When the past speaks, it’s wise to listen.
On a cool, blustery spring night in March, Timothy Egan stepped onto a storied stage to tell an Indiana tale. The story was drawn from his 2023 prizewinning and bestselling book, “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.”
Both Egan’s lecture and book focused on a piece of Indiana history many Hoosiers like to forget—or even pretend that it never happened.
A century ago, the KKK dominated the state. Klan members occupied the Indiana governor’s office, key mayors’ offices and the state legislature. They peopled the benches in courtrooms around the state and they almost monopolized Indiana’s congressional delegation.
They even formed their own semi-official police force, thousands of badge-holding members strong, that served to terrorize those with whom the Klan disagreed or of whom Klan members disapproved.
It was a dark time, a period in Hoosier history when all notions of law and decency seemed to crumble under the weight of mass cruelty.
Egan spoke at a time when those earlier infamies echo once more.
He came to Indiana from his home in the Pacific Northwest to deliver the 2025 Indianapolis Public Library Marian McFadden Lecture.
As he started his lecture, he joked that he wasn’t sure how the Hoosier state would welcome him after the book came out. He thought he might find his picture displayed like a wanted poster at the airport and elsewhere around Indianapolis.
The crowd packed into the Historic Walker Theatre in Madam Walker Legacy Center, though, is never anything other than warm and welcoming to Egan. Those gathered interrupt his lecture often with applause, some of it prolonged, all of it appreciative.
Context may play a role in the crowd’s response to the author.
Egan came to Indianapolis at a time when a president of the United States and his minions have begun saying they have the right to ignore judicial decisions and laws they don’t like. Their allies in Congress and in Statehouses across the land either sit mute or applaud these explorations of lawlessness.
And the president has deputized a private initiative by a man unvetted by anyone by a commander-in-chief whose attention to detail and respect for legal constraints are less than scrupulous.
Echoes upon echoes upon echoes.
Part of the power of Egan’s lecture is that it made explicit themes and comparisons that were implicit in his book.
He described how the KKK surged to prominence in the troubled days following World War I, when Americans were both scared and confused. Egan made clear that both Hoosiers and Americans were looking to blame others for the anxiety and insecurity that plagued them.
Enter D.C. Stephenson, an amoral, misogynist hustler out of Oklahoma who found his way to Evansville and decided he’d found a garden of rubes ripe for the plucking.
Egan described Stephenson—accurately—as a con man who took satisfaction in gulling those who followed and pleasure in treating women with enraged cruelty. He arranged to have between 65% and 70% of the KKK’s most lucrative revenue streams flow directly into his pocket, transforming himself into a multi-millionaire through this serial fleecing.
At the same time, he careened from assault to assault to assault upon women, unchecked by the police or the law, each attack escalating in brazenness and violence.
Does that sound like anyone operating these days?
It was one of the women Stephenson attacked who finally brought him down and ended the Klan’s reign.
Stephenson raped Madge Oberholtzer in 1925.
Actually, the word “rape,” awful as it is, doesn’t do justice to what Stephenson did to her. He bit her. He beat her. He tortured her.
Eventually, she died, but not before leaving behind a dying declaration that proved enough to convict him and stop the Klan cold.
It was a tremendous act of heroism on her part, one that may have saved both a state and a nation.
But it was a close thing.
A very close thing.
Egan’s book and his lecture remind us that the best parts of America are always fragile, always endangered.
A century ago, we Americans almost lost what we love most about this country, until a woman walked through hell to point the way back to what this country should be.
When the past speaks, it’s wise to listen.