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

“It was the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says the aide to the great man, “how this guy could spread the bunk and make the hicks eat it up.” Readers could be forgiven for thinking this quote refers to Donald Trump, circa 2023, but in fact it is spoken by Court Asher, a strongman and bootlegger “always keen to a new con,” describing his boss, DC “Steve” Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in 1923.

Like Trump, Stephenson aspired to be President, though the latter is now all but forgotten, along with the millions of American Klansman he inspired in the first half of the Roaring Twenties. Of this mass amnesia, Timothy Egan writes in A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, “When the grandchildren of these leading citizens later discovered hoods in the attic, or membership lists that included their kin, they could not fathom how such a thing had come to pass.” Egan’s book explains it all.

The ambitious Stephenson’s central epiphany was “he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress.” A drifter and con man from Texas, he winds up in Evansville, Indiana, just across the border from Kentucky, but one of Egan’s primary concerns is to show that in the 1920s, the real strength of the Klan was not in the South but in the “Heartland” of the book’s title, and in the West as well: California, Colorado, and Oregon all demonstrate their fair share of racism and violence.