# The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland  ## Metadata - Author:: [[James H. Madison]] - Full Title:: The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland - Category: #books ## Highlights > 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 ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=91)) > 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.” ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=107)) > “hill-billies, the Great Unteachables.” ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=141)) > Klan women and men saw themselves not as bigoted extremists but as good Christians and good patriots joining proudly in a moral crusade. ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=147)) > 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. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=152)) > They knew that they were 100 percent Americans and others were not. ([Location 155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=155)) > White native-born Protestants were the Klan. ([Location 156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=156)) > 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. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=159)) > The political agenda focused on the passage of anti-Catholic and anti-immigration laws and enforcement of Prohibition. ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=175)) > Klan agendas also expanded to attack corruption in local government, improve public schools and libraries, and assist the poor. ([Location 176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=176)) > It helped opponents that the Klan suffered internal divisions. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=189)) > The Klan certainly helped impose immigration restriction on the nation and enforce Prohibition, ([Location 193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=193)) > 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. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=207)) > The Muncie marching band (soon known as the best Klan band in the state) ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=236)) > Hooded marchers carried signs reading “Separation of Church and State,” “Law and Order,” “Protection of Pure Womanhood,” and “Just Laws and Liberty.” ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=237)) > Parades were often preludes to initiation ceremonies, known in Klan language as “naturalizations.” ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=242)) > On command they removed their hats and knelt to take an oath to God and country. ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=247)) > pledged to “perpetuate our great American country, the most dauntless lineage known to man.”6 ([Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=253)) > The grandest Klan spectacle in US history occurred in Kokomo’s Melfalfa Park on July 4, 1923. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=262)) > “Konklave in Kokomo,” ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=265)) > 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.” ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=266)) > Among the floats were those depicting Klansmen protecting young women from black male aggressors, Catholic “papists,” and foreigners. ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=271)) > Local meetings were also social gatherings of good fellowship with like-minded neighbors. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=277)) > Among the many Klavern officers were Klaliff, Klokard, Kludd, Klabeek, and Klokann. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=280)) > constant demands for money. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=294)) > Eventually local Klans sensed rivalry, selfishness, and corruption at the top of the organization. ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=295)) > 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 ([Location 299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=299)) > With masterful marketing strategies, the Klan divided Hoosiers into us or them. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=309)) > Such twenty-first-century notions as pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusiveness were alien. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=311)) > The very best were the “100 percent Americans”—those bound together in a triangle of native birth, Protestant religion, and white racial identity. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=313)) > Klan critics then and later suggested a contradiction between Christianity’s God of love and the Klan’s intolerance of others. ([Location 316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=316)) > 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. ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=322)) > Klan religion was not broadly Christian but rather militantly Protestant. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=339)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > included all Protestants and aggressively excluded other Christians and all non-Christians. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=342)) > Protestant ministers shoveled the coal in the powerful Klan locomotive. ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=349)) > overturn earlier assumptions about Klansmen. No longer can we dismiss them as the ignorant or the unwashed. They were not marginal people. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=365)) > Their home was the Rotary Club, where only 4 percent became Klansmen. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=373)) > 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. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=401)) > Genuine equality was not on their agenda.34 ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=410)) > Klansmen protected women in a manner that meant second-class status. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=416)) > “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.” ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=420)) > “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 ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=423)) > Within many, likely most, beat a genuine commitment to their God, the American flag, and other white, native-born Protestant Americans. ([Location 445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=445)) > 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. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=457)) > The Klan could identify them. The Klan could show 100 percent Americans who they should fear and how they should fight. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=619)) > 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.” ([Location 620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=620)) > “I want to put all the Catholics, Jews, and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft.” ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=623)) > I love the catholics, I love the foreigners and I love the black man but I want them to keep their place.” ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=626)) > to Indiana Klan members, Catholics were by far the most dangerous. ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=633)) > 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. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=648)) > 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.” ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=659)) > Jackson’s book, Convent Cruelties, ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=683)) > Among the fantastical Klan claims was that the Catholic Church was recruiting “100,000 negroes to become Catholic priests.”20 ([Location 688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=688)) > 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.” ([Location 713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=713)) > The new immigrants, Stephenson warned, were not only physically and mentally inferior but “also inferior in moral character.” ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=718)) > This “great army of unfit must be excluded at any cost.”27 ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=721)) > They placed at the top a superior white race of Anglo-Saxon and Northern Europeans (excluding Irish), often labeled the Nordic race. ([Location 731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=731)) > Too many Hoosiers were hyphenates, less than 100 percent American. Irish Catholics were among those who were less worthy, even dangerous. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=752)) > 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 ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=754)) - Note: Irish, order of the hiberian > 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. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=759)) > It designated who was deemed white, or might possibly become white, and who was unlikely ever to join the “pure” race. ([Location 762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=762)) > Jews and Italians, for example, were not pure white and perhaps unlikely ever to become true Americans. ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=764)) > 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.” ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=765)) > 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 ([Location 767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=767)) > 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. ([Location 770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=770)) > The Klan’s first enemies were Catholics and immigrants. Among the least desirable immigrants were Jews. ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=776)) > 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. ([Location 782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=782)) > 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. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=784)) > black Hoosiers remained second-class citizens. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=802)) > Pseudoscience strengthened concepts of a pure white race and an inferior black race as ordained by God and tradition. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=802)) > 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 ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=808)) > 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. ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=812)) > 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 ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=816)) > 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 ([Location 822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=822)) > never considered as dangerous as Catholics. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=826)) > 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. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=831)) > Pointing to enemies enabled Klan messengers to whine that their members were victims. ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=839)) > 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. ([Location 842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=842)) > Jews and blacks were dangerous, but immigrants and Catholics were the core enemy. ([Location 848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=848)) > 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.” ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=857)) > 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. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=875)) > Anti-Saloon League, ([Location 877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=877)) > The national Volstead Act ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=881)) > Indiana’s tradition of individual freedom and weak government flourished in the pioneer era, along with a fondness for corn liquor. ([Location 884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=884)) > For many ordinary Klan members, these illegal and immoral acts in their own communities were the driving force in paying their Klan dues.9 ([Location 915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=915)) > The hooded order was the remedy for inadequate policing, the Klan frequently pointed out. ([Location 927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=927)) > The Klan’s role in law and order moved to vigilante justice, which had a long history in Indiana. ([Location 929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=929)) > 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. ([Location 933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=933)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > One remedy was the revival of Indiana’s nineteenth-century Horse Thief Detective Association (HTDA), a state-authorized volunteer constabulary. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=936)) > Too many women were beginning to practice “coarseness of expression and vulgarity” as “evidence of intellectual freedom,” a leading Catholic newspaper asserted.16 ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=954)) > Automobiles were nothing but a house of prostitution on wheels, thundered a Muncie judge (who likely was a Klan member). ([Location 967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=967)) > 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 ([Location 969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=969)) > Crispus Attucks, ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=979)) > Hollywood invaded Indiana’s main streets and courthouse squares in the 1920s. ([Location 988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=988)) > Mainstream theaters showed both Klan films, but more frequently the films were shown in schools, churches, and community venues. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1057)) > Unidentified “night riders” in Sheridan forced an Asian immigrant to leave town.49 ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1093)) > No reputable historian has yet found a single documented lynching of anyone by the Klan in Indiana in the 1920s. ([Location 1115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1115)) > Always there was praise for a God and nation that required vigorous intimidation and exclusion of others.58 ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1122)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > 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. ([Location 1134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1134)) > “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 ([Location 1197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1197)) > This “mess … is the worst we have ever had,” one lamented. “There never has been any such effort 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 ([Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1210)) > 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.” ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1270)) > 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.” ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1285)) > Black voters stood in long lines on election day to abandon for the first time the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. ([Location 1301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1301)) > 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. ([Location 1343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1343)) > The Bone Dry law was the culmination of the long Prohibition crusade and, more broadly, of legislating morality. