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Piñero, Rebecca

47
October Saturdays
Rebecca Piñero
Fourth grade was an important year. 
No settling into a new school for the first 
year in two. 
My whole family was now a part of a beautiful 
community 
Full of teachers with shining smiles and 
students tucked 
Into little uniforms, green ties pulled 
tight, and skirts freshly ironed. 
Fourth grade was a special year.
When fall rolled around, taking with it the 
sluggish humidity 
And sour afternoons of summer, it brought 
crisp motivation 
Sprinkled in with the cold wind that brought 
tiny hands to the upper arms. 
We were going to learn a poem. It felt 
special — 
They trusted us enough to recite it to 
parents.
When the Frost is on the Punkin.
You had to say it like that. Not “pumpkin”. 
Punkin. Like a woman
Who noticed you gazing around her store on
Shortridge 
Spotlight
48
the road trip with your family 
“Can I help you dear?” Dialect was key. Put 
your hands behind your back 
And don’t stand on your tippy-toes. Lift your 
chin up. Eye-contact. 
For a nine year old, I was pretty good at it.
Saturday School.
Twice a year. Half a day. The autumn one 
Was always the best. Uniform, light sweater 
Pulled over to protect you from the chill. 
Wind rustling your hair, forcing the 
goosebumps 
Up your arm. Pumpkin cider doughnuts in the 
morning, 
A smile from the principal. The smell of the 
leaves 
On the ground, the cold pinching your nose 
and turning it red. 
Hoping it wouldn’t be stuffed up as you stood 
With your pumpkin and let your brain rattle 
away 
The words you had spent weeks memorizing, 
And could still remember six years from then.
A little shake.
A little shiver.
The promise of carving pumpkins when we got 
home.
Saying the words — don’t stumble.
I didn’t.
A big smile.
A little wave.
I miss those October Saturdays.


English

October Saturdays

Duncan, Carly

Mad Woman

Castle, Luanne

A Long Time from Burdick Street

Connolly, Wm. Anthony

Radio at Night

Schumann, Tina

The North Meridian Review 
Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 13 
2021 
Isolation Affirmation 
Tina Schumann 
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Recommended Citation 
Schumann, Tina (2021) "Isolation Affirmation," The North Meridian Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 13. 
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview/vol2/iss1/13 
This Prose is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in The North Meridian Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler 
University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. 
 
136 
 
 
Tina Schumann is a Pushcart nominated poet and the author of three poetry collections, Praising the 
Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019), which was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books 
Intro Prize, and the Julie Suk Award; Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017), winner of  
the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition; and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010), which was awarded 
the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is editor of the IPPY award–winning anthology Two Countries. 
U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017.) Here work received the 2009 American 
Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal, finalist status in the Terrain.org annual poetry contest, and  
honorable mentions in The Atlantic, Crab Creek Review and The Allen Ginsberg Award. She is a poetry 
editor with Wandering Aengus Press, and her poems have appeared widely since 1999, including The 
American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, 
Parabola, Palabra, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. 
www.tinaschumann.com 
 
Isolation Affirmation  
I make more of these moments 
than perhaps I should. Last night  
in a friend’s garden, over a dinner  
of take-out curry and saag, the last warm air  
of summer cushioning our conversation, we spoke  
of long-ago travel; motorcycle tours over the Dolomites,  
sailing cruises to Catalina, hitchhiking in Spain.  
Because we had been sequestered and forced to face  
ourselves for too long the mere talk of travel felt rebellious,  
thrilling in a way it hadn’t since our teens.  
We were rule breakers.  
Throwing our masks into the air behind us 
and blowing down the open road.  
While the ice cream man chimed his bells 
throughout the neighborhood, 
we looked into each other's faces  
and reaffirmed the facts of our past –  
saying We’d been there. We’d done that. 
 
137 
 
October 
Lately, it’s been like Groundhog Day  
around here; same thoughts, same steel  
whistle of the kettle, same slow pulse  
of another smoky sunset. Still, people  
really are trying – what with their chipped  
toothed jack-o’-lanterns 
crouched on the front porch 
and gauzy ghouls peeking out  
the screen door. They are trying  
to say hello to this misstep of a season  
contained within this misstep of a year.  
This close to the end of it all we reach out  
for the usual and the comfort of a childhood  
mask. As if the scare tactics of reality  
were not enough. We want the kind of fear 
we can decorate and fold away in a box  
the next day. Now that we are all bi-polar 
and understatements abound – it’s a trick  
of the mind to keep going – a treat to be 
delusional together. That’s OK. Let’s be something  
less capricious than the garden-variety delusional;  
you buy the waxy candy bars in their little coffins  
of colorful paper, and I’ll screw in the red lightbulb  
over the front door. Someone is bound to ring  
our bell in their chosen disguise                                
just begging for something  
completely different.  
 
