A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

You’ll notice I’m deviating from my normal convention of naming a post after the governor in office during the era. I feel like Belle deserves her own heading. Her story is incredible. How I didn’t know about her before is beyond me.

Belle Gunness: “triflers need not apply”

Backroad Brewing Company out of La Porte has a good stout named “Belle Gunness.” Until I got into this Indiana history kick I’ve been on, I didn’t pay too much attention to the name except to vaguely note that the name sounded a little like “Guinness.” Turns out Belle Gunness was the name of a Norwegian born, American serial killer who lived, at least for part of her career, in  La Porte. She was 6 feet tall, 200 pounds, and had extraordinarily bad luck with fires and loved ones dying. In Chicago, the unsuccessful confectionary store owned by her and her husband burned down. It was insured. She had four children with this husband. Two died. They were insured. Her husband died July 30, 1900. He had insurance policies that overlapped on that day.

In 1901, the grieving widow used her (in today’s dollars) $240,000 insurance payout to buy a farm in La Porte. The boat and carriage houses at her new home burned down shortly after she moved in. I don’t know whether those were insured. On April 1, 1902, she married a widower. A week after their marriage his daughter died. In December 1902, this husband died too. According to Belle, he died “reaching for his slippers next to the kitchen stove when he was scalded with brine.” Or maybe a sausage grinding machine fell from a high shelf onto his head. She told both stories. He was insured. In 1906, Belle had a foster daughter who disappeared. She told neighbors that the foster daughter had gone away to a Lutheran college in Los Angeles. Her body was later found buried on the property.

In 1907, Belle ran the following column in the Chicago dailies:

Personal — comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply.

Suitors came to the farm and, with one exception, they never left. George Anderson of Missouri had a nice dinner with Belle, then slept in the guest room. He woke with her holding a candle, staring at him. The look on her face was so murderous, he fled without taking his stuff. He made it back to town and caught the first train back to Missouri. Belle took delivery of large boxes during the day and was known to spend time digging in the hog pen late at night. In 1907 and 1908, several suitors appeared and disappeared, including John Moe of Minnesota, Ole Budsberg of Wisconsin, and Andrew Helgelien of South Dakota. All of them brought money. The flow of suitors was apparently interrupted for a period of time when there was another fire at the Gunness farm.

Throughout this period of time, she had a farm hand named Ray Lamphere who was in love with Belle. Despite helping Belle with a lot of these unusual chores and his being in love with her, perhaps she regarded him as a trifler. Belle kicked him off the farm and tried to have him committed as insane, then arrested as a trespasser. Lamphere started running his mouth in ways that were inconvenient. She started telling people that Lamphere had threatened to burn her house and kill her. On cue, a fire started at her house on April 28, 1908. The new farm hand barely escaped with his life. Investigators found four bodies — three of Belle’s children and a headless woman who may or may not have been Belle. The head wasn’t found. Lamphere was charged with arson and murder. Further investigation resulted in witnesses who were certain the woman’s body couldn’t be Belle’s. The headless woman, examining doctors said, would have been about 5’3” and 150 pounds — far short of Belle’s 6 feet, 200 pounds. Also, the woman’s internal organs contained lethal doses of strychnine. Eventually, investigators checked out the hog pen. About a dozen bodies were found there, and she appears to have killed more than 40 people.

Lamphere was found guilty of arson but acquitted of murder. He died of tuberculosis in prison not long after, but not long before his death, he provided information about Belle’s methods:

When a victim arrived, she made him comfortable, charming him and cooking a large meal. She then drugged his coffee and, when the man was in a stupor, she split his head with a meat chopper. Sometimes she would simply wait for the suitor to go to bed and then enter the bedroom by candlelight and chloroform her sleeping victim. A powerful woman, Gunness would then carry the body to the basement, place it on a table, and dissect it. She then bundled the remains and buried these in the hog pen and the grounds about the house. Belle had become an expert at dissection, thanks to instruction she had received from her second husband, the butcher Peter Gunness. To save time, she sometimes poisoned her victims’ coffee with strychnine. She also varied her disposal methods, sometimes dumping the corpse into the hog-scalding vat and covering the remains with quicklime. Lamphere even stated that if Belle was overly tired after murdering one of her victims, she merely chopped up the remains and, in the middle of the night, stepped into her hog pen and fed the remains to the hogs.

She was reported to have been very wealthy, having potentially amassed something like $6 million before she left La Porte. She was never positively identified after the fire. Reports came in from all over the country but none was ever definitive. In 1931, a woman going by the name of Esther Carlson was arrested for poisoning a man for money in Los Angeles. Some people claimed to recognize her as Belle Gunness from photographs, but the identification was never proved. Carlson died in 1931 while awaiting trial.

***

And, just to wrap up Governor Durbin: Apropos of Ms. Gunness’ experience with fire loss, Governor Durbin recommended that there be a fire marshal law passed. Apparently Indiana’s experience with fire loss had resulted in higher insurance rates in the state. He also urged regulation that would prevent “wildcat” insurance companies that did not pay out when there were losses and oversaw a recodification of the laws of Indiana. He closed, in his 1905 biennial (and farewell) address by warning the General Assembly that it “would be called upon to resist the importunities of the most corrupt professional lobby which has visited itself upon any General Assembly in the history of the State.”

