Here's Where It Gets Interesting - A Fever in the Heartland with Timothy Egan

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize—winning reporter, lifelong journalist, and the author of ten books, most recently the highly acclaimed A Pilgrimage to Eternity and The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. 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. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Timothy Egan Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. So glad that you're here today because I just finished reading a book and I could not wait to speak to the author about it. It is called A Fever in the Heartland, the Ku Klux Klan's plot to take over America and the woman who stopped them. And when I tell you what Timothy Egan has written, reads like a compelling novel, you have got to find out what happened. That is the truth. So cannot wait to dive in to this conversation. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you, Tim, for being here today. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

We have to set the stage. This is a book about a woman who brought down the KKK. Yeah. Often history is about great men or great women who do great things and because they have powerful armies behind them or they have governments behind them or they have corporations behind them. This is a woman who was a school teacher who worked for a lending library in the state of Indiana who was really a, quote, nobody, as her villain said. And she goes up against, just because an accident has thrust her into this, she goes up against one of the most powerful monsters in American history. People that I think a lot of folks have never heard of named D.C. Stevenson. He was the grand dragon of the largest realm of the Ku Klux Klan the world had ever seen. In the state of Indiana in 1925, one in three white males swore an oath to the Ku Klux Klan, and they were on their way.

I mean, they had 75 members of the United States Congress follow them, a dozen senators, at least four governors. Now, when you're a sworn Klan, you put your hand on a Bible and you take an oath to, quote, forever uphold white supremacy. The Klan of the 1920s was very different than the earlier Klan, too. They hated Jews. They hated immigrants. They hated Catholics, really hated Catholics, because a lot of them were Irish and Italian and Southern European. So they associated them with otherness. It's this one woman, Madge Oberholzer, to get to your question, who ultimately

brings down the Klan at its peak at a point where, and I'm not exaggerating, they had the White House within their sight. They were marching across the land. There was a Klan from sea to sea. And so she's one of these, I don't want to call her an accident of history, but she's one of these women who gets written out of history, but deserves her place because of what she did. history, but deserves her place because of what she did. Your book is very compellingly written. Narrative nonfiction is a challenging genre to do well, in part because you want to be faithful to the truth, and the truth does not always provide the most ideal narrative.

You know, it would be great if we could just find a letter that said what I wanted to say so that you could directly quote somebody. And I noticed right away, just in the beginning of the book, you said this. It had been barely four years since the Reborn clan moved across the Ohio River and spread north. But now crosses burned all over the state. They burned on the lawns of Black families. They burned near Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues. They burned across the street from police stations. They burned near cornfields at the edge of small towns.

They burned after Sunday services and Independence Day parades and Christmas week sleigh rides. Torching an oversized cross was theater of intimidation, leaping flames on the night horizon, but also a thrilling bond of brotherhood. Hoosiers were joiners. And in 1925, if you were not a knight of the KKK, If you were not a knight of the KKK, you did not belong. And I was, that made like the, it's like makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I want to talk a little bit about the rebirth of the KKK. Because Americans tend to think that it has always been a powerful organization.

And there was a time period post-Civil War when the actions of the federal government really tamped down a lot of their activities. But then, like weeds planted underground, those seeds began to grow again. And we see this rebirth of Klan activity at the beginning of the 20th century. What was it that allowed the Klan to roar back? So I'll tell you what happened. The Klan was destroyed in the late 1860s, early 1870s, mainly by General Grant, who'd won the war for the North, of course, and then he was president. And suddenly, 37% of the adult population of the South, which had been enslaved, 37% of the adult population of the South, which had been enslaved, are citizens. And it's a reaction to these people who were owned as human property. Suddenly, they have all the rights of normal Americans. So the Klan formed in resistance to this huge sea change in American history. And they were horrible. They branded foreheads of white teachers who were down there trying to help African Americans. They raped and pillaged and plundered. They were just awful. They were a terror group. And Grant declared war against them.

