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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes graphic discussions of racism, violence motivated by racism, alcohol addiction, suicide, domestic violence, and multiple acts of sexual assault, including rape.

If Stephenson’s rise to power is indicative of one thing, it’s that memories are short. A mere 50 years after Ulysses Grant all but destroyed the first incarnation of the Klan, Stephenson, Evans, and others realized that the seeds of anger and fear that first gave rise to the Klan in a small Tennessee town had only lain dormant. In response to the loss of the Civil War and in the face of great social change that followed, the South had spent the last half century disenfranchising Black voters and perpetuating stereotypes about them. As the 1920s represented a new era of change and modernism took hold, it only took only a spark to rekindle the flaming crosses and spread a new wave of terror through Black and immigrant communities.

Now, a century later, history repeats once again, as rhetoric similar to that which rekindled the Klan movement begins anew. In 1924, Georgia Governor Clifford Walker opined, “We receive at our ports of immigration an ignorant and disreputable omnium-gatherum of scorbutic and vicious spawn” (xviii).