A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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.

In our last installment, I started with some history of Governor Isaac Gray before digressing into a discussion of the natural gas boom. Gray was ambitious and had a history of playing hardball. He was, after all, a Democrat who had – early in his career – made a name for himself as a Republican state senator who barred the doors against Democrats attempting to leave the Senate to break a quorum in an effort to prevent ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Black Day of the General Assembly

In 1884, Governor Gray’s lieutenant governor was Mahlon Manson. Gray had aspirations to have the General Assembly elect him to the U.S. Senate. Some of Gray’s fellow Democrats had no desire to see the former Republican who had locked the doors against Democrats elected to that post. So, they were content when Manson accepted President Cleveland’s appointment to the position of revenue collector. This would leave Gray with no successor if he were elected to the Senate and, therefore, served to thwart his ambitions. Gray, however, asked the attorney general to give him an opinion that it was acceptable to have a special election for lieutenant governor in the 1886 mid-term election. The attorney general responded that this was permitted.

However, Democrat Alonzo Smith was the President pro tem of the Senate and he argued that there was no vacancy. Rather, he argued, the President pro tem was the acting lieutenant governor and would be until the term expired. Nevertheless, an election was held for lieutenant governor in 1886. The Republican nominee, Robert Robertson won the election — apparently with the support of Democratic governor Gray. He believed that, with a Republican lieutenant governor, he could get Republican support to send him to the U.S. Senate since that would get him out of the way and put a member of their party in the governor’s office. Meanwhile, Republicans also took control of the Indiana House in that election. Even though the wave was against them, Democrats held on to the Indiana Senate due to senators who had not been up for election.

When the General Assembly started its session, the minority senate Republicans caused a commotion and were ignored as the (Democratic majority) Senate re-elected (Democrat) Smith as President pro tem and acting lieutenant governor. Then, the House and Senate met in joint session and the (Republican) Speaker ignored the bitter protests of Democrats as the Speaker announced that (Republican) Robertson had won the lieutenant governor’s election. The Speaker turned the gavel over to Robertson (presiding over the Senate as the lieutenant governor). Robertson was shouted down by Democrats as he tried to speak and the joint session eventually adjourned in disorder.

The Marion County Circuit Court issued an injunction prohibiting Robertson from exercising power, reasoning that the mid-term election of a lieutenant governor was unconstitutional. However, on February 23, 1887, the Indiana Supreme Court reversed the Circuit Court saying that it did not have jurisdiction over the matter and neither did the Supreme Court. Rather, the court held, it was the General Assembly’s issue to resolve. One source (I’m not  sure of that sources’ source, but it paints a picture) described the scene the next day as follows:

On February 24, 1887, Robertson arrived at the Senate Chamber to preside over the Senate. A group of Democratic Senators attacked him and beat him to the floor. The Senate president pro tempore ordered the doormen to expel Robertson. The doormen complied. Republicans soon raised a ruckus, demanding that Robertson be allowed to take his seat. When the Democrats resisted, fights broke out all over the Senate chamber. As the fighting progressed through the floor, one Democratic Senator pulled a gun and shot a hole in the Senate Chamber’s ceiling. He then threatened the Republicans, saying he would start killing them if they did not desist in fighting. This halted the conflict in the Senate, but people outside the chamber, alerted to the happenings inside the Senate, began fighting. The fight soon spread to the House of Representatives. They overwhelmed the outnumbered Democrats and ran through the Capitol, dragging Democrats outside to beat them. Another group broke down the Senate door and began dragging Democratic Senators outside. Governor Gray was compelled to send for the police, who came and brought the conflict under control. Four hours of chaos led to a total shutdown of legislative activity for that session, as the Democrats refused to communicate with the Republicans and the Republicans refused to communicate with the Democrats.

(This will not be the last incident of physical violence I write about in this Installment 6 of our series). I read one source that said the General Assembly was deadlocked and no further business was done that session. However, I also see that the General Assembly passed a bill on March 3, 1887, to create the Indiana Soldier’s & Sailors Monument, so I’m not entirely sure what transpired after the ruckus.  

Gray was, needless to say, not elected to the U.S. Senate and he earned the nickname “Sisyphus of the Wabash” for his extensive but ultimately futile labors. This incident was raised a quarter of a century later by advocates of the 17th Amendment arguing for direct election of U.S. Senators and to end the practice of state legislatures selecting them.

