Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Timothy Egan Discusses “A Fever in the Heartland”

St. Louis County Library Foundation’s Westfall Politics & History Series presents Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning historian Timothy Egan for a discussion of his book “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.”

The event will take place on Wednesday, April 19 at 7:00 p.m. at the Ethical Society of St. Louis, 9001 Clayton Road, St. Louis MO 63117.

The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event from Left Bank Books.

Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author Timothy Egan tells the riveting story of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows—their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

“A Fever in the Heartland” marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.

TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the author of nine other books, most recently the highly acclaimed A Pilgrimage to Eternity and The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time,” won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher,” won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.

Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.