A Century Ago, The Klan Fizzled Out Across Indiana

The Ku Klux Klan started 1925 as the most powerful political entity in the state. By the end of 1926, they'd all but disappeared.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JANUARY 12, 2026

It's May 1924, and the streets of South Bend are loud and busy and filled with bodies. The alleys are quieter, but the alleys are not empty. Instead, they are filled with young men from the University of Notre Dame, and the young men have come to cause trouble.

But it might be more accurate to call what's about to happen next a righteous fury.

A dozen students huddle in the shadows, pressed against a brick wall, eager to make sure that when they are first seen, it will come as a surprise. They wait and they scheme and they wait some more.

Then they pounce, leaping out from the alley and unleashing their first punches before the victim understands what's happening. They drag him back into the alley, and plenty of onlookers are content to look the other way. They punch until the man hits the ground, and then they start kicking. They won't stop until the man finds the wherewithal to surrender, and even them they'll force him to give up a prize before they'll release him. The mugging is over in less than a minute. It's hardly a noble way to fight, but their enemy doesn't exactly have nobility on his side either.

He's a Klansman.

In 1924, the Klan descended upon South Bend, eager to stake a foothold in the only Hoosier city that they hadn't fully corrupted with their power, their morals, and their ideals. Turns out, the men from Notre Dame had other ideas. During the coming years, the Klan would fade and dissolve. The legend would tell that the Fighting Irish had struck the first blow against the organization, and maybe that was true, but they weren't really responsible for killing the Klan.

That was something the Klan did to itself.

The Ku Klux Klan had already been crushed once. The first iteration of the hate group had sprouted during the aftermath of the Civil War, and its earliest leaders had not been subtle in their actions. They promoted an agenda of white supremacy through a strategy of intimidation, murder, and outright insurrection. The United States frowned pretty significantly on insurrection in those days, and they took drastic steps to curb the activity of the Klan. The first Klan was squashed in 1872, and it does not appear to have taken root in Indiana.

But the cancer returned.

In 1915, the Klan was reborn like a phoenix from its own inbred ashes. And while it is tempting to look at those Klansmen as stupid, ignorant, tough-guy cosplayers, the truth is that the second Klan's leadership was smart, shrewd, and — usually — careful. This was a different Klan than had existed 50 years prior. It was organized and hierarchical. It had goals and it had a plan.

By 1920, it came to Indiana. The first chapter was founded in Evansville, and the disease spread throughout the state in an alarming hurry. By 1922, the Indiana Klan was the largest such organization in any U.S. state. By 1923, it had more than 250,000 members — all men, all white, and all Protestant, per the organization's charter. Some estimates tell that as many as 1-in-3 eligible Hoosiers was a card-carrying, robe-clad member of the Klan barely three years after it had come to the state.

How in the hell does that happen?

The Klan is most famous, of course, for its well-documented hatred of black people. The lynchings, the cross burnings — all of it is real, and all of it is horrible. For the rank and file of the Ku Klux Klan, especially in the south, violent racism was the most important thing the organization stood for.

But for the leaders, the ones at the top of the twisted pyramid, there was another cause to work for, and one that they thought even more important. For as much as they hated African Americans, they loved power even more. That's why they'd come to Indiana, a state with an African American population of less than 2%. There was plenty of racism to be exploited in the state to be sure, but even the average racist person didn't consider African Americans an existential threat. There were a few places where Klan leaders could stoke racial fears to enroll new members, but often, they were going to need to invent and exaggerate other threats if they wanted to sell new hoods.

And yes, the Klan's leaders were making money selling hoods.

In Indiana, the Klan hired paid and commissioned recruiters, then sent them across the state to scare up as many people as they could. They boasted wild conspiracy theories about corruption in the government, and they promised to stamp it out. They led the charge against an obscure idea called the Catholic threat. They promised to stamp that out too. They were vocal Prohibitionists, although as we'll see a little later on, the organization's leaders didn't always practice what they preached.

Most of all, they preached an intense and perverted form of patriotism. They spoke about an America that was under threat — from too many immigrants, too many religious minorities, and too many people who just weren't white Protestant men. Those people had values and ideas that weren't just different, the Klan shouted. They were dangerous. They threatened America.

