A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

When white-robed riders first appeared in the night shortly after the end of the Civil War, they were seen as ghosts of the dead Confederacy come back to haunt their enemies. As the robes become part of the Klan mystique, they represented secrecy. Part of the Klan’s allure was elite membership in a secret society, one that included its own passwords, rituals, and initiation. Hiding behind robes and hoods became a way to demonstrate membership in a select society while at the same time hiding one’s identity to avoid legal repercussions. The masks function also as a sort of terrifying costume: Black communities—and later, Jewish, Catholic, and immigrant communities—came to associate the masks with terror and death. Only later, under Stephenson’s leadership, did the Klan gain enough legitimacy for its members to lift their hoods and expose their faces to the world.

The whiteness of the robes also symbolizes purity, or the lack of stain (or color) from “lesser” races. The homogeneity of the robes acts as a unifying visual symbol, a uniform of the initiated. Since the Klan advertises itself as a community of the like-minded, that similar identity is reflected in the similarity of the costume. Often emblazoned with the other Klan symbol—the cross—the robes give Klan members a sense of belonging and of conformity, the opposite of diversity.

Madge Oberholtzer’s dying words, faithfully recorded by District Attorney Remy, became the prosecution’s most compelling evidence against Stephenson. She described—with intimate detail—her abduction, rape, and violent physical abuse. Although the defense argued that the statement was hearsay, the judge ultimately allowed her words to reach the ears of the jury and generate the intended pathos. Rather than an upstanding leader of a noble organization, Stephenson was now a hypocritical and vicious criminal. Oberholtzer’s words embody her steadfast devotion to a cause: to serve justice upon a man who spent his life avoiding it. Even while lingering on the verge of death, she had the fortitude to dictate—and double-check—her traumatic experience. In the 1920s, sexual assault crimes were often not prosecuted or were seen as the fault of the victim. A public admission of sexual assault could just as easily bring shame on the family of the victim as a conviction for the perpetrator. Still, Oberholtzer risked all of that to convict a man who had done this before and would likely do it again. In a case that defense attorneys believed would come down to he said/she said, Oberholtzer’s statement appealed to an all-male jury’s desire to preserve a young woman’s “virtue”—a patriarchal sentiment, but one that also believes a young woman’s virtue cannot be taken from her by force.