Most American historical past buffs have seen the terrifying {photograph} of the Ku Klux Klan’s parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1925, with the U.S. Capitol seen in the background. Sadly, that’s only a minor glimpse of the klan’s sway throughout what we choose to recollect as the Jazz Age. But in reality, there are extra white robes hid in musty attic trunks than we could understand; at its top, the klan had 6 million members.
The KKK originated in defeated Confederate states after the Civil War, however the epicenter of the revived klan in the early Nineteen Twenties was effectively to the north of the Mason-Dixon line. The Upper Midwest was a stronghold—notably Indiana, the place the klan successfully managed the state’s political system. In his newest enthralling historic narrative, A Fever in the Heartland, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning writer Timothy Egan charts the klan’s speedy rise and spectacular collapse in Nineteen Twenties America.
The new klan rose in response to the convergence of 4 issues: excessive ranges of immigration from Catholic and Jewish individuals, the Great Migration of Black Americans, the launch of the racist film The Birth of a Nation and the widespread recognition of fraternal organizations. The KKK pretended to benignly uphold “Americanism” however not-so-secretly terrorized anybody who wasn’t a white Protestant, with the complicity of a staggering quantity of clergypeople.
Egan, writer of bestsellers together with The Worst Hard Time and A Pilgrimage to Eternity, properties in on Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, “the most talented psychopath ever to tread the banks of the Wabash,” who ran the Indiana KKK, of which the governor was a proud member. A serial sexual predator, Stephenson had not-unrealistic aspirations for top workplace—even the White House. But his plans had been derailed when he sexually and bodily abused Madge Oberholtzer, an informed younger skilled whose courageous response helped flip public opinion. Egan skillfully leads readers by way of the horrifying experiences of Oberholtzer and a handful of different beleaguered klan opponents.
American democracy had an in depth name in the Nineteen Twenties. The KKK disintegrated as a strong political drive, however not earlier than its affect helped move a lot of its anti-immigrant and Jim Crow agenda. Its malevolence went underground for some time, however historical past exhibits that it has resurfaced many times, like in the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s. A Fever in the Heartland is only one essential chapter in an ongoing historical past.
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