Timothy Egan’s new book describes the Prohibition-era tale of a power-crazed Klan leader and the woman, Madge Oberholtzer, that helped to bring him — and the KKK — down.
Drugged, abducted and raped, she had also been brutally tortured.
David C. Stephenson was the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana’s Ku Klux Klan — and he also harbored presidential ambitions.A serial adulterer and sexual predator, he studied the speeches of Benito Mussolini, and considered the fascist Italian prime minister his mentor, chiefly because he understood what made people hate others. “The Klan owned the state,” Egan writes, “and Stephenson owned the Klan.
As Egan writes: “The crowd could not know that their illustrious leader was a drunk and a fraud, a wife-beater and a sex predator, a serial liar and an unfettered braggart, a bootlegger and a blackmailer.”Hyriam Wesley Evans was the Imperial Wizard of the KKK from 1922 to 1939.When he met Madge Oberholtzer at the Indiana governor’s inaugural ball, he assumed she was just another in his long line of conquests.
Later, she would take a handful of highly toxic bi-chloride of mercury tablets. While she failed to take her life, she became dangerously ill. When Oberholtzer’s family attorney, Asa Smith, quizzed Stephenson about the attack, he denied everything, but accepted it had been a drunken guest at one of his house parties who was guilty of the attack and, as a gesture, he would give the family $5,000 compensation.
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