• A • A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year • A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist "With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country--and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." --Erik Larson, author of “Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” -- A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan''s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them. 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....

Autorentext

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the author of nine other books, including the New York Times bestsellers A Fever in the Heartland and The Immortal Irishman. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.

Klappentext

****NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • A Chicago Review of Books Best Book of the Year • A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year • A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist

"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile

“Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

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.

Leseprobe
1.

Birth and Death of the Klan

1866-1872

When white-sheeted nightriders first appeared in the dark Southern night, many people thought they were ghosts. That was the idea: the souls of those who'd died for a republic of slaveholders had returned from their graves. They were out for vengeance, and they were invisible. They burned houses and churches, stole crops and food, dragged men from their farms and whipped them until they fell, ripped teachers from schoolhouses and branded their foreheads, raped women in front of their children, and shot their husbands at point-blank range. During rampages, they often displayed skeletal hands from beneath their robes, rattled chains, or removed fake heads-all to further the scare of a spectral and invincible force. In daylight, they vanished. The morning after a raid, a victim might come across the man who had torched his barn, the clerk at the mercantile store, and know nothing of his role in the nocturnal horror. But they were not ghosts. The hooded horsemen were part of the unmoored mass of defeated Confederate soldiers, more than half a million men who'd surrendered on the condition that they not "take up arms against the United States." Though conquered, they were free to return home, free to farm and bank and own property, eventually free to vote and hold office. For the most part, traitors were not tried.

In early 1866, six of those rebel veterans met in Pulaski, in Middle Tennessee a few miles north of the Alabama border, to form a secret club. The market town of 2,000 people was named for a Catholic immigrant from Poland who'd fought for the Americans against the British. Before the Civil War, almost half the county was enslaved. Now they walked the streets-freedmen and freedwomen. They attended schools, held worship services, and made plans to vote. President Lincoln had established a Freedmen's Bureau to help people who'd been held in bondage become people with tools to make a living on their own. His generals had offered reparations-forty acres and a mule, carved out of land seized from more than 70,000 slaveholders. But his successor, Andrew Johnson, had overturned the order just a few months after Lincoln was assassinated. The task of peace, as Walt Whitman had prophesied, would be more difficult than the war itself.

Two of the young men gathered in Pulaski had been Confederate officers. Two were lawyers. One was a newspaper editor. One was a cotton broker. They were adrift, bored, and bitter, chafing at new life in the South after four million enslaved people had been freed, and would soon make up 36 percent of the citizen population. The Greek word kuklos, representing a circle, was offered as a name. Klan was an alliterative pairing of the first word, and an echo of the clans to which the Old World ancestors of these Scots-Irish Protestants had belonged. A costume came together: a conical top to make the wearer look much taller, a white mask with…