Quotes from Timothy Egan

the West of open spaces, or the West of mythology, this region's hold on the American character never seemed stronger. A person puts on a cowboy hat anywhere in the world, even if alone in a room, and starts acting differently—sometimes stupidly, sometimes nobly, but it is a new personality.

His father had followed the old Santa Fe Trail in 1909, the year Congress tried to induce settlement in one of the final frontiers of the public domain—the arid, western half of the Great Plains—with a homestead act that doubled the amount of land a person could prove-up and own to 320 acres.

No one was ever charged with a lawless execution witnessed by thousands of Hoosiers in the public square.

Bank accounts were not backed by anything but the good name of the people who ran the bank. And too many of them saw the personal savings of High Plains nesters as just another source of cash for the stock market or an ill-conceived business loan. No matter the exact cause: the First National was broke.

Ike Osteen's life spans the flu epidemic of 1918, the worst depression in American history, and a world war that ripped apart the globe. Nothing compares to the black dusters of the 1930s, he says, a time when the simplest thing in life—taking a breath—was a threat. Up

The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana," he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. "The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.

All it took were a few good Hoosiers to put an end to Klan "influence" in Indiana, as it was phrased.

Faith is groping at air during the fall, hoping to find something to grab on to.

Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.

The wet years in the late 1920s were not normal.

aimed at all of Western Europe except Jews, who

What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.

They pored over a list of Klan-backed candidates for high office next year—governors in the West, the South, and the Midwest, senators from ten more states, and the presidential ticket. About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order

By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

In the balloons of grandeur that kept Stephenson aloft, the presidency was just a few puffs of helium away. "Boys, I'm not in this for the money," he told his cronies. "You're going to put me in the White House.

Nearly seven in ten Americans are still Christian. But if White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were indeed the rootstock of the United States, then the mother ground is nearly barren. What's happening is a mass exodus, particularly among the young: 71 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-four say they have no religion.

To say that there is no causal connection between the acts of appellant and the death of Madge Oberholtzer, and that the treatment accorded her by appellant had no causal connection with the death of Madge Oberholtzer would be a travesty of justice," the court majority wrote in 1932, upholding the murder conviction.

They also bombed their own headquarters—and blamed it on Catholics.

Two million Americans were living as nomads. They were not long-time drifters, most of them, according to reporters who had spent some time on the trains. They were family men, farmers and factory hands, merchants, some professionals among them, writers and bank clerks and storeowners—all broke, people who could not stand to see their kids in rags, hungry.

The female Klan of Indiana held its first statewide convention in July 1923, with a parade of white-robed women on horseback, bands and floats, initiation ceremonies, speeches on virtue and temperance, and a cross burning at night.

What saved the land, this study found, was what Hugh Bennett had started: getting farmers to enter contracts with a soil conservation district and manage the land as a single ecological unit.

Most days, Bam didn't care what people said to him or about him. Gossip in town wasn't worth a cup of curdled spit.

Nationwide, the Klan had expanded to nearly three million members, and most of the growth was in the Northern states, Steve's domain—Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Out West, Colorado and Oregon were adding to their Klan rolls just as quickly.

I am the spirit of righteousness. They call me the Ku Klux Klan I am more than the uncouth robe and hood With which I am clothed. Yea, I am the soul of America.