A01=Tom Chorneau
alcohol
American History
Anti-Saloon League
Author_Tom Chorneau
Benton County
bootlegging
Booze
Category=DNXC
Category=JKVM
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
discrimination history
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
heartland crime
heartland mystery
Iowa Black Codes
Iowa bootlegging
Iowa folklore
Iowa gangs
Iowa history
Iowa racial history
Iowa true crime
John Looney
KKK
Ku Klux Klan
law
Legal History
murder mystery
Myrtle Underwood Cook
ociology
organized crime
politics
prohibition
race relations
temperance
temperance unions
true crime
unsolved murder
unsolved mystery
Women's Christian Temperance Union
Women’s Christian Temperance Union
Product details
- ISBN 9781496235848
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2025
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
