KU KLUX KLAN: Gentlemen from Indiana

The Democrats have a chance to win the senatorial elections in Indiana. That fact, of some national consequence, was recognized last week by the press of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans. Concerning candidates for the Indiana Senate, Senator James E. (“Big Jim”) Watson, a Republican opportunist, might well, it was conceded, be beaten by young Albert Stump, whose personality reminded older citizens of how Albert J. Beveridge had looked, and behaved at his age. Evans Woollen, an Indianapolis banker of 62, whose intellectual integrity had hitherto been considered a handicap, appeared to have some chance of beating his opponent, Republican Senator Arthur R. Robinson. So stated, the situation is simple enough, but there are reasons behind even so simple “a thing as a State’s dissatisfaction with the party in power. Responsible for the hope of the Democrats in Indiana, is a story filled like a cinema with incredible wild flashes . . . a searchlight fumbling over an army of marchers in white hoods . . . an airplane with a gilded nose tilting out of a cloud . . . a bed in a poor house, something dead on the bed . . . old checks, thumb-marked, rubber-stamped, checks for enormous sums made out in furtive or in precise or pompous or illiterate calligraphies to a person named “Stephenson”. . . . A man hissing through the disinfected bars of a prison cell a word so soft that his listener could hardly hear him. “The swine . . . the swine . . .”

Thomas H. Adams, a venerable, harmless-looking newspaperman living in Vincennes, Indiana, had known certain things for a long time. He has gone about getting documents and putting them into a black brief case. One David Curtis Stephenson was tried in Indianapolis for murdering a girl. While the trial went on, Mr. Adams’s brief case grew fatter. He asked Governor Jackson to investigate some charges in support of which he, Mr. Adams, would be very glad to bring forward documents. The Governor did not seem to think an investigation was necessary. Mr. Adams then got himself appointed head of a special investigating committee of the Indiana Republican Editors Association. As a hint of what was coming he supplied the press last week with a copy of an ungrammatical letter:

“In return for the political support of D. C. Stephenson, in the event I am elected mayor of Indianapolis, Ind., I promise not to appoint any person as member of the board of public works without they first have the indorsement of D. C. Stephenson. . . .

“I also agree and promise to appoint Claude Worley as chief of police and Earl Klenck as captain.

“Signed by me, this 12th day of Feb., 1925.”

The signature was that of the present Mayor of Indianapolis, J. L. Duvall. But Mayor Duvall, Mr. Adams made clear, was nothing. He was dealing not with Mayor Duvall but with a man who had kept half a dozen Indiana Mayors in his pay, a man who had controlled the lower house of the State legislature, who had ruled the state constabulary and the highway police, who had kept an airplane with a gilded snout, a private yacht on Buckeye Lake, who had given parties modeled on those of the later Caesars, who had said—his thin voice rising to a shriek in a drunken and lascivious party—”I am the counterpart of Napoleon, the master mind of all the world. Drink her down.” He was dealing with a man who had embodied in his person most of the political power of Indiana, and who was then serving a life sentence in Michigan City Prison for the rape and murder of a girl. He was dealing with D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana.

The name of D. C. Stephenson, struck off with interlocking capitals, and underscored with a bold line, first appeared in 1921 in Indiana on the register of the Vendome Hotel in Evansville. After it the writer had added, as if to gratify his taste for romantic atmosphere, the words “Dallas, Tex.”

But Mr. Stephenson had really lived in Dallas, and so had Hiram Evans, dentist, salesman, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. They used to work together. The Wizard told Mr. Stephenson the system and the blurb of the K. K. K. They hatched a scheme. For four years after that, D. C. Stephenson moved among the virgin fields of Indiana, getting members for the Klan. For every $10 initiation fee he was paid $4. He took in several hundred thousand members and made so much money that he got into trouble with the national Klan.* He was ready, he thought, to reach out for power.

He began by buying a few politicians. His system was a miracle of simplicity. He found a good Klansman who wanted to run for office and paid his campaign expenses always with the understanding that his candidate, when elected and in control of public moneys, should repay him at the rate of three to one, or 300%. If the candidate lost he owed nothing.

It quickly came to be perceived that Mr. Stephenson’s nominees seldom lost. He conducted campaigns with just the right combination of lavishness and precision; the Mayors of three important Indiana cities looked on him with great respect and the members of legislative committees called at his home before the day’s session to see which bills were to be passed. To his legislators he gave orders rather than suggestions, but when he wrote to his Mayors he was careful to phrase his wishes in terms of a larger and collective power, the will of the Klan.

“Klansmen attention: Remember your solemn oath to obey all edicts, mandates, rulings, and instructions of the imperial wizards. It is the order of the imperial wizard that all klansmen work faithfully for the nomination of our brother klansman, Major Jackson.

