The Black Hole of Indiana

Muncie Post-Democrat, July 14, 1933
Muncie Post-Democrat, July 14, 1933. Hoosier State Chronicles.

“The most damnable spot in America.”  “A disgrace to civilization.”  “Filth and abomination.”  “Indiana’s Black of Hole of Calcutta.”

The Hoosier State sometimes get bad national press, but in 1923 the criticism was homegrown.  True to Hoosier stereotypes, the alleged horrors took place on a farm, the state penal farm,  and involved the abuse of prisoners.

On the eve of World War I, a new, “open-air” penitentiary opened about an hour west of Indianapolis.  Overcrowding at the major state prisons in Michigan City and Jeffersonville, as well as at county jails all over Indiana, led the legislature to pursue a “progressive” alternative to mere incarceration.  Many prisoners, after all, were behind bars for minor crimes like theft and assault and battery.  That changed in 1917, when Indiana Governor James Goodrich initiated statewide Prohibition, two years in advance of the Federal liquor ban that came with the Volstead Act in 1919.

Since some Indiana counties and towns had already passed local dry laws, by 1915 sheriffs were cracking down on operators of illegal saloons, moonshine distillers, and town drunks.  While most violators were never tossed in the clinker for more than a few weeks or months, as the war on alcohol got more serious, Hoosier jails began to fill up fast.  The temptation to make a profit off jails was a further problem, a situation that still exists today.


Indiana prohibition act, 1917
Governor James Goodrich signs Indiana up for early Prohibition in 1917.

Prohibition laws provide a fascinating glimpse into the dark side of reform movements.  As one Hoosier editor, Muncie’s George R. Dale, discovered while investigating allegations of prisoner abuse at the State Farm in Putnamville, punitive social reform — including the ban on alcohol sales — had scarcely hidden undertones of racism and class operating behind it.  Working-class Americans, African Americans, and Catholics bore the brunt of laws framed mostly by women’s rights advocates and middle-class white Protestants.  Liquor laws, oddly enough, turned out to be a major milepost on the intellectual superhighway that led to the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 — coincidentally, the year of the penal farm’s founding.  The original Klan had died off in the 1870s.  Revived just before Word War I, it found its highest membership not among stereotypical rural Southerners and defeated Confederates, but among white middle-class Midwesterners.  The ideology of “the second Klan,” moreover, wasn’t totally foreign to the reform movements of the 1910s.

Thomas Hart Benton’s “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press” mural, courtesy of Indiana University, accessed Indiana Public Media.

In 1922, Dale, a civil liberties maverick, joined the campaign to investigate the penal farm — then went there twice as a prisoner, sentenced to hard labor for criticizing a Delaware County judge with Klan connections.

Though the farm would soon fall under suspicion, the plans behind its creation were full of good intentions.  Jailers and prison reformers had always been vexed by the failure of jail sentences to cure some criminals of their attraction to lawbreaking.  The theory was that inmates were bonding behind bars while living in “idleness.”  As a Hoosier paper, The Hagerstown Record, put it in 1916,

Jails are simply breeding places for vice.  Lawbreakers thrown together in sheer idleness day after day have opportunity and incentive for devising more lawlessness.  The hardened men create an atmosphere of viciousness that influences the less hardened, while the shiftless vagrant finds very little punishment in free board and no work.


The Fort Wayne News, November 2, 1914
The Fort Wayne News, November 2, 1914.

Penal labor, though not wrong in itself, had an enormously dark history — from Charles Dickens’ hellish “workhouses” in David Copperfield to British convict colonies in Australia and of course the Siberian gulags of Tsarist and Soviet Russia.

A 1913 law passed by the Indiana legislature made possible the establishment of a pioneering state penal farm.  That law appropriated $60,000 for the purchase of at least 500 acres of land.  To help prevent party control and graft, the bipartisan committee, like the prisoners themselves, would receive no salary for their work.

