When the Klan came to Carnegie

Commemorating 100 years since a violent clash pushed back the Invisible Empire

The standoff began at the Glendale Bridge linking Carothers Avenue in Scott Township with Third Street in Carnegie.

On the Scott Township side of the bridge, a sea of white-robed members of the Invisible Empire, commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan, peered at their opponents from dark eye holes cut into their white hoods.

Many of the Klansmen hid weapons—clubs, pistols, and baseball bats—underneath their robes, just as their leader, Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, had advised.

On the Carnegie side of the bridge, arrayed against them, a crowd of mainly Irish Catholics had gathered, determined to stop the Klan from marching in Carnegie.

Between these two hostile groups, John J. Dillon, assistant chief deputy sheriff of Allegheny County, climbed atop a truck on the bridge adorned with electric lights flashing the letters KKK in the darkness.

“I seen that things looked very serious and realized that if we could not get control of either party that there would be some serious trouble. After pleading with the citizens and Klansmen for some time, I seen it was useless,” the sheriff testified later at a coroner’s inquest into the events that evening.

Carnegie defends itself

Sheriff Dillon was correct. A little after 11 p.m., less than twenty minutes after the sheriff appealed to both sides for peace, the evening degenerated into a riot, with fights raging over a three-block section of Carnegie from the Glendale Bridge to Third Street and West Main Street. Citizens and Klansman battled for over an hour — throwing volleys of bricks and rocks, exchanging blows with clubs and blackjacks and opening fire with pistols. At the intersection of Third and West Main, Klansman Thomas Rankin Abbott from Washington County was shot in the right temple.

The Klan marchers on the night of August 25, 1923, took a terrible beating. After Abbott was killed, they retreated to the Glendale Bridge, then trudged back to their temporary campground in Scott. Earlier they had ignited an enormous cross. The Klansmen gathered in a circle with torches ablaze, and initiated a thousand new members as dusk fell over the Chartiers Valley.

After the riot, defeated Klansmen regrouped at their meeting site, near their now smoldering cross, overlooking Carnegie before disappearing into the night.

The Pittsburgh Gazette Times chronicled the dispirited retreat of the Klan: “Many men, dusty, torn, and apparently wary, some with unattended wounds, lacerations, and bruises, were seen in Pittsburgh restaurants and passing through the city in automobiles.”

Despite vowing to come back and burn Carnegie to the ground, and offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the conviction of the man shot Abbott, the Klan never returned, having experienced first-hand the wrath of people determined to protect their home town.

Allegheny County detectives, acting on a tip from a Carnegie resident, charged Patrick “Paddy” McDermott, a local funeral home director, with Abbott’s murder. A coroner’s inquest convened on September 28 resulted in a dismissal of all charges when the coroner’s jury found insufficient evidence to name McDermott as the killer.

The spread of the Invisible Empire

A book published this year, “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them,” by Timothy Egan describes the epic clash between the Klan and Carnegie citizens, but the riot was just one event in the rise of the Klan in the early 1920s.

Mr. Egan notes that Klan marches in New Wilmington, Punxsutawney and New Castle before the riot in Carnegie were part of a bold Klan move to expand its membership in Western Pennsylvania.

Imperial Wizard Evans, a dentist from Dallas who led the march in Carnegie, shared power in the rising Klan with Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, who had made the state of Indiana the base of his operations. In Indiana, he wielded considerable influence over the state’s political and judicial systems with judges, sheriffs, politicians and even the governor of Indiana in thrall to the Grand Dragon.

A glib, charming flim-flam man from Oklahoma, Stephenson soon amassed a fortune from the $10 membership fee assessed for each new recruit to the hooded order. He and Evans also received a cut on Klan merchandise like robes, patches, and emblems, but conflict soon broke over their cut of the money flowing into the Klan’s coffers, weakening the organization.

While membership rolls were kept secret, Mr. Egan and other chroniclers of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, estimate paid membership stood somewhere between two million and six million men. Stephenson and Evans even established Klan charters enrolling women and children.

With Klan membership flourishing in the Midwest and Western states, and his power growing in Indiana, Stephenson was a step away from being appointed a U.S. senator from his adopted state — an appointment, he believed, that would position him to run for president.

D.C. Stephenson, however, hid more than his face behind his Klan hood. A raging alcoholic, he would viciously attack women while intoxicated, and when the women threatened to turn him into authorities, he would tell them, “I am the law in Indiana.”

But one woman, Madge Oberholtzer, dared to defy the Grand Dragon after she was kidnapped and raped by Stephenson in 1925. Before she died, she gave a detailed statement to investigators of what he had done, which was corroborated by witnesses.

Stephenson was convicted of second degree murder by an Indiana jury, and given a life sentence. He served 25 years and was released in 1950 — but the Klan had by then dwindled in power and influence.

Echoes of history

The Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s would leave a lasting and pernicious legacy, Mr. Egan explains in his book. The anti-immigration fervor it spurred was largely responsible for a restrictive immigration law in 1924 that shut down almost all immigration into the United States for 41 years.

This had profound international consequences: By shutting down most immigration, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in the 1930s from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied countries in Central and Eastern Europe could not escape to America. Most of them later died in Nazi death camps.

While the Carnegie riot was a local manifestation of Klan hatred, it was only one small tragedy in the Klan’s rise to power throughout the United States in the era.

Today, America is riven by deep political polarization, with unscrupulous politicians, major media outlets, and internet platforms using hate to attract and keep an audience of devoted followers.

It’s a tactic Stephenson employed to devastating effect in the 1920s, as the citizens of Carnegie discovered. Near the end of Mr. Egan’s book, he writes, “[D.C. Stephenson’s] 1922 epiphany in Evansville that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress was brilliant. And true.”

Written by Bob Podurgiel. Bob Podurgiel is a freelance Pittsburgh writer whose work often appears in the goodness section of the Post-Gazette.

The Carnegie Historical Society and the Heinz History Center have additional information on this historic day.

Article first Published August 6, 2023, 5:30 am/ Pittsburgh Post Gazette

NOTE: Many people have told us some of the bricks from our building, which was being built around that time, were used in the fight.