He destroyed them. So by the 1870s, they were gone. They dismantled. They burned their records and they threw more than 2,000 of them in jail. They were a done organization. So suddenly, 50 years later, as you know, they reappear like weeds. You call them weeds coming out of the ground. These weeds were not destroyed. What happened? Well, the face of America was changing. We were at the peak of immigration. And where were these immigrants coming from? They weren't coming from the Nordic countries. They weren't coming from Britain. They were coming from Southern Europe. They were coming from Sicily, which had had a horrible earthquake and sent 800,000 people to America in a 10-year period. They were coming from Eastern Europe,

Ukraine. At the same time, 800,000 African-American soldiers have come back from serving abroad in World War I, and they've just put their lives on the line for the U.S., and they expect to be treated as citizens. But they are not. There's Jim Crow South, which operates throughout the country. Then a third thing is going on. Remember, it's the 1920s. Flappers. Women have the vote for the first time.

They're out there. They're not only voting, they're owning property. They're running for office. They're going to speakeasies. They're liberated. They're dancing. It's this explosion of rights suddenly for women. So the Klan of the 20s is a reaction to those three things going on.

And they form in the golden age of fraternal organizations. It becomes the largest fraternal organization in the United States, six million members by one estimate. And it's a fraternal organization not dedicated to just the usual silly rituals that people have, but dedicated to just the usual silly rituals that people have, but dedicated to white supremacy. And they state that. You have to swear out an oath to God and for the rest of your life that you will support white supremacy. They did awful things, but on the surface, they were seemingly normal. When you look at the history of Klan activity in places like, say, Tulsa during the Tulsa Race Massacre, they had separate

programs for women and children to go to. It was some kind of church organization where it's like, and now we're going to have the women's group over here. The children can go to this special program so we can begin to indoctrinate them from a young age. I think a lot of Americans have this picture of the Klan being evil, ne'er-do-well men, meeting under cover of darkness, wearing hoods around a fire. And in many cases, that was true. But these were also average, normal members of the community that were judges, police officers, bankers, teachers in some cases. These were the people who lived next door to you.

Correct. These are the people who held their communities together. And you touched on something really important, that they would go to these clan dens and they would have these rituals. They're much like Sunday school. I mean, they had a manual that was like a Bible. They would follow it. And the children would be like going to Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts. They put on their little Ku Klux Kitties, except for what they were being indoctrinated with was hate. It was under the guise of Americanism, as they call

it. The all-purpose term for the clan of the 20s was, they said, we want things to be 100% American. purpose term for the clan of the 20s was they said, we want things to be 100% American. So you'd see ads in the local paper saying the Ford dealer only works with 100% Americans, or this grocery store sells to only 100% Americans. And so again, you have this fascinating dichotomy going on of seemingly normal, I call it the Mayberry clan, you know, the barbershop quartet clan, but working a parallel thing of absolute hatred of those Americans, you know, who were Catholic or Jewish or African American, or, you know, in the case of women, you know, showing their sensuality. One of the big things they did was raid speakeasies. They were certified by the cops to go do this. And they would go into places where people were playing cards on cops to go do this. And they would go into

places where people were playing cards on Sunday and break it up. So they had a morality part of it too. So you have this really strange surface level normalcy, music man like quality, good old Indiana. And then this other side of it, which is the dark, what they're really up to part of it. Yeah. The music man is such an interesting thing to think about because it was set in a time and place where the Klan would have been very active. Absolutely. And Professor Hill is like Gary Indiana. There's a whole song, Gary, Indiana, and he is playing on these, what today we would talk about as a culture war of, we got trouble. We got trouble right here in River City. That's right.

And it starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for cool, right? Very good. So one of the first people to read this book when it was in a manuscript form said, oh my God, this is the music man with hate. A charismatic con man shows up in town. And really that's what happened. This guy just was a drifter who's DC Stevenson, shows up out of nowhere. Within four years, he's completely running the state. And that's not me saying, the Indianapolis papers all said that. They said, this is a Klan republic. And there was a music man like quality. And how did he do it? He was charismatic. But also, we got trouble right here. It's to say, things are happening that we need to get control of. So the Klan wasn't just about racism or anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism, they also had a social culture war component.