The committee eventually bought 1,600 acres around Putnamville, five miles south of Greencastle, in a hilly, rocky part of Putnam County.  Much of this acreage was considered “too broken for agriculture.”  Yet this didn’t put a halt to plans, since the penal farm would include several industries besides farming.  Underlain by Mitchell limestone, prisoners were put to work breaking rock in quarries, used for road building and the production of crushed limestone fertilizer used on fields.  Prisoners also sawed lumber from a neighboring forest reserve.  Additionally, the farm kept a dairy herd, apple and peach trees, and fields that grew corn, hay, soybeans, sorghum, pumpkins, and tobacco (a crop now practically extinct in Indiana).  In 1916, the prison kept 190 “fat and sleek” hogs.  Most of this produce went to fed patients and staff at state hospitals.

A brick plant came in 1918, with prisoners turning out 30,000 bricks a day.  The bricks were used in the construction of a new medical college and a military warehouse in Indianapolis and of the Indiana Village for Epileptics, later renamed the New Castle State Hospital.  (This happened at a time when epileptics were considered a menace to society and segregated.  Indiana’s 1907 eugenics laws forbade epileptics to get married, putting them virtually in the same class with criminals subjected to forced sterilization.)

The money-making possibilities of the state farm were already stirring up buzz among citizens of Putnamville, an old pioneer town on the National Road that nearly became a ghost town when the Putnam County seat was moved to Greencastle.  The Indianapolis News reported that rumor of the farm’s coming “spread over the hills and valleys like wildfire” and that residents believed it would “make the old village glow with new life.”  “Friends of prisoners” and “sightseers” will “come and go and Putnamville will thrive on the nickels and dimes they spend.”

Locals didn’t seem worried about having prisoners as neighbors, though the penal farm was barely guarded at all.  Punishment for escaping was apparently considered enough of a threat to deter the attempt.  Fugitives from the law would find their sentences, sometimes a mere 90 days, extended to two years in a state prison if caught.

Newspapers give insight into the type of criminal sent to the State Farm.  After Indiana’s prohibition law was ratified in 1917, more than half of the prisoners here came on liquor-related offenses — whether running a  “blind tiger,” a rural whiskey still, or being drunk in public.  Although bootleg whiskey could be very deadly, other prisoners were jailed for the slimmest of crimes.  One was an 18-year-old from Indianapolis who stole a penknife.


The Fort Wayne Sentinel, May 13, 1915
The Fort Wayne Sentinel, May 13, 1915.

Brazil Daily Times, June 18, 1915
Brazil Daily Times, June 18, 1915.

The Indiana State Penal Farm’s bleak reputation wasn’t long coming.  Less than a year after its founding, John Albright, a bootlegger from Terre Haute, actually requested deportation to his native Germany during the height of World War I rather than serve 90 days at the farm.


Brazil Daily Times, June 22, 1915
Brazil Daily Times, June 22, 1915.

Newspapers also documented escapes from the farm, a few of them dramatic.  In 1916, two prisoners who drove farm horses ran away with their steeds.  They tied them to trees in the woods around Greencastle, where the animals were later found starved to death, “tethered a few paces from an abundance of grass and water.”   A year earlier, two Indianapolis youths escaped, went on a burglary and horse-stealing spree near Terre Haute, and were then hunted down by a posse of Vigo County farmers.  When four men escaped in 1917, including an African American from Lake County,  a “sensational gun fight” ensued.  The African American, a man named Hall, was shot dead.

In May 1915, just a month after opening, there were 217 prisoners living at the farm, including 30 African Americans.  The total number that skyrocketed to almost 1,200 within a year.  In its first decade, the farm “entertained” about 25,000 prisoners.


The Huntington Press, July 30, 1921 (2)
The Huntington Press, July 30, 1921.

In 1920, a controversy broke out over allegations of cruelty at Putnamville.  Charles McNulty, an Indianapolis saloon keeper let out on parole, filed a complaint with the State Board of Health. McNulty’s claims about unsanitary conditions and violence were backed up a year later when Oscar Knight, a prisoner, filed a further complaint with a judge.  Knight claimed that jailers served inmates food that “is not fit for hogs.”

McNulty alleged that prisoners were routinely underfed and worked ten hours a day at hard labor.  Meat was only served once a week, “one slice of fat bacon,” less than what prisoners at other jails got while merely sitting in a cell.

Musty meal was used for making corn bread three times a week until Putnam County health officers forbade the use of it. . . On Sunday, five crackers is the substitute for the dry bread of weekdays.  Some of the paid guards are insulting and cruel and inhuman, especially to cripples and weaklings, using a loaded cane to beat them.

