MYCELIUM OF EVIL
In the southernmost reaches of the mountains closest to where I live – the Blue Mountains of Washington and Oregon – lives the largest organism on the planet. A single living entity, it covers 3.5 square miles, weighs 35,000 tons, and is believed to be 8,600 years old – so not only the largest living thing on earth but among the oldest. It is a massive fungus composed of dark, rootlike rhizomorphs which spread underground through forest soil, seeking the nutrients found in wood. Mycologists – mushroom specialists – know it as a species of Amillaria, a genus often known as the honey mushroom. The most startling feature of this wiry immensity, next to its sheer size, is its invisibility. If you were to walk across a mile or two of the Blue Mountain forest which stands atop it, you would never know it was there, but you would see its effects. In wet years, the humongous fungus will sprout thousands of handsome, dun-colored mushrooms – the kind with gills beneath the caps, reminding you of safe, delicious species you can buy in grocery stores. These particular Blue Mountains honeys are Amillaria ostoyae, edible if properly cooked, but not particularly choice or delicious, and, for some, hard to digest. The fungus itself, however, has no problem with digestion. It lives by feeding on coniferous trees, working its filaments upwards through the cambium layers and eventually girdling and killing its host. If you are a forest hiker, you have likely seen the kinds of results wrought by parasitic fungi: a dead tree bole lying on the ground with dislodged bark and something that looks and feels like white latex painted onto the inner wood. Those are the pale mycelial felts left by dense nets of Amillaria rhizomorphs, which have girdled and killed the tree. Amillaria kills a lot of trees.
I just finished reading Tim Egan’s 2023 excellent political thriller, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, and the book, strangely, got me thinking about mycelia.
Egan takes the reader deep into the darkest recesses of white supremacy at the time of the Klan’s shocking resurrection in the 1920s. He briefly traces the rise of the Klan in 1866, soon after the end of the Civil War, when bands of white-sheeted night-riders began to emerge across the countryside of the defeated former Confederacy, terrorizing black families and communities. The riders were rebel veterans, enraged by the sudden freedom of four million slaves, with their newly acquired civil rights, among those the right to vote as American citizens. Sometime in 1866, Egan reports, six of those reb-vets came together in Pulaski, Tennessee, to organize a secret club, to which they affixed a cryptic name borrowed from Greek. Kuklos, meaning circle, was the word they chose, and to it they attached the word clan, denoting the white South’s common affiliation with Scots-Irish ancestry. Spelling klan with a “k” and replacing the “s” in kuklos with an “x” proved to be a brilliant stroke, as it gave the newly-named secret circle a memorable handle. No one who encounters the Ku Klux Klan in print can ever forget it. It soon became a name branded in the American psyche.
The Klan spread like a rash across the South, doing everything it could to thwart the federal reconstruction project and suppress the rise of African-Americans. Under the leadership of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general and the Klan’s first “Grand Wizard,” the KKK grew to more than 500,000 members using tactics of terror and violence to undergird its rise toward Southern political dominance. “We are the law itself” became a mantra many Klansmen would use to define the intentions of their organization, then and later.
Egan goes on to trace the campaign of President Ulysses Grant to smash the Klan, using his Justice Department to oversee passage of several Ku Klux Klan acts which elevated terrorist violence to the level of federal crime. When more than 5,000 Klansmen had been rounded up and prosecuted, some receiving lengthy prison terms, Grand Wizard Forrest declared defeat, disbanded his organization, and burned all records. By 1870, the Klan was effectively dead – or so it seemed. In reality, the dark forces of hatred and revenge that brought the organization into being in the first place did not die; they merely retreated as if sunken into the ground. Hence, mycelium.
