
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
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Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them:(Showing 30 of 30)
“He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.”
“Men talk of the Negro problem,” said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. “There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”
“When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.”
“With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.”
“The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less.”
“He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction. He”
“Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.”
“They didn’t hide by day and only come out at night. They were people who held their communities together, bankers and merchants, lawyers and doctors, coaches and teachers, servants of God and shapers of opinion.”
“The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.”
“Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X. —”
“This was even harder to accept for 200,000 Black soldiers who had returned from military service in France and felt entitled to be full citizens. “The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place,” wrote James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Cities erupted in violent attacks on Black property and life. And as vigilante executions by a hangman’s noose continued without sanction in the South, Congress could not muster enough votes to pass an anti-lynching law.”
“What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn't drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It's there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”
“These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves. The Ku Klux Klan “filled a need,”
“the Klan birthed in Indiana—a state that had lost 25,000 men fighting the Confederacy just a half century earlier—would soon have more Klansmen than any other state.”
“At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had ‘changed its bedsheets for a policeman’s uniform”
“Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?”
“A mob with clubs had chased a group of immigrant miners out of town in 1921. The whiff of socialism was enough to inflame the attackers. Irish laborers had helped to build the city; refugees of the Great Famine dug the ditch that would become the Wabash and Erie Canal, largest in the United States, connecting Evansville to Lake Erie, 460 miles to the north. But because of their religion, they were second-class citizens in the caste system that the Klan exploited in Evansville.”
“Stephenson had succeeded with an unusual formula for a mass movement: men were the muscle, women spread the poison, and ministers sanctified it all.”
“What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.”
“What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.”
“At day’s end, he was sitting on his front porch when a member of the Klan walked up the steps of a house nearby and plopped into a chair on the veranda. Once the mask was off, the boy could see that the now visible congregant of the Invisible Empire was his neighbor, Mrs. Crousore.”
“The state’s racial animus dated to at least 1844, when the provisional government ordered all Black people out of the territory. After Oregon became a state in 1859, it banned nonwhites from living there. Following the Civil War, Oregon was one of only six states to refuse to ratify the 15th Amendment, which granted full voting rights to all male citizens, regardless of race. By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.”
“In Washington, people shared the story of a woman who once sat next to Coolidge at a dinner. She told him she’d bet a friend that she could get him to speak three words that evening. “You lose,” said Coolidge”
“Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.”
“Laughlin’s law also drew strong interest from a circle of proto-Nazi scientists in Germany. Laughlin himself would later praise Hitler for understanding that “the central mission of all politics is race hygiene.”
“He understood people’s fears and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction.”
“The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should 'build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven' against immigrants.”
“Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.”
“Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model. In 1981, Oregon performed the nation’s last legal forced sterilization.”
“For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.”