William E. Wilson

By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had more than 4 million members who exercised great political power in many states, including Indiana, which was said to have the most powerful Klan. Author William E. Wilson was a college freshman in 1924, when his father, an Indiana congressman, ran headon into the political power of the Klan and lost his seat in the House. That same year, the Klan elected Edward Jackson for Indiana's governor. In the following excerpt, Wilson describes the fear, anger, and hatred during that long, hot summer when the Klan was riding high across the Indiana countryside.

When I think of the nineteen twenties, I think of the heat of summers in southern Indiana where I spent my vacations from Harvard. They were mostly happy summers, but there was one that was not—the...