The development of modern indiana (1865-1900)
Reconstruction referred to the plans of the national government to help rebuild the South, and Indiana’s leaders played an important role to form such policies. The main issue in reconstruction was the question of how to deal with a large population of freed Blacks and whether or not Blacks should have the right to vote. Some leaders thought that the freed Blacks should have the right to vote. Still others thought that they should have the right to vote immediately and that the administrators of the former Confederate Government should be punished, and even executed. This group became known as the radical Republicans and included such Hoosiers as Schuyler Colfax (South Bend), Speaker of the House of Representatives and George W. Julian, a staunch abolitionist and a representative of eastern Indiana.
On the conservative side were those who favored a gradual change for the South and opposed the ideas of the radicals. Daniel W. Voorhees, from Terre Haute and Senator Thomas A. Hendricks from Indianapolis were the leading Hoosiers in Congress who favored a less violent attitude towards the defeated Confederacy. However, the radicals, and the radical point of view, was a view held by a majority of representatives and their policies went into effect. One of their main accomplishments was the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment.
The Fifteenth Amendment Indiana’s General Assembly had already ratified the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments that gave Blacks their freedom and rights of citizenship. There had been great difficulty among the states in getting the 13th Amendment passed, however the 14th passed with little or no discussion.1
However, in 1869, when the 15th Amendment (that gave Blacks the right to vote) was due for ratification, there were many heated debates in the Indiana General Assembly. The Republicans controlled the legislative body, but some Democrats were necessary in order to actually be able to vote on the issue of the 15th Amendment. In protest many Democrats began to resign from the General Assembly and the process of ratification within Indiana came to a grinding halt. A special state election was held and all of those members who had resigned were again reelected to their posts. When the amendment was again brought up for ratification, members of the General Assembly again began to resign in protest. However, the members that were left went ahead and held a vote. The General Assembly still had two-thirds of its members and was legally able to hold the vote. The 15th Amendment was ratified with a majority vote. Later, when the Democrats gained control of the General Assembly they attempted to recall the passage of the amendment but met with no success.1
Bitter Reconstruction - The reconstruction policy that the radical Republicans of Congress put into effect for the treatment of the defeated southern states is looked upon today as one of the shameful periods of our collective history—the tragic carpet bagging days. Some of Indiana’s representatives in Congress, like Colfax and Oliver P. Morton, were among those radical Republicans. Not all Republicans favored the policies enacted by the radicals. The outstanding Republican opponent of such policies was a man who spent 14 years-from the age of 7 to 21-in our state of Indiana. That man was Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. President Lincoln had already instituted a just and humane policy for the treatment of the defeated southern states when his assassination closed his career, and his wishes.
Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President, was a staunch supporter of Lincoln’s policy and tried to carry it out. He was bitterly opposed by radicals in Congress, who finally brought impeachment proceedings to remove him from office. The impeachment failed and Johnson remained President, but he was helpless to prevent the policies of the radical Republicans from going into effect. His vetoes of bills were simply overridden by the radical Republicans who controlled Congress for 12 years following the Civil War.
The ratification of the 15th Amendment by Indiana was not followed by an immediate change in the Indiana Constitution. Blacks were still excluded from voting in the state and, in addition, free Blacks were not allowed to enter the state. During the next two decades, Blacks were gradually granted the standing of full citizen. The laws made to restrict Blacks within Indiana were eventually eliminated and they were allowed to take part in the making of contracts. In education there was to be a fair distribution of public funds between white and colored schools. In 1881, Blacks gained full equality in voting and the only remaining discrimination in the Indiana constitution at the time was the clause that prevented Blacks from taking part in the state militia.1
Reconstruction Governors in Indiana - There were two governors during the period of the Reconstruction, Conrad Baker and Thomas A. Hendricks. Baker was lieutenant governor under Oliver P. Morton and gained the governor’s office when Morton resigned to become a U.S. Senator. Baker’s home was in Evansville. He ran for the office of governor against Thomas Hendricks in the election of 1868. Humane and public oriented, Baker was known as a good man with a high intellect. He was especially concerned with the social welfare of his fellow Hoosiers. He actively secured reforms in the prisons and other state institutions. Governor Baker was a believer in eliminating the state’s debt as soon as possible and began making arrangements for paying it off. When he left office the state’s debt was significantly reduced. He died in 1885.
