By James H. Madison
special to The Indiana Citizen
January 13, 2025
The inauguration of Gov. Mike Braun and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith sparks thoughts of the similar inauguration a hundred years ago, January 12, 1925, when Edward Jackson and Harold Van Orman took their oaths. The past never repeats itself exactly, but in this case there are lines that rhyme and questions that cause concern.
At the dinner following Gov. Jackson’s inauguration, William Herschell recited his beloved poem, “Ain’t God Good to Indiana.” In the reception line next to the new governor stood Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson, the man who boasted that “I am the law in Indiana.” The two men had plans.
Jackson turned out to be the worst governor in Indiana’s history, caught in corruption and scandal and forever remembered as the Klan governor. Stephenson earned his place as the vilest of Hoosiers.
The forces that created these two men remain with us. Indiana’s new governor and lieutenant governor are not Klansmen, but in the religious and political culture around them are scents of a century ago, when the Klan dominated the Hoosier state.
Those white, native-born Protestants who flocked to the Klan in the early 1920s called themselves 100% Americans. They boasted that only they were the real Americans. They created enemies to exclude and people to hate. Jews, African Americans, immigrants, and, above all, Catholics were “the others.” By 1924, one political operative lamented, “Ideas of race and religion now dominate political thought.”
Klan recruiters were clever salespeople, a mix of hucksters and true believers. They softened their hatreds to appear more palatable to respectable Hoosiers. “I love the Catholics, I love the foreigners and I love the black man but I want them to keep their place,” a Klan leader in Huntington claimed. Occasionally speakers were less guarded: “I want to put all the Catholics, Jews, and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft.”
The soil that sprouted the Klan included a culture of fear exacerbated by the Great War. Fear of Russian Bolsheviks and German Huns widened to include all outsiders, immigrants especially. The nation should simply retreat behind the Atlantic wall, close the gates, and make America First.
The Klan built an agenda based on the claim that the country was going to hell in a handbasket. Danger was everywhere: in syncopated music, crime and corruption, parochial schools, Hollywood movies, wayward young people, especially flappers in flimsy dresses. A Logansport newspaper advertised a new film with “its jazz, its flapperism, its petting parties, its reckless disregard for conventions.” Indiana’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Booth Tarkington, wrote that this was the “swiftest moving and most restless time the world has ever known.”
A Christian crusade was the remedy. The Klan promised to enforce prohibition, censor Hollywood films, stop backseat sex, end political corruption, and keep women closer to the kitchen, nursery, and Sunday school room. Giving women the ballot, reported the Klan’s weekly newspaper, the Fiery Cross, “would foster masculine boldness and restless independence, which might detract from the modesty and virtue of womankind.”
Hoosiers joined the Klan in large numbers. Most came from the middle ranks of society: lawyers, merchants, church women, Kiwanis club members, teachers, ministers, mayors. They were not the “low classes” or the “unteachables,” as one commentator claimed. Convinced that they were 100% Americans, they pulled on their white robes to march under placards claiming, “White Supremacy.” They watched reverently as their Christian cross burst into flames and as voices rang with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the beloved hymn of the Klan.
Indiana’s political culture aided the Klan’s rise to power. No generation before or since had such mediocre leaders in both major parties. As they played their petty partisan games and ignored real issues, they left a void for the Klan to fill.
Ordinary citizens were part of the problem, too. Hoosiers had low expectations for their government and high tolerance for corruption. So many Indiana politicians went to jail that pundits joked that the word “Hoosier” derived from “hoosegow.” Gov. Warren McCray’s financial thievery took him in April 1924 to the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Seven months later voters elected another corrupt governor, Ed Jackson. “We are governed by swine,” Indiana author Meredith Nicholson lamented.
Celebrating the 1924 election victory, Fiery Cross headlines boasted that the “Protestant Ticket Sweeps State” and “National Papal Machine Smashed.” Hoosiers had chosen the Klan in a fair election. The outcome was not a fluke event but rather a reflection of deep discontent in mainstream Indiana.
Along with a governor, a majority – perhaps a supermajority – of the 1925 General Assembly were Klan members or sympathizers. Nearly all were white, Protestant, and native born, joined by only four Catholics, four foreign born, and not a single African American or Jewish member.
The 1925 Klan legislature was mostly a bust. Internal divisions and self-aggrandizement led to only modest success in pushing through the Klan agenda. All assumed there would be other sessions to make good.
