A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them is a work of historical fiction first published by Viking on April 4, 2023. Written by National Book Award-winning author, Timothy Egan, the book followed similarly well-received works of his such as Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, The Big Burn, and The Worst Hard Time. Most of Egan’s works center on historical tragedies that may be overlooked by the American public, such as the Great Depression's Dust Bowl and the Great Fire of 1910. In A Fever in the Heartland, he gives a face to the return of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, an era whose flamboyant Jazz-Age and Gatsby-esque reputation tends to overshadow its more insidious aspects: the Prohibition, Jim Crow, and the rise of a hate organization that, at its peak, boasted a membership of over six million Americans.

While Egan originally planned to write about the Klan’s stronghold in Oregon, he stumbled upon the lesser-known story of D.C. Stephenson and Madge Oberholtzer in his research, and instead decided to commemorate the woman who sparked the beginning of the Klan’s eventual decline. In its second incarnation, the Klan was able to bolster recruitment by re-branding its image to that of a brotherhood of civic righteousness, patriotism, and American values. Apart from recruiting through Protestant churches, it also pandered to the moral panic of the time, modeling its operations on the Anti-Saloon League. No longer vengeful ghosts in the night, the newly formed Klan was its own public ecosystem, engaging in community work with charities, churches, and schools while conducting targeted campaigns of terrorism and hate.

Despite the book’s subtitle, the part Madge played in bringing down the Klan’s Invisible Empire was far from calculated. Her original intention in approaching Stephenson was merely to ask one of the most powerful men in the state to salvage her job at the Indiana Young People's Reading Circle. Little did she know, however, that her precarious relationship with the man would martyr her to the anti-Klan cause. Although Madge’s abduction, rape, and assault were exceptionally gruesome, she was far from the first victim of Stephenson’s brand of sexual violence. It was Madge’s tragic death that separated her from the Grand Dragon’s other victims, allowing for her victimhood to be a source of strength for those fighting against the Invisible Empire.

It was not someone belonging to the victimized Black, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant ranks who brought about the Klan’s downfall, but a white woman and Indiana native—precisely the demographic the organization purported to protect. Because one of the Klan’s central tenets was the protection of white women’s virtue—hence, their hateful stance against race-mixing—Madge’s fate helped tear off the organization’s sanitized facade. Most notably, Stephenson’s declaration that he was “the law in Indiana” awakened the public to the extent by which the Klan had taken control of the state. In effect, the grisly bite marks Stephenson inflicted upon Madge symbolized the Klan’s quiet cannibalization of American life in the Midwest—something that eventually festered and made its ugliness known.

In the epilogue, Egan points to the disheartening fact that Stephenson merely capitalized on the hatred and intolerance that was already present in the hearts of many Americans during the 1920s. A Fever in the Heartland was, in part, written to dislodge the myth that racism in its most vicious and cruel forms only existed in the Deep South. In Noblesville today, a plaque commemorating the site of the Stephenson trial can be found—an everlasting reminder of how Indiana was once dominated by a hate organization that terrorized and persecuted thousands on the basis of race, religion, and culture.