  
 
138 
 
Self-Portrait as Shut-in 
Even the summer air seems carotid  
with disease. Invisible though it is.  
The season is no invitation, but a rude  
seducer. Not a caress, but a diabolic con- 
sequence. It gives you pause, and then  
another pause and another. Better to not  
venture. Don’t speak. Don’t blink. Just  
don’t. Streetlights cast dystopian  
beams over cars and empty bleachers. 
It floods this suburban dream. Like a bad cop 
in a windowless room it demands –  
Where are you from? Who sent you here?  
Show us your papers. The words are muffled,  
of course, as every mouth is wrapped in gauze.  
The radio is no help, not the news 
or the mail. Those daily standbys 
only reinforce the rules: don’t touch your face,  
stand six feet apart, try to make your eyes look like a smile.   
Now, every love song is overwrought. 
Ridiculous with ardor. Every old impulse  
a broken notion; unattainable, passé, a joke  
you forgot was a joke. Nature is no longer free.  
Public spaces? Not so much. You feel yourself 
 
139 
 
an imposter, escapee, out-patient 
on the lam and that old song keeps running  
through your head …Got nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide… 
 
 
  


Isolation Affirmation

Wergeland, Kari

The North Meridian Review 
Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 20 
2021 
Pandemic 
Kari Wergeland 
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Recommended Citation 
Wergeland, Kari (2021) "Pandemic," The North Meridian Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 20. 
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview/vol2/iss1/20 
This Prose is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in The North Meridian Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler 
University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. 
 
153 
 
 
 
Kari Wergeland, who hails from Davis, California, is a librarian and writer. Her work has appeared 
in many journals, including New Millennium Writings, Pembroke Magazine, and Chariton Review. Her 
chapbook, Breast Cancer: A Poem in Five Acts (Finishing Line Press, 2018), has been named an Eric 
Hoffer Book Award Finalist. Meanwhile, her long library career has taken her into libraries up and 
down the West Coast. At some point in all of this, she served as a children’s book reviewer for the 
Seattle Times. 
 
 
Pandemic 
Stave churches were built in Norway 
before Black Death opened its eyes 
and lumbered over cities, 
leaving the streets littered with dead. 
Long staves took a long time to cure. 
A father would start the process— 
a son might finish, 
watch the church materialize, 
resemble a Viking ship 
with menacing dragons on each end 
to ward off evil spirits. 
They meant business. 
1000 churches built in time  
to take on the plague 
but only a few edifices survive.  
These remaining vessels shift and creak  
with the rocking of time— 
wooden engineering holding firm. 
It’s an important voyage for those used to steel,  
 
154 
 
plastic – stone even – 
for people who have never experienced a pandemic 
until now. 
 
  
 
155 
 
Getaway 
On the road,  
first public restroom  
after 10 weeks of sitting in my own germs.  
Someone holds the door open – 
gratitude I don’t have to touch it. 
A bare hand shoves coffee out  
the drive-through window. 
Miles later,  
I observe few masks in the grocery store. 
Highway curving alongside the sea. 
I pull into the driveway, 
slip into my tiny shelter 
like a hermit crab 
with suitcases, laptop, groceries, books. 
I plan to buy a puzzle  
from the friend who sells gifts. 
Spray the knob before locking up – 
rub it down. 
When I take my masked walk, 
I spot what followed me here 
dogging my attempts to soar, 
I bow to the horizon, 
go back inside 
wondering if this shell  
will take on the clam’s jaw. 
 
 


Pandemic

Mami, Fouad

The North Meridian Review 
Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 33 
2021 
Susan Abulhawa. Against the Loveless World: A Novel. New York: 
Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2020. 
Fouad Mami 
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Recommended Citation 
Mami, Fouad (2021) "Susan Abulhawa. Against the Loveless World: A Novel. New York: Simon and 
Schuster, Inc., 2020.," The North Meridian Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 33. 
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview/vol2/iss1/33 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in The North Meridian Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler 
University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. 
 