Also during Governor Baker’s term in office a Hoosier was elected Vice-President of the United States. In 1868 South Bend native, Schuyler Colfax, was on the Republican ticket that elected General Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency of the United States.
Governor Thomas A. Hendricks took office as Indiana’s governor in 1873. He had served in the state legislature, in the constitutional convention of 1850, as a United States Senator and previously ran for office of governor twice (both times being defeated). His first Indiana home was in Shelbyville, but had moved to Indianapolis. In what became known as the “Disputed Election of 1876,” Hendricks ran for the office of Vice-President of the United States with Samuel J. Tilden, but never won the national election of that year.1 He gave 35 years to public service in this state and finally died in the office of Vice-President in 1885.
The Panic of 1873 A national depression hit the United States in the first year of Hendricks’ term as governor. This depression did not affect the expansion and prosperity throughout Indiana after the Civil War; but the industrial and commercial areas of the economy within the state suffered. There were conflicts between laborers and employers, often followed by strikes. In the coal industry around Knightstown and Brazil, rioting was quieted only after the involvement of the state militia. At Logansport, employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who had recently gone on strike, were causing severe problems for the local sheriff, who had contacted the governor for help. Detachments of troops were sent to Logansport to disperse the crowds of disgruntled workers. There were several other incidents, but none led to any serious violence.
“Blue Jeans” Governor James D. Williams was elected to office during the first centennial of American Independence (1876). The 100 years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence had been a century of progress for the state of Indiana. Governor Williams will long be remembered in history as the “farmer governor of Indiana.” He became the 17th Hoosier governor and was the first farmer by occupation to make it to that office.
In his early youth his parents moved from Ohio to Knox County, Indiana, where he resided until he went to the state capital to assume the duties as governor. Williams’ early education was a one-room schoolhouse and to this he added a good general knowledge of current events. When he was 20 years old his father died making Jim the sole support for his family. He soon established a good reputation within his community and was known for his honesty, hard work and common sense. Williams became the wealthiest man in his Knox County community through his excellent farming techniques.
Williams’ first taste of public service was as a justice of the peace. Four years later, in 1843, he was elected to the General Assembly where he served until 1874, when he was elected to Congress. In his campaigns for governor he wore his usual homespun clothing, or blue jeans. His opponents called him “Blue Jeans” and made fun of him, regarding him as an ignorant hick. This was a huge mistake on his opponent’s part, knowing that Indiana is a highly agricultural state and Williams’ appeal to the Hoosier farmer. When the campaign ended, the election returns showed that the old farmer from Knox County had beaten his opponent, General Benjamin Harrison, by over 5,000 votes!1
Williams’ administration is marked by some very important events. Several amendments to the state constitution were proposed at this time and pushed forward to final adoption in 1881. The most important events included the holding of elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (instead of the former October elections), limiting of debts by local communities and elimination of the restrictions against Black voters. Governor Williams died November 20, 1880, and lieutenant governor Isaac Gray served out the remaining 7 weeks of his term.
During Governor Williams’ term Oliver P. Morton died and Benjamin Harrison completed his mansion in Indianapolis.
To visit Benjamin Harrison’s Indianapolis home http://www.presidentbenjaminharrison.org
1. Lockridge, Ross F. The Story of Indiana. Harlow Publishing. Oklahoma City: 1957, pg. 325-332.
*Copyright
Users may download material displayed on this site for noncommercial, educational purposes only, provided all copyright and other proprietary notices contained on the materials are retained. Unauthorized use of the Northern Indiana Historical Society d/b/a Northern Indiana Center for History’s logo and Web site logo is not permitted.The contents of this site may not be used for commercial purposes, without written permission of the Northern Indiana Historical Society d/b/a Northern Indiana Center for History. To obtain permission to reproduce information on this site, submit the specifics of your request in writing to Director of Marketing, Center for History, 808 West Washington Street, South Bend, Indiana 46601 or [email protected]
If permission is granted, the wording “provided with permission from the Northern Indiana Center for History” and the date must be noted. However, permission is not required to create a link to the Northern Indiana Center for History’s Web site or any pages contained therein.