Never was the Klan without opponents, even in the worst moments in 1924-1925. Opposition was weak and slow to develop, however. It took courage to stand against such a powerful movement with its sophisticated political machine that deployed the best of technology and marketing, its tactics of intimidation, and its range of great promises to quiet the fears.
Most opposition came from the Klan’s enemies. Catholics led, exemplified by Patrick O’Donnell, a fiery orator who headed the American Unity League, an organized Catholic response to the Klan. O’Donnell told a Fort Wayne audience that the “fight against the klan was not a Jewish fight or a negro’s fight or a Catholic’s fight, but an American fight.” In Indianapolis Rabbi Morris Feuerlicht used wit and humor to condemn the hatred. The Indiana branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People formed a statewide NAACP to mobilize Black voters. A few newspaper editors began to step up, including the Indianapolis Times, which earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for its coverage of the Klan. Most Protestant denominational organizations remained silent, but some individual ministers spoke out, as did a Tipton County Presbyterian minister who accused the Klan of unchristian behavior.
Resistance grew. The conviction of Stephenson for rape and murder in 1925 and the rising awareness of the threat to basic democratic values had effect. By 1930, the Klan was mostly gone in Indiana. “Nobody wanted to admit he’d ever belonged,” one reporter recalled.
The Klan’s world view endured. The civil rights movement of the 1960s created a backlash that sparked a revival. Klan members rallied and marched across the state. This new Klan of the late twentieth-century was anemic, however, a pale imitation of its predecessor. Its shouts of white power and horrible epithets attacking immigrants, gays, and feminists seemed increasingly absurd. Perhaps Hoosiers had learned to stand against Klan-style values and against the sprawling family of anti-Semites, nativists, white supremacists, and others who feared and hated.
For a long time, Hoosiers tried to forget the Klan. It was too embarrassing. In recent years this willful ignorance has given way to new understandings. New history books, once silent, now tell the story. The Indiana Historical Society recently opened a compelling exhibit: “Resist!” which features University of Notre Dame students who challenged a Klan rally in 1924 and spotlights other citizens who stood up to the Klan. The hundredth anniversary of Stephenson’s trial later in 2025 will offer more opportunities to think about this man and the larger meanings of bigotry and evil.
The intolerance in the last fifty years has come not from an out-of-date Klan but from a potpourri of sprawling and amorphous groups and movements, often linked to versions of Christian nationalism. As with the old Klan, today’s Christian nationalists tend toward binary choices of good and evil, toward a willingness to force their religious and cultural views on all of us, and toward use of government power in undemocratic and authoritarian ways that Indiana’s pioneers would have found appalling. Those pioneers wrote a Constitution in 1816 that contains the finest words ever penned on Indiana soil, including such commitments as “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious societies, or modes of worship.”
Today’s descendants of the Klan manufacture their enemies and spin their lies as they preach their fear of change. They bark out muleheaded convictions that are preposterous to democratic and reasoned men and women. They decide who are the righteous ones. Civility, decency, and law do not apply. Generosity to others who are different is weakness. The Beatitudes are suspended. A few even move to the corruption and hypocrisy that afflicted the Klan.
Christian nationalists today are doubtless far fewer than Klan members in the 1920s. The twists of electoral politics, however, have created a lieutenant governor who stands a heartbeat away from the governor’s office, a self-styled Christian nationalist who denies the separation of church and state and who claims that that God speaks directly to him. The day after the Jan. 6, 2021, violent attack on the nation’s Capitol, Micah Beckwith said that God told him directly that “I sent those riots to Washington,” and “What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” There are Biblical truths that are political truths, the new lieutenant governor says, “because abortion, marriage, sexuality, gender, immigration, taxes — those are all biblical issues. God has a lot to say on all of those.” All Hoosiers will need to watch carefully what God tells Beckwith.
Religious, racial, and ethnic differences weave through our history. Some Americans celebrate our pluralism. Some fear it. Out of ignorance, selfishness, or malevolence, they launder our history and replace it with myths of a golden age when America was great. Such comfort history not only violates the craft of historical scholarship but also reinforces our state’s worst traditions. Lies about our past disrespect the democratic ideals that Lincoln told us make America “the last best hope of earth.”
James H. Madison is the Thomas and Katherine Miller Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning teacher, he is the author of several books, most recently The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (Indiana University Press, 2020).
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
