A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
The roaring twenties -- the Jazz Age -- have been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of a uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in equal measure and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion the Klan's takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.
Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he'd become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows -- their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches and spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors, and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of Stephenson's influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman -- Madge Oberholtzer -- who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to its knees.
A Fever in the Heartland marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.
VIKING PRESS, HARDCOVER, 1ST EDITION, 3RD PRINTING, 2023
THIS IS A BRAND-NEW BOOK.