When the Ku Klux Klan rose to power in Indiana in the 1920s, it seemed unstoppable, author Timothy Egan said October 3 during a talk at Notre Dame.
Egan discussed history repeating itself and the 1920s growth of the Ku Klux Klan, based on his 2023 book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. His appearance was hosted by the Institute for Social Concerns.
“Notre Dame plays a significant role in this extraordinary chapter in our history. It's one of the good guys,” Egan said. “This is a dark story. . . . It's about hatred. It's about a terror group. It's about how ordinary people can learn to hate their fellow citizens.”
The book chronicles the rise and fall of the Klan in Indiana, including the 1924 brawl between Klansmen and Notre Dame students on the streets of South Bend. Egan details the life of a charismatic and ruthless con man, D.C. Stephenson, who became the state’s powerful Grand Dragon, and Madge Oberholtzer, a young woman whose death at his hands exposed his crimes and brought down the Klan.
Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of 10 books. He seeks to write about little-known people who made a difference. “History is written by great men and about great men, but sometimes it's the people in the margins who stopped them,” said the author, who grew up in Spokane, Washington, one of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family.
“The only thing new in the world is the history we do not know,” he said, quoting former President Harry S. Truman, noting the past offers many lessons for the present.
Egan described how the original Klan was founded in the South after the Civil War to terrorize American Blacks who had received the rights of citizenship. Disguised in white sheets and hoods, Klan members burned down Black churches and schools, and attacked whites who sought to educate former slaves. President Ulysses S. Grant went after the Klan, backing a series of laws designed to rein in the Klan, and by 1875 the group was essentially gone.
The Klan’s second rise began in 1915, inspired by the release of the silent film blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the KKK as heroic. The film “was the most powerful and effective piece of racial propaganda in American history,” Egan said. This new Klan expanded its hatred beyond Blacks to also include Catholics, Jews, immigrants and flappers — liberated women of the 1920s.
With Stephenson leading the way, Indiana became the epicenter of this new KKK. The Klan took over the political power structure of Indiana, both at the state and local level. One in three male white Hoosiers put their hand on the Bible and joined the group. No state in the country was more Klan-centric than Indiana, Egan said.
The Klan members of Indiana weren’t hicks and rubes. “They were coaches, they were merchants, they were bankers, they were teachers, they were cops, they were judges, they were lawyers. They were people who held their community together and they all joined the oldest domestic terror group in the United States,” Egan said.
The Klan gained power in Indiana by recruiting Protestant ministers to preach against Catholicism, infiltrating fraternal organizations, establishing a women’s auxiliary and creating the Ku Klux Kiddies, a group to indoctrinate children.
The Klan didn’t have as much backing in South Bend, which had a large Catholic and immigrant population and was home to Notre Dame, the nation’s best-known Catholic university. So the Klan planned a large picnic and rally in South Bend for May 1924. Even though Notre Dame President Rev. Matthew Walsh, CSC, told students to stay on campus, the students vowed to confront the visiting Klan members.
Egan read from the section of his book that recounts the clash between Notre Dame undergraduates and Klan members. The students greeted the arriving Klansmen, misdirecting them to the edge of town, and grabbing their robes and hoods. Fistfights broke out, guns were fired into the air and one student was knocked to the ground by a baseball bat.
The conflict culminated in the students lobbing potatoes at the lighted electric cross outside the downtown Klan headquarters, smashing the red bulbs. A Chicago newspaper headline reported the outcome: “Students rout Klansmen.”
The clash helped popularize the “Fighting Irish” nickname that Notre Dame officially adopted in 1927. “And I’ve got to say, as a very proud and full Irish-American, I’m damn proud of it,” Egan said.
An exhibit recounting the 1924 clash between Notre Dame students and Klan members, continues on display at the Indiana Historical Society through January 24, 2026.
It was Oberholtzer, the young Indianapolis woman, who wrote out a deathbed declaration about how the Grand Dragon viciously attacked and raped her, that brought about Stephenson’s downfall, Egan said. It was the beginning of the end of power for the Klan in Indiana and across the nation.
Egan spoke of the need to remember and learn from history. It was just a century ago that Catholics were considered untrustworthy outsiders, he noted. “Now, a hundred years later, the majority of members of our Supreme Court are Catholic, and a huge amount of our legislators are Catholic,” he said.
“As Catholics, we should not forget where we came from,” Egan said. “We were the ones to keep out of the country. We were the ones they didn't want to have citizenship. We were the ‘other.’”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.