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.

Continuing the term of Governor James Mount:

The story of pi

In 1897, the Indiana House of Representatives passed a bill that lives in infamy. This is when they tried to legislate the value of pi. “Pi” is the mathematical ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference. That ratio is always 3.14159 etc. However, had the legislation succeeded, in Indiana, the value of pi would have been “five-fourths to four” (i.e. 3.2).

The bill was introduced by a Rep. Record of Posey County on behalf of Dr. Goodwin, also of Posey County. According to the bill’s preamble, it was, “A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897.” Goodin was attempting to “square the circle,” despite the fact that it had been proven mathematically impossible some 13 years earlier. Many members of the House did not have the foggiest idea what the bill meant or what it was trying to do, but they passed it anyway with a vote of 67-0.

Thankfully, a Purdue math professor was in town lobbying for the university’s appropriation. He overheard the debate in the House. When offered the chance to meet Dr. Goodwin, Professor Waldo is declined, saying that “he was already acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know.” After Professor Waldo spoke to some Senators about the legislation, it met a different fate in the Senate. Senator Hubbell was quoted as saying, “the Senate might as well try to legislate water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law.”

Compulsory School Law

Not all of the legislation during this period was awful, however. Also in 1897, the General Assembly passed a compulsory school law requiring parents put kids between the ages of 8 and 14 in public, private, or parochial school for at least 12 weeks during the year. The law provided for the appointment of truant officers and penalizing noncompliant parents with misdemeanor charges and fines of between $10 to $50. (The law also provided for creation in counties of something called the “Parental Home”  for “incorrigible and truant children.)

Black officers

In 1898, Mount oversaw Indiana’s efforts to provide soldiers in the Spanish-American War. Indiana was the first state to meet the initial quota called for by President McKinley.  A subsequent quota caused some controversy, however. In response, among its troops, Indiana provided two companies of black volunteers. At the time, the War Department would not allow the black volunteers to be commanded by black officers. Indiana was not a bastion of racial equality by any means, but at the time the state was so evenly divided as between Republicans and Democrats, that the Republicans were dependent on the black vote to win elections. So, Governor Mount and Senator Charles Fairbanks went to work. When they were rebuffed by the Secretary of War, they took the matter up with President McKinley and, ultimately, Indiana was permitted to send two companies of black volunteers with black captains.

Harboring a Kentucky Fugitive

Dan Carden of the Northwest Indiana Times writes of Mount’s entanglement with Kentucky politics.

In 1899, Mount was at the center of a curious episode in Kentucky politics.

Republican William Taylor appeared to have won election as governor over Democrat William Goebel, though Kentucky Democrats were investigating claims of voter fraud. During their appeal, Goebel was shot as he entered the Kentucky Statehouse and died a few days later.

Taylor was indicted for complicity in Goebel’s murder, but fled to Indiana, where Mount, a fellow Republican, refused to extradite Taylor back to Kentucky. Indeed, Taylor remained in Indiana and became an insurance executive.

At the end of Mount’s term, he was weary of the job. In his farewell speech on January 14, 1901, Mount called his last day, “the happiest day of his life.” He died two days later of a heart attack while preparing to leave Indianapolis for home.

Dueling Senators

In the late 1890s, Indiana appointed two notable U.S. Senators. Charles Fairbanks was appointed to the Senate in 1897 and would serve under Teddy Roosevelt as vice-president from 1905-1909. Fairbanks started his legal career as a railroad attorney and, through some family connections, became counsel to railroad financier Jay Gould. He gave the keynote speech at the convention that elected McKinley, and was appointed by the General Assembly to the Senate not long after. After serving vice-president in the Roosevelt administration, he returned to the practice of law and would once again run for vice-president in 1916, losing to the ticket headed by Woodrow Wilson.

In 1899, Albert Beveridge was appointed as Indiana’s other Senator. Beveridge was a graduate from (what is now known as) DePauw and had a reputation as a compelling orator, gaining attention campaigning for various candidats over the years. He was particularly enthusiastic about American imperialism and Teddy Roosevelt’s brand of Progressivism. Beveridge broke ranks with the Republicans when Roosevelt did and ran for office as a Progressive. When he returned to the Republicans, his political career had diminished. Later in life, he became a historian and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall and, before his death, wrote about half of a planned four volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Indiana historian James Madison writes of the distinction between the two men, describing them as part of a new generation of Republican leaders. While Fairbanks came off as aloof and cold — “the Indiana Icicle,” Beveridge was charming, dynamic, and a powerful orator. The two were initially separated by simple political rivalry. Over time, there was a rift between them that reflected the rift in the national political party — with Beveridge following Roosevelt and the Progressive wing of the party and Fairbanks standing with the old guard.

James Mount (1897-1901) Governor James Mount was born in Montgomery County in 1843 and fought in the Civil War as a young man. He was part of the Lightning Brigade and volunteered for charges against superior forces at Chickumaga. He was also a scout, leading the way during Sherman’s March to the Sea when Sherman determined to make the South howl.

