Indiana Klan

Indiana Klan

An Indiana Klan gathering in Muncie, Indiana in 1922[1]
Predecessor	none
Successor	none
Formation	1920
Founder	Joe Huffington
Founded at	Evansville, Indiana
Dissolved	1925
Legal status	defunct
Region	Indiana
Membership (2,000 new members per week between July 1922-July 1923 (peak year))	250,000 at its peak (30% of native-born Indiana male population)
Key people	D. C. Stephenson
Parent organization	Ku Klux Klan

The Indiana Klan was a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society in the United States that organized in 1915 to promote ideas of racial superiority and affect public affairs on issues of Prohibition, education, political corruption, and morality. It was strongly white supremacist against African Americans, Chinese Americans, and also Catholics and Jews, whose faiths were commonly associated with Irish, Italian, Balkan, and Slavic immigrants and their descendants. In Indiana, the Klan did not tend to practice overt violence but used intimidation in certain cases, whereas nationally the organization practiced illegal acts against minority ethnic and religious groups.

The Indiana Klan rose to prominence beginning in the early 1920s after World War I, when white Protestants felt threatened by social and political issues, including changes caused by decades of heavy immigration from southern and eastern Europe. By 1922 the state had the largest organization nationally, and its membership continued to increase dramatically under the leadership of D.C. Stephenson. It averaged 2,000 new members per week from July 1922 to July 1923, when he was appointed as the Grand Dragon of Indiana. He led the Indiana Klan and other chapters he supervised to break away from the national organization in late 1923.

Indiana's Klan organization reached its peak of power in the following years, when it had 250,000 members. By 1925 over half the elected members of the Indiana General Assembly, the Governor of Indiana, and many other high-ranking officials in local and state government were members of the Klan. Politicians had also learned they needed Klan endorsement to win office.

That year Stephenson was charged and convicted for the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a young schoolteacher. His vile behavior caused a sharp drop in Klan membership, which decreased further with his exposure to the press of secret deals and the Klan's bribery of public officials. Denied pardon, in 1927 Stephenson began to talk to the Indianapolis Times, giving them lists of people who had been paid by the Klan. Their press investigation exposed many Klan members, showed they were not law-abiding, and ended the power of the organization, as members dropped out by the tens of thousands. By the end of the decade, the Klan was down to about 4,000 members and finished in the state. Efforts by some to revive it in the period of the 1960s and 1970s were not successful.