The golden era of Indiana (1900-1930)
Indiana and the Ku Klux Klan
A majority of people have an already formed image of the Ku Klux Klan in their minds. Men, dressed in white robes and hoods, riding throughout the countryside harassing blacks. Most believe that the Klan is an extinct organization, once comprised of rednecks and racist southerners. However, unfortunately, the Klan is still alive in Indiana. There was a time in Indiana when Klan membership could help an aspiring political career. Leonard Moore from the University of California has carefully analyzed Klan membership documents of Indiana and discovered that 250,000 white men in Indiana (about 30% of the native-born Caucasian men in Indiana) joined the Klan in the early 1920s.1
The Klan has appeared and disappeared more than four times throughout its history. It is the constant bad dream for a free American society to deal with. Just when you think it’s gone, it rears its ugly head once more. In its various forms and incarnations, the Klan has not entirely remained a southern-dominated organization. White supremacy has always been its goal, its anger and hatred has been used against other minority groups than just black Americans.
Its first appearance in American history was in the South, organized for only a short number of years between 1865 and 1872. The group was started by a group of 6 men from Pulaski, Tennessee, mainly as an elaborate game and roleplay of wearing eerie costumes while riding on horseback. It didn’t take long for the Ku Klux Klan (its name, supposedly, derived from the Greek word kuklos, which means “circle”) to go from a fraternal organization to a vigilante group bent on violence. An ex-Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was chosen to be the Klan’s first leader.
Forrest headed up a committee that made the Klan a secret society with elaborate and, sometimes, bizarre titles: grand wizard, grand dragon, titans and cyclops. The Klan was filled with members of the recently defeated Confederate army. Their focus was threefold: to strike back at the federal Reconstruction government, to put the blacks “back in their place,” and to chase the white carpetbaggers back North.1 Because many southerners believed that the North was using the Reconstruction to hand over the South to illiterate blacks, the Klan was a way for southern whites to strike back.
The first Klan attacked with a fierce vengeance. This first Klan set the violent tone of the future organization. Anyone, either black or white, would meet a violent death if they stood in their way. The Klan’s tools of intimidation included lynching, shooting, stabbing and whipping. They perceived their mission as defenders of the white way of life. They also saw themselves as protectors of white women and the property of their birth. The federal government, however, saw them as criminals.
The government stepped in and ordered Nathan Forrest to disband the Klan. He reluctantly agreed and the secret organization of terror dissolved in 1869. However, violence towards blacks continued even after the dissolution of the Klan. The Klan’s reign of terror was temporarily over.
The Birth of a Nation The Klan would have been forgotten if Thomas Dixon, Jr., a novelist, hadn’t produced a romanticized version of the Klan’s history. Dixon claimed that the Klan was fighting for a just cause, defending their honor from wild blacks and white criminals. In 1915, almost 10 years after Dixon’s writings, film maker D.W. Griffith used his book as a basis for a new movie. The new movie was entitled, Birth of a Nation and it was praised in the South and crucified in the North. The South saw it as a true depiction of the raw deal of Reconstruction, while the North saw the film as a way to legitimize racial hatred and violence toward minorities. However, when President Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat, saw the film and remarked that it was “all too terribly true,” the rest of America flocked to see this new epic.1
When Birth of a Nation debuted in Atlanta, Georgia on December 7, 1915, an advertisement appeared in the Atlanta newspaper calling for southern white men to join “A High Class Order for Men of Intelligence and Character.” This was, of course, the new rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. This new Klan was, basically, a fraternal social club for white supremacists.
