READING THE WORST Hard Time, Egan's book about the Dust Bowl, was a personal landmark for me; my parents grew up in the Dust Bowl, and Egan's book gave me a clearer idea than I had ever gotten before, even from their own stories, of what their childhood had been like.
This book did not have the same personal relevance for me, but considering it was about events of about one hundred years ago, it felt painfully relevant to our moment.
The Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist vigilante outfit of the Reconstruction years, was revived in 1915 in the wake of D. W. Griffiths' popular and influential film Birth of a Nation (which, among other things, celebrated the exploits of the Reconstruction era Klan). By the mid-1920s, stoked by a variety of anxieties about "others" (Blacks moving north, Jews, Catholics, women's suffrage), membership had exploded, and the Klan had started to flex some serious political muscle.
Egan focuses on Indiana, where a particularly energetic Klan organizer and demagogue, D. C. Stephenson, had such a talent for provoking and channeling the fear and ressentiment of midwestern white Protestants that Indiana's local law enforcement, municipal government, courts, and state legislature were all crawling with Klan members. Stephenson saw himself, with some justification, as the most powerful man in the state. He could even tell the governor what to do.
Besides being a talented organizer and effective speaker, Stephenson was a serial rapist and sexual abuser, crimes he could commit with a degree of impunity, given his connections. However, Madge Oberholtzer, a woman he kidnapped, raped, and assaulted, lived long enough (despite poisoning herself in desperation) to tell her story. Her parents, friends, and lawyers were foresighted enough to have her deathbed testimony witnessed and notarized, and that testimony was ruled admissible in the prosecution of Stephenson for what he did to her. In a verdict that surprised the whole country, he was convicted.
Because Egan focuses so closely on two characters, Stephenson the Caligula wannabe and the brave though grievously injured Madge, I kept thinking what a natural candidate for a film or television series A Fever in the Heartland is. I was thinking even more, though, of how much D. C. Stephenson--arrogant, entitled, vicious, dishonest, drunk on his own power, seemingly beyond the reach of the law--reminded me of a certain DJT, and what a sweet and fitting thing it was that justice at long last caught up with him.