Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland

Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland was recommended to us at a luncheon, where we gathered to celebrate the wedding of some dear friends. It was the summer of 2024 and we had been studying American and European fascism and authoritarianism for several months. We were seated with like-minded people, and the topic naturally came up. I try to act on recommendations, and the premise of Egan’s historical recounting sounded perfectly in line with our studies. We are ourselves Hoosiers, so hearing about the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Indiana in the 1920s was pertinent to every aspect. I was not prepared for how well-written, how gripping, or how traumatic the tale would be.

This is the story of how the Klan rose to power in America in the 1910s and 1920s on the back of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-black, white supremacist sentiment. By 1925, the Klan was everywhere and dominating state politics in many states, but especially in Indiana.  In fact, the man responsible to making the Klan’s presence in the North so extensive had become the most powerful man in Indiana and his eyes were set on the presidency of the whole nation.  It was not a pipe dream for him, either. With the Klan’s embedded power within Congress, this was a real possibility. That man was D.C. Stephenson, or at least that’s the name he adopted when he drifted into Indiana several years before.  Stephenson was vicious, crude, a bully, a racist, and a misogynist.  He had many times brutally abused women in his life, including his wives, but as the powerful often do, he escaped any kind of reckoning, keeping his victim’s silent through fear and power over the law enforcement. But when he brutalized one young woman in 1925, she and her family, along with an unbought prosecutor, took the remarkable steps to demand justice.  The trial changed the entire course of the Klan’s influence.  That’s the story that Egan artfully unfolds. 

As a book of history, A Fever in the Heartland is first rate.  It’s an easy read that is full of surprises (for me) and direct, powerful, recounting of the state of America.  Egan covers the history of the clan in deft strokes, doing an amazing job of bringing the times to life with sensitivity but without euphemisms.  Even as we spend time in the lives of Klan members, Egan always has the moral clarity to call their actions what they are—hateful, anti-democratic, self-interested, and repugnant.  I appreciated his balancing of an unimpassioned presentation of the facts as he knew them with the equally unimpassioned moral position of the horrors spurring the organization.  I walked away from the book with what felt like a full understanding of the times.  It is the kind of book that pulls you through even as you want to stop to ingest all the details so that you can recall them later.

If you listened to Rachel Maddow’s two seasons of Ultra, this book will be of especial interest to you.  The two narratives (along with others available to us in this age of podcasts and peoples’ histories) work together to build an understanding for how much of the 20^th century has been a struggle between the forces of authoritarian white supremacy and the those fighting for genuine democracy and equality.  This is the history I was never taught, as the American education system is too interested in the tale of American exceptionalism. The rotten fruits of the Trump administration were planted centuries ago, and the land has been tilled with fervor for more than 100 years.  This is a book that every Hoosier should read to understand the present moment, even though the events took place almost 100 years ago to the day.

The only thing I found dissatisfying about the book was the brief coverage of the Klan’s undoing that followed the trial that let to D.C. Stephenson’s incarceration and fall from power.  I realize that there are a lot of factors that play into something like a nationwide organizations crumbling, but I wanted more than the relief of knowing that the group was diminished.  It crumbles so quickly in the retelling that there is little to take away from it.  I would gladly read another 200 pages about all the bits and pieces that went into the Klan’s members shedding their robes and wearing their racism in other ways.  That was not the scope of this book, and I can’t blame Egan for not writing those additional 200 pages, but still I found myself disappointed in the denouement.

The book will be staying on my shelf because I will want to have this bit of history available to me to read again and from which to gather still more wisdom.