Winfield Durbin (1901-1905) was the last of the Civil War veterans to serve as governor. During the gas boom, Durbin founded a number of manufacturing businesses with his father-in-law and became moderately wealthy. Like one of his predecessors, Ira Chase, Durbin was very involved with the Grand Army of the Republic. At the outbreak of the Spanish American War, Durbin enlisted and was promoted to the rank of colonel in charge of the 161st Regiment Indiana Infantry which was deployed in the occupation of Havana. From there, he seems to have had a fairly easy run to the governor’s office. The Republican convention nominated him handily, and the Democrats were on the outs in the state. Their most likely candidates declined to run, and Durbin beat Democrat John Kern by 25,000 votes (out of about 682,000 cast).
The decline of the White Caps
Because of his predecessor’s lax stance on White Capping, vigilante activity was on the rise. Durbin took action to beat it back. In 1898, following a rash of lynchings, the General Assembly had passed legislation “requiring sheriffs to petition the governor for military assistance when lynchings were threatened and granted the governor power to remove sheriffs from office who refused to turn over prisoners to state custody, and to call out the militia to protect prisoners. Despite the law, lynchings continued until Durbin took office.” Statistics are likely very inadequate, but blacks were disproportionately the victims of these ostensibly morally based lynchings. Of the sixty-one known lynchings (probably very incomplete statistics) between 1865-1903, about a third of the victims were black despite black people being about 2% of the population at the time.
In 1902, Governor Durbin invoked the recent law, removing the Sullivan County sheriff from office, and, in 1903, called out the militia after a lynching in Evansville sparked a race riot. The militia fired on a white mob, killing eleven. That incident made a strong impression, as the lynchings seemed to die down following the incident.
The Evansville riot began on July 4, 1903, after a black man killed a white police officer. (One source suggested the officer, Lewis Massey, was shot by Lee Brown when Massey was pursuing Brown for walking out of a bar without paying his tab. Another suggests that tensions flared after a heated confrontation between Brown and the saloon keeper that escalated and turned into a shootout when the officer went to investigate. I imagine reliable source material as to just what started the bullets flying is tough to come by.) The Evansville Courier did not do much to calm matters when printing a caption “Negro bullet plows through body of patrolman Massey.”
A mob formed and unsuccessfully attempted to storm the jail. The Sheriff evacuated Lee (who would eventually die of complications from the wounds he received from Massey) to Vincennes. The mob (described as “howling but disorganized”) increased in size to about two thousand and (unaware that Lee had been evacuated) demanded that the Sheriff surrender his prisoner. Clashes between blacks and whites were occurring in other parts of the city. As blacks who had been assaulted earlier in the day began to arm and travel in groups for protection, rumors spread among white citizens that blacks were preparing for a general assault on the whites. White members of the mob began to leave the jail and shoot at blacks on sight. Blacks broke into the hardware store and seized arms and ammunition. Whites raided the same hardware store for the same reason. Understandably, the Sheriff called the governor for assistance.
The Governor contended that, although the mob was ostensibly after justice for the murder of the policeman, it was “actually engaged only in a senseless uprising against duly constituted authority.” The mob engaged in increasingly aggressive taunts on the militia. Then, as seems to be pretty standard in these tragedies, someone threw a rock which caused someone to fire a shot which caused a bunch of tense people to open fire generally. When the dust cleared, five died immediately and six died later. Between thirty-five and fifty were wounded. After this incident, however, it would be another twenty years before another recorded lynching in Indiana.
Automobiles in Indiana
People had been dabbling and experimenting with various types of horseless carriages for quite some time, but it was only in the late 1880s that gasoline powered automobiles with internal combustion engines began to be produced. From there, the idea caught on.
In the early 1900s, Indiana was a mover and shaker in the automobile industry, trailing only Michigan in terms of the numbers of automobiles produced. However, the approach of most of the Indiana car producers was to eschew mass production in favor of a more craftsmanlike approach. The major exception to this was Studebaker. Originally a wagon manufacturer, Studebaker began making automobiles in South Bend starting in 1902 with a battery powered model. Its first gasoline powered model was made in 1904.
There was also the Cole Motor Car Company out of Indianapolis that gave President Taft his vehicle. It operated from about 1909 to 1925. The Stutz Company also operated out of Indianapolis from 1911 to 1935. It gave us the famous Stutz Bearcat with one of the earliest multi-valve engines. The Marmon Motor Car Company, yet another Indianapolis manufacturer operated from 1902 to 1933 and produced the Marmon Wasp, the car that won the first ever Indianapolis 500 in 1911.
As the automobile was being developed and catching on, the Good Roads Movement had been promoted by bicycling enthusiasts. “[T]he main goal of the movement was education for road building in rural areas between cities and to help rural populations gain the social and economic benefits enjoyed by cities where citizens benefited from railroads, trolleys, and paved streets.” Bicycles would benefit from good country roads. Eventually, as the bicycle was fading in the face of the growing popularity of the automobile, road advocacy would be taken up by automobile interests. One notable example is Carl Fisher.
Fisher was born in Greensburg and dropped out of school when he was twelve. After holding a number of odd jobs, he opened a bicycle repair shop. Fisher apparently had a gift for promotion, expanding his business with successful promotional stunts. Fisher seems to have gotten his big break in 1904 when approached by the holder of a patent for acetylene headlights. Before long, he was manufacturing nearly every headlamp used on automobiles. He got even richer when he sold the company to Union Carbide. He is also regarded as having opened up the first automobile dealership in the U.S. The Fisher Automobile Company in Indianapolis carried Oldsmobiles, Reos, Packards, Stoddard-Daytons, Stutzes, and others. (One of his promotional stunts for that was to fly a car attached to a hot air balloon over Indiana.) He and some partners opened up the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909. In 1913, Fisher “ conceived and was instrumental in the planning, development, and construction of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, which connected New York to San Francisco.
Governor Durbin recognized Indiana’s position as a potential connection on routes west, and endorsed legislation to promote road and highway expansion. In his 1905 biennial message to the General Assembly, Durbin noted the number of accidents resulting from the reckless and careless operation of automobiles on the roads and suggested that it might be a good idea to regulate the speed and operation of the vehicles.
Since I’m discussing turn of the century transportation, it’s worth noting that it was on December 17, 1903, occasional Hoosiers, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered flight at Kittyhawk in North Carolina.
Interesting stuff.
Thanks for posting.