There were further allegations that Governor Goodrich’s family and “hirelings” of his administration profited from unpaid labor, since inmates at Putnamville were “farmed out” to the Globe Mining Company, partly run by the governor’s son.  Charles E. Talkington, superintendent of the penal farm, blew these charges off by claiming that McNulty was a member of the International Workers of the World (IWW) or “Wobblies” Talkington had previously been head of the Farm Colony for the Feeble-Minded in Butlerville and Bartholomew County’s school superintendent.  The “Feeble-Minded Farm” — also called the Muscatatuck Colony — was, like the epileptic “village” in New Castle, part of Indiana’s dark eugenics campaign, which blamed crime on mental retardation and figured into a backlash against immigrants and the poor.


The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, April 19, 1920
Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, April 19, 1920.

Yet early charges made about the farm were tame compared to those reported in one of the most fiery and flamboyant Hoosier newspapers Dale’s Muncie Post-Democrat.

Dale had just begun a landmark battle against the Ku Klux Klan. Though the Klan almost took over Indiana government in the 1920s, it was rooted in years of corrupt politics and arguably even social reform movements like Prohibition and eugenics.  During his long battle to expose the Muncie Klan, Dale would be attacked by gunmen who tried to shoot him and his son.  Yet the white-haired editor took on the Klan with humor, writing outrageous lampoons about “Koo-Koos” and “Kluxerdom” in his weekly paper, which was almost wholly dedicated to ridiculing the Invisible Empire.  Dale published lists of known or suspected Klan members.  He also grappled with the KKK’s powerful women’s auxiliary at a time when thousands of Hoosier Klanswomen spread hatred through families in ways that their male counterparts actually had less success at in their public roles.  Dale vocally supported blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, and anybody else targeted by the Klan.


George R. Dale
Muncie Post-Democrat editor George R. Dale, anti-Klansman extraordinaire.

Muncie Post Democrat, August 18, 1922
Muncie Post-Democrat, August 18, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.

In August 1922, Dale also came to the defense of prisoners at the State Farm.  The battle would go on for years.  Before it was over, he got a chance to see the terrors of the “Black Hole of Indiana” up close.  For criticizing a Muncie judge with links to the Klan — Clarence Dearth, a man he called “the most contemptible chunk of human carrion that ever disgraced the circuit bench in the state of Indiana” — Dale was sentenced for contempt of court and libel, fighting a four-year-long legal battle to stay out of the farm himself.  Dale’s campaign is an overlooked part of the history of freedom of speech in Indiana.

His first jab came on August 4, 1922.  That story was based on the accusations of “a man from Muncie” who had just visited Putnamville.  (Dale doesn’t give his name.)


Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922


Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922 (5)

Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922 (4)

Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922 (2)
Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922 (3) Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.

When Dale criticized a libel ruling Dearth, the judge handed him a 90-day sentence at Putnamville.  After eleven days in a Muncie jail, the editor entered the State Farm’s gates as “Convict 14,378.”  Partly through the efforts of his wife Lena, the Indiana Supreme Court ordered Dale’s release after just three days. He now had a chance to write “from actual experience”, not the reports of others.  Dale immediately set to work “serving notice on the Ku Klux Klan and its miserable tools in office.”

While wealthy bootleggers and Prohibition violators with connections in government often got off scot-free, Dale wrote that when he went to Putnamville, he stood in line with working-class men.


Muncie Post Democrat, March 23, 1923


Stepping into the prison barber’s, “in exactly ten seconds my head looked like a billiard ball.”  The 56-year-old and father of seven claimed he was then forced to strip down and shower in public, received filthy clothes that “smelled like sin,” got sprayed down by a fruit-tree sprayer, and was vaccinated by a veterinarian.  Of the eight meals he ate in the mess hall in the course of three days, he never got any meat.  He slept in a miserable, freezing dormitory with 204 other inmates, most of them sick and packed in “like sardines in a can.”


Muncie Post Democrat, March 23, 1923 (2)


Dale insisted that many of these inmates were jailed on trivial liquor charges.  He described one man whose family was left subsisting on charity while he rotted at the farm for almost two years, “having no money to pay his fine,” though prisoners were supposed to receive $1.00 a day for their labor.  Always keen to publish news about the discrepancies in punishment meted out to African Americans versus whites, Dale mentioned black teens at the penal farm sentenced for bicycle theft and other minor offenses.


