#1518 Gangbuster, One Man’s Battle against Crime, Corruption, and the Klan by Alan Pendergast

Gangbuster, One Man’s Battle against Crime, Corruption, and the Klan, is an amazing nonfiction work which Alan Prendergast has written more like a thriller than a dry nonfiction historical work. Phillip Van Cise was an attorney who was floating about the Western US, looking for a place to develop his career. He found such a spot not long after landing in Denver and he then won an election as the city’s District Attorney. In the Roaring 20’s, grifters and confidence men seemed to have had free rein to swindle people out of their life savings without worrying about getting caught. The highest levels of government were corrupt.  

In the first half of the book, the battles between Cise and the corrupt government leaders and criminal bosses was detailed by Prendergast. Responsible citizens of Denver backed Cise, but the corrupt powers were formidable. The second half of the book is devoted to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in Denver. Colorado had the second highest per capita of Klan members, only falling behind Indiana in such efforts. Prendergast wrote about the Klan’s message, “It was a nationwide call to white Protestants to unite and defend their women, their homes, and their communities from a seemingly endless array of threats posed y Blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and others who were not, could never be “100% American.” There seemed to be little difference in the claims of the Klan in the 20’s and todays ultraright wing rhetoric. John Galen Locke was the leader of the Klan in Colorado.

Nationwide, by 1925, the Klan had a membership of two million to four million people. Considering the use of hoods to hide their identity, and their habit of working in secret they were often referred to as the Invisible Empire, while the usual governmental forces were thought of as the Visible Empire. It was after internal warfare in the Klan that the membership suddenly and rapidly declined. Prendergast wrote that they lost 80% of their membership in a matter of months. 

 

(As an aside, I’m originally a Hoosier although I’ve now lived in California longer than I lived in Indiana. I was always aware of the racism and bigotry in the state, and it’s my memory that the right wing newspaper, Indianapolis Star, quoted the Grand Dragon about once a week during the 1970s when I was living there and attending medical school. Interestingly, at least in the 70’s and 80’s, the Star was owned by the same family which produced Dan Quail, former senator from Indiana and the one-term Vice President of the U.S., under the first President Bush from 1989 to 1993. There can be no doubt that the Klan continues to wield influence in state politics.) Prendergast wrote, “The most grotesque fall from grace was in Indiana, where Grand Dragon David Stephenson lorded over the largest, loudest state organization in the country. At the height of its power, roughly a third of Indiana’s adult white males were loyal to the Klan, and few Hoosier politicians would dare to make a move without first consulting Stephenson, a charismatic salesman in his early 30s.” It was Stephenson’s violent treatment of women which derailed his plans to build his own empire. By 1929, the number of Klan members in Indiana dropped from 250,000 to about 4,000.

 

Even after Van Cise left office as the District Attorney, he could not leave the ongoing corruption and residual Klan related problems. In private practice, he was able to take on such cases that led to a further gansignificant decrease in such corruption. The author wrote, “The group would linger, increasingly fractured and directionless, but there was no longer anything to fear from the Colorado Realm of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was finished.”

 

If you’re captured by U.S. history, this book is a must. While I knew it had been a big factor in Indiana during the 20^thcentury, I knew little of its spread to the western part of the U.S. It’s an excellent read and it gets my recommendation.