AMERICAN HISTORIES

David Curtis (D. C.) Stephenson’s relentless pursuit of the American dream kept him constantly on the move. Born in 1891 to Texas sharecroppers, Stephenson moved with his family to the Oklahoma Territory in 1901. After quitting school at age sixteen, he drifted around the state for more than a decade, working for a string of newspapers and gaining a reputation as a heavy drinker and a ladies’ man. In 1915 he married and appeared to settle down; however, he soon lost his newspaper job, abandoned his pregnant wife, and hit the road working for one newspaper after another in between binges of drunkenness. His wife divorced him, and in 1917 Stephenson joined the army to fight in World War I. He was stationed stateside, but his service was marked by a series of drunken brawls and sexual misadventures. Nevertheless, he rose to the rank of second lieutenant and received an honorable discharge in 1919.

Stephenson remarried and settled in Indiana, where he finally found financial and political success. In 1920 he joined the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Reconstruction-era organization that had reemerged in 1915 in Georgia. The newly revived Klan spread beyond the South, targeting African Americans, recent immigrants, Jews, and Catholics as enemies of traditional Protestant family values. Stephenson directed Klan operations in twenty-three states, building a profitable empire on fear and prejudice as well as get-rich-quick schemes that appealed to the spirit of American adventure. A few years later, however, his old pattern of self-destruction led to his arrest and conviction on rape and second-degree murder charges and the end of his Klan career.

Ossian Sweet also pursued the American dream. Like Stephenson, he rose from humble beginnings, but he had far more to overcome. The descendant of slaves, Sweet was born in 1895 and grew up in the central Florida town of Bartow. Hoping to shield him from the violence that whites used to keep Bartow’s blacks in their place, Sweet’s parents sent him north when he was thirteen years old to get an education.

After attending Wilberforce University in Ohio and Howard Medical School in Washington, D.C., Sweet moved to Detroit in 1921 to open a medical practice in the city’s ghetto known as “Black Bottom.” He married, and in 1924 the Sweets decided to buy a house for their growing family, which now included an infant daughter, in a working-class neighborhood occupied exclusively by whites. Before the Sweets moved in, their white neighbors, with Klan backing, began organizing to keep them out.

When the Sweet family finally moved into their house on September 8, 1925, they encountered a hostile crowd in the street. Dr. Sweet had brought some backup with him, including two of his younger brothers and several friends. Armed in case the mob got out of hand, the Sweets and their defenders fired their weapons at the crowd after rocks smashed through the upstairs windows of the house. When the shooting stopped and the police restored calm, one white man lay dead and another wounded. Dr. Sweet, his wife Gladys, and the other nine occupants of his house went on trial on first-degree murder charges. The NAACP represented the eleven defendants and hired the famous criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow. After two trials—the first ended in a hung jury—Darrow won an acquittal for his clients in 1926. •

THE AMERICAN HISTORIES of Ossian Sweet and D. C. Stephenson illustrate the competing forces that shaped the 1920s. Both achieved a measure of financial success, but they did so in the post–World War I atmosphere of growing social friction and intense racial resentments. After serving in the war, many blacks and ethnic minorities had a greater sense of pride in themselves. When Sweet’s parents decided to send him north to get an education, they were responding to the racial violence that plagued the South, but they were also demonstrating their belief that a better life was possible for their son. By contrast, Stephenson grew wealthy by tapping into the same racial tensions that shaped the Sweets’ lives. Just as the census of 1890 had announced the end of the frontier, the census of 1920 indicated that the population of rural America had dwindled and that the majority of Americans now lived in cities with more than 2,500 people. Many who considered themselves “100 percent Americans,” born and bred in small towns or living in sections of cities with homogeneous populations, believed that racial and ethnic minorities threatened their power. Although the general prosperity of the period masked the tensions lying beneath the surface, it did not eliminate them. As the experiences of D. C. Stephenson and Ossian Sweet show, the decade following the end of World War I opened up fresh avenues for economic prosperity as well as new sites for cultural clashes exacerbated by the tensions of modern America.