The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland

"Who is an American?" asked the Ku Klux Klan. It is a question that echoes as loudly today as it did in the early twentieth century. But who really joined the Klan? Were they "hillbillies, the Great Unteachables" as one journalist put it? It would be comforting to think so, but how then did they become one of the most powerful political forces in our nation's history?

In The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, renowned historian James H. Madison details the creation and reign of the infamous organization. Through the prism of their operations in Indiana and the Midwest, Madison explores the Klan's roots in respectable white protestant society. Convinced that America was heading in the wrong direction because of undesirable "un-American" elements, Klan members did not see themselves as bigoted racist extremists but as good Christian patriots joining proudly together in a righteous moral crusade.

The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland offers a detailed history of this powerful organization and examines how, through its use of intimidation, religious belief, and the ballot box, the ideals of Klan in the 1920s have on-going implications for America today.

Introduction
1. The Klan Arrives
2. The Dangers to America
3. To Hell in a Handbasket
4. The Politics of Mediocrity
5. Stephenson Goes Down
6. The Klan's Enemies Step Up
7. The Klan Returns
8. The Klan is Dead
Timeline
Bibliography: Learning More about the Ku Klux Klan

James H. Madison is author of Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana, Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II, and A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America. An award-winning teacher, Madison is the Thomas and Kathryn Miller Professor of History Emeritus, Indiana University Bloomington. The Midwestern History Association recently honored him with the Frederick Jackson Turner Lifetime Achievement Award.

By now, 100 years later, the story of the spell cast by the evil D.C. Stephenson over the good people of Indiana is familiar to anyone who knows the state's story.  But that's not the whole story, says historian James H. Madison in his revelatory new book, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. The whole story is even more uncomfortable.

Hard to take in, but easy to read due to his writing style, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, is a do-read. Madison's account of the Ku Klux Klan combines primary sourece material and original research with his clean, vivid and well researched writing. While lots of nonfiction by academics is, well, academic, Madison is monstrously absorbale.

In this tightly packed and well-written volume focused mostly on the second Klan, Madision provides a fast-paced analysis of how the Invisible Empire spread across the Hoosier State in the 1920s, becoming a symbol of good, solid Americanism for its many adherents and a symbol of fear and hatred for its myria of victims....The book deserves a wide readership.

In The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, James H. Madison, attempts, with great success, to peek underneath those white hoods to bring focus the people who were part of the Klan, why they joined, how they viewed themselves, and how the Klan, seemingly once dead, has hung on to continue to preach its reprehensible creed.