Quotes from Timothy Egan

may be easier to lasso the wind than to find a sustaining story for the American West. Still, as storytellers it is our obligation to keep trying.

Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known, and even encouraged

Once, a preacher joined a postal carrier making his rounds in No Man's Land. The sky turned black and lightning flashed. Bolts struck the ground and electrified barbed-wire fences. The preacher cowered for cover. The carrier told him to relax. "God isn't that awful," he said. "Lightning will never strike a mailman or a preacher." Within ten years, God would change moods.

the Klan had "changed its bed sheets for a policeman's uniform.

He scoffed at the pictures of fruit vendors on city streets; they were selling apples at five cents apiece, he said, because it was more profitable than working a regular job. The Republicans had been routed in the 1930 midterm elections, losing seventeen seats in the Senate and control of the House.

The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

With a campaign slogan that railed against what he called "The Three C's—Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons," Murray won by a huge margin, 301,921 votes to 208,575.

THE FIVE HUNDRED or so homes atop Acoma are still heated by wood, with mounded clay ovens outside that look like big beehives. The old timbered ladders, baked white by the sun, still rise to the top terraces, and there are deep footpaths along the tabletop of the rock. It is not a museum, but a living town, somewhat iced in time. The wind dominates all other sounds.

Murray hated Jews as well. Blacks had some virtues, but Jews had none, in his view.

The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy

Religion is fable. Yes, a story! Poetic. Universal. And I would start in about faith, which by its very nature can never be proven, and that the foundational narratives of most religious

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Las Vegas] is the American Vatican for vice, requiring grand ritual and show for pilgrims dressed like six year olds.

beliefs are perhaps more allegorical than factual.

There's nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy, it was only race pride, he said. 'I cannot see anything anti-American in that

The Klan owned the state, and Stephenson owned the Klan. Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors—they all answered to the Grand Dragon.

It was a slate-gray day, featureless, drab, and cold.

Indiana, where truth was no defense, and the First Amendment had no force of law.

In the summer of 1935, FDR launched the Second Hundred Days, one of the great thrusts of domestic change ever seen—zero to sixty in an eyeblink, by government time. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act to ensure that the pensionless elderly would not starve, started the Works Progress Administration to keep the government payroll rolling, and backed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined union rights in the workplace. The

There's nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy, it was only race pride, he said. 'I cannot see anything anti-American in that.' He dismissed the numerous stories of violence as the work of 'a paper owned and controlled by a Jew.' and imposters trying to take down the invisible empire

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.

Hartwell was not going down without a fight, but if the elements finally beat him, he wanted a record of his struggle; maybe it would serve as a warning to some future nester. The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine, on harvest day, from victory stands. So Hartwell started his diary at the darkest hour.

A Klan mayor ruled Anaheim, California; the city was nicknamed "Klanaheim.

But at the time, she was too scared to do anything. His reach into the cops and courts, he told her, was beyond anything she could imagine.