Trunk Opens Up Indiana Town’s Secret Klan Past : History: Papers reveal ‘pillars of community’ joined in the ‘20s. Decision to keep names private stirs controversy.

NOBLESVILLE, Ind. — As Hamilton County coroner and the town funeral director, 65-year-old Joe Roberts has been privy to an awful lot of sensitive information over the years.

Some he passes along: He informed his brother, Don, for instance, that Charlotte Stern had died and her little house on Wayne Street would be up for sale.

Some he keeps to himself: He’d been told long ago that in the attic of the weathered barn out back, a dusty steamer trunk contained a secret that Noblesville, like many other towns, would find uncomfortable to confront. Invited once to take a look, he had declined.

In March, Don Roberts bought the house to renovate and rent. In May, he and his son, Jeff, started to clean out the barn. They found the trunk, about 3 1/2 feet long and 2 feet wide, in a corner and they opened up the past.

There, just as Joe had heard, were the old Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, one with a big red tassel on top. There was the cross. And there, tan and crumbling, bound loosely with twine, were the membership cards and dues receipts of Hamilton County men who, from 1923 to 1926, paid a $10 fee to become citizens of the Invisible Empire, entering through the portal of Klan No. 42, Realm of Indiana.

On the klan’s 3x5 cards were signatures of men who would later serve as sheriff and county clerk, of the local Disciples of Christ minister, of downtown merchants, of respected farmers from miles around the White River plain--of roughly 35% of the white male American-born adults. “These were pillars of the community,” Don Roberts said.

As it happened, the county historian, Joe Burgess, lives just across the alley from the old Stern place. Don Roberts paid him a visit. “Hmmm,” said Burgess. “This should be preserved. Oh, my.”

The find set off a flurry of interest among scholars who have been delving over the past decade into the story of the so-called second klan, which recruited millions of members and saw its influence spread far beyond the South, into the northern reaches of Indiana, Ohio and Michigan and even to Colorado, Oregon and California.

“In the klan of the 1920s we see the beginnings of modern . . . right-wing populism,” said Leonard J. Moore, a historian at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “It’s an attempt to defend white Protestant culture.”

“This was not the klan of ‘Birth of a Nation’ or ‘Mississippi Burning,’ ” said M. William Lutholtz, author of a biography of D.C. Stephenson, an Indiana Grand Dragon of the period who counted many important politicians as his friends.

This klan certainly appealed to racism, but emphasized even more strongly a hatred and suspicion directed at immigrants, Catholics, Jews and union workers.

The town itself has changed much in the intervening years, more than doubling in population to more than 17,000. The interurban tracks remain, but it is freeways, not trains, that now link Noblesville with Indianapolis and Muncie. The quaint Victorian core is flanked by a zone of strip malls and fast-food joints that looks like any suburb in the country.

The question, however, of just who participated in those long-ago rites is still sensitive. Presumably most of those listed are dead--men had to be 18 to join--but many of their descendants are still around and distinctly squeamish about the possibility of the names getting out.

The Hamilton County Historical Society voted this week to accept the local papers, but to keep the names private. Only Don Roberts and Joe Burgess have sifted through them. Researchers can apply to inspect the list, if no identities are revealed. Families can inquire whether a particular name appears and the society will discreetly check.

“If it had been 10 more years, there wouldn’t have been any problem at all,” said David Heighway, the society’s director. “The local community is really important to us. We don’t want to offend them.”

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The decision has been controversial. “It’s not healthy at all,” said Lutholtz. “The attitude has been ‘we’re not going to apologize, we’re not going to say anything, it didn’t happ”

“It’s important for Americans to understand how a very wide spectrum of people was involved so we can get an idea of how deeply those ideas permeated the culture,” said Northwestern University historian Nancy McLean.

“I think it’s really problematic to conceal their identities,” she added, “because it makes it hard to say anything of substance about them. It protects people who engaged in really anti-social behavior.”

No matter what the collection’s fate, the news of its existence has spawned a debate in Noblesville over what the klan really meant in that place and time.

