story of the tiny Milan championship team of 1954, celebrated in the Hollywood film Hoosiers. Only in the twenty-first century did the Crispus Attucks story begin to receive the popular attention it deserved.14 College basketball teams also struggled to accept black players. Bill Garrett broke the color barrier at Indiana University in 1947, but he faced intense racial discrimination in Indiana and across the Big Ten, where, from Ann Arbor to Evanston to Champaign, he was always

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the only black player on the court. The All-American told an interviewer in 1950 that he might have made a mistake going to Indiana University: “They all treat me ok . . . but too many of ‘them’ try to treat me like they’re doing me a great favor.”15 Sometimes unnoticed by basketball fans was the fact that the IU team that won the national championship in 1953, just after Garrett graduated, was 100 percent white—testament to the failure of Coach Branch McCracken, like most of his colleagues in college basketball, to lead in changing times. At the center of the changes taking place in the 1960s was the possibility of legal racial equality. Court decisions and passage of the federal civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 offered new hope, as did Indiana’s unusually progressive civil rights law of 1963. Such government intrusions were lightning rods for traditionalists. It was too soon and too much, they said. A sharp spur to the revival of Indiana’s Klan came in 1964. Alabama segregationist George Wallace entered the state’s Democratic presidential primary, where he combined states’ rights arguments with opposition to federal civil rights legislation—especially the bill then moving through Congress that would become the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wallace’s reputation drew Walter Cronkite and other well-known reporters to Indiana. President Lyndon Johnson’s stand-in candidate was Indiana governor Matthew Welsh, who had done more for civil rights than any of his predecessors. Welsh understood the burden of the past. He later recalled that during the campaign, “Most of the reporters wanted to hear the story of D. C. Stephenson and his Ku Klux Klan.” Welsh took on Wallace because he feared the Alabama governor would give “credence to a racist philosophy” and revive the “same ‘know-nothing’ politics that had been prevalent in Indiana for so many years.” Many Protestant church leaders joined in condemning Wallace’s racist appeals. Welsh won, but Wallace captured 30 percent of the Democratic primary vote by attracting support from white working-class and suburban Hoosiers, including Republicans who crossed over to vote for him, and from right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society, which was gaining traction. The phenomenon of white voters threatened

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by the civil rights movement would be labeled the “white backlash” and, refined and employed by Richard Nixon and other Republicans, as the “southern strategy.”16 Wallace made acceptable, his biographer wrote, “the politics of rage.” Others took up the cause and carefully packaged rage and race in coded language, broadened the scope to various “social issues,” and mixed in a disdain for Washington, DC. They also copied Wallace’s skills as a feisty slinger of sound bites and a magnet for television cameras.17 Here was the opening for a new Klan. A N e w Gr a n d Dr agon As Governor Welsh had feared, the politics of rage offered an updated platform to revive traditions of racial animosity, narrow nationalism, and nostalgia for an imagined past. The old myths appealed especially to angry white men, some of whom began to shout about “white power” and even to organize in paramilitary groups.18 The Klan that appeared in the mid-1960s differed in its choice of enemies, which now were primarily African Americans and less so Jews, Catholics, and immigrants who had so aroused ire in the 1920s. Catholics had moved toward the American mainstream, legitimized by the election of a Catholic president in 1960 and by the emergence of Notre Dame as a nationally respected university with a football team composed of the children and grandchildren of Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants.19 The leader of the revived Indiana Klan was William Chaney. Eager to wear D. C. Stephenson’s robes, Chaney was born in Kentucky in 1922 and served in the Pacific during World War II, including during the invasion of Guadalcanal. In 1950, Chaney moved to Indianapolis, where he worked as a bus and truck driver and became active in a labor union, the American Legion, and the Masons. A Baptist and father of three, he had little formal education but was full of selective historical tidbits. In an interview in 1971, Chaney said that his grandfather had joined the Klan in the 1920s. “I feel like I’ve more or less been a Klansman all my life.”20

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Resistance to the civil rights movement gave Chaney his opening. He joined a small group in Greenfield that began a Klan membership drive in 1965. One of the men owned a truck stop, where he placed a billboard with an image identified as Martin Luther King Jr. attending a communist training school in Tennessee. The same fake image appeared on the membership solicitation mailer. The FBI and state police investigated and concluded that there was no significant Klan activity. Governor Roger Branigan reassured the press that “the 1920s are too fresh in the minds of Hoosiers to permit a resurgence.”21 In 1967, state police announced that the Klan was “getting a little more active in the state after being near-dormant.” They identified Chaney as the Grand Dragon.22 That summer, as newspapers and television featured racial violence in Detroit and other cities, reporters wrote about Klan literature and graffiti in Indiana towns and about Chaney’s plans for a motorcade through Greenwood, Franklin, Mooresville, and Martinsville. “Hoosiers may get a chance to see the first group of robed Ku Klux Klansmen,” the press reported, “since the heyday of the organization in Indiana in the 1920s in the reign of D. C. Stephenson.”23 Opposition was immediate. Extensive press coverage condemned the revival. Elected leaders spoke out. Johnson County officials used Indiana’s 1947 antihate law to obtain a restraining order to prevent Chaney’s motorcade, which he announced would include national Klan leader Robert Shelton. Chaney claimed that Johnson County’s repression violated his constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and asked the American Civil Liberties Union for help, even though it “went against the grain a little bit.”24 Finally, in October 1967, Chaney led his expanded motorcade through the state. Some thirty cars traveled east and west on US Highway 40 and north and south on US Highway 31, a border-toborder cavalcade that formed a cross on the state. One of the cars displayed a handmade sign on the door reading, “Never. King says we shall overcome. Klan says like hell you will.” Most people ignored the spectacle. Fifty protestors showed up in South Bend. A cross burned in Jeffersonville, but firefighters extinguished it immediately.

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Before arriving in Kokomo, Chaney promised a repeat of the massive Konklave of 1923, but only a handful of people showed up. The Grand Dragon spoke passionately, nonetheless, telling listeners that “the Klan is not against anyone of another race or color, if they leave the white race alone.” “We don’t mind Negros, Jews and Catholics as long as they keep to themselves.” The harshest vitriol he directed to African Americans. “The downfall of any civilization is the association with black people.”25 Chaney’s Kokomo speech presented the hate-filled diatribe he repeated dozens of times in the following years. He targeted African Americans, always using the N-word, with occasional bursts against Jews, using the K-word when warning of an international Jewish conspiracy. School integration would cause “mongrelization of the races,” he said. The white race will be extinct in a few years, he predicted. Catholics, the primary enemy of the Klan in the 1920s, became “our own” people, though they were ineligible for Klan membership. As women’s rights movements grew, Chaney promised the Klan would “keep women and motherhood . . . on a pedestal and protect them.” The Equal Rights Amendment would “reduce sex to a beastly level.” Looking back to the scientific racism of the early twentieth century, Chaney claimed America ought not to have fought against the Germans in World War II because they “have the purest bloodlines in the world.”26 Often he rang the alarm bell of communism, claiming that the liberal National Council of Churches was part of the communist conspiracy. Among the new enemies were homosexuals and hippies, sometimes linked to “wily” Jews.27 The United Nations was created “to establish a one-world government, and, of course, a one-world race, and one-world religion and it’s hoped by the Zionists that they can control the government.”28 Chaney delighted in performing for the media. He could speak in measured tones as he sought respectability. But more often he engaged in barefaced bigotry, which made good news. He understood the image of deploying bodyguards wearing combat helmets and military boots to highlight the dangers he faced. He enticed the

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press to cover his pilgrimage to the Kentucky birthplace of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, where he placed a wreath of artificial flowers in the shape of the Confederate flag, followed by dinner at the nearby Holiday Inn and a showing of The Birth of a Nation.29 In Indianapolis, accompanied by a dozen Klansmen, Chaney showed up at a luncheon for George Wallace and, at a high point, rose and let out a loud yell of “whoeeee, whoeeee.” Afterward he told a reporter that Wallace “stands for old fashioned Americans, he’s our kind of man.”30 He spoke of his admiration for Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover but regretted that Hoover’s FBI was harassing the Klan, bugging his phone, and canceling reservations he made at hotels.31 Chaney’s papers at the Michigan State University Library show an enthusiastic organizer who enjoyed the details of planning monthly Klan gatherings on the south side of Indianapolis at the Bonanza Steakhouse, MCL Cafeteria, and the Holiday Inn (he liked the Holiday Inn because the hotel chain was headquartered in the southern city of Memphis). Chaney’s monthly mailings encouraged members to pay their $24 annual dues and to bring guests to hear talks on “Americanism, the old-fashioned kind where White was White and Black was Black.” Speakers included a local musician who talked about “The N***** Jazz Adulteration of America’s Modern Music.” On the reverse side of his mimeographed newsletter, Chaney often copied a viciously racist cartoon. Rather than the pomp and glory of the 1920s, the 1970s Klan newsletters seemed cheap and antiquated, as did Chaney and his small band of followers.32 Chaney publicly disavowed violence, but he was a violent man who encouraged others to violence. In late 1968, African American students at Indiana University opened a store near the Bloomington campus. The Black Market sold clothing, books, and art and symbolized the emergence of black identity. The day after Christmas 1969, two Klansmen threw a firebomb that burned the store to a shell. Reflecting the tensions of those days, a black student leader asserted that racial peace was over and now African Americans would “live by the law of God, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” No violence

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followed, but the ashes of the Black Market left a scar even after the Klan members went to jail. Chaney’s role is unclear, but the Monroe County sheriff soon arrested him and four others in nearby Ellettsville for possession of 314 pounds of dynamite.33 After two Klansmen were shot in Kokomo in 1974, Chaney urged all Klan members to arm themselves with shotguns. He split from Imperial Wizard Shelton’s United Klans of America because it was becoming too soft. In support of an Indianapolis labor strike, Chaney himself firebombed a business where he had once worked. At one of Chaney’s several trials, an expert testified that alcohol fueled his violent tendencies. Sentenced to five years in prison, Chaney claimed it was all part of the ongoing harassment of the Klan.34 In 1977, the Five Points Baptist Church in rural Morgan County removed his name from the roll because of his Klan membership.35 Chaney’s days as leader of the organization were over, although it was not until 1994 that he admitted, although his views had not changed, “There’s no use to go on with the struggle, because it’s a lost cause.”36 It was a lost cause from the beginning. The FBI and state and local police began to monitor and infiltrate the Klan in the 1960s. They arrested Klan members for various crimes, including carrying concealed or illegal weapons. Sometimes Klan members were denied gun permits.37 The Indianapolis Star reported in 1973 that law enforcement officials estimated only 250 members in the state, driven mostly by “racial hatred and white Christian rule.”38 Using reports from antihate organization the Anti-Defamation League, a writer for the Indianapolis Jewish Post concluded, “While they are bigoted, their power is basically minimal and they draw their support from the very edges and fringes of American society.”39 The state police officer who had labeled the Klan “meatheads” told the Indianapolis Star, “Unless the leaders and membership changes drastically, the Klan would be the last group capable of an organized revolt or political intrigue.”40 Hoosiers knew that Klan members were meatheads. Coverage in the media was very negative, as was an Indianapolis television documentary shown in 1982.41 Protesters taunted and mocked members

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and turned rallies into carnivals. At one Klan event, a reporter noticed several young African Americans accepting Klan literature with the greeting “right on, brother.” Who could possibly believe a robed speaker in a cow pasture outside Elwood who boasted that “Indiana will once again be the greatest Klan state in the country?”42 An FBI agent told reporters in 1989 that the agency knew of no Klan activity in the state.43 The Klan seemed a rotting dinosaur. And yet there remained the stink of narrow patriotism, exclusion, and xenophobia. And, as in the 1920s, there remained the fear that violence would claim innocent victims. W h ite Pow er a n d N e w En e m i e s i n t h e 1990s The sporadic Klan gatherings that marked the 1990s seemed throwbacks. A rally outside the statehouse in 1993 attracted only thirty-five followers. Jeers from a thousand protesters drowned out the public address system. Few could hear the warnings about African Americans, which were now mixed with newer tirades about illegal immigration, affirmative action, welfare, abortion, and homosexuality. LGBT protesters were already aware of the Klan’s message on sexuality and were among the first to show up. Also visible as a forerunner of later years were Nazi swastikas. White power was the primary harangue. “The white man is the most discriminated person there is on earth today,” a Greenfield resident lamented. Police in riot gear protected Klan members, but there was some violence.44 The practical challenge for authorities was the Klan’s right of free speech and assembly and the cost of protecting them from angry protesters. A Klan event in Marion in 1995 brought out SWAT and K-9 teams and an overhead helicopter. When three dozen Klan members gathered at the Warrick County courthouse in 1998, twelve hundred people turned out to insult them, along with one hundred police officers, a fifty-person tactical intervention team in riot gear, several police dog teams, video surveillance teams, and undercover officers. A gathering of two dozen Klan members in 2000 in Elkhart brought

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out “state police snipers on rooftops, sheriff’s deputies and police on horseback, police and deputies on foot in full riot gear, a number of police SWAT teams in bullet-proof vests, and a state police helicopter circling overhead.” In Gary, a demonstration in 2001 had such overwhelming police presence that it was a bore.45 Some ignored Klan demonstrations by organizing a boycott or a prayer rally at local churches so as not to give them the publicity they sought.46 Some cities tried requiring permits and fees to hold rallies or tried passing antimask laws, both of which attracted condemnation from the American Civil Liberties Union.47 Police became more sophisticated in controlling events, and their tactics included installing fences to separate robed from unrobed. After a rally in Portage, which cost $90,000 for Klan protection, the local police chief said that Klan members “want a riot, they want the publicity to sell . . . whatever they’re selling. We did everything we could to make it a non-event, and we did.”48 Robes and hate language remained media magnets. Print and television reporters tracked the Klan and often let slip their frustrations. A reporter for the Indianapolis Star admitted in 1995, “I formerly was in the ignore-them-and-hope-they’ll-go-away camp. I thought we at the newspaper, and even more so the television stations, had become accomplices in helping to publicize a small, anachronistic, fringe group.” But after attending a rally, he wrote, “There’s no substitute for seeing hate in the flesh . . . to see and feel evil . . . to be reminded that evil—pure detached, visceral evil—does exist in the world.”49 Evil joined ignorance in the form of Jeffery L. Berry, the most visible successor to Stephenson and Chaney.50 Berry had a knack for making outrageous comments that attracted reporters. A chain-smoking convicted felon with a Mickey Mouse tattoo, Berry worked as a tow truck driver in rural DeKalb County in northeastern Indiana. A visitor in 2000 reported that around Berry’s modest house waved an American flag, a Klan flag, and a Confederate flag. In the yard, a Klan gnome sat silent watch as bulldogs barked furiously. Berry became Grand Dragon of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1995, one

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of dozens of competing Klan organizations. The group Klanwatch listed the American Knights as among the most openly racist and fastest growing in the nation, though still with only a few hundred members. Identifying his organization as a church and calling himself “Reverend” in hopes of greater legal protection, Berry deployed a website to recruit members, to warn of black men as sexual predators, and to sell pins depicting lynch nooses. He appeared on national television, including The Jerry Springer Show, where he said, “A n***** is a beast—it’s not a human being.”51 Berry sometimes reined in his hatred, claiming to be a white civil rights leader who “would rather have a good black live next door to me as a neighbor than some whitescum drug dealer.”52 More frequently he taunted enemies, flirted with violence, and spewed ignorant and manipulative lies. His leadership screeched to an end when he was convicted and jailed for holding television reporters as hostages in his home.53 Not nearly as smart or sophisticated as Stephenson or even Chaney, Berry and his followers personified the Klan as a pathetic cause. As Hoosiers protested and mocked, the Klan descended lower into the gutters. At a rally in Kokomo on a hot July day in 1996—one of several in Indiana that summer—twenty-five robed men and women, accompanied by children and protected by 280 police officers, offered “eighty minutes of cursing, race-baiting, name-calling, finger-flipping and numerous other displays of the worst America has to offer.” Unable to present anything resembling a speech, they simply chanted “white power” and shouted out their enemies, including the United Nations, “faggots,” and “pigs in D.C.” One Klan supporter told a reporter that “the blacks are starting to take over.” The far larger numbers of protesters reacted by standing silent and glaring, but a young white woman and a black youth were hoisted into the air to embrace and kiss. A deliberately conspicuous lesbian couple held hands. In a nearby park, many more citizens gathered to sing, pray, and play basketball in an interracial party for peace. The television stations and reporters focused on the Klan demonstration, providing them the attention they sought at a cost of $30,000 to taxpayers who protected their free speech. There was no violence.54

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The ghosts remained. Racial tensions and Klan gatherings continued. The South Bend Tribune reported in 1998 that “with the recent rash of racist acts, some fear the state’s past may still be present.”55 There was hope that in the new century such retrograde racism would prompt all good-hearted citizens to stand up for American ideals of justice and equality for all. Perhaps, paradoxically, the meatheads helped good citizens see that path forward.