They were, on the surface, the most anti-alcohol organization outside of the Muslim world. And prohibition was going on. So the threat to America in their mind, to their members, every Klan rally mentioned this, were the bootleggers, were the immigrants who were fermenting wine in their basements, or the Germans, German-Americans were a big target, who were making beer in their basements, or women in their 20s who were going to speakeasies. So all these reactions to prohibition were what stirred up the culture war and what stirred up the trouble in River City. And every little town in the Midwest would have a rally about, we know so-and-so is a bootlegger living down the street.

Let's go down and burn a cross on his lawn and threaten to run him out of town if he doesn't change his ways. We know so-and-so, this woman is unfaithful to her husband, and we're going to give you warning. So they had the hatred part, but then they also had this huge reaction to the changes of the 1920s. So this is a hundred years ago, a century from the time we live in now. And it was one of the biggest periods of change ever. So they had a kind of a two-part campaign against the changes happening in America in the 1920s. And this is the thing that makes, you know, of course, we can look back on the clan of this

time period. And of course, the clan still exists, but the clan of this, you know, when it was particularly powerful, we can look back on it now and be like, what? You know, like it seems so shocking to us. But at the time, it seemed like because they trafficked in fear, it became a perceived safety issue for people at the time who felt like, yeah, my way of life is under attack. My way of life that benefits me that I think is moral and correct, my way of life is being threatened by these other groups. Christianity is under attack. Alcohol conception, which I believe is immoral. They're trying to corrupt society with these films and these loose women and this alcohol. My way of life is being threatened. And so when you perceive

that you're under threat or you're under attack, so to speak, it seems like, and I'm not condoning this, I'm not at all saying that this was a good idea or the right way to think, but it seemed like a safer choice to some people to make to align themselves with the Klan because they were going to protect them from all of these perceived outside invaders. Yeah, that's a spot on observation and the record proves that. Here's what happened. There was a brave crusading, I mentioned earlier, Irish American lawyer named Patrick O'Donnell. His parents had come from Ireland where the British could rule Ireland for 800 years. And he saw what happens when our culture is tried to be wiped out. So he saw these attacks going against Catholics, Blacks, and Jews in the Midwest.

He founded a paper called Tolerance. And what Tolerance did was they would get the names from people they had on working on the inside of them of people who'd recently sworn an oath to the Klan. And they printed these names. And he thought this would be shocking to people because, oh my God, there's the banker. There's the minister whose church I go to. There's the woman who runs the Girl Scout group. There's the guy who delivers my groceries. They all appeared on this list. And he thought this will shame them because the Klan was still a secret organization.

I mean, the reason they wore hoods and they were called the Invisible Empire because they said in their manuals, we were much better and more powerful when no one can see our faces. So they were a masked organization. So his secret was, I'll unmask them. I'll print the names and that will blow

them up because we'll see who they are. Well, what happened? It backfired. Just to your point, it had the opposite effect of people saying, oh, if all those right thinking people belong to the clan, maybe I better join. Because all these, it was sort of validating to see all these good, solid citizens who you knew. They were your neighbors. And you put your finger on exactly the other thing, which was fear of others and fear of change. I want America to be the way I think it should be, which is, I mean, mostly white Protestant. And it was changing.

Immigrants were bringing Roman Catholicism. Here's the great irony. We've touched on this before. While they're professing this, the leaders, the handful of clan leaders were bootleggers, sexual predators, make DC Stevens case, sexual predators. He was a raging alcoholic, criminals. I mean, they did the exact opposite of what they professed, which is kind of the rule of thumb a lot of cases when you have groups like this. Yeah. So true.

Watch what I say and not what I do. Exactly. This is another thing that I think a lot of Americans fail to understand is the deputization of the Klan. Can you talk about what that means and what the effects of that were? To me, again, all of this was a surprise to me, by the way. I, like most Americans, thought the 20s were basically the Flapper and the Great Gaspier. And I knew the Klan was around, but I knew about the Tulsa Massacre. But I didn't really know the extent to which they penetrated the society of the North.

