The Indiana Klan rose to prominence beginning in the early 1920s after World War I, when white Protestants felt threatened by social and political issues, including changes caused by decades of immigration from southern and eastern Europe.

By 1922 Indiana had the largest Klan organization of any U.S. state, and its membership continued to increase dramatically under the leadership of D.C. Stephenson.

Indiana's Klan was one of the strongest in the country, with a large percentage of the entire White Protestant male population being members.

Denied pardon, in 1927 Stephenson began to talk to the Indianapolis Times, giving them lists of people who had been paid by the Klan.

[citation needed] In 1920, Imperial Wizard William J. Simmons of Atlanta, Georgia chose Joe Huffington to start an official Indiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Huffington met D.C. Stephenson, a fellow war veteran with a background in Texas and Oklahoma, who quickly became one of the leading members of the chapter.

[4] Southern Indiana had already had significant vigilante activity among White Cap groups, dating back to the American Civil War.

He initially stressed the concept of the Klan as a fraternal society and brotherhood, organized for civic activism, to help the poor and defend morality.

He gained the support of many ministers and church congregations for these appeals to populist issues, and the Klan grew rapidly in Indiana.

Governor Warren T. McCray vetoed the bill, beginning his public resistance to the Klan; he was the highest-ranking official to oppose them.

As a reward and in recognition of Stephenson's recruiting success, Evans appointed Stephenson as Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan and head of recruiting for seven states north of Mississippi during a 1923 Fourth of July gathering of the Klan in Kokomo, Indiana, with more than 100,000 members and their families attending.

The Klan's rhetoric was anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic in these years, as rapid expansion of industrial jobs in Indiana and other Midwestern states brought tens of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

As these immigrants were mainly of Catholic or Jewish faith, the Klan alleged that they were behind secret plots to overthrow the government and exterminate Protestants.

The Indiana Klan stressed more social issues than racism, as it promised to uphold moral standards, help enforce Prohibition, and end political corruption.

Daisy Douglas Barr, who had risen to political prominence through the successful campaign to ban alcohol in the city of Muncie nearly a decade earlier,[11] became a vocal supporter of the Indiana Klan.

[13] Other cities, including Indianapolis, were almost completely controlled by the Klan, and election to public office was impossible without their support.

The Klan leaders used their influence to have McCray tried, convicted, and imprisoned for mail fraud, forcing him to resign from office in 1924.

A large part of these funds went to helping the poor, but millions were also poured into bribing public officials, paying off enemies, purchasing weapons, and contributing to political campaigns.

During the night of the inaugural ball of Republican Governor Edward L. Jackson, she was abducted from her home, taken to the Indianapolis train station, and held in a private railroad car.

Numerous commissioners and other local leaders across the state were charged with bribery and forced to resign, stemming from their acceptance of support from the Klan.

[5] The Stephenson rape case and the ensuing bribery scandal both destroyed the Klan's image as the defender of women and justice.

Most swiftly renounced their former affiliations with the Klan, as "[w]hite robes and membership lists" quickly disappeared into "attics and trash piles.

Nevertheless, a Klan office in Greenwood, a suburb just south of Indianapolis, continued to publish extensive recruiting materials for decades, including mailed pamphlets introducing the group and its mission.

Nor should the Klan be seen as thoroughly dominating the state and accurately reflecting racist, violent, or provincial beliefs shared for all time by all Hoosiers.