He came home and began working a farm from the ground up, developing a reputation for business acumen, helping develop co-ops and teaching other farmers how to negotiate the sale of their crops. In 1888, he was one of the farmers recruited by the Republicans in an effort to beat back the influence of the Populists. (This was the movement that brought Gov. Claude Matthews into the fold.) He served for a time in the Indiana General Assembly, then ran — with some reluctance — for Congress. When he was defeated, he went back to farming. However, in 1893, the Panic of that year caused enormous problems for farmers. Republicans swept into power in the 1894 mid-term elections.  Prompted by a concern for the agricultural economy, Mount ran for the governor’s office in 1896.

Cyclists and Sound Money

Interestingly, it turns out, bicyclist organizations figured prominently during the 1896 campaign. “Founded in 1880, the [League of American Wheelmen] was a national organization of cyclists whose members worked to promote a greater appreciation and awareness of cycling, to encourage cycling-friendly legislation, to stand behind cyclists who felt they had been mistreated by state and local governments or other entities such as railroad corporations, and, above all, to encourage the construction and maintenance of good roads.” Enthusiasm for cycling grew from then and seemed to peak in the mid 1890s and, due to its popularity and political organization of the cyclists, politicians began to court their vote. LAW was nonpartisan, but cyclists meshed well with McKinley’s campaign strategy. McKinley’s “front porch” strategy was contrasted with Bryan’s whistle stop tour. Cyclists were politically interested and could come to Canton, Ohio to McKinley’s front porch and they could return home where they had the mobility to distribute Republican campaign literature.

Cyclists would be the perfect campaigners. First of all, there were thousands of them and their numbers were growing, so much so that bicycle manufacturers could hardly keep up with demand. And not only did cyclists love to be part of a crowd, they also displayed an impressive ability to draw a crowd of their own. In 1895, one Fourth of July bicycle derby in Chicago, for example, drew 25,000 people. Cyclists were also willing to travel long distances to take part in cycling events. Independence, Iowa, celebrated that same Fourth of July with bicycle races that included participants who had traveled as far as sixty miles to compete, and even the wheelmen’s tournament that was held in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that day drew spectators from as far away as Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado. Surely cyclists would come to Canton, too. There were hundreds and probably even thousands of bicycle clubs across the country, many of whose members were enthusiastic young businessmen with interests that the Republican Party promised to protect. It was in their best interest to come to Canton. And once they had come and seen for themselves what a great man McKinley was, they would go home and start spreading the word about the GOP. They could help distribute all that campaign literature, too. A man on a bicycle, after all, would be able to cover more territory in less time than a man traveling on foot. Cyclists could also travel far out into the country and reach small towns and farms that may have had limited contact with more densely populated and politically informed areas.

In Fort Wayne, while a gubernatorial candidate, James Mount received a warm reception from the “Sound Money Bicycle Club.” The Club had 400 members, took part in parades and races, and escorted Republican speakers from Fort Wayne to the smaller outlying towns.

Cycling was not an inherently partisan activity, and LAW received criticism for some pro-Republican stances. But, at the time, Republicans seemed to have taken better advantage of the cycling craze than the Democrats. Michael Taylor, author of the above linked article, says “when all was said and done, however, Democrats did a relatively poor job of winning cyclists over to their side. Bryan’s sober, evangelical image clashed with the lighthearted, carefree spirit of the bicycle boom.” (There is also a good bit in there about Indianapolis’ mayor, Thomas Taggart’s full court press at the 1897 L.A.W. convention in Philadelphia to convince them to have their 1898 convention. Of Indianapolis, Taggart told reporters, “It will be worth the trip to enjoy a ride over the streets where a century run can be made without leaving asphalt and without covering the same territory twice.”)

White Capping

As you might recall from a previous installment, during the late 19th century, there was a “white cap” movement in Southern Indiana. Their methods were similar to that of the Ku Klux Klan’s (lynching, drowning, arson, whipping, night attacks), but the movements are considered distinct and the ostensible goals of the White Caps were not racial but, instead, to enforce morality — targeting men who were thieves, drunks, adulterers, or not supporting their families  and women who weren’t sufficiently family oriented. That said, as the movement moved from Southern Indiana to the South, it was predictably used by poor whites to persecute black people. In Indiana, Governors Gray, Hovey, and Matthews tried to curb the white cappers. Not so much Governor Mount. He had been president of the “Horse Thief Detective Association” in 1892. It was a prominent vigilante association, devoted to “privately defending” county farmers. As such, he was not inclined to be as active as his predecessors in deterring the White Cap organizations.

Next time: A hodgepodge, including the story of pi.

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) If you ever want to feel slothful and unaccomplished, just read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. The scope and volume of his activities were astounding. His energy was unbounded. At 42 years old when inaugurated, Roosevelt was our nation’s youngest President. I will not do his life or Presidency any sort of justice here. It’s fair to say that Platt’s plan of sidelining Roosevelt by putting him in the Vice-President’s office backfired.