And they had like a three-pronged thing that allowed them to penetrate. They operated out of evangelical churches and they bribed ministers. And they were open about this later in the interviews that were done later. They would say, yeah, we'd go into a church, we'd give the minister 50 bucks, maybe sometimes 75 bucks, and then we'd have him in our pocket for the next couple of years. And the minister would preach the virtues of the clan. So they bribed enough evangelical ministers who were also against alcohol and against the, quote, perceived immorality. So they were sort of common cause on that. And I don't want to broad brush all religion because a lot of the opponents of the clan were religious leaders. And Christian and Catholic and

Jewish fought them and said, no, this is not what Christianity is about. This is the opposite of Christianity. So I don't want people to think I'm saying this is a uniquely Christian group, but they operated out of Christian churches, okay? The second thing was the family. We talked about that. The children, mothers, they penetrated the family. And then to your point about deputization, there were 30,000 men who were actively deputized. They were to be the enforcers of Klan virtue. They weren't sheriff's deputies. They weren't actual cops, but they had badges and they had arrest powers and they worked for the Ku Klux Klan. So they were this sort of vigilante arm of government and the Klan. And they they mainly harassed women who were dancing at speakeasies.

They would stop cars. They'd see lovers kissing in the dark, and they'd go break them up because this was an offense to have two teenagers kissing in a car. Any businesses that were open, mainly Jewish businesses that were open on a Sunday, they would force them to close. So they were this enforcement arm that was legally deputized until Indiana changed the law in the late 1930s, that these people were legally deputized to arrest and harass the Klan's enemies. It really is shocking when you understand the full scope of their power. They had the power of the police. They had the power of social pressure. And then they had the actual power of the government.

Yeah. No, it's one thing to have the first two things you mentioned, but then to have the actual power of government. And that was their goal. Under D.C. Stevenson, they said, look, why should we just be a fraternal organization? Why don't we go for real power? Let's go where the action is. Let's go to the state house. And their goal was the White House. They controlled the 1924 conventions so much that Time Magazine put the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Evans, on their cover and said that the Klan was the single biggest force at both of the 1924 conventions. So their goal was, they were close.

They thought they were within five years of their ultimate control, which would have been a Klansman in the White House. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me?

Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. The subtitle of your book is The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America

and the Woman Who stopped them. So was their plot to take over America largely to infiltrate all the branches of government and to sort of install or elect Klan-friendly people? Was that the plot? It was that, and they had it in the 1924 elections. I mentioned their control at both political conventions where they were so strong, they were able to veto a simple resolution that was put on the floors that said, we condemn any organization that goes against American values of free worship and free assembly and free speech. They were able to veto that because it was directed at the Klan.

And then they elected all these governors, a governor in Oregon, a governor in Colorado, a governor in Indiana, mayors all across the state. Four United States senators swore an oath to the Ku Klux Klan, 75 members of Congress. Evans, their national leader, said, our goal is 20 million Klansmen. And they thought they had to march down Washington, D.C. in 1925. 50,000 Klansmen marched openly, openly. They're not hiding in the shadows. Marched openly down the Capitol. From the Capitol building to the Treasury building,

the Washington Post said it was one of the largest demonstrations D.C. had ever seen. They got an office in D.C. with 75 paid members, just like a national lobby would have right now. The goal was to continue to go from 75 members of Congress to have a majority of members of Congress, to go from having a Klan sympathetic president, like say Warren Harding, to having an actual Klansman as president. And what would they do then? Well, they wanted to change the constitution. So how do you change the Constitution? You get a majority in Congress to pass an amendment, and then you send it to the states.

They wanted to change it to diminish rights of African Americans who'd been granted it through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments after the Civil War. To basically put the Jim Crow laws of the South, make them universal. They wanted to outlaw certain religions or make them not able to worship in public. Our First Amendment guarantees free worship of the God of your choice. They wanted to change that. They said, we are a 100% Christian nation, even though it doesn't say that anywhere in the Constitution. So they were absolutely a white Christian nationalist organization. Yes. Now we hear that term thrown around a lot today because you hear about certain white

Christian nationalists. And I hope I'm correct in saying this. They seem to be a fringe group because we are a society of many different faiths and many different people. So when you hear white Christian nationalism now, you think of it as, again, a largely fringe group. But at the time, they thought of themselves as a majority. 90% of Americans were white Christians, and they wanted to carry that over to make it the law of the land, that white Christianity is the law of the land. Now, that's not in the Constitution.