Isaac Gray 1885 – 1889

Isaac Gray was a Quaker who was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Ohio for some years, and settled in Randolph County, Indiana in his 20s. He was a store owner who expanded into banking and grain processing, but he studied law with an eye toward advancing his political career. Shortly after he opened his law office, however, the Civil War started, and he raised a company of volunteers. During his military career, Gray was part of the efforts to repel Morgan’s Raid in the summer of 1863.

Following the war, he unsuccessfully challenged radical Republican (and thorn in Oliver Morton’s side) George Julian for a Congressional seat in 1866. He and Julian would later follow a similar path in leaving the Republican Party for the Democrats. As the focus on slavery diminished and issues such as tariffs and corruption became more prominent, the men found their views less aligned with the Republicans and more with the Democrats.

However, in 1870, Gray was still very much a Republican and had been elected to the Indiana Senate. You may recall this passage from the discussion of Indiana’s (potentially illegal) ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment:

When the proposal was drawing near to consideration, Democrats proposed to bolt again. Republicans resolved to use some strong arm tactics. Several senators claimed to have resigned but they had not left the building. The doorkeeper was told to bring them into the chamber, the doors were locked (apparently locked by a Republican senator by the name of Isaac Gray — who would later become a Democratic governor), and they were counted for purposes of a quorum despite claiming to have resigned.

Despite that history, for the 1884 gubernatorial campaign, Democrats put aside their old resentment of Gray and nominated him to be their candidate. The platform was mostly focused on national issues, but one state issue that was raised was defense of a state law passed by the Democratic General Assembly that took appointment and control of the city police out of the hands of the mayor and placed them with a board appointed by the governor, secretary, treasurer, and auditor of state.

The Democrats that year were boosted by a Presidential ticket that included Grover Cleveland and former Indiana governor Thomas Hendricks for vice-president. The General Assembly went to the Democrats that year and Gray beat Republican nominee William Calkins by about 7,500 out of about 500,000 cast. (An estimated 92.2% of the voting age population cast a vote that year, down from 94.4% in 1880.)  Of some note, Eugene V. Debs was elected to the Indiana Senate as a Democrat. While in office, Debs tried to get a worker’s compensation bill passed that would have required corporations to compensate employees for work related injuries. The bill did not get passed and Debs (who would eventually run for President as a socialist five times) did not return to the General Assembly.

Of lesser note, it was during the Gray administration, in 1886, that the Purdue All-American Marching Band was established when the Purdue Student Army Training Corps formed a five member drum corps to play music for the cadets during their morning conditioning. According to Wikipedia, in 1887, Purdue, IU, Butler, and Notre Dame would all form football squads. (On the other hand, the Wabash football Wikipedia entry says that Wabash defeated Butler 4-0 in its first game in 1884, so that’s what I get using Wikipedia as a source.)

Natural Gas

In the mid 1880s, transportation — particularly the railroads — was changing the economy in Indiana. Manufacturing in the 1850s was typically something like flour and grist mills. Milling grain was the leading industry at the time. Other industries were related to taking advantage of the state’s natural resources: pork packing, liquor distilling, lumber production.

This sort of industry was giving way to heavier industry that took advantage of new tools and the ability to transport products beyond local markets. And, in 1886, a natural gas boom hit Indiana. Ten years earlier, in 1876, in the search for coal, W.W. Worthington and George Carter bored a test core in Delaware County.

At a depth of 606 feet they ran into “an ill-smelling gas,” that readily ignited, producing a two-foot high flame. It was a natural gas deposit, suffused with malodorous sulfur content. Disappointed that there was no coal to be found, they capped the pipe and moved on.

In 1885, Andrew Carnegie had replaced a good deal of the coal he used for steel making with natural gas. Industries looked for locations with access to natural gas. A major discovery was made in Findlay, Ohio in January of 1886 (initially so powerful a towering plume of fire burned for 4 months.) In Portland, Indiana Henry Sees followed the news out of Findlay, and convinced local investors to form the Eureka Gas & Oil Co. They struck gas in March of 1886.

Meanwhile, George Carter went to Findlay and recognized the smell of the well from the hole they’d dug in Delaware County ten years earlier. He found investors, and on September 15, 1886, his company hit natural gas in Eaton, Indiana, and produced a plume that was reportedly visible in Muncie. This was the beginning of the Trenton Gas Field, spread over 17 counties in east central Indiana.

