This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Always a popular author with our library patrons, today I’m recommending the latest work from Timothy Egan, Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. An NPR Best Book of the Year for 2023, as well as a Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction and a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist, this book is a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.
The Roaring Twenties was a decade of flappers, prohibition, jazz music, economic prosperity—and the modern resurgence of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy and the South, but the Heartland and the West. And the man who set in motion their takeover of these 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 KKK out of the shadows—their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches and 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 Stephenson’s influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman—Madge Oberholtzer—who would reveal those cruelties he kept secret, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.
A meticulous researcher and skilled storyteller, Timothy Egan has once again crafted a title that is a true master class in narrative nonfiction and perfect for history buffs and true crime fans alike. Highly readable and disturbingly riveting, this book is a must-read!
Check out Fever in the Heartland and other meaningful works of nonfiction like it at the Sioux City Public Library.