It says nothing about religion. It does not mention except for to say Congress shall make no law establishing a religion. And that was a reaction to the Brits. I mean, I did a book on Irish history, and I realized part of where this came from was that the Brits insisted that Irish Catholics practice Anglicism, which is the Protestant religion of the King. And so when our constitution was written, we said, we're not going to establish a religion, but the Klan was a very specific, and it was in all their statements, all their written platforms, that we're going to change the constitution. We have to, it'll be a white Christian group.

All right. I want to get to the second portion of the subtitle of your book, which is The Woman Who Stopped Them. And as is so often true, women, minority groups have either been intentionally written out of history or excluded from narratives because the victors write the memos, right? The victors write down what happened. And if it wasn't directly impacting them, they didn't write it down where they intentionally wanted to obscure the involvement of somebody who didn't fit what they thought should be the hero of the story. So let's, first of all, set the stage for who this woman is and what does it mean that she stopped the Klan's plot to take over America? I try to make a case in this book that this one

woman, Madge Oberholzer, did almost single-handedly bring down the mighty Ku Klux Klan. So she was a woman who lived in Irvington, Indiana, which is a lovely suburb of Indianapolis, So she was a woman who lived in Irvington, Indiana, which is a lovely suburb of Indianapolis, lived with her parents. She was somewhat of a liberated woman. I mean, she went her own way. She liked to party. She had a couple of boyfriends.

She liked to travel. She went on a cross-country trip in America before we had highways. She was an intelligent woman, kind of a woman of the age. And the state was cutting her job. She worked for the state lending library. And the only person she thought who could save her job was the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, D.C. Stevenson. Why? Because he controlled the state. He had a boiler room operation.

A law did not get passed unless D.C. Stevenson approved of it. So that brings these two forces together, Madge Oberholzer and the Grand Dragon of the Klan. Now, I'm going to somewhat spoil the story here. It goes against my writerly instincts, but a horrible thing happens. D.C. Stevenson is a sexual predator and a monster. D.C. Stevenson is a sexual predator and a monster. And though his clan preaches the sexual purity of women and protecting women from immorality, he rapes her. And he not only rapes her, but he claws at her with his teeth.

He's somewhat cannibalistic. His awfulness is just out of control. So he, on this train ride, he kidnaps her, rapes her, and claws her with his teeth. And she's left nearly for dead. She lives for 29 days, 29 days. And it's a big, big story. People realize that, you know, something has happened to this lovely woman. And women start to rally at this Butler College in Indianapolis where she'd gone. They start to rally behind her.

She lingers in and out of death because she has these infections all throughout her body from where he chewed her. She had also taken a dose of poison because she didn't want her mother to be shamed by the rape. In the middle of taking this poison, she realized she wanted to live. So she tried to throw up the poison. So she lives for 29 days. Just before she dies, she swears out a deathbed story of what happened. She tells the story of the most powerful man in Indiana and what he did to her. And that sets up a trial by the only prosecutor in Indianapolis, the only public official, I should say, who was not in the control of the Klan, a guy named William Remy.

He's a World War I vet. He despised the Klan and what they had done to his beloved state. So he brings charges against the Grand Dragon. Stephen says, oh, you can't touch me. He said, I am the law. That's what everyone heard him say. I am the law. So Madge's words from beyond the grave are brought to this trial.

And it's her words that ultimately bring him down. And it's a sensational trial. It's like the Scopes Monkey Trial, which is the evolution trial, which happened in the same year. Reporters across the nation are covering it. And what they're seeing is that this clan of virtue, this clan of Christianity, this clan of purity and homespun values is run by a rapist and a drunk and a bootlegger and a monster. And that there are other people in the midst of the Klan who are just as awful, that they're the opposite of what they profess. So this sensational trial brought to flight by the words of Madge Oberholzer,

who's 28 years old and a single woman, are what finally opened the eyes of most Americans. Klan membership craters right at the end of this trial, just collapses because they see the hypocrisy, they see the evilness of what these people truly are. So she's the woman, as I said, who stopped them. She didn't set out to stop them. I mean, many people had tried. You had this tolerance group run by Patrick O'Donnell.