The people of that time were profligate with what seemed like an unlimited supply of gas. They were spectacularly wasteful. “It became fashionable to erect arches of perforated iron pipe and let them burn brightly day and night for month after month.” There were calls for conservation that were largely ignored. (“In 1893 the State Inspector of Natural Gas wrote, ‘The waste has been criminal and the day of repentance is fast approaching, and can only be delayed by practicing the most rigid economy and unrelaxed efforts in the husbandry of this valuable resource of our State.’”)

Still, the gas boom attracted industry to the area:

“The rapid growth and industrialization that Findlay, Portland and Eaton experienced was repeated again and again in Indiana’s “Gas Belt.” Cities like Muncie, Kokomo, Anderson, and Marion competed to attract new industries with offers of free natural gas, land, railway sidings, and tax credits.”

Lured by the generous incentives, 162 factories were built, creating over 10,000 jobs by 1890. Among these new industries were tinplate mills in Anderson, Gas City, and Elwood as well as 21 new glass factories. “Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing” relocated to Muncie from Buffalo, N.Y.

By 1902, however, the wells were starting to fail and the falling pressure was allowing salt water to creep in. Companies that had re-located to take advantage of the cheap, readily available gas were forced to close. The boom ended as quickly as it started.

At the same time as the gas boom, during the 1880s and 1890s, railroads and interurbans were continuing to grow (pdf). In 1880, there were five major railroads that crossed Indiana to reach Chicago from the east. This established the pattern we would see with our major interstates later on. Fort Wayne, Lafayette, Logansport, Terre Haute, and Indianapolis formed as rail centers. The expanded urban centers also gave rise to the electric interurban railways. With these railways, pretty much all roads led to Indianapolis, showing its dominance of the area. (I’ve experienced this driving back roads with no map, trying to get from one small city to another — very frequently the roads, instead of continuing in a particular direction will start to bend toward Indianapolis. I did not experience this anywhere near as frequently when wandering Ohio back roads.)

The electric railway offered a more flexible and lighter-weight, self-propelled vehicle than the large steam locomotives that required an extensive infrastructure for fuel and water. Within cities, small streetcars could readily navigate the city street grid using electric power provided by a central generating source. Streetcars and interurban electric cars were still heavier than horse-drawn wagons, however, and necessitated increased load-bearing capacity in bridges on streetcar routes.

Indiana, like the rest of the country, was being rapidly transformed by changes in transportation and industry. It must have been very disorienting to the people of the time.

Friday: Isaac Gray’s term continued — including “The Black Day of the Indiana General Assembly.”

Albert Porter 1881 – 1885

The first governor of this period was Albert Porter. In 1880, Indiana had reached a population of almost 2 million people. It was 98% white and about 20% of the population lived in cities while 80% remained in rural locations. Despite the overwhelmingly white population, it was in 1880 that a black man, James Hinton, was first elected to the Indiana General Assembly.

At his election, the Indianapolis Leader proclaimed [of Hinton], “thirty years ago, the Indiana Legislature was engaged in concocting brutal laws to prevent the entrance of colored people into this state. Now a member of the race then proscribed, is a member of the Legislature. Time sets all things right.”

As for Governor Porter, he was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, only the second Governor to be born in Indiana. His family moved over the river to Kentucky when his mom inherited land there. He worked his father’s ferry across the Ohio for a period of time before enrolling at Hanover. He ran out of money before he finished. His uncle offered to pay for the remainder of his schooling if he went to a Methodist School. So, he finished at Asbury University (now DePauw) in 1843. (Recall the educational feud between Presbyterians and Methodists back in the days of Samuel Bigger.)

Porter became a personal secretary to Governor Whitcomb and was originally a Democrat, but he got caught up in the factional dispute of the 1850s over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was on the wrong side of Jesse Bright’s faction when the dust cleared. He left the Democrats and became a Republican shortly thereafter. Porter was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1858 and served until 1863. He declined to run for another term, going into private practice in Indianapolis with, among others, Benjamin Harrison. One of his cases was the Ex Parte Milligan case.

