Mrs. Cook and the Klan: Booze, Bloodshed, and Bigotry in America’s Heartland

“Ku Klux Klansmen in full-sheeted splendor escorted the hearse carrying Mrs. Cook’s body from the undertaker to the church to its final resting place in the boneyard.”

Who knew that Iowa was such a cauldron of violence, booze, hate, and political intrigue in the 19th century and into the 20th? For that matter, who even knew that much about Iowa today, much less a century or two ago?

Much of this country’s common knowledge of the Hawkeye State derives, most recently, from following basketball phenom, and all around class act, Caitlin Clark. Before that, popular culture provided some insights. Who can forget the catch phrase from 1989’s Field of Dreams? “Is this heaven?” “No. It’s Iowa.” But according to Tom Chorneau’s Mrs. Cook and& the Klan: Booze, Bloodshed, and Bigotry in America’s Heartland, Iowa’s history is more hellish than heavenly.

Oh sure, the story takes a scenic bypass into the story of baseball player-turned-preacher Billy Sunday, nee William Askley Sunday, Jr., who traded in his cleats for a Bible. But even that had its darker moments, as Sunday received death threats in his zeal to evangelize the masses, energize righteous voters, and turn the hoi polloi from their wicked drunken ways. At one revival, in Marshalltown, the aptly-named Sunday told his listeners, “If the church people will but vote right, the saloon will be down and out in no time.”

As one might deduce from Sunday’s sermon, the fulcrum of the whole sinful mess in Iowa was the battle over the bottle. The author details the struggle through a series of vignettes, some of which might be amusing had they not been so serious, at least to the people involved. For example, in 1902, Iowa law granted authority for judges to sentence alcoholics to terms in mental institutions. The state even opened a dedicated hospital for treatment of alcoholics. Its first superintendent said, “I look on drunkenness wholly and solely as a disease,” and described “crime and degeneracy” as the “results, rather than the causes of inebriety.”

All of this history is but a precursor to the main event. Chorneau tells the reader that Iowa pendulumed between wet and dry eight times before Prohibition struck in 1919. And, of course, Prohibition hardly settled anything, either, whether morally or legally.

It takes a while for the author to get there, but after a brief mention in the Introduction, in the last part of the book he finally brings the narrative around to the true crime story suggested by the title. In the 1920s, Myrtle Underwood Cook found herself in the middle of the melée as leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It’s unclear whether she knew going in that her belief in the purity of the temperance movement, and her ardor in seeking prosecution of bootleggers, would provide her with strange bedfellows.

Murdered in her own home over Labor Day weekend in 1925, ostensibly because of her zealous prohibition stance, Ku Klux Klansmen in full-sheeted splendor escorted the hearse carrying Mrs. Cook’s body from the undertaker to the church to its final resting place in the boneyard. As Chorneau tells the reader, to the Klan, “Myrtle Cook was one of their own.”

Not that Mrs. Cook was a card-carrying, or sheet-wearing, member, mind you. Rather, it was a shared belief system—of sorts—that brought them together. For Mrs. Cook, it was the temperance movement. For the Klan, “[i]t was a shared dislike for Catholics” that sealed their alliance. Catholics were, they believed, the driving forced behind bootlegging.

This reviewer’s complaint is that the murder of Mrs. Cook, which is ostensibly the subject of the book, is seemingly relegated to an afterthought. When picking up a book entitled Mrs. Cook and the Klan, the reader might reasonably expect the book to be mostly about . . . well, Mrs. Cook and the Klan. Instead, the reader is confronted with, primarily, a series of loosely-connected stories tracing back to the early 18th century, ultimately ending with, but not necessarily leading to, the title story at the very end.

Most true crime books present an actual solution to a crime, something that Mrs. Cook & the Klan promises. The Introduction states, “. . . after nearly a hundred years, the identity of the real killer remained unknown. Until now.” However, that is a broken promise.

The big reveal in the final chapter—titled “Who Killed Mrs. Cook?”—simply tells the reader who didn’t do it (is it a spoiler if it fails to spoil?), while determining what the motive “most likely” was and who “best fits the role of the trigger man.” There is no definitive assertion of the identity of the real killer, however, notwithstanding the Introduction’s lofty promise.

And that failure is followed up with a brief mention of an additional name that is not even taken seriously. The author, himself, admits this last suspect is “a long shot but too intriguing not to mention.” Hardly a satisfying payoff at the destination of the narrative.

But the journey makes for interesting reading. And isn’t that what books are really all about?