Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan
1891-1966
Appears in 1 documentary
David Curtis Stephenson arrived in Indiana around 1920 as a failed businessman with a gift for salesmanship and no fixed loyalties. Within four years he had made himself one of the most powerful men in the state, not through elected office, but as Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan.
Stephenson took control of the Klan’s Indiana realm in 1923 and turned it into a political and financial machine. At its height in 1924, roughly a quarter of a million Indiana men, close to thirty percent of the state’s native-born white male population, held Klan membership. This was not the rural Southern Klan of stereotype. It was Midwestern, respectable, and mainstream, drawing in ministers, businessmen, and officeholders. Stephenson collected a cut of every initiation fee and robe sale, amassing a personal fortune, and boasted, “I am the law in Indiana.” For a moment he was very nearly right: the Klan helped elect Governor Ed Jackson in 1924 and held sway over the legislature and city halls across the state.
In 1925 Stephenson abducted Madge Oberholtzer, a young state employee, and assaulted her aboard a train. Poisoned and gravely injured, she gave a lengthy deathbed statement before she died. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, confident that the governor he had installed would pardon him.
The pardon never came. In retaliation, Stephenson handed over documents exposing the network of politicians the Klan had bought and controlled. The revelations triggered indictments, resignations, and public revulsion. Indiana’s Klan, which had seemed unstoppable, collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. Membership cratered within a few years.
Stephenson’s story is uncomfortable precisely because it happened in the American heartland, not on its margins, and because it shows how quickly organized bigotry can capture the ordinary machinery of government when enough respectable people look away. But it also delivered a hard lesson in how such machines end: not always through noble resistance, but often when their own corruption consumes them from the inside. He was paroled decades later and died in obscurity in 1966.
Timothy Egan's gripping account of how Stephenson seized Indiana for the Klan, and how Madge Oberholtzer's testimony brought him down.
Free with an Audible trial. The full story of Stephenson's rise and ruin, narrated.
In the 1880s, workers excavating the grounds of the Indiana Statehouse unearthed hundreds of ancient Mound Builder human remains -- a prehistoric burial ground beneath the seat of state government -- and construction simply continued over most of it.