The first imperial wizard of this second Klan movement was a former Methodist preacher named William Simmons. He was interviewed in 1928 as to why people joined this new Klan movement. Simmons said:
I went around Atlanta talking to men who belonged to other lodges [Masons, Woodmen of the World] about the new Ku Klux Klan. The Negroes were getting pretty uppity in the South along about that time. The North was sending down for them to take good jobs. Lots of Southerners were feeling worried about conditions. Thirty-four men belonging to various other lodges, promised to attend a meeting in [attorney E.R.] Clarkson’s office. And on the night of October 26, 1915, we met. They were all there. Two of them were men who had belonged to the old Klan. John W. Bale, speaker of the Georgia legislature, called the meeting to order. He was the first man in America to wield a Klan gavel. I talked for an hour and we all decided that the idea would grow. We voted to apply for a state charter.1
In November of 1915, Simmons and the new Klansmen held their first initiation ceremony and cross burning. With Birth of a Nation providing free recruiting advertisement for the Klan, membership soared.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Klan grew in strength. America now had to be ‘protected’ from the Germans and others: Catholics, Jews, Socialists, blacks and union leaders. Membership in the Klan was a way for citizens to help out the war effort in Europe by making sure American soil was kept ‘pure.’ The Klan was quickly becoming something universal and not just a southern racist group. William Simmons now realized that the Ku Klux Klan could now become a national fraternal movement.
D.C. Stephenson and the Indiana Klan A man named Joe Huffington was chosen by Simmons and other top Klan officials to start organizing the Klan in Indiana. Huffington’s first base of operations was located in Evansville, Indiana. In the late summer of 1920 he began preparations to bring the Klan to Indiana. It was not long before Huffington met a young man named D.C. Stephenson.
D.C. Stephenson was born, probably, in Texas and soon would become the most powerful and influential man in Indiana. Stephenson found himself, eventually, in Evansville working as a salesman of bonds for the L.G. Julian Coal Company. By 1921 he was helping Huffington recruit for the newly formed Indiana chapter of the Klan. He was making a pretty good living with both jobs. The Klan had a large vocabulary of secret words and titles that Stephenson had to learn. William Simmons was known as the imperial wizard, the top office of the Klan. Other office titles included: kligrapp, kludd, nighthawk and cyclops. Their secret meetings and gatherings were known as klonvocations. Membership fees were called klecktoken.
D.C. Stephenson, like all other new members, had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Klan and a vow of secrecy. New recruits were asked 9 questions:
Is the motive prompting your ambition to be a Klansman serious and unselfish?
Are you native born, white, Gentile, American citizens?
Are you absolutely opposed to and free of any allegiance of any nature to cause, government, people, sect, or ruler that is foreign to the United States of America?
Do you esteem the United States of America and its institutions above any other government, civil, political, or ecclesiastical in the whole world?
Will you, without mental reservations, take a solemn oath to defend, preserve, and enforce these same?
Do you believe in Klannishness and will you faithfully practice same toward your fellow Klansmen?
Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of White Supremacy?
Will you faithfully obey our constitutions and laws, and confirm willingly to all our usages, requirements, and regulations?
Can you always be depended on?1
Did D.C. Stephenson take the oath seriously? No one really knows. Stephenson’s public speeches aren’t filled with the racist rhetoric as many of the other leaders of the Klan. He usually left the hate speeches up to others in the power structure of the Klan. His talent was centered around organizing the Klan in Indiana and collecting new recruits.
Membership in the Indiana division of the Klan began soaring with each new speech that Stephenson made. The group began to expand to the western states and industrial cities of the Midwest, the Klan was no longer a southern sensation.
The Klan even made inroads into Indiana churches. The Reverend William Forney Harris of the Grand Avenue Methodist Church preached in 1922 that secret societies like the Ku Klux Klan would not get his support. However, these were times of “moral decay,” and as such, any organization that stood for decency and order ought not to be shunned. Other clergy found themselves offering similar endorsements to their congregations as the Klan membership began to grow locally.1
D.C. Stephenson went on to become a powerful political figure in Indiana. His rise to power was short-lived, however. In 1922 David Curtis Stephenson was appointed Grand Dragon of the KKK for Indiana. In 1925 he had met a Madge Oberholtzer, who ran a state program to combat illiteracy, at an inaugural ball for Governor Ed Jackson. She was later abducted from her home in Irvington, a neighborhood of Indianapolis and taken by Stephenson and some of his men to the train station. While on a trip to Hammond, Indiana, Stephenson repeatedly attacked and raped Oberholtzer in one compartment of his Pullman railcar. In Hammond she took poison to frighten Stephenson into letting her go. He immediately rushed her back to Indianapolis where she died a month later, either from the effects of the poison or the severe bite marks she incurred during the rape.
