J. Frank Hanly (1905 – 1909) was born in Illinois, and following his graduation from the Eastern Illinois Normal School, made his way to Warren County, Indiana. During his school years, he gained a reputation as quite an orator. He taught school there and became friends with Judge Rabb in Williamsport. Rabb’s influence led him to become involved with politics and study law. Hanly joined Rabb’s practice in 1889 and, that same year, filled a vacancy in a state Senate seat. In 1894, he was elected to Congress but was promptly gerrymandered out of a seat by the state Democrats. He sought one of the U.S. Senate seats but lost out to Albert Beveridge. Beveridge was part of the Progressive wing of the Republican Party. Hanly was a prohibitionist and part of the conservative wing. The Senate race exacerbated the split between the wings in the party.
Taking advantage of his oratorical skills, Hanly went on a speaking tour of the state to build up support for another run for office. In 1904, he won the Republican nomination for governor. John Kern, once again, ran for the Democrats. Hanly beat Kern by 12% and 80,000 votes out of about 635,000 cast. Hanly was brutal in his attacks during the campaign saying it was “‘unholy’, and ‘great only its ability to destroy.’ He called their election campaign ‘selfish’ and said they ran it only so they could ‘obtain the flesh pot of office.’”
Once in office, Hanly was not much of a party man, inclined to push his own agenda — pushing for prohibition, working against horse-racing and political corruption. He mounted campaigns against the popular West Baden and French Lick resorts. During his term, the teetotalers gained a major victory.
Prohibitionists had long been a force in Indiana politics. They made gains in the 1850s, but a statewide prohibition law was declared unconstitutional, and then the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War and its aftermath wiped away other issues. The influx of anti-prohibition Germans into the state also dampened the influence of the prohibitionists. There was a distinct anti-immigrant undercurrent to the prohibitionist movement. Native born Protestants feared the foreigners and Catholics. According to Indiana historian James Madison, the temperance committee of the Presbyterian Synod of Indiana reported in Indiana that:
The ranks of the drinking men are constantly recruited by the influx of bibulous and intemperate foreigners . . . The great majority of these alien immigrants . . . are addicted to the use of strong drinks, as well as steeped in ignorance and vice.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Indiana Anti-Saloon league put strong pressure on politicians. Republicans were particularly sensitive to the pressure given their electoral reliance on “pietistic church members.” In 1907, when Vice President Charles Fairbanks was a potential candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination against Taft, he felt the backlash of the teetotalers after a luncheon for President Roosevelt and other dignitaries at the Fairbanks home at 2960 Meridian Street in Indianapolis. Manhattan cocktails were on the menu. This gained national attention. Probably Fairbanks himself did not consume any alcohol at the lunch, but “Buttermilk Charlie” as he was known for his advocacy of buttermilk instead of liquor was tagged with the name “Cocktail Charlie.”
In 1908, just before the elections of that year, Governor Hanly called a special session of the Indiana General Assembly to force through a county option law which allowed voters to ban liquor sales within their county. This apparently caused some consternation among his fellow Republicans. I don’t know this, but I speculate that the dynamic was that a lot of these Republicans had no real appetite for prohibition but had to mollify constituents for whom this was a burning priority. I expect they made prohibitionist noises but, somehow, legislation never seemed to make it through the General Assembly. When Hanly called for a special session, these types of lawmakers were exposed. There were perhaps no other issues before the General Assembly to muddy the waters and give them plausible deniability as to why they didn’t manage to pass prohibition legislation. In any event, the county option law passed. By late 1909, seventy of Indiana’s ninety-two counties were dry. But the law was controversial. Republicans sustained losses at the pollis in the 1908 and 1910 elections. In 1911, the Democratic legislative majority replaced the county option law with a township option law.
After his term in office, Governor Hanly continued the anti-liquor crusade as a major spokesman for the Anti-Saloon League. In 1917, World War I gave the prohibitionists the push they needed to pass statewide prohibition. Again, according to Madison, “[a]nti-German prejudice, the need to conserve grain, and general patriotic sentiment led the General Assembly to adopt statewide prohibition in 1917. Two years later, Indiana joined in ratifying the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal constitution, making the whole nation dry.”
This was an era of reform generally. (See James Madison, The Indiana Way at p. 222-223) Efforts to regulate the quality of food and drugs were helped along by Hoosiers. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, a Purdue chemist, became chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Senator Beveridge campaigned for a meat inspection bill, bringing the issue into the political arena. (Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was published in 1906). The result was a federal meat inspection law in 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1907. (Indiana’s Col. Eli Lilly had been an advocate of the sorts of reforms included in the 1907 act.) The Indiana University School of Medicine was created in 1908. The Indiana Railroad Commission was created in 1905. A revised child labor law was passed in 1911 as was a voter registration law. Hanly oversaw a recodification of the Indiana Code and improved the State’s accounting system, making it more difficult to misappropriate money. The Indiana Public Service Commission was created in 1913, and an inheritance tax was passed that year. The Indiana State Board of Health, created in 1881 to collect vital statistics and disseminate information about disease was particularly effective under the leadership of Dr. John Hurty from 1896 to 1922. He began campaigns of publicity and regulations to combat typhoid fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, and venereal disease. Under Hurty’s guidance, Indiana had passed a pure food and drug law in 1899, one of the first states to do so.
Next time: Unfortunately Hurty was also a fan of eugenics.
I recall reading a statement about this era. “Democrats are in favor of soft money(silver) and hard liquor.”
Yes!