A Fever In The Heartland

Adult nonfiction 

     "On Thanksgiving night in 1915, fifty years after the close of the Civil War, Simmons and fifteen other men clambered up the granite monolith of Stone Mountain in Georgia.  They built an altar on which they laid a Bible, an American flag, and a sword.  The men set fire to a cross and shouted to the heavens an oath of allegiance to the Invisible Empire of a new age.  The Ku Klux Klan had risen, Simmons proclaimed, 'awakened from a slumber of half a century.'"

     The image most of us carry of the roaring 20s involves hair bobbed flappers in skimpy dresses, their sheiks, and speakeasies with secret phrases required for admission  because prohibition was at least officially the law of the land.  That would be like mistaking the Kardashians' media feed for 2023 American reality.  For every privileged teen or young adult flinging conventions to the winds there were scores of people emerging from the double trauma of an unprecedented worldwide pandemic and an equally unprecedented global war and desperately seeking a return to the security of normalcy...

     ...as well as scapegoats on whom to blame their misfortunes.  At that point in American history there were plenty.  Eugenics was in ascendancy.  Whites were being continually warned that their pure 100% American blood was in danger of being corrupted by an influx of "undesirables": Blacks, immigrants from "inferior" nations, Catholics, and Jews.  While some race warriors were all out lynchers, others followed a strategy of preventing them from reproducing.  State approved forcible sterilization laws led to the Supreme Court nationalizing the heinous practice in its 1937 Buck v Bell, a decision that inspired Hitler and his underlings as revealed in the Nuremberg Trials.

     And, as Timothy Egan tells us in A Fever In The Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot To Take Over America, And The Woman Who Stopped Them, there was a group ready to channel and exploit this fear and anger.  Thomas Dixon Jr. was born at the tail end of the Civil War and was probably brought up with the narrative of the lost cause.  He was horrified by seeing Uncle Tom's Cabin portrayed on stage and set out to avenge the South with The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan which was made into a blockbuster silent movie by D. W. Griffith.

     William J. Simmons, an itinerant minister, had a father who had been a member of the original Klan.  The movie had inspired him to  try to recreate the group.  He was one of the group who had climbed Stone Mountain.  He, in fact, was the one who had proclaimed the KKK "awakened".  

     Those who would reawaken the slumbering  organization were birthing a hate group far more dangerous than it was in its original incarnation when it consisted of well off Confederate worshippers terrorizing, torturing, and killing all they wanted to eliminate or at least keep "in their place."

     "The way to win over the Heartland was with a wholesome Klan, a Klan of family and faith and Midwestern values.  It would not be the Klan of the whip and the sword, but the Klan of the hearth and the Lord.  'It's a clean organization,' said Huffington, 'standing for the uplift and protection of untainted Americanism.'"

     It was a Klan that grew to include chapters for women and children (Ku Klux Kiddies in miniature robes and hoods).  It was a group that included law officers, clergy representing an array of protestant denominations, and legislators at various levels of government.  In fact they used their clout to get members elected to achieve their goals.  In fact they envisioned a Klan president.

     In a highly readable and engaging narrative (that toward the end is as suspenseful as any fiction chiller) Egan brings to life a Klan that encompassed the nation, sometimes having more membership in the North than the South, the very colorful personalities that shepherded it, the factors in the nation that made it possible, if not inevitable, and the ultimate act of courage that led to its downfall.

     Although it adds a great deal of clarity to a less than glorious chapter of American history, I see A Fever In The Heartland as even more of a cautionary tale for our times and beyond.  If we look at history as cyclical rather than a series of dots on a time line it would seem that we have come full circle back to the world of the 1920s.  We're seeking stability after a once in a century pandemic.  We are experiencing the biggest wealth gap since guess when with all but the top percentages (and the politicians in their pockets) leading lives of increased precariousness.  We have people in high places stoking fears about Blacks, Muslims, Jewish people, Latinx people, immigrants, and anyone who isn't totally CIShetero; warning white supremacists that they could become a minority in their "own" country; and trying to ban any books and curriculum that aren't totally white washed.

     You know what they say about people who can't or won't learn from the lessons of history.

Jules Hathaway 

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