Stephenson was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The sensational trial took place in Noblesville, Indiana in 1925. His conviction sent Stephenson to the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana for the next 31 years (the longest imprisonment in this state for that crime). He was released from prison in 1956 and faded into obscurity, however, not before causing the shocking downfall of many corrupt political officials within Indiana. When he went to jail he was convinced that Governor Ed Jackson, who he had helped elect, would pardon him. Governor Jackson never came through with the pardon and Stephenson began to talk.
The Downfall of the Klan in Indiana With help from The Indianapolis Times (which won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigations), the structure of Indiana politics would be shaken. Stephenson began to talk about who had helped him rise to power and began to name names. The aftermath was shocking, indictments were filed against Governor Ed Jackson, Marion County Republican chairman George V. “Cap” Coffin, and attorney Robert I. Marsh, charging them with conspiring to bribe former Governor Warren McCray. Even the Mayor of Indianapolis, John Duvall, was convicted and sentenced to jail for 30 days (and barred from political service for 4 years). Some Marion County commissioners also resigned from their posts on charges of accepting bribes from the Klan and Stephenson.
1. Lutholtz, M. William. Grand Dragon: D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. Purdue University Press: Lafayette, 1991.
*Copyright
Users may download material displayed on this site for noncommercial, educational purposes only, provided all copyright and other proprietary notices contained on the materials are retained. Unauthorized use of the Northern Indiana Historical Society d/b/a Northern Indiana Center for History’s logo and Web site logo is not permitted.The contents of this site may not be used for commercial purposes, without written permission of the Northern Indiana Historical Society d/b/a Northern Indiana Center for History. To obtain permission to reproduce information on this site, submit the specifics of your request in writing to Director of Marketing, Center for History, 808 West Washington Street, South Bend, Indiana 46601 or [email protected]
If permission is granted, the wording “provided with permission from the Northern Indiana Center for History” and the date must be noted. However, permission is not required to create a link to the Northern Indiana Center for History’s Web site or any pages contained therein.
A majority of people have an already formed image of the Ku Klux Klan in their minds. Men, dressed in white robes and hoods, riding throughout the countryside harassing blacks. Most believe that the Klan is an extinct organization, once comprised of rednecks and racist southerners. However, unfortunately, the Klan is still alive in Indiana. There was a time in Indiana when Klan membership could help an aspiring political career. Leonard Moore from the University of California has carefully analyzed Klan membership documents of Indiana and discovered that 250,000 white men in Indiana (about 30% of the native-born Caucasian men in Indiana) joined the Klan in the early 1920s.1
The Klan has appeared and disappeared more than four times throughout its history. It is the constant bad dream for a free American society to deal with. Just when you think it’s gone, it rears its ugly head once more. In its various forms and incarnations, the Klan has not entirely remained a southern-dominated organization. White supremacy has always been its goal, its anger and hatred has been used against other minority groups than just black Americans.
Its first appearance in American history was in the South, organized for only a short number of years between 1865 and 1872. The group was started by a group of 6 men from Pulaski, Tennessee, mainly as an elaborate game and roleplay of wearing eerie costumes while riding on horseback. It didn’t take long for the Ku Klux Klan (its name, supposedly, derived from the Greek word kuklos, which means “circle”) to go from a fraternal organization to a vigilante group bent on violence. An ex-Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was chosen to be the Klan’s first leader.
Forrest headed up a committee that made the Klan a secret society with elaborate and, sometimes, bizarre titles: grand wizard, grand dragon, titans and cyclops. The Klan was filled with members of the recently defeated Confederate army. Their focus was threefold: to strike back at the federal Reconstruction government, to put the blacks “back in their place,” and to chase the white carpetbaggers back North.1 Because many southerners believed that the North was using the Reconstruction to hand over the South to illiterate blacks, the Klan was a way for southern whites to strike back.
