A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes graphic discussions of racism, violence motivated by racism, alcohol addiction, suicide, and multiple acts of sexual assault, including rape.

The cross, a Christian symbol for millennia, was appropriated by the Klan. The Klan not only burned wooden crosses on the lawns of Black, Jewish, and other residents as a fear and intimidation tactic, but also at parades and rallies and to memorialize its allies, such as President Harding. The irony of this chosen symbol is significant. A group of “faithful” Protestants who identified as virtuous Americans could not see beyond a narrow definition of ethnicity or national identity and thus used the cross, an instrument of death for their spiritual leader, as a flaming incarnation of hatred and exclusion.

Egan notes that cross-burning was something “the original Klan never did” (21); it was one of the many fabrications of the film The Birth of a Nation, whose 1915 release prompted the revival of the Klan by William Simmons, who burned a large cross on Stone Mountain, Georgia, to mark the occasion. Simmons’s vision included “codes, secret phrases, hand signs, titles, rituals, oaths, and a constitution” (22), all of which, Egan notes, mirrored the rites of other fraternal societies of the day.