This week, we turn to non-fiction and events in a decade of U.S. history that is unknown to most Americans. The 1920’s were known for remarkable social change. In the wake of World War I, there was cultural exuberance, the first real skyscrapers, jazz age, flappers, the Charleston, and also prohibition. There was also a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and surprising to many, it came in the north. As award-winning journalist Timothy Egan writes in his remarkable new book to be released April 4th A Fever in the Heartland, the Klan held a lot of power in the state of Indiana. As a vicious, sadistic, charlatan, Eagan says the KKK leader David C. Stephenson encouraged millions in Indiana alone to join the Klan. Egan says one in three white men in the state, not to mention women and children, took the oath. And this in a state that had lost 25,000 Union soldiers in the Civil War just 50 years previous. Egan writes that Stephenson thought himself above the law - “I am the law” he declared. But his brutal treatment of one woman, largely unknown to history, Madge Oberholtzer, brought him down and began the disintegration of the Klan, not only in Indiana, but in the rest of the country. It’s a sobering story well told by Egan. One, we felt, worthy of attention by all of us.

Books mentioned in the podcast:

A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith by Timothy Egan

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan

Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan

The Good Rain by Timothy Egan

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion