Timothy Egan on Extremism and Fear

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1:32Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:19Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm recording this upstairs at my house. We just spent all afternoon packing up the camper. We're going to drive out to Big Bend. I guess it'll be the third trip we've made in the last three years. You know, the Stokes say we never step in the same river twice. This is quite true for the Rio Grande these days because it is drying up. And when we were there in April last year, it was flowing like a trickle and then it was all but gone. I am expecting there to be a little bit more water right now, but we'll see. We're taking the kids.

2:59The other two times we've been there, it's been very, very hot. And it may snow one of the days that we're going to be there. So it's going to be an adventure. We were speculating about whether we should cancel or not, but we decided to go through it. To go through with it, it's going to be an adventure. And it's going to be fun. It's one of my favorite places on the planet, a very underrated American national park. We've got a Yellowstone trip planned later in the year. But just taking some time, trying to spend more family time lately, decompress a little bit, get outside. Remembering what Seneca says, that the whole world is a temple of the gods and nowhere reminds us of this better than, as Ken Burns says, America's best idea.

3:43The national parks, the national monuments. And we're going to get out there and do that. But I wanted to record this intro to set you up to listen to an interview with someone I was very excited to bring on, someone whose work I've read in the New York Times for many, many years. He is also a National Book Award winner for his book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, which was a bestseller. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for his series on how race is lived in America. He has done, speaking of interesting trips, he's done many pilgrimages and hikes. He followed the entire length of the Lewis and Clark Trail.

4:23Not just a writer, but a person who has lived a bunch of different experiences that form his writing. He's worked on a farm and a factory at a fast food outlet. It took him seven and a half years of college off and on. And he's written nine books and spent almost two decades at the New York Times. Timothy Egan. Timothy Egan is an American author, journalist, former op-ed columnist, and just an overall fascinating guy. His new book could not be more timely and eye-opening. As I've said before, one of the best ways to understand what's happening in the world right now is actually not reading the New York Times necessarily, but reading about the kinds of things that the New York Times would have covered 50 years ago, 80 years ago, 100 years ago, reading about significant historical events from a, from a, not a 10 ,000 foot view, but a sweeping view.

5:20Like, as I said, you know, I think at the outset of the pandemic, one book I highly recommended to everyone was James M. Barry's The Great Influenza, right? If you want to understand the Cold War, David McCullough's book on Truman, let's say. Actually, it's a good glimpse into the whole 20th century. If you want to understand American history, don't read the latest sort of controversial hot take, woke or unwoke. Read a great biography of the founders, of the lesser known founders, of the hidden figures of history. I really liked Henry Louis Gates's book on Phyllis Wheatley, for instance, America's first black poet and her encounters with the founding fathers.

6:05Totally different view of people I'd read about a bunch. Anyways, I'm getting distracted because what I really want to recommend is Tim Egan's new book, A Fever in the Heartland, the Ku Klux Klan's plot to take over America and the woman who stopped them. It just came out yesterday on April 4th. and it's a fascinating book. As I said, it's a good way to understand some of the extreme feelings that are going on, the backlash, the resentment, this idea of white supremacy. It's hard and loaded when you're looking at what's happening right now, but when you can look at it decades ago, it's less loaded.

6:43You have less of a dog in the fight. You can see what's happening, not just on a historical level, but on a human level, and then you can see how something like this could happen again, how echoes of it are happening again, less extreme, hopefully. And you get this sense that history is the same thing happening over and over and over again, as the Stoics would certainly have posited. Anyways, this is my interview with Tim Egan. It's a great one. Looking forward to bringing it to you. You can check out his website, timothyeganbooks.com and follow him on social media at NYTEgan on Twitter and enjoy this interview.

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8:20Get yours before the holidays at dell.com slash deals. Terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a Eight Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is Eight Sleep's best product. I've used Eight Sleep for many years now, and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better.

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10:03look i i i loved the book i want to talk about it but i i had a question for you first so yeah you've been you've been doing this a long time you've covered pretty much every beat you can imagine uh when you say this what do you mean by this uh being a journalist being a journalist yeah okay yeah um you know i've i've read rural stuff that you've written urban stuff that you've written, political stuff that you've written, social stuff you've written, racial stuff you've written. So I've got to imagine you have met thousands of people, talked to thousands of people, powerful people, unpowerful people.

10:40What do you feel like you have learned about people over the years that you've done this? Well, what do you think you find to be true about all the different people that you meet? Wow, what a question. My God. Well, even people who never get interviewed by the news media. I mean, I used to cover Alaska, for example. I love covering Alaska because they're like the last state in the union where people are really happy to see the press. And they love to tell long, sometimes boring stories because, you know, in some cases they haven't talked to someone in a while. And, you know, they're really open.

11:28They're, oh, you're from the New York Times. Let me tell you something. You know, they go on and on and on. I got to go. So public people, private people, you asked me about the similarity. Everybody has a public face and a private face, whether you're being, whether a reporter's talking to you for the first time or, you know, you're one of these politicians who's maniacally on message and just never goes off message. I don't think there's – the test of any interviewer, what you do, or any journalist, is to find the core of the authentic. And that's what I think is really hard. Also, the other thing I'll say, and this is part of what this book is about, is that I'm more and more interested in people who are at the margins of history, not the great men, not the men who ran the railroad, the governor, or the guy who commanded the armies, the people who are at the margins that actually affect history.

12:25And so in a lot of my books, I have these characters. In this case, the subtitle is the woman who brought down the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. I mean, she was like in the eyes of her tormentor, she was a nothing. You know, she had a public school teacher, you know, lived at home with her parents, you know, worked at the state, 28 years old. And this guy, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, controls the entire state of Indiana. And governors grovel at his feet, and he snaps his fingers, and a bill gets passed, and he's raped and attacked and chewed on different women. And this small, seeming nothing woman brings him down.

