Gentlemen From Indiana

I

A HUNDRED thousand men, most of them wearing flowing white robes and visored cowls, waited patiently about a mound in a field near Kokomo, Indiana. They had been told, ‘A new Messiah will be born in the ballot box of Indiana.’ Several doctors of divinity had already climbed the mound — or, as they called it, the mount — and exhorted the multitude to smite the Devil. There were allusions to the Prince, the Sermon on the Mount, the Nativity.

Suddenly a Knight flung a trembling hand toward heaven and shouted, ‘ He’s coming!' The sea of white hoods rippled. Every eye was strained toward the southern sky. A flake of the sun itself flashed from behind a cloud.

The Purple Prince was coming to his coronation. Some Knights raised their arms toward him and shouted prayers of thanksgiving. The Prince’s chariot of fire was a gilded airplane in which he circled the field and descended in a wide spiral to a stretch of meadow reserved for his advent.

A squat but agile figure clad in a silken robe of purple, embellished with a gold piping and mystic symbols, climbed from the plane and gravely shook hands with several distinctively robed men who stepped forward from the multitude. Armed men cleared a path to the mount. The Prince, bowing stiffly to right and left, was escorted to his dais. He paused until the whole countryside was dead with silence. When every eye was on him he raised his hand so vigorously and imperiously that no sceptre could have improved the effect. With his other hand he flung back his visor, exposing a rosy, chubby face lighted with animal cunning.

‘My worthy subjects, citizens of the Invisible Empire, Klansmen all, greetings. It grieves me to be late. The President of the United States kept me unduly long counseling upon vital matters of state. Only my plea that this is the time and place of my coronation obtained for me surcease from his prayers for guidance.

‘Here in this uplifted hand, where all can see, I bear an official document addressed to the Grand Dragon, Hydras, Great Titans, Furies, Giants, Kleagles, King Kleagles, Exalted Cyclops, Terrors, and All Citizens of the Invisible Empire of the Realm of Indiana.

‘It is done in the executive chambers of His Lordship, the Imperial Wizard, in the Imperial City of Atlanta, Commonwealth of Georgia, on this Tenth Day of the Seventh Month of the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Three, and on the Dismal Day of the Weeping Week of the Hideous Month of the Year of the Klan LVII.

‘It is signed by His Lordship, Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard, and duly attested.

‘It continues me officially in my exalted capacity as Grand Dragon of the Invisible Empire for the Realm of Indiana. It so proclaims me by Virtue of God’s Unchanging Grace. So be it.’

Thus did David Curtis Stephenson, Texas printer, confirm his boast that he was the most powerful man in Indiana.

He concluded his oration with a plea for straight Americanism, an admonition to avoid violence, and a word of compliment and farewell.

As he turned to leave, a coin was thrown at him. This was a signal for a wild demonstration of fealty and love. Rings, stickpins, pocketbooks, watch charms, coins, were showered upon him. He stood fast until the tribute subsided, motioned his retainers to gather in the treasure, and retired to make merry with his Knights and to discuss the fiscal affairs of his principality.

Ku Klux Klan officials said that this was the greatest assembly of Klansmen in the history of the order. The Klan estimate of the number of people was 200,000. The popular tradition in Indiana is that 100,000 were present.¹

II

Stephenson’s coronation, or sanctification, raised the curtain on a new era in the Indiana Klan. Stephenson was taken into the Klan for the express purpose of applying high-pressure sales methods to increasing its strength. He was soon sent to Indianapolis to build up the membership, and in a few months he seized the power and later the title of Grand Dragon of the realm by going over the heads of his superiors to the Imperial Wizard himself.

The original purpose of the revived Klan, as defined when William Joseph Simmons gave new life to it during the World War, was to stop immigration. The Ku Klux Kreed, as printed in the Kloran, or ’THE Book of the Invisible Empire,’ declared simply for white supremacy and ‘the sublime principles of pure Americanism.’ The candidate for membership — or, in the language of the Klan, ‘for naturalization in the Invisible Empire ’ — was, however, required to swear, with his left hand over his heart and his right hand raised to heaven, an affirmative answer to these two of eight questions: ‘Are you a native-born, white, Gentile American citizen?’ and ‘Are you absolutely opposed to and free of any allegiance of any nature to any cause, government, people, sect, or ruler that is foreign to the United States of America?’

