Governor Chase was born to a poor New York family but received an education and some training as a minister. The family moved to Illinois where he spent some time driving wagons in the Chicago stockyards but became a teacher before the Civil War broke out. His health was poor, so he was moved away from the front lines and served as a drill instructor. In 1867, he moved to Indiana to become a pastor.
Chase was involved in the founding of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization that served as an advocacy group for Civil War Veterans but which also became a de facto arm of the Republican Party. Chase became chaplain of the Indiana G.A.R. in 1886 and then became the state department head of the organization in 1887. This position gave him quite a bit of political clout. (Chase’s story calls to mind Cyrus Trask from Steinbeck’s East of Eden. — “Despite having very little actual battle experience during his brief military career, cut short by the loss of his leg, Adam Trask’s father Cyrus joins the GAR and assumes the stature of “a great man” through his involvement with the organization.”)
In 1888, Chase was elected lieutenant governor under Alvin Hovey and became governor from 1891 to 1893, after Hovey’s death.
(I’ll be honest, the next couple of items don’t have much to do with Gov. Chase, but there are some odds and ends I wanted to throw in from this general era and don’t have a good segue):
Golden Age of Indiana Literature
These days, Indiana isn’t much known for its literary production, but during the period from 1880 to 1920, we had some decades in the sun. Edward Eggleston wrote “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” in 1871 and other books that often featured depictions of early Indiana. Celebrating what Indiana had to offer, he wrote:
It used to be a matter of no little jealousy with us, I remember, that the manners, customs, thoughts, and feelings of New England country people filled so large a place in books, while our life, not less interesting, not less romantic, and certainly not less filled with humorous and grotesque material, had no place in literature. It was as though we were shut out of good society.
Probably the most commercially successful was Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880. It has been called “the most influential Christian book of the 19th century” and outsold “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It was an action adventure of sorts that was popular with the people but has had decidedly mixed opinions from critics.
James Whitcomb Riley began a rise to prominence in the 1870s, based in part on an endorsement from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He gained popularity traveling a touring reading circuit in the 1880s. His Rhymes of Childhood, featuring children’s poems was very successful. According to historian, James Madison:
Riley’s poetry was sentimental and nostalgic for a rural and small-town childhood, for a past and present often seen through rose-colored lenses. Poems such as “The Old Swimmin’ Hole,” “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” and “Little Orphant Annie” were memorized by generations of school children and fondly remembered to old age. More than anything else, Riley’s poetry created for Indiana an image of quiet rusticity and common sense wholesomeness, an image that endured long after his death in 1916.
Booth Tarkington was somewhat later, mostly the first two decades of the twentieth century, but he wrote a number of well-received novels, including The Gentleman from Indiana, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Alice Adams. His novels detailed the changes experienced by middle and upper-class Hoosiers in the face of dramatic changes in society, hopeful but fearful the urban and industrial would threaten traditional Hoosier values of stability and individualism.
Hailing from west central Indiana, George Ade worked with his colleague, cartoonist John McCutcheon in the late 19th century. (John McCutcheon’s brother, George Barr McCutcheon was also a noted author.) Ade wrote a column in Chicago and fiction dealing with the ‘little man,’ the common, undistinguished, average American, usually a farmer or lower middle class citizen. Ade was possibly the first modern humorist, showing ambivalence between the Horatio Alger/McGuffey reader rural virtues with which he was raised and the crafty energy he could see around him in booming Chicago.
Roads
Until the early 1890s, there was not a big push for improved roads. Farmers seemed content with dirt, often ungraded roads to make local trips with their wagons. At this point, bicyclists were some of the prime advocates for improved roads. However, things were beginning to shift. In 1893, Chicago held the World Columbian Exposition which made extensive use of concrete and influenced city planning for quite some time. The National League for Good Roads was founded in 1892. The federal government implemented rural free mail delivery in 1896. The 1890s also saw the first automobiles, for Indiana, notably including Studebaker. This set the stage for a lot of road work and improvement in the early 20th century. So, more on that later.
Invention of basketball
In December 1891, James Naismith was a physical education teacher at the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA. Charged with coming up with a game that would occupy rowdy boys during the cold winter, he came up with basketball.
In his attempt to think up a new game, Naismith was guided by three main thoughts. Firstly, he analyzed the most popular games of those times (rugby, lacrosse, soccer, football, hockey, and baseball); Naismith noticed the hazards of a ball and concluded that the big soft soccer ball was safest. Secondly, he saw that most physical contact occurred while running with the ball, dribbling or hitting it, so he decided that passing was the only legal option. Finally, Naismith further reduced body contact by making the goal unguardable, namely placing it high above the player’s heads. To score goals, he forced the players to throw a soft lobbing shot that had proven effective in his old favorite game duck on a rock. Naismith christened this new game “Basket Ball”
Dribbling was an innovation designed to stop the mayhem the boys caused one another with tackling and slugging when a boy was running with the ball. Instead of hoops (or “basketball rings”), the first games were famously played with peach baskets.
Nicholas McCay was one of the people who played basketball with Naismith in Springfield. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Crawfordsville and introduced Indiana to the game. Instead of the peach baskets, McCay used metal rims with burlap sacks.The first organized intermural game was between the Crawfordsville YMCA and the Lafayette YMCA on March 16, 1894.
An account in the following day’s Crawfordsville Journal-Review never could have foreseen all that was to come:
“Basketball is a new game, but if the interest taken in the contest last night is any criterion, it is bound to be popular.”
Maybe a little. Crawfordsville won 45 – 21.
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During his short time as governor, filling out the remainder of Gov. Hovey’s term, Gov. Chase also struggled with the General Assembly. He was unsuccessful in his advocacy for alcohol prohibition, obtaining increased funding for roads, and getting a full appropriation to support Indiana’s pavilion at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Even while governor, Chase continued to live in Danville, Indiana and would ride the train to Indianapolis.
In 1892, some members of the Republican Party tried to deter Chase from running for governor in his own right. They feared his affiliation with the Church of Christ would alienate the majority Methodists and Presbyterians in the state and, furthermore, that his temperance advocacy did not have wide support.
Dog, your survey of Indiana history has been a real treat for the readers.
Your posts remind us of the important place that Indiana held in the 19th century. It was a political swing state and produced some national leaders. It had great literary heritage. Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons examined the collapse of the decadence of old wealth in the face of rapid social and economic change. And Indiana was the birth place of the acerbic Ambrose Bierce. He was raised in Warsaw. His piece “What I Saw at Shiloh” was a brutal and trenchant picture of the horror of the War of Civil War.
Thanks for sharing. Things sure have changed.
Thanks for the encouragement! If I want to get traffic, I can just slop up a bunch of Daylight Saving Time posts. These history posts require more effort and get a lot less traffic — but, I really do feel like the folks who like these posts, like them quite a bit.
Researching these, I am learning an awful lot that I didn’t know. And, as you mention, I’m getting a real appreciation for how important Indiana was in the past. We’ve faded quite a bit in terms of relative importance from those high water days. I think those glory days pervade our local culture in subtle ways that creates a bit of cognitive dissonance when we go out into the larger country or world and find that we’re perceived as more of a backwater than we would have thought.