Roosevelt called his domestic program, the “Square Deal.” His goal was to pass laws that gave citizens a more substantial equality of opportunity in part, through control of corporations. As the nation’s economy grew, so too did the consolidated power of large corporations. Their reach extended into the lives of Americans in ways that could not have been anticipated a generation or two earlier. And, so, the law was not well-suited to controlling their power. Among other things, with his support, Congress passed the Elkins Act which regulated the ability of railroads to provide “rebates” to large corporations which resulted in what seemed to be unfair treatment of, for example, small farmers seeking to move their products to market. Roosevelt also pushed for the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act which provided for the inspection of food and regulation on the sale of adulterated products. (Both of these were influenced by Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”)  He gained a reputation as a “trust buster,” making an effort to break up large monopolistic corporations — bringing 40 anti-trust suits, including one against Standard Oil. These initiatives were contrary to the spirit of laissez faire economic philosophy of the time (still often favored at least rhetorically by present-day politicians.)

In 1904, Roosevelt won the Presidency in his own right. There was still a division in the Republican Party between Roosevelt progressives and Mark Hanna’s old guard. But, Roosevelt was popular and Hanna was ailing. After Hanna’s death, Roosevelt secured the nomination and put one of his supporters in the position of party chairman. Still, he did not get his choice in a vice-presidential running mate. Instead of Robert Hitt (one time personal secretary of Oliver P. Morton), the party selected Hoosier Senator, Charles Warren Fairbanks. Roosevelt’s opponent in the election was Democrat Alton Brooks parker. Roosevelt won in a landslide, beating Parker by 18% in the popular vote. Prior to his inauguration, Roosevelt promised not to seek re-election (a promise he came to regret).

In 1907, there was a Panic caused mostly by financial shenanigans. An effort to corner the market on the shares of the United Copper Company failed which led to a run on the banks associated with the effort and the failure of those banks led to runs on other banks, and pretty soon the whole system was in shambles. While the Treasury and prominent businessmen (J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller among them) made loans to maintain the liquidity of some healthy banks, New York banks were generally unwilling to make the short term loans they usually made to finance stock market investments. (The linked Wikipedia entry has a pretty good description of a scene where J.P. Morgan locked a bunch of prominent bankers and businessmen in his library to strong arm them into making the loans necessary to keep some liquidity in the system.)  That drove the prices of stocks down which led to a panic and crash in the stock market. (As part of the effort to stave off an even deeper crisis, Roosevelt had to put aside his antitrust inclinations as U.S. Steel acquired the distressed Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company). This Panic was one in a line of persistent panics since the Civil War and hammered home the need for a system that would help maintain liquidity in these situations. In Europe, central banks filled this role. With no central bank in the U.S., eventually the committees and studies following the 1907 Panic led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

Another focus of the Roosevelt presidency was conservation of public lands and “reclamation” projects that provided irrigation infrastructure in arid Western lands.  He established the United States Forest Service, designated 18 national monuments, and signed into law five national parks, including Wind Cave, South Dakota, Mesa Verde, Colorado, and Crater Lake, Oregon.

As President, one of Roosevelt’s main foreign policy initiatives was construction of the Panama Canal. This, plus a general affinity for imperialism, led him to the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine — basically justifying the U.S. exercising a sort of international police power in the Western Hemisphere as a way of enforcing what we regard as good behavior on other Western Hemisphere countries, thereby keeping other international powers out of our back yard as they take such enforcement matters into their own hands.

In addition, Roosevelt helped mediate a treaty to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. He also improved the U.S. Navy — sending “the Great White Fleet” (composed of 16 battleships) around the world, ostensibly on a mission of goodwill, visiting numerous countries and harbors. But, it also was obviously designed to show off the U.S.’s growing naval strength. With the U.S. having destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Spanish American war and the Japanese having destroyed the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese War, the U.S. wanted to demonstrate that it could be a check on the Japanese in the Pacific.  In 1907, Roosevelt negotiated the Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan which generally tried to remove the discrimination against Japanese immigrants in California  and, in return, Japan would restrict new immigration from Japan to the U.S. — with some exceptions. (Japan continued issuing passports allowing its people to go to the territory of Hawaii.)

Something like the modern press was developing, and Roosevelt started handling them in ways that we would recognize today. For example, he gave the press a room at the White House, gave a daily press briefing, and made sure to provide plenty of interviews and photo opportunities.

Having promised not to run for re-election, Roosevelt stepped aside and promoted the candidacy of William Taft who he preferred to his vice-president, Charles Warren Fairbanks.

William Taft (1909 – 1913) Taft was born to an elite Cincinnati family and continued the family tradition becoming Solicitor General at the age of 33 and going on to be a federal judge for the Sixth Circuit, Governor-General of the Philippines, United States Secretary of War, President of the United States, and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Taft had initially been lukewarm toward the Presidential candidacy of his fellow Buckeye, William McKinley, but after his nomination was secure and Bryan began his Cross of Gold campaign — something Taft viewed as “economic radicalism,” — Taft became a supporter of McKinley. What Taft seemed to want more than anything else was the Supreme Court. McKinley approached Taft to resign his federal judgeship to participate in organizing a civilian government in the Philippines, a task Taft accepted with the promise that the next Supreme Court opening would be his. Taft went to the Philippines but McKinley died before another opening on the Supreme Court. (That said, a couple of opportunities to join the high court would come up during the Roosevelt administration that Taft would pass up for various reasons.)