In the ritual of the Klan there is no incitement of hatred for the Jew, the Catholic, the negro, or the foreign-born. They were excluded from membership as being the polluting undercurrents and backwash of the sparkling stream of Americanism. ‘Shut off the poisonous inflow; purify what is here’ — that was the battle cry of the Klan as written and preached by its revivalists.

Had the Klan invasion of Indiana been kept on this plane, where it was held until it accumulated a considerable membership of honest men eager to protect the Cross and the Flag, it would have run its course, as it did in neighboring states, thinning out to nothing in the lake-district industrial centres.

The distinctive feature of the Klan of Indiana was the sales plan of D. C. Stephenson. He sold fright, as he had sold coal, in carload lots. If the Klan went fairly well on a diet of fear, how would it flourish on large quantities of it?

He saw in the Klan exclusion feature a combination of the four liveliest prejudices that inspire men to put upon their fellows. These four prejudices he made his ‘sales features.’

First came the normal American aversion to alien newcomers speaking a foreign tongue. The war intensified this aversion to a degree never known in the history of the country.

Secondly, the original Klan crushed out of the negro all his dreams of political equality, and left a prejudice which was easily whipped into fury by his invasion of the Northern labor market during the war and the elevation of his economic and social position by the immigration restriction law.

Thirdly, it was easy to make capital of the fact that the Jew money lender and credit merchant is a red flag in every community where he prospers.

The fourth sales feature was the well-known rabble-rousing formula against the Catholic Church. The American Protective Association and various slanderous anti-Catholic weekly newspapers have kept it in working order.

But it is a well-known fact that a man cannot be induced to fear the neighbor near whom he has lived many years in peace and harmony.

The Stephenson sales plan took this fact into consideration. It was the secret of its success. The campaign was directed, not against the little band of negroes who lived together down along the river, worked for the white folks, kept a religious revival in continuous operation, and minded their own business, but against a mythical wave of black labor sweeping up from the South to work for a dollar a day, live in squalor, and commit unspeakable offenses against the white people.

No one was urged to lynch Nick, the smiling and busy Greek confectioner whose ice-cream parlor was a highschool students’ meeting place, but a terrifying curse was hurled at an unnamed Greek in the next county who had put an American-born citizen out of business by cutthroat competition, and especially against remote masses of unassimilated aliens in large cities awaiting only a Lenin to show them how to abolish by force the institution of private property.

No voice was lifted against the peace of Solomon Stein, the industrious, amiable clothier, model family man and perhaps faithful attendant, as a visitor, upon the service of the Presbyterian Church, but the welkin rang with invective hurled eastward in the general direction of a Jewish ring of international bankers who started the war and were preparing to foreclose a mortgage on the world, bankrupting Henry Ford and others.

The Catholics were the hard problem. In most Indiana communities there is but one Catholic parish. Catholic children are required by diocesan order to attend Catholic schools. The families live near the church because their religious and educational interest is centred in it. The adults mingle socially but little with the Protestant people, the children less. The Catholic Church ritual is so foreign to anything in the experience of the average American rural Protestant that a skilled agitator can ascribe to it many of the attributes of a pagan incantation and excite religious animosity. But the Catholics are important customers. Acting on the theory that the intensity of a weak man’s hatreds is measured directly in terms of his remoteness from his enemy, the Pope was selected as the archenemy of American purity. There are few things a Kokomo Klansman can do with greater safety than stand in the privacy of his own home and shake his fist at Rome, Italy.

For good measure, Stephenson threw in the Devil. To win the Anti-Saloon League, he declared war on bootleggers and ‘blind tigers.’ He blacklisted roadside ‘ petting parties ’ and promised to banish the vice element from every community.