13:03So that's the other thing. You asked me about all this stuff. I'm really interested in how one person could still have an effect, and that one person is seemingly powerless. Yeah, I imagine it's that all individuals have a certain amount of power. Some of that power is well codified, and then some of that is just sort of human agency. Right. And in the internet age, seemingly nothing, a person without power can have power overnight. Yeah, all you got to do is put on a monkey suit and run around half naked and say some racist shit. And before you know it, you've got a million followers. followers.

13:43Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's interesting because, uh, what, one of the things I noted as I was, I was reading the book, actually, right as your publicist had reached out, I found myself, I'm writing a chapter in my, uh, the book that I'm working on now about the crack epidemic. And I had stumbled across a piece that you wrote in 1999 about sort of the, the, the breaking of the crack epidemic. You know, the main character of the piece is Rudy Giuliani. And I was like, oh, he's back in the news. And then, you know, sort of a society wrestling with this, you know, this substance that's, you know, so damaging, the sort of political institutions that failed, you know, that's what's happening right now with the fentanyl epidemic.

14:31But I imagine it must have been interesting for you in the years that you've done this, you meet these, The names and the places change, but it's kind of the same stories over and over again. Yeah, that's sad, isn't it? Because you expect some of these veins that run through history to, after a while, get exhausted or subsumed, but they're always there. I mean, I write about the 1920s, and you think of it as this Gatsby era, this freewheeling flapper era. And it was like the peak of institutional racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism, and sort of anti-fun. I mean, they were like Taliban-lite, the Klan of the 1920s.

15:19They would go into dance halls and break up parties. People were playing cards on Sunday. They had these guys. So, yeah, to your point, it's sad that this stuff just comes and goes. It's either prevalent or not. But maybe that's the human nature side of it, that human nature has so much darkness to it as well. That said, though, I don't think you should be in the storytelling game, which is what all journalism and writing is, unless you can still be surprised. Yes. Unless you have the capacity to be surprised by something. And I'm still pleasantly surprised by enough twists in what happens in the public world.

16:02Yeah, but I mean, even the surprises, like, I mean, I think when you study history, you see not only the darkness, but you also see the characters like the ones in this book. You see the surprises are also history repeating itself, if you know what I mean. They are. They are. Yeah. Yeah. So the main character of this book is a monster. Okay. He's a rapist. He's a cannibal. I mean, he chews on women. He's a raging alcoholic. He's a fraud. He's a con man. He's a liar. He's a braggart. He's a millionaire. And, you know, he drifts into the most quintessential American state. And within four years, he's running the effing state, which is a real ding on America's character.

16:50Are we such suckers? I mean, this guy is running an organization that professes purity of women, prohibition. that, you know, they're busting up, you know, liquor joints and he's a raging alcoholic and a sexual predator and he's running the state. So, you know, it really, it's sort of like music man is like, you know, river city guy that rolls into town and has all the people to follow him. And that's unfortunate. I mean, that's, you'd think, I mean, what's that old cliche about no one ever, no one ever got poor underestimating the suck, you know, it's Barnum and Bailey quote. Yeah. No one ever went broke, underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

17:30That's what it is. Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of history repeating itself, you have this quote in the intro from the guy, Stevenson. He says, I did not sell the Klan in Indiana on hatred. I sold it on Americanism. Isn't that amazing? I mean, so they had like oompa bands at the Klan rallies. They had barbershop quartets singing, you know, if you don't like your country now, go back to where, leave your Uncle Sam. They had like clan kitties. The Ku Klux Kitties would be given these junior-sized robes and masks, and they'd march in parades of hate. Oh, the Ku Klux Kitties. So, you know, he really tried to stitch his clan to American, Norman Rockwellian American.

18:13Sure. That it was, you know, crosses would burn after sleigh rides at Christmastime. Crosses would burn, you know, at baseball games. There was a Klan baseball team, by the way, with their flannel uniforms. So Ku Klux Klan, you know, it was extraordinary how American and that's that's I'm glad you read that quote. That is the that's probably the theme of this book. And that that that explains how the Klan could have almost six million members and 75 members of Congress under its control. And at least four U.S. senators who were sworn Klansmen, probably a dozen who were in their pocket. Four governors, Oregon, Colorado, Indiana, and Ohio, were Klansmen.

19:00More than anything, what explains that is what you just read, that it wasn't some outsider thing. It was tied to Americanism. Well, I think that's something we miss about extreme groups is that for the most part, the way they're able to become popular is by making people think that they're actually not extreme, that they're quite normal. that the other side is extreme, right? Exactly. It wasn't 6 million people that had turned themselves over to the equivalent of ISIS and saw themselves as these villains and extremists as outside of society hell-bent on destroying it. It's that they saw themselves as the silent majority that felt that they couldn't be silent anymore to protect that majority And that like what they were doing was fundamentally very normal, very sane, very reasonable.

19:58And that's the insidiousness of the lines of thinking and the propaganda that they managed to put out. Yeah, very well put. They weren't a bunch of toothless rubes. They were the pillars of society. They were the people that – they were the coaches, the bankers, the merchants, the guy who delivered your groceries, the minister. They bribed a lot of Protestant ministers. And they thought of themselves as the people that held their society together. Now, I'll give you one example of this. So there was a character in the book named Patrick O'Donnell. He's a crusading Irish-American lawyer who comes from Ireland where he saw the Brits try to erase a culture for 800 years.

20:38And now he sees the Klan trying to do that to Catholics and Jews and blacks. And he starts this group called Tolerance, this paper called Tolerance. And what they do is they print membership lists once a week. He had all these Klan insiders who would give him these lists of people who'd sworn an oath to white supremacy. And he'd print it on his paper. And it's like, we're unmasking the Invisible Empire. Because remember, these people were masked. This is a society of six million people who went around in hoods. You know, their parades where they get 50 ,000 people, including one in Washington, D.C., were by and large, they were masked men.

21:14So we unmask them. And he goes, this will destroy them because they'll see who they are. What does it do? It has the opposite effect. People say, oh, my God, I didn't know so-and-so was in there. I better join. You know, the banker, my teacher, my coach, my minister, they're all on the list. So his unmasking ended up being validating rather than shaming. So people felt like, oh, if I don't belong, there's something wrong with me. I have a line in the book where I said, Hoosiers were joiners. And in 1925, if you were not a member of the KKK, you did not belong because one in three white males in Indiana belonged to the Klan.

21:54Yeah, that tendency is it's almost so foreign that we can't comprehend it. I remember I was reading David McCullough's book about Truman, and he talks about Truman's decision to briefly join the Klan in Missouri. And he basically, he tries to present it, and obviously this is a charitable interpretation, but he's like, he's like, Truman was a joiner. Truman was a member of like 40 clubs. Like if there was a club, like Truman joined it, the Masons and the, the, the Elks and the, you know, the Shriner. If there was a club, he wanted to participate in the club and in a sort of a pre internet world.

22:32That was how you connected with people. That's how you got business. That's how you, you showed yourself to be a decent, moral, upstanding human being. And, and again, to go to the point about sort of the normalization of extreme views, the clan managed to do a pretty good job presenting themselves as a club, not that dissimilar from the other clubs. It just had a vile mission. Right. So they stole a lot of these silly rituals, you know, the secret handshake and the clavering title and the royal so-and-so and the oaths and all. They stole that stuff from fraternal organizations. And this was the golden age.

23:11You mentioned that, and thank you. Way, well, well, pre-mass media where, you know, if you belong to the Elks, the Shriners, the Odd Fellows, that's what guys did. They're mostly men and they're men's clubs. The largest fraternal organization in 1925 in the United States of America was the Ku Klux Klan. And they did use all these rituals and all these, all these oaths and all these secret things. But here's the difference. And everything on the surface seemed normal. At the same time, they were still branding the foreheads of their enemies with hot iron brands. They were still running people out of town on a rail.

23:46There was a small town in Indiana where they gave the blacks who lived there less than 12 hours to all get out of town. They would go and shame women who were filing for divorce because how dare you file for divorce? You know, they firebombed certain houses. So they were doing terror. They were still committing terror. Terror was part of their toolkit, while on the surface, they're seemingly normal and American. I thought the title of the book was interesting because you present it as a fever. Although obviously there is this kind of dark energy that goes through American history where these themes have always been there.

24:25it did seem like it was a particularly bad fever. There's a Marcus Aurelius quote that I thought a lot about during the pandemic. He says, there's two kinds of plagues. There's the one that can destroy your life, and then there's the one that can destroy your character. And I think he was talking about these sort of trends or fads or lines of thinking that can spread from person to person not unlike a virus. What do you think happens in this moment in time that the Klan is so resurgent and so many people get infected? That's a great question. And I'll just go to the fever thing for one minute.

25:03I went back and forth with my editor over this. We did debate the very question you said is a fever implies an aberration. It'll come and go away. And, you know, we, well, is this more than a fever? Is this something that's just deep in our character and it's never going to go away. This was a particular fever because it took hold more dramatically and in a more powerful way. I mean, the Klan had never been so powerful. You can't even compare it to the early Klan of the 1860s and the 1870s, which General Grant, later President Grant, destroyed, actually destroyed, put him in jail, sent an army feds down to nail him and passed the Ku Klux Klan laws.

25:41The Klan was done in 1872. They were broken. And suddenly it reappears in 1915. Twelve guys go up to a mountaintop in Georgia and light a cross and put their hand on a Bible and say to God, well, the new Klan is born today. Okay, it could have been a bunch of knuckleheads on a frigging mountain in Georgia and should have never gone any further. Why did it take off? Well, you have to look at what was going on in 1920s America. And there were three things going on. The most radical social experiment in our history, the only time the United States Constitution was ever amended to take away a right, prohibition.

26:22Okay. And what did prohibition do? It prompted way more drinking than you had before prohibition. And who were drinking? Women, young people, and they were breaking the law. So the Klan was militantly anti-alcohol. I mean, I say no state was more anti-alcohol outside of the Muslim world than Indiana in the 1920s. And the Klan's big pillar of the thing was anti-alcohol prohibition. By the way, being led by a raging alcoholic, D.C. Stevenson in the hypocrisy realm. So it's prohibition. They've got to do something about these bootleggers, these Italian Americans who are brewing wine in their basements, these German Americans who are making beer, these foreigners who come to our country and they have an alcohol culture.

27:05The Irish were meeting in the pub, The bar was the Irish Social Club. It was the Irish Political Club. They outlawed all that. That's going on. Secondly, women. What was the other thing? We took away a right with prohibition, but we had a huge right granted when we gave women the vote in 1920. Suddenly, women not only have the vote, they can run for office. They can own property without their husband's permission. They're going into bars, speakeasies, underground bars. They're driving the social culture. Movies has these flappers, you know, having a great time and, you know, throwing off all the moralistic shackles of the 19th century.

27:43The Klan reacts to that. And then the third thing is immigrants. We've got a huge surge in immigration going on. And where are they coming from? They're not coming from the Nordic countries. They're not coming from Great Britain. They're coming from southern Italy. And this is a big distinction. Not northern Italy, southern Italy, Sicily. In a 10-year period after an earthquake, Sicily sent 800 ,000 people to the United States. They're generally dark-skinned, and they're Roman Catholic. There's Greeks coming from, because after the tumult with Turkey, tons of people from the southern Mediterranean, and then there are Jews from Eastern Europe.

28:19The largest influx of Jews into this country happened in the early part of the 20th century from what is now Ukraine, Eastern Europe. And so the Klan reacts to these other Americans, these people coming to our country who aren't white Christian. And that's, they have a three-pronged thing. They're against alcohol, they're against immigrants, and they're against the new sensuality of the 1920s, which, you know, jazz is exploding. You've got the Charleston going on. You've got American music, this unique form of American music is taking off, and that's linked with all the changes of the 20s. So into that world is born a reaction to it.

28:59But you haven't brought up black Americans there. I think when people think of the Klan, they think of it as primarily an anti-black social group or an anti-black terrorism organization. I guess there's also a migration of black Americans from the South to northern cities, right? Right. And so where does that sort of fit in here? Yeah, well, thank you for bringing that up. So blacks were the original targets of the Klan, of course, in Reconstruction. Suddenly you had 37 % of the people living in the South who had been held as human property are now American citizens. That's what the Klan reacts to.

