WI: The DC Stephenson scandal never happens

During the early 20th Century, the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915, was a organization with friends in high places and influence over several important positions in the United States. One of their most powerful members was the Grand Dragon of Indiana, DC Stephenson, who was close friends with many members of the Indiana state government, including Governor Edward L Jackson.

When he joined the Klan, he became the leader of the Evansville Klavern which experienced exponential growth to the point where 23% of the men in Vanderburgh County joined the Klan.

He moved to Indaniaopolis where from July 1922 to July 1923, nearly 2,000 new members joined the Klan each week in Indiana. Hiram Wesley Evans, who led recruiting for the national organization, maintained close ties to state leaders throughout 1921–1922 and he was especially close to Stephenson, because by then, Indiana had the largest state Klan organization. Stephenson backed Evans in November 1922 when he unseated William J Simmons as Imperial Wizard of the national KKK. Evans had ambitions to make the Klan a political force in the country.

After Evans won, he officially appointed Stephenson as Grand Dragon of Indiana. Privately he made him head of recruiting for seven other states north of Mississippi. In the 1920s, Klan membership grew dramatically in these states. In Indiana, membership grew to nearly 250,000 or about one third of all white males in the state.

On the surface, Stephenson and his friends portrayed themselves as defenders of law and morality. In reality, they were alcoholics and womanizers. This secret lifestyle came to light after a momentous scandal in which Stephenson raped and murdered a woman named Madge Oberholtzer, during which Oberholtzer was repeatedly bitten on the face, neck, breasts, leg and back, resulting in her death from a staph infection, alongside kidney failure from her ingesting mercury in an attempt at suicide. She survived long enough to sign a statement to the police.


The scandal destroyed the Klan. Klan lodges were so disgusted by the attack that they quit en-masse, reducing the Indiana Klan to impotency. What made it worse was that in retaliation for the Governor not giving him a pardon, Stephenson released lists of public officials who were or had been on the Klan payroll. The Klan's membership tanked after this from four million members in 1925 to just under a million members in 1926, effectively destroying the Klan as a political force.


But what if the scandal never happened or what if Oberholtzer died before she was able to tell the police what happened? Does the Klan continue to hold significant power in the United States or does it still fall from influence due to another scandal?





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So long as they stay out of the 1928 presidential election, and Black Tuesday still happens, the Thirties belong to the Klan.
 
To quote an old post of mine:

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Not having a Stephenson scandal would not IMO have saved the Klan.

The Klan had reached its peak and was starting to decline even before the Stephenson scandal hit in 1925. Already in 1924 it suffered such setbacks as the defeat of governor Walter Pierce in Oregon and the victory of "Ma" Ferguson over Klansman Felix D. Robertson for governor of Texas.

The Stephenson affair was not the only cause of the Klan's decline. Another important factor was internal dissension, both at the national level (the dispute between William Joseph Simmons and his successor as Imperial Wizard, Hiram Evans) and locally. (It is remarkable how in city after city, even before Stephenson was convicted, large numbers of the Klansmen--in some cities virtually all of them--seceded and formed new organizations like the Minute Men of America in Denver, the Independent Protestant Knights of America in Niagara, New York, etc. See Kenneth Jackson, *The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930,* https://books.google.com/books?id=xkgwSauBgTwC&pg=PA254 ) Another point is that electoral success became harder as the Klan's opponents united, and electoral frustration in turn led to decline in membership. (It also led non-Klan politicians who had associated themselves with the Klan to back away from it, so that joining the Klan would no longer bring patronage benefits.) Also, the Klan's issues became less compelling: Reds seemed less scary than in the early 1920s, immigration had already been restricted, Prohibition proved unenforceable, and the Catholic Church obviously was not going away. Finally, the sheer *novelty* of the group wore off--I think this factor is often underestimated. The 1920's was an era of short-lived crazes, and in some respects the Klan was one of them, though obviously more sinister than most. Even Al Smith's presidential candidacy in 1928 could not really revive it.

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I might have added that even the very narrow failure of the Democrats to denounce the Klan by name in their 1924 platform was not really a victory for the Klan; as Klansmen privately noted with concern, even many of those who succeeded in defeating the anti-Klan plank (like Bryan) made clear that they disagreed with the Klan.
 
So long as they stay out of the 1928 presidential election, and Black Tuesday still happens, the Thirties belong to the Klan.

(1) Of course the Klan couldn't stay out of the 1928 election; Al Smith was the antithesis of everything they believed in.

(2) Why on earth does "the Thirties belong to the Klan" any more than in OTL? Yes, there was a depression. Depressions didn't lead to anything resembling a Klan-like government in the UK, Canada, Australia, France, or for that matter the United States. As I noted, the Klan was already in decline by the mid-1920's and there is no reason to think that just because Stephenson is around, the Klan is going to make the comeback that it miserably failed to make in OTL.
 
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