A Fever In The Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

A Fever In The Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

Read by Timothy Egan

10 hours, 29 minutes

Published April 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. 

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he'd become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows - their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman - Madge Oberholtzer - who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees. 

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.

My Thoughts: 

Every once in a while my friend passes along The New York Times' Book Review sections, and my to-be-read list grows rapidly. This is one of those books I wouldn't have heard about were it not for NYT and, consequently, I would never have learned about this dark period in the history of the U.S. Midwest. 

What Didn't Work For Me: 

• Egan does a fine job of reading his book...except that he's prone to take breathes or pauses at strange places in sentences, say between a first and last name. It's not a very big deal but it was one of those things that really started to annoy me. 
• Occasionally I felt like names were repeated where it was unnecessary, as though Egan was afraid readers would have forgotten who a particular person was. 

What I Liked About This Book: 

• You all know how much I LOVE to learn about something entirely new to me in my reading and in A Fever In The Heartland, Egan introduces me to new names in U.S. history who played a tremendously important role in their lifetimes, but whose names have disappeared over time. Understandably, in this case, as the country tried to forget how close it had come to allowing a hate group to rule not just towns and counties but states and the entire country. I had no idea how vast and how powerful the Ku Klux Klan was in the Midwest in the 1920's, that Indiana had a greater percentage of the state with Klan members than any other state in the country. In all honesty, I wasn't entirely unaware that the Klan had been in the Midwest at that time and who they had attacked - The Big Guy's great-grandfather was a leader in the county in Nebraska they lived in at the time. 
• For the most part, I really liked the way Egan structured the book, introducing the events early on that would ultimately lead to Stephenson's downfall then retreating to give readers the background to the characters and the time. 
• This is an exceedingly timely book, given how closely the events of the time seem to mirror the events of our own - corruption, a charismatic leader who convinces people to join his cause, root hatred that was fanned by leaders into a movement that framed the values of entire cities and states, even though it wasn't the popular opinion of the majority. 

Would I Recommend It: 

• Yes - it's a time in history that is little discussed but important to remember and a terrific cautionary tale. Egan purports that it's 100% factual (conversations being reported directly as they were recorded at the time) but it's a dynamic, propulsive read. 
• A word of caution - you'll know going in that the Klan was an extremely violent group. But Stephenson was also an extremely brutal man and Egan pulls no punches in describing the things that Stephenson did to women.