29:40What happens in the 20s is two things. You mentioned one of them. The Great Migration has been going on since the start of the 20th century where blacks are moving from the South to the North. and Jim Crow is moving with him. I mean, we fool ourselves into thinking the North was so, you know, racism was all in the South. Come on, Oregon was one of the most racist. The West too, yeah. Yeah, Oregon had a Klan governor in the Pacific Northwest where I live. Colorado had not only a Klan governor, but a Klan mayor. And his motto was, every man under the Capitol dome, a Klansman. So, you know, the racism is from the Blacks moving from the South to the North for the first time.

30:18And one more thing. Several hundred thousand African-Americans has served in the United States Army in World War I. They were soldiers putting their lives on the line for this country. They come home and they say, holy cow, it's Jim Crow. I can't even be a citizen in this country. I can't vote if I live in the South. So they want their rights. They've just fought for this country. And they come home as ex-soldiers, as veterans, and they're asking for rights. So yeah, the animus towards blacks is still the central guiding. And don't let me misconceive you. When you put your hand on a Bible, as nearly 6 million people did in the 1920s, and you swear out an oath to the Ku Klux Klan, the number one thing you swear, and it's written there in every oath, is I will forever uphold white supremacy.

31:04There is no, you know, it doesn't actually say in broad words, I'll hate Jews and Catholics, but it has a bunch of, you know, sort of nonsense language on that.

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33:26No, no, I think you raise a good point here, though, which is that when we hear the word white supremacy today, we don't necessarily think of it the same way they did then, which is that there were a lot of people today who are considered white, who were not considered white in the early 1900s, as far as the Klan was concerned. There were Jews, Catholics, and then And people from Eastern Europe, basically, even Italy, were subject to, you know, vehement racism in a way that's almost incomprehensible to us in our current definitions of race. That's exactly right. And I wish people understood that.

34:12So this is one of my pet peeves. And you may disagree with me on this. But I think today that white supremacy gets misused. I think it's, you know, you make people study math. That's white supremacy. Okay, you could call it maybe something else, but I don't think it's white supremacy. I spent three years time traveling in this period, and I know what white supremacy was because, again, you not only put your hand on a Bible and swore an oath with absolute language of, I will forever uphold white supremacy. You then passed laws, as they did in Indiana, as they did in Oregon, to not allow blacks to have anything close to full citizenship.

34:54You couldn't move into a certain neighborhood. You couldn't go to a certain school. You certainly couldn't marry a member of another race because you'd go to jail for that. So, yeah, I mean, people now when they use white supremacy, I think it's kind of an easy term to throw around for cultural things. And I think it's important to understand really how awful it was and what it really means. Yeah, there's a sort of an extreme or exaggerated sort of woke version of what we call white supremacy, which almost does – is almost too kind to what actual white supremacy was in very recent American history, which is much closer to Nazism in its sort of explicitness and systemicness and violence.

35:46It wasn't just a set of ideas. It was something enforced by the point of a gun. Forced by the point of a gun and passed in many laws, too. I mean, it was – so I just – it's one of many minor episodes in my book. But in a small town in Indiana, one night the town council got together and gave every black living in that town 12 hours to get out of town. They drove them – it was a pogrom. That's what you would call that in Eastern Europe. They drove them out of this town in Indiana. That's white supremacy. I mean, that was white supremacy in action. It was preached from evangelical pulpits, and it was practiced in the law.

36:26No, and I think we don't want to think about this as Americans because we want to look at what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 40s as this aberration. But I mean, they looked to 1920s America as an example of what was possible legally and culturally as far as like how far you could take ideology like this. Right. And let me just say this with this caveat. I don't like to use Nazi Germany almost as an analogy for anything because it usually shuts down any conversation. It's too facile and people use it. Oh, that's just like the Nazis. But I will say, just because the historical record is there, Hitler called the number one book on white supremacy, which was used for a lot of eugenicist laws and it used a lot of laws.

37:17It was written by an American zoologist. I forget his name, but he called it My Bible. And it was a book that everyone used to sort of justify white supremacy. They were saying that there were biological reasons why whites were superior. Their foreheads were different. And they would measure like your forehead if you were Southern Italian or if your nose was a certain size. And they determined that you were inferior mentally because you had a bigger forehead. So there's all this crazy eugenics going on. And Hitler called that book My Bible. And it was the basis for a lot of eugenicist laws. And it was pioneered in America.

37:57Number two, the first eugenics for sterilization law was passed in Indiana. And they were all this whole category of undesirables, you know. And some states when they passed it, gay people were included among the undesirables. But usually it was like loose women as they defined them then. You know, a woman who was, you know, promiscuous or, you know, drunk. Had a lot of kids, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And they could, under their laws, they could forcibly sterilize them. Well, when the Nazi Germany instituted their forced sterilization eugenesis laws, they said the Americans had given them the model.

38:31I mean, that's where they got it from. So I mean, that's, again, I don't like to use Nazi analogies, but that's the historic record. So what is it? Like, where does this dark energy in humans come from? I guess more specifically in Americans, because it does seem to be there. And it seems to be, there are times when it's dormant. And then there are times when particularly cunning or ambitious politicians or cultural groups managed to reanimate it and use it. I think we're, there's to some degree, we're in a moment like that now. And you can see the politicians that are good at playing it, the politicians that are afraid of it and won't defy it.

39:12And then the politicians who are sort of ham handed and clumsy at it. But what is that? So I think it's just really simple. And a number of African American scholars at the time pointed it out, as did a number of rabbis who were trying to figure this thing out. It's fear of others. It's just fear of people who are different. America at the start of the 1920s, 100 years ago, 90 % of Americans were white, and most of them were Protestant. And the face of America was changing. And remember, America, you may disagree with me on this, but I still think America is an idea. It's not a nationality. We were the first big country founded not on, we're all Celts, we're all Teutonics, we're all Sicilians.

