Quotes from Timothy Egan

A third of all loggers in the Northwest will be seriously injured at some time during their careers. According to medical insurance records in Washington and Oregon, only two lines of work are more dangerous than logging - professional football and crop-dusting.

Among the 150 members of the General Assembly of 1925, only two were women and four were Catholics; there were no Black or Jewish representatives.

An apple that hasn't experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that's hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to bring out the acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth.

To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment

Keep your ears open. You know what the first word of the holy rule of Saint Benedict is? Listen.

Stephenson would oversee a Klan map that stretched from the Atlantic coast to well beyond the Great Lakes, from the Ohio River to the Canadian border. In a candid moment with a reporter, he had said he was "just a nobody from nowhere—but I've got the biggest brains." Now

In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman.

Oh, for the pre-Twitter days, when it took something more than a word fart by a president who never opens a book to turn the world upside down.

Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board.

The West is full of mountains imprinted with pedestrian names. But the French-Canadian fur trappers, openly lustful, had it right when they named the Tetons for their wet dreams.

That's what the suitcase farmers were doing. Salesmen, druggists, barkeeps, docs, mechanics, teachers—the range of day-jobbers who thought they wanted to be wheat farmers, ripping up a half-section here and there, trying to hit a crop—they were getting out before they got in any deeper.

There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune," Roosevelt said just before he became president.

to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

But even if the Fourth of July celebrants in Kokomo knew about the Big Lie of Stephenson's life, would it have mattered? They believed because they wanted to believe.

Hoover had called the eighteenth amendment, implementing Prohibition, which started in 1920. A moneymaker and job-creator was what it was. Cimarron, Dallam, and Baca Counties boomed with the black-market whiskey trade.

It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.

Several hundred thousand Hoosiers had pledged fealty to and were effectively governed by a rapist, a murderer, a drunk, and a dictator. He was not a man of God, but a fraud. He was no protector of women's virtue, but a violent predator.

The fastest-growing faction, comprising 40 percent of all Klan members, came from just three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain "any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.

At the time, she was too traumatized to go to the police and report a felony committed by one of the most powerful men in the state. And besides, what good would it do? The Kokomo cops were Klansmen.

Kokomo has seen with its own eyes the class of people who comprise the Klan," the Fiery Cross wrote in its report of the biggest day in the history of the Ku Klux Klan. "It saw staunch American farmers with their wives; merchants of repute; bankers of integrity; honest and hard-working mechanics, and ministers and devout church members.

America cannot remain half-Christian and half-agnostic." Thereafter, the Klan lobbied for teaching the biblical story of seven days of creation in public school science classes

In church they sang "Gott is de liebe" and made such a month-long fuss over Christmas that customs in America changed as well. They

After dangling in a summer breeze for eight hours, the bodies were cut down by a deputy at dawn. The woman at the roadside robbery scene later said there had been no rape; she had made the story up.