The Ku Klux Klan and D.C. Stephenson

In the early nineteen twenties, Indiana became the most thoroughly Klan-dominated state in the nation. Not the Deep South. Indiana.

At the movement's peak between nineteen twenty-two and nineteen twenty-five, the Indiana Ku Klux Klan claimed between a quarter million and half a million members, a higher per-capita rate than any other state. The governor was sympathetic. The mayor of Indianapolis was a member.

Perhaps a third of the state legislature had Klan ties. Klan candidates won elections in Kokomo, in Indianapolis, across small towns from the Ohio line to the Illinois border. The man who built this was David Curtiss Stephenson, known as D.

C. He was a coal salesman from Texas who arrived in Indiana in nineteen twenty and within two years had made himself Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. Stephenson understood that the Indiana Klan was not primarily about racial terror in the Southern sense.

Black Hoosiers were a smaller share of the population than in the South. His Klan marketed itself as a Protestant fraternal organization defending family values against Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and moral corruption. He recruited through churches and lodges and picnics.

He built a political machine that was genuinely powerful. Then in nineteen twenty-five, Stephenson abducted a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer on a train to Chicago. She was drugged and assaulted.

She died of complications from her injuries and from a self-administered overdose of bichloride of mercury tablets she had taken in her captivity. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder. He had expected a pardon from the governor.

When none came, he produced a box of documents implicating dozens of officeholders in corruption. Indiana's Klan collapsed almost overnight. The machine that had controlled a state government dissolved in scandal.

Stephenson died in nineteen sixty-six. Madge Oberholtzer was twenty-eight.