A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
View on GoodreadsTimothy Egan's narrative history of the 1920s second Klan — particularly its Indiana stronghold under D.C. Stephenson — and the rape-and-murder of Madge Oberholtzer whose deathbed testimony brought Stephenson down and broke the movement's mainstream momentum.
Core ideas
- The second Klan was not a Southern, rural backwater phenomenon — it was a Midwestern, urban, politically dominant movement at its peak, with millions of members and control of state governments in Indiana, Oregon, Colorado, and elsewhere.
- The Klan's enemies in this iteration were Catholics, immigrants, and Jews as much as Black Americans — the white-Protestant-American-nationalism package that Stephenson's machine sold was the prototype for later 20th-century fusions.
- The Stephenson trial and Oberholtzer's testimony are the book's narrative heart — the personal courage that ended a near-takeover of American politics within a few years of its peak.
Published2023
Pages432
ISBN9780735225268
ReadFeb 2025
