[Note to readers:Â Part I of this essay can be found here.]
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Mark Twain isn’t the only close observer to have noted that history has its own cycles, especially of human folly. The philosopher George Santayana wrote the famous line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.” The social theorist Karl Marx put it this way: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The famed American attorney Clarence Darrow said that, “History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”
One hundred years after the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, American history is again rhyming. Sometimes in precise iambic pentameter, sometimes in shambolic doggerel.
No one since DC Stephenson in the 1920s has so mimicked and pursued the Indiana Klan leader’s recognition that “he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman”1 than has Donald J. Trump.
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Of course his record demonstrates that Trump has never been an honest businessman. And his ability to bilk his followers and to milk personal and family fortunes from political power puts Stephenson’s scheming to shame.
But more to the point is that the second Trump Administration stamped 2025 with some of the Indiana Klan’s greatest hates and ugliest subversions. And history may find in this history a good measure of irony, if not farce. The beginning of the end of the Indiana Klan–and its national organization–came in 1925. Our future may record that the beginning of the end of Trumpism occurred precisely 100 years later. And that Indiana played an important part in both demises.
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Like Stephenson, Trump has placed himself above the law. One hundred years ago, the Klan leader openly claimed that in Indiana, he was the law. And he had the local judges, police chiefs, and politicians–all the way to the US Congress–to prove it. But Trump’s rampant lawlessness makes Stephenson’s look quaint. When it comes to law, while the latter was an arrogant scoundrel, our current president is a narcissistic traitor. While Stephenson paid for his political officials, Trump has wrought something of a nonviolent putsch against the nation’s democratic form of government.
Consider only the following shortlist. The American president has radically continued the long-running defenestration of the Congress,2 but in ways that none of his predecessors could ever have imagined.
He has snatched from the national legislature its power to impose tariffs on the country’s trading partners and the power of the purse to fund–or defund–policies that fit his–and only his–political and financial interests. He has unlawfully invaded American cities with federal military troops on the transparent lie that crime rates were increasing in them, when in fact they have been decreasing.
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He has ignored both immigration law, judicial process and the US Constitution in pursuing his draconian policies to incarcerate and deport immigrants of color, whether in the country legally or illegally. He has even adapted KKK tactics in sending into the nation’s cities masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in unmarked vehicles who terrorize immigrant communities, every now and then shooting and even killing individuals, including the occasional citizen, as in Minneapolis this week.
Without justification or legal authority, Trump’s Administration has forced out hundreds of thousands of federal employees charged with carrying out many thousands of laws protecting citizens’ rights and interests, including their health and safety.
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Trump has converted the U.S. Department of Justice into an overt Department of Retribution and Protectionism. It has begun patently bogus investigations into and filed criminal charges against former prosecutors and political opponents who had investigated his crimes associated with his first Administration and the January 6, 2021, attempted coup that he fomented following his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, on his first day in office in 2025, he granted clemency (pardons and commutations) to all of the almost 1600 rioters charged in that January 6 attack on the Capitol, including those who had assaulted and seriously injured police officers trying to protect it.
Trump’s chief advisor in his severe anti-immigration and other racist policies, Stephen Miller, has said out loud the quiet part on the Administration’s view of law. On a 2017 CBS news program, he asserted that “The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” In 2025 he argued that Trump possesses “plenary authority” (effectively, absolute power) to deploy the US military in American cities despite any objections from state governors, mayors, or court orders.
DC Stephenson would have greatly envied that authoritarian, lawless view.
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It was a murder in Indiana in 1925 that marked the beginning of the end of the Klan’s control in that state and in the nation. The victim was a 28-year-old white woman from Indianapolis, Madge Oberholtzer. The perpetrator was a conman, serial liar, a shameless braggart and repeat sexual predator. He was DC Stephenson, the second most powerful KKK leader in the nation.
After efforts to court her, beginning on March 15, 2025, Stephenson kidnaped, raped and sadistically tortured Madge. She died a month later, on April 14.
In the political landscape of Indiana at the time, Stephenson did not believe he would be held accountable for her death. Not given Klan control of law enforcement and judges in so much of the state. He was sufficiently confident of his immunity that he had the dying woman delivered to her parents’ home with the wholly implausible cover story that she had been in a car accident.
Despite being indicted for murder in Indianapolis, based largely on the dying declaration of Madge Oberholtzer as to what Stephenson and his men had done to her, Stephenson’s confidence was not misplaced. His team of seven defense lawyers had succeeded in having the trial moved from the capital city to the small town of Noblesville, IN, an enclave of some 5000 residents that was heavily infiltrated by the KKK. Its city attorney, the chief of the fire department, four members of the town council, and roughly 35 percent of the native-born white males in its county were Klan members. Noblesville was home to some ten companies of the Klan’s private enforcement personnel, and its foremost preacher was the local KKK’s chaplain.3 Stephenson’s fate would be decided by 12 white men from the Noblesville area, three of whom were likely KKK members.4
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But the good people of Indiana stood up against the evil now so displayed before them in all of its brutality. Despite death threats to himself and his family, the Marion County (Indianapolis) prosecutor–slender, youthful Will Remy–had a stout character. He had singularly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Klan at an earlier gathering of the county’s major elected political leaders,5 and he convinced a grand jury of local citizens to indict Stephenson for murder, along with his two Klan accomplices in the crimes. At this, the formidable wall of fear and silence that had sustained the Indiana Klan and its political backers was broken.
