Quotes from Timothy Egan

The car gave her real independence.

Pope Julius II issued an encyclical in 1512 declaring that the native people of North America were more than muscle and fiber; in fact, he declared, they had souls. The bad news was, this meant that they were also burdened with Original Sin, thus putting them in urgent need of baptism, which would wipe the stain from their souls.

She'd also been suffering from a painful sexually transmitted disease, given her by her husband.

It still scares people driving cars named Expedition and Outlander... Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems.

For all the horror, the land was not without its magic... After a rain- or hailstorm had rumbled through, the sky was open and embracing, the breeze only a soft whisper against the songs of meadowlarks and cooing of doves... Robin's egg blue was the color of mornings without fear. At night, you could see the stars behind the stars. Infinity was never an abstraction on the High Plains.

the American Breeders Association, had nothing to do with horses; its eugenics committee was headed by a man who'd been president of Indiana University, and the first president of Stanford, David S. Jordan. He taught that the human race could be improved only by preventing the disabled or certain nonwhites from reproducing

Still, he was the leader of a violent hate group. The profile in the paper had painted the Grand Dragon as the relatively benign boss of Indiana, with Stephenson asserting that his "Klan is not based on racial, religious or other prejudice.

And here was yet another plum: Ed Jackson, the Republican whose name had first appeared on membership rolls of the Klan in 1923, had been swept into the governor's office. He owed it all to D. C. Stephenson.

Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire.

The Klan claimed fifteen United States senators under its control, and seventy-five members of the House of Representatives. Many had sworn allegiance in secret Klan initiation rituals, becoming "naturalized," as it was called.

Testifying before Congress, Dr. Laughlin said sterilization laws would lead to lower taxes, lessening the burden of society to take care of people with epilepsy, the blind, the deaf, and the mentally disabled, not to mention the high cost of jailing criminals prone to music and art.

Ideas take on their own trajectory, but they die without people to carry them into the corridors of power.

The state had passed the world's first eugenic sterilization law, targeting "idiots, imbeciles, and confirmed criminals," as the statute dictated. The Klan was now pushing for a more severe measure, singling out paupers, alcoholics, thieves, prostitutes, and those with epilepsy to be sterilized against their will.

The Negro is among us and the race should be encouraged to progress, but that path should never lead to social mingling," warned the Indianapolis Star in 1921.

I want to put all the Catholics, Jews and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft," said a Klan speaker in rural Whitley County, just outside Fort Wayne. His suggestion was met with wild applause.

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you.

By the early estimates of the rangers, the fire had burned enough wood to provide timber for the whole nation for fifteen years.

At the peak of his power, D. C. Stephenson wanted to wipe the dirt of the Midwest from his shoes. He would say goodbye to India-no-place, Naptown, as the swells in his circle called the capital city. This was the year to do it, depending on when that Senate seat opened. All that would stand between him and Klan control over much of the United States was Madge Oberholtzer.

the police had not only given Steve a pass on Prohibition but often served as his protectors.

The Klan of the 1920s had enough control of the legal system to ensure that those who gutted the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a mass murder of American citizens, would not face justice.

When the grandchildren of these leading citizens later discovered hoods in the attic, or membership lists that included their kin, they could not fathom how such a thing came to pass. They knew the Ku Klux Klan was born in the murk of blood-spilling hate, built around a racial order that would find its most ghastly expression in the laws of Nazi Germany.

A handful of Hoosiers were heroic—two rabbis, an African American publisher born enslaved, a fearless Catholic lawyer, a small-town editor repeatedly beaten and thrown in jail, a lone prosecutor.

Middle-aged men of privilege could be seen on corner couches in the embrace of somebody not their wife. Steve usually had a photographer circulating, given free access by his boss to take pictures of the most intimate situations. The photos proved very useful and helped to ensure that those in the know would not turn on their political master—a conspiracy of silence that proved remarkably successful

he showed no outward fear of getting caught; law enforcement couldn't touch him. And because the Klan had made him rich, money further immunized him from justice.