Muncie Post-Democrat, April 13, 1923
Muncie Post-Democrat, April 13, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The editor put out an appeal to Governor Warren Terry McCray to investigate the “Putnamville Disgrace.”  While he commended the governor for investigating similar jail horrors in Marion County and at the new Indiana Reformatory in Pendleton, Dale insisted on “The Difference Between Men and Bulls.”  Cattle on McCray’s bull farm near Kentland lived better lives than prisoners at Putnamville, he announced.  Taking heed of these accusations, Dr. James Wilson, mayor of Wabash, Indiana, refused to send any further offenders to Putnam County “until that place of horror is changed from a torture pen into a place of punishment where convicts are treated like human beings instead of dumb brutes.”


Muncie Post-Democrat, September 1, 1922
Muncie Post-Democrat, September 1, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.

In 1926, two years after Ed Jackson, a Klansman, became Governor of Indiana, Judge Dearth and editor Dale were still fighting.  Dearth sent the newspaperman back to the penal farm once more when Dale continued to ridicule him.  Dale was also found guilty on a “trumped up” charge of liquor possession and of libeling George Roeger, a Muncie distributor of D.C. Stephenson‘s newspaper, The Fiery Cross (printed in Indianapolis).  Dale had accused him of being a “Ku Klux draft dodger.”)  A jury allegedly packed with Klansmen also declared him guilty of carrying a concealed weapon.  Dale appealed the case to the Indiana Supreme Court but lost.  Judge Julius C. Travis wrote the opinion that “the truth is no defense” and that Dale had held the law up to ridicule.  Newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere started a defense fund to support freedom of speech.

In July 1926, Dale spent a further nine days at Putnamville, digging a tile ditch.  He was released, strangely enough, by order of Governor Jackson himself.  He got another sentence in August 1927, but spent just half an hour there.  It was enough time, however, for him to be fingerprinted and booked as a convict.  He also described a conversation with a young African American, James Martin, sentenced to six months for stealing $5.00.  Martin had a wife and three children.

Judge Clarence Dearth of Muncie was later impeached.  George Dale went on to become Muncie’s mayor from 1930 to 1935.  As editor and mayor, he kept an eye on corrupt judges and police.


Muncie Post-Democrat, September 20, 1929 (2)
“The Police Carefully Pick Their Victims,” Muncie Post-Democrat, September 20, 1929. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The Indianapolis Times began a series of articles about abuse allegations that continued to come out of the Indiana State Penal Farm.  Yet the farm survived, receiving many inmates throughout the Depression.  Most came on charges of larceny, liquor offenses and issuing fraudulent checks.  Some, though, were guilty of more serious crimes, like drunk driving and child molestation.  Still others came for downright strange reasons, like a Kendallville man arrested for selling “fake radium belts” for which he claimed curative powers. Then there were the sentences that now seem downright cruel.


The Evening Republican (Columbus, Indiana), January 2, 1930
The Evening Republican, Columbus, IN, January 2, 1930. A destitute, poorly-dressed Chicago man stole an overcoat from a car in Greencastle and got three months on the farm.

Heavy drinkers were packed off to Putnamville into the 1950s. Through the 1960s, inmates milked cows, tended an orchard, and grew vegetables, also raising 18 acres of tobacco.  About 40 convicts a year escaped in the 1970s and ’80s.  Staff and guards were unarmed.

In 1977, the farm was reclassified as a medium-security prison and began receiving convicted felons, which partly contributed to the decline of farming there in the 1980s.  The State of Indiana later tried to revive dairy farming at Putnamville in the 1990s.  In 1995, the prison was operating the largest dairy farm in the county.  Yet of the farm’s 1,600 inmates that year, less than 100 were working in agriculture.

Conditions in the mid-’90s had definitely improved since the days of Prohibition.  The Kokomo Tribune reported in 1994 that 900 gallons of food scraps a day were being taken from the dining hall, mixed with cow manure, and used in a composting initiative.  That project cut the prison’s garbage bill in half.


Kokomo Tribune, December 28, 1994
Kokomo Tribune, December 28, 1994.