40:00No, we're everything. And it's an idea. This is one of the biggest tests in our history of that idea, because you had a changing face of America moving it. Now, the other part of this is the cultural thing. We hear this thing thrown around, culture wars in our country. They really had culture worse then. Why? Because cinema had taken off and it was, it wasn't regulated until they had these morality codes in the 1930s. But before then, and the people who were not all of them, but the people who were, I don't want to say the head of, a lot of Jews were in Hollywood and the Klan tied that. That was part of the anti-cinematism was to say, look, they're giving us this filth.

40:45They showed, you know, women, and loose women dancing. I read some of the ads of the 1920s movies that said flappers and their inhibitions and their wildness and their petting parties. Sexuality was finally something that was fairly open after the long siege of the Victorian era. They had a huge reaction to that. So they're having this race reaction. They're having this changing face of America reaction, but they're also having a reaction to expressions of sex and sensuality and jazz. You know, people are going to speakeasies, listening to black music, dancing in, you know, flimsy outfits, all this stuff.

41:23And then they're seeing these movies. They boycotted a lot of movies throughout the Midwest because there were Jews in them or they said that Jews were the ones who were behind them. So do you think that it's not just fear of others maybe, but it's sort of a resistance to change, right? Like I want things to stay the way that they are. And then there is this sort of a political or a cultural profiteer or politician, whatever you want to call it, that manages to say, here are the people or the groups or the institutions that are driving that change. And so if we can destroy them or stop them, or if you empower me, I will do that.

42:08And then I'll be able to deliver on this dream or wish that you have, which is that things remain as they are and as they have been. Correct. So, I mean, I just agree with what you said. That is exactly right. But they were a sort of mom and pop organization at one level because they penetrated the family with this Ku Klux Kitties and the Women's Auxiliary. There were 2 million women in the Klan. and, you know, newly empowered with the vote. They'd been given the vote and they thought, oh, we can use women to help support white supremacy. And they did, they did. Women weren't any better than the men.

42:48One of the women in my book was one of the lead anti-Semites and racist. You know, she was very powerful and a woman named Daisy Barr. So they had the family part of it, but then politicians would do their dirty work. And that's where my, the monster who's at the center of this book, DC Stevenson was so good. He ran the state and he ran a Klan state. They called it a Klan Republic. And, you know, as with a lot of hypocrites, it was everything that he, it was do what I say, not as I do. I mean, the guy, again, was a raging alcoholic, a sexual predator and all this stuff. But yeah, then they empowered other people to do this.

43:23Well, yeah, I was just thinking, because again, it's not that all these people were unwitting participants, but if you think about it as this sort of multi-level organization that's profiting from the people, that's using them as a political base to get power, it's extreme, but it's dressed up as not being extreme. I was just thinking, it's like, if I'm someone who lives in Florida right now and someone's got me mad about woke universities and elites in the media and our failure at the border. It's essentially the same story, right? It's like the same prongs of things. It's less outwardly racist in the language that it uses and it's a little bit more dressed up and it's more of a multimedia approach than the Klan having a newspaper however many years ago.

44:16But it does strike me as a relatively consistent playbook throughout history with kind of the same unwitting groups, like decent, lower middle class to middle class people who want to preserve how they like things. Yeah. There's this basic struggle. You could see now that I've listened to you and I'm seeing the larger theme as well. There's this basic struggle that runs through all of American history. Part of it is puritanical versus the opposite of puritanical. Some great writer once described Puritans as somebody who has a fear that someone somewhere is having fun. I think it was Mencken. Yeah, it was making it.

45:02Exactly. It was just one of the great lines about purity. So there's a sort of puritanical story. It goes back to the founding, meaning when some of the people came to America, they passed these really harsh laws about alcohol and sex and adultery, the scarlet litter and all of that. That goes back to our history. And you can carry it all the way up to today with banning drag shows. Sure. What would Milton Berle do now? Or for that matter, Rudy Giuliani, who's been a drag many a time in Tennessee. I mean, look, not to cut you off, but I know that part of the reason I'm thinking about this is I live in this small town called Bastrop, right outside Austin, Texas.

45:41And I have a little bookstore here. And every night, every Thursday night, one night a month, Bastrop Pride, which is the gay group in town, would have a game night on the back porch of our bookstore. And then when pride came along, they wanted to do an adult drag show. Um, and they were going to do it in this golf course. Uh, you know, like they were going to rent out a golf course and they got chased out of there. Uh, and then they were going to do it in this other venue that got chased out of there. And, um, we said, um, you know, do your event wherever you want to do it. But if you want to do a, a, a, a, a drag reading for kids at some point, you're welcome to, right?

46:20Like, uh, not, not an adult drag show, but just, uh, it was pirates and princesses, which they did. They did a reading at the bookstore. So some men dressed up as princesses and some women dressed up as pirates. It was fun. My kids had a great time. Other people's kids had a great time. But when you do something like that, and then there's a real worry of people showing up with assault rifles to protest said thing, or when you start getting, you know, when you start getting very real violent threats from people for having done such a thing. And the Texas Tribune just wrote a piece about it. You go, oh, this strain of American life where it's not just I object, I don't like what you're doing, but I object, I don't like what you're doing.

47:05And I will threaten or potentially use violence to stop you from doing that thing. That's not as gone as I think we'd like to think it is. Yeah. It changes the nature of a reading, doesn't it? It does. It does. Someone's showing up with AKs because of a drag show. Yeah. But not only drag shows, but the resistance to them is as old as American history as well. Of course. Or as old as human history. I mean, go back to Roman times. I mean, this is a struggle. You mentioned you're in Texas. I want to say one thing about Texas. So the Klan was very powerful in Texas. Sure. But my book takes place in Indiana.

47:48They elected the first Klan United States senator, a guy named Mayfield, Senator Mayfield, open Klansman elected in Texas. I have an incident in the book where this guy, an African-American bellboy, makes a remark to a woman sort of flirting with her. And they take him, they drag him out, and they hot iron brand him on the forehead. They strip him naked. They whip him to within an ounce of lice, and then they drop his body on the door of the hotel. The newspaper wrote about this and wrote about it in a way saying the guy deserved it. The cops were called, and they were sent to investigate it, and they said the guy no doubt deserved it, deserved what he got because he made a solicitous remark to a white woman.