There is something in modern life which lies invisible all around us, an ambient, latent anger and hatred which lies largely dormant, until some new combination of social and cultural forces beckons it back to the surface. It’s a massive web of dense, strong filaments not unlike the dark rhizomorphs which lie beneath that Oregon forest floor, and when conditions on top are right, it erupts and spreads its fruiting bodies with astonishing speed and force. What lay invisible beneath our very feet is suddenly in our faces, demanding another confrontation with the past. In the case of the Klan, it was a distinctly American past, but the history Egan outlines is not simply an American phenomenon. Mycelia of evil seem to lurk beneath the feet of many modern societies. Fascism in western Europe did not materialize out of clear mountain air.
What interests me most in Egan’s fine book is the task of reading between the lines of the history he presents to try and discern matters more of conjecture than of fact. The facts he reports are these:
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan, once thought all but dead, entered very suddenly into the decade of its greatest flourishing. What was most remarkable about its explosive growth was where it occurred. Klan activism did revitalize in its Southern birthplaces, but the most dramatic flourishing occurred north of the Mason-Dixon line, in states such as Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Oregon. Klan membership reached 1.2 million by the middle of the decade. The organization reached its peak as a visible, credible force in American politics in 1926 when 30,000 robed supremacists marched on Washington.
The central figure in Egan’s riveting narrative is David C. Stephenson, a sadistic grifter, alcoholic and con artist who saw blazing opportunities for personal wealth and power in the newly risen KKK. Stephenson watched from afar when D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, filled theaters from coast to coast. Griffith based his film on a popular novel, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, written by Thomas Dixon, Jr., a North Carolinian Baptist minister and former classmate of Woodrow Wilson. The novel and film sought to re-cast the story of reconstruction, making its Klansmen protagonists into noble defenders of the honor and order of a civilized Old South, while the black characters in the story are portrayed mostly as sex-crazed, filthy criminals.
The film’s success inspired immediate efforts to revive the KKK, that great defender of Southern honor and female virtue, only this time the newly arisen Klan would expand its original circle of hatred against Blacks, Jews, and Catholics to include Asians, Mexicans, nearly all recent immigrants, even Mormons. And now, it wasn’t just a crusade against certain religions and ethnicities, but also against certain social behaviors deemed to be pernicious corroders of morals: drunkenness, fornication, and the alarming rise of liberated women known as flappers (“young things with a talent for living,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald called them). People from every region of the country flocked to the Klan until its membership peaked in 1926.
D.C. Stephenson had a genius for sensing the ripeness of hatred lying just beneath the surface of American life. With no roots in Indiana, he arrived amid the dark of night and installed himself as a white supremacy entrepreneur of the first order, rapidly growing his Midwestern node of the Klan into a powerful political machine. Under Stephenson’s leadership, headquartered in the town of Irvington, the Indiana Klan grew faster than any other across the country. By the time of the KKK’s infamous march through the Washington Mall, one-third of white males in Indiana held memberships. Indiana’s Governor Jackson was an outspoken Klansman.
Stephenson’s meteoric rise was short-lived. His sheer hatefulness, megalomania, and thirst for violence, especially against women, led to a conviction of murder – he raped and killed a woman named Madge Oberholtzer – and his empire in Indiana crumbled alongside the nationwide structure of the Klan itself. Indeed, Stephenson’s lurid story played a major part in Americans’ disillusionment with the ridiculous “knights” in white robes.
But as with Donald Trump today, D.C. Stephenson was a symptom of a sickness, not the cause. The sheer outrageousness of such colorful and dangerous demagogues tends to blur the reality of their momentary place in history. These kinds of people are like society’s truffle pigs, able to sniff out and exploit what others cannot detect: moments in time when conditions are just right for long-simmering, subterranean hatreds and resentments to erupt, with an immense burst of fresh energy which can be channeled into a political force capable of doing great harm.
As part of my quest for sanity, I have to keep reminding myself that the electorate who brought Trump into power twice in the past eight years is the same electorate who placed Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House, not long ago. As another part of my quest for sanity, I occasionally go mushroom hunting, thinking all the while about the mycelia beneath my feet – that invisible mass of dark energy which lies waiting for just the right wizard to conjure it.