Information for Colorado Peace Officers
Provided by Judge Charles A. Riccio Jr.,
Academy Legal Consultant
Charles.Riccio@cdps.state.co.us

At one time, the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful political organization in the United States. Klan members, supported by the votes and monetary contributions of thousands of their fellow members, ran for and won positions as congressmen, governors, mayors, sheriffs, city councilmen, entire school boards and other high political offices.

THE BEGINNING OF THE KLAN

The Klan began, not as a political organization, but as a purely fraternal society dedicated to patriotism, brotherhood and good fellowship. It had its inception in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, when a group of young Civil War veterans, newly discharged from the Confederate army, found time hanging heavy on their hands and decided to form a social club. The club's name was taken from Kuklos, the Greek word for circle, Kuklos became Ku Klux and Klan, a variation of clan, was added to form an alliterative and mysterious sounding name for the organization.

THE GROWTH OF THE KLAN

Throughout the sleepy towns of the post-war South, membership in the Klan increased quickly and soon a national leader was elected and became known as The Imperial Wizard. The first person to hold this title was General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Civil War cavalry commander well known for his wartime exploits and in particular for his stirring though ungrammatical battle plan, "Git thar fustest with the mostest."

As the Klan grew, its purpose and goals changed. Its purpose became to control and oppress the newly freed slaves and to prevent them from entering the mainstream of American life. Ulysses S. Grant, who was elected president in 1868, said the purpose of the Klan was "by force and terror to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of its members, to deprive (black) citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot, to suppress the schools in which (black) children were taught and to reduce the (black) people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery."

THE DECLINE AND REBIRTH OF THE KLAN

The Klan was popular for a time but then was disbanded in 1869. It lay dormant until 1915, when it was reactivated by a small coterie of friends and led by "Colonel" William Joseph Simmons, the new Imperial Wizard. During these years, motion pictures, radio and television and other forms of mass entertainment and communications were unknown or in their infancy, so membership in the Klan provided and excitement which was a panacea for the mind numbing boredom and tedium in the small towns and villages of middle America. The gaudy robes worn by members, the secret rituals and secret grip, the mysterious and arcane passwords, the meetings at night and the burning of the fiery cross all gave purpose and meaning to life during the time between the world wars.

Under "Colonel" Simmons the Klan spread rapidly throughout the United States. By 1923, the Klan boasted a membership of five million. The largest gathering in Klan history took place in Kokomo, Indiana on Independence day, 1923. It was an assemblage of 200,000 members from three midwestern states, an enormous number in view of the primitive roads and traveling conditions at the time. There was spirited martial music from several high school bands, clergymen called the faithful to pray, prominent Klan members and political leaders made speeches and, of course, there were enormous amounts of free food.

THE ARRIVAL OF THE GRAND DRAGON

The high point of the day was to be an appearance by David Curtis Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana. A sentinel shouted, "There he is! He is coming!" In the sky, a dot appeared which rapidly grew to be a silver airplane with the letters KKK emblazoned on the undersides of its wings. The crowd cheered and applauded, thrilled by the arrival of their chief.

The Grand Dragon, robed and hooded in purple silk, descended from the plane like an eastern potentate. He stilled the cheers and shouts of the faithful simply by raising his hand. Then he announced with a straight face, "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". The crowd murmured. The Grand Dragon, or "Steve" as he preferred to be called, began a rousing speech on "back to the constitution", a favorite theme among Klan members. When the speech concluded, the crowd, amidst more applause, returned to the celebration with parades, fireworks and the grand finale: the awesome burning of the fiery cross.

THE BACKGROUND OF A MAN CALLED STEVE

David C. Stephenson had risen to his preeminent position from humble beginnings. A native Texan, he had served as a lieutenant during the Great War. Married twice, he had divorced or abandoned both wives and moved to Indiana to become active in local politics. In 1920, he joined the Klan, became an organizer and as far as he was concerned, this was only the beginning.

He had interests and holdings in diverse businesses and other income producing properties. It was whispered that he had earned between two and five million dollars in one 18 month period. His home in the Indianapolis suburb of Irvington was a show place. He also kept a suite of rooms at one of the deluxe downtown hotels, a fleet of expensive late model automobiles and a yacht on Lake Michigan. He was never seen without a retinue of bodyguards, gofers, and hangers on. There were even some who said that Steve's ultimate goal was nothing less than the White house!

