History's hateful echo in Ohio: Century-old Klan resurgence resonates today • Ohio Capital Journal (2024)

• Civil Rights
• History

He was a crooked, gaslighting sad*st who a jury found guilty of sexually attacking a woman he’d chewed so savagely that the wounds he inflicted helped to kill her. He led a white-nationalist drive so successful that it could have landed him in the White House. And much of what he did happened right here in Ohio.

It’s important during Black History Month to highlight the struggles and successes of giants and martyrs who helped clear away barriers for all who came behind them. But as the commemoration draws to an end today, it’s also important to remember just how high and hateful those barriers really were, if we ever really knew that in the first place.

Fever

Fighting after 1915 to keep the most forbidding barriers in place was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. It was led by one D.C. Stephenson, a man who came north seemingly from nowhere, set up shop on the Indiana portion of the Ohio River and began a rise that appalled much of the country while taking the rest of it by storm.

Author Timothy Egan paints a terrifying portrait of the utterly amoral Stephenson in his 2023 book “A fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.”

Stephenson was actually born in Texas, but he lied so relentlessly about his background — and everything else — that by the time he showed up in Evansville in 1920, he could have been from anywhere.

“His new life in Evansville was a dash and a dodge, just a few steps ahead of the multiple lives he’d left behind,” Egan writes. “He’d knocked around from town to town, selling linotype parts, stock in a coal company, but mostly selling himself. He could talk a dog off a meat wagon, as they said in those parts.

“His smile was toothy and his cheeks dimpled, his eyes blazed, his shoes sparkled and his clothing was impeccable. He liked heavy food, a good cigar and many a drink. He looked prosperous, even if he wasn’t. He sounded educated, an incontinent user of five-dollar words even if the college he attended changed with each telling. But the truth of his background didn’t matter; his swagger was convincing.”

Stephenson was, in other words, both a fraud and a born salesman. But he was also something more and much more sinister.

As he maneuvered his way into one of the top two slots in the Klan and the recruiter across a vast swath of the Midwest, Stephenson made himself rich by skimming off a hefty portion of the money members paid for dues and robes. And he hid the grift behind a veneer of respectability.

Stephenson made common cause with the Anti-Saloon League and other Christian conservatives while being such a drunkard that he at one point required medical treatment. He was also a bigamist, rapist and murderer.

Stephenson was hardly alone in his rank hypocrisy. Egan described how time and again, Klansmen paid off Protestant clergy to get them to spread the Klan message of hate from the pulpit. They dressed it up as “100% Americanism,” but through a mix of fear and greed, those erstwhile messengers of Jesus espoused a creed antithetical to any actual Americanism or any true Christianity.

Fear in a changing nation

Never one for humility, Stephenson boasted that he was the world’s “foremost mass psychologist.” And he understood that he wasn’t selling people anything new so much as appealing to something very old: a fear of the “other” that was already present in so many.

Stephenson’s new Klan continued the relentless, violent persecution of Black people that its earlier, Southern forebear did, with many highly racialized lynchings taking place through the 1920s.

But Stephenson expanded the circle of hate to encompass those he said were responsible for the country’s “national decline.” They included beer-brewing, wine-drinking immigrants, independent young women known as flappers, Mexicans, Chinese, Catholics and of course Jews — who were supposedly masterminding the “national decline” because… something.

Of course, the claim of decline was laughable. The economic engine that was the United States had just brought an end to the Great War and it was by far the richest nation in the world — and strong immigration played a vital role fueling that growth.

But the country was changing. Women were voting and smoking, dark-complexioned people who spoke scary-sounding languages were crowding the cities, kids were running around in cars and they were wild about music created by Black people.

By the time he was ensconced in a Klan-owned mansion in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis in 1923, Stephenson was manipulating those anxieties like the master he was. People joined out of a fear of change or a fear of the Klan — extortion, to put it bluntly. For example, some farmers were advised that joining was a way to protect their livestock from a malady known as “bullet in the brain.”

Stephenson, known to his henchmen as “Steve,” was just as effective using carrots and clubs to dominate politicians and businessmen — especially in Indiana. By 1925, a Klan slate promising to keep Black children out of most city schools and to officially segregate Indianapolis neighborhoods swept to victory, giving the benighted city the nickname “Klanopolis.”

Metastasis

The power of Stephenson and the Klan radiated far beyond the Hoosier State and especially into Ohio.

Old clippings from The Columbus Dispatch show that as the organization rose in the Buckeye State, the paper had a hard time deciding whether that was a good or bad thing.