The first Klan attacked with a fierce vengeance. This first Klan set the violent tone of the future organization. Anyone, either black or white, would meet a violent death if they stood in their way. The Klan’s tools of intimidation included lynching, shooting, stabbing and whipping. They perceived their mission as defenders of the white way of life. They also saw themselves as protectors of white women and the property of their birth. The federal government, however, saw them as criminals.
The government stepped in and ordered Nathan Forrest to disband the Klan. He reluctantly agreed and the secret organization of terror dissolved in 1869. However, violence towards blacks continued even after the dissolution of the Klan. The Klan’s reign of terror was temporarily over.
The Birth of a Nation The Klan would have been forgotten if Thomas Dixon, Jr., a novelist, hadn’t produced a romanticized version of the Klan’s history. Dixon claimed that the Klan was fighting for a just cause, defending their honor from wild blacks and white criminals. In 1915, almost 10 years after Dixon’s writings, film maker D.W. Griffith used his book as a basis for a new movie. The new movie was entitled, Birth of a Nation and it was praised in the South and crucified in the North. The South saw it as a true depiction of the raw deal of Reconstruction, while the North saw the film as a way to legitimize racial hatred and violence toward minorities. However, when President Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat, saw the film and remarked that it was “all too terribly true,” the rest of America flocked to see this new epic.1
When Birth of a Nation debuted in Atlanta, Georgia on December 7, 1915, an advertisement appeared in the Atlanta newspaper calling for southern white men to join “A High Class Order for Men of Intelligence and Character.” This was, of course, the new rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. This new Klan was, basically, a fraternal social club for white supremacists.
The first imperial wizard of this second Klan movement was a former Methodist preacher named William Simmons. He was interviewed in 1928 as to why people joined this new Klan movement. Simmons said:
I went around Atlanta talking to men who belonged to other lodges [Masons, Woodmen of the World] about the new Ku Klux Klan. The Negroes were getting pretty uppity in the South along about that time. The North was sending down for them to take good jobs. Lots of Southerners were feeling worried about conditions. Thirty-four men belonging to various other lodges, promised to attend a meeting in [attorney E.R.] Clarkson’s office. And on the night of October 26, 1915, we met. They were all there. Two of them were men who had belonged to the old Klan. John W. Bale, speaker of the Georgia legislature, called the meeting to order. He was the first man in America to wield a Klan gavel. I talked for an hour and we all decided that the idea would grow. We voted to apply for a state charter.1
In November of 1915, Simmons and the new Klansmen held their first initiation ceremony and cross burning. With Birth of a Nation providing free recruiting advertisement for the Klan, membership soared.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Klan grew in strength. America now had to be ‘protected’ from the Germans and others: Catholics, Jews, Socialists, blacks and union leaders. Membership in the Klan was a way for citizens to help out the war effort in Europe by making sure American soil was kept ‘pure.’ The Klan was quickly becoming something universal and not just a southern racist group. William Simmons now realized that the Ku Klux Klan could now become a national fraternal movement.
D.C. Stephenson and the Indiana Klan A man named Joe Huffington was chosen by Simmons and other top Klan officials to start organizing the Klan in Indiana. Huffington’s first base of operations was located in Evansville, Indiana. In the late summer of 1920 he began preparations to bring the Klan to Indiana. It was not long before Huffington met a young man named D.C. Stephenson.
D.C. Stephenson was born, probably, in Texas and soon would become the most powerful and influential man in Indiana. Stephenson found himself, eventually, in Evansville working as a salesman of bonds for the L.G. Julian Coal Company. By 1921 he was helping Huffington recruit for the newly formed Indiana chapter of the Klan. He was making a pretty good living with both jobs. The Klan had a large vocabulary of secret words and titles that Stephenson had to learn. William Simmons was known as the imperial wizard, the top office of the Klan. Other office titles included: kligrapp, kludd, nighthawk and cyclops. Their secret meetings and gatherings were known as klonvocations. Membership fees were called klecktoken.
D.C. Stephenson, like all other new members, had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Klan and a vow of secrecy. New recruits were asked 9 questions:
Is the motive prompting your ambition to be a Klansman serious and unselfish?
Are you native born, white, Gentile, American citizens?