“It is very important that we should nominate our esteemed brother, Major Jackson, in order that the delectable bonds of the invisible empire may rule supreme. Brother Jackson will keep the faith of the K K-Duo.

“Done by me, the great klaliff of this province, in this holy glavern, on the weird day of the woeful week, of the dreadful month, of the bloody moon, in the weeping year of the klan (L. V. 1). This 16th day of March, 1924.”

His fashion of life did not dawdle behind his ambition. One could not receive congressmen or even mayors, bought and paid for, in a flat. D. C. Stephenson built a formidable house at Irvington. Decorators from Indianapolis did what they could for him; he sent to New York for clothes and a few antiques. His taste ran to the oriental. Quite often now, behind the big yellow windows of his ballroom, saxophones giggled and clucked all night and limousines drove away in the early morning with the blinds pulled down. Odd callers were always waiting in his library, men of dignity who had suddenly become nervous, and gutter-rats dressed up like men of dignity.

One evening they celebrated the political demise of John D. Williams, head of the highway commission, whose removal was necessary for the passage of Mr. Stephenson’s “road ripper” bill. With solemn reeling the Grand Dragon pronounced the rites:

“O Earth, take charge of this maggot of the dunghill who, for a brief space, inhabited our sphere of life. This man’s premature demise was brought on himself by his constant refusal to hear his master’s voice. . . . Let us all take a damn fine drink now as we lower John to his final resting place in oblivion. Amen.”

Mr. Stephenson had by this time bought an airplane and with one Court Asher, a onetime army aviator, his secretary, clerk, and majordomo, he toured Indiana, talking to the crowds that came out on the fields to hear him. Sometimes he talked in the afternoons; sometimes at night by searchlights. Once, at Kokomo, there were 75,000 listeners around his golden plane and when he told of the dangers of Catholicism and described his hatred for Negroes and Jews, women pulled jewels* from their fingers and men tore their pockets to give him money for “the cause.” Mr. Stephenson would save them. America for the Americans.

And then one spring afternoon in 1925, a detective calmly pushed past Mr. Stephenson’s butler, found the Grand Dragon upstairs in a closet, took him away in a patrol wagon. An unsavory and sensational case. It was vaguely known that D. C. Stephenson had possessed some sort of political influence and the courtroom was filled. The judge, in his instructions to the jury, summed up the evidence somewhat as follows:

On the night of March 15, 1925, one Madge Oberholtzer, a girl locally known as “Poor Madge,” who had been connected in a minor capacity with Republican activities in Indianapolis, was led to Mr. Stephenson’s house, forced to take a drink, and abducted by train to Hammond where Mr. Stephenson ravished her. In the morning she found some arsenic on the bathroom shelf. She was returned in a closed car to her father’s house on March 17. Later she died.

The jury returned a verdict of guilty. The court sentenced D. C. Stephenson to life imprisonment.

From jail he has been writing letters. Two of them got past the prison authorities. He says that the murder charge was trumped up against him by his political tools who, rather than pay what they owed him, packed him off to jail. Mr. Stephenson lists among his onetime tools Governor Ed. Jackson,* Mayor J. L. Duvall of Indianapolis, and many another weaker light.

In another letter he wails: “Tell Tom Adams to have me transferred to Pendleton to keep these swine from killing me.”

Meanwhile, Editor Adams had little success in stimulating either of the Senators Watson or Robinson, or Governor Jackson to start an investigation of “super-government” in Indiana. Last week Mr. Adams threatened to force the calling of a special session of the Indiana Senate to consider the impeachment of Governor Jackson, if he was not allowed to interview D. C. Stephenson. Later in the week, Prosecutor Will H. Remy, who had sent Mr. Stephenson to jail, called for a grand jury investigation of Indiana’s grime.

*Later, in 1924, Mr. Stephenson was ousted from the national Klan because he had violated his oath of allegiance and had been “disrespectful to virtuous womanhood.” He had already organized an independent Klan, had himself chosen Grand Dragon; and then replied to his old friend, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans: “The present national head is an ignorant, uneducated, uncouth individual who picks his nose at the table and eats his peas with his knife. He has neither courage nor culture. . . .”

*One story says he collected the jewels in a pint milk bottle, took it home full. -Mr. Stephenson says he spent $120,000 to elect Governor Jackson, and later commanded him to appoint Senator Robinson, Republican, as the successor of the late Senator Samuel M. Ralston, Democrat.

*Mr. Stephenson says he spent $120,000 to elect Governor Jackson, and later commanded him to appoint Senator Robinson, Republican, as the successor of the late Senator Samuel M. Ralston, Democrat.