193 
 
 
 
Susan Abulhawa. Against the Loveless World: A Novel. New 
York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.,  
2020. 
 
Reviewed by Fouad Mami.  
 
Against the Loveless World is Susan Abulhawa’s third novel. Her Mornings in Jenin (2010) and The Blue 
Between Sky and Water (2015) are accelerators toward this work. Here, Abulhawa spells the ABCs of 
the Palestinian revolution to come. Readers do not encounter the terror-stricken Yousef of the first 
novel, nor the damaged Nur of the second. One cannot get enough of Nahr (“river” in Arabic) if only 
because she is a voluptuous dancer. Nahr is not a secondary character as with Epic of Gilgamesh. Instead, 
Nahr stays le réacteur conceptual of the revolution, but she does not attribute any narcissist role to herself. 
As there exists no script to follow, it is her being that metamorphizes to the essence and that, in turn, 
organically develops to a concept for the revolution. Nahr embodies in absolute certainty the way a 
revolution becomes irreversible. Only when the would-be revolutionary dances erotically does life 
become incendiary.  
Readers meet Nahr when she is incarcerated in the cubicle, a high-tech security facility that 
targets the detainees’ knowledge of the absolute. She narrates her exile from its beginning in the pre-
1990 Kuwait City, when a large Palestinian community is building Kuwait. Nahr marries Mhammed 
with presumably unmatched credentials as a revolutionary, which explains why he is a celebrity among 
Palestinian girls in the city. Because he is gay, Mhammed cannot reconcile with his strict gender 
expectations and painfully leaves Nahr. As her family’s main source of financial support, Nahr takes 
various odd jobs until she meets Um Buraq in a wedding ceremony. An Iraqi living in Kuwait, Um 
 
194 
 
Buraq is enchanted with Nahr’s dancing and adds her to a team of girls in an underground brothel for 
rich khalidji customers. The night Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Nahr and two other girls are 
entertaining exacting Saudi emirs who turn out to be extremely abusive. With the occupation underway, 
the emirs are arrested and later executed, showcasing poetic justice.  
With the liberation of Kuwait, Palestinians become overnight personae non gratae in a country 
that they helped build from the sands. Nahr’s family find themselves refugees in Amman now. Under 
the Oslo Accords of 1993, Nahr is finally convinced to visit the West Bank, terminates her divorce 
papers, and remarries. Mhammed’s brother, Bilal, facilitates the daunting procedures and  Nahr slowly 
becomes entangled in Bilal’s secret workflow. She discovers that under a surface of docility, 
underground groups from multiple villages form autonomous resistance cells to Israeli occupation. 
After earning their trust, Nahr becomes part of Bilal’s unit and helps organize several painful blows. 
In consequence, she must serve an eighteen-years prison sentence. This explains why readers 
encounter Nahar in the cubicle early in the novel. Exchanged in a deal, readers meet her in closing in 
Amman. She sees Bilal again but resists the urge to publicly reunite as he is still on the Israelis’ wanted 
list.  
The novel’s world is far richer than the details of its plot. If Karl Marx’s call for communist 
revolution, his disposition against the state and money, or his historicist approach seem too abstract, 
Nahr’s choices facilitate the reception of such abstractions better than the finest professor in the finest 
institution. Nahr embodies Marx’s Gattungwesen, the life of men and women free from alienation. She 
incarnates the ontological vibration of the primordial tradition predominant before the Neolithic 
Revolution. Readers discover that the communism of the future can be no other than the way Nahr, 
Bilal, Samar, Jumana, and Ghassan live, with or without occupation. Before resorting to the armed 
struggle, they are mentally clear that the revolution is how they need to challenge their society’s 
sedimented gender roles and sanctions of morality. Their anti-statist logic does not waver before either 
 
