Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [84]
Jackson won the election in a landslide. At Jackson’s inaugural ball, Stephenson met Madge Oberholtzer, a twenty-eight-year-old former schoolteacher who ran a state anti-illiteracy program. A little more than two months later, on March 25, 1925, Stephenson invited Oberholtzer to his house on the pretext of discussing state business. He drugged her, forced her into a car, and drove her to Union Station in Indianapolis, where they boarded a train bound for Chicago. In a Pullman compartment, Stephenson attacked Oberholtzer, raping her repeatedly and biting her breasts and genitals so viciously that her flesh was torn. They got off the train in Hammond, Indiana, where Oberholtzer tried to poison herself with mercuric chloride. Stephenson took her back to her parents’ home in Indianapolis, dropping her off with the warning, “I am the law and the power.” Oberholtzer died a month later, either from the poison or from an infection resulting from her wounds. In any event, Stephenson, in a spectacular and lurid trial, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He fully expected his fellow Klansman, Governor Jackson, to pardon him. When he didn’t, Stephenson, enraged, exposed the Klan’s machinations in Indiana politics to the Indianapolis Times, helping the paper win a Pulitzer and bringing the Klan’s second wave to an inglorious end.
Until Stephenson’s downfall, the Klan’s political influence was extraordinary, not only in Indiana but throughout the Midwest and, of course, the South. Back in 1922, when he was running for Jackson County judge, Harry Truman himself had paid the ten-dollar initiation fee to join the Klan, membership seeming to be a prerequisite for political success at the time. Informed he could not hire Catholics if elected, Truman, who had commanded many Catholics in World War I, withdrew his application and got his ten dollars back. Later, he claimed he and his old army chaplain, a Dominican priest named Curtis Tiernan, had busted into “many a meeting of the KKK” in Missouri and confronted the speakers. “We were ejected from some of the meetings, but we broke many up.”
At the same time Klansmen were parading through Richmond in the 1920s, down in a hollow west of town, in a shack by the Whitewater River, African American jazz and blues musicians were making some of the most epochal recordings in the history of American music.
Back in 1872, an Alsatian piano maker named George M. Trayser, with the help of two local businessmen, Richard Jackson and James Starr, opened a factory in Richmond. The Starr Piano Company, as it came to be known, quickly became one of the country’s leading piano manufacturers, at a time when the piano was a status symbol akin to the iPhone today. In 1893, the company was acquired by Henry Gennett, a Nashville businessman who moved to Richmond to oversee his new business.
By 1915 Starr was selling fifteen thousand pianos a year. The business seemed impregnable.
Then the phonograph came along.
Thomas Edison had invented the cylinder phonograph in 1877, but it wasn’t until a German immigrant named Emile Berliner invented a machine he called the gramophone that the recording industry began to develop. Berliner’s invention played music recorded on flat discs instead of cylinders. The discs were easier to duplicate and store, and, since both sides could be used, they held more recording space than cylinders. Berliner’s invention touched off a war between the two formats not unlike the Beta/VHS and Blu-ray/HD DVD wars of more recent generations. When the dust finally settled in the late 1910s, Berliner’s format had prevailed.
Back in Richmond, Henry Gennett, the owner of the Starr Piano Company, followed the phonograph wars with intense interest.