The Klan decided on a new motto, one that they thought they could get everyone to line up behind. They called it:

America First.

A year before they came to South Bend, the Klan spent their Independence Day in Kokomo. More than 100,000 members plus their families attended that gathering. They were about to witness one of the most important moments in the history of their organization. The state was about to ordain a new Grand Dragon, and the guy they picked was a real blowhard — a sociopath named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson cared for nothing except power and influence. He learned early on that the easiest way to get those things was to pretend that he already had them and trust that the rank and file would be too blind to fact-check him. Stephenson opened his address to the hooded throngs thusly:

My worthy subjects, citizens of the Invisible Empire, Klansmen all, greetings. It grieves me to be late. The President of the United States kept me unduly long counseling on matters of state. Only my plea that this is the time and the place of my coronation obtained for me surcease from his prayers for guidance.

Stephenson had never spoken with the President, but the men in the hoods had believed everything their leaders had told them so far. Why should they start doubting now?

The Klan lined up to follow their new leader, and then things started to move very, very quickly.

It had been almost too easy for the Klan to take over the Hoosier state. All they'd needed to do was to invent a boogeyman, and for good measure, they'd invented several. It was all lies, of course. African Americans had never concocted a scheme to steal white women. The Pope was not about to declare a religious war against the Protestants. The Jews did not control the entire American currency system. Educators were not out to corrupt children's minds with ideas like science and revisionist history.

But it had all been believed, and if anyone spoke out against any of the lies, especially if they were an elected official, then that was ironclad evidence that they too were a part of the conspiracy and should not be trusted. Just like that, the entire state had been effectively reduced to two separate groups of people — the Klan members who wanted to save America, and everyone else, who wanted to destroy it.

It took just two election cycles for the Klan to take over the state government. By 1925, more than half of the Indiana General Assembly were Klan members. The Klan had one governor removed and tried to bribe another — all of it an effort to transform their hatred into law and to protect their own power. Six years earlier, the Klan hadn't even existed in Indiana, and now, under puppetmaster D.C. Stephenson, they ran the entire state.

Most of those corrupted politicians weren't necessarily open about their involvement with the Klan, but it was hard to be too secretive about it, either — not when you were part of an organization with a quarter-million members. Anyway, campaigning politicians didn't need to explicitly say they were part of the Klan, not when they'd been given a series of seemingly innocuous code words that communicated the same thing to the Klansmen lined up at the ballot box:

America First. 100% American. Take Back America.

Somehow, the fall came even quicker than the rise.

D.C. Stephenson had let the power go to his head. He was a heavy drinker behind closed doors, and it got worse from there. When he raped and murdered a woman named Madge Oberholzer, he attempted to frame her death as a suicide. He assumed that his control over the State Government was absolute, and that he would be able to make the whole thing just go away.

He was wrong.

It is no credit to the individual Klansmen that they drew the line at rape and murder after they'd greedily accepted hate, bigotry, and xenophobia; but at least it's better than the alternative. As the sordid details were revealed in newspapers throughout the state — and throughout the nation — more and more Hoosier Klansmen turned their backs on the organization. Whether or not they ever recanted of the views they'd expressed after they robed up is a different question.

The end of the Indiana Klan did not come about as a dramatic repudiation of bankrupt ideals. Very few of its members publicly renounced the group or any of the things the KKK was supposed to stand for. Instead, they quietly hid their robes and stopped paying their dues. Publicly, they pretended they'd never been members. They hoped no one would ever ask. They certainly weren't about to ask anyone else.

As for D.C. Stephenson, he remained confident that the men he'd installed into government would see him through his trial, or at least his appeals. They didn't. That's when Stephenson went scorched earth, opening up to the press, and telling them how he had installed a good chunk of Indiana's government. He named names. By 1928, the Indiana Klan was functionally dead and dozens of politicians had been forced to resign in disgrace.

It took five years for the Klan to rise and three for it to die. They have assured us that, this time, the cancer will not return.