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Purdue University Press


The Ku Klux Klan reached its height in the 1920s, and nowhere was it as large and politically powerful as in Indiana, where about 30 percent of the native-born white male population were Klansmen. This book explores the career of D. C. Stephenson, grand dragon of the Indiana Klan, his rise to power, and his eventual conviction for second-degree murder in 1925. Grand Dragon traces Stephenson's background, still shrouded in mystery due to Stephenson's own colorful but imaginary accounts of his early years. A political opportunist, Stephenson's rise to power in the loan was startlingly swift, but so was his fall from grace. Tried in Klan country for the rape and murder of a young government worker, Stephenson was convicted and imprisoned for a crime of which some still consider him innocent.