Steve was short, stocky and overweight, but he had that indefinable quality –- presence. He was handsome and well dressed, he had a broad and friendly smile, and he seemed to be able to remember the name and face of everyone he had ever met. He might well have attained all of his goals including the White house, except for a weakness that not only destroyed his life and career but also caused the downfall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. As with so many ego ridden aspirants to power, that fatal weakness was for women.

The elements of violence, alcohol, illicit sex, and finally murder, electrified the sensation hungry people of America and provoked a shocked and disillusioned reexamination of the Ku Klux Klan and everything it stood for.

A CATALYST FOR CRIME

Madge Oberholtzer was not the sort of woman you might expect to catch the eye of the sophisticated, fast moving Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana. She was described by unchivalrous newsmen of the day as "not particularly attractive", as long nosed, as buxom (by which they meant overweight), and as "over 28" (which in 1920s Indiana meant she was an old maid). To make matters worse, she wore her hair in an unfashionable and unflattering coiffure.

Madge lived with her parents in Irvington, only a couple of blocks from Stephenson's palatial home. She was a college graduate, employed as a rather unimportant manager of the young people's reading circle within the Indiana State department of Education. Madge had attended a banquet for state employees in January 1925 and there she met the up and coming young politician. Steve asked the blushing spinster for dates, but although she was attracted to him she coyly refused. Eventually, she overcame her shyness and consented to dine with the handsome Grand Dragon, who gallantly called for her in his chauffeur driven Cadillac. He escorted her to fashionable restaurants, amused and impressed her with tales of his accomplishments and ambitions, and then deposited her early and safely at her front door. Later she attended, at Steve's invitation, a party at his home where many prominent people in the Klan and in state government were present. Of course, Madge was thrilled by this unexpected but very flattering attention.

THE FATEFUL PHONE CALL

About 9:30 P.M. one evening in March 1925, Madge Oberholtzer arrived home after visiting friends to find that Steve had been phoning her all afternoon. Madge did not need her mother's urging to return his call at once. Steve whispered hoarsely that he, "had to see her at once on a matter of great importance." Steve's tone of voice and the message itself unsettled Madge, but before she had decided how to respond to the call, one of Steve's retainers, a big, cigar-smoking man named Earl Gentry, arrived at her front door and escorted her the short distance to Steve's house. When they arrived, Madge saw at once that Steve had been drinking. She was dismayed to see that there were no other women or guests present at the house. The only other people present were Steve's chauffeur, a man called Shorty, and Earl Klinck, another of Steve's bodyguards. Even Steve's housekeeper was absent. Madge became frightened when Steve ushered everyone into the kitchen and the men began to drink from a large bottle of whiskey. They forced her to drink, too. And she managed to swallow three small glasses of straight whiskey. Unaccustomed to alcoholic beverages, Madge became ill almost at once. By this time she was terrified and she pleaded to be allowed to go home.

"No, you can't go home", barked Steve in a tone of voice that she had never heard him use before. "You are going with me to Chicago. We are going now." And then he blurted to the astonished Madge, "I love you more than any woman I have ever known!"

What might have been a tender expression of love in other circumstances now served only to frighten and confound Madge. She tearfully asked permission to telephone her mother at home but her request was denied. The men forced her to an upstairs room where Steve distributed revolvers to his men and selected a loaded pearl handled revolver for himself. Steve and the others forced Madge into Steve's Cadillac, and despite her tears and protests, they drove off into the night.

In the car Steve told Madge, perhaps to cow her or perhaps to reassure himself, that he was "the law and the power in Indiana". At the railroad station, Steve, Madge, and Gentry boarded the midnight train to Chicago and went immediately to their reserved drawing room. Shorty and Klinck remained in Irvington with the car.

In the drawing room, as if according to plan, Gentry climbed into the upper berth. Despite Madge's attempts to fight him off, Steve succeeded in ripping off her clothes and he pushed her into the lower berth. He then removed his own clothes and approached her with a demented look in his eyes that made her sick with fear.

JOURNEY INTO FEAR

As the train began to move out of the station, Madge's worst fears were realized. Steve went into some kind of alcoholic frenzy, sexually assaulting Madge and then biting her and bruising her all over her body.

The nightmare continued for several hours, with Madge falling in and out of consciousness as the train sped through northern Indiana. At 6:00 A.M., the train pulled into the station at Hammond, a town near the Illinois state line. Brandishing his revolver, Steve ordered Madge to dress and they prepared to get off the train. In view of the criminal conduct the night before, Steve did not want to run afoul of the Mann Act(or White Slave Act), the federal criminal statute which prohibits transporting a woman across a state line for immoral purposes.