Now called the Putnamville Correctional Facility, the institution survives.  Almost 2,500 prisoners are there today, more than at any time in its history.


Contact:  staylor336 [AT] gmail.com

“Koo Koo Side Lights”: George Dale vs. the Klan

Dale obit

If you enjoy today’s “farcical newspaper” The Onion, in 1922 you might have sent in two dollars for a subscription to George R. Dale’s eccentric and fascinating Muncie Post-Democrat.

While The Onion lampoons everything from politicians to microwaves to bad tippers, George Dale — Indiana’s Jazz Age version of a Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart — focused his ridicule on a powerful group famous for wearing nighties and “mother goose caps” around cornfields at night.  That group, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan, whose grip on big cities and small towns alike led to its near-domination of state politics in the 1920s.

Muncie and neighboring towns like Marion, Elwood, Fairmount and New Castle were once a stronghold of the Klan.  Warding off physical assaults and threats on his life, Dale fought in the belly of the beast, bravely using humor to expose a group that lured in tens of thousands of Hoosiers, many from the middle class, under the banner of “100% Americanism.”


November 9, 1923
Muncie Post-Democrat, November 9, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

December 15, 1922
Dale ridiculed Klan recruitment in the Muncie Post-Democrat, December 15, 1922. The “ten bucks” was for a Klan robe, which made millions of dollars for the Klan’s hierarchy.

Hoosier State Chronicles, in cooperation with Ball State University Libraries’ Digital Media Repository, is proud to bring a long run of Dale’s Muncie Post-Democrat online, from 1921 through 1950. Here’s a brief bio of the man whose war on the Klan is still little-known outside Muncie, where he served as mayor from 1930 to 1935.  We’re including some of his best comic barbs here, lobbed at the not-so-Invisible Empire.

In 1930, a writer named W.A.S. Douglas wrote a long piece in The American Mercury, a magazine edited by the acerbic literary critic H.L. Mencken.  (Mencken was a famous enemy of the Klan, though his own views bordered on anti-Semitism.)  Douglas recalled that he first met George Dale during the 1925 trial of D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Klan in Indiana and many other Northern states.  Though Stephenson was indicted for the kidnap, rape and murder of an Indianapolis stenographer, a crime that involved her near-cannibalization while he was raping her, since the trial was held in Klan-dominated Noblesville, the Klansman seemed confident that his political machine could get him off the hook.  Stephenson, still in his thirties, was their “Old Man.”


Stephenson and Jackson
D.C. Stephenson and Indiana’s Klansman governor, Ed Jackson.

“There were Klansmen all around [Stephenson],” Douglas wrote about the courtroom in Hamilton County, “at the counsel-table, in the jury box, in the audience, and guarding the doors of the courtroom.  All were brothers in the secret bond.”  Then Stephenson looked over and saw a “shabby little old man,” scribbling with a pencil while casting a look that seemed to bore “right into his brain.”

This was George Dale, “a white-haired little man, well into his sixties and with the seat worn out of his pants — a man who had become a joke all over the state because alone, broke, and kicked from pillar to post, he dared to fight. . .”


George R. Dale and Family
George R. Dale and family, circa 1925.

Born in 1867 in Monticello, Indiana, Dale — son of a Civil War veteran — was orphaned by age 18.  He moved to Hartford City around 1885, where he worked for an uncle who owned the town’s first electric power plant.  In his twenties, Dale founded the Hartford City Times, then the Montpelier Call.  He married Lena Mohler in 1900 and the couple had seven children.  Around 1920, the Dales came to Muncie on the eve of the Klan’s takeover there.

In a study conducted by Hoosier-born sociologist Robert Staughton Lynd and his wife Helen, Muncie became the first American town to ever be systematically dissected on a sociologist’s “operating table.”  The Lynds chose Muncie mostly for its averageness.  Their 1929 book Middletown wasn’t flattering.  Nor was the description that W.A.S. Douglas left:  “I well remember this Indiana city when it weltered in starkness; when it tucked its tail between its legs and ran from the sound and the smell of cowshed-perfumed klansmen…”

Douglas’ stereotype wasn’t totally accurate.  Muncie wasn’t all Klan.  And the most influential Klansmen weren’t farmers.  Klan influence was strong in big cities, too, with large membership in Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis, where D.C. Stephenson turned out his own newspaper, The Fiery CrossAnd in the ’20s, the Klan had more support in the Midwest than in the Deep South.