It seems worthwhile to mention that Taft had to work with military governor of the Philippines, Arthur MacArthur, Jr. — who also has the distinction of being the father of General Douglas MacArthur. Taft seems to have been a positive influence in treating Filipinos with more respect than had been the case under the Spanish and American military regimes. Even so, there were still some very ugly things going on in the Philippines while Taft was there.

In 1904, Roosevelt appointed Taft Secretary of War, a position Taft accepted, in part, because it would allow him to continue work on the Philippines. He served in this capacity throughout Roosevelt’s second term, and Roosevelt supported Taft as his successor. Taft won the Republican nomination on the first ballot. However, he was also saddled with a member of the GOP’s conservative wing as vice-president — James “Sunny Jim” Sherman. Taft would become more conservative during his presidency and Taft’s wife got along well with Sherman’s wife. So, it ended up being a fairly productive relationship.  

The Democrats had been so thoroughly beaten in the 1904 campaign that they returned to an old favorite, William Jennings Bryan, for the 1908 campaign. The irrepressible Roosevelt could not help but inject himself in the campaign, leading wags to suggest that “TAFT” stood for “Take Advice From Roosevelt.” Taft supported Roosevelt’s policies, by and large, and these had mostly coopted many of Bryan’s progressive positions. Taft was not the most able campaigner, but he beat Bryan by 8% and 159 electoral votes.

Taft supported passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, permitting imposition of an income tax. It provides, “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Although an income tax had been imposed during the Civil War, in 1894 the Supreme Court held that such taxes were unconstitutional direct taxes due to the Constitutional requirement that direct taxes be apportioned among the States. In dissent, John Marshall Harlan wrote:

When, therefore, this court adjudges, as it does now adjudge, that Congress cannot impose a duty or tax upon personal property, or upon income arising either from rents of real estate or from personal property, including invested personal property, bonds, stocks, and investments of all kinds, except by apportioning the sum to be so raised among the States according to population, it practically decides that, without an amendment of the Constitution — two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three-fourths of the States concurring — such property and incomes can never be made to contribute to the support of the national government.

This exacerbated widespread concern that the wealthiest Americans were amassing too much economic power.

Support for the income tax was strongest in the South and West and opposition was strongest in the Northeast. At the time, tariffs were the main source of income for the federal government, and the industrial Northeast favored the protection against foreign competition that high tariffs provided. Fans of the new U.S. empire supported income taxes as well because a modern military required more money. (Indiana ratified the amendment on January 30, 1911). The amendment was ratified by the requisite number of states on February 3, 1913.

In foreign affairs, Taft was fairly lawyerly in his approach — preferring arbitration and negotiation to much in the way of muscle flexing. He favored avoiding much involvement in European affairs except to promote commerce. In the Western Hemisphere, he favored continuation of the Monroe Doctrine and use of force if necessary to keep Europeans out of American affairs. In particular, the Panama Canal — which was under construction during his term — was a central focus. Due to his involvement with the Philippines, Taft was also more interested than his predecessors in the Far East. The Chinese Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Manchu Dynasty and replaced it with Sun Yat Sen and the Republic of China. Taft was slow to recognize the new government but moved in that direction prior to the end of his term.

Remarkably, Taft in his four year term appointed *six* Supreme Court Justices. In other respects, however, Taft’s domestic policy pretty consistently lived in the shadow of Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt disappeared into Africa on a massive safari for a year. When he returned, the relationship between the two men had cooled. Taft went his own way on a number of issues and, when issues spilled over from the Roosevelt administration into the Taft years, Taft was not necessarily careful to avoid finger pointing.

By the time the end of Taft’s term was approaching, Roosevelt was restless and chafing at Taft’s departures from his policies. Roosevelt claimed that Taft was not a Progressive but was, instead, following policies from the Gilded Age. Roosevelt dominated the states that used the relatively new primary system to choose delegates. But Taft controlled the party machinery and did well in the states that used a convention system. At the convention, Roosevelt, with his usual humility told supporters, ““we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Roosevelt was unsuccessful at challenging some of the convention delegates and, consequently, would not be able to win the nomination. Roosevelt bolted the party, and he and his supporters formed the Progressive Party.
With the party fractured, neither Roosevelt nor Taft stood much of a chance. Wilson saw Roosevelt as the bigger electoral threat, and the incumbent President was largely ignored in his re-election campaign. The Republicans that year won only Utah and Vermont. The Progressives won Washington, California, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan. Wilson won 435 of the 531 electoral votes, and Democrats took control of the House and Senate.

Next time: Governor James Mount (also: the relationship between bicycles and sound money.)