MADGE'S TRAGIC DECISION

Madge, overcome with with anguish and humiliation and feeling the crippling effects of the brutal assault and the liquor, begged Steve to shoot her. He thrust the gun against her side but then thought better of it. After everyone was dressed, Steve and Gentry took Madge the short distance to the Indiana Hotel where reservations had been made. Steve registered himself and Madge as husband and wife under assumed names and Gentry registered separately. As they went to their adjoining rooms Madge begged Steve to let her call or telegraph her mother. Steve refused.

Steve lay down for a nap while Gentry applied hot towels and witch hazel to Madge's wounds. Later, breakfast was served in their rooms. Steve consumed a hearty meal while Madge only sipped some coffee. In desperation, Madge devised a ruse to get out of the hotel. She asked for money to buy a hat which Steve gave her and then she left with Shorty, the chauffeur who had just arrived from Indianapolis. After she bought the hat she asked Shorty to take her to a pharmacy to buy some rouge. In the drugstore she secretly bought a box of bichloride of mercury tablets, intending to kill herself with them.

Back at the hotel, the men began drinking again and soon a drunken Steve announced that they would all be driving to Chicago! He forced Madge to write the following telegram to her mother: "Driving through to Chicago. Be home on night train." When Madge's parents received this telegram, they went to the railroad station and remained all night, anxiously awaiting the daughter who never arrived.

While the men continued drinking, Madge slipped into the adjoining room and swallowed six of the mercury tablets. She would have taken more, but they burned her mouth and throat. It was now about 10:00 A.M. on March 16th.

THE BIZARRE STORY CONTINUES

In his alcoholic stupor, Steve seemed to have forgotten about the plan to drive to Chicago and they all remained at the hotel. During the afternoon, Madge became nauseous from the mercury tablets and she became violently ill. Steve had passed out on the bed, but Shorty became frightened by Madge's condition. When she told him what she had done, Shorty paled and nearly passed out. He roused Steve from his alcoholic slumber, and once Steve understood the seriousness of Madge's condition, he ordered a quart of milk and forced her to drink it.

Steve considered taking Madge to a hospital, but after a few minutes of indecision he snapped, "We'll take you home!" Then almost as an afterthought, he announced that they would travel to Crown Point, Indiana where he and Madge would be married! By this time Steve was not thinking of romance; doubtless he had remembered the rule of evidence which prevents a wife from testifying against her husband. Steve's cynical suggestion did not impress Madge. In terrible agony by this time, she flatly refused.

The three men and Madge began the drive back to Indianapolis. For Madge, it was nothing short of hell. Suffering terrible pain, she sat doubled up, pleading for a doctor, and she even begged to be abandoned by the side of the road. Although it was clear to all that she was dying, her pleas were ignored. Throughout the trip, Steve continued to drink, issuing orders and babbling incoherently, "I am the law and the power...I have been in worse scrapes than this before...it takes guts to do this...I have made a quarter of a million dollars."

Upon their arrival in Indianapolis, Steve did not take Madge to her home. Instead, they went to Steve's home where Madge was carried to a loft above the garage. There she remained without medical aid or attention of any kind as her condition worsened by the hour. At noon on Tuesday March 17th, Earl Klinck awakened Madge, carried her to the car and drove her to her home.

Mrs. Schultz, a roomer at the Oberholtzer house, was the only person present when Earl barged into the house and carried Madge up to her room. Earl, who was a stranger to Mrs. Schultz, gave a false name and said that Madge had been injured in an automobile accident. Then he fled. Mrs. Schultz was horrified when she saw the bruises and wounds on Madge's body. Madge cried piteously that she was dying, which in fact she was. Mrs. Schultz called the family physician, Dr. Kingsbury, who ministered to Madge's needs as she recounted the events of the past couple of days. Madge's mother returned home and almost immediately went into shock. Despite the best efforts of Dr. Kingsbury and the specialists he called in for consultation, Madge's condition deteriorated steadily and she died of acute nephritis on April 14th.

THE OUTRAGE AND THE TRIAL

Middle America of the 1920's was shocked and appalled by the revelations coming out of Indiana. Newspapers carried lurid headlines and the sob sisters, as female columnists were called, had a field day. The case rapidly became a cause celebre. Stephenson insisted it was all a frame up by his political enemies.