In 1880, he was the Republican nominee for President. The election was a close one. The Democrats had held the governor’s office since 1873, the Democrats had William English as a Vice-Presidential candidate, and some prominent observers of the day felt that the state was safely Democratic. Nevertheless, the Democrats lost both the governorship and the Presidential race by less than 8,000 votes out of 470,000 cast.

The Democrats’ failure usually has been placed on national factors: e.g., the supposed political ineptitude of the Democratic presidential candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock; the unfortunate appearance of the phrase “a tariff for revenue only” in the party platform; the general disorganization and anarchy within the party following the loss of the disputed election of 1876; and the decline in both the health and political mastery of Samuel J. Tilden in New York. Some writers have credited other national causes such as the energy, money, and imported voters which were supposedly poured into Indiana in the closing weeks of the campaign by the Republican national committee under the direction of its secretary, Stephen W. Dorsey.

Isaac Gray campaigned for the Democrats as lieutenant governor even though he was a stronger nominee than Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Franklin Landers. Gray’s actions as a Republican, locking Democrats into the Senate to maintain a quorum to pass the Fifteenth Amendment, was not forgotten by his (now) fellow Democrats. Landers lost to Albert Porter by about 7,000 votes out of 470,000 cast. According to one commentator, during the period from 1880 – 1892, the Tariff Question was “the only serious issue in Indiana politics.” The economy was shifting from agricultural to industrial. Republicans generally favored the tariff as protecting developing and diversifying local industry from foreign competition. Democrats, meanwhile, generally favored low tariffs and free trade. This appealed to farmers — particularly in the south and the west — who were exporting products like tobacco, cotton, and wheat.

During the early part of the Porter administration, the Republicans held majorities in the General Assembly, They promptly passed a bill which would have a prohibition amendment in the Indiana Constitution. This backfired on them and the next session was heavily Democratic as there was apparently a strong showing by German voters opposing the temperance legislation. The Republicans of 1881 had also passed resolutions for amendments that would have provided for female suffrage and would have made all state and county offices four year terms. (In Indiana, a proposed constitutional amendment has to pass two General Assemblies before it is eligible for a statewide vote.)

The Democratic General Assembly also employed some heavy handed opposition to the Republicans, taking away much of the Governor’s legislatively granted appointment power to offices like prison board member, State Geologist, State Statistician, and State Oil Inspector. It was also during this period that the hospitals for the insane were created at Richmond, Logansport, and Evansville.

I’m not sure the best section to put this, but I feel like an under-appreciated aspect of state and local government is our system of drainage. There are a tremendous number of miles of regulated drain in Indiana. But they’re mostly invisible to citizens. When drains are working, you simply don’t notice them. It rains, the land is wet for a while, and then it dries up. There used to be a lot less productive acreage in Indiana. From the State’s inception, government dabbled at drainage laws, but a comprehensive system seems to have begun in earnest in the 1880s. The surge in drainage activity had to do with the closing of the frontier (making more difficult land in the settled areas more attractive), an increase in land prices, and the growing proof of how valuable a system of regular drainage could be — the cost of the drains were small in comparison to the increase in value of the drained land. Despite these benefits, there is some natural resistance to construction of drains. It does not fit very well with our atomistic view of property rights and a philosophical inclination to limit government power. There was no right under the common law for one land owner to construct drains over the property of another. But, water does not respect property lines, and so through the 1880s, the General Assembly enacted a variety of drainage laws that helped open up a good deal of territory in Indiana. (I believe Northern Indiana was particularly swampy.)

A focus on problems with water were probably also triggered by the fact that 1882, 1883, and 1884 saw significant flooding along the Ohio and Wabash rivers. The 1883 flood was the most significant of these and, in Peru anyway, rivaled the flood of 1847.

On Friday, February 2, 1883, there was a heavy fall of snow, which turned to rain late in the afternoon. The ground was frozen so that the water could not penetrate it, the temperature rose during the night and the snow melted, adding to the volume of water that was forced into the streams over the frozen ground. By eleven o’clock on Saturday morning the Wabash railroad tracks were under water and the channel of the river was filled with floating ice. Rain fell all day on Saturday and during the night it turned colder, the temperature on Sunday morning being only a few degrees above zero. When the people arose that morning they found the Strawtown pike under water from the bridge to the toll house, the Mississinewa pike was under water for a mile or more, and South Peru was inundated. Frank Henton and Lou Cole led a rescuing party to convey the people in boats to places of safety. The back water had extinguished the fires at the gas works and the people had to return to coal oil, and in some instances to candles, for their light. All along the river, on the high grounds, could be seen little herds of livestock and the intense cold added to the suffering of both man and beast.