In this, the seventh installment of my bicentennial series, we’ll cover the period from 1897 to 1913. The world is really starting to change now. Cars were a recent invention, and this period would see their mass production and the invention of powered flight. The Bell system was growing. In 1892 network stretched from New York to Chicago. Transcontinental telephone service would become a reality by 1915 when, in something of a marketing stunt, Alexander Graham Bell would echo his first telephone call by calling his assistant, Thomas Watson, in San Francisco and repeating his famous line, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”

William McKinley (1897-1901) –  Since high school (for reasons I can’t recall), in my head, I have always thought of President McKinley as “Big Bill” McKinley. He took office on March 4, 1897. Prior to that, he had been a U.S. Representative and the governor from Ohio. His election to the Presidency is always associated with Mark Hanna (who figures prominently in a way that other political advisers almost never seem to do.) Hanna’s prominence is probably a combination of the fact that he raised record amounts of money and the rise of mass communication. He was effectively lampooned by Homer Davenport in a way that was apparently difficult to do with McKinley himself. The big issue of the campaign was whether to retain the gold standard or not. McKinley’s opponent, William Jennings Bryan, was a very effective speaker and his “Cross of Gold” speech had populist appeal. But, at the end of the day, a populist speaker drawing crowds gave way to money and organization. McKinley won the election comfortably.

One by-product of the relationship with Hanna was a problematic appointment to the Secretary of State position. McKinley appointed Senator John (“brother of William Tecumseh”) Sherman of Ohio to the post in order to open up a Senator’s spot for Mark Hanna. The problem was that Sherman’s mental faculties were in decline. There were rumors prior to Sherman’s appointment, but McKinley declined to believe them. Sherman’s impairment became evident to those in the State department, and he was often by-passed. McKinley also gave into some pressure to appoint one Theodore Roosevelt, head of the New York City Police Commission, to the position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

In the late 1890s, Cuban rebellion against Spain had turned into a full on war for independence. The American people generally sided with the Cubans, and Spanish methods were apparently becoming unusually harsh. The U.S. attempted to broker negotiations, but the sides’ positions had hardened and they were useless. In January 1898, there were riots in Havana, and McKinley sent the U.S.S. Maine to protect U.S. citizens and property. However, on February 15, 1898, the Maine sank and 266 men were killed. The press and the public wanted blood. This was another instance where mass media seems to have been a new force. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were in a circulation war, and a real war was a good way to sell papers; particularly for newspapermen who were comfortable with stories that had only a nodding acquaintance with the truth.  Hearst is reported to have told a reporter, “you furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” In fact, Congress declared war on April 20, 1898.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt, was instrumental in preparing the Navy for conflict with Spain. On May 1, 1898, far far from Cuba, Commodore George Dewey engaged the Spanish Pacific Squadron and, in one of the most decisive naval battles in history, destroyed the Spanish forces with minimal loss to the Americans. The U.S. ended up taking possession of the Phillippines. In 1901, William Howard Taft would be appointed as Governor General.

Meanwhile, back in the Western Hemisphere, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his position as assistant director of the Navy and joined the Rough Riders, a volunteer unit commanded initially by Col. Leonard Wood. Roosevelt would earn a measure of glory by leading the charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba while taking the San Juan heights. On August 12, 1898, the Spanish Government surrendered to the United States and agreed to an armistice that relinquished their control of Cuba. The armistice also gained the United States the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The United States had acquired an empire. In June 1900, McKinley further exerted a sort of imperial power when he ordered 5,000 troops into Peking, China to assist westerners threatened by the Boxer Rebellion. The United States’ increased interests in the Pacific also led to an increased effort to secure a canal across Central America. After the war with Spain, McKinley had appointed a new Secretary of State, John Hay (a notable individual, born in Salem, Indiana, who got his start as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln). Hay negotiated a treaty with Britain that ultimately paved the way for the Panama Canal.

McKinley was popular in the run up to the 1900 election. His vice president Garret Hobart died in 1899, leaving the position open. Theodore Roosevelt had returned from Cuba covered in glory and won the governor’s position in New York. He was a popular choice for vice-president, but Mark Hanna opposed Roosevelt, regarding him as too impulsive. However, Hanna was undermined by another political boss — Thomas Platt of New York. Platt opposed Roosevelt’s reform agenda and wanted to get him out of New York, sidelining him in the Vice-President’s office. Roosevelt was chosen for the spot and was the active campaigner of the ticket. The Democrats once again chose William Jennings Bryan who, in a time of prosperity and after a popular war, failed to excite the voters. McKinley won handily.

McKinley was inaugurated for his second term on March 4, 1901. On September 6, he was shot by Leon Czolgosz, part of the growing anarchist movement.

Next time: Roosevelt & Taft.

 

Claude Matthews (1893 – 1897)

Governor Matthews was born and raised on a farm in Kentucky. After graduating college, he moved to Vermillion County where he met and married Martha Whitcomb, the daughter of former governor James Whitcomb. He continued farming in Vermillion County and apparently gained a reputation for producing quality cattle and horses. He served a term as a state representative, then lost a bid for the state senate. He was approached by Democratic party leaders in 1890 to run for Secretary of State. They were making a particular effort at the time to recruit farmers in an effort to stave off the loss of members to the Populist Party. The Populists grew out of “a mood of agrarian unrest in response to low agricultural prices in the South and the trans-Mississippi West, as well as thought that the “Eastern Elites” were taking advantage of the farmers by charging higher rates on loans and trains.” Matthews was a strong advocate of the unlimited silver coinage movement.

