'Fever in the Heartland' links Klan history to MAGA movement
BY TIMOTHY KELLY
August 26, 2023
... A Fever in the Heartland draws powerful and uncomfortable parallels between the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the rise of the MAGA movement in the past decade ...
... Egan .... focuses intently on a particular Klan organizer with unsettling parallels to some of today's right-wing leaders ...
... the state with the highest percentage of Klan members and the state in which the Klan exercised the most complete control over state and local governments was actually Indiana ...
... Stephenson was a charismatic salesman whose oratorical and organizational skills ballooned the Klan's membership throughout the northern states. He sold a Klan that focused intently on cleansing American society of moral ills and those whom he blamed for fostering those ills: Catholics, Jews and Blacks. He exhorted Klan recruits and members to prohibit alcohol's sale and consumption and to police their neighbors' sexual activities ...
Republican leaders feared criticizing the Klan in public and refused to denounce their extralegal activities ...
https://www.ncronline.org/culture/book-reviews/fever-heartland-links-klan-history-maga-movement
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Ku Klux Klan marching down Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C, 1926
Madge Oberholtzer lived with her parents just down the street from Stephenson's mansion. She graduated from Butler College and exemplified the 1920s "new woman" in many ways. She did not necessarily support the Klan's aims, but she worried that Republican budget cuts imperiled her state librarian job and that only Stephenson might save it. She knew well that he controlled the state legislature and the governor.
The price Oberholtzer had to pay was to go on a number of dinner dates with Stephenson and then, at his insistence, come to his house late one night. Stephenson professed his love for Oberholtzer and forced her to accompany him and two bodyguards on a train headed for Chicago. When she resisted, he raped her on the train. Stephenson also beat her and bit her body in multiple places. In the midst of this multiple-day ordeal, she managed to consume poison.
She suffered tremendous pain, feared that Stephenson would escape responsibility and sought to end her life. Stephenson eventually brought her home, denied any knowledge of her struggles and accused her angry father of trying to extort thousands of dollars from him with a "fictional" story of rape. Stephenson explained to his supporters that his political enemies invented the charges to undermine his important work of restoring America to its greatness.
But Madge Oberholtzer prevailed.
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