The shift from a rural agricultural economy to an urban industrial economy likely made Hoosiers feel the impact of the floods more deeply. A flooded field is no picnic, of course, but flooded out homes, businesses, and factories in cities built up against rivers are more expensive and recovery takes longer.

Even as the General Assembly was busy weakening the office of the governor, they did give Governor Porter some money and authority to address the damage caused by the floods. The Indiana Constitution prohibited consecutive terms at that time, so Porter did not run for office in 1884. He declined an opportunity to run in 1888. He did, however, have the opportunity to nominate his former law partner, Benjamin Harrison, to be the Republican nominee for the Presidency.

Benjamin Harrison 1889 – 1893

Harrison’s election seems to have been based on some very corrupt practices. Harrison’s campaign manager, Matthew Quay (a political boss from Pennsylvania), upon hearing that Harrison ascribed his narrow victory to “Providence,” was quoted as saying, “Think of the man! He ought to know that Providence hadn’t a damn thing to do with it.” Harrison, Quay added, would “never know how close a number of men were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him president.”

In the election of 1888, Harrison’s fellow Hoosier, W.W. Dudley (hailing from Richmond, Indiana) was the Republican National Committee treasurer, buying votes wholesale in Indiana in what came to be known as the Blocks of Five scandal. Interestingly, ten years earlier, Dudley — while employed as U.S. Marshal in Indiana, had arrested numerous Democrats, accusing them of vote fraud. The special prosecutor, Benjamin Harrison, had managed only one conviction.

Intensely polarized and almost perfectly balanced in partisan strength, “venal Indiana” was notorious during this period for bitterly contested, frequently corrupt elections with miniscule margins between victory and defeat, margins often secured with the votes of nonresident or irregular floaters at two to five dollars each.

Fraudulent or not, Harrison took office in 1890.

One landmark piece of legislation during Harrison’s tenure was 1890’s, Sherman Antitrust Act named after Senator John Sherman (who had lost the nomination battle to James Garfield). The law was intended to combat monopolistic practices that were plaguing the U.S. economy at the time. In a general sense, a trust is an old legal device where one holds property for the benefit of another. For example, a trust that holds an inheritance for the benefit of a minor heir. But, the trust in question here was where several large businesses were held in trust together, getting around prohibitions where corporations were forbidden from holding stocks in other corporations. The law aimed to prohibit combinations that restrained trade while permitting monopolies that were created and maintained simply because that business provided the goods or services of higher quality or at a better price than others could. Initial efforts to use the Act against trusts were fairly anemic. And, in an ironic but somewhat predictable twist, its initial uses were mostly only successful against trade unions. Later legislation would specify that trade unions were acceptable and Teddy Roosevelt was able to make more effective use of the tools under the Act.

Also in 1890, the struggles with the Native Americans were coming to an ignominious end. The massacre at Wounded Knee took place on December 29, 1890. U.S. soldiers were ostensibly trying to disarm a band of Lakota but ended up killing at least 150 of them with at least 51 wounded. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were killed and 39 wounded. Twenty soldiers were dubiously given the Congressional Medal of Honor for their actions that day. (One was given for “conspicuous bravery in rounding up and bringing to the skirmish line a stampeded pack mule.”) This was to be the last major Indian battle of the 19th century.

Tariffs continued to be a major issue. Republicans, particularly from the northeast, tended to favor them as protective to domestic industry. Westerners and southerners tended not to favor them as they restricted agricultural exports. One by-product of the high tariffs was a major (and apparently embarrassing) government surplus. Under the Harrison administration, one way the government tried to spend down the surplus was through generous pension benefits to disabled Civil War veterans (whether the disability was war related or not). This legislation had a great deal to do with the support of the Grand Army of the Republic — a lobbyist group devoted to Civil War veterans issues. Rather than lower the tariffs, Congress — through an initiative of future President William McKinley — actually raised tariffs even higher.