Matthews ran against Governor Gray and the Populist candidate, Leroy Templeton. Eighty-nine percent of eligible voters cast ballots. A major focus of the campaign was depressed farm prices and farmer desire to inflate the currency to help alleviate debt. Coopting the Populist positions seems to have been a short-term winner for the Democrats but a long term failure. The Panic of 1893 and the party’s free-silver position seems to have pushed Hoosiers away from their near equal support of the two major parties and toward a solid Republican majority. From 1896 to 1908, the Republicans would have what historian James Madison calls “an unprecedented ascendancy.” And, really, this has mostly lasted through the present day.

Pullman Strike, Eugene V. Debs, and deployment of state troops to Hammond

In the summer of 1894, Gov. Matthews dispatched state troops to Hammond during the Pullman Strike. Pullman ran a company town and, during the economic downturn, reduced wages but did not reduce the rents in the company town where the workers were compelled to live. This was not a popular move. The workers had not organized into a union, and this was a wildcat strike. Terre Haute native, Eugene V. Debs had founded the American Railway Union the year before and came to Pullman, Illinois to organize. The company refused to negotiate. In order to increase the pressure, the ARU employed tactics designed to stop movement of Pullman cars along the tracks. The ARU and its members also organized a boycott: “Debs began the boycott on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had ‘walked off’ the job rather than handle Pullman cars.” President Cleveland’s Attorney General (who still received a salary from his old railroad employers) got an injunction that the ARU ignored. Federal troops were dispatched.

The situation in Hammond was apparently as violent as anything going on in Chicago. Mobs confronted nonunion workers, derailed locomotives and rolling stock, and, on July 7, seized the telegraph office. The Lake County sheriff could not handle the situation and requested aid from the governor. But, Gov. Matthews was initially unreceptive to the requests. Only after federal forces were dispatched did Gov. Matthews also deploy about 700 state guardsmen. Because the General Assembly was not in session, Matthews found it necessary to personally borrow $41,000 to pay the troops. He was later reimbursed.  

There was an incident where federal troops fired indiscriminately into a crowd and killed Charles Fleischer, an innocent bystander who was searching the area for one of his sons. A local magistrate swore out a warrant for the regular federal soldiers involved in the incident, but the military felt that the soldiers were provoked and ignored the civil warrant. With the numerous federal injunctions, involvement of federal troops, and arrest of Debs and other leaders of the ARU, the strike ended on August 5. The Supreme Court ultimately determined that Posse Comitatus Act did not restrict the  use of federal troops in any strike involving transportation of the mails or the movement of interstate commerce.   

Election of 1894 and Republican majority

The Democrats fared poorly in the election of 1894. Republicans took back the General Assembly. During the Albert Porter administration, the Democratic General Assembly had stripped the governor of a great deal of his appointment powers. When Democratic Gov. Matthews was elected, they restored those powers. The Republican General Assembly promptly stripped them again. Gov. Matthews vetoed the bill stripping his authority and did so minutes before the General Assembly was set to adjourn — in an effort to delay their ability to override the veto. However, the House Republicans blocked the governor’s messenger from reaching the House Speaker. This resulted in fist fights between Republican and Democratic lawmakers that lasted about a half hour. (A good round up of the newspaper coverage of the incident is here.) The governor’s private secretary, Myron King, was apparently in pretty rough shape after the beating. “Revolvers were flourished and blows struck with such articles of furniture as the combatants could lay hands on conveniently.” The Democrats apparently finally got King with his veto message to the Speaker’s desk, but moments after the Speaker declared the session adjourned sine die. The members of the legislature involved in the assault of King apparently left the city quickly thereafter to avoid arrest.

During his term, Matthews also successfully cracked down on horse racing and prize fighting in Lake County, notwithstanding the offer of a $500 bribe for the House clerk to “lose” the racetrack bill before the governor could sign it.

Oh, Lake County. Never change.

Courthouses

During this period, Indiana was coming to the end of its major courthouse construction period. The period of 1870-1900 saw the construction of the state’s largest and grandest courthouses (pdf). State law allowed county commissioners “to appropriate any funds in the county’s treasury to borrow up to one percent of all appraised real and personal property without an election and to levy and collect whatever taxes were necessary to build a courthouse whenever the commissioners thought such a building was necessary.” This encouraged generous expenditures for courthouse construction and many Indiana courthouses exhibit remarkable grandeur. According to courthouse expert David Hermansen in 1868:

Indiana still has one of the finest assemblages of nineteenth-century courthouses in the Midwest, and they vividly express a variety of architectural concepts. They express the architectural skills and aspirations of America in the nineteenth century… They are tangible and can continue to afford us a rich architectural stimulus and experience for many decades.