III

Until the day Stephenson wrested the leadership of the realm of Indiana from Joe Huffington, there was no plan for a state-wide membership drive. There were small klaverns in several counties, but much of the state was unrepresented. To cover the state in one sweeping campaign, Stephenson cast about for a group of men skilled in the brand of exhortation required to chill with fear. Ruling out the forbidden classes and the politicians, who in nearly every community were classed as allies of the Devil, he came to the Protestant clergymen. He made every Protestant clergyman in Indiana an honorary member of the Klan. Not all availed themselves of the privilege, but in many communities every Protestant clergyman was a Klan leader.

The war chest was a perplexing problem, but Stephenson knew that few things interest a zealous reformer more than easy money. The Klan initiation fee was fixed at ten dollars. This fee was split on a sliding scale, Stephenson giving as much as six dollars to the solicitor who actually got the cash from a new member. The commission was at times much less. It has been estimated that Stephenson’s average share was $4.20, out of which he paid all expenses of the state headquarters.

The sale of Klan regalia and klavern equipment netted large profits. Klan robes cost $3.28 each in large quantities and were sold to initiates at an average price of $6.50.

Stephenson’s imperative command was that every community must be split into two factions — a large group of Klansmen, a small group of outlanders. He knew that an active enemy would keep every klavern on its toes and presenting a united front for self-preservation. The membership drive cut a new line of cleavage through lodges, clubs, churches, political parties, labor unions, and farm organizations. The intelligent leadership in nearly every group was anti-Klan, openly at first, silently later. The Klan group fought savagely and incessantly. Often it won, and when it did many of the antis joined in fear of losing their clients, patients, and customers.

Stephenson made no attempt to regulate the propaganda or to censor the speeches used by lecturers and evangelists. He turned them loose and let them talk. Many of the most successful had the advantage of years of training in the pulpit. They were especially good at strafing the Pope. One exaggeration led to another until it was declared that the Pope was coming to Washington, D. C., to lead in person the uprising against the United States of America. For some time photographs of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, on Mount Alban, at Washington, were circulated as true pictures of the new Vatican in process of erection. The Cathedral was described as being so placed, four hundred feet above Washington, that field guns could be fired from its vicinity directly upon the Capitol and the White House. Work on the Cathedral being somewhat slow, the orators adopted a detailed description of the Scottish Rite Temple at Washington as the new home of Pope Pius XI. The left-wing leaders even went so far as to move the Pope’s new headquarters to Cincinnati, and some Klansmen exhibited pictures of the Jewish Hospital as his headquarters until he could take over a section of the city suitable to his needs.

The climax came when an overzealous lecturer declared to a crowd at North Manchester, a college town, that for all they knew the Pope might come there any day. ‘ He may even be on the north-bound train to-morrow!’ shouted the barker. ’He may! He may! Be warned! Prepare! America for Americans! Search everywhere for hidden enemies, vipers at the heart’s blood of our sacred Republic! Watch the trains!’

Some fifteen hundred persons met the north-bound train the next day to the great embarrassment of the lone North Manchester passenger, a quietly dressed and somewhat clerical-appearing traveling man who, believing that he was about to play the part of the victim in a lynching party, started to flee and was forced to identify himself by his possessions as not being the Pope.

Klan boycotts were of little effect in the larger cities, but in third-and fourthclass cities and the towns, where each Klansman knew his fellow citizens in the Invisible Empire and could check their buying, they brought disaster to a number of Jewish merchants, unemployment to Roman Catholics, and terror to negroes, many of whom felt that they dared not leave their homes after nightfall.

Indiana once supported a flourishing organization known as the Horsethief Detective Association. Its object was stated in its name, but in some cases it took general law enforcement in its own hands. The Horsethief Detective Association was on the verge of dying for want of horses when Stephenson revived it as the armed rank of the Klan. Its members were sworn in by hundreds as deputy constables. It was they who made the fight against rum runners and roadside petting parties. They became so bold that they halted motor cars indiscriminately, subjected both men and women to search, and in time caused Indiana to be blacklisted by several motor clubs.

Acting on a report that the negro vote in Indianapolis had gone Democratic, they rode through the negro precincts on primary day flourishing revolvers and yelling for law and order at the polls. It was these men who, when the Klan provinces held meetings in fields near towns, blocked the roads for miles, forming lines through which no one was allowed to pass without the magic word and sign.