Are you absolutely opposed to and free of any allegiance of any nature to cause, government, people, sect, or ruler that is foreign to the United States of America?
Do you esteem the United States of America and its institutions above any other government, civil, political, or ecclesiastical in the whole world?
Will you, without mental reservations, take a solemn oath to defend, preserve, and enforce these same?
Do you believe in Klannishness and will you faithfully practice same toward your fellow Klansmen?
Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of White Supremacy?
Will you faithfully obey our constitutions and laws, and confirm willingly to all our usages, requirements, and regulations?
Can you always be depended on?1
Did D.C. Stephenson take the oath seriously? No one really knows. Stephenson’s public speeches aren’t filled with the racist rhetoric as many of the other leaders of the Klan. He usually left the hate speeches up to others in the power structure of the Klan. His talent was centered around organizing the Klan in Indiana and collecting new recruits.
Membership in the Indiana division of the Klan began soaring with each new speech that Stephenson made. The group began to expand to the western states and industrial cities of the Midwest, the Klan was no longer a southern sensation.
The Klan even made inroads into Indiana churches. The Reverend William Forney Harris of the Grand Avenue Methodist Church preached in 1922 that secret societies like the Ku Klux Klan would not get his support. However, these were times of “moral decay,” and as such, any organization that stood for decency and order ought not to be shunned. Other clergy found themselves offering similar endorsements to their congregations as the Klan membership began to grow locally.1
D.C. Stephenson went on to become a powerful political figure in Indiana. His rise to power was short-lived, however. In 1922 David Curtis Stephenson was appointed Grand Dragon of the KKK for Indiana. In 1925 he had met a Madge Oberholtzer, who ran a state program to combat illiteracy, at an inaugural ball for Governor Ed Jackson. She was later abducted from her home in Irvington, a neighborhood of Indianapolis and taken by Stephenson and some of his men to the train station. While on a trip to Hammond, Indiana, Stephenson repeatedly attacked and raped Oberholtzer in one compartment of his Pullman railcar. In Hammond she took poison to frighten Stephenson into letting her go. He immediately rushed her back to Indianapolis where she died a month later, either from the effects of the poison or the severe bite marks she incurred during the rape.
Stephenson was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The sensational trial took place in Noblesville, Indiana in 1925. His conviction sent Stephenson to the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana for the next 31 years (the longest imprisonment in this state for that crime). He was released from prison in 1956 and faded into obscurity, however, not before causing the shocking downfall of many corrupt political officials within Indiana. When he went to jail he was convinced that Governor Ed Jackson, who he had helped elect, would pardon him. Governor Jackson never came through with the pardon and Stephenson began to talk.
The Downfall of the Klan in Indiana With help from The Indianapolis Times (which won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigations), the structure of Indiana politics would be shaken. Stephenson began to talk about who had helped him rise to power and began to name names. The aftermath was shocking, indictments were filed against Governor Ed Jackson, Marion County Republican chairman George V. “Cap” Coffin, and attorney Robert I. Marsh, charging them with conspiring to bribe former Governor Warren McCray. Even the Mayor of Indianapolis, John Duvall, was convicted and sentenced to jail for 30 days (and barred from political service for 4 years). Some Marion County commissioners also resigned from their posts on charges of accepting bribes from the Klan and Stephenson.
1. Lutholtz, M. William. Grand Dragon: D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. Purdue University Press: Lafayette, 1991.
*Copyright
Users may download material displayed on this site for noncommercial, educational purposes only, provided all copyright and other proprietary notices contained on the materials are retained. Unauthorized use of the Northern Indiana Historical Society d/b/a Northern Indiana Center for History’s logo and Web site logo is not permitted.The contents of this site may not be used for commercial purposes, without written permission of the Northern Indiana Historical Society d/b/a Northern Indiana Center for History. To obtain permission to reproduce information on this site, submit the specifics of your request in writing to Director of Marketing, Center for History, 808 West Washington Street, South Bend, Indiana 46601 or [email protected]
If permission is granted, the wording “provided with permission from the Northern Indiana Center for History” and the date must be noted. However, permission is not required to create a link to the Northern Indiana Center for History’s Web site or any pages contained therein.