***

At the end of Governor Matthews term, he was a contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1896 but lost on the fifth ballot to William Jennings Bryan and his “Cross of Gold” speech.

Next month we’ll resume with 1897 and into the 20th century!

Ira Chase (1891 – 1893)

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.

——-

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.

Alvin Hovey (1889 – 1891) was the Republican nominee for governor in 1888. In a number of ways, his life was a thread that runs through a number of the issues we’ve already discussed in prior installments. He was born in Mt. Vernon, Indiana in 1821, shortly after Indiana became a state. He eventually worked his way through his legal studies and became a lawyer, gaining some prominence very early on through his work on the estate of William Maclure, a wealthy industrialist who collaborated with Robert Owen on his failed utopian New Harmony initiative. Maclure’s will provided that his estate be used to build libraries. However, his siblings had misappropriated much of it and, as lawyer for the estate, Hovey had to pursue more than sixty lawsuits to recover the money. The money was eventually used to build 160 libraries in Indiana and Illinois.

In 1851, Hovey was named one of the delegates to the Indiana Constitutional Convention. He was the sponsor of what became Article XIII of the Constitution of 1851 which prohibited “negroes or mulattoes” from settling in the state.  In 1854, Hovey was appointed to the Indiana Supreme Court, at age 34, the youngest Justice to have been appointed. In that capacity, he was able to interpret the Constitution he helped author, including the decision in Greencastle Township v. Black, 5 Ind. 557 (1855) which helped bring the progress of the School Law of 1852 to a halt by invalidating a statute that would allow township taxes to fund schools.

Hovey was part of the faction of Democrats who got on the wrong side of Jesse Bright and was expelled from the party, eventually becoming a Republican. Toward the end of the Civil War, Gov. Morton placed Hovey in command of the Indiana Legions in the state. In this capacity, he helped break up an alleged plot by southern sympathizers and had them tried by military tribunal. This led to the ex parte Milligan decision where the court decided that because the civil courts were in operation, conviction of a civilian by a military tribunal was unconstitutional.

After the Civil War, Hovey spent some time as minister to Peru and then spent the years from 1870 to 1886 in private practice as an attorney. In 1886, he was elected to Congress for a term and then, in 1888, Hovey became the Republican nominee for governor.  Running on a ticket with the locally very popular Benjamin Harrison as President, Hovey still barely eked out a victory over the Democratic nominee, Courtland Matson, by 1,600 votes out of about 570,000 cast (93.3% of eligible voters).  

The General Assembly remained Democratic and, apparently, remained hostile to the governor. He unsuccessfully challenged the laws Democrats had passed limiting the power of the former governor with respect to making appointments. However, one successful initiative he had was with respect to election reform in response to the Harrison “Blocks of Five” election scandal.

Under Hovey, Indiana was among the earliest states to end party printing of election ballots that were cast in public (to make sure bought voters selected the right ballot), and instead began using state-printed ballots marked in secret for its elections. Indiana also began regulating who could enter polling places and limited campaigning at sites where voters cast their ballots.

The General Assembly did, however, assist in expanding the state’s judicial system. In 1891, the Indiana Appellate Court was created. It was initially intended as a temporary measure to handle overflow cases from the Indiana Supreme Court and was scheduled to last for six years. The state was growing and, as one of my favorite quips goes: “one lawyer starves where two lawyers prosper.” In other words, lawyers have a way of making work for one another. In any event, when the six years passed, the caseload remained heavy, so the Appellate Court was continued for another four years. After that, the legislature made the court permanent and it began its function as an intermediate appellate court.

White Capping

Hovey and the General Assembly took action to crack down on the practice of “white capping” that became a problem in Southern Indiana in the late 19th century. White capping was a sort of vigilante justice where individuals in the community committed violence against other members of the community who supposedly weren’t living up to the obligations and standards of a good Christian. That sort of justice is prone to being unevenly enforced and enforced as pretext. Unsurprisingly, in the South, it ended up taking on a racial characteristic. Early on, at least, the secret societies that administered the justice targeted “men who neglected or abused their family, people who showed excessive laziness and women who had children out of wedlock.” They also targeted “women who were not believed to be adequately caring for their home and children, children who were truant from school, and people who shirked from civic duty like working on road projects.” As the movement matured and moved south, it was just as likely to be used by poor white farmers to force more prosperous black farmers off their land.

In 1889, two men suspected of murder were in the jail in Corydon. James Devin and Charles Tennyson were thought to have murdered two women of the Lemay family in a botched robbery. As they were awaiting trial, on June 12, 1889, between 150 and 200 men in hoods, the Harrison County Regulators, dragged them from their cells in the middle of the night and hung them from the West Bridge. Initial efforts to combat these groups had limited success, in no small part because a number of the sheriffs charged with enforcing those efforts were, themselves, members of the white cap groups. Hovey had campaigned on the issue to some extent and threatened to have uncooperative local officials removed and place their towns under martial law. The White Cap activity subsided somewhat with only two lynchings during Hovey’s term.

Gov. Hovey did not complete his four year term. He fell ill and died on November 23, 1891, and was succeeded by the lieutenant governor, Ira Chase.