Klansman at Union Station
“Klansman at Union Station,” Indiana, circa 1930. Courtesy Indiana Memory/Ball State University Libraries.

Klan ideology in the ’20s also differed from its focus during the Civil Rights Movement in the ’50s and ’60s. While never friendly to African Americans, the “second wave” of the Klan was mostly interested in halting immigration, undermining perceived Catholic and Jewish influence in American politics and schools, enforcing Prohibition, and protecting the “purity of American womanhood.”  A new religious movement, Protestant fundamentalism, also fueled the Klan’s rise, with ideologues hijacking religion to stir up nativism.  It’s no coincidence that 1925 was the year both of Stephenson’s trial in Indiana and the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.

George Dale and others went to work documenting the hypocrisy of the Klan’s basic principles — from “100% Americanism” to a ludicrous KKK resolution passed in Muncie proclaiming that Jesus Christ was a white Protestant native-born American and not a Jew.


March 28, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, March 28, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The Klan didn’t invent nativism.  Waves of immigrants like the Germans, Irish, Italians and Eastern European Jews all suffered the slander of earlier settlers. Anti-Semitism came into the mix whenever Jews joined labor unions, the Socialist Party, and supported the Russian Revolution.  (D.C. Stephenson himself, however, had briefly been a Socialist in Oklahoma.)

When Dale turned the spotlight on anti-Catholicism, he had to deal with fears going back decades, all the way back to the Reformation and the roots of the war in Northern Ireland.  As late as the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, many Americans feared that Catholics would take over American politics and schools, then hand the country over to the Pope.

Dale thought the Northern Irish roots of bigotry worth pointing out, especially when it turned out that a busy anti-Catholic editor had taken a long time to get American citizenship, something prized by the Klan.


April 11, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, April 11, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles. Dale noticed that many professional anti-Catholics, like the editor of the The American Citizen, had serious moral failings.

When Dale took jabs at the shady goings-on in Newark, Ohio he was criticizing his own town on the sly.  It’s hard to say how truthful Dale’s “reportage” was, but his satire cut to the bone.


May 16, 1924 (2)
Muncie Post-Democrat, May 16, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Muncie Post-Democrat, May 4, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Helen Jackson -- January 4, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, January 4, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles. Anti-Catholicism was probably stronger in parts of the Midwest than in the Deep South. At the height of Klan influence in 1928, Al Smith, the first Catholic and Italian-American to run for president on a major party ticket, carried six states in the Deep South.  He won just two in the North and none in the West, losing to Herbert Hoover.

When it came to mocking the thousands of women who got involved with the KKK, conventions regarding the treatment of “ladies” didn’t hold him back.  Dale even used two prominent “Camelias” — as the Women of the Ku Klux Klan were known — as journalistic target practice. One was the infamous Helen Jackson (mentioned above), a bogus “escaped nun” who helped spread Klan propaganda around the Midwest.  Jackson, daughter of Polish immigrants, had actually been a teenage prostitute who was sent to a Catholic reform school for “wayward” girls in Detroit.  In fairness, her experience there was probably harsh, but her stories of escaping from a convent — stories she told in a book called Convent Cruelties — drew on generations of anti-Catholic fiction and folklore.


Fiery Cross 12-08-1922-3
The Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.

In the 1920s, Helen Jackson and a sidekick “ex-priest” — a French-Canadian Holiness preacher, L.J. King — gave lectures in American auditoriums and churches, where they mocked Catholic religious practices, spread fear about priestly tortures and Vatican takeover of the U.S., and incited riots, some of them deadly.  Jackson and King were busy stirring up religious hatred in Indiana just before the crucial 1924 election, when Hoosiers put a Klansman, Ed Jackson — no relation to Helen — in the governor’s seat.

Dale lampooned her as just another fraudulent “Koo Koo klucker” interested in profiting off the sale of hate.  He was eager to announce her arrival in Muncie in November 1922, when he could debunk her.  The “ex-nun” Helen Jackson actually visited Muncie several times, causing so much trouble there that she eventually got kicked even by Muncie’s Klan-friendly police.  Her companion, L.J. King, was also well-known to cops.  When he started charging extra admission rates for “men’s only” lectures — where he made lurid allegations about sex in confessionals — a few towns, like Phoenix, drove him out for insulting women and for spreading “verbal filth.” George Dale, who was not Catholic, relished the rumor that King had once had links to  an “Indian medicine show” and that his mother in Canada thought “he had always been a bad boy.”  Jackson and King were on the road throughout the 1920s, critical operatives of the Klan.


