Gabi's Review

Timothy Egan’s explosive new work, A Fever in the Heartland reveals how one malignant narcissist can powerfully influence civic and political life for his own ends. What might seem like a scarcely credible story is verified by 31 pages of source documents at the end of the book. Meticulously scrutinising diary entries, news reports and archival records, and weaving them into a narrative that defies belief, Egan has uncovered a remarkable and disturbing story. 

The book’s focus is Grand Dragon David C. Stephenson in Indiana: the central figure in this exposé of the Ku Klux Klan’s expansion across the American Midwest in the 1920s. Egan traces how African Americans seeking more profitable work in the North, and waves of European migration arriving in America after the First World War, offered the Klan perfect targets for frustrated white Protestants. Bribing judges, prosecutors and most significantly priests, racial purists armed with eugenics stoked fears of being replaced by blacks, Catholics and Jews. Members of the Klan, in search of so-called moral purity, justified their moral obscenity by claiming that such ‘foreigners’ needed to be eradicated to defend white women and the sanctity of the church.

Stephenson was funded by extortion and embezzlement. His ostentatious wealth and control of law officials made him untouchable; as he himself proclaimed: “I am the law.” In his ultimate bid to control congress, he persistently avoided being apprehended for monstrous crimes of sexual predation. The subtitle of the book, The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, points to the unravelling of Stephenson’s plots, but I won’t spoil how this happened. 

Egan doesn’t preach to the reader, and his use of the first-person is designed to bring the characters into sharper relief rather than make himself the centre of the story. Importantly, too, his book clearly has relevance for more recent periods of history: the propaganda tactics employed by the Nazis, and the threat to democracy posed by America’s imminent presidential election. Admirers of revisionist history in a style reminiscent of writer David Grann and people concerned about the state of global politics simply can’t afford to miss this informative, chilling and highly readable book.

Publishers Reviews

From the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author, the "powerful... gripping" (The New York Times Book Review) story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

A Fever in the Heartland is an instant New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction, an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Review of Books Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year and a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist. 

"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country-and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." - Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile

"Riveting...Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer." -Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A master class in the tools of narrative nonfiction." -The Washington Post

A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he'd become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows - their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman - Madge Oberholtzer - who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A Fever in the Heartland marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.