EIGHT

THE KLAN IS DEAD

K la n lea flets a nd cross bur nings h ave seldom polluted Indiana’s twenty-first-century landscape.1 Hoosiers in robes have dwindled to a few deeply alienated racists who seem farcical, mentally unbalanced, and pathetically out of touch with changing times. Minuscule in numbers and without political power, the Klan nonetheless continues to spark stories, myths, and fears whenever intolerance and hatred rear up.2 More troubling in the twenty-first century is the emergence of new white supremacists and radical nationalists. They glory in hatred as they embrace the politics of rage, racial resentment, and white pride. These descendants of the Klan are not so easily dismissed when seemingly mainstream Americans are reluctant to condemn and at times even join them in drawing lines of difference. The questions of the 1920s have returned. Who is an American? Are Latinos, gays, lesbians, Muslims, powerful African Americans, outspoken women, and Jews really 100 percent Americans?3 En du r i ng Ghosts Events that have no direct connection to the Klan have brought out ghosts of the past. One of Indiana’s great tragedies occurred in Martinsville in 1968. Twenty-one-year-old Carol Jenkins, a black woman 189

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in a nearly all-white town, was selling encyclopedias door-to-door when an assailant stabbed her in the chest and left her dying on a sidewalk. As the crime went unsolved, popular explanations included police incompetence or a cover-up. Of course, people said, there had been a Klan rally in Martinsville just the year before. This was one of Indiana’s sundown towns, many warned—one where only whites should remain when night fell. Into the twenty-first century, African American students and faculty driving south to Bloomington heard it was not safe to stop for gas there. Tanisha Ford remembered as a young black girl traveling in 1987 from Bloomington to Fort Wayne with her mother and aunt. When their car’s headlights failed, they stopped in Martinsville. Listening to the two older women that night, Ford learned that “navigating the state was less about knowing direction and more about knowing ‘your place.’ Mom and Aunt Janice seemed to know—instinctively, it seemed—where they belonged and where they didn’t.” Looking back at that night in Martinsville decades later, Ford recalled sensing that “the trauma of the past was now etched into my skin. To be a Black girl in this world meant pain would be part of the experience.” She began to see, too, that this was “a rite of passage that . . . my white peers did not have to experience. Their privilege shielded them from ever having to learn about this real American horror story.”4 The horror story of Carol Jenkins’s murder made Martinsville a Klan town—even, some claimed, the headquarters of the Klan. A writer for New Yorker magazine reported in 2002 that “discussing Martinsville with reporters from other Indiana cities, I find the conversation never gets very far before references to the Ku Klux Klan creep in.”5 Martinsville remained not only white but also one of the less affluent of the towns around Indianapolis. The gap widened in wealth, culture, and image between Martinsville to the south and the affluent north suburbs of Carmel and Zionsville. Martinsville became a scapegoat. Other towns in Indiana and the United States had their own racial injustices, past and present. But Martinsville also had a knack for keeping alive its negative reputation. At a 1998 high school basketball game in the John Wooden Gym, taunts against black players on the opposing team were deemed so

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racist that the Indiana High School Athletic Association invoked severe penalties. Covering the basketball story, reporters retold the thirty-year-old story of Carol Jenkins and the older story of the Klan.6 In late 2001, Martinsville’s assistant chief of police sent a letter to the local newspaper ranting about Arabs, the outlawing of school prayer, and the prominence of gays on television. “America put God in the closet and let the queers out,” Dennis Nail wrote.7 His superiors refused to discipline him, and he received a standing ovation at a city council meeting. There were also voices of opposition. Several hundred citizens placed a notice in the local newspaper condemning Nail’s letter. The episode faded. The 1968 murder did not. Even after a suspect was finally arrested in 2002, the stigma of a Klan town persisted. Citizens formed a group called PRIDE: People Respecting Individuality and Diversity in Everyone. In 2017, the town placed a memorial to Carol Jenkins outside the municipal building. It was, the mayor said, an effort to acknowledge and heal. Also captivating was the Injustice Files, a 2014 television program on sundown towns that featured a sensationalized telling of the murder and supposed cover-up.8 Although weakened to a handful of meatheads, the Klan remained a difficult subject, even on college campuses, where freedom of speech and engagement with controversy were essential to learning. At Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis in 2007, an employee observed a janitor on break reading a book with robed figures and burning crosses on the cover. The book was an account of Notre Dame students who demonstrated against the Klan in 1924. The school’s affirmative action office accused the white janitor, who was also a student at the university, of “extremely poor judgement by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers.” The American Civil Liberties Union took up the cause, as did conservative columnist George Will and the Wall Street Journal. The university chancellor eventually apologized.9 On the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, the so-called Klan mural caused controversy for decades. Indiana’s contribution to the Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition in 1933

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was a series of murals that told the state’s history. Thomas Hart Benton wisely included unsavory stories in his masterful images. His panel titled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press” included robed Klansmen and a burning cross. A close look with some contextual knowledge made clear that Benton was condemning the Klan and advocating racial integration. University students quickly recognized the burning cross and white robes in the panel’s background but did not always see in the foreground a black and a white child in an integrated hospital and a newspaper reporter exposing the Klan’s corruption. Another detail usually missed was that Benton’s robed figures were marching in front of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Peru, Indiana, making the valid point that Catholics were the Klan’s primary enemy.10 Benton’s murals were controversial from the beginning. Some state legislators thought it best to ignore the Klan and other unpleasant stories. Some thought that the bare feet of a pioneer woman were too big, that a prostitute ought not to have been depicted, or that a Hoosier artist should have received the commission. Since 1940, the Klan panel has hung in a campus classroom, becoming too fragile to move. In 1983, vandals painted an X over the Klan portion of the panel and the words “BAN the KLAN!” below. Some claimed that the panel prompted bigoted comments against African American and Jewish students. A task force in 1990 recommended against proposals to cover up or remove the panel. The chair of the task force concluded that the murals were “treasures of Indiana University, and their presence on campus should be celebrated.”11 The issue resurfaced in 2002, when students used the mural, as they had earlier, to argue for more diversity on the campus. The mural remained in the classroom, but the administration promised to do better in recruiting and retaining minority students and faculty and in explaining the contexts of Benton’s anti-Klan imagery. In 2016, right-wing hate demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, and controversies over Confederate monuments prompted new calls to remove the panel. The university decided to cease using the classroom. “For some of our students, the burning cross is a symbol of terror that has haunted their families for generations,” the provost stated. The decision was controversial.12

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“Instead of denying history, embrace it, talk about it, keep it from ever happening again,” Benton’s daughter advised.13 The Benton mural in a locked classroom underlines the enduring power of burning crosses and white robes. The Klan may have been dead in twenty-first-century Indiana, but images of hooded figures can still hurt even as most Hoosiers understand that they were fools to be ignored. Thoughtful Hoosiers know, too, that ashes still smolder from the Klan culture of the 1920s. 100 Percen t A m er ica ns i n Decli n e Descendants of white native-born Protestants who marched in Klan parades in 1924 were a declining percentage of the population. The US Census Bureau reported in 2008 that non-Hispanic whites would drop to under half the nation’s population by 2042. “That’s what really lit the fuse,” one demographer said. “People went crazy.” Changing census numbers represented “for white nationalists,” the New York Times reported, “a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance.” It did not take census numbers to see more black and brown faces and more intermarriages that made defining whiteness more challenging, perhaps even irrelevant.14 The future that Klan speaker Daisy Douglas Barr warned of in 1923 seemed at hand: “It will be only a few more generations until whites will be in the same position as the Indians today.”15 Even the most ignorant citizen might suspect that white would not remain the default color, the one against which all others were ranked. “They are trying to breed us out,” one said in 2014. “White people are the minority.”16 Campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, Lee Hamilton, who for more than three decades represented southern Indiana in Congress, used his folksy style to tell his older, white audiences, “I know what you’re thinking. . . . He’s different, he’s young, he’s black.” And then after a pause, Hamilton added, “Well, I’m telling you, this guy is the future. And it’s time for a change.”17 Hoosiers voted for Obama in 2008. Indiana changed more slowly than some parts of the heartland, but change it did. Citizens committed to equality and justice found voices.

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Women, Latinos, and African Americans rose in all walks of life. They sat in boardrooms and government offices. A Muslim represented central Indiana in Congress. A popular, openly gay mayor governed in South Bend.18 Change brought anxiety, as it had in the 1920s and 1960s. A new disease set off great uncertainty, for example, when Ryan White brought the AIDS scourge to his classroom.19 More broadly, technological changes and global forces closed the once-booming factories of the industrial Midwest. Opioid addiction, low wages, family hardships, and inadequate education left many fearful.20 Two US presidents revealed the struggles white Americans faced in meeting American ideals. As the first black president, Obama faced vicious racial antagonism, symbolized by the false assertion that he was not US-born. His successor, Donald Trump, fed the fires with techniques not unlike the 1920s Klan. Trump told an interviewer in early 2019, “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word— fear.”21 Trump encouraged fear of others by promising walls to keep out immigrants, bans on Muslim travelers, and a foreign policy of America first. A British newspaper described the faithful attending a Trump rally: “They carry with them . . . hate in their bellies towards those they call “un-Americans.”22 After three Klansmen handed out literature in a small Indiana town, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center told the Indianapolis Star, “What Trump has done is open up a space for discussion of subjects that were previously really taboo, subjects the Klan wants to discuss, like the idea that America is a white man’s country.” Using images and rhetoric similar to that pioneered by George Wallace in the 1960s, Trump went even further in mocking and calling out individuals, including four Democratic congresswomen.23 Accompanying Trump’s harsh voice and tweets was a rise in rightwing white nationalism, formally acknowledged in late 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security.24 Hate crimes increased. After white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 to march and spew hatred, the Washington Post reported, “Trump asserted that ‘both sides’ were equally to blame and that there were ‘some very fine people’ among the far-right demonstrators, many of whom wore ‘Make America Great Again’ caps while chanting racist

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and anti-Semitic slogans.”25 Of course, Trump himself was not a Klansman. The cover of the New Yorker magazine that depicted him sitting in a small sailboat and blowing on a sail shaped like a Klan hood may not have been completely fair.26 One not-so-fine person participating in the Charlottesville demonstrations was Matthew Heimbach, a resident of Paoli in southern Indiana. Profiled frequently, Heimbach became “the thuggish face of white nationalism.”27 A twenty-six-year-old college graduate (a history major), soft-spoken, and friendly, he looked like “a member of a college debate team.” Heimbach helped organize the Charlottesville rally. Amid bright Confederate and Nazi banners, he marched in a Nazi-style helmet and black battle dress. Afterward he spoke with pride of the revival of white nationalism and offered no regret for the violence that included the death of a young woman. Earlier, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, he had attacked a black female protester at a Trump rally in Louisville—a video of which went viral and led to criminal charges that eventually landed him in jail. Heimbach warned of white genocide as he denied the fact of the Holocaust. His timeworn hatred mixed with twenty-firstcentury ingredients, including rapid internet connections to likeminded people. His website and radio broadcasts combined with his wide reading and his travels around the nation and overseas to make him a new breed. “He kind of bridges the gap between the intellectual racists and the neo-Nazis,” said a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League. Like Jeff Berry and William Chaney, Heimbach attracted large media attention and few followers. His neighbors in Paoli placed rainbow-colored yard signs around town that read, “No matter what color your skin, no matter where you are from, no matter what you believe, we’re glad you are our neighbor.”28 White supremacist hatred targeted African Americans and extended to immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, and Jews. Old traditions continued, for example, with graffiti of Nazi flags painted outside a Hamilton County synagogue in 2018 and in 2019 swastikas and KKK graffiti on the Indiana Dunes State Park pavilion. White supremacists seemed more visible, even at a vegetable stand in Bloomington’s farmers’ market, where threats of violence caused a temporary closing in

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summer 2019 at the same time that Klan recruiting notices appeared across town.29 Also important were the new social issues that had begun to appear on traditional political agendas in the 1990s. Abortion and same-sex marriage became increasingly divisive. As had their predecessors in the 1920s, some Hoosiers resisted changing times by pushing their particular religious beliefs into the political arena. Powerful political voices emerged from growing numbers of conservative evangelical Christians who sought to regulate personal choices in the name of family values and religious conviction. Not unlike Prohibitionists in the early twentieth century, they pushed for government presence in their selected causes even as they professed to want small government.30 The firestorm in Indiana came with passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 2015. Governor Mike Pence and his family values supporters celebrated RFRA as a guarantee that, in the name of religious freedom, businesses might deny service on the basis of sexual orientation. Critics argued that RFRA legalized discrimination. Pence had grown up in an Irish Catholic family in southern Indiana but later converted to evangelical Christianity. His religious faith came first, he often said, as it did for many other citizens. RFRA proved a step too far in forcing that faith on all Hoosiers. After the closed-door signing ceremony, the governor’s staff posted a picture of the event, with the governor surrounded by robed religious figures and several stalwart Christian-right lobbyists. Protests broke out across the state. Pence became, his biographer Andrea Neal wrote, “the face of homophobia.”31 Critics suggested that the toxic culture of hoods and burning crosses had returned. Longtime Indiana political expert Brian Howey opened his column condemning RFRA with an account of Indiana’s Klan. Howey wrote, “I’ve watched in horror how the Indiana brand was desecrated.” National commentator Dan Thomasson, whose family had deep roots in the state, wrote, “It took Indiana generations to rid itself of the Ku Klux Klan image,” but now came this “latest episode of intolerance, this time aimed at same-sex love.” South

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Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg wrote that “it called to mind the ugliest demons of our state’s past, harkening back to . . . the Ku Klux Klan.” The Indianapolis Star, which had endorsed Pence, ran a front-page editorial with the heading “FIX THIS NOW.” Business, religious, and political leaders, including many Republicans, condemned the new law as they urged LGBTQ equality. Stickers appeared on doors and windows announcing, “This business serves everyone.” The legislature quickly arranged a modification of RFRA. Asked whether he had anticipated such backlash, Pence responded, “Heavens, no.” Perhaps he was truly unaware that many Hoosiers had moved beyond traditional notions of marriage, sexuality, and religion.32 Talk show host David Letterman said, “This is not the Indiana I remember as a kid,” as he mocked the Indiana governor.33 A respected Republican businessman, Mickey Maurer, concluded that Pence would “never get elected again in Indiana.”34 Pence’s election to the vice presidency in 2016 offered his exit from the state. Times were changing fast, but controversy continued as traditionalists stood up for their religious and political beliefs. An accountant in a small town refused in 2019 to prepare income taxes for a legally married lesbian couple. “I am a Christian and I believe marriage is between one man and one woman,” she told the press.35 State law offered the couple no legal recourse. In 2019, the Indiana legislature refused to include gender identity and sexual orientation in a hatecrimes bill, despite support from the state chamber of commerce and leading businesses. When in 2019 the United Methodist Church strengthened its worldwide ban on same-sex marriage, many disappointed Hoosier Methodists made it clear they had moved far from the Klan days of the 1920s.36 One among many small signs of change came when the Indiana Historical Society Library began to collect primary sources of LGBTQ history.37 L egaci e s The Klan was history. The legacies remain. Events in the early twentyfirst century make it clear that the Klan of the 1920s has descendants who continue to draw divisions between us and them, to exclude

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some Americans as they pray to their particular God, to fear that change is decline, to believe that there had once been a golden age after which the United States lost its way. D. C. Stephenson had descendants among those who sought boondoggles to enrich their own pockets and those who harmed others with acts of abuse and words of hatred. Governor Ed Jackson had descendants among politicians willing to dance with the devil as they pretended to work for the people. And there remain those who believe their particular version of God and nation ought to be forced on all. Such descendants are far removed from the Klan of the 1920s, but anyone with historical antennae checks the landscape for white robes and burning crosses, even if only metaphorical and even if hidden under pressed blue shirts or silk blouses with sleeves rolled up to redeem the nation. The two major distinctions between the Indiana Klan of the 1920s and today are the radical differences in numerical strength and the resistance that now arises with the first scent of a burning cross. Strong resistance began in the years after World War II and expanded in the 1960s. By the late twentieth century, it was easy to denounce the Klan. Still not so easy has been rejecting small-minded tribalism and us-versus-them divisions, understanding the privileges white men enjoy, and learning the values of democracy for all. The Klan story does not give comfort. It rests at the core of American history, not at the margins. Eyes open to the past remind us that people of the heartland could claim a righteous hatred and dare to define who was 100 percent American. A clear-eyed history shows us that seemingly good people could make bad choices, that changing times brought challenges too large to understand, and that there was evil. Perhaps even among the kindest, most generous people in the world were hearts of darkness that rejected American ideals. And yet, across a century of Klan hatred, there has always been opposition and even hope that the great moral arc has been bending, if slowly, toward justice.

NOTES

Introduction 1. One historian states, “The KKK may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed.” Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017), 36. For historiographical overviews, see Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 221–28; Craig Fox, Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), xvi–xxi. 2. Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 3. Washington Post, August 9, 1925. 4. One of the best historians has written that the Klan “was distinctive in its local manifestations.” Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 228. Pegram also suggests that “historical understanding . . . requires attention to specificity, acknowledgement of the peculiar uniqueness of historical context, the willingness to accept contradictions, the patience to discern patterns in the myriad of local variations” (227–28). 5. Meredith Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” The Bookman 67 (March 1928): 7. 6. Irvin S. Cobb, Indiana (New York: George H. Doran, 1924), 49. See also James H. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People, 1920–1945 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982), 1–25.

