Mrs. Cook and the Klan

Booze, Bloodshed, and Bigotry in America's Heartland

Tom Chorneau (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

276 Seiten

2025
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
9781496235848 (ISBN)

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On the day she was murdered, Myrtle Underwood Cook boasted to local authorities about new evidence of a major bootlegging ring operating out of the Rock Island train depot behind her house in a small farming town in eastern Iowa. Then, as she sat at her parlor window sewing, she took a single slug through the heart. She was president of the local temperance union; her killing made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news due to the eerie presence of a small army from the Ku Klux Klan, its members donned in full regalia, drawn from three surrounding states.

It was September 1925, and Al Capone had just taken over the Chicago Outfit, evangelist Billy Sunday was converting thousands to temperance, and the KKK had just marched on Washington, DC. During its first half century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry and back eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. And back when Iowa was still a territory, its Black Codes imprinted generations with a legacy of intolerance and racism.

Mrs. Cook and the Klan is a true crime investigation that not only sheds new light on Myrtle Underwood Cook’s unsolved killing but also explores the confluence of the social, political, and economic forces that brought the Klan, lawless street gangs, a local mob boss, and the temperance movement together in a small American town.

Tom Chorneau spent nearly thirty years as a journalist, including more than a decade as an investigative reporter for the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of three works of fiction, including Victim Eleven.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Hawkeyes from Dixie
2. The Bridge at Davenport
3. The Witches of Temperance
4. A Schoolhouse on Every Hilltop and No Saloon in the Valley
5. The Martyr of Sioux City
6. Oily Tongued Sharpers and Swindlers
7. The Mulct Law
8. God Hates the Four-Flusher
9. A Kill Fee
10. The Suffragists
11. Last Call in Marshalltown
12. The Hyphenated Americans
13. Wet to Dry Again
14. The Hangings at Camp Dodge
15. Shootout at the Carbarn CafÉ
16. America Is for Americans
17. Comes a Killer
18. The Investigation
19. The Prime Suspects
20. Who Killed Mrs. Cook?
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	16.01.2025
Zusatzinfo	17 photographs, 2 illustrations, index
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
ISBN-13	9781496235848 / 9781496235848
Zustand	Neuware