48:34A judge was asked about this, and he said, well, hopefully this will set an example and prevent blacks from flirting with women. So all the stuff you're talking about, they also had the institutional law enforcement on their side. Sure. And the newspapers. I mean, I was just shocked to read this newspaper account of this hot iron branding, this terror attack that nearly killed this guy. And the papers asked to go along and write about it. And the headline was something like, you know, man gets what he deserves for insult to white woman. You know, so the institution was really behind it, too. It's off your point, but I wanted to say.

49:12No, no. I think that's a great point because right now in our culture, we throw around words like institutional and systemic, which I don't disagree that there are sort of implicit and subtle and exhausting forms of racism and discrimination and injustice. But there was a version of systemic and institutional racism, let's say, in Indiana, where literally all the institutions were explicitly captured by members of the same criminal gang, right? Right, right. And they protected each other, and they used those institutions in lockstep against specific groups. No, exactly right. And that's a good perspective to get on this.

49:58Now, just talk about the church for one second. And the Klan had something like 30 ,000 Protestant ministers on its payroll. Wow. Their key to success early on, you know, was to infiltrate the fraternal groups, and there were a lot of them. Yeah. But also to infiltrate the pulpit. So they would bribe these Klan ministers, and they were universally white Protestant. And they didn't like Catholics, they didn't like Jews, and they didn't like blacks. But the institutional part of that was the ministers. So I say the way the Klan worked, people say, how did the Klan work in the Midwest? It worked really simply.

50:38The men were the muscle. So they had this private police force, the vigilantes who went out and broke up all the booze joints and stopped cars and all that. The men were the muscle. But the ministers sanctified it all. Without that sanctification from God, it wouldn't have been a holy organization. It had that spiritual part of it. And then the third part of that was he started these things called poison squads, which is the equivalent of misinformation today. And he had women do that. And he bragged that he could spread a misinformation, let's say, about you. You know, Ryan is gay. And they would plant something.

51:17and he said within six hours, everyone in Indiana would have heard about it. And it was like a gossip chain. So they had, and women were the ones who did it. And he called them, he said, well, one of my poison squads will take care of him. And it was just to plant something. So those are the three pillars that allow them to operate. In addition to the institutional things she wrote about.

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53:38No, I guess if you think about it, it's like, how did people not know something that was obviously wrong was wrong? It's that their church didn't tell them it was wrong. The newspapers didn't tell them that was wrong. The police didn't tell them it was wrong. Their politicians, It's all these people are propagating this lie together. And it's not just a lie that's enforced by, you know, it's a lie that's enforced by do you want a bank loan from these people? Do you want to get a job working at a school from these people? Even the political patronage and the business patronage, there was no national bank to get your home loan from.

54:23It was the small credit union down the street whose president was a local heavy in the Klan. Right. And let's say you wanted to go buy a new car. Yeah. So the Ford dealer, there's two interesting things about that. I saw all these ads in all the newspapers in the Midwest by the local Ford dealer. It would say, we serve only 100 % Americans. What does that mean? Well, it means if you're a Jew or a black or someone who's not, or an immigrant, is not 100 % American. That was a hardly coded word for what you just said. The second thing was, the biggest anti-Semite, one of the biggest anti-Semites in America was Henry Ford.

55:04Sure. When you bought a new, just talk about institutional validation. When you bought a new Model T in 1924, you not only got an owner's manual, you got a track on how Jews controlled the world. So with every car, he gave out the protocols of the elders of Zion. That's how deep, you know, anti-Semitism was planted in. And so all of that, of course, is validating to your, it's just your normal life. It's everyone up and around. I'll make some larger point about this if I can. And the hero, if there is a hero in my book is a woman, that's the subtitle of my book, and the woman who brought them down, this powerless woman who's, you know, I don't want to spoil the story.

55:46Yeah, she's – a terrible thing happens to her. She's raped and attacked and cannibalized. And ultimately there's a big trial, and her voice is the number one thing that brings it. It's a sensational trial. It's a trial of the century that all the papers are covering, and it shows this organization that it's about virtue is really about rape. That this organization that's about prohibition is really about alcoholism. That this organization that's about honesty is about theft and bribery. You know, all this, they're the opposite of everything they profess. So the scandals that she prompts do bring down the Klan of the 20s.

56:25I mean, they cratered. They went within a year from 6 million members to under 100 ,000. And there were similar scandals. But here's the important point. They had achieved most of their goals. Prohibition was the first thing. Jim Crow, which was the law of the land in so many states until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Acts lasted more than half of the 20th century. and most importantly, the 1924 Immigration Act, which basically made it impossible for Jews to get in this country. And several good books have been written about the immigration law. What they say is that millions of Jews who died in Eastern Europe would have otherwise immigrated, who died at Hitler's hand, would have otherwise immigrated.

57:09So I argue that one of the reasons the Klan broke up was not just the scandals, but that they'd achieved most of what they wanted. No, you could argue we're still in the process of unwinding some of those laws and that precedent even to today. No, no, precisely right. So when you look at a moment like this in history, I think there's one version of it that's sort of deeply depressing. and you sort of go, there's this original sin in American history that it's not even an original sin because we've committed it egregiously like a dozen or so specific times, right? And maybe we can't escape it. Is that the view you take from it or is there something more hopeful that you see?

57:57No, I can't get out of bed if I wasn't optimistic. I'm the opposite of that. I'm the Martin Luther King line, Barack Obama line, the arc of history bends toward justice with huge, I didn't even call them aberrations. So when the Chicago Tribune was trying to summarize what happened in the 1920s in the Midwest, and they wrote about this after the Klan was broken, they said, they wrote about it like a fairy tale. They said, and so it came to pass that one state, the quintessential American state in the American heartland gave itself over entirely, and this is all true, to a terror organization, to a hate organization, to an anti-American organization, to a thing that broke all the themes of the Constitution.

