The Grand Dragon

By nineteen twenty-four, D. C. Stephenson ran Indiana. Not metaphorically. The Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan had his offices in the Kresge Building in downtown Indianapolis and entertained United States senators, congressmen, judges, and a sitting governor on his yacht. The Klan had grown with extraordinary speed in Indiana during the early nineteen twenties, recruiting nearly two thousand new members a week at its peak. Estimates of total Indiana membership vary, and historians dispute the exact numbers, but the commonly cited figure is that at the height, roughly one-third of white native-born men in Indiana held Klan membership. The Indiana Klan was the largest state chapter in the country.

Stephenson had arrived in Indiana in nineteen twenty with nothing. He was a gifted recruiter who understood that the Klan's appeal was not only racial fear but also community, belonging, shared grievance, and the pleasure of exclusion. He built a machine that controlled state politics, school boards, and local law enforcement across Indiana. Governor Edward Jackson, who took office in January of nineteen twenty-five, was a Klan ally.

Two months later, in March, Stephenson invited Madge Oberholtzer, a twenty-eight-year-old state education official, to dinner. What followed was documented in Oberholtzer's own deposition, taken as she lay dying weeks later. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder in November of nineteen twenty-five.

The verdict destroyed the Indiana Klan. Governor Jackson, whom Stephenson had helped elect, refused to pardon him. In nineteen twenty-seven, bitter in prison, Stephenson began talking to reporters for the Indianapolis Times, releasing lists of elected officials who had been in the Klan's pay. The machine he had built collapsed into its own exposure.

In the two years following the conviction, the Indiana Klan lost more than one hundred seventy-eight thousand members. It did not rebuild.