A brief published on May 23, 1921 described a Klan raid on an Akron home in which members cut the beard off of a man who was likely Jewish or foreign-born — or both — “after an alleged assault on his aged and crippled wife.”

But less than three months later, on Aug. 5, 1921, the paper published a brief extolling the group as a positive good.

“The Ku Klux Klan is a patriotic order, which stands for law enforcement and true Americanism,” it said, credulously.

As Klan chapters formed across the state, there was pushback. Ohio had done as much as any state to win the Civil War, and some veterans’ organizations were adamantly opposed to an organization that sought to undo the second founding of the nation that had come at the cost of so much blood.

On Oct. 2, 1921, the Rev. G.W. Hopewell, a member of a “colored” Ohio post of the American Legion, made a powerful speech against the Klan at the state convention. It was so well received that he was elected to be a delegate to the national convention in Kansas City.

“The resolutions committee in a report condemned all societies discriminating against race, color or religion ‘under the guise of 100% Americanism,'” the Dispatch story said.

But the fire continued to rage.

Some may want to forget it now. But racism was then so sweeping and so ingrained that even the president of Harvard University, A. Lawrence Lowell, embraced the pseudoscience of eugenics and sought to limit the numbers of Jews admitted to his university.So it’s not surprising that humbler people who felt more buffeted and bewildered by change would turn to racist nonsense to explain a world that scared the crap out of them.

Impunity

In Ohio, the predatory Klan leader Stephenson received a disconcerting welcome.

“Ohio was a second home for Steve during the warm months,” Egan wrote. “He’d purchase a showcase at Buckeye Lake, where many of the wealthy and powerful of the state passed their summers. He could count on Ohio judges, prosecutors, politicians as friends of the order. Youngstown, 170 miles from the site of the police encounter, was about to elect a Klan mayor.”

Egan was referring to a June 1923 incident just outside Columbus that foreshadowed what would lead to Stephenson’s downfall a few years later.

Two motorcycle-mounted Franklin County sheriff’s deputies stopped by a car parked alongside a dark, lonely road. In the back seat, they found Stephenson with his pants down and a young woman with her dress up.

Stephenson, who maintained a public persona of Christian virtue, at first refused to identify himself. Deputies only let him go when he pulled out a badge showing he was a deputy with the Horse Thief Detective Association.

Horses were mostly gone from midwestern roads in 1923. But Stephenson had built the detective association into a paramilitary force in Indiana. He swelled its ranks to 14,000 and used his troops to entrench his power much as Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts did in contemporary Italy.

Stephenson escaped accountability on the outskirts of Columbus only to sin again. On July 12, 1923, even he was surprised that 75,000 showed up for a Klan rally at Buckeye Lake that was ridiculously known as a Klonklave. It was the largest Klan gathering in Ohio history.

“Three days later, Stephenson stumbled down his Buckeye Lake compound to a cottage that housed some of the women who worked for him,” Egan writes. “It was 3:30 a.m. He was naked but for his underpants and so drunk he could hardly stand. He barged inside and went to the bedroom of his stenographer, a 19-year-old from Indianapolis who had been an employee since April. She jumped out of bed, terrified at the sight of the glassy-eyed Klansman stumbling toward her.

“He grabbed the girl and tried to kiss her. He was her boss; she was told when she was hired that she should never cross the Old Man. He threw her on the bed and lowered his underwear. As he tried to pin the woman, she squirmed out of his grasp.”

Stephenson desisted when she threatened to scream. But Egan noted that it was at least his second attempted rape in two weeks — and the second for which he’d suffered no consequences.

To the contrary, just a few weeks later, Stephenson was hosting Ohio Gov. A. Victor Donahey and other high officials on his 98-foot yacht, Reomar II, as it sailed out of its home port in Toledo.

Another attack

Stephenson continued to consolidate his wealth and power — including by extorting Black, Jewish and Catholic business owners to pay up or face Klan boycotts.

His control over Indiana state government was so complete that he was able to force through a bill ordering a health-education curriculum. It was so specific that only he could control the content and publication of the textbook from which it would be taught.

But the woman to whom he dangled authorship of that text proved to be Steve’s downfall.

Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old who had formerly been a student at Butler College, which was then in the Indianapolis suburb of Irvington near Stephenson’s Klan compound. She was known as lively and independent. She’d made, for example, a cross-country driving trip with a female friend at a time when rural roads were nothing like they are now and attitudes about what women could properly do on their own were even more primitive.

