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A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND
By: Timothy Egan
The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
Viking
April 2023
On Sale: April 4, 2023
Featuring: Madge Oberholtzer
432 pages
ISBN: 0735225265
EAN: 9780735225268
Kindle: B0B5SP91VY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Political
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.
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