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7. In 1920, Indiana’s population was 95 percent native-born, 97 percent white, 75 percent Protestant. 8. This best estimate is from Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 47. There are no good estimates on membership for women. 9. Cobb, Indiana, 51. 10. Elmer Davis, “Have Faith in Indiana,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 153 (June 1, 1926): 621. 11. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 60. 12. James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin’s, 2001). 13. “Nearly everybody in Indiana joined in during the reign of the Klan,” wrote journalist John Bartlow Martin in Indiana: An Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1947), 271. 14. Peggy Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor’ in a Changing World: Fort Wayne’s Jesse Greene,” Indiana Magazine of History 113, no. 4 (December 2017): 333. 15. Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” 7. 16. For a recent articulation of the nation’s struggles with race, see Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type, 2016). I have written about memory, myth, changing times, race, and related issues in several pieces, including “Civil War Memories and ‘Pardnership Forgittin,’ 1865–1913,” Indiana Magazine of History 99, no. 3 (September 2003): 198–230; “What Is Our History Today?” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 28, no. 4 (fall 2016): 4–11; and A Lynching in the Heartland. 17. In the photo gallery of this book is an image of the sculpture Listening to History, by Bill Woodrow, 1995, located in the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI. 1. Th e K l a n A r r i v es 1. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 29, 1922, January 5, 19, February 2, 1923; Jackson County Banner, January 3, 1923. Some Klan organizing occurred as early as 1920 in Evansville, but growth was slow until late 1922. Norman Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1954), 146–47. For the significance of the Indianapolis Fiery Cross, see Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 38–42. 2. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 29, 1923. 3. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, January 5, March 16, 1923; Fairmount News, February 6, 1923. 4. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 2, March 9, 1923; Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 121–22. 5. James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin’s, 2001), 39–40. W. A. Swift was a Muncie

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commercial photographer who took dozens of photographs of Klan activity in central Indiana. Digital images of Swift’s photographs, from Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University, are at https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection /swift. 6. Quoted in Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 70. 7. Huntington Herald, January 1, 1923; Franklin Evening Star, January 1, 1923; Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 3, 1923; Richmond Republican, January 3, 1923; Seymour Tribune, January 5, 1923; Columbus Republic, February 15, 1923. 8. Allen Safianow, “‘Konklave in Kokomo’ Revisited,” The Historian 50, no. 3 (May 1988): 329–47; M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 83–93; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 6, 1923. Robert Coughlan and his Catholic family attended the Kokomo rally. His widely read and well-written account is “Konklave in Kokomo,” in The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941, ed. Isabel Leighton (Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 1949), 105–29. Some details of Coughlan’s memory are challenged in Safianow, “‘Konklave in Kokomo’ Revisited.” 9. New York Times, July 6, 1923. 10. The Klan Management: Standard Plan for the Organization and Operation of Klans in Indiana, Adopted by Grand Dragon and Great Titans in Official Meeting, April 14, 1925 (n.p., n.d.), 10–11, 32–33; G. Volstad and Son, Ku Klux Klan Rings . . . (Indianapolis, n.d.); Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 6, 1923. 11. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 28, April 11, 1924; Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 166–78. 12. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, October 3, September 5, 1924; Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 166–78. 13. Good overviews are in Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 15–20. 14. Klan Brochure, handwritten date, April 18, 1923, Clarence E. and Edna Hatfield Edmondson Family Papers, Collection C716, Indiana University Archives, Bloomington. 15. New York Times, July 6, 1923; Indiana Ku Klux Klan Field Letter 64, Indianapolis, August 30, 1923, KKK Miscellaneous File, Manuscript Division, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis; Indianapolis News, September 8, 1923. 16. Claude R. Wickard Oral History interview by Dean Albertson, 1952–1953, no. 7, p. 316, Claude R. Wickard Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. 17. William E. Wilson, “Long Hot Summer in Indiana,” American Heritage, August 1965, 56–64. 18. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan, provides very good contexts for religion. 19. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), 315. 20. Huntington Herald, May 21, 1923; Fairmount News, December 7, 1923. 21. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan, 55–62, 186–89. 22. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, September 7, 1923.

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23. Funeral Services: Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (n.p., 1925); Columbus Republic, November 13, 1923. 24. Testimony of Hugh Emmons, February 20, 1928, State of Indiana v. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, p. 188, Ku Klux Klan Files, Office of the Indiana Attorney General, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Testimony of Hugh Emmons). 25. Quoted in Baker, Gospel According to the Klan, 67. Moore’s speech is in the Noblesville Ledger, January 8, 1923. See also Peggy Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor’ in a Changing World: Fort Wayne’s Jesse Greene,” Indiana Magazine of History 113, no. 4 (December 2017): 334–36. 26. Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 2009), 101. 27. Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 108, 118; Allen Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (September 1999): 203–31. See also the analysis of members in one Michigan county in Craig Fox, Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011). 28. Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 40, 47, 100–101. 29. There were several Klan organizations for women, including the Queens of the Golden Mask and the Kamelias as well as the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, reflecting organizational competition. See Blee, Women of the Klan, 26–28; Leonard Moore, “Indiana and the Klan: A Review Essay,” Indiana Magazine of History 88, no. 2 (June 1992): 132–37. Also helpful in thinking about gender issues is Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017), 109–37; and Nancy K. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). MacLean’s focus is on Athens, Georgia, a very different place from Kokomo or other Indiana communities. 30. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 19, 1924. 31. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 20, 1923. In this report, as in others, the Fiery Cross praised women for preparing good food and generally used language most Americans today consider demeaning to women. There were Klan organizations for children, the Tri-K Klub for girls and the Junior Klan for boys. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, August 8, 1924; Blee, Women of the Klan, 157–63. 32. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 11, 1924; Allen Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 126. 33. Quoted in Blee, Women of the Klan, 82. See also Testimony of Hugh Emmons, 167–68; Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 193. 34. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 6, 1923; Blee, Women of the Klan, 23–41. The Lynds wrote that Muncie men “are likely to speak of women as creatures purer and morally better than men but as relatively impractical, emotional, unstable, given to prejudice, easily hurt, and largely incapable of facing facts or doing hard thinking.” Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 117. 35. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 2, July 6, 1923. 36. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 29, 1922.

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37. For snapshots of other Klanswomen, see Blee, Women of the Klan, 112–22. 38. Dwight W. Hoover, “Daisy Douglas Barr: From Quaker to Klan ‘Kluckeress’,” Indiana Magazine of History 87, no. 2 (June 1991): 171–95; Blee, Women of the Klan, 104–11; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, August 17,1923; Muncie Post-Democrat, November 2, December 14, 1923; Greencastle Daily Banner, January 3, June 2, 1924. 39. David Laurance Chambers, Indiana, A Hoosier History: Based on the Mural Paintings of Thomas Hart Benton (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933), 48. 2. Th e Da nger s to A m er ica 1. Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 147. 2. Quoted in Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 2009), 172. 3. Huntington Herald, November 28, 1922. 4. James H. Madison, Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885–1977 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1988), 99–101. 5. Quoted in Jason S. Lantzer, “Prohibition Is Here to Stay”: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 116. See also Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), 114; James M. O’Toole, The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 38–42, 89–93, 97–111. 6. Elmer Davis, “Have Faith in Indiana,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 153 (June 1, 1926): 617. 7. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 482; Allen Safianow, “‘Konklave in Kokomo’ Revisited,” The Historian 50, no. 3 (May 1988): 338; Noblesville Ledger, July 28, 1925. 8. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 4, 1924. For the tangled history of America’s struggles with church-state separation and religious pluralism, see Steven K. Green, The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 225–57. 9. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 29, 1922. 10. Quoted in Samuel W. White, Fragile Alliances: Labor and Politics in Evansville, Indiana, 1919–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 60. 11. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 13, 1925. 12. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 27, 1923. 13. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 25, 1923. See also Indianapolis Fiery Cross, January 16, 1925. For the variety of ethnic, religious, and patriotic forces in education, see Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘Each “Race” Could Have Its Heroes Sung’: Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 92–111. 14. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 12, 1924. 15. Adam Laats, “Red Schoolhouse, Burning Cross: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform,” History of Education Quarterly 52, no. 3 (August 2012): 323–50.

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16. Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 105; Lance Trusty, “‘All Talk and No Kash’: Valparaiso University and the Ku Klux Klan,” Indiana Magazine of History 82, no. 1 (March 1986): 1–36. 17. Minnie Morrison, Life Story of Mrs. Minnie Morrison: Awful Revelations of Life in Convent of Good Shepherd, Indianapolis, Ind.: A True Story ([Indianapolis?]: n.p., 1925), 26, 30. 18. L. C. Rudolph, Hoosier Faiths: A History of Indiana Churches and Religious Groups (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 546–50; Allen Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 120. 19. Blee, Women of the Klan, 88–89. See also Stephen J. Taylor, “‘Escaped Nuns Are Myths’: The Roots of a Forgotten Riot,” October 10, 2015, Historic Indianapolis, https://historicindianapolis.com/misc-monday-escaped-nuns-are-myths. 20. Rushville Republican, March 2, 1923. 21. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 5, 1924. 22. Josephine Cartwright Ives to William A. Wirt, May 19, 1923, William A. Wirt Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; Grover L. Hartman, “Brookston: A Study of the Cultural Evolution of an Indiana Agricultural Community, 1829–1940” (PhD diss., American University, Washington, DC, 1946), 178. See also Blee, Women of the Klan, 145. 23. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 148. 24. Blee, Women of the Klan, 147. 25. John Duvall to Grove Smith, March 20, 1924, box 1, D. C. Stephenson Files, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis. 26. Indianapolis News, March 1, 1923; Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (New York: Dell, 1984), 21. 27. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, September 21, 1923. 28. Indianapolis News, January 23, 1925. For contexts and consequences, see Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (New York: Scribner, 2019); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016), 301–22; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010), 213–27, 256–90, 301–26; Alexandra Minna Stern, “‘We Cannot Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear’: Eugenics in the Hoosier Heartland,” Indiana Magazine of History 103 (March 2007): 3–38; Jason Lantzer, “The Indiana Way of Eugenics: Sterilization Laws, 1907–74,” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Paul A. Lombardo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 26–41. A special issue of the Indiana Magazine of History 106, no. 3 (September 2010) is devoted to eugenics. Indiana’s law was strengthened in 1927, opening the way for the sterilization of some two thousand Hoosiers. The law’s primary focus, however, was on poor whites, not immigrants or blacks.

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29. The Klan Management: Standard Plan for the Organization and Operation of Klans in Indiana, Adopted by Grand Dragon and Great Titans in Official Meeting, April 14, 1925 (n.p., n.d.), 51–52. 30. Rushville Republican, March 2, 1923. 31. Quoted in Safianow, “Konklave in Kokomo,” 337. 32. Indiana State Board of Education Minutes, March 19, 1920, p. 226, Indiana State Archives. 33. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, September 8, 1923. 34. Okrent, The Guarded Gate, 343. 35. David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 149. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 36. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 25, 1924; Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 67–92. 37. Quoted in Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History,’” 128. 38. Transcript of Unemployment Conference, November 6, 1930, 28–29, Governor’s Commission on Unemployment Relief File, box F, drawer 45, Harry Leslie Papers, Indiana State Archives. See also Ngai, “The Architecture of Race,” 67–92. 39. Dwight W. Hoover, “To Be a Jew in Middletown: A Muncie Oral History Project,” Indiana Magazine of History 81, no. 2 (June 1985): 131–58. 40. Waterloo Press, December 23, 1923. See also Painter, The History of White People, 304–5, 325–26; Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 78–104. 41. Quoted in Hoover, “To Be a Jew in Middletown,” 151, 153. Martin Schwartz became a distinguished leader in establishing the Indiana Humanities Council in the 1970s. The Federation of State Humanities Councils annually honors outstanding public humanities programs with the Helen and Martin Schwartz Prize. 42. James H. Madison, “Race, Law, and the Burdens of Indiana History,” in The History of Indiana Law, ed. David J. Bodenhamer and Randall T. Shepard (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 37–59; Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1957). 43. KKK to Emmett F. Branch, August 8, 1924, Emmett F. Branch Papers, Indiana State Archives. 44. Quoted in Safianow, “Konklave in Kokomo,” 337. 45. Indianapolis News, September 20, 1928; Emma Lou Thornbrough and Lana Ruegamer, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 47–69; Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 142. 46. Maxwell Manors Incorporated, September 6, 1927, Monroe County Plat Book 3, p. 70, Monroe County Courthouse, Bloomington, IN. 47. The index to the digitized version of the Fiery Cross brings up no reference to one of the most popular white supremacy books of the 1920s, Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s,

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1921). See also Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 71–72. And for larger, changing contexts of race in the North, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). 48. Lowell Mellett, “Klan and Church,” Atlantic Monthly 132 (November 1923): 5; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 25, 1924. The candidate was Lew Shank, the Indianapolis mayor running for governor. 49. Testimony of Hugh Emmons, February 20, 1928, State of Indiana v. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 364, 368–69, 379, Ku Klux Klan Files, Office of the Indiana Attorney General, Indiana State Archives. 50. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, August 8, 1924. 51. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 16, 1923. 52. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, August 31, 1923. 53. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, June 6, 1924. 3. To H ell in a H a ndbask et 1. James H. Madison, “Celebrating Indiana: 1816, 1916, 2016” in The State of Indiana History, 2000, ed. Robert Taylor (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2001), 276. Organizers of Indiana’s statehood centennial celebration in 1916 ignored the troubling present by looking backward to tell comforting stories of virtuous Hoosier pioneers. 2. Newton Booth Tarkington, The World Does Move (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 290. Broad contexts are found in James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014). 3. Jason S. Lantzer, “Prohibition Is Here to Stay”: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). The Anti-Saloon League attracted some Catholic support. An uneasy relationship with the Klan blended cooperation and antagonism. See also Jason S. Lantzer, Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 39–42; Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 139–56; Thomas R. Pegram, “Hoodwinked: The AntiSaloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 1 (January 2008): 89–119. 4. Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: Norton, 2016), 37. 5. Claude R. Wickard, Oral History interview by Dean Albertson, 1952–1953, no. 13, 550, Claude R. Wickard Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. “A lot of men drank and didn’t want their wives to know it,” Wickard added. 6. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 21, 1924. 7. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 25, 1924. 8. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, June 27, 1924. 9. Tim Crumrin, Wicked Terre Haute (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2019), 73–78, 100–102; Dana M. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism: Evansville,

note s to page s 101–106

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Indiana’s Embrace of the Ku Klux Klan, 1919–1924,” Ohio Valley History 11 (winter 2011): 3–24. Marion’s mayor in the 1920s, Jack Edwards, later admitted there was illegal gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging in the town, but “we never took it seriously.” James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin’s, 2001), 36. 10. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 23, July 20, 1923. 11. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 23, 1923. 12. Elliott J. Gorn, Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11–12, 209. 13. Quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 147. 14. Testimony of Hugh Emmons, February 20, 1928, State of Indiana v. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 227, 233, Ku Klux Klan Files, Office of the Indiana Attorney General, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Testimony of Hugh Emmons); Brazil Daily Times, July 2, 1923; Garrett Clipper, December 22, 1924. See also Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 133–34. 15. James H. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People, 1920–1945 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982), 297–98. 16. Indianapolis News, October 24, 1921, April 15, 1924; Allen Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (September 1999): 218; Indiana Catholic and Record, June 2, 1922. 17. The Leisure of a People: Report of a Recreation Survey of Indianapolis (Indianapolis: C. E. Crippin and Son, 1929), 499; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922. Social and cultural contexts are presented in Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 18. Crumrin, Wicked Terre Haute, 85. 19. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), 114. 20. Hammond Times, April 22, 1922. 21. South Bend News-Times, April 1, 1922. 22. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922. 23. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 13, 1923. 24. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922. For larger contexts, see Tom Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 54–105. 25. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change, 367. 26. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 266. 27. Greencastle Herald, December 28, 1928. 28. Logansport Pharos-Tribune, February 1, 1924. 29. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 29, 1924. 30. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 27, 1923. 31. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, October 26, 1923. 32. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 16, 1924. 33. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 241.

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34. The Klan Management: Standard Plan for the Organization and Operation of Klans in Indiana, Adopted by Grand Dragon and Great Titans in Official Meeting, April 14, 1925 (n.p., n.d.), 24. 35. These artifacts are from the John Martin Smith Ku Klux Klan Collection at the Eckhart Public Library in Auburn, IN, and are digitized at https://willennar .pastperfectonline.com/library/1A4B87F8-4A6C-4B84-8297-725257660118 and https://willennar.pastperfectonline.com/library/29AC0AA7-4471-48B8-8BA1 -218505639910. 36. 100% Red Hot Songs: The Best of Our Own Klan Songs (Muncie, IN: Rinehart Bros., n.d.). Klan music publishing ventures were also located in Hammond, Vincennes, and Indianapolis. Michael Jacobs, “Co-Opting Christian Chorales: Songs of the Ku Klux Klan,” American Music 28, no. 3 (fall 2010): 368–77. 37. Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 36–38, 60; Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 126–41. 38. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March, 7, 28, 1924; Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 142–59. 39. Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 104–6; Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 116–66. 40. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 14, 1924; Anderson Daily Bulletin, September 1, 1924; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, January 11, 1924. 41. Quoted in Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 132. Cavalier Productions had grand plans for more Klan films. Indianapolis Star, November 13, December 10, 1923. 42. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, March 14, 21, 1924. 43. Tom Rice, “‘The True Story of the Ku Klux Klan’: Defining the Klan through Film,” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 3 (December 2008): 486; Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 110–13. 44. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 18, 1924. 45. Lantzer, “Prohibition Is Here to Stay,” 113–32. 46. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 11, 1924; Safianow, “Klan Comes to Tipton,” 216–18; Alexandria Times-Tribune, January 31, 1924; Testimony of Hugh Emmons, 227. For a good overview of sumptuary legislation, see Justin E. Walsh, The Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1987), 291–309. 47. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 157–83. Pegram’s other chapters on the Klan are full of Indiana details. Linda Gordon includes Indiana among several northern states that “experienced a great deal of actual Klan violence,” but she offers no evidence or sources. (She also mistakenly includes Methodists among the Protestant denominations that “did not respond enthusiastically” to the Klan.) Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017), 89, 100–101. For a discussion of violence in the South in the 1920s, see Nancy K. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 149–73. 48. William Clayton Wilkinson, “Memories of the Ku Klux Klan in One Indiana Town,” Indiana Magazine of History 102, no. 4 (December 2006): 339–54. 49. Allen Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100 (June 2004): 124–25.

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50. H. J. McKinney to Robert W. Bagnall, February 7, 1923, I: G66, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. See also Indianapolis Star, March 17, 1922. 51. Indianapolis Star, March 17, 1922. 52. Johnnie Johnson, interview by Jessica Scott, ca. 1971–1976, Black Muncie History Project, MSS 33/R 5, Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University, Muncie. 53. William E. Wilson, “Long Hot Summer in Indiana,” American Heritage, August 1965, 62. 54. Anonymous, interviewed by James R. Gardner, July 16, 1980, Black Middletown Project, R 21, Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University, Muncie. One scholar writes of “the near silence in the scholarly literature on African Americans’ specific representations of the impact of violence on them.” Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 4. 55. The Klan Management, 47. 56. I am indebted to Richard Nation for this estimate. Email to author, April 19, 2019. 57. There have been frequent assertions that the tragic lynching of Abe Smith and Thomas Shipps in Marion in 1930 was the work of robed Klansmen. Contemporary evidence contradicts such claims. Since the Evansville racial violence in 1903, the 1930 Marion lynching is the only documented lynching to date in Indiana. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland. The death of George Tompkins in Indianapolis in March 1922 may have been a lynching, but the newspaper reports are unclear and do not mention the Klan. Indianapolis Star, March 17, 18, 1922. Thanks to Richard Nation for this reference. 58. Peggy Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor’ in a Changing World: Fort Wayne’s Jesse Greene,” Indiana Magazine of History 113, no. 4 (2017): 337. 4. Th e Politics of M ediocr it y 1. Meredith Nicholson to Claude G. Bowers, March 9, 1926, Claude G. Powers Papers, II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Nicholson was among those good-hearted Hoosiers who were deeply regretful of the Klan’s success. His love of Indiana and his Democratic Party loyalty influenced his criticism, but sometimes, as in an address to the American Library Association, he could pull back from attacking the Klan. Indianapolis Star, May 29, 1928. (I am indebted to George Hamlin for this reference.) See also Ralph D. Gray, Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007), 153–55, 171–73. For details of Indiana’s political culture in the 1920s, see James H. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People, 1920–1945 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982), 1–75; and Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 151–83.

