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The Roaring Twenties \\u2013 the Jazz Age \\u2013 has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan.

Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he\\u2019d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows \\u2013 their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors, and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman \\u2013 Madge Oberholtzer \\u2013 who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize\\u2014winning reporter and the author of nine other books, most recently the highly acclaimed\\xa0A Pilgrimage to Eternity\\xa0and\\xa0The Immortal Irishman, a\\xa0New York Times\\xa0bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl,\\xa0The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis,\\xa0Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.