The Ku Klux Klan as an organization in South Bend, 1923–1926

1923 — 1926

The enemy order, at the size the record gives it: The second Ku Klux Klan was, in form, a secret fraternal order — robes, degrees, klaverns for local bodies, a women's auxiliary, and a recruiting machine that paid its organizers by the head — and in Indiana it became the largest fraternal organization in the state. In South Bend it organized late and never ruled: the Indiana History Blog's account, written from the papers, states plainly that while the Klan "had gained political power and legitimacy in Indiana by the early 1920s, it had yet to find a foothold in South Bend or larger St. Joseph County," in a city of Catholics, immigrants and Jews with the nation's best-known Catholic university at its edge. The scholarly study of the local organization — Jill Suzanne Nevel's "Fiery Crosses and Tempers: The Ku Klux Klan in South Bend, Indiana, 1923–1926," catalogued by the Indiana State Library — dates the South Bend Klan's life to those years, 1923 to 1926.

The organization kept a headquarters on North Michigan Street downtown, and hung an electric cross of red light bulbs in its third-floor window. Its state leader's connection to the city is documented at exactly this size: D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of Indiana, came to South Bend for the Klan's announced rally and picnic of 17 May 1924, and it was Stephenson who called the parade off that evening, in rain and after a day of street fighting — the fighting itself, the students' part, and the three days stand whole in Events and are not retold here. The organization's own newspaper, the Fiery Cross, afterwards claimed the Klan had paraded 35,000 strong through South Bend on 11 November 1924 with the cooperation of the mayor and the police chief; no other newspaper reported any such event, and the Indiana History Blog's examination prints the claim as the propaganda it appears to be.

Against the organization stood the city's paper: the South Bend Tribune was, by the account of Indiana Business's history of its publisher, "the first major Indiana publication to take on the Ku Klux Klan as it gained power and influence in the 1920s," with near-daily front-page stories and editorials that cost it subscribers. Stephenson's conviction in November 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer broke the Indiana Klan statewide, and the South Bend organization ends with the state organization's fall, inside Nevel's 1926 bound. No later South Bend revival of the Klan at organizational size appears in the record reached for this account: the State Library's Klan guide records revival attempts in Indiana in the 1960s and 1970s that "were not received in large numbers," and names no South Bend klavern among them.

Sources:

1. Indiana History Blog (Indiana Historical Bureau), "University of Notre Dame" — the Klan's missing foothold in South Bend; the Fiery Cross's November 1924 claim examined and discounted.
2. Indiana State Library, "Ku Klux Klan in Indiana" subject guide — Nevel, "Fiery Crosses and Tempers: The Ku Klux Klan in South Bend, Indiana, 1923–1926"; the statewide revival attempts of the 1960s–70s.
3. Notre Dame Magazine, "History Lessons" (2023) — the May 1924 rally and Stephenson's part, from Egan's account; students and the electric cross.
4. Indiana Business, "50 Great Indiana Businesses: Schurz Communications" — the Tribune's editorial war on the Klan; the 1924 picnic planned to welcome Stephenson.