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2. Indiana Senate Journal, 1923, 6. See also Tony L. Trimble, “Warren T. McCray,” in The Governors of Indiana, ed. Linda C. Gugin and James E. St. Clair (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006), 260–66. 3. Justin E. Walsh, The Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1987), 296–301, 306–8. 4. James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014). 5. Republicans in 1922 engaged in “a nasty fight over the control of the state committee.” Hilton U. Brown to Delavan Smith, May 10, 1922, Warren Fairbanks Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Governor McCray’s conviction caused additional splits. Gertrude Fanning McHugh to Samuel M. Ralston, September 26, 1923, Samuel M. Ralston Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (hereafter cited as Ralston Papers). This factionalism within the party likely created additional space for Klan maneuvering. 6. Harold Feightner, interview with Thomas Krasean, 1968, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, 24. 7. Ralston to B. A. Worthington, October 20, 1922, Ralston Papers. Elected in 1912, Ralston had been a somewhat progressive governor. Suellen M. Hoy, “Governor Samuel M. Ralston and Indiana’s Centennial Celebration,” Indiana Magazine of History 71, no. 3 (September 1975): 245–66. 8. New York Times, March 31, 1923; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922; Jason S. Lantzer, “Prohibition Is Here to Stay”: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 122. In prison, McCray taught a men’s Bible class and edited the weekly newspaper. Muncie Post-Democrat, April 17, 1925. 9. Feightner, interview with Krasean, 56. D. C. Stephenson remembered the governor as “poor old drunken Emmett Branch.” Marion County Grand Jury, Investigation of Political Corruption, July 30, 1927, Testimony of D. C. Stephenson, typescript, p. 73, box 2, folder 9, D. C. Stephenson Collection, Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Stephenson Collection). 10. Such is, at least, the opinion of the author. 11. Harry D. Evans to Walter White, March 21, 1922, I: G63, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as NAACP Papers). 12. Indianapolis News, May 26, 1924. See also Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 30, 1924. 13. Tolerance, May 4, 1924. 14. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change, 56–57. 15. Charles F. Lowe to Stephenson, box 1, folder 3, Stephenson Collection; Testimony of Hugh Emmons, February 20, 1928, State of Indiana v. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 99, 188, Ku Klux Klan Files, Office of the Indiana Attorney General, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Ku Klux Klan Files); New York Times, October 2, 1927. 16. Roland G. Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, “Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127, no. 4 (November 2012):

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1885. See also “Instructions for the Use of Form K-114,” November 9, 1923, box 1, folder 4, Ku Klux Klan Files. 17. Robert G. Tucker to Will H. Hays, October 24, 1924, Will Hays Papers, Manuscript Division, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Hays Papers). 18. Bert Morgan to Hays, May 29, 1924, Hays Papers. 19. M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 107. 20. Stephenson to [?], April 15, 1924, Harold C. Feightner Papers, Manuscript Division, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Feightner Papers). 21. Indianapolis News, May 6, 1924. The News claimed that Stephenson sent out 225,000 letters supporting Jackson’s nomination. Indianapolis News, April 15, 1924. 22. Quoted in William W. Giffin, “The Political Realignment of Black Voters in Indianapolis, 1924,” Indiana Magazine of History 79, no. 2 (June 1983): 136. See also Jason S. Lantzer, “Edward L. Jackson, January 12, 1925–January 14, 1929,” in Gugin and St. Clair, The Governors of Indiana, 274–79. 23. Local elections also showed Klan influence, as in the Seventh District, where a Klan-backed candidate upset five-term Republican congressman Merrill Moores. Indianapolis News, May 9, 1924. 24. Huntington Herald, May 24, 1924. 25. The downtown tabernacle was built in 1921 for the evangelical ministry of Howard Cadle, who may have had Klan connections. Theo Anderson, “Back Home Again (and Again) in Indiana: E. Howard Cadle, Christian Populism, and the Resilience of American Fundamentalism,” Indiana Magazine of History 102, no. 4 (December 2006): 301–38. 26. Indianapolis News, May 13, 1924; Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 137. See also Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 16, 1924. By fall 1924, there was an alternative Klan leader in Indiana who asked “every Protestant preacher” to prepare four sermons and “to have them ready at the time of the election.” Walter Bossert, “To All Exalted Cyclops . . . ,” October 18, 1924, Ku Klux Klan Files. 27. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 23, 1924. 28. Stephenson to Roy V. West, August 9, 1924, box 1, D. C. Stephenson Papers, Indiana Historical Society Library. 29. Hilton U. Brown to Warren Fairbanks, May 22, 1924, Warren Fairbanks Papers, Lilly Library. 30. Dan W. Simms to Ralston, May 22, 1924, Ralston Papers. 31. W. B. Carleton to Ralston, May 19, 1924, Ralston Papers. 32. Frederick Van Nuys to Ralston, May 17, 1924, Ralston Papers. 33. Thomas Taggart to Ralston, April 7, 1924, Ralston Papers. The state and national Democratic planks on the Klan issue were similarly moderate. Taggart aggressively pushed Ralston for the presidential nomination. James Philip Fadely, Thomas Taggart: Public Servant, Political Boss, 1856–1929 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 1997), 185–95. 34. Joseph M. White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920’s as Viewed by the Indiana Catholic and Record” (MA thesis, Butler University, 1974), Graduate Thesis Collection, https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/24.

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35. L. G. Ellingham to Ralston, May 20, 1924, Ralston Papers. 36. William A. Pickens to Ralston, May 19, 1924, Ralston Papers. 37. Indiana Catholic and Record, August 1, 1923, quoted in White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana,” 31. 38. John T. Barnett to Ralston, May 26, 1924, Ralston Papers. See also Leroy Sanders to Ralston, May 24, 1924, Ralston Papers. 39. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change, 64. 40. Indianapolis News, June 6, 1924. The Klan was a divisive issue at both parties’ national conventions in 1924. See Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 211–15. 41. Indianapolis News, October 29, 1924; Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 125. 42. Quoted in Scott M. Bushnell, Hard News, Heartfelt Opinions: A History of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 116; Indiana Catholic and Record, September 14, 1923, quoted in White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana,” 58. 43. Grand Dragon, Realm of Indiana, to My Faithful Klansmen, November 1924, I: G63, NAACP Papers. 44. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, September 26, October 24, 1924. 45. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, October 31, 1924. The Republican was James W. Hill, running for Congress. 46. Quoted in Todd Gould, For Gold and Glory: Charlie Wiggins and the AfricanAmerican Racing Car Circuit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 74. 47. New York Times, October 16, 1924. 48. G. W. Langston to William Pickens, September 25, 1924, I: G63; R. W. Bagnall to H. J. McKinney, September 12, 1924, I: G66; Bagnall to A. Wayne Brooks, July 26, 1922, I: G65—all in NAACP Papers; Giffin, “The Political Realignment of Black Voters,” 133–66; New York Times, May 13, 1924; John A. Davis, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1920–1930: An Historical Study (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1966), 181–98. 49. Quoted in Giffin, “The Political Realignment of Black Voters,” 141. 50. Indiana Catholic and Record, November 7, 1924, quoted in White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana,” 76. African American voters in Evansville remained with the Republican Party. Samuel W. White, Fragile Alliances: Labor and Politics in Evansville, Indiana, 1919–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 57, 62. 51. Indianapolis News, October 24, 1924. 52. Morgan to Hays, October 24, 1924, Hays Papers; White, Fragile Alliances, 58–59. 53. W. B. Carleton to Ralston, May 19, 1924, Ralston Papers. Wilson’s son wrote a good memoir of that campaign. William E. Wilson, “Long Hot Summer in Indiana,” American Heritage, August 1965, 56–64. 54. Peggy Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor’ in a Changing World: Fort Wayne’s Jesse Greene,” Indiana Magazine of History 113, no. 4 (December 2017): 339. 55. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, November 7, 1924. 56. Walsh, The Centennial History, 316–17.

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57. Morgan to Hays, May 29, 1924, Hays Papers. 58. Marion County Grand Jury Investigation of Political Corruption, box 1, folder 1, Ku Klux Klan Files. 59. Walsh, The Centennial History, 310–11. The Republican Party abandoned support for the law in 1932. Hoosiers joined the nation in ending Prohibition in 1933, with a 64 percent vote in favor of repeal. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change, 40–44. 60. The Indiana Anti-Saloon League and the Klan overlapped, to the detriment of the league and to the cause of Prohibition. See Lantzer, “Prohibition Is Here to Stay,” 121–31. Lantzer concluded, “The Klan’s hateful legacy helped to shatter any hope for the dry coalition of white evangelical Protestants, African Americans, and Catholics needed to maintain Prohibition as the law of the land” (131). 61. Indiana Catholic and Record, March 6, 1925. 62. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 20, 1925. 63. Indianapolis News, February 17, 1925; Greensburg Daily News, February 5, 1925; Delphi Citizen, February 14, 1925. For larger contexts, see Adam Laats, “Red Schoolhouse, Burning Cross: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform,” History of Education Quarterly 52, no. 3 (August 2012): 323–50; Caitlin S. Kerr, “Teachers’ Religious Garb as an Instrument for Globalization in Education,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18, no. 1 (2011): 539–61; and James H. Madison, “John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board and the Rural School Problem in the Midwest, 1900–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 24, no. 2 (summer 1984): 181–99. 64. Indianapolis News, January 21, 23, 1925; Walsh, The Centennial History, 317. See also Steven K. Green, The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 236–43. 65. A good illustration of internal differences, false promises, and greed is the Klan’s interest in purchasing Valparaiso University. See Lance Trusty, “All Talk and No ‘Kash’: Valparaiso University and the Ku Klux Klan,” Indiana Magazine of History 82, no. 1 (March 1986): 1–36. 66. “Examples from the Constitution and By-Laws of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” Feightner Papers. The document is not dated or signed but was likely prepared in 1924 or 1925 and has Stephenson’s tedious style and propensity to play the role of lawyer. Details of the split and 1925 legislature are in Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, esp. 130–44, 163–76, and Walsh, The Centennial History, 314–37. Walsh provides analysis of roll call votes but notes the challenges of precision because of the Klan’s factional battles. See also Tipton Daily Tribune, March 16, 1925. 67. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 117–21; Muncie Morning Star, March 25, 1924, April 8, 1925; Knights of Ku Klux Klan v. Independent Klan, 11 F.2d 881 (D. Ind. 1926); Jewish Daily Bulletin, January 25, 1926. 68. Indiana Catholic and Record, March 13, 1925. 69. Testimony of Hugh Emmons, Ku Klux Klan Files, 25.

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note s to page s 127–133 5. Steph enson Goes Dow n

1. Harold Feightner, interview with Thomas Krasean, 1968, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, 15. 2. A contemporary example is Morton Harrison, “Gentleman from Indiana,” Atlantic Monthly 141 (March 1928): 676–86. One of the best efforts to diminish the overemphasis on Stephenson’s leadership by placing it in broad contexts is Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). More focused on the man is M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991). Lutholtz’s book provides much of the biographical detail that follows. 3. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Evansville Indiana Charter, May 15, 1922, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis. 4. Roland G. Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, “Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127, no. 4 (November 2012): 1911. The national Klan leader wrote Stephenson to praise his “magnificent record” of remitting to the national office in the first four months of 1923 a total of $641,475. H. W. Evans to D. C. Stephenson, August 2, 1923, box 1, folder 2, D. C. Stephenson Collection, Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Stephenson Collection). 5. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 12, October 12, 1923. 6. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 97, 102. 7. Marion [no last name] to D. C. Stevenson, n.d.; [signature illegible] to Stephenson, April 24, 1924, both in box 1, folder 3, Stephenson Collection; Helen Wilson to Stephenson, November 20, 1925, box 1, folder 3, D. C. Stephenson Papers, Manuscript Division, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis (hereafter cited as Stephenson Papers). 8. Statement of Chas. N. Hoff, Franklin County, Ohio, June 10, 1923, box 1, folder 10, Stephenson Collection. 9. John Bartlow Martin, Indiana: An Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1947), 201–6. A good analysis of local Klan corruption is in Allen Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (September 1999): 203–31. 10. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 183. Lutholtz provides the best detailed account, based on newspaper reporting and on court testimony and records, many in the Stephenson Collection. 11. Noblesville Ledger, August 21, 1925. The paper reported that the children distributed the contents to vacationers along the river who “spent the evening going through the documents with much interest.” I am grateful to David Heighway for this reference. 12. Meredith Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” The Bookman 67 (March 1928): 7. 13. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 233–34. Again, Lutholtz’s research offers a detailed account. See also Walter O. Lewis, affidavit, October 7, 1939, box 1, folder 33,

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Indiana Attorney General’s Office, State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis. 14. Seymour Tribune, October 31, 1925; Linton Daily Citizen, June 15, 1925. See also Allen Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 129–30. 15. Quoted in Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 95–96. 16. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 296, 299. 17. Indianapolis News, November 16, 1925. Klinck and Gentry were found not guilty. 18. Feightner, interview with Krasean, 40. 19. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 306–9; New York Times, July 26, 1927; Noblesville Ledger, November 21, 1925; Greencastle Herald, September 23, 1927. 20. Marion County Grand Jury, Investigation of Political Corruption, July 30, 1927, Testimony of D. C. Stephenson, typescript, box 2, folder 9, 23–24, 41, Stephenson Collection. 21. Indianapolis News, September 9, 1927; Indianapolis Star, September 10, 1927. See also Columbus Republic, September 10, 1927; Huntington Press, September 10, 1927. 22. Indianapolis Star, February 17, May 24, 1928; New York Times, July 27, September 10, 1927, February 17, May 24, 1928. 23. Indianapolis Star, January 7, 1926. 24. Vidette-Messenger of Porter County, March 26, 1928. 25. Cong. Rec., 69th Congress, 2d Sess., March 24, 1928, vol. 69, part 5, pp. 5305–7; New York Times, October 29, 1926; Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” 11. 26. David Laurance Chambers, Indiana, A Hoosier History: Based on the Mural Paintings of Thomas Hart Benton (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933), 48. 27. Stephenson to Felix Blakenbaker, November 19, 1928, box 1, folder 1, Stephenson Papers, Indiana State Library. Most of this collection contains letters to and from Stephenson in prison, including letters withheld from him because he was permitted to receive only legal and business correspondence. Reading the three boxes of documents and newspaper clippings is a surreal experience. 28. Paul B. Newman to Stephenson, June 12, 1930, box 2, folder 1, Stephenson Papers, Indiana State Library. 29. Bloomington Daily Telephone, December 2, 1932. 30. Greencastle Banner, June 28, 1933; New York Times, September 26, 1950. See box 3, folder 13, Stephenson Collection, for extensive documentation of one of his appeals, and also the files of the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, Indiana State Archives. 31. New York Times, December 23, 1956; Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 310–24. 32. A reporter’s account in the Indianapolis Star of discovering Stephenson’s death date and grave site characterized him only as the “head of the white-supremacist group,” reflecting a common misunderstanding of the Klan’s many enemies and wide range of beliefs. Indianapolis Star, September 9, 1978.

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note s to page s 138–141 6. Th e K l a n’s Enemi es Step U p

1. New York Times, November 7, 1923. 2. Greensburg Daily News, December 24, 1925; Rushville Daily Republican, December 26, 1925. See also Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 144–47. 3. W. D. Foulke to [Alice Stone] Blackwell, December 28, 1926, roll 8, National American Woman Suffrage Association Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. I am grateful to Nicole Etcheson for this reference. Foulke had earlier received an anonymous threatening letter from a Klan member. Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, December 16, 1922. 4. New York Times, October 2, 1927. 5. Meredith Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” The Bookman 67 (March 1928): 9. An example of the common assumption that Stephenson’s conviction had immediate consequence is on the plaque placed outside the Hamilton County courtroom in which the trial was held: “The outcome of the trial resulted in the rapid decline of the theretofore powerful Klan influence in state government.” As this chapter explains, the decline was not rapid. The belief in rapid decline is part of the larger myth of the Klan as a fluke event dependent only on Stephenson. 6. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, January 5, 1923. 7. South Bend News-Tribune, October 28, 1922; Allen Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (September 1999): 220; Garrett Clipper, January 8, 1923; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, January 19, February 2, April 13, June 1, August 31, 1923; Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 151–52. For a good overview, see David J. Goldberg, “Unmasking the Ku Klux Klan: The Northern Movement against the KKK, 1920–1925,” Journal of American Ethnic History 15, no. 4 (summer 1996): 32–48. 8. Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” 222; Lynn Dumenil, “The Tribal Twenties: ‘Assimilated’ Catholics’ Response to Anti-Catholicism in the 1920s,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11, no. 1 (fall 1991): 21–49, esp. 34; Eleanor Arnold, ed., Buggies and Bad Times: Memories of Hoosier Homemakers III (n.p., 1985), 89. 9. Indiana Catholic and Record, July 28, 1922; Allen Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 120. See also Indiana Catholic and Record, November 3, 1922, November 2, 1923; Brookville Democrat, October 16, 1924. A good account is Joseph M. White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920’s as Viewed by the Indiana Catholic and Record” (MA thesis, Butler University, 1974), Graduate Thesis Collection, https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/24. 10. Fort Wayne Sentinel, October 1, 1923. 11. Quoted in M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 124. 12. Tolerance, December 23, 1923, April 20, 1924. See also White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana,” 35–36.

