A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
View on GoodreadsWho brought down the 1920s Klan at the height of its power? In Egan's telling, a dying woman did. Madge Oberholtzer's signed statement against D.C. Stephenson, Indiana's Grand Dragon, helped convict him of murder in 1925, and you watch the movement he'd built across the Midwest and West come apart.
Core ideas
- Not a Southern story: By the 1920s Klan members were ministers, judges, police officers and bankers, and Indiana's membership neared 250,000, about a third of the state's white men.
- An invented man: Stephenson's claimed Army officer service was fiction, yet he built a machine through churches and politics and declared himself the law.
- Of its era: This Klan backed eugenics and forced sterilization, and Egan places it alongside the 1924 National Origins Act restricting immigration.
Published2023
Pages432
ISBN9780735225268
ReadFeb 2025
