The Rise and Fall of American Evil

Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

D.C. Stephenson was an itinerant snake-oil salesman with a string of divorces and unpaid child support when he washed up in Indiana in 1922. Initially, he had nothing Hoosiers wanted, and struggled to pay his bills. But his arrival coincided with a landmark in American history: the rebirth of the long-dormant KKK. Indiana, the least-diverse state in the old North, was a prime market for an ambitious young Klan salesman.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan has written previous books about the years between World War I and the Great Depression. The decade famous for flappers, jazz, and Jay Gatsby also harbored simmering resentments that primed America for hatemongers and terrorists. Klan-adjacent politicians got elected governors of several states, including supposed progressive strongholds like Oregon and Colorado. No state welcomed the Klan more eagerly than Indiana.

Egan charts Stephenson’s rapid rise, championing the so-called Invisible Empire. Though the 1920s are famous for ostentatious displays of wealth, most ordinary Americans lingered in an economic doldrum, worsened by Prohibition. This, coupled with changes in immigration patterns and lingering wartime propaganda, encouraged ordinary Hoosiers to seek an outlet for their resentments. Stephenson effectively resold Americans their own resentments, dolled up in Lost Cause mythology and shiny white bedsheets.

Stephenson’s Indiana success gave him control of recruitment in nine Northern states—and he was good at it, too. Though membership rolls were secret, he supposedly initiated well over a million into the Klan, and its women’s and children’s auxiliaries. He skimmed money off both the initiation fees and uniform sales, money he plowed into buying politicians in multiple states. Before long, Stephenson was a certified kingmaker in Midwestern politics.

But like many political wheeler-dealers, Stephenson lacked the virtues he professed. His Klan pushed staunch Prohibition, while Stephenson held lavish bacchanalian parties. He preached simplicity and hard work while buying the biggest mansion in Irvington. And most importantly, his Klan advocated lily-white womanhood, the myth of wives and daughters who need protection, while Stephenson himself showed women abject disdain. Stephenson was, by any measure, a sexual predator.

Timothy Egan

That’s where Stephenson’s undoing began. He targeted women close to him: receptionists and secretaries, then celebrities and socialites. Egan describes Stephenson as a monomaniac so drunken on his own mythology that he becomes reckless, racking up a Weinstein-like roster of crimes. But Stephenson’s loyalists keep ranks closed and lips sealed; countless women kept his secrets, believing themselves the only ones. Until Stephenson picked one woman too many.

Madge Olberholzer was pretty and well-liked, but unmarried at twenty-eight, practically an old maid. Stephenson became unaccountably obsessed with her, offering her lavish gifts and possible government jobs in exchange for her time. Then one night in March, 1925, Stephenson lost all composure, Backed by his Brotherhood muscle, he basically abducted Madge and held her captive, putting her through a weekend of torture that ended in disgrace, suffering, and attempted suicide.

Egan recounts the pains Stephenson inflicted on Madge, and on everyone who dared care about her in the weeks afterward. Because Madge had deep community sympathies, several trusted sources kept extensive records of what she endured. This included doctors, attorneys, and professors, people whose testimony Hoosiers trusted. Egan excerpts their testimony in detail that is frequently chilling and difficult to read, but no less insightful.

Stephenson’s crimes, once exposed, turned into an O.J. Simpson-like spectacle trial, which tested Indiana’s conflicted loyalties between the Klan and its moral values. As detail after detail emerged, Stephenson, once the darling of Indiana’s political establishment, quickly became a pariah, shunned by politicians he’d helped get elected. His Invisible Empire quickly disintegrated. Not just in Indiana either, as Stephenson’s downfall exposed secrets in other Klan-dominated states.

This story makes for tough reading. Both the tactics Stephenson used to cultivate his empire of bigotry, and the predatory tools he concealed behind his rhetoric, expose the rot common in American politics. But in some ways his story is also reassuring, because as quickly as he ascended the ranks of organized hatred, he descended even faster. Stephenson thought himself invincible, but his political machine lasted only three short years.

In his epilog, Egan waxes rhapsodic about the innate weakness of weaponized hatred. Though he avoids naming names, he clearly intends readers to correlate Stephenson’s fast-burning political empire with current events. The politics of hatred inevitably consumes itself, Egan suggests, even if the system appears all-consuming to those living through it. Hold on and stick with the truth, Egan advises, because bigots only know destruction, and will inevitably destroy themselves.