Helen Jackson -- November 10, 1922
Muncie Post-Democrat, November 10, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.

May 16, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, May 16, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

A favorite target for Dale, however, was the influential Hoosier Quaker minister Daisy Douglass Barr, who headed the women’s auxiliary of the KKK.  Barr had once been a well-known reformer in central Indiana, espousing Prohibition, shutting down red-light districts, and reforming prostitutes.  Well-meaning reformers like her often had their dark side, however, as the history of the Indiana Women’s Prison illustrates.  In theory, Klan rhetoric supported “womanly purity” and the banning of booze though a plethora of sex abusers, bootleggers, and rapists joined the rank and file of the Klan, including Stephenson, its leader.  (W.S.A. Douglass referred to Indiana’s Grand Dragon as a “booze-soaked printer.”)

George Dale despised Daisy Barr, who lived in Indianapolis for years but was influential in Muncie politics and in her native Grant County next door.  Dale put some of his best comic language to work to help take down Barr.  Mocking the Klan’s absurd titles, he called her the “Quakeress Fakeress,” “Daisy Doodle Barr,” “champion Kluxerino of Indiana,” and “prize gold digger of the Klan.”


December 7, 1923
Muncie Post-Democrat, December 7, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Women of the KKK — known as “Camelias” or “Kamelias” — attend a funeral in Muncie, circa 1923. They flew the Stars & Stripes, not the Confederate flag. Courtesy Indiana Memory/Ball State University Libraries.

Investigations eventually exposed the Reverend Barr’s greed.  The influential Quaker minister had pocketed a fortune from the sale of Klan robes to women.  George Dale was quick to argue that the business of the KKK’s leadership, in fact, was just that — a business, one that fleeced “suckers” out of their “boob money.”  Members got “nighties” in return.


June 6, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, June 6, 1924. “Hi” was Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans of Atlanta.

March 28, 1924 (5)
Muncie Post-Democrat, March 28, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The editor of the Muncie Post-Democrat wasn’t making millions from his poetry.  Nor did exposing the “Ku Klux Quaker” or anybody else help ensure his personal safety.   Yet in spite of death threats made against him and his family — with Klansmen shooting at him and attacking his home — Dale had the courage to continue publishing the names of Klansfolk in Ohio and Indiana as soon as he got his hands on membership lists.  For all their parading through the streets, many members still wanted their involvement with the Invisible Empire kept secret — including gubernatorial candidate Ed Jackson himself.  When the extent of Daisy Barr’s business with the Klan came out, she was forced to step down as chaplain of the Indiana War Mothers.


May 2, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, May 2, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Muncie Post-Democrat, August 1, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, August 1, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

May 9, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, May 9, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

June 13, 1924
Muncie Post-Democrat, June 13, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles.

George Dale’s campaign against the KKK was part of a national movement to discredit it.  Newspapers and religious leaders led the campaign.  While religion had played a disturbing role in fueling the Klan’s growth, it also played a major role in debunking it.  Over the next few decades, the opposition of Protestant ministers like Reinhold Niebuhr — not to mention Martin Luther King — helped erode support for the Klan, though the organization survives.

In 1923, Catholic members of the Indianapolis police force did their own part, breaking into a Klan office on College Avenue, stealing a membership list, and publishing it in Tolerance, an anti-KKK paper in Chicago.  (In light of the deadly Paris attacks in November 2015, the activist group Anonymous is doing something similar, hacking websites and publishing the personal details, addresses and Twitter handles of suspected ISIS extremists.)   Other Hoosier newspapers, including the Indiana Jewish Chronicle, the Indianapolis Freeman, the Indiana Catholic & Record, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Indianapolis Times all attacked the misinformation and bigotry spouted by the Klan.  D.C. Stephenson’s murder trial, which exposed the organization’s hypocrisy at its worst, also helped debunk the Klan credo.