And through the breach rushed a flood of Indiana women to claim justice for Madge. These included other victims of the Klan leader’s kidnapping and violent sexual assaults who offered testimony to the prosecutor. Soon after Madge’s death, 500 women rallied in Indianapolis against bail for her murderer. They turned inside-out the Indiana Klan’s hypocritical emphasis on the sanctity of the family, women’s virtue, and religious faith. As one urged at the rally, “We should remind fathers and mothers of daughters that they have something at stake in this trial.”6
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The trial of DC Stephenson in the small town of Nobleville was a national sensation, covered by major and minor media outlets from around the country.  Evidence and testimony were presented over five weeks in mid-Fall, 1925, during which females seeking justice for Madge predominated among the 176 seats in the courtroom. Remy and his team presented evidence of her kidnapping, brutalization and rape. The defense team worked to sully the victim’s reputation and to deny that any crimes had been committed. The relationship was consensual and Madge was not the naive innocent that the prosecutors had portrayed, they asserted, offering testimonly likely paid for by Stephenson’s KKK lieutenants.
The all-male jury began its deliberations on the afternoon of November 14. Journalists covering the trail settled in for what they imagined would be a days-long set of deliberations. But the jury came back later the same afternoon, delivering the verdict that Stephenson was guilty of the second degree murder of Madge Oberholtzer. Two days later, the judge sentenced him to life in the Indiana State Prison.
It was the beginning of the end of the KKK. Many members in Indiana dropped out of the Klan from Stephenson’s hypocrisy. By the end of the 1920s, national membership in the KKK had fallen below 100,000.7 In 1939 the national leadership of the Klan was passed to a veterinarian from Terre Haute, IN.8 Five years later, during the war against Nazism, he formally disbanded the national Ku Klux Klan.
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The history of the Indiana Klan and its leader echoes today in the US, 100 years later.  After a series of strongman moves in its first year to erase the nation’s constitutional system of the rule of law, Trump and his administration now find themselves facing weakening support for and rising resistance to their designs and policies. One indicator is Trump’s steadily declining approval ratings in polls during the first year of his second term. In January 2026, aggregated poll results show that 58% now disapprove of his performance in office while only 39% approve.
Much of the change in the political climate is due to the president’s failures to reduce price inflation and to produce more job opportunities in the economy, promises that he rode to his 2024 re-election to a second term. This complaint includes extraordinary inflation in health care insurance threatened by Republican resistance to continuing subsidies for it. Another factor has been the invasion of American cities by the US military and the thuggish activities of the masked ICE agents snatching Americans’ neighbors and workers of color off the streets and from workplaces and schools. The unlawful military sinking of small boats that the Administration claims (but has not proved) carry illegal drugs, and its invasion of Venezuela and the taking of its president and his wife, have even awakened a few of the typically quiescent Republican lawmakers in Washington to a new resistance to Trump’s warmaking.
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But the major breach in the wall of silence and fear that had long protected Trump and his allies has been brought–again–by women.  These are the numerous victims of the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s long-running international operation of a sex trafficking ring, in which Donald Trump has long been suspected of involvement at some level. In 2025 these strong women, some only girls when they were sexually abused by Epstein and his friends, have organized and given shattering voice to the call for justice for the countless victims.
This past November the urgency of their call compelled the Congress to pass virtually unanimously 9 the Epstein Files Transparency Act that required the Department of Justice to release all of its files regarding investigations of the pedophilia and sex trafficking of Epstein and his wealthy and powerful friends. Even the president’s supine acolytes in the GOP felt compelled to support the law in the face of the horrors described by the victims.
Predictably Trump’s Justice Department has flagrantly violated the new law, releasing only initial tranches of heavily redacted10 files.  It has clearly done so to protect the interests–and perhaps the criminal culpability–of the US president. But the cracks in his apparent invincibility were now visible as the matter rolled into 2026.
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And the good people of the state of Indiana again stood up.  Against Trump’s efforts to gerrymander Republican-controlled states’ legislative districts essentially to steal seats in Congress in the 2026 elections, only in Indiana’s legislature did Republicans join their Democratic colleagues to defeat the plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts.
Last month the Washington Post gave its inaugural “State of the Year” award to Indiana for its principled resistance to the president’s pressure to load the dice for the coming elections.
- 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. 338.[↩]
- The Congress has long progressively abdicated pieces of its Constitutional authorities to the president, especially in connection with its war-making responsibilities. The current Trump Administration has converted this long-term trend into a Constitutional catastrophe.[↩]
- Egan, pp. 239-240.[↩]
- Egan, p. 260.[↩]
- All but two of whom were Klansmen.[↩]
- Egan, p. 232.[↩]
- Egan, p. 350-351.[↩]
- My home town.[↩]
- The combined vote in the House and Senate was 527-1.[↩]
- Without the required explanations for the redactions.[↩]