The Klan’s favorite public demonstration was the parade, or, in the language of the Kloran, ‘ klavalkade.’ Two of its largest parades were held in Indianapolis — one past the principal negro district, the other past the residence of the Catholic bishop. Although hundreds of persons in the larger cities who had no direct contact with the Klan felt that the whole movement could be laughed out of existence, few ever expressed that view after seeing a robed Klan parade.

Bystanders watching a night parade of robed Klansmen marching four abreast were immediately quieted by the ghostly spectacle. The column extended, in the glare of one street lamp after another, as far as there was any visibility. White-robed figures with heads and faces covered with pointed hoods, bodies completely draped in loose flowing cassocks — the dead whiteness of the uniforms and the dead silence of the marchers; here and there a float picturing stirring episodes of the Revolutionary War, or in the Christian war for the world. A great profusion of fiery crosses and American shields, held on the floats by unmasked men and women, most of them stiff with self-consciousness, but now and then a youth staring defiantly at the crowd, like a small boy making faces at a securely caged circus lion.

In the great mass of marchers there was not an eye or a face or a hand in sight, nothing to read but a broken ripple of old shoes, — square-toed, cracked, run over at the heel, — shuffling in and out of the shadow cast by the robes. Hood tipped forward, each marcher following the old shoes ahead — and at the head of the parade a curious want of pomp and splendor. Grand Dragon Stephenson is not there, nor is Grand Klaliff (Vice Dragon) Walter Bossert, of Liberty (Indiana University, LL.B., 1907), sometime Republican Sixth District chairman, nor the Grand Kludd, or chaplain, the Reverend V. W. Blair, of Plainfield, ordained to minister to the spiritual needs of the Disciples of Christ, but lately without charge, a roving missioner on the Klan’s Indiana realm. The Grand Officers are elsewhere, conferring with the Grand Klabee, or treasurer.

The Klan demand for action took the form of demonstrations and Horsethief Detective Association highway patrolling, with now and then a cross-burning near a Catholic church or on some commanding hilltop. A cross was built of lumber, wrapped in burlap, saturated with kerosene, planted upright, and fired. These crosses flashing through dark nights drove many a worthy citizen to the refuge of his home, there to gather his family about him and pray earnestly for deliverance from the wrath of his neighbors.

The Stephenson sales plan got results. Membership cards came in by hundreds. A former Klan organizer testifying in the campaign of Arthur L. Gilliom, Indiana attorney-general, to cancel the charter of the Klan on the ground that it was a political organization disobeying the corrupt-practices law by failing to file an account of its expenditures, testified that the Klan’s greatest membership in Indiana was 178,000. It is known from reliable sources, however, that 194,000 names were listed in the roster of the realm at one time. The Klan claimed as many as 250,000 members.

IV

Stephenson chose to strike, not with the lash, the tar brush, and the torch, but with the ballot. As he came into full sway as Indiana’s Klan leader, the governor, Warren T. McCray, a farmer, banker, and cattle breeder, suffered serious financial reverses in the postwar collapse of land values and farmproducts prices. He engaged in credit methods which the United States district court regarded as a scheme to use the mails to defraud; he was taken from his office and sent to Atlanta prison. This was the first time in the history of the country that a governor was taken from office to serve a prison sentence on a felony charge. The disgrace shocked and humiliated the state. McCray’s misfortune was in no way connected with the Klan, but Stephenson made capital of it. He exploited it as proof of his charge that there was corruption in high political offices.

Ed Jackson, secretary of state, became Stephenson’s candidate for governor. Arthur R. Robinson, whose law firm served as Stephenson’s attorney in several cases and who was Jackson’s close personal friend, spent much time with both men. Charles J. Orbison, a Masonic and Democratic leader, came into the deal. These men developed so much power that Senator James E. Watson, former state president of the Epworth League, was forced to recognize their political power, not as a Klansman, but as a politician forming an army to win an election. There was talk about the five sons — Stephenson, Jackson, Robinson, Orbison, Watson.

