On August 27, our latest Book Club conversation featured this year’s Robert F. Kennedy Book and Journalism Award’s Honorable Mention, 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 is a historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them. At the peak of D.C. Stephenson’s influence was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees. Fever in the Heartland marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian of American history and law professor, moderated the discussion. 

Timothy Egan began by explaining the historical and cultural context of the 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Conservative, and especially anti-immigrant nativist sentiment was on the rise in response to rapidly changing social norms as the roaring twenties got into full swing with flappers, jazz, and speakeasies. Additionally, this rhetoric made further fuel of the Great Migration and the increasing numbers of African-Americans flocking to Northern urban centers in search of economic opportunities and freedom from Jim Crow segregation. 

This background takes us to Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its power with around six million members nationwide. They had groups for men and women as well as children, indoctrinating them all into xenophobia and hate. They achieved extensive political influence, with 75 Congress members and three elected governors either supporting or being full members of the Klan. In Indiana, they had a Klan governor, a Klan mayor in Indianapolis, and nine Klan-affiliated Congress members, with about one in three white males in Indiana being Klansmen. 

Egan emphasized the normalization of Klan membership. The KKK performed a superficial respectable all-American image, hosting baseball games, church groups, and charity events. The organization had a massive reach, appropriating existing institutions such as the police, government, churches, and the press for their own goals. 

Egan described how the project gave him a ‘different view of American guardrails’. He found that most local press and institutions were either complicit or ineffective in countering the Klan. He added that this history highlights the fragility of democracy and the failure of institutions to always effectively counteract extremist influences. 

The discussion ended looking forward to countering extremism in the future. Effective resistance requires more than shaming; it involves direct legal and social confrontations, as demonstrated by the Klan’s decline due to legal actions and exposure of criminal activities. Egan’s book reveals previously unknown aspects of the Klan’s influence and demonstrates compelling prose and exceptional research. Click here to watch the full interview.