If Tim Egan’s latest book, “A Fever in the Heartland” [Viking 2023] has already been torn from school library shelves in states where legislators fear the past and don’t much like the present, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Set 100 years ago in what nostalgia tells us was a simpler and more righteous time and place, the story Egan tells of a monstrous Ku Klux Klan leader is disturbingly timely.
“A Fever in the Heartland,” which chronicles D.C. (Steve) Stephenson’s dramatic rise to prominence and power in Indiana’s Ku Klux Klan, invokes stunning parallels between today and a past many would rather seal off and forget.
In 1920, a young Stephenson, who had already abandoned two wives, moved from Oklahoma to Evansville, Indiana, a Klan stronghold. Stephenson joined the Klan and by 1923 had vaulted to prominence as Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, along the way expanding its membership to an astonishing 250,000, fully one third of the state’s White males. A cross between Billy Sunday and Al Capone, Stephenson spread the Klan’s message of hate and fear, riding waves of anti-Black, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish resentment to great personal wealth and political influence.
Stephenson had the gift of gab possessed by many successful hucksters. Klan rallies were great draws. The Fourth of July rally in Kokomo, Indiana, where he was appointed Grand Dragon, drew more than 100,000 Klan members and their families. Think of all those robes and hoods spread across acres of the Heartland. Stephenson did. The sudden great wealth that allowed him to live in an Indianapolis mansion derived from the cut he received from the sale of every one of them. If this seems familiar to today’s readers, it should.
It’s comforting to think of the Klan as an aberration, a localized illness that raged for a time from which we have fortunately recovered. For many, the Klan was something confined to the South, still making a few headlines late in the last century when David Duke, one-time Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, ran for office in Louisiana in the 1970’s and 80’s. But that was a thing of the past. We’re all better now.
Sadly, we’re not. “A Fever in the Heartland” sets the record straight.
Only a century ago, the Klan and the hate and violence it preached was even stronger in the Midwest and West than in the South. In Indiana it elected a governor. It did the same in Oregon and controlled city governments in Denver, Colorado, Portland, Oregon and Anaheim, California. Interspersing the Klan’s wider history with Stephenson’s sudden and spectacular rise and equally sudden and dramatic fall in 1925 when he was tried and convicted of a grisly rape and second-degree murder, Egan documents it all. “A Fever in the Heartland” tells of a man who for his personal benefit deliberately employed the wedges that splinter people into tribes of race, religion, and region. Donning the mantle of morality, Stephenson bribed Protestant preachers to recruit for the Klan. While claiming “I am the law,” he gleefully flouted it or bent it to his will.
Throughout its 354 pages, the image in the mirror that Stephenson’s story holds up to the present couldn’t be sharper. In his hypocrisy and grift, Stephenson was all about serving himself. And if we somehow missed the connection, Egan occasionally winks at us with expressions like “The Big Lie,” and when beleaguered, Stephenson’s claims of “Fraud and Hoax.”
Droll in places, Egan’s story is hardly funny. While the robes that made Stephenson rich might be gone, the racism the Klan proudly practiced is not. Its infection is still with us. Call it Christian Nationalism or White Supremacy. Dress it in camo or a business suit, racism is a fever we can’t seem to shake.
“A Fever in the Heartland” is a sly, smart, and entertaining reminder of just how sick we were and remain. I wonder if students everywhere will be allowed to read it.
Ken Winkes is a retired teacher and school principal living in Conway, Wash.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2023
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