Although Stephenson once filed for a Congressional nomination in an Indiana Democratic primary, he turned to the Republican Party to gain his political ends. He won the nomination for Jackson in the primary. In the convention a bloc of new faces jumped at the crack of Stephenson’s whip and he approved the nomination of every man on the ticket except Arthur L. Gilliom, upstate candidate for attorney-general. In many counties the Klan won a complete primary victory, Democrats by thousands violating the primary law by marking Republican ballots. Stephenson won the state election. He won the Indianapolis city and school elections.

He was so busy winning elections that the old Klan faction outflanked him and persuaded his home klavern at Evansville to banish him from the realm on a charge of immorality. Bossert was elevated to Grand Dragon. The allegiance of the Klan generalassembly bloc was so divided between Stephenson and Bossert that neither could command enough strength to pass the promised laws abolishing private schools, establishing segregated negro districts in cities, requiring New Testament instruction in the public schools, forbidding alien landholding, and other violent class legislation.

Stephenson’s goal was the 1928 Republican nomination for President of the United States. He planned to enter the United States Senate as successor to Samuel M. Ralston, Democrat, the incumbent, whose health was rapidly failing. From the Senate he expected to gain enough strength to salt the Republican national convention with a majority Klan bloc, and then, as the Republican nominee, to carry much of the North and nearly all the South, reuniting the country under the rule of the Cross, the Flag, and the Old White Blood.

But when Ralston died Stephenson lay in Noblesville jail, near Indianapolis, awaiting trial on a first-degree murder indictment. The evidence showed that Stephenson kidnapped a girl and so terrified and abused her that she took poison. Her dying statement, admitted as evidence, was that after she took the poison he carried her in his motor car half the length of the state, replying to her appeals for medical attention with a demand on his chauffeur for more speed. She stated that when the chauffeur finally rebelled, saying they would run afoul of the law, Stephenson shouted, ’I am the law!’ He left her alone in his garage all night and then had her taken to the home of her parents to die. Instead of going to the Senate, he went to the Indiana state prison for life. Robinson went to the Senate, served until the next election, and won the nomination and election.

Within the next two years John L. Duvall, Klan slate mayor of Indianapolis, was driven out of office with a thirty-day jail sentence over his head, following his conviction on an election law charge; five of the six Republican councilmen elected on the same slate were indicted on bribery charges; and Governor Jackson and two others, including the Marion County (Indianapolis) Republican chairman, were accused by the grand jury of conspiring to bribe McCray, former governor. Jackson stood trial first, and after five witnesses, including McCray, had testified that Jackson had offered the bribe himself and had been a party to causing it to be offered through two other channels, the judge directed the jury to acquit Jackson on the ground that the statute of limitations had run against the alleged crime. Jackson did not take the stand to refute the testimony of his accusers. Nearly all the more influential newspapers in the state demanded that he resign, but he stood fast. Clyde A. Walb, Republican state chairman, was indicted by the Federal grand jury on a statement of evidence relating to the failure of a national bank which he had served as vice president. He resigned the chairmanship.

The most dramatic crash in the wreck of Stephenson’s dream of empire was the impeachment of Judge Clarence W. Dearth, of the Delaware circuit court. Dearth was rated as a rousing Klan orator. The Delaware county seat is at Muncie, where Gerald Chapman and Dutch Anderson lived in luxury and freedom while Federal agents and police throughout the country were hunting them. The city was the home of the notorious Chicken Blood Gang, a troupe of confidence men. They persuaded farmers in distant states to come to Muncie to back the challenger in a fake prize fight. The farmer came expecting to win some easy money from a Muncie banker with more sporting blood than financial acumen. The fights were staged with the cash in a neutral corner of the ring. At the appointed signal, the farmer’s fighter went down with blood spurting from his mouth. The fighter achieved this remarkable effect by biting on a rubber sac of chicken blood concealed in his mouth. A doctor then pronounced the fighter dead and the farmer usually put three states behind him before he paused for breath. The town was also a favorite headquarters for fake stock salesmen, politicians, and bank robbers.

