He was the charismatic conman who invented himself out of vapor. His special gift was not in convincing followers that he would bring them to the Promised Land. It was in convincing them that he would restore their Promised Land and protect it from the pollution of infidels and lesser human beings. He roiled them into a powerful force, one that was fulfilling the aims of the Almighty. He would safeguard morality and clean out government corruption.
Behind his savior’s mask he was a degenerate. He was not merely louche. He was evil in bespoke suits and fancy cars. He sexually assaulted women at will and whim, and he bent politics and government to his purposes. He charmed and bribed white conservative Protestant clergy and generated much of his mass of support from their congregations. He diverted law and “justice” to his goal of domination. He was the law, he said. He aimed to be the U.S. president.
He sought power not to further America’s promise as imagined by the Founding Fathers, but to profit from it.
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He was David Curtis Stephenson, and 100 years ago to the decade he built and led the largest contingent of the Ku Klux Klan in the nation.  Known to his friends and associates as DC or simply Steve, he was born in Texas in 1891 and had little education. His early adult years were filled with itinerant travel across states and through a number of forgettable jobs. In 1920, when he was 29, he landed in Evansville, IN, where he began work in a retail coal company. It is said that by that time he had already married twice and had simply abandoned his wives.
It was in Evansville that his outsized ambition met its opportunity:Â the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan for the first time since Reconstruction in the American South following the Civil War.
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The 1920s were not simply “Roaring”. They were also a decade of nativistic nationalism, of inflamed racism and xenophobia, and of widespread anti-immigrant sentiment, reflected in a number of federal anti-immigration laws. These included the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. These laws excluded immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and from Japan. The former were excluded based principally upon immigrants’ religion, especially Catholics and Jews, who had emigrated to the United States in large numbers beginning in the 1880s. The latter were resisted on racial grounds.
Racism was further exacerbated in northern states by the Great Migration that began around 1910. Millions of black Americans migrated from the rural South to the industrialized cities of the North, seeking the better job prospects there while also fleeing the violent racism in the South during and following Reconstruction.
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This was fertile ground in the North for the regrowth of an organization based upon the principles of white supremacy and nationalism, and the new Klan organizations proudly declared “America First.” The effort to birth the Klan in the Northern states in the 1920s was based on an appeal to heartland values. It would be a Klan based on the purity of the family and the homilies of faith. As Timothy Egan writes in his excellent history, A Fever in the Heartland, “It would not be the (old) Klan of the whip and the sword, but the Klan of the hearth and the Lord.”1
And on this foundation the charismatic Stephenson proved to be a genius at recruiting and organizing members for the KKK, especially in Indiana. The Hoosier state, which had fought with the Union in the Civil War, was “the most Southern of the Northern States” in culture and politics, given its proportion of white southerners who had migrated there. It was colloquially known as “North Dixie.”2
After having helped to build the Klan in Evansville to more than 5400 men–23 percent of the native-born white men in the city–he moved his operations to Indianapolis, the state capitol, bringing his organizing efforts to the doorstep of the state’s government. Between July 1922 and July 1923, his network of recruiters drew almost 2000 new members a week to the Indiana KKK. By one estimate, its members in the state grew to 250,000, almost one-third of the white males in Indiana, by which time it had the largest state membership in the nation.  In late 1923 the Indiana Klan itself claimed 700,000 members.3 Nationwide, the new KKK grew to six million.
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During this period he was named Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan by the Imperial Wizard of the national KKK, Hiram Wesley Evans, and given responsibility for Klan recruitment in seven other Northern states. The Klan of the North came to dominate the KKK nationwide.  And Stephenson’s power in the organization began to rival, and eventually to oppose, Evans’ own. The KKK took over many city councils and a number of mayorships and police chiefs in Indiana’s cities and towns. Following the 1924 elections in the state, in Marion County–for which Indianapolis was the county seat–all but two of the major elected officials were Klan members.4 By 1925 over half of the state’s legislature were Klansmen or dependent on it for political and financial support, as was the Indiana Governor, Edward L. Jackson.
And in keeping with the Klan emphasis on maintaining the morality and “pure” blood of the white, Protestant family, women’s auxiliary KKK units were formed in the state5, one of whose missions was to drive Jewish businesses from the state capitol with boycotts. Also formed were local groups of Ku Klux Kiddies for children, Junior Ku Klux Klan for teen boys, Tri-K-Klubs for teen girls, and even “cradle clubs” for infants.
My mother recalled those days. In the mid-1920s she was an Irish American elementary school student in Terre Haute, IN, and she remembered being harassed by KKK children on the streets as she walked to her Catholic school in the center of the city. What she did not know at the time was that their parents in the KKK were working with their allies in the state legislature and governor’s office to pass a state law that would require all Indiana children to attend public schools, and that provided jail sentences for parents who tried to send their children to Catholic schools.6
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If DC Stephenson didn’t buy into the Klan’s message of family purity, morality and faith, he knew a profit opportunity when he saw one.  He took a percentage of every initiation fee his recruiters took from new members, as well as a portion of the prices they paid for their robes and hoods. He claimed later that he took today’s equivalent of at least $11.5 million from initiation fees alone. Egan puts it this way: “Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville–that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress–was brilliant. And true.”7
End Part I
- Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.  Viking, 2023, p. 25.[↩]
- Egan, p. 37.[↩]
- “Indiana Swayed Entirely By Klan,” The New York Times, Nov. 7, 1923, p. 15.[↩]
- Egan, p. 221.[↩]
- Known as the Queens of the Golden Mask. Egan, pp. 55-57.[↩]
- An effort that ultimately failed in the legislature.[↩]
- Egan, p. 338.[↩]
