Word: stephenson
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...world. Drink her down." He was dealing with a man who had embodied in his person most of the political power of Indiana, and who was then serving a life sentence in Michigan City Prison for the rape and murder of a girl. He was dealing with D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana...
...name of D. C. Stephenson, struck off with interlocking capitals, and underscored with a bold line, first appeared in 1921 in Indiana on the register of the Vendome Hotel in Evansville. After it the writer had added, as if to gratify his taste for romantic atmosphere, the words "Dallas...
...Stephenson had really lived in Dallas, and so had Hiram Evans, dentist, salesman, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. They used to work together. The Wizard told Mr. Stephenson the system and the blurb of the K. K. K. They hatched a scheme. For four years after that, D. C. Stephenson moved among the virgin fields of Indiana, getting members for the Klan. For every $10 initiation fee he was paid $4. He took in several hundred thousand members and made so much money that he got into trouble with the national Klan.* He was ready, he thought...
...quickly came to be perceived that Mr. Stephenson's nominees seldom lost. He conducted campaigns with just the right combination of lavishness and precision; the Mayors of three important Indiana cities looked on him with great respect and the members of legislative committees called at his home before the day's session to see which bills were to be passed. To his legislators he gave orders rather than suggestions, but when he wrote to his Mayors he was careful to phrase his wishes in terms of a larger and collective power, the will of the Klan...
...fashion of life did not dawdle behind his ambition. One could not receive congressmen or even mayors, bought and paid for, in a flat. D. C. Stephenson built a formidable house at Irvington. Decorators from Indianapolis did what they could for him; he sent to New York for clothes and a few antiques. His taste ran to the oriental. Quite often now, behind the big yellow windows of his ballroom, saxophones giggled and clucked all night and limousines drove away in the early morning with the blinds pulled down. Odd callers were always waiting in his library, men of dignity...