58:46And they said, how did this happen? Well, it was an aberration. And that's where I disagree. It's not an aberration. It's in our history. But I do think we tend to, we just, you got to whack a mole every 50 years or so, you know. Now the good thing is that the forces of good tend to win. I mean, so far, uh, there's Philip Roth wrote a great book. I'm sure you read it. Um, uh, what if, if, if Lindbergh had been elected instead of FDR, we wouldn't have gone to war against the Nazis. Uh, it's called the plot against America. Um, and so there, there is a lot of what ifs, you know, what if DC Stevenson, the monster at the center of this book hadn't been brought down.

59:28Well, they were pretty close to, you know, they had their eyes set on the White House. Now people, oh, that's bullshit. The Klan couldn't possibly take it over. Excuse me. They dominated the 1924 political conventions. Time magazine put the imperial wizard of the Klan on its cover and wrote a largely praiseworthy story saying the most influential force that put the Democratic and Republican parties at their 1924 conventions was a terror group. They didn't call them that. They called it Ku Klux Klan. So again, this what if of history, I've been towards, I follow the bend towards justice and optimism, but there's all these, oh my God, what if we just had gone down that way?

1:00:07How close were we? We're in this debate now as a society about sort of what version of our history do we teach, right? And there's some people that don't want to talk about this stuff at all because it's nasty or they deny that it exists. I feel like we do ourselves a disservice. You said that we have to sort of play whack-a-mole every 50 years. We have to sort of do this battle. I think if people understood that, that actually, yes, there are these original sins in American history, but every so often enough critical mass gets together and vanquishes that darkness, slays the dragon. If we could see that as a kind, If we could see American history as it's founded around the original sin of slavery, but then you have the American Civil War, then you have Reconstruction, then you have Grant's attempt to destroy the Klan, then you have the second defeat of the Klan, then you have the Civil Rights Movement, then you have the Gay Rights Movement.

1:01:11if we could see, if we could understand that, you know, there's this really dark version of history and then there's this version of history that's dark, but it's contrasted with the light that goes and slays the dragon. I think that would be, that's the version of history I want my kids to know. I couldn't agree more. That's exhilarating because the forces of good defeat the forces of evil. That doesn't mean the forces of evil aren't ever present and don't pop up a lot. and we have these horrible episodes like the eugenicist age. I mean, come on, it's horrible that 30 states had laws forcefully sterilizing, quote, undesirables against their will.

1:01:46It's horrible that Jim Crow deprived, you know, millions of American citizens of the basic rights of citizenship. You know, it's horrible that gays were put in jail for having drag shows, which they were up until, well, maybe they're going to be put in jail now again. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, since you brought this up, I'm just going to read one paragraph, okay? And this is from my friend, Ken Burns. We did a documentary together. He did a documentary about my book, The Dust Bowl. He was asked about this question. It's just what you said. He said, being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice.

1:02:21Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong, but it's dangerous. The dark chapters of our history have just as much to teach us, if not more than the glorious ones. And the two are often intertwined. I urge us to confront the hard truth and trust our children with it because a truly great nation is one that acknowledges its failures. It's just the point you made. I don't think that's going to make some kid in eighth grade feel like it's a shame to be an American. No, he should be happy to be an American because you confronted that dark truth and you defeated it. Yeah, that it's this ongoing battle that every generation replenishes the lines in.

1:03:04And I mean, to me, one hopeful thing, as I've sort of studied this period of American history, someone pointed it out to me, but they were like, you know, yeah, there's all these awful, let's say, Southern racists who are enforcing Jim Crow in the 20s and 30s. But they sent their kids, and in some cases themselves, to die in Europe to defeat fascism and Nazism. And so the idea that all hope is lost, you know, is belied by the fact that a lot of these people did change. Right. And a lot of the laws changed, too. Remember, Jim Crow was codified by a Supreme Court with only one dissenting vote. And, you know, whatever, 80 years later, they throw it out.

1:03:48So, I mean, this is, yeah. And again, if you teach this, I always approach history from a narrative perspective, not so much a policy perspective, but because I'm a storyteller. If you teach this in narrative arcs, you do see that, you know, and I think we're really regressing right now with laws saying you can't teach anything that makes people feel bad about their history. And again, I would argue, as Ken did, that in some ways it makes you feel better about your history. you teach the awful stuff and you say, look, they confronted that. It also gives people a blueprint, a blueprint for how to confront it.

1:04:23No, I heard someone say once, if it makes you feel good, you're probably not studying history. Yeah. No, that's a great line. That's a great line. Yeah. It's propaganda is what it is. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. If you're just looking at history as a catalog of human evils, of irredeemable shittiness, you're also doing something wrong, right? Because how did we get from there to here? Obviously, some things changed. Well, that's where I have my differences with the 1619 Project, because it says that America's revolution was founded to ensure that slavery would forever be there, which a lot of historians, including African-American historians, take issue with, because it's just not factually sound.

1:05:06Yeah, it's not true. And also, though, I think when you look at Lincoln, when you look at Martin Luther King, what the people who have actually affected change have always focused on is the promise of what America was and then tried to bring it closer to that promise. You look at Martin Luther King and you look at Malcolm X, they both choose very different tacks. One manages to accomplish things and the other effectively doesn't because they chose different, different handles to grab history by. Right. And studying both of them gives you an example of how one, you know, could change society. We all, you know, revere Martin Luther King right now.

1:05:50Yes. Malcolm X makes a brief appearance in my book because the Klan terrorizes his family one night in Omaha, I think it is. And he's a seven year old boy holding the hand of his mother. And he's the Klan tries to burn down his house one time, one night. Yeah. And he later said that the Klan changed its bedsheets for a policeman's uniform, which I talked about this incident in Dallas later. But, you know, to your larger point. Yeah. So I wonder, as this book is published on April 4th, you know, will people be afraid of this history or can you see triumph amidst the tragedy? And that's, to me, that's always, you know, I don't know.

