A Fever in the Heartland
by Timothy Egan
The KKK had millions of members in the 1920s. In the Midwest.
For you if
you want to understand how white supremacy captured mainstream American institutions — not at the fringes but at the center
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In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had four to six million members — not in the rural South but in the cities and suburbs of the Midwest, in Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, Oregon. They ran school boards, elected governors, controlled police departments. They were not a fringe. They were mainstream. Egan reconstructs this through D.C. Stephenson, the Klan's Grand Dragon in Indiana, whose rise and spectacular fall — convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman — brought the whole edifice down. The most important American history book about how white supremacy operates not at the margins but at the center, dressed in civic respectability. The book that makes clear that what feels unprecedented has happened before, in the heartland, in living memory.
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