But Muncie is endowed with a strong and outspoken better element. One of several families of honorable and successful manufacturers is noted for its generous and wise philanthropies. George Dale, editor of the weekly Post-Democrat, challenged the Klan, the underworld, and the politicians. Judge Dearth sent him to the state penal farm, but he returned to continue the fight. He printed an anonymous letter, signed ‘One Who Knows,’ in which it was charged that Dearth was his own lawmaker in selecting juries and in conducting some trials. It was shown subsequently that the letter was written by a manufacturer who did know. Dearth ordered the paper suppressed, and two hundred and fifty Muncie citizens retaliated with a petition asking the legislature to impeach Dearth. The lower house of the assembly voted the impeachment unanimously in March 1927, the first time in ninetytwo years that an Indiana judge was ordered before the bar of the senate for trial.

The climax of the trial came when John Ranes, a fourteen-year-old newsboy, testified that he was selling copies of the Post-Democrat when a policeman took him into the courthouse to face Judge Dearth. The judge took the boy’s papers.

’Was any writ or any paper of any kind read to you?’ asked the prosecution.

‘No,’ the boy answered.

He faced the senate of his state, fifty men whose interest he did not know was in the law of private property. The floor and galleries were packed with house members, — Dearth’s accusers, — newspaper men, spectators. Above the boy on a high platform stood the lieutenant governor, acting as judge. Staring hard at the boy was Judge Dearth.

‘Did the judge say anything?’

‘ He told me to get out and if I sold any more papers he would put me on probation.’

‘What did you do then?’

The newspaper men looked up, the senators leaned forward, every eye was fastened upon the boy.

‘I went out and got some more papers and sold them till another policeman chased me up an alley and put his hand on his revolver and told me to stop. He took me to the courtroom and smacked me. The judge said nothing more, but sent for my father.’

Here the lieutenant governor rapped sharply for order, stopping an outburst of applause.

There were seven counts in the impeachment. A two-thirds vote was required to convict. On five of the counts a majority of the votes were for conviction; but the charge was not sustained on any count, and Dearth was permitted to resume his bench. The trial, however, served its purpose. The boy’s testimony alone sounded an effective and timely warning to many judges who were standing with members of the Horsethief Detective Association in raids on private homes without warrant or reason.

All the candidates for Stephenson’s mantle failed in some essential respect. Bossert had the title of Indiana Grand Dragon, but he was helpless in the face of an obligation to carry out Stephenson’s extravagant promises. He lacked Stephenson’s showman instinct.

Stephenson maintained an extensive suite of offices over a five-and-ten-cent store. There he kept all the state Klan records. Over his private office door was a sign promising death to bearers of evil tidings. Lined along the back of his desk was a collection of books on psychology. He called himself the master mass-psychologist of the world. But his chief inspiration was a small bronze bust of Napoleon. He had a fake telephone system and in the company of visitors whom he wished to impress held long mythical conferences with the President, members of the Cabinet, and industrial leaders in all parts of the country. His energy was astounding. He worked fourteen hours a day for weeks at a time.

Within the Klan, Stephenson organized a personal espionage system on the plan used within the army during the war. He had two spies in each precinct. They were rated as intelligence sergeants. Over them was a lieutenant, who was responsible to a captain. At the top of the pyramid was Field Marshal Stephenson. On several occasions he demonstrated that he could get a report on any man in the state within a few hours.

He had the women of the Klan organized under women leaders, one, a Quaker preacher, being particularly successful. The Klan woman’s auxiliary proper was known as the Kamelia. Through his own spy system and the ‘poison squads of gossiping women’ formed in the Kamelia, Stephenson could spread a rumor throughout the state in twenty-four hours.

When no second Stephenson rose to the emergency and Klan members refused to pay dues on the ground that promises had not been kept, the organization fell to pieces. It was estimated that there were fewer than 7000 paid-up members in the state on February 22, 1928, when, by decree of Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans, the Klan was unmasked and disbanded and its members ordered to join a new Evans group, the Knights of the Green Forest, pledged to help the country assimilate its alien population.

V

When the Klan first began to gather strength in Indiana, a few newspapers ridiculed it; but after they discovered that most of the leaders were earnest churchmen bent upon moral and political reform they were silent. It was in this silence that Stephenson recruited his army to war strength. He paid little attention to newspapers. Klan publicity-department statements about parades and other meetings which newspapers could verify through their own men were found to be so exaggerated that no attention was paid to them. No newspaper of any standing upheld the Klan cause.