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1349)) > 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. ([Location 1359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1359)) > 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. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1399)) > 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. ([Location 1414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1414)) > 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 ([Location 1429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1429)) > 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. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1455)) > 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 ([Location 1528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1528)) > Indiana was “the brightest jewel in the American diadem of States.”25 ([Location 1560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1560)) > 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. ([Location 1619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1619)) > 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. ([Location 1638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1638)) > 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 ([Location 1663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1663)) > 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 ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1729)) > 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 ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1748)) > 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. ([Location 1758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1758)) > “effete east.”37 ([Location 1763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1763)) > Taking a stand on issues involving deep differences in the religious, political, and social fabric was not the road to profit. ([Location 1794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1794)) > Across Indiana the story of the Klan was willfully forgotten in gestures toward healing. ([Location 1846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1846)) > 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.” ([Location 1850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1850)) > 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. ([Location 1917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1917)) > 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.” ([Location 2033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2033)) > Among the new enemies were homosexuals and hippies, sometimes linked to “wily” Jews.27 ([Location 2044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2044)) > 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. ([Location 2069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2069)) > Few could hear the warnings about African Americans, which were now mixed with newer tirades about illegal immigration, affirmative action, welfare, abortion, and homosexuality. ([Location 2099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2099)) > 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 ([Location 2118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2118)) > A chain-smoking convicted felon with a Mickey Mouse tattoo, Berry worked as a tow truck driver in rural DeKalb County in northeastern Indiana. ([Location 2124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2124)) - Note: A time to kill - antihero drove a wrecker & had a Mickey tattoo > 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. ([Location 2156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2156)) > 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 ([Location 2159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2159)) > “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 ([Location 2227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2227)) # The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland  ## Metadata - Author:: [[James H. Madison]] - Full Title:: The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland - Category: #books ## Highlights > 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 ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=91)) > 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.” ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=107)) > “hill-billies, the Great Unteachables.” ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=141)) > Klan women and men saw themselves not as bigoted extremists but as good Christians and good patriots joining proudly in a moral crusade. ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=147)) > 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. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=152)) > They knew that they were 100 percent Americans and others were not. ([Location 155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=155)) > White native-born Protestants were the Klan. ([Location 156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=156)) > 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. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=159)) > The political agenda focused on the passage of anti-Catholic and anti-immigration laws and enforcement of Prohibition. ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=175)) > Klan agendas also expanded to attack corruption in local government, improve public schools and libraries, and assist the poor. ([Location 176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=176)) > It helped opponents that the Klan suffered internal divisions. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=189)) > The Klan certainly helped impose immigration restriction on the nation and enforce Prohibition, ([Location 193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=193)) > 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. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=207)) > The Muncie marching band (soon known as the best Klan band in the state) ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=236)) > Hooded marchers carried signs reading “Separation of Church and State,” “Law and Order,” “Protection of Pure Womanhood,” and “Just Laws and Liberty.” ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=237)) > Parades were often preludes to initiation ceremonies, known in Klan language as “naturalizations.” ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=242)) > On command they removed their hats and knelt to take an oath to God and country. ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=247)) > pledged to “perpetuate our great American country, the most dauntless lineage known to man.”6 ([Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=253)) > The grandest Klan spectacle in US history occurred in Kokomo’s Melfalfa Park on July 4, 1923. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=262)) > “Konklave in Kokomo,” ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=265)) > 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.” ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=266)) > Among the floats were those depicting Klansmen protecting young women from black male aggressors, Catholic “papists,” and foreigners. ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=271)) > Local meetings were also social gatherings of good fellowship with like-minded neighbors. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=277)) > Among the many Klavern officers were Klaliff, Klokard, Kludd, Klabeek, and Klokann. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=280)) > constant demands for money. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=294)) > Eventually local Klans sensed rivalry, selfishness, and corruption at the top of the organization. ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=295)) > 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 ([Location 299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=299)) > With masterful marketing strategies, the Klan divided Hoosiers into us or them. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=309)) > Such twenty-first-century notions as pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusiveness were alien. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=311)) > The very best were the “100 percent Americans”—those bound together in a triangle of native birth, Protestant religion, and white racial identity. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=313)) > Klan critics then and later suggested a contradiction between Christianity’s God of love and the Klan’s intolerance of others. ([Location 316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=316)) > 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. ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=322)) > Klan religion was not broadly Christian but rather militantly Protestant. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=339)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > included all Protestants and aggressively excluded other Christians and all non-Christians. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=342)) > Protestant ministers shoveled the coal in the powerful Klan locomotive. ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=349)) > overturn earlier assumptions about Klansmen. No longer can we dismiss them as the ignorant or the unwashed. They were not marginal people. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=365)) > Their home was the Rotary Club, where only 4 percent became Klansmen. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=373)) > 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. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=401)) > Genuine equality was not on their agenda.34 ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=410)) > Klansmen protected women in a manner that meant second-class status. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=416)) > “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.” ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=420)) > “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 ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=423)) > Within many, likely most, beat a genuine commitment to their God, the American flag, and other white, native-born Protestant Americans. ([Location 445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=445)) > 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. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=457)) > The Klan could identify them. The Klan could show 100 percent Americans who they should fear and how they should fight. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=619)) > 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.” ([Location 620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=620)) > “I want to put all the Catholics, Jews, and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft.” ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=623)) > I love the catholics, I love the foreigners and I love the black man but I want them to keep their place.” ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=626)) > to Indiana Klan members, Catholics were by far the most dangerous. ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=633)) > 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. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=648)) > 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.” ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=659)) > Jackson’s book, Convent Cruelties, ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=683)) > Among the fantastical Klan claims was that the Catholic Church was recruiting “100,000 negroes to become Catholic priests.”20 ([Location 688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=688)) > 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.” ([Location 713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=713)) > The new immigrants, Stephenson warned, were not only physically and mentally inferior but “also inferior in moral character.” ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=718)) > This “great army of unfit must be excluded at any cost.”27 ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=721)) > They placed at the top a superior white race of Anglo-Saxon and Northern Europeans (excluding Irish), often labeled the Nordic race. ([Location 731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=731)) > Too many Hoosiers were hyphenates, less than 100 percent American. Irish Catholics were among those who were less worthy, even dangerous. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=752)) > 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 ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=754)) - Note: Irish, order of the hiberian > 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. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=759)) > It designated who was deemed white, or might possibly become white, and who was unlikely ever to join the “pure” race. ([Location 762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=762)) > Jews and Italians, for example, were not pure white and perhaps unlikely ever to become true Americans. ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=764)) > 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.” ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=765)) > 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 ([Location 767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=767)) > 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. ([Location 770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=770)) > The Klan’s first enemies were Catholics and immigrants. Among the least desirable immigrants were Jews. ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=776)) > 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. ([Location 782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=782)) > 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. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=784)) > black Hoosiers remained second-class citizens. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=802)) > Pseudoscience strengthened concepts of a pure white race and an inferior black race as ordained by God and tradition. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=802)) > 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 ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=808)) > 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. ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=812)) > 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 ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=816)) > 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 ([Location 822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=822)) > never considered as dangerous as Catholics. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=826)) > 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. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=831)) > Pointing to enemies enabled Klan messengers to whine that their members were victims. ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=839)) > 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. ([Location 842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=842)) > Jews and blacks were dangerous, but immigrants and Catholics were the core enemy. ([Location 848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=848)) > 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.” ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=857)) > 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. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=875)) > Anti-Saloon League, ([Location 877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=877)) > The national Volstead Act ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=881)) > Indiana’s tradition of individual freedom and weak government flourished in the pioneer era, along with a fondness for corn liquor. ([Location 884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=884)) > For many ordinary Klan members, these illegal and immoral acts in their own communities were the driving force in paying their Klan dues.9 ([Location 915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=915)) > The hooded order was the remedy for inadequate policing, the Klan frequently pointed out. ([Location 927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=927)) > The Klan’s role in law and order moved to vigilante justice, which had a long history in Indiana. ([Location 929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=929)) > 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. ([Location 933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=933)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > One remedy was the revival of Indiana’s nineteenth-century Horse Thief Detective Association (HTDA), a state-authorized volunteer constabulary. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=936)) > Too many women were beginning to practice “coarseness of expression and vulgarity” as “evidence of intellectual freedom,” a leading Catholic newspaper asserted.16 ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=954)) > Automobiles were nothing but a house of prostitution on wheels, thundered a Muncie judge (who likely was a Klan member). ([Location 967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=967)) > 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 ([Location 969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=969)) > Crispus Attucks, ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=979)) > Hollywood invaded Indiana’s main streets and courthouse squares in the 1920s. ([Location 988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=988)) > Mainstream theaters showed both Klan films, but more frequently the films were shown in schools, churches, and community venues. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1057)) > Unidentified “night riders” in Sheridan forced an Asian immigrant to leave town.49 ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1093)) > No reputable historian has yet found a single documented lynching of anyone by the Klan in Indiana in the 1920s. ([Location 1115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1115)) > Always there was praise for a God and nation that required vigorous intimidation and exclusion of others.58 ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1122)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > 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. ([Location 1134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1134)) > “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 ([Location 1197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1197)) > This “mess … is the worst we have ever had,” one lamented. “There never has been any such effort 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 ([Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1210)) > 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.” ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1270)) > 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.” ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1285)) > Black voters stood in long lines on election day to abandon for the first time the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. ([Location 1301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1301)) > 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. ([Location 1343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1343)) > The Bone Dry law was the culmination of the long Prohibition crusade and, more broadly, of legislating morality. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1349)) > 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. ([Location 1359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1359)) > 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. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1399)) > 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. ([Location 1414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1414)) > 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 ([Location 1429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1429)) > 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. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1455)) > 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 ([Location 1528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1528)) > Indiana was “the brightest jewel in the American diadem of States.”25 ([Location 1560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1560)) > 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. ([Location 1619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1619)) > 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. ([Location 1638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1638)) > 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 ([Location 1663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1663)) > 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 ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1729)) > 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 ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1748)) > 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. ([Location 1758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1758)) > “effete east.”37 ([Location 1763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1763)) > Taking a stand on issues involving deep differences in the religious, political, and social fabric was not the road to profit. ([Location 1794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1794)) > Across Indiana the story of the Klan was willfully forgotten in gestures toward healing. ([Location 1846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1846)) > 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.” ([Location 1850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1850)) > 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. ([Location 1917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=1917)) > 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.” ([Location 2033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2033)) > Among the new enemies were homosexuals and hippies, sometimes linked to “wily” Jews.27 ([Location 2044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2044)) > 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. ([Location 2069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2069)) > Few could hear the warnings about African Americans, which were now mixed with newer tirades about illegal immigration, affirmative action, welfare, abortion, and homosexuality. ([Location 2099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2099)) > 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 ([Location 2118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2118)) > A chain-smoking convicted felon with a Mickey Mouse tattoo, Berry worked as a tow truck driver in rural DeKalb County in northeastern Indiana. ([Location 2124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2124)) - Note: A time to kill - antihero drove a wrecker & had a Mickey tattoo > 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. ([Location 2156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2156)) > 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 ([Location 2159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2159)) > “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 ([Location 2227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08DLRPCKF&location=2227))