1:06:31I don't know if this is, the 20s, what happened in the 1920s with the Klan has been largely forgotten, or most people don't know about it. I mean, I started this book because, you know, I'm a Pacific Northwestern. I wanted to, I'd heard that the Klan had a governor in Oregon. They got Oregon's, you know, you think now of woke rioters in Portland. It's got this, you know, reputation as an uber-progressive state, which is sort of only half true. But it was a hotbed of Klanism. So I was going to write this book about the Oregon and the Klan. I'm thinking, oh, this will – and then I looked at the greater 1920s.

1:07:04I said, holy shit. This was a big, big deal for that decade. And I didn't – I think I'm fairly well informed. I didn't know jack shit about it. I really didn't. Yeah. No, I'm watching 1923 right now, the TV show. And it's like – it's interesting. Like, hey, check out this washing machine. Hey, we're driving around in cars. and it's like also every member of this group would be a member of the Klan. You know what I mean? No, exactly, exactly. But we don't want to talk about that. But I mean, I think about, I was looking at the cover of the book, like my bookstore's in a little building just like this.

1:07:40And sometimes as I walk in, I think, who would have been and who wouldn't have been allowed in this store for the vast majority of the time that it was open in small town Texas. And I think about, there's a Confederate statue down the road on the courthouse that we're trying to get removed. And I think about, why did they put that up in 1905? And who was it sending a message to? And what did that message feel like? If you were walking around town, you were cited for speeding or unpaid taxes, you had to go into that courthouse and see a white judge who was almost certainly a member of the Klan, what was the purpose of that monument there for?

1:08:25And what did it feel like to that person, man or woman walking in? I thought I've had the same thought. It was to remind you that a nation of slaveholders were pretty prominent. And that's what it does to me. I mean, why did it only happen 50 years after the Civil War? It happened at the same time the Klan was happening because of the lost cause. Now, we didn't mention one more thing that was really important. I overlooked it in the rise of the Klan. The greatest instrument of racial propaganda in American history, I'm sure you know the answer, was the film, The Birth of the Nation. Yes. One in four Americans saw that film.

1:09:03Okay. And it was actually technically brilliant. I mean, he broke so many new things, you know, in terms of action shots. I mean, they had a cast of 20 ,000 people. They used something like 100 ,000 yards of white muzzle to dress up all these Klansmen. But the filmmaker, D.W. Griffiths, said the whole point of that movie was to change the view of Northerners of what happened in Reconstruction. Yeah. To make them think that it was a glorious era where the Klan saved the day. That the Klan were the heroes. They were the ones who fought back against these Reconstructionist bastards who came down and told people how to live.

1:09:39But it was hugely successful, not just in the South, but in the North. And it rewrote the narrative of what happened in not just the Civil War, but in Reconstruction. It made the Klan to be glorious. So therefore, as the Klan's coming of age in the 20s, it's not this terror group. It's this heroic group. You know, the people who saved the day. And that was the first film to play in the White House. Woodrow Wilson played it. And talk about institutional validation. Yeah. And at the end of this film, there's a chyron that says, after the Civil War, North and South finally joined together in their Aryan brotherhood.

1:10:20I mean, this is what comes up. I was watching this and I go, holy shit. Wow. I mean, you really can't overstate how incredibly racist this film was. They said the quiet part out loud as the expression today. Exactly. The blacks are shown as legislators with bare feet throwing chicken bones in the aisle and swilling liquor while they legislate over whites. Yeah. And that was deliberate. Griffith said, I want to change the narrative. And he did change the narrative. So you can't understand the growth of that, Klan, all the things we talked about without understanding that propagandistic component of it.

1:10:57Yeah, I've been reading a bunch about the Kennedy brothers during the civil rights movement. And there's this remark, I forget if it's Robert or John, they're battling over something in Mississippi and they go, man, our professors at Harvard really, really bought into the lost cosmos. They were like, I'm starting to actually understand what things must have actually been like, right? Because I think you're right. There was this sort of ideological capture, even amongst Northerners and intellectuals. intellectuals, it's probably just because one side really cared and the other side didn't care very much.

1:11:41And they managed to sort of place certain ideas and stereotypes so firmly in the culture that it took the violence of the civil rights movement and television to displace. You could argue that what's happening in Mississippi summer on national television and on the front page of the New York Times, that's what finally displaces D.W. Griffith's image from A Birth of a Nation. Yeah, no, and at the same time, what they're doing is they're putting in Statuary Hall, which is in our nation's capital where each state can put two statues. They're putting statues of traitors, Confederate, guys that fought against the United States.

1:12:21Absolute traitors are being put in the 20s. That's when this is happening, in Statuary Hall. There's a Harvard president, I quote him in the book, Harvard segregated its dorms by race for a long time in the early 20th century. And he's very open. There's a New York Times story I quote him where he says, we think it's better that the Negroes and the whites do not live together at Harvard. This is 1925 when he's saying this. We do ourselves a disservice as Americans by thinking this is a Southern thing because it allows us to say all those those hicks and rubes in the South and slaveholding grandchildren.

1:12:54And well, yeah, OK, if you could say that. But also it was it really penetrated so much of society. That's one of the themes of this book. That's why it's the heartland and not a fever in Alabama. Yeah. No, no. And and as you said, that it's the other disservice we do ourselves is when we tell ourselves that, you know, and obviously this is an extreme story about the worst of the worst. but we do ourselves a disservice would we try to dismiss it as an aberration because it wasn't. It was just, this was where the fever broke. This is the worst part of the fever but the fever was everywhere. That's correct.

1:13:31And that's why we struggled over the title too because fever implies it. But you could get a lot of fevers in your life too. Yes, yes, yes, you can. Well, I thought the book was fascinating. I think it's really important and I've loved your writing over the years. So this is a complete honor for me. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Ryan. And look, I hope you get a great crowd in Seattle, the Moore Theater, where Nirvana played there once, you know, so. I didn't think about that, but that's very, very cool to hear. Well, that's something you're going to have to uphold. You're going to have to live up to that standard.

1:14:03I'll try. I'll try.

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