You had rabbis and African-Americans and Catholics who'd formed an American unity group together. You had leading newspapers across the country run exposés. You had the NAACP, which broke with the Republican Party over this issue and thereafter voted Democratic up until the present day in presidential elections because of this. All of these major forces couldn't stop the Klan. What stopped them was one woman from Irvington, Indiana, Madge Oberholzer. I want people to read your book, so I'm not going to get into exactly what happens to D.C. Stevenson and what happens as a result of the trial, what happens, all of the things that

happen to Madge. People just have to read this story. It is so compelling. I know that people are going to read this book, and it's going to be the type of book that they are going to be like, I'm sorry, I cannot watch Netflix with you now. I need to read this book and it's going to be the type of book that they are going to be like, I'm sorry, I cannot watch Netflix with you now. I need to read this. So I won't spoil the ending. But it is such a poignant and in many ways heartbreaking, but also very, very bittersweet ending to this story because what her courage does is unmask the clan. It unmasks them for who they really are. And people are able to see more clearly exactly who they were in bed with. In the way that group tolerance tried to unmask them by revealing those names, that didn't really have much effect.

As I mentioned earlier, that had an opposite effect. But what Madge Obholzer did to the unmasking was, as you said, was to show their true character, that to show that they were the opposite of what they professed to be, and to show that rather than protecting women, they were rapists. They were people who attacked women. So yes, I mean, her voice from beyond the grave, because again, she died and her words were recorded and that's what carried the way in this sensational trial, the trial of the century in Indiana.

That had more power. And it's worth noting that sometimes a single person telling the truth can have more power than all the institutions that were brought to bear against them. Now, I play a little bit of what if. What if Madge Oberholzer hadn't done this thing? I think it's very likely the Klan would have made a run for the White House. Would they have won? I can't say that. But they were absolutely ascendant, ascendant.

They were going upwards. That march in D.C. with the 50,000 people, they were at the peak of their power. And there was seemingly nothing that could stop them. There weren't that many voices outside of the ones I mentioned who were speaking out against them. So you play this game of what if, and I think we would be looking at an entirely different country if she hadn't stopped them. Now, there's one more thing we haven't talked about, which is part of the Klan's platform, and that was forced sterilization. They were big on eugenics, and they wanted to create a sort of perfect American.

So, they would have these better baby contests at state fairs where they would give ribbons, like they would give out ribbons to a pig. If the baby looked, had shiny blue eyes and was perfect looking and no blacks need apply, no immigrants need apply. And then they passed these laws starting in Indiana, where the Klan was in control of the state, to, by force of law, sterilize a whole series of so-called undesirables. In parts of the West, that would include gay people. It was people who were busted for drinking or thieves or petty crimes. And they would forever take away their right to have children. And 30 states passed forced sterilization laws based on the one that the Klan pioneered in Indiana. And later Nazi Germany, when they built their eugenics program and had their forced sterilization law, said the model was the one that the Klan promoted in the United States. These veins of hatred, if you think of like veins running underground, they're always there in American history. Sometimes they're prevalent, sometimes they're not visible, but they seem to just pop up every now and then. The 20s was one of those times when and we're seeing a little bit of it now again. It just kind of is always there.

And important to understand so that we can choose differently, so that we don't get sucked in by a culture of fear as people in the 1920s in places like Indiana did. So we don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. And fear is the right word. We talked about that earlier. What is this all about? And people have tried to analyze, why did this grow? Why did this come so big? Fear is the one word. It was fear of others and fear of others who seemed different from the majority. a day. I think people are going to take so much away, including this idea that one person's actions mean something. You always hear when you're growing up as a little kid, a good teacher will tell you, you could make a difference. And history proves this time and time again. In this case, all the king's horses and all the king's men, meaning all these institutions, couldn't stop the clan, but one person without power could. Thank you for being here.

Thank you. I love the conversation. Oh my goodness. I could have talked to Tim forever. You have got to read A Fever in the Heartland if you are interested in US history, if you're interested in stories that you have never heard before, and he's just a fantastic writer. This book sucked me in immediately. You can find A Fever in the Heartland wherever books are sold. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon. you