195 
 
Israel, Palestinian Authority, Jordan, or Kuwait. Any state, they find, is the codification of alienation. 
During the short window of time between the Iraqi occupation and American liberation (August 1990-
January 1991), Nahr witnesses first-hand how money is commodity fetishism. With inflation escalating 
like wildfire, people reclaim communism almost in a reboot mode. Even when not articulated as 
communism, that brief experience undid the ghettoization into Kuwaitis, Iraqis, and Palestinians.  
The proof for an underlying revolutionary approach is that Nahr did not have to shy away 
from her past as a sex worker. Still, not shying away is in no way championing that past. Rather, it is 
despite that past, perfectly understandable with the logic of undesirable refugees in the Gulf, that she 
was able to reflect on her condition—a reflection that tolerates the emergence of a radical 
consciousness actively seeking to reverse the collective misfortune. Her radical logos results from 
bypassing private misery, refusing to sabotage or coerce one’s clarity by zooming in instead on the 
collective injustice. Sex work is redefined to signify not subscribing one’s life force in the reversal of 
occupation, any occupation. Nahr forces comparisons with both Zoulikha in Assia Djebar’s La femme 
sans sépulture (1976) and Hajj Khaled in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses (2007). Hatred for 
opponents fails to motivate these three protagonists. Unsurprisingly, they lack personal enemies. With 
these three characters, readers note the ancestral breath of the hunter-gatherer. As Nahr admires the 
curve shaping her breast (reveling in her Dasein), readers cannot overlook the parallel of the curve with 
the hunter’s arch. Both subscribe to the same sacral (not sacred) breath. In hitting the prey, the hunter 
seeks sustenance, not profit. Readers close the novel with the conviction that whoever cannot dance 
cannot qualify as a revolutionary.  
Fouad Mami is a professor of English at the University of Adrar in Algeria.  


Susan Abulhawa. Against the Loveless World: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2020.

Maolalai, DS

The North Meridian Review 
Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 16 
2021 
His new moustache 
DS Maolalai 
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Recommended Citation 
Maolalai, DS (2021) "His new moustache," The North Meridian Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 16. 
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview/vol2/iss1/16 
This Prose is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in The North Meridian Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler 
University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. 
 
146 
 
 
 
DS Maolalai has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart 
Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love Is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle 
Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019) 
 
 
His new moustache 
we met him  
up near  
stoneybatter, 
when he was only 
a few days home, 
just after  
a month-long  
binge, he said, in sligo  
in a house  
by the country- 
side mountains,  
where he’d lived 
when the covid  
had hit. he’d been cycling 
 
when we saw him 
toward the stoney- 
batter markets,  
kicking speed  
and wearing 
a rugged moustache, 
 
147 
 
and he skidded a loop  
through dust and around 
light traffic 
and stopped  
by the courthouse 
to talk.  
 
and we had been out 
a minute easy, 
walking the dog 
and picking up  
our groceries  
and fish grew hot  
by the wine  
and stained our knees  
with sunshine, sweating 
through thin  
plastic shopping bags 
to the seaside smell 
of fresh and dribbled  
piss. and he told us  
 
about his problems 
getting work  
since he’d been back 
and his problems 
getting dole, or any sort 
of covid payment, 
his problems 
 
148 
 
meeting girls right now 
and meeting his friends –  
our friends –  
for a drink. he talked 
a good 30 minutes – it was 
unusual – he’d been 
in paris  
and australia 
and not talked  
so much.  
 
eventually we made 
excuses – the dog 
needed to be fed –  
our masks were 
sweating us –  
and went on. he must have been 
very lonely  
to want to talk   
so much. afterward, 
crossing the road, 
we looked back 
and he was gone, 
stitching his wheels 
into traffic, dragging 
his sweating body 
and his rugged 
new moustache. 
  


His new moustache

Estringel, David

The North Meridian Review 
Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 27 
2021 
Digging for Lost Temples 
David Estringel 
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Recommended Citation 
Estringel, David (2021) "Digging for Lost Temples," The North Meridian Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 27. 
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview/vol2/iss1/27 
This Prose is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in The North Meridian Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler 
University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. 
 
172 
 
 
 
David Estringel holds a Bachelor’s degree in English. His poetry and short fiction have appeared 
and/or are forthcoming in online and print publications, such as the Setu Bilingual Journal, Azahares 
Literary Magazine, Route 7 Review, the Blue Nib, Pif Magazine, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Latin Anthology, 
Rigorous Magazine, Bosphorus Review, Lahar Magazine, the Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Drunk Monkeys. David has 
also been a lead editor at The Good Men Project and editor at Red Fez and the Elixir Magazine. 
 