Although Steve had boasted that he was the law and the power in Indiana, subsequent events showed that perhaps he had been exaggerating the extent of his power. He and his men were brought to trial on charges that included murder while attempting to commit rape. Steve's brutal conduct had made a mockery of everything the Klan claimed to stand for. Newspapers screamed, "There's Mud on Indiana's White robes". Angry and disillusioned Klan members burned their regalia and disavowed their memberships. Women's groups previously captivated by Steve's charisma now clamored for his swift conviction.

Notwithstanding the seriousness of the charges, Steve maintained his calm confidence that no jury would convict him. He retained at least five attorneys who prudently got the venue of the trial changed to a little town downstate.

The trial dominated the media for over a month. The bulk of the evidence in the case consisted of medical reports and Madge's own words. The family attorney had visited Madge several times during her illness and had recorded her statements to which she later swore and which were entered into evidence as dying declarations.

Steve's attorneys argued vehemently that nothing he did caused Madge's death, but that she had died as a result of her voluntary ingestion of the mercury tablets -- that is, she committed suicide. Much case law was introduced to support the proposition that Madge's swallowing of the poison was an independent intervening cause of her death for which Steve could not be held legally responsible. Steve's failure to take the witness stand did nothing to sway the jury to believe in his innocence.

The court instructed the jury that if they found that Madge had taken the poison while she was under the influence and control of Steve and after she had been criminally attacked by him, his conviction of murder would be justified.

THE VERDICT AND STEVE'S "INSURANCE POLICY"

Steve was under the impression that the jury had been fixed and that no matter what the evidence showed, he would be acquitted. To his utter amazement, the all male jury convicted him of second degree murder. According to newspaper reports, he almost fainted upon hearing the verdict. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The Indiana supreme court affirmed the conviction with this somewhat melodramatic opinion: "At the very moment Madge Oberholtzer swallowed the poison, she was subject to the passion, desire, and will of the defendant... We conclude that the evidence was sufficient and justified the jury in finding that the defendant by his acts and conduct rendered Madge distracted and mentally irresponsible and that such was the natural and probable consequence of such unlawful and criminal treatment by the defendant and that the defendant was guilty of second degree murder..."

For Steve, the next shock was not long in coming. Indiana governor Ed Jackson, a longtime friend and crony who owed his high office to Steve's influence, refused to pardon him or commute the sentence. The governor was not the only one of Steve's political allies who failed him. Eventually he was abandoned by all of his friends who wielded political influence.

In desperation, Steve dug up his "insurance policy", the records he had accumulated over the years which documented the illegal activities of his venal colleagues. By the time all this dirty laundry had been washed and hung out to dry, a congressman, the mayor of Indianapolis and many other officials hd beden sent to jail. The entire Indianapolis city council paid fines on bribery charges and resigned in a body. A prominent judge was impeached and hundreds of lesser office holders throughout the state were ruined. Despite this wholesale cleanup of Indiana politics (or perhaps because of it) Steve remained in prison still serving a life sentence.

DOWN BUT NOT QUITE OUT

The case, its trial and the aftermath were a blow to the solar plexus of the Ku Klux Klan. It could hardly be said that family, home, God and country were the watchwords of the Klan. The Klan went into a steep decline and within a year of the trial, the membership of the Indiana Klan had shrunk from 350,000 to a mere 15,000. Throughout the United States, the Ku Klux Klan was reviled and abandoned.

Steve served 25 years of his life sentence. He was paroled in 1950, but after five months he broke parole and was returned to prison. He received his second parole in 1954. In 1961, he was arrested for assaulting a 16 year old girl but the charges were dropped for insufficient evidence. During this time, Steve married and abandoned two more wives. In 1961, he died in the arms of his fourth wife who knew nothing of his former sordid life.

Since those days, the Klan the Ku Klux Klan has shown itself to be remarkably persistent. In the 1980s, there was an upsurge in the desecration of synagogues, the burning of black citizens' homes and the stabbing and murder of people who are "different." Some of these crimes were committed by Klan members acting in small independent cells. Others were committed by the Klan's imitators, the hate groups that use different names but have the same standard of racism and prejudice.

We may never see the end of the Klan. As long as right minded people abandon rational thought and allow the poisons of hate and ignorance to infect their minds and hearts, the Klan will live on.