It was Noblesville where D.C. Stephenson, the grand dragon, was convicted of murder in 1925, after the trial was moved from Indianapolis. He spent his time away from court in a cell in the French Renaissance brick-and-limestone jail that is now the historical society’s museum.

Until the trial, Noblesville had been a hotbed of klan support. The Rev. A. H. Moore was certainly open about his enthusiasm. “I would rather wear a white sheet in the dark than to see my country in a shroud,” he sermonized, according to the Noblesville Daily Ledger of Jan. 6, 1923. The Italians, Germans and Jews who had flowed into this country were “an element,” he said, “that does not become Americanized . . . danger lurks in every corner.”

The klan burned crosses on a western hillside before Christmas every year, and paraded to the courthouse square several times. Joe Burgess, who is 75, remembers watching--as a boy of 3--a throng of robed marchers filling 10th Street from curb to curb.

He was accompanied only by his mother. Now he thinks he knows why. The receipts show that his father paid quarterly dues of $1.25 to the klan in 1923. “Maybe he was in the parade,” Burgess said.

His father was a well driller. Businessmen, Burgess said, were expected, even pressured, to join up.

He and other local whites say the klan was more of a social and political organization than anything else, a fraternal group like the Oddfellows, something to do in the evenings before television was invented, a way to advance in the Stephenson-dominated Republican Party.

The lore in minority families takes on a more ominous cast.

Fannie Glover is 85. She uses a cane these days but her memory of growing up black in Noblesville is clear. Her uncle, Andrew Lucas, worked for Craycraft Dry Goods downtown, cleaning window blinds, cutting linoleum, whatever needed doing.

The klan approached the Craycraft brothers, Albert and George, and requested the pleasure of their membership. “Of course,” one representative told them, gesturing at Lucas, “you’ll have to let him go.”

Lucas was able to laugh as he recounted these events to his relatives, but that was because the Craycrafts said they just weren’t interested.

Edward (Bud) Costomiris, who is 70, tells a tale without such a happy ending. His father’s cousin, George Kosto, who came from Greece, opened a candy store and christened it Kosto’s Kandy Kitchen. The klan didn’t like the KKK initials on the foreigner’s storefront and “forced” Kosto--Costomiris isn’t sure how--to change them.

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Soon, Kosto sold his place to Costomiris’ father, Sam, who renamed it Sweet Home. Sam Costomiris, born on an island off the Turkish coast, spoke heavily accented English. Four years later, he too closed up shop. He moved to New Haven, Conn.

“I asked him many years later why he left,” said Bud Costomiris, now a farmer like his maternal grandfather, American-born. Finally, Sam Costomiris explained to his son that the klan had left constant calling cards: a dead raccoon in the doorway one day, a dead groundhog the next.

Over the years, there’s been plenty of quiet talk about who had been with the klan. Joe Roberts, of course, heard many such stories.

“One man told me,” he said-- and he won’t say who it was--”that he was going to a klan meeting and they wouldn’t tell him where it was.” He was told to go to a certain corner and to wait for a black Buick.

When he got to the corner, the sheriff was there as well. “ ‘What are you doing?’ ” he asked. And the sheriff said, ‘Oh, I’m waiting for a fella to pick me up.’

“And when the car came, they got in together.”

Another person, Roberts recalled, said he once returned downtown to the store where he worked after it had closed for the night. “He walked in a back room and there was a big crowd there,” Roberts said. “And he was told: ‘We’re having a klan meeting here and we want you to forget about it.’ ”

Historians have heard these snippets too. “We always had a suspicion,” said Nancy Gabin, of Purdue University. “We know it was a popular movement. But lists like this could give us something to confirm it.” And, as McLean said, extensive files like the one from the Sterns’ barn, are “few and far between.”

Three years ago, for example, a family in Fremont, Mich., northeast of Muskegon, found a cache of klan records from 1925. They were sold at auction.

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Though several universities bid on the collection as a whole, the auctioneers made more money from selling various parts to individual bidders, so “it went here, there and everywhere,” said Louise Slager, whose aunt owned the farm where the artifacts were discovered.

Slager made a point of not reading the lists before they were dispersed. “I did not want to have to answer people’s questions,” she said. “I am a Christian and I didn’t want anything to do with that.”