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The signature was that of the present Mayor of Indianapolis, J. L. Duvall. But Mayor Duvall, Mr. Adams made clear, was nothing. He was dealing not with Mayor Duvall but with a man who had kept half a dozen Indiana Mayors in his pay, a man who had controlled the lower house of the State legislature, who had ruled the state constabulary and the highway police, who had kept an airplane with a gilded snout, a private yacht on Buckeye Lake, who had given parties modeled on those of the later Caesars, who had said—his thin voice rising to a shriek in a drunken and lascivious party—"I am the counterpart of Napoleon, the master mind of all the 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.
The 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, Tex."
But Mr. 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, to reach out for power.
He began by buying a few politicians. His system was a miracle of simplicity. He found a good Klansman who wanted to run for office and paid his campaign expenses always with the understanding that his candidate, when elected and in control of public moneys, should repay him at the rate of three to one, or 300%. If the candidate lost he owed nothing.
It 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.
"Klansmen attention: Remember your solemn oath to obey all edicts, mandates, rulings, and instructions of the imperial wizards. It is the order of the imperial wizard that all klansmen work faithfully for the nomination of our brother klansman, Major Jackson.
"It is very important that we should nominate our esteemed brother, Major Jackson, in order that the delectable bonds of the invisible empire may rule supreme. Brother Jackson will keep the faith of the K K-Duo.