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13. Lutholtz, Grand Dragon, 65–72; Deborah Ballee Markisohn, “Ministers of the Klan: Indianapolis Clergy Involvement with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan (MA thesis, Indiana University, 1992); John A. Davis, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1920–1930: An Historical Study (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1966), 51–54; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, April 6, April 27, 1923. 14. Jill Suzanne Nevel, “Fiery Crosses and Tempers: The Ku Klux Klan in South Bend, Indiana, 1923–1926” (senior thesis, Princeton University, 1977), 60–61. 15. Todd Tucker, Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004), 145–62; Jill Weiss Simins, “Integrity on the Gridiron Part One: Opposition to the Klan at Notre Dame,” November 19, 2019, Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana History Blog, https://blog.history.in.gov /integrity-on-the-gridiron-part-one-notre-dame-opposition-to-the-klan/; Brendan O’Shaughnessy, “A Clash over Catholicism,” University of Notre Dame Stories, https://www.nd.edu/stories//a-clash-over-catholicism/. The argument for more scholarship on the Klan and Catholic universities is in William Vance Trollinger, “Hearing the Silence: The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan, and Catholic Universities and Colleges in the 1920s,” American Catholic Studies 124, no. 1 (spring 2013): 1–21. 16. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, May 23, June 13, 1924. 17. Goldberg, “Unmasking the Ku Klux Klan,” 42. Goldberg signals out for violence against the Klan the tristate area of the West Virginia panhandle, western Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio, where traditions of labor strikes and violence were likely stronger than in Indiana. 18. Arthur S. Meyers, “‘A Sturdy Core of Thinking, Fact Seeking Citizens’: The Open Forum Movement and Public Learning in Terre Haute and Hammond, Indiana, in the 1920s,” Indiana Magazine of History 99, no. 4 (December 2003): 360, 366; Peggy Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor’ in a Changing World: Fort Wayne’s Jesse Greene,” Indiana Magazine of History 113, no. 4 (December 2017): 335. 19. Dwight W. Hoover, “To Be a Jew in Middletown: A Muncie Oral History Project,” Indiana Magazine of History 81, no. 2 (June 1985): 155. 20. Douglas Wissing, “‘Cook Good, Serve Generously, Price Modestly’: The Shapiro’s Story,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 21 (fall 2009): 11. 21. Judith E. Endelman, The Jewish Community of Indianapolis: 1849 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 118–26; Richard Moss, “Creating a Jewish American Identity in Indianapolis: The Jewish Welfare Federation and the Regulation of Leisure, 1920–1934,” Indiana Magazine of History 103, no. 1 (March 2007): 39–65. 22. Harry D. Evans to Walter White, March 21, 1922; G. W. Langston to William Pickens, September 26, 1924; Indianapolis Informer, October 11, 1924—all in part 1: G63, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as NAACP Papers); A. Wayne Brooks to Robert W. Bagnall, July 18, 1922, part 1: G65, NAACP Papers; Tolerance, July 20, 1924; Emma Lou Thornbrough and Lana Ruegamer, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 49; William W. Giffin, “The Political Realignment of Black Voters in Indianapolis, 1924,” Indiana Magazine of History 79, no. 2 (June 1983): 133–66;

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James H. Madison, “‘Gone to Another Meeting’: Willard B. Ransom and Early Civil Rights Leadership,” Indiana Magazine of History 114, no. 3 (September 2018): 165–201. 23. Indiana Methodists eventually offered a response to the intolerance of the 1920s. At the Indiana annual conference in 1930, the Committee on Memorials passed a resolution that “‘Jim-Crowism’ in our country at the present time seems utterly inconsistent with our ideals and teaching of brotherhood.” It was time for Methodists, the resolution concluded, to “lead the way to practical brotherhood by squaring our practices to our preachments.” Minutes of the Ninety-Ninth Session, Indiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church Held at New Albany, Indiana, September 24–29, 1930 (Cincinnati: Indiana Conference, 1930), 378–79. I am grateful to Philip Amerson for this reference. 24. Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 3, 1923; Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” 220; Frank Elon Davison, Thru the Rear-View Mirror (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1955), 75–79; Meyers, “‘A Sturdy Core’,” 360; James H. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People, 1920–1945 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982), 53; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, February 22, 29, 1924. 25. Indiana Catholic and Record, August 10, 1923; Richard Morris Clutter, “The Indiana American Legion, 1919–1960” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1974), 85–89. 26. Quoted in Samuel W. White, Fragile Alliances: Labor and Politics in Evansville, Indiana, 1919–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 60. 27. Thomas R. Pegram, “The Ku Klux Klan, Labor, and the White Working Class during the 1920s,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, no. 2 (April 2018): 373–96; White, Fragile Alliances, 54–56. White acknowledges the challenges of explaining the Klan’s appeal to union members and working-class Hoosiers, including in cities such as Evansville, where there was support for Socialist Party candidates in the immediate postwar years. White, Fragile Alliances, 177–79. Relevant to the uncertainty is the paucity of good scholarship on Indiana labor history. 28. Clutter, “The Indiana American Legion,” 54; Dean J. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 83–84, 90–91. 29. Fort Wayne Sentinel, July 6, 1923; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, July 13, 1923. 30. Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” 7; Boston Globe, May 19, 1928. One critic has noted that Tarkington “was almost pathologically nonconfrontational”—a trait not uncommon among Midwesterners. Robert Gottlieb, “The Rise and Fall of Booth Tarkington,” New Yorker, November 11, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-booth -tarkington. 31. Lowell Mellett, “Klan and Church,” Atlantic Monthly 132 (November 1923): 9. 32. Meredith Nicholson to Claude G. Bowers, March 9, 1926, Claude G. Bowers Papers, II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. See also New York Times, October 14, 1926. 33. Quoted in Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor,’” 333; Peter Sehlinger and Holman Hamilton, Spokesman for Democracy: Claude G. Bowers, 1878–1958 (Indianapolis:

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Indiana Historical Society Press, 2000), 92. There is irony in Bowers’s popular, pro-Southern book on Reconstruction, about which one scholar has written, “More than any other book in the late 1920s, The Tragic Era helped the Democratic Party keep the segregationists in power for another generation.” Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016), 331. 34. Indianapolis News, April 26, 1922. 35. Testimony of Hugh Emmons, February 20, 1928, State of Indiana v. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, p. 121, Ku Klux Klan Files, Office of the Indiana Attorney General, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis; Bradford W. Scharlott, “The Hoosier Newsman and the Hooded Order: Indiana Press Reaction to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s” (MA thesis, Indiana University, 1978), 54–55. 36. Indianapolis Fiery Cross, September 5, November 14, 1924. 37. Mellett, “Klan and Church,” 4; Indianapolis Fiery Cross, November 9, 1923. 38. Muncie Post-Democrat, March 7, April 4, November 14, 1924. See also Ron F. Smith. “The Klan’s Retribution against an Indiana Editor: A Reconsideration,” Indiana Magazine of History 106, no. 4 (December 2010): 381–400; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1937), 323–24; Carrolyle M. Frank, “Politics in Middletown: A Reconsideration of Municipal Government and Community Power in Muncie, Indiana, 1925–1935” (PhD diss., Ball State University, 1974), 54–55; Stephen J. Taylor, “‘Koo Side Lights’: George Dale vs. the Klan,” Hoosier State Chronicles, November 17, 2015, https://blog.newspapers.library.in.gov/koo -koo-side-lights-george-dale-vs-the-klan/. For the Indiana State Supreme Court’s partial upholding of Dale’s conviction, see Hugh Evander Willis, “Punishment for Contempt of Court,” Indiana Law Journal 2, no. 4 (1927): article 2. 39. Nicholson, “Hoosier Letters and the Ku Klux Klan,” 9. 40. New York Times, October 14, 1926; Fellowship Forum, October 23, 1926; Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 182, 187. 41. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 12, 1926. 42. Indianapolis News, December 9, 1927; Indianapolis Star, May 25, 1928. 43. George E. Stevens, “Winning the Pulitzer Prize: The Indianapolis Times Battles Political Corruption, 1926–27,” Journalism History 2, no. 3 (autumn 1975): 82–83; “Indianapolis Times,” Indiana Historical Marker, https://www.in.gov /history/markers/4115.htm. 44. Indianapolis News, February 26, 1927. See also Justin E. Walsh, The Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1987), 326. 45. New York Times, July 7, 1927, October 23, 1928. 46. Ann Gilliom Verbeek, “The League and the Law: Arthur L. Gilliom and the Problem of Due Process in Prohibition-Era Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 107, no. 4 (December 2011): 289–326. 47. Indiana Democratic State Platform, 1928, Indiana State Platforms, I. 48. Huntington Press, November 3, 1928. See also Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change, 71–72; Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” 227; Andrew E.

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Stoner, Campaign Crossroads: Presidential Politics in Indiana from Lincoln to Obama (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017), 221. 49. Columbus Republic, November 29, 1929. Bruce Catton became a noted Civil War historian. 50. Greenfield Daily Reporter, November 6, 1929. See White, Fragile Alliances, 59–68; Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change, 73; Greencastle Herald, May 8, 1929; New York Times, November 10, 1929. 51. Kokomo Tribune, November 20, 1929; Fellowship Forum, August 11, September 1, 1928, June 29, 1929; Allen Safianow, “‘Konklave in Kokomo’ Revisited,” The Historian 50, no. 3 (May 1988): 66. For an example of fear of a Klan return, see Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 443. 52. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, 462–65. 53. Harold Feightner, interview with Thomas Krasean, 1968, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, 61. 54. Noblesville Ledger, December 7, 1938. See also Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History,’” 136. 55. For memories of the Klan in the late 1980s, see Kathleen M. Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (September 1993): 596–606. 56. Indiana Catholic and Record, April 8, 1927, quoted in White, “The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana,” 102. See also Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History,’” 143–54. 57. Keith A. Erekson, “Losing Lincoln: A Call to Commemorative Action,” Indiana Magazine of History 105, no. 4 (December 2009): 312; New York Times, July 6, 1930. 7. Th e K l a n R etu r ns 1. Kokomo Tribune, January 14, 1964; William E. Wilson, “Long Hot Summer in Indiana,” American Heritage 16 (August 1965): 64. 2. Indianapolis Star, April 29, 1973. 3. See, for example, the high school textbook by John D. Barnhart, Donald F. Carmony, Opal M. Nichols, and Jack E. Weicker, Indiana: The Hoosier State (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1962). The first two authors were members of the history department at Indiana University Bloomington. The book avoids any mention of not only the Klan but also African Americans. A section on “Personalities in Indiana History” spotlights fourteen Hoosiers, all white men. This narrow history was the norm in the United States into the early 1960s. 4. David Crosson, “What’s the Risk? Controversial Exhibits Challenge the Romantic Past,” History News 36, no. 4 (April 1981): 19; Allen Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 152–53. For an excellent meditation on discovering Klan images in family papers, see Susan Neville, “Into the Fire,” Ploughshares Solos 7, no. 6 (2019). 5. Indiana Historical Bureau, State Historical Markers, https://www.in.gov /history/markers.htm. The major exception is the marker for the Indianapolis Times, which mentions the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Klan. In

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recent years, the Indiana Historical Bureau has sought to mark aspects of history that include race, gender, and ethnicity. 6. Safianow, “‘You Can’t Burn History,’” 109–54. Opposition to releasing the names continued. Noblesville Times, March 1, 2019. As of this book going to press, the Indiana Historical Society has agreed to take the collection and is awaiting action from the Hamilton County Historical Society. A Klan membership list with over twelve hundred names was discovered in Columbus in 1975 and then locked away in the Bartholomew County Historical Society. Columbus Republic, December 31, 2015. 7. Harley Burden Jr., interview with the author, September 4, 1998, author’s personal collection; James H. Madison, “‘Gone to Another Meeting’: Willard B. Ransom and Early Civil Rights Leadership,” Indiana Magazine of History 114, no. 3 (September 2018): 165–201; Indianapolis Star, November 8, 1946. For an example of a former Klansman, Court Asher, picking up the cause in 1947, see John Bartlow Martin, Indiana: An Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1947), 212. An attempt to revive the Klan at a ceremony at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in May 1946 may have heightened concern. 8. Paul Rule and Art Keller to Robert O’Neal, December 17, 1946, box 1, folder 8, Klux Klan Files, Office of the Indiana Attorney General, Indiana State Archives, Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indianapolis; Jason S. Lantzer, “Ralph F. Gates,” in The Governors of Indiana, ed. Linda C. Gugin and James E. St. Clair (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006), 317. 9. Indianapolis Star, November 8, 10, 1948; McCabe Betty to Walter White, November 12, 1946, part 2: C336, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Indianapolis Recorder, January 26, 1947; Indianapolis Star, March 1, 1947; Libby Cierzniak, “Deja Vu Tuesday: The Year the Legislature Outlawed Hate,” September 26, 2017, Historic Indianapolis, https://historicindianapolis .com/deja-vu-tuesday-the-year-that-the-legislature-outlawed-hate-in-indiana/. 10. For a good case study, see Aaron G. Fountain Jr., “Building a Student Movement in Naptown: The Corn Cob Curtain Controversy, Free Speech, and 1960s and 1970s High School Activism in Indianapolis,” Indiana Magazine of History 114, no. 3 (March 2018): 202–37. 11. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 498–501. 12. Thomas Graham and Rachel Graham Cody, Getting Open: The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 188. A study in 1965 concluded that there were few, if any, actual sundown laws or ordinances in Indiana. Nonetheless, many Hoosiers believed such laws existed and required all African Americans to be out of town before the sun set. This fear doubtless worked to keep blacks from moving to or working in some towns and cities. Donald M. Royer, “Indiana’s ‘Sundown Ordinances’—Fact or Fiction? A Study of ‘Sundown Ordinances’ in Nineteen Indiana Towns and Cities,” Indiana Civil Rights Commission, Indianapolis, February 1965, https://digital.palni.edu /digital/collection/gopplow/id/8175.

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13. James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin’s, 2001), 131–36. 14. Richard B. Pierce, Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920–1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 9–25, 126–27; Randy Roberts, “But They Can’t Beat Us”: Oscar Robertson and the Crispus Attucks Tigers (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 1999); Indianapolis Star, February 15, 2004; Ron Briley, “Basketball’s Great White Hope and Ronald Reagan’s America: Hoosiers (1986),” Film and History 35, no. 1 (fall 2005): 12–19; “Attucks: The School That Opened a City” (Indianapolis: WFYI and Ted Green Films, 2016). 15. Graham and Graham Cody, Getting Open, 190. 16. Matthew Welsh, “Civil Rights and the Primary Election of 1964 in Indiana: The Wallace Challenge,” Indiana Magazine of History 75, no. 1 (March 1979): 1–27; New York Times, May 7, 1964; Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1964; Andrew E. Stoner, Campaign Crossroads: Presidential Politics in Indiana from Lincoln to Obama (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017), 352–56. Reporters often raised the Klan issue of the 1920s in covering the Wallace campaign. Vidette-Messenger of Porter County, April 1, 1965; Terre Haute Tribune, April 23, 1964. 17. Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics,” Journal of Southern History 62, no. 1 (February 1996): 3–26; Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 209–12; Margaret M. Conway, “The White Backlash Re-examined: Wallace and the 1964 Primaries,” Social Science Quarterly 49, no. 3 (December 1968): 710–19. 18. See Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 19. James M. O’Toole, The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 193–98; New York Times, November 16, 2018. 20. William M. Chaney, interview with Randall Jehs, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, June 6, 1971, 1. 21. New York Times, August 22, 1965. See also New York Times, August 1, 1965. FBI surveillance focused on the potential for racial violence from African Americans. See “Indianapolis, [Indiana]—157-1-v.8 [Classification—Civil Unrest]—Possible Racial Violence in Major Urban Areas, National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),” Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1896–2008, Record Group 65, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. The detailed reporting and anxiety about race in these documents is notable. 22. Vidette Messenger of Porter County, January 9, 1967. 23. Vidette Messenger of Porter County, July 22, 1967. See also Indianapolis News, June 7, 1967. 24. Chaney, interview with Jehs, 7. See also Terre Haute Tribune, August 4, 1967; Kokomo Morning Times, August 10, 1967; Vidette Messenger of Porter County, July 22, August 12, 1967.

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25. Kokomo Morning Times, October 16, 17, 1967. See also Jasper Herald, October 16, 1967. 26. Indianapolis Star, April 29, 1973. See also Chaney, interview with Jehs, 3. 27. Indianapolis Jewish Post, August 16, 1974. 28. Chaney, interview with Jehs, 22. 29. Kokomo Tribune, June 5, 1978; Evansville Courier and Press, June 4, 1978; William Chaney Newsletter, May 21, 1978, box 1, folder 14, William M. Chaney, Assorted Materials, 1977–1978, United Klans of America Collection, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, East Lansing (hereafter cited as Chaney Papers). Chaney advised members that mace was legal in Kentucky, but Klansmen should keep other weapons hidden under their robes. In an interview recorded in the mid-1970s, Chaney presented himself as a measured historian of the Klan and America as he spouted racist and antisemitic nonsense. William Chaney interview, n.d., Archives of African American Music and Culture, Indiana University, https:// media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/5425kf15k. Additional newsletters, broadsides, and miscellaneous items from Chaney are in the United Klans of America Collection, L208, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, https://archives.isl.lib.in.us /repositories/2/resources/318. 30. Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1972. Wallace claimed to be embarrassed. 31. Chaney, interview with Jehs, 22–23, 27. See also Lee Sigelman, “Two Intrepid Young Political Scientists Meet the Klan: A Reminiscence,” Monkey Cage, June 3, 2009, http://themonkeycage.org/2009/06/post_208/. 32. Chaney Newsletter, July 17, April 22, 1977, box 1, folder 13, Chaney Papers. See also Chaney Newsletter, April 11, 1974, box 1, folder 12, Chaney Papers. 33. Mary Ann Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 130–31; Indiana University Archives Exhibits, “1968 Black Market Fire, Part 1,” http://collections.libraries .indiana.edu/iubarchives/exhibits/show/studentdemonstrationsatiu/1968 blackmarketfirepart1; Bloomington Herald-Times, July 19, 2013; Indianapolis News, September 18, August 22, 1969. 34. New York Times, August 25, 1974; Jasper Herald, June 4, 1976; Kokomo Tribune, March 3, 1979. 35. Shirley Staggs to Chaney, November 23, 1977, box 1, folder 40, Chaney Papers. Chaney protested and demanded a trial before the church. Chaney to Pastor and General Membership, Five Points Baptist Church, November 28, 1977, Chaney Papers. See also Jasper Herald, December 1, 1977. 36. Franklin Daily Journal, December 19, 1994. 37. Anderson Herald, October 1, 1970; Rushville Republican, October 10, 1972. 38. Indianapolis Star, April 29, 1973. 39. Indianapolis Jewish Post, August 12, 1977. 40. Indianapolis Star, April 29, 1973. 41. The documentary Klan was produced for WTHR in 1982. Documentation is in the Tom Cochran Collection, Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis. 42. Indianapolis Jewish Post, August 16, 1974; Anderson Herald, July 29, 1975. 43. Munster Times, November 9, 1989.