Stephenson was the most important man in Indiana and when she came to his attention and he dangled the book project, Oberholtzer took a wary interest.

After the two had become more familiar, a Stephenson aide made a nighttime telephone call to Oberholtzer’s parents’ Irvington home on March 15, 1925. The aide demanded that Madge come to the Klan compound for some sort of emergency. After some resistance, Oberholtzer got into a car driven by a Klan flunky.

At the compound, an intoxicated Stephenson ordered his henchmen to force Oberholtzer to take several drinks that turned out to be drugged. They then drove to Indianapolis’s Union Station and boarded a train to Chicago.

In a berth once the train was underway, Stephenson forced himself on Madge.

“He bit her neck, her face, her breasts — a burst of savagery,” Egan wrote. “Blood flowed out. He chewed her tongue and spit out blood. He chewed her breasts again. He moved on to her legs, her ankles, mutilating her body. The pain was excruciating.”

Stephenson and his party disembarked in Hammond, short of the Illinois state line. He knew he could control Indiana state law enforcement. But if he carried Oberholzer into Illinois, he would be subject to federal jurisdiction and Steve didn’t know if he could control that.

Courage and comeuppance

As Stephenson ate and slept in a Hammond hotel, Oberholtzer demanded to be taken to a drug store so she could get medicine for her wounds. Unbeknownst to her Klan escort she also bought bichloride of mercury, a poison used in the well-publicized death of a silent film star in 1920. Madge took six of the pills.

When Stephenson learned what Oberholtzer had done, he was furious and ordered an aide to get a car. On the way back to Indianapolis, Madge changed her mind about suicide and begged to be taken to a hospital.

Stephenson refused unless Oberholtzer agreed to marry him, thus giving him a way around a rape charge. There was no such crime as marital rape in Indiana until the 1990s.

A disgusted, suffering Oberholtzer doggedly refused, so Stephenson drove her back to the Klan compound. He told her it would be futile to report what he’d done to her.

“What’s done is done,” Steve said. “I am the law and the power.”

Back at her parents’ home, Madge Oberholtzer clung to life for nearly a month. And as she did, she dictated a painstaking account of what she suffered at the hands of Grand Dragon Stephenson, the most powerful man in Indiana.

In a state where Stephenson controlled most public offices from the governor down to sheriffs and judges, lawyers and prosecutors were understandably reluctant to take up Oberholtzer’s cause. But several did, anyway.

In a trial held months later just to the North in Noblesville, prosecutors were able to use Oberholtzer’s dying declaration to damn Stephenson from beyond the grave. And doctors testified that her death wasn’t just a suicide from the poison she took — a severe infection from the bites Steve had inflicted played an important role in killing her.

In the end, an all-male jury of stolid farmers convicted Stephenson of second-degree murder on Nov. 14, 1925. He was sentenced to life in prison two days later.

Worry and hope

Surely reinforcing prosecutors and jurors against the phalanx of threats they faced was a large group of women who attended court day after day in support of Oberholtzer’s cause.

“Here was a crime that strikes at the very foundations of our life as Christian people,” reads a statement by the Irvington Women’s Club that Egan quotes in his book. “If we permit perpetrators of such acts to go unpunished it will show that our ideals have become obscured or that our sense of justice has been blunted.”

The women’s advocacy and their attendance at the trial were brave in their own right. But they surely also bespeak a long history of abuse that mostly went unreported and unpunished, as Stephenson’s many other depredations had.

In the end, the horror and thievery exposed at trial — and in the Klan more broadly — irreparably harmed a gang that tried to pretend that it was protecting Christianity and “Americanism.” And Stephenson himself brought down Indiana Gov. Ed Jackson when that official refused to pardon the Klansman.

But during the trial, as Stephenson’s monumental cruelty was being exposed to the world, many refused to believe what they read or heard. In jail, the grand dragon was flooded with letters of support and gifts of food. Those supporters included Stephenson’s jailer, Hamilton County Sheriff Charles Goodling, a “lawman” who continued his fealty in the face of Stephenson’s utter lawlessness.

It’s worrying to think that a monster such as Stephenson achieved unaccountable power in states like Indiana and Ohio, which sent thousands to die in a war against his kind. It’s even more disturbing that such a man had a plausible path to the American presidency.

But it’s inspiring to think that principled citizens — including humble farmers, downtrodden minorities, and a woman who was uncowed even when facing death — were able, even if just barely, to turn the tide against Stephenson and the fear and hatred he hid behind.