The Indianapolis News, the largest newspaper in the state, supported anti-Klan candidates in the primary; and when John L. Duvall was nominated for mayor of Indianapolis on the Klan slate it supported the Democratic nominee, an avowed enemy of the Klan. Twenty members of the Indiana Republican Editorial Association rebelled against Stephenson’s rule of the party, and under the leadership of Thomas H. Adams, editor of the Vincennes Commercial, conducted an investigation and published charges exposing several Republican leaders as allies of Stephenson. The Indianapolis Times, a member of the ScrippsHoward syndicate, first published the bribery story that led to the indictment and trial of Governor Jackson.

Why did so many Hoosiers join the Klan? Many men have prayed for light to answer that question. Many persons joined the Klan in other states. In some states they went further than intimidation and resorted to physical violence. So it may be fairly assumed that a considerable proportion of the American people do hold the prejudices upon which the Klan was built. At least, they did in the decade following the war. Many Klansmen lacked both the social position and the money to join a standard lodge and gratify their yearning for distinction by wearing a plume and sword. Many found the hood and robe a convenient shelter for daydreams and a promise of supernatural power by night. Klan ceremonies, parades, and regalia fed the starving spirit of many nonconformist Protestants nursing a secret and undefined yearning for less scolding and more ritual in the church.

The average public-school graduate had no equipment to protect him from his own preacher when that worthy began to froth at the mouth about a Roman invasion, a new Holy War with the United States serving as the crucified victim. In the lower schools there is no instruction in the history of religious movements, and in the high schools the teachers, if not the textbooks, treat the Protestant Reformation as the real beginning of modern civilization. The school-history fiction of a perfect United States shining against a black cloud known as the rest of the world banded together to put down liberty is not fiction to students who study no further. Lack of modern-language study in country schools has created in the minds of many farmers and villagers an impression that a man who cannot understand English is a person of very inferior mentality. The social subordination of negroes starts in the schoolroom, where they occupy a few back seats in a roomful of white children and learn to keep out of the social and athletic affairs of the white children. The gradeschool graduate’s ideas about Jews comes from Protestant Sunday-School teachers, and the high-school graduate is familiar with only one Jew — Shylock.

’Drys’ went into the Klan to get some little help in their battle against home distilling and brewing, pastimes which have dismayed the prohibitionists since a war-excited Congress allowed numerous harried state politicians to pass the sumptuary liquor-law responsibility to the Federal Government.

Many preachers and not a few ministers went into the Klan not only to buy new Fords, and clothing for their children, but to breathe new life into expiring rural churches and arouse the crusading and sacrificial instincts of militant Christians. Precinct political workers joined to hasten their rise to job-holding stature in the city and county. State political leaders capitulated in self-defense. Thousands took the oath and paid their ten dollars without knowing that the Klan was anything more than a new American lodge, and certainly other thousands joined through fear and to keep peace with their neighbors.

The Klan gained more headway in Indiana than in neighboring states because it had in the person of Stephenson a leader who was a natural orator, an efficient organizer, and a fanatical salesman. Had Stephenson kept his senses; had he been above the tricky streak in his makeup which stimulated him to blame the President for his tardiness at his coronation, when he had come direct from his Indianapolis palace; had he been above fake telephone conversations and vague allusions to his long years of study in many universities, he might have given the strength of America’s prejudice against the Jew, the Catholic, the negro, and the alien resident a real test. He proved that the prejudice is there. He proved that it is — or was — so strong that it will yield a following to men whose pasts will not bear the most cursory examination; he proved that, under the lash of religious and racial hate, men of old American stock, living in a community essentially American by inheritance and development, will desert lifelong family, political party, lodge, and church teachings to line up with an apostle of hate, violence, bigotry, and night skulking.

The answer to the question why Indiana allowed the Klan to seize its government is in the record. The state went Klan because the Klan prejudice, strong here or weak there, is rampant in fully a tenth of Indiana’s white, Gentile, Protestant, native-born people.