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44. Indianapolis Star, October 17, 1993. A few months later, officials improved plans to protect Klansmen and minimize violence at a similar Klan rally at the statehouse. Indianapolis Star, April 3, 1994. 45. Indianapolis Star, December 27, 1995; Evansville Courier, October 18, 1998; South Bend Tribune, November 12, 2000; Gary Post-Tribune, March 11, 2001. See also Greenfield Daily Reporter, June 14, 1996; South Bend Tribune, May 7, 2000. 46. Indianapolis News, January 2, 1999. 47. Muncie Star Press, August 27, 1998; Munster Times, April 6, 2001. 48. Indianapolis Star, March 29, 1998. 49. Indianapolis Star, December 27, 1995. See also Indianapolis Star, March 29, 1998. 50. Klan organizations and leaders were in great flux and competition. See Bloomington Herald-Times, January 1, 2012. 51. Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, June 13, 2013. 52. Muncie Star Press, May 14, 2001. See also Munster Times, April 24, 1999. 53. Deborah Wray, “Imperial Wizard,” Indianapolis Monthly (October 2000): 122–27, 209–18; Worth H. Weller, with Brad Thompson, Under the Hood: Unmasking the Modern Ku Klux Klan (North Manchester, IN: DeWitt Books, 1998); New York Times, October 23, 1999; Indianapolis Star, March 29, 1998; South Bend Tribune, November 12, 2000. 54. Kokomo Tribune, July 14, 1996. 55. South Bend Tribune, May 26, 1998. 8. Th e K l a n Is De a d 1. Munster Times, August 3, 2014; Muncie Star Press, October 2, 2016. 2. For example, the long account of Stephenson and Madge Oberholtzer in Indianapolis Star, November 18, 2018. 3. Among many efforts to explain current politics and race is Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019). 4. Tanisha C. Ford, “Traveling While Black,” Belt Magazine, June 19, 2019, https://beltmag.com/traveling-black-indiana/. 5. Mark Singer, “Who Killed Carol Jenkins?” New Yorker, January 7, 2002, 24. See also New York Times, May 17, 2002. For a somewhat different assessment of sundown towns, see James W. Lowen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: New Press, 2005). Lowen’s account of Martinsville is on pages 327–30. 6. Sports Illustrated, February 23, 1998; ESPN Magazine, July 10, 2012, http:// www.espn.com/espn/magazine/archives/news/story?page=magazine-19980406 -article28. 7. Singer, “Who Killed Carol Jenkins?” 28. 8. Indianapolis Star, November 2, 2017; Bloomington Herald-Times, January 15, 2012; https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/tv-shows/injustice-files/videos /sundown-towns-the-martinsville-experiment; Sandra Chapman, The Girl in the

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Yellow Scarf: One of Indianapolis’s Most Notorious Cold Case Murders Solved (Indianapolis: Prince Media Group, 2011). The arrested suspect was from Indianapolis, not Martinsville, and died before a trial. For another controversial incident, see Indiana Daily Student, April 30, 2019. 9. Indianapolis Star, March 4, 2008. See also Indianapolis Star, July 15, 2008, December 3, 2012. Conservative critics of what they label “political correctness” attacked the university. See, for example, Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2008. For more extreme analysis, see Political Correctness Watch, July 31, 2008, http://johnjayray .com/pcwjul08.html. The book was Todd Tucker, Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004). For Tucker’s later thoughts, see the preface to second edition of his book, Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). 10. Nanette Esseck Brewer, “Coping with the Klan: A University’s Response to Thomas Hart Benton’s Indiana Murals,” in Monumental Troubles: Rethinking What Monuments Mean Today, ed. Erika Doss and Cheryl K. Snay (Notre Dame, IN: Midwest Art History Society and the Snite Museum of Art, 2018), 42–55; Kathleen A. Foster, Nanette Esseck Brewer, and Margaret Contompasis, Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 72. An entire issue of the Indiana Magazine of History is devoted to the Benton murals. Indiana Magazine of History 105, no. 2 (June 2009). 11. Indianapolis News, January 30, 1990. 12. Indiana University Bloomington, Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President, “Provost Statement: On the Benton Murals,” September 29, 2017, https://provost.indiana.edu/statements/archive/benton-murals.html. See also Indianapolis Star, January 21, 1975, March 29, 1990, March 9, 26, 2002, August 31, September 30, 2017; Indianapolis News, January 30, 1990; Bloomington HeraldTimes, December 9, 2017. 13. Bloomington Herald-Times, November 30, 2017. 14. New York Times, November 22, 2018. 15. Rushville Republican, March 2, 1923. 16. Richmond Palladium-Item, May 17, 2014. 17. Ben Rhoades, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random House, 2018), 16. 18. Congressman André D. Carson and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. 19. Allen Safianow, “The Challenges of Local Oral History: The Ryan White Project,” Indiana Magazine of History 112, no. 1 (March 2016): 33–54; Allen Safianow, “Ryan White and Kokomo, Indiana: A City Remembers,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 25 (winter 2013): 15–25; Ruth Reichard, “The Challenges of Recent History: Using the Ryan White Project Oral Histories,” Indiana Magazine of History 112, no. 2 (June 2016): 108–15; Nelson Price, The Quiet Hero: A Life of Ryan White (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2015). 20. For contexts, see James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014), 275–338.

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21. New York Times, February 4, 2019. 22. Guardian, November 1, 2018. Some citizens believed Trump would defend their particular Christian traditions. Andrew L. Whitehead, Samuel L. Perry, and Joseph O. Baker, “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Sociology of Religion 79, no. 2 (May 2018): 147–71. 23. Indianapolis Star, October 2, 2016; New York Times, July 28, 2019. For a preliminary comparison of Trump and the Klan, see Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep, The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). One Indiana writer charged, “If Stephenson sounds a bit like Trump, it’s because he was. If his followers sound like people who voted Trump into office, it’s because they probably were.” Susan Neville, “Into the Fire,” Ploughshares Solos 7, no. 6 (2019): 11. More broadly, Rick Perlstein explores long trends of right-wing politics, including the Klan, in “I Thought I Understood the American Right: Trump Proved Me Wrong,” New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2017. 24. New York Times, October 1, 2019. 25. Washington Post, November 25, 2018. See also Indianapolis Star, August 12, 2017; Louisville Courier-Journal, October 2, 2018; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Hate Groups Reach Record High,” February 19, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org /news/2019/02/19/hate-groups-reach-record-high. 26. New Yorker, August 28, 2017. 27. Ryan Lenz of Southern Poverty Law Center, quoted in the Guardian, March 14, 2018. 28. Quotes from Indianapolis Star, August 27, 2017. See also Tony Rehagen, “Matthew Heimbach Has a Dream—A Very Different Dream,” Indianapolis Monthly, April 2017; Eli Saslow, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (New York: Doubleday, 2018), 239, 264–65. For Heimbach’s unfaithfulness and violence toward his wife, see Washington Post, March 14, 2018. 29. Indianapolis Star, July 31, 2018; Michigan City News-Dispatch, October 24, 2019; New York Times, August 18, 2019; Indiana Daily Student, August 5, 2019. 30. Madison, Hoosiers, 322–26; Pew Research Center, “Mainline Protestants Who Are in Indiana,” http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/state /indiana/religious-tradition/mainline-protestant/. 31. Andrea Neal, Pence: The Path to Power (Bloomington, IN: Red Lightning Books, 2018), 188. For explicit connections between Pence and Klan politics, see Theo Anderson, “Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos and the Klan’s Long Shadow,” In These Times, February 15, 2017, http://inthesetimes.com/article/19904/mike-pence-betsy -devos-and-the-klans-long-shadow. 32. Lafayette Courier and Journal, April 3, 2015; Wooster [Ohio] Daily Record, April 8, 2015; Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future (New York: Liveright, 2019), 211; Indianapolis Star, March 31, 2015; Washington Post, March 31, 2015. Attacking RFRA in the Indianapolis alternative newspaper Nuvo, Stephanie Dolan asked, “Did you know that the KKK is a religious organization? What if a member of Indiana’s inauspicious chapter decides

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that a lynching was necessary in the practice of his religion?” Stephanie Dolan, “Are There More Than Bigots in Indiana?” Nuvo, April 1, 2015, https://www.nuvo .net/voices/guestvoices/are-there-more-than-bigots-in-indiana/article_f866668e -044f-50ba-8f1c-6efd28888b0f.html. “People I know who are truly religious, they don’t hate,” said one Indianapolis resident. Quoted in Dan Carpenter, “Civil Rights and Uncivil Wrongs,” Indy Midtown Magazine, March 3, 2016, https://www .indymidtownmagazine.com/civil-rights-and-uncivil-wrongs/. 33. Tom LoBianco, Piety and Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House (New York: William Morrow, 2019), 217. A defeated Pence signed the revised bill without ceremony and snuck out of the statehouse to avoid reporters. See a fuller account in LoBianco, Piety and Power, 207–20. 34. Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President Pence,” New Yorker, October 23, 2017. See also Indianapolis Star, March 26, 2015, March 28, 2018. 35. Indianapolis Star, February 18, 2019. 36. New York Times, February 26, 2019; Indianapolis Star, February 25, March 1, 2019. 37. Indiana Historical Society, “Indiana LGBT Collecting Initiative,” https:// indianahistory.org/stories/indiana-lgbt-collecting-initiative/.

TIME LINE

First Klan is formed in the South, 1865 Indiana Anti-Saloon League is formed, 1895 Eugene V. Debs is sentenced to jail for wartime sedition, 1918 The Great War ends, November 1918 Labor strikes take place in industrial cities, 1919 Eighteenth Amendment prohibits alcohol, 1919 Nineteenth Amendment enfranchises women, 1920 Attempted Klan rally fails in Indianapolis, March 1922 First Indiana Klan Klavern is chartered in Evansville, May 15, 1922 Indianapolis Fiery Cross begins publication, July 1922 Klan activity surges, Christmas season 1922 Tolerance publishes Klan membership lists, April 1923 At the Konklave in Kokomo, D. C. Stephenson is proclaimed Grand Dragon, July 4, 1923 Women of the Ku Klux Klan first meet, July 1923 Indiana Bar Association condemns the Klan, July 1923

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Grand Dragon Stephenson explains the dangers of immigration, September 1923 Daisy Douglas Barr headlines a Klan rally in Marion, Labor Day 1923 Klan film, The Traitor Within, is shown at the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis, March 1924 Klan basketball tournament is held in Elwood, April 1924 Governor Warren McCray is sentenced to federal penitentiary, April 1924 Edward Jackson and other Klan candidates win primary elections, May 1924 Notre Dame student “riot” against the Klan, May 1924 Democratic Party refuses to condemn the Klan by name, May 1924 National Immigration Restriction Act passes, May 1924 Catholic Information Bureau is formed to oppose the Klan, summer 1924 Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People create a state NAACP, October 1924 African American voters reject the Republican Party, November 1924 Republican-Klan candidates win a landslide election victory, November 1924 D. C. Stephenson is celebrated at Governor Jackson’s inauguration, January 1925 Klan legislature passes the Wright Bone Dry Bill, early 1925 Madge Oberholtzer dies, and D. C. Stephenson is arrested, April 1925 Stephenson’s trial begins in Noblesville, October 1925 Stephenson is found guilty, November 1925 Republican-Klan candidates are victorious in local elections, November 1925

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Vincennes editor Thomas H. Adams begins investigation of Klan corruption, spring 1926 Stephenson’s black boxes are opened, July 1927 Governor Jackson is charged with bribery, September 1927 Federal investigations of the Indiana Klan take place, early 1928 Indianapolis Times wins Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Klan, 1928 Republican election victories take place, November 1928 Democratic local election victories take place, November 1929 Two African American teenagers are lynched in Marion, August 1930 Indiana’s antihate bill is passed, 1947 D. C. Stephenson is released from prison, 1956 Indiana Civil Rights Law is passed, 1963 George Wallace enters the Indiana primary, 1964 William Chaney leads a Klan motorcade through Indiana, October 1967 Carol Jenkins is murdered, 1968 Klansmen firebomb the Black Market in Bloomington, December 1969 Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society museum opens a Klan exhibit, 1980 Klan membership list is found in Noblesville, 1995 Barrack Obama wins in Indiana, 2008 Governor Mike Pence signs the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 2015 Martinsville dedicates a memorial to Carol Jenkins, 2017 Matthew Heimbach helps organize a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017 Indiana University closes a Bloomington classroom with a “Klan” mural, 2017 Indiana passes a moderate antihate bill, 2019

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Learning More about the Ku Klux Klan

The r ichness of pr im a ry sources a nd the expa nsion of high-quality scholarship now makes possible a deeper understanding of the Ku Klux Klan generally, and particularly so for Indiana. Nonetheless, opportunities for others to add to this knowledge remain abundant. New finding aids and digitization ease the challenges of locating relevant sources. The availability of online newspapers is particularly helpful—in fact, almost revolutionary—in enriching primary research. A pioneering digital project, Hoosier State Chronicles, includes the Indianapolis Fiery Cross, an essential record of Klan propaganda and reporting. Other ever-growing and ever-changing digital sites draw explorers of the past away from microfilm. Primary sources provide the foundation for understanding the Klan. The work of several generations of librarians and archivists has resulted in a large collection of documents and images. Many are now available in digital format. Rich collections exist in Indianapolis at the Indiana Historical Society Library, the Indiana State Library, and the Indiana State Archives (Indiana Archives and Records Administration). At Indiana University Bloomington, the Lilly Library contains 233

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relevant collections, especially for the political history of the era. Ball State University, in Muncie, has very good collections, including the digitized photographs of W. A. Swift. Local collections include the Calumet Regional Archives at Indiana University Northwest; Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne; and the William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, Eckhart Public Library, Auburn, which contains the collection gathered by John Martin Smith. Beyond Indiana are the Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, which are rich in evidence of the challenges facing African Americans at state and local levels. The twisted world of more recent Klan life is illustrated in William Chaney’s papers in the United Klans of America Collection, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, East Lansing, as well as Chaney’s Papers at the Indiana State Library and Indiana Historical Society Library. Among the best recent general histories are Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011) and Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017). Pegram offers a very good historiographical overview. Among the many good studies of the Klan in particular locations are Craig Fox, Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011); Nancy K. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Shawn Lay, The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Masatomo Ayabe, “Ku Kluxers in a Coal Mining Community: A Study of the Ku Klux Klan Movement in Williamson County, Illinois, 1923–1926,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 102, no. 1 (spring 2009): 73–100; and Tim Rives, The Ku Klux Klan in Kansas City, Kansas (Chicago: Arcadia, 2019). Studies of specific aspects of the Klan include Tom Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan

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235

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); Jason S. Lantzer, “Prohibition Is Here to Stay”: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 2009); and Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), which includes a chapter on Indianapolis. For Indiana, the pioneering work is Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), which is based on analysis of Klan membership lists. Very important are several articles by Allen Safianow, including “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (September 1999): 203–31; “‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 109–54; and “‘Konklave in Kokomo’ Revisited,” The Historian 50, no. 3 (May 1988): 329–47. Dozens of scholarly articles in the Indiana Magazine of History add to our knowledge, including Peggy Seigel, “A ‘Fearless Editor’ in a Changing World: Fort Wayne’s Jesse Greene,” Indiana Magazine of History 113, no. 4 (December 2017) and Dwight W. Hoover, “Daisy Douglas Barr: From Quaker to Klan ‘Kluckeress’,” Indiana Magazine of History 87, no. 2 (June 1991): 171–95. An essential biography is M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991). Broader contexts for Indiana’s history can be studied in James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014); James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin’s, 2001); and Richard B. Pierce, Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920–1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

INDEX

Note: Photographs and figures are indicated by italicized page numbers followed by f. Adams, Thomas H., 148–49 Ade, George, 146 African Americans: in AUL, 141; bigotry and discrimination against, 93–95, 156, 157f, 182; and the Black experience, 190; in Indiana’s population, 4; Klan attitudes toward, 84; during parade in Kokomo, 164–65f; protesting Wallace, 157f; resistance to Klan, 144–45; as second-class citizens, 151; and sundown towns, 221n12; on television talk show, 168f; threat of violence against, 6, 110, 209n54; and voting in 1924 election, 121. See also equal rights alien threat, 89–92. See also Catholics; immigrants Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society museum, 176 American Civil Liberties Union, 181, 186, 191 American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 186–87

American Legion, 100, 142, 145 Americanness: definition and characteristics of, 1, 2, 31f, 147, 189; laws to enforce, 124; preaching on, 10. See also Americans, 100 percent Americans, 100 percent: as 100 percent Protestant, 15–17; challenge to Klan definition of, 78f, 143; and hate against un-Americans, 194; in hierarchy of population, 14–15; Hoosiers’ self-perception as, 3, 4–5; Klan descendants of, 198; and organizational policies, 84–85. See also African Americans; anti-Catholicism; anti-immigrant crusade; immigrants; Jewish citizens; patriotic displays American Unity League (AUL), 141, 143 Anderson (IN): film showing in, 108; HDTA in, 109; Klan visits to church in, 10; parades in, 38f, 163f; Women’s Klan’s role in firing of teachers in, 88 anti-Catholicism: and film industry, 105; Klan propaganda, 68f; in

