Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [79]
The next morning they disembarked at Hammond, Indiana, and Oberholtzer, pretending she needed medicine for her visible injuries, bought and took an overdose of mercury tablets. It took Stephenson two days to return her, suffering terribly, to Indianapolis and her parents. By that time it was too late for doctors to help her although she was able to give a full statement to the police before she died.
In the sensational trial that followed, Stephenson was convicted and sentenced to life. People were horrified by the savagery of his crime, his contempt for the judicial system “and his smug belief that he would escape punishment” because he was so close to the center of Indiana’s government. The governor he had brought to power, Ed Jackson, refused to pardon him and in revenge Stephenson blew the whistle on Klan activity in Indiana. His evidence brought the mayor of Indianapolis, a Congressman, a county sheriff, several other local officials and very nearly Jackson himself to jail.
After this public outrage, the Klan could no longer claim to be the guardian of America’s morals and its decline was dramatic. Other scandals erupted, including the imprisonment of Colorado’s Grand Dragon for tax evasion, although he was also tried for threatening to castrate a high-school student if he didn’t marry his pregnant girlfriend. In Buffalo, New York, where a local policeman and a Klan member had been shot during a gun battle in 1924, a local Klan leader was arrested for illegally selling contraceptives.
It was clear that once in power, the Klan had licensed the very evils it had promised to eradicate. Its leaders had shown themselves weak and corrupt. More importantly, as America grew more prosperous, immigration was restricted and relations between the races improved in the mid-1920s, and the social and political fears the Klan had played on to achieve power seemed less urgent. Klan membership in Pennsylvania, which had peaked at about 300,000 in early 1925, was down to 5,000 five years later. Indiana had less than 7,000 Klansmen in 1928. In Middletown, according to the Lynds, the Klan had all but disappeared by 1925, “leaving in its wake wide areas of local bitterness.”
Caresse Crosby at a typically bohemian picnic at the Moulin de Soleil, 1928; the donkeys were used for donkey-polo.
9
IN EXILE
THE PETTY XENOPHOBIA THAT FED THE REVIVED KU KLUX KLAN was anathema to one small but vocal section of American society: its writers and artists. Feeling themselves and their T values stifled by what they saw as the jingoism, philistinism and repression of their parents’ generation, these self-conscious rebels turned their backs on what the poet Harry Crosby called “all this smug self-satisfaction.”
“Red drug-stores, filling stations, comfort stations, go-to-the-right-signs, lurid billboards and automobiles swarming everywhere like vermin . . . How I hate this community spirit with its civic federations and its boyscout clubs and its educational toys and its Y.M.C.A. and its congregational Baptist churches,” wrote Crosby during a visit home to the U.S. from Paris in 1926, inadvertently describing the Klan’s heartlands. “Horribly bleak, horribly depressing.”
Harry Crosby had left America four years earlier, running from his respectable banking job and the expectations of his fond parents—all the pressures of what one of his contemporaries called “the American high bourgeoisie.” The family into which Crosby had been born in 1898 was American aristocracy. His uncle and godfather, J. P. Morgan Jr. (the financier John Pierpont’s son, known as Jack), epitomized the values of the American Establishment