 
Digging for Lost Temples 
 
Thumbing through The Borderlands, I can’t help but feel not brown enough. I’m Mexican Lite. Got 
a case of the “coconuts.” There are no rageful battle cries inflaming this breast. No bitterness lingering 
on the tip of the tongue (the back of hands and the starch of white collars taste just the same no matter 
the bearer’s color). No tortured soul, longing for identity and re-appropriation. There’s just me and 
this suit of rosy-beige meat that touts my value best in the dead of winter.  
“If you’re not pissed, you aren’t paying attention,” some people used to say. Others, “We’re nothing 
but second-class citizens—wetbacks—to them!” (My back dried three generations ago) Then, there is 
all this talk of The Wall, as if one had actually never existed before in the first place. How funny people 
are when the invisible begin to reflect the Spectrum of Things in the cruel clarity of daylight—ancient 
atrocities shining, unforgivingly, like newly minted coins under brusque fluorescents. When did 
symbols become more real than the things they represented? (Maybe around the same time ‘detention 
centers’ and ‘concentration camps’ meant different things?) “Better them than me,” I would think to 
myself. “Everyone’s got to hate someone, right?” 
Call it apathy. Detachment. Indifference. Call it what you like, but don’t let an absence of tears convey 
a treason of the flesh. I know where I come from and where my people have been. I am one of the 
many brown bodies that was piled in heaps, used as target practice by Texas Rangers that stood 
proudly before them, posing for photographs. I swung low from sturdy boughs in the Southwest, 
proving Strange Fruit –plucked in all its hues and flavors—tastes coppery and bitter in Life’s maw. I 
starved outside with the rest of the dogs, staring into diner windows—mind, body, and spirit 
consumed—barred from entry, wanting for crumbs. The narrative’s my own, but the story remains 
the same.  
I’m no one’s machisto, gangbanger, Latin lover, wetback, or Spic. I am no one’s pimp, Sancho, caballero, 
or maricon. I can’t roll my Rs, I hate tequila, and I don’t code switch. Sheepskins—paid by my own 
coin—adorn my walls, not holographic portraits of The Last Supper or La Santa Muerte adorned with 
plastic red roses from the dollar store. I am not “spicy” like something that is novelly consumed. And 
 
173 
 
I—a being, self-determined, not cast from a vulgar mold— respect God’s will as much as he respects 
mine (which doesn’t say much).  
The blood of peasants and slaves, warriors and kings run through our veins. Our ears once heard 
gods’ whispers through the rustling of leaves in the breeze and the trickling of streams over time-
smoothed stones. We rode the winds--the sun kissing our backs (not breaking them)—as we flew 
through fields of pale azure upon Serpent’s wings, over treetops and verdant expanses. We ate our 
enemies’ courage and drank victor’s wine with lips, stained red, from their skulls. (So, step back with 
your ‘tallboys’ and that Four Lokos jive!) This is what lies beneath the skin. Melanin be damned! We 
are the sons and daughters of Earth and Sky, Aztec Temples of Sun and Moon, buried beneath 
blanched soil, crowned by cathedrals—papal tiaras anointed by brown blood that pepper the land like 
so many gravestones. Remember? 
Remember! 
So, I pray to the Archangel Anzaldua to help me find my lost sovereignty—my words wafting up into 
the clouds on velvety ropes smoke of sandalwood incense and braided sweetgrass. Tears of honey fall 
from Heaven upon my skin, feeding cuts and scrapes no one (not even I) can see. Unfolding her 
rainbow-hued wings, like Hebe on Olympus, she descends with arms outstretched and an angelic 
smile. Face to face, she pulls me close, blesses my forehead with champurrado-scented kisses then 
tugs at my ear and says with the fire of cinnamon on her tongue, “Huerco, just love the skin you’re in!” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Digging for Lost Temples

Lepley, John

The North Meridian Review 
Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 35 
2021 
James H. Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. 
Bloomington: Indiana University 
John Lepley 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview 
Recommended Citation 
Lepley, John (2021) "James H. Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. Bloomington: Indiana 
University," The North Meridian Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 35. 
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/thenorthmeridianreview/vol2/iss1/35 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in The North Meridian Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler 
University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. 
 
199 
 
 
James H. Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. 
Bloomington: Indiana University  
Press, 2020. 
 