237

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I n de x

legislative agenda, 124; in political campaign, 120; portrayed in Benton’s mural, 192; as primary Klan cause, 85–89, 96; violent actions of., 109–10; and whiteness of Catholics, 151 Anti-Defamation League, 184, 195 anti-immigrant crusade: and films, 105; and Indiana’s population, 70–71; Klan nativism and, 89–92, 96; Klan propaganda in, 53f, 71f; and legislation, 6, 7, 91–92; and Prohibition, 99–100 antimask laws, 139–40, 141, 186 Anti-Saloon League, 98, 101, 123, 150, 206n3, 213n60 antisemitism, 92–93, 161f Ashenhurst, J. J., 145 Asher, Court, 130 Ashes of Vengeance (film), 105 AUL. See American Unity League automobiles, moral dangers of, 103 Bailly Branch Library, 70f Bantz family, 72f Baptists, 16, 144 Barr, Daisy Douglas: on foreigners, 90–91, 193; photograph of, 52f; popularity of, 4; public career of, 21–22; on where to shop, 88 basketball: at Indiana University, 156f, 178–79; as Klan social activity, 13; racism in Martinsville, 190–91; segregation in, 178 Bedford (IN), 9 Bella Donna (film), 105 Benton, Thomas Hart: Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press (mural), 172f, 191–93 Berghoff Brewery, 72 Berry, Jeffery L. (Grand Dragon), 186–87 bigotry, respectability of, 2 Black Market (Bloomington), 162f, 183–84

Bloomington (IN): cross burning in, 9; firebombed market in, 162f; on Indiana’s emancipation from hate, 175; Klan broadcasts from, 107; mural in, 172f; segregation in, 94, 178; white supremacists at farmers’ market, 195–96. See also Indiana University blue laws, 108 Bone Dry Bill, 213n59 bootleggers and illegal alcohol industry, 99, 100–101 Bossert, Walter F. (Grand Dragon), 125 Bowers, Claude, 147, 219n33 Branch, Emmett Forrest, 114 Branigan, Roger, 181 Brethren, 16 Brookston (IN), anti-Catholicism in, 88 Brown County, photograph of, 28f Bush, Edgar D., 92 Buttigieg, Pete, 197 Cadle Tabernacle, 65f, 108, 117, 211n25 Calumet region and alcohol, 100 Carmel (IN), 10, 190 Catholic parochial schools, 69f, 86 Catholics: in Indiana, 4; as most dangerous Klan enemy, 84, 85–89, 95–96; move to mainstream, 180; position in 1924 election, 119, 120; resistance to Klan, 140–41, 142; whiteness of, 151. See also anti-Catholicism; Indiana Catholic and Record Catton, Bruce, 150 Cavalier Motion Picture Company, 65, 107–8 Central Labor Union, 145 Chalmers Methodist Church, Klan gift to, 10 Chaney, William (Grand Dragon): arrest and conviction of, 184; background of, 180; barefaced bigotry of, 182–83; motorcade through Indiana, 181–82; as organizer, 183; postcard from, 160f; removal from Baptist

I n de x church membership, 223n35; violence of, 183–84, 223n29 Charlottesville (VA): calls for removal of Benton mural, 192; white nationalist rally in, 173f, 194–95 Christian Ministers Association, 144 churches: Klan contributions to, 35; Klan visits to, 10 civil rights acts, 113, 179 civil rights movement, 158–59f, 177–78 Clark, George Rogers, 153 Claypool Hotel, 100, 123 Clinton (IN), intimidation in, 110 Cobb, Irvin, 3, 4 Columbia City (IN), 10 Columbus (IN), 16 communism, 181, 182 Cox, Charles, 133 Craig, George, 137 Crispus Attucks High School, 104, 178 cross burnings: in 1960s, 181; enduring power of, 192; first sights of, 9, 10, 12; photographs of, 29f, 37f; in political campaigns, 118; to protest Smith’s candidacy, 150; as purification and intimidation, 16, 111; on sheet music and record labels, 53f, 60f Daily Reporter (Greenfield), film advertisement in, 66f Dale, George, 21, 80f, 148, 151 Daviess County, funeral rites in, 58f Davis, Elmer, 4, 85 Davis, Jefferson, 182 Davison, Frank E., 145 Dearborn Independent, 93 Dearth, Clarence W., 80, 148 Debs, Eugene V., 115 DeKalb County, 102, 186 Democrats: in 1928 election, 150–51; Catholic and Jewish loyalty to, 120; on Klan, 211n33; Klan as challenge for, 118–19, 149; membership in Klan, 27; and segregationists in power,

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219n33; vision of government, 113. See also Ralston, Samuel M. DeRee, Alvia O.: “The Bright Fiery Cross,” 61f Dillinger, John, 101 Disciples of Christ, 16, 144 Dreiser, Theodore, 146 Dubois County, 100 Durgan, George R., 119 Duvall, John L., 88–89, 115, 135 Edwards, Jack, 207n9 Eighteenth Amendment (1919), 99, 101 electoral campaign of 1924: Catholic, African American, and Jewish voters in, 120–21; chaos of, 116–17; Democratic challenge in, 118–19; Klan political machine, 115–16, 211n23; Klan-Republican victories in, 121–22; national conventions for, 211n40; Republican primary in, 117–18 Eli Lilly and Company, 84–85 Elkhart (IN), Klan gathering in, 185–86 Elks, 93 Elwood (IN), Klan gatherings in, 13, 139 Emison (IN), 108 Emmons, Hugh (Pat), 95 Episcopal Church, 144 equal rights: for African Americans, 94–95, 144; civil rights acts, 113, 179; civil rights movement, 158–59f, 177– 78; voices for, 193–94; for women, 20 eugenics movement, 90, 204n28 evangelical Christians, 196 Evans, Hiram (Imperial Wizard), 92, 125, 214n4 Evansville (IN): and alcohol, 99, 100; all-black basketball team of, 178; antiCatholicism in, 86; Democratic victory in, 151; intimidation in, 110; Klan organizing in, 200n1; labor workers in, 91, 145; political affiliations in, 121, 212n50, 218n27; segregated schools in, 94; and Stephenson’s Klan career, 128

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FBI, 181, 183, 184, 185, 222n21 Feightner, Harold, 134, 149, 152 Feuerlicht, Morris M., 79f, 143 film and television: attraction and dangers of Hollywood, 104–5; Flaming Youth, 67f; Injustice Files, 191; Klansmen on talk show, 168f; The Toll of Justice, 66f, 107–8; The Traitor Within, 65f, 107–8 Fink, Joseph, 143 First Christian Church (Noblesville), 17, 152 Five Points Baptist Church, 184 Foohey, William, 76f Ford, Henry, 93 Ford, Tanisha, 190 Fort Wayne (IN): 1924 election results from, 122; and alcohol, 99, 100–101; cross burnings in, 9; Klan events and meetings in, 141, 148; opposition to the Klan in, 6–7, 120, 143, 145, 147; photograph in, 49f; in The Traitor Within, 65, 108 Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 120 Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 147 Foulke, William Dudley, 139, 216n3 Frankfort (IN), 10 Franklin Evening Star, 11 fraternal and social organizations, proliferation of, 13 Freeman, 144 free speech and assembly, rights of, 185 French Lick (IN), intimidation in, 9, 110 funeral rites, 55–59f Garrett, Bill, 156f, 178–79 Gary (IN): all-black basketball team of, 178; demonstration in, 186; ethnic population of, 70f; funeral in, 55f; labor strikes in, 91; NAACP activity in, 121, 144; National Black Political Convention in, 177; segregation in, 94, 144, 178 Gates, Ralph, 177 gay pride button, 171f. See also LGBTQ equality

Gebhart, H. R., 17 Gennett Records, 60f, 61, 107 Gentry, Earl, 131, 133 German Americans, 89, 91, 99, 100 Gilliom, Arthur L., 150 Gooding, Charles W., 133 Gordon, Linda, 199n1, 208n47 “Grand Pageant of Protestantism,” 19 Great Depression, 7, 151 Great War: domestic effects on tolerance, 2; and suspicion of foreigners, 89, 91, 98 Green, Jesse, 147 Greencastle (IN), film showing in, 104–5 Greencastle Herald, 147 Greenfield (IN): film showing in, 66; Klan membership drive in, 181; white supremacists in, 185 Greensburg (IN), cross burning in, 138 Gurley, Boyd, 149 Hamilton, Lee, 193 Hamilton County: evidence discovered in, 132, 214n11; Klan activities in, 92, 108; Nazi graffiti in, 195; women’s activities in, 19. See also Noblesville Hamilton County Historical Society, 176, 221n6 Hammond (IN): Klan music publishing in, 208n36; public lecture series on tolerance in, 143; warnings about jazz in, 103. See also Oberholtzer, Madge Harding, Warren, 119 Hartford City (IN): alcohol in, 72f; challenges to the Klan in, 139; Women’s Klan in, 51f Hatcher, Richard, 177 hate, culture of, 7, 95, 120, 146, 186, 194, 196, 197. See also Chaney; Charlottesville; Indiana; Indiana General Assembly; racism; white supremacists and white supremacy HDTA. See Horse Thief Detective Association Heimbach, Matthew, 173f, 195

I n de x Henry, J. F., 110 Herschell, William, 146; “Ain’t God Good to Indiana?,” 3, 122 Hill, James W., 120, 211n45 Hohenberger, Frank M., photographs of Indiana, 28–29f Homeland Security, Department of, 194 Hoosiers (film), 178 Hoover, J. Edgar, 183 Horse Thief Detective Association (HTDA), 102, 109, 116 Howey, Brian, 196 Huntington Herald on sales of Fiery Cross, 11 immigrants: as Klan targets, 69f; resistance to Klan, 142; as threat, 89–92, 151 inclusion, voices of, 7 Independent Klan of America, 125–26 Indiana: arrival of Klan in, 9–14, 27, 200n1; avoidance of Klan history, 176, 220n3; board of education resolution, 91; bucolic image and people’s values in, 3–4, 28f, 111, 197, 199n1, 227n32; changing ideas of Americanness in, 193–97; demographic characteristics of, 4, 200n7; equal rights and justice in, 193–94; hate crimes bill, 197; Klan membership patterns in, 17–22; as Klan state, 153; law enforcement in, 101; map of, 27f; overview of Klan in, 4–8; political culture of, 112–15; prosecution of political corruption in, 132–36; statehood centennial celebration themes, 206n1. See also Democrats; Indiana General Assembly; public education; Republicans; specific towns and counties Indiana Bar Association, 146 Indiana Catholic and Record: on black voters, 121; on Bone Dry Law, 123; on Klan’s heyday in Indiana, 152; opposition to Klan from, 140–41; on political parties, 120; on political strategy, 119

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Indiana Dunes State Park, 195 Indiana General Assembly: antihate law and school segregation, 177; characteristics of 1925 legislature, 122–23; legislative activity of, 113; and Prohibition, 100, 123; silence on Klan in 1927, 149–50. See also Klan legislature Indiana High School Athletic Association, 191 Indiana Historical Bureau, 221n5 Indiana Historical Society, 197, 221n6 Indiana Jewish Chronicle: opposition to Klan by, 143; support for Democrats by, 120 Indianapolis (IN): and alcohol, 71f, 100; all-black basketball team of, 178; anti-Catholicism in, 88; antimask laws in, 139; gay pride celebration in, 171f; investigation of social clubs in, 103; Klan music publishing in, 208n36; Klan protests in, 177; Klan service to others in, 10; NAACP activity in, 144; nightlife of African American neighborhoods, 104–5; opposition to Klan in, 143–44, 145; parades in, 44f; possible lynching in, 209n57; segregated schools in, 104; Stephenson’s office in, 129; success of Klan candidates in, 138; theft of Klan’s membership lists in, 141. See also Cadle Tabernacle Indianapolis 500, 108–9 Indianapolis Cathedral High School, 88 Indianapolis Fiery Cross: advertisements and announcements in, 47f, 65f; on Ancient Order of Hibernians meeting, 91; anti-Catholicism of, 86, 87, 120, 124; on antimask laws, 140; on bar association condemnation of, 146; editorial cartoon in, 71f; on election results, 122; on films, 104; on immigration, 92; on Klan service to others, 10; lumping of all enemies by, 95; on mainstream press, 147; on nightlife, 104; on Notre

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I n de x

Dame riot, 142; on outrages against Klan members, 96; on Prohibition raids, 100–101; publication of lists of businesses to boycott, 88; reports of cross burnings in, 9; sales of, 11, 143; Stephenson’s role in, 129; on Tolerance, 142; on violators of Prohibition, 99–100; on women and womanhood, 20–21, 202n31 Indianapolis Freeman on Klan in politics, 120 Indianapolis Jewish Post on power of Klan, 184 Indianapolis News: criticism of the Klan by, 147; on Jackson-Shank political contest, 117; on the Klan in politics, 119; on reaction to investigation of Jackson, 135; on Stephenson, 134; on Stephenson’s trial, 149; on women’s wicked behavior, 102 Indianapolis Star: on Jackson, 135; on Klan’s revival, 177; on the 1960s Klan, 184; on Pence’s support of RFRA, 197; reporter’s comments on seeing hate, 186; on Stephenson, 149, 215n32 Indianapolis Times, 147, 149, 220n5 Indiana State Fair, 14 Indiana University: Benton’s mural at, 191–92; black basketball players at, 178–79; recruitment at, 14 Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, 191, 225n9 initiation ceremonies (“naturalizations”), 11, 36–37f Injustice Files (TV program), 191 intermarriage, 94 Interurban Terminal (Fort Wayne), 49f intimidation tactics of Klan, 6, 30f, 110. See also marketing and communication techniques; violence; white robes and hood Irish Americans, 91, 99, 141 Irvington (IN): cross burnings in, 9; Stephenson’s house in, 129, 131; young girls in, 82f. See also Oberholtzer, Madge

Italian Americans, 92 IUPUI. See Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis Jackson, Edward: ad denouncing, 141; attempted bribery by, 132; commemoration of Abe Lincoln, 152; indictment and trial of, 135–36; investigation and trial of, 135; in 1924 election campaign, 117–18, 120, 122, 135; photograph of, 73f; political descendants of, 198; Stephenson’s support for, 211n21; as worst governor, 114–15 Jackson, Helen: Convent Cruelties, 87; muzzling of, 139; rebuttal of lies told by, 141 jazz music, immorality of, 103–4, 105 Jeffersonville (IN): antimask laws in, 139; cross burning in, 181 Jenkins, Carol, 189–90, 191, 225n8 Jennings, John, 86 Jewish citizens: in AUL, 141; Chaney diatribes against, 182; cooperation with Catholics, 143; in Indiana, 4; and Jewish businesses, 93, 105; Klan prejudice toward, 84, 88; otherness of, 151; position in 1924 election, 120; resistance to Klan, 143–44; as threat, 92–93, 95 Jewish Welfare Association, 144 Jim Crow segregation, 94, 177–78 John Birch Society, 179 Johnson, Jack, 94 Johnson County, opposition to Klan in, 181 Johnson-Reed Act, 91–92 Journal-Gazette, 147 Junior Klan, 13, 108, 202n31 Junior Klan Band (Evansville), 106 Kenney, Herbert, 124 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 181 Kingsbury, John, 131, 132 Klan jewelry, advertisement for, 64f Klan legislature (1925): demographic characteristics of, 122–23; divisions

I n de x within the Klan in, 124–26, 213n65; education agenda of, 124; legislative record of, 124, 126; and Wright Bone Dry Law, 123 The Klan Management, 63f, 90 Klan manual, 63f, 90, 106, 111 Klan music: as 100 percent American, 106; “The Bright Fiery Cross,” 61f, 107; “Come Join the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 62f; “Midnight’s Roll Call,” 60f, 106; 100% Red Hot Songs, 107; publishers of, 61, 107, 208n36. See also marching bands Klan revival of the late twentieth century: overview of, 1; differences with 1920s Klan, 175–76, 183; emergence of, 7, 179–80; enemies of, 180, 182; leadership of, 160f, 186–87, 224n50; and lesbians and gays, 171; as lost cause, 184–85; newspaper coverage of, 184–85; protests of, 174f, 184–85; white power in the 1990s, 185–88. See also opposition to Klan; parades; racism; violence Klanwatch, 187 Klaverns: establishment and functioning of, 12–13; loyalty to, 3 Klinck, Earl, 131, 133 Knights of Columbus, protest by, 140 Knox (IN), 35f Knox County Republican Committee, 148 Kokomo (IN): anti-alien rhetoric in, 91; anti-Catholicism in, 86; barbecue for black voters in, 120; basketball team from, 13; bigotry in, 175; continued rallies in, 151; First Christian Church opposition to Klan in, 145; induction of Stephenson as Grand Dragon, 129; Klan “Konclave” in, 12, 21, 45f, 175, 182; parade in, 163f, 165; police and media attention to Klan in, 166–67f; rally and demonstration in 1996 in, 187; segregated schools in, 94; story on racial mixing in, 94; violence against Klan in, 184