Harrison was the first President to have his voice preserved on a phonograph and also had electricity installed in the White House. During his administration, six new states were admitted to the Union: North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. No states had previously been admitted in more than a decade. Congressional Democrats were reluctant to admit states that would add to Republican majorities. Their concerns were well founded. All six of those states initially sent Republican delegations.

Harrison also embraced naval technology and started the U.S. on its path to becoming a legitimate naval power. The Harrison administration, additionally, was quick to recognize the new government of Hawaii installed by Sanford Dole after a coup d’etat overthrew Queen Liliulokalani. The Harrison administration tried to move on a subsequent petition for annexation of Hawaii, but could not get it done and the second Garfield administration backed off of that initiative.  

Harrison’s re-nomination was not without trouble. A contingent of Republicans preferred James G. Blaine (continental liar from the state of Maine). Harrison did get the nomination and ended up facing a re-match with Grover Cleveland. The surplus was evaporating and the economy was declining — a precursor to the upcoming Panic of 1893. Tariffs were so high that imported goods were prohibitively expensive. Republican support in the west eroded as many former Republicans defected to the Populist Party who promised free silver, generous veterans’ pensions, and an eight hour work day.

Cleveland ended up winning the popular vote by 400,000 votes out of 10.6 million cast and an electoral vote of 277 to 145. Harrison did not win his home state of Indiana.

Grover Cleveland II: Electric Boogaloo (1893 – 1897)

Almost immediately after his election, Cleveland faced the Panic of 1893. The panic had to do with a tangle of reasons probably too complicated for me to easily explain. But it seems to have had to do with a combination of the U.S. economy’s reliance on high commodity prices, a wheat failure in Argentina, and U.S. monetary policy having to do with gold and the relative ease with which international business could obtain gold from the U.S. This triggered a panic and bank runs which left the economy in the doldrums for some time.

The McKinley Tariff Act was replaced by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act. The sausage making nature of legislation seems to have been particularly egregious with this bill, but it lowered the tariffs from the McKinley version. The shortfall in revenue from reduction of the tariffs was made up by the first peacetime income tax — a 2% tax on incomes over $4,000 (about $100,000 today). This income tax was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and led to the passage of the 16th Amendment. Prior to the 16th Amendment, the Supreme Court held that the constitution required direct taxes to be imposed in proportion to a state’s population.

In 1894, Congress passed an enabling act permitting Utah to enter the Union as a new state. Prior to the Harrison administration, it had been a decade since a new state was admitted. While six states were admitted once the ball got rolling in the Harrison administration, Utah was not one of them. The state was thought likely to vote for Democrats, and there was still concern over polygamy (which had only been disavowed in 1890.) Those concerns were overturned and Utah joined as the 45th state in 1896.

In May and June of 1894, Cleveland faced the Pullman Strike. A strike by railroad workers over low wages and a 12 hour work day, augmented by sympathy strikes led by Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union ended up paralyzing national commerce. Grover Cleveland’s Attorney General had been a railroad attorney and the Cleveland administration took the side of the railroads. (“If it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a postcard in Chicago”, Cleveland proclaimed, “that card will be delivered.”) The election of 1894 was disastrous for Cleveland. The economy and the hardened attitude of labor against him resulted in landslide Congressional victories for Republicans.

In 1896, Cleveland did not seek the Democratic nomination. Nationally things were not going well for his administration, and there were factions inside the Democratic Party who did not want him to run. And, while there were no term limits and he had not been elected consecutively, he had served two terms which was, by custom, the limit for Presidents. At age 36, William Jennings Bryan became the youngest major party nominee for President. He had a gift for oratory, and his Cross of Gold speech helped him secure the nomination over Richard Bland who had been the favorite going into the convention.  I should probably try to do a better job of explaining the gold/silver coinage debates, as they dominated the political discussion for a good long time. But, my understanding of the subject is limited. Basically, it had to do with whether to expand the money supply or not. The gold-standard advocates wanted to limit the money supply because it made international trade more secure and because it preserved the value of the debts owed to them. The silverites or bimetalists thought that increasing the money supply — by allowing silver to be struck into coins — would increase the nation’s prosperity. (It would also make their debts easier to pay off.) Bryan was a populist, and he was not shy about casting his message in religious terms. He concluded his speech:

Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

The speech won him acclaim, but that cross of gold fueled the election of William McKinley who outspent Bryan 5 to 1 and won the election 271 to 176 electoral votes.