Reviewed by John Lepley 
 
History clashed with memory when USA Today interviewed Adam Driver about his role in the 2018 
film BlacKkKlansmen. Raised in Mishawaka, Indiana, Driver recalled the Ku Klux Klan as a ubiquitous 
presence throughout his childhood. “If anything, I was more aware of it as a kid growing up in Indiana 
because they were always Klan rallies, like, every summer,” he shared. However, James H. Madison, a 
historian at Indiana University, threw cold water on this reminiscence. “Most of the memories of this 
sort tend to be grossly exaggerated, but at the same time, it’s quite possible that he [Driver], saw men 
and women in robes and sheets. It’s quite possible that he saw a burning cross. But not a lot of it,” 
Madison explained.155 We ought to cut Driver some slack, though; his recollection exemplifies the 
history that Madison describes in The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland.  
     In the early 1920s, the Indiana KKK boasted over 300,000 members, peaking in 1922–
1923. Madison contends that too much attention has been focused on its elites, particularly Grand 
Dragon D. C. Stephenson. Instead, he tells us to look at the rank and file that organized “Klaverns” 
in every county in the state. “In the American heartland, the Klan found its best people,” Madison 
writes. (p. 2). Nativism, 100% patriotism, and militant Protestantism provided a milieu that African 
 
155 “Star Wars Actor Adam Driver Says He Had KKK Neighbors in Indiana,” 5Chicago, modified 
Aug. 21, 2018, https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/star-wars-actor-adam-driver-says-he-had-
kkk-neighbors-in-indiana/49645/  
 
 
200 
 
Americans, Jews, and Catholics threatened to tear asunder. While the Klan reinforced de jure and de 
facto structures to marginalize African Americans, “they were never considered as dangerous as 
Catholics” (p. 95). The Klan is usually associated with virulent racism because of its origins in the 
aftermath of the Civil War and resurgence during the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and 1960s. However, 
the Great War intensified the suspicion with which white Protestants regarded the Eastern and 
Southern Europeans who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the 
1920s, these factors created a siege mentality upon which the Klan erected a formidable redoubt.  
The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland is outstanding regional history. The endnotes reveal deep 
archival research. One-third of the monograph is visual; two galleries feature photographs and images 
illustrating the Klan’s pursuits. A flyer for a Klan picnic in Vincennes advertised “One Whole Day of 
Diversified Delight and Amusement”; several photos bear the name of “W. A. Swift,” a Muncie 
photographer who covered Klan functions. Still, Madison’s focus on the local level unearths a deep 
vein of exclusion and division in the American past writ large. “Running through that history is racial, 
ethnic, and religious conflict and hatred,” he continues (p. 7). Hoosier Klan members were not 
illiterate backcountry rubes who eschewed civic and patriotic ideals. To the contrary, in their minds, 
they were its defenders and evangelists who used modern technologies to promulgate their creed, 
enforce moral standards, and regulate who belonged to the nation. Less than a decade after Woodrow 
Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House, the Klan produced the films The Toll of Justice 
and The Traitor Within that “portrayed the Klan as a nonviolent moral reform organization” (p. 107). 
Madison’s emphasis on the Klan’s cultural, political, and social aspects creates a rich history, 
but it lacks a political-economy perspective that would have enhanced his argument. For example, did 
the postwar glut in agricultural commodities influence Klan membership? The distinction that 
Madison makes between the Klan’s intimidation of African Americans and the violence the Klan 
actually perpetrated invites scrutiny as well. Even if there are no primary sources to support the claim 
 
201 
 
of “an intensely violent Indiana Klan,” (p. 110) mere threats are on the same spectrum as actual deeds. 
Chapters on the Klan’s critics and opponents, its political endeavors, the downfall of D. C. 
Stephenson, and brief revivals in the latter decades of the 20th century round out this excellent 
contribution to midwestern history.  
Driver’s recollections of the Klan prompted others to speak up. Corey Havens, a reporter for 
the South Bend Tribune, documented several instances of Klan violence and hate group activities in 
Indiana in the 1990s and early 2000s. Travis Childs, an educator at South Bend’s History Museum, 
who had also cast doubt on Driver’s claims, owned up to his mistake. “I was shocked. I would never 
have guessed there were that many events. Shocked and saddened,” he admitted.156 In an ironic way, 
this row anticipated Madison’s conclusions in The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. “The Klan story does 
not give comfort. It rests at the core of American history, not at the margins” (p. 198). 
John Lepley is a labor educator in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduate of Indiana State University’s MA 
program in labor and reform movement history.    
  
 
156 Yes, There Were Plenty of KKK Rallies when Adam Driver Lived in St. Joseph County,” South 
Bend (IN) Tribune, Aug. 21, 2018,  https://www.southbendtribune.com/news/local/yes-there-were-
plenty-of-kkk-rallies-when-adam-driver/article_ddeafc15-d21f-5cce-beff-6e48f66a1e00.html.  
 


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