243

Ku Klux Kiddies, 42–43f, 202n31 Ku Klux Klan: acknowledgement of damage from, 8; legacies of, 197–98; local and regional differences within, 3, 199n4; march on Washington, DC (1925), 2–3, 25f; requirements of national organization, 13–14; target issues and reach of, 2; three movements of, 1; tripartite identity of, 5, 15, 17, 199n1; in the twenty-first century, 189. See also Americans, 100 percent; Klan revival of the late twentieth century; Ku Klux Klan in Indiana; white supremacists Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (1920s): alternative Klan leader of Indiana, 211n26; application for membership, 33f; continued activity after 1930, 149–53; demise of, 127, 135–36, 150–53, 216n5; federal investigation of, 135–36; fund-raising success of, 21, 108, 116 (see also white robes and hood); in Indiana’s political culture, 112–15, 138; internal divisions in, 7, 81; intimidation tactics of, 6; membership of, 4–5, 14, 128, 141–42, 176, 200n13, 221n6; members’ self-view as moral patriots, 4–5; most dangerous enemies of, 5; political action of, 7 (see also Jackson, Edward); relationship with national organization, 13–14; service to others, 10, 95; social activities of, 13 (see also basketball); study of, 3, 7–8, 198. See also Americans, 100 percent; Chaney, William; cross burnings; electoral campaign of 1924; Indianapolis Fiery Cross; Klan legislature; Klan revival of the late twentieth century; marketing and communication techniques; moral decline; opposition to Klan; parades; Prohibition; Protestantism; public education; racism; Stephenson, D. C.; violence; white robes and hood; women; individual towns and counties

244

I n de x

labor unions’ opposition to Klan, 145, 218n27 Lafayette (IN): antimask laws in, 139; funeral rites in, 57f; opposition to Klan in, 119 law enforcement: for 1990s Klan rallies, 185–86, 224n44; Klan’s role in, 101–2 lawyers and the Klan, 145–46 lesbian/gay pride button, 171f. See also LGBTQ equality Letterman, David, 197 LGBTQ equality, 197 libraries as dangers, 106 Logansport (IN): antimask laws in, 139; film showing in, 66, 105; WKKK vigilance in, 20 Lowe, Charles F., 116 Luther, Martin, 85 Lutholtz, William, 130 lynchings, 5–6, 111, 178, 209n57 Lynd, Robert and Helen: Middletown, 106, 151, 202n34 Madison (IN), protesters of the Klan in, 174f marching bands, 106 Marion (IN): Barr in, 21; crime in, 207n9; initiation ceremonies in, 11, 37f; Klan event in 1995, 185; lynchings in, 111, 209n57; white resistance to racial equality in, 178 Marion County: attempted bribery in, 132, 135; Klan members in, 75f; Klan supporters in, 117; women’s activities in, 19 marketing and communication techniques, 107–9, 111. See also film and television; Klan music marketing materials: brochures and pamphlets, 31–32f; recruitment flyer, 161f; recruitment materials, 169–70f Martin, John Bartlow, 200n13 Martinsville (IN), racism and stabbing in, 189–91, 225n8

Masons, 4, 13, 55f, 93, 142 Maurer, Mickey, 197 McCracken, Branch, 179 McCray, Warren: appointment of Barr, 21; attempted bribery of, 117, 132; conviction and resignation of, 114–15, 119; governmental vision of, 113; photograph of, 73f; and sports on Memorial Day, 108–9; testimony at Stephenson’s trial, 135, 210n8 McCulloch, Carleton B., 119, 120 McNutt, Paul V., 145 media coverage of hate, 186 Mellett, Lowell, 95, 146, 147–48 Methodists: resolution on Jim-Crowism, 218n23; response to Klan, 16, 144, 197; on Roaring Twenties, 102; and temperance, 98 Metz, Roy: “We Are the Ladies of the Ku Klux Klan,” 54f Mexican Americans, 92 Michigan City (IN), removal of police chief in, 139 Miller, Mildred, 10 ministers, relationship with Klan, 15, 17, 118, 141, 144, 145, 152 Mishawaka (IN): immigrants in, 69f; Prohibition raid in, 100–101 Monroe County: arrest of Chaney in, 184; marketing materials in, 170f; rallies in, 118, 171f Moore, Aubrey H., 4, 17, 152 Moore, Leonard J.: Citizen Klansmen, 17–18 Mooresville (IN): cross burnings in, 9; Dillinger robbery in, 101; Klan events in and near, 19, 21; WKKK picnic near, 19 moral decline: as cornerstone of Klan message, 96; Klan crusade against, 97; Stephenson as exemplar of, 129–30; techniques to fight, 107–9. See also Prohibition; Roaring Twenties; sin and fun; women

I n de x Morrison, Minnie: Awful Revelations of Life in Convent of Good Shepherd, 87 Motion Picture Magazine, 104 Muncie (IN): anti-Catholicism in, 85–86; antisemitism in, 93; Campbell Hall gathering in, 81f; change in mid1930s in, 151; intimidation in, 110, 143; Klan band from, 10, 40f, 106; music publishing in, 107; NAACP activity in, 121, 144; parades in, 39f; revival of Klan in, 158–59f; study of residents of, 106, 151, 202. See also Asher, Court; Dale, George; Independent Klan of America Muncie Post-Democrat: criticism of the Klan in, 147, 148; editor of, 80f; on Klan film showing, 108 municipal elections of 1929, 150–51 myth making about Klan history, 5, 7–8, 128, 152, 189, 216n5 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nail, Dennis, 191 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): challenges to Klan, 78, 115, 121, 144; challenges to segregation, 178; formation of branches in Indiana, 95; revitalization of, 176–77 National Black Political Convention, 177 National Council of Churches, 182 nativism, 89–92 Nazi reminders, 185, 195 Neal, Andrea, 196 Negri, Pola, 105 Nejdl, James J., 89, 125 Newbern (IN), cross burnings in, 12 New Castle (IN), 41f; Klanswomen in, 50f; parades in, 42–43f New Yorker: on Martinsville, 190; on Trump, 195 New York Times: on civic awakening in Indiana, 152–53; on continuing

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support of Klan-supported officials, 139; on Klan in Indiana, 138; on Klan’s political machine, 116; on Klaverns in Indiana, 12–13; on opposition silence in Indiana, 150; on white nationalists and census projections, 193 Nicholson, Meredith, 112, 133, 135, 139, 146, 148, 209n1 1960s, context of, 177–80 Nixon, Richard, 180 Noblesville (IN): American Theater in, 108; Catholics and anti-Catholicism in, 86, 87; cross burnings in, 9; denunciation of Jackson in, 141; discovery of Klan membership lists in, 176, 221n6; parades in, 10; Stephenson’s trial in, 132–37. See also First Christian Church; Moore, Aubrey H. Noblesville Ledger’s criticism of Adams, 148 Noblesville Ministerial Association, 152 North Judson (IN), violence in, 109–10 Notre Dame riot, 76–77, 142, 191 Obama, Barack, 193, 194 Oberholtzer, Madge: death of, 83f, 130–32, 133, 134; photograph of, 82f; relationship with Stephenson, 122, 131 O’Donnell, Patrick, 141 “The Old Rugged Cross,” 61 O’Mahony, Joseph Patrick, 140–41 100% Publishing Company, 62 “Onward Christian Soldiers,” 10, 11 opposition to Klan: overview of, 6–7; to 100 percent American concept, 78f; and contradictions in Klan beliefs, 15; to Daisy Douglas Barr, 21; early, sporadic challenges, 139–40; initial chill in Indiana, 14; and Klan’s demise, 127; from Klan’s enemies, 140–44; mainstream challenges, 144–46; in 1960s, 181; from newspapers, 146–49; political opposition, 149–51; silence of opponents, 138–39;

246

I n de x

student protests, 76f, 142; today compared to 1920s, 198; in Tolerance, 74–75f. see also African Americans; Catholics; Jewish citizens; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Paoli (IN), 195 parades: all-girl parades, 41f; in Anderson, 38f, 163f; to celebrate political victory, 117; children in, 42–43f; in Elwood, 139; in Indianapolis, 115; in Kokomo, 12, 163f; as mainstay event, 111; motorcade of 1960s Klan, 181–82; in Muncie, 39f; in Noblesville, 10; in political campaigns, 118; route diagram for, 44f; support for public education in, 87; in Washington, DC, 24–25f; WKKK parade, 19 party conventions, 118–19 patriotic displays, 11, 37–38f, 37f Pegram, Thomas, 5, 109 Pence, Mike, 196, 197, 227n33 personal lives, government regulation of, 113 pluralism and inclusiveness, 6, 7, 14 politicians: criminal behavior and corruption of, 73, 114–15; and Prohibition, 100. See also Indiana General Assembly; Jackson, Edward; McCray, Warren; Obama, Barack; Pence, Mike; Ralston, Samuel M.; Trump, Donald; Wallace, George Porter County Fairgrounds, rally at, 48f Portland (IN): antimask laws in, 139; parades in, 10 prejudice and discrimination, 156; legalization of, 196 Presbyterians, 16 PRIDE: People Respecting Individuality and Diversity in Everyone, 191 progressive programs, 7, 106 Prohibition: and Bone Dry Law, 123–24; and culture of Indiana Klan, 98–100; drinking during, 100, 123, 206n5;

effect of Great Depression and FDR, 151; end of, 213n59, 213n60; enforcement of, 6, 101–2; and immigrants, 72, 100–101; Klanswomen in fight for, 20; in political campaigns, 114; raids on bootleggers, 71f, 100–101 Protestant Committee of One Hundred, 145 Protestantism: and anti-Catholic sentiment, 85; as characteristic of the United States, 15; in Indiana, 4, 34, 34–35f; liberal traditions in, 15; unity in, 17; white robes and, 15–16. See also Americans, 100 percent; anti-Catholicism; individual denominations Protestants: condemnation of Wallace, 179; continued strength of, 151–52; opposition to Klan from, 144–45 public education: and Americanism, 91; anti-Catholicism regarding, 86–87, 88; Bible readings in, 108; celebrations of, 42–43f; and integration, 182; Klan legislature’s agenda for, 124; segregation of, 177, 178 Pulitzer Prize winner, 149, 220n5 Quakers, 16 quota systems, 91–92, 93 racial equality: legislation for, 179; movement for, 1, 177–78 racism: of 1920s Klan, 93–95; of 1960s Klan, 163f, 175; of 1990s Klan, 187; attacks on segregation, 176–77; against Obama, 194; in recruitment, 161f; scientific, 90; and Wallace, 179–80. See also white privilege; white supremacists and white supremacy radio, use of, 107 rallies, 48f, 95, 111, 115, 151, 173f, 185–87, 194–95 Ralston, Samuel M., 114, 118, 210n7, 211n33 Recorder, 144

I n de x Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), 196–97, 226n32 Remy, Will, 132, 134 Republican Editorial Association, 148 Republicanism, 113–14, 121, 148 Republicans: Barr as head of Party in Indiana, 21; factionalism among, 210n5; parade to celebrate primary victory, 44f; relationship with Klan, 117, 118, 135, 136 RFRA. See Religious Freedom Restoration Act Rhinehart Brothers, 107 Richmond (IN): Klan headquarters in, 11–12; membership patterns in, 18; music publishers in, 60, 107; parades in, 10–11 Roaring Twenties, 97–98, 102. See also moral decline; Prohibition; sin and fun Robbins, Bess, 143 Robinson, Arthur, 136 Rosenwald, Julius, 93 Rotary Club, 18, 91 Rowbottom, Harry, 121–22 Rushville (IN): Barr in, 90; Klanswomen activity in, 138 Saturday Evening Post on antisemitism, 93 saxophone, as wicked, 106 Schricker, Henry, 136 Schwartz, Martin D., 93, 205n41 scientific racism, 90, 182 Sears, Roebuck, 93 sexual harassment and assault, 21, 131 Seymour (IN): Klan ignorance of, 12; Stephenson in, 137 Shank, Lew, 117, 140, 206n48 Shapiro, Louis and Rose, 143 sheet music: “Come Join the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 62f; “Our Mothers of Liberty,” 53f; “The Bright Fiery Cross,” 61f; “We Are the Ladies of the Ku Klux Klan,” 54f

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Shelby County, resistance in, 140 Shelbyville (IN): cross burnings in, 9; treatment of African Americans in, 178 Shelton, Robert (Imperial Wizard), 181, 184 Sheridan (IN): free Bibles in, 108; intimidation in, 110 Shipps, Thomas, 209n57 Shumaker, Edward S., 98, 123 sin and fun: in African American neighborhoods, 105; in Hollywood films, 104–5; immorality of, 103–4; in popular magazines, 104–5; in Stephenson’s life, 129–30, 131–32; and wickedness of women’s behavior, 102–3 Smith, Abe, 209n57 Smith, Alfred E., 150 Smith, Asa J., 132 South Bend (IN): and alcohol, 100; bigotry expressed in, 95; gay mayor in, 194; HDTA in, 109; hostility toward Klan in, 142; Klavern headquarters in, 77f; NAACP activity in, 144; protest of 1960s Klan, 181; stories on jazz in, 103. See also Gilliom, Arthur L.; Notre Dame riot South Bend Tribune: on continuing racism, 187; denunciation of Klan by, 142, 147 Southern Poverty Law Center, 194 Spanish flu, 2 Sparks, Will, 133 St. Bavo Catholic School, 69f Stephenson, D. C. (Grand Dragon): as 1924 political campaign organizer, 115–16; on alien threat, 89; arrest, trial, and conviction of, 132–37, 136, 148, 175, 216n5; on Branch, 210n8; as charlatan, 7, 127–30; compared to Trump, 226n23; credit for Bone Dry Law, 123; and election results, 122; film company founded by, 65, 107; huckster descendants of, 198; income of, 129; at Kokomo “Konclave,” 12;

248

I n de x

later life, and death of, 137; leadership of, 5, 6; personal characteristics of, 129–30; photograph of, 46f, 83f; recruitment of miners, 145; relationship with Evans, 125, 214n4; relationship with Jackson, 117–18, 211n21; and student violence, 142 sterilization, legislation permitting, 90 St. Joseph County: HTDA raids in, 102; Klan picnic in, 13; political activity in, 116; women’s activities in, 19–20 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 149 Stoddard, Lothrop: The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, 205n47 Stormfront, 60 Stroup, Earl, 139 Sullivan (IN), funeral in, 56f sundown towns, 190, 191, 221n12 Swift, W. A., 11, 200–201n5

United Mine Workers, 145 United Nations, 182 United States Census Bureau, 92, 193 University of Notre Dame: accusations about, 88; as respected university, 180; as “the fighting Irish,” 142. See also Notre Dame riot unteachables in the Klan, 4, 7

Valparaiso (IN), rally in, 48f Valparaiso University, 87, 213n65 veterans: and the Klan, 145; and racial segregation, 176–77 Vevay (IN), cross burnings in, 9 victims: of Klan discipline in Indiana, 5; Klan members as, 96, 136, 146, 147 vigilante justice, 101–2 Vigo County, officials jailed in, 100 Vincennes (IN): Klan music publishing in, 208n36; Klan picnic in, 47f; laments over moral decline in the US, 97 Taggart, Tom, 119, 211n33 Vincennes Commercial, 147, 148 Tarkington, Booth, 97, 146, 218n30 violence: firebombings, 162f, 183–84; temperance movement, 98–102 against the Klan, 142–43, 217n17; Terre Haute (IN): account of rally in, perpetrated by the Klan, 5–6, 109–11, 95; and alcohol, 100; Bungalow Dance 208n47; of white nationalists, 195. See Hall practices, 103; NAACP activity also law enforcement in, 144; opposition to Klan in, 143 Volstead Act, 99 Thomasson, Dan, 196 Vonnegut, Kurt, 89 Thompson, K. R., 10 Tipton (IN): membership patterns in, Walker, Madam C. J., 104 18; moral crusade in, 108; wicked Wallace, George, 157f, 179–80, 183, 194 behavior in, 102 Wall Street Journal on accusations Tipton County: boycott of fair in, 140; against janitor at IUPUI, 191 opposition to Klan in, 145; revival Walsh, Justin, 123 service in, 10 Walsh, Matthew, 142 Tolerance, 74–75f, 141 Warren (IN), Klan identification of The Toll of Justice (film), 66f, 107–8 enemies in, 84 Tompkins, George, 209n57 Warrick County, protests against Klan The Traitor Within (film), 65f, 107–8 in, 185 tribalism, 198 Washington, DC: parades in, 2–3, Trump, Donald, 194–95, 226n22 25–26f; segregation in, 3 Tydings, Millard E., 135–36 Washington Post on crowds during 1925 march, 3 United Klans of America, 184 Waterloo Press, 93 United Methodist Church, 197

I n de x Watson, James E., 114, 136 Wayne County, initiation ceremony in, 11 Weinstein, Aaron L., 143 Welsh, Matthew, 179 White, Alma: The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 68f White, Ryan, 194 white nationalism, 173f, 194–95 white privilege, 90, 190, 198 white robes and hood: disposition of, 152; enduring power of, 193; in funeral rites, 59f; photograph of, 30f; profits from sales of, 116 white supremacists and white supremacy, 7–8, 90, 182, 195, 196, 205n47. See also racism; violence White Supremacy League, 94 “Why You Should Become a Klansman,” 32f Wickard, Claude, 14, 99, 206n5 Will, George, 191 Wilson, William E., 110, 121 Windfall (IN), Klan visits to church in, 10 Windle, Harry F., and Noah Tillery: “Our Mothers of Liberty,” 53f

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WKKK. See Women of the Ku Klux Klan Wolf, Conrad, 146 Wolfsie, Dick, television show of, 168f Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 98, 101 women: all-girl parades, 41f; gathering in New Castle of, 50f; Klan and women’s movement, 20; Klan expectations of, 20; Klanswomen at funeral, 59f; music dedicated to Klanswomen, 53–54f; protection of womanhood, 133, 182; and sexual promiscuity, 87–88; who joined the Klan, 18–22, 200n8, 202n29; and wicked behavior of, 102–3. See also equal rights Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), 19, 202n29 Women’s Klan, 16, 21, 108 Woodrow, Bill: Listening to History (sculpture), 24f, 200n17 Wright, Frank E., 123 Wright Bone Dry Law, 123, 126 Zamberletti, Arthur, 100

JA M ES H. M A DISON is Thomas and Kathryn Miller Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University. An award-winning teacher, Madison is the author of dozens of essays and several books, including Eli Lilly: A Life; A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America; Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II; and Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana, which formed the basis for an Emmy Award–winning documentary produced by WFYI. Recently, the Indiana Historical Society honored Madison as an Indiana Living Legend, and the Midwestern History Association presented him with the Frederick Jackson Turner Lifetime Achievement Award.