Even in Muncie, the tide had begun to turn.  Embattled and fearing for his life in the mid-1920s, George R. Dale won the 1929 mayor’s race. His first action was to fire the forty-two members of the Muncie police force.

An indictment for violating Prohibition laws in 1932 overshadowed Dale’s mayoral career.  When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt repealed Prohibition soon after coming into office, he issued Dale a presidential pardon on Christmas Eve 1933.

The editor’s journalistic battle for civil decency had taken a toll on his health and finances.  He had also gone blind in one eye.  Yet Dale was at work at a typewriter right up to the moment of his death.  Surrounded by his family, and having just typed out one last editorial, George Dale died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 27, 1936, at his home in Muncie.


Dale obit 2
Muncie Post-Democrat, March 27, 1936. Hoosier State Chronicles.

 

Contact:  staylor336 [AT] gmail.com

Movember: A Medical Moment

The Greencastle Democrat, January 26, 1900(The Greencastle Democrat, January 26, 1900.)


“Movember” or “No-Shave November” is a new tradition dating only back to 2003, when a group of Australians started growing “Mos” (Australian slang for “‘stache”) to raise awareness of men’s health issues, especially prostate cancer and depression.  As many cancer patients lose their hair, some men this season are paying homage to the golden days when spectacular whiskers grew wild and free.

There’s more than a little five-o’clock foreshadowing, then, in that mustachioed dandy from 1900 pictured above.  “Nervita pills” were  one of many old-time panaceas that purported to relieve some of the more difficult masculine ailments, though this one, of course, wouldn’t cure one of the worst, cancer.  Contrary to the cartoon version of history, the American public really did talk about sex-related issues back then — not necessarily on the front page, but certainly in the ads section, which was often full of treatments from doctors and drug store owners.

Since Hoosier State Chronicles often highlights episodes of American medical history,  here’s our tribute to “No-Shave November.”  We waded through a plethora of debonair mustachios and culled some worthy ones.  Many yet remain for your discovery.

Amazingly, as an Indianapolis barber feared in November 1902, these bold bristles would soon enough go out of style.  The Hoosier State’s own Benjamin Harrison was among the last generation of unshorn presidents.  Since William Howard Taft in 1913, no president has sported facial hair, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, whose disastrous five-o’clock shadow contributed to his loss to JFK in 1960.  Even the boldest and most unconventional candidates in the coming election year don’t appear prepared to change this.

It was good business for the barber, at least.


Indianapolis Journal, November 16, 1902Indianapolis Journal, November 16, 1902 (2)Indianapolis Journal, November 16, 1902 (3)

(Indianapolis Journal, November 16, 1902.)


Indianapolis Recorder, January 15, 1910(Indianapolis Recorder, January 15, 1910.)


The Greencastle Democrat, October 30, 1903 (2)(The Greencastle Democrat, October 30, 1903.)


The Greencastle Democrat, January 16, 1897(The Greencastle Democrat, January 16, 1897.)


Indianapolis Recorder, February 19, 1910(Indianapolis Recorder, February 19, 1910.)


Indianapolis Recorder, July 30, 1910(Indianapolis Recorder, July 30, 1910.)


Indianapolis Journal, July 7, 1891(Indianapolis Journal, July 7, 1891.)


The following image from the cover of The Jewish Post (a national paper first printed in Indianapolis in 1933) isn’t Santa Claus, but a rabbi.  The paper’s Rosh Hashanah or Jewish New Years’ edition came out in September 1939, just a few weeks into World War II.


Jewish Post, September 14, 1939

(The Jewish Post, September 14, 1939.)


Indianapolis Journal, May 3, 1892

(Indianapolis Journal, May 3, 1892.)


Fort Wayne Daily News, August 29, 1896

(“A mix-up in bicycle polo,” Fort Wayne Daily News, August 29, 1896.)


Some native Hoosiers were known to sport impressive facial — or overgrowth, depending on your point of view.  Lew Wallace, the Crawfordsville native who became colonel of the 11th Indiana Infantry (a Zouave regiment), Civil War general, territorial governor of New Mexico, author of the novel Ben Hur, and U.S. Minister to Turkey.  Wallace’s Ben Hur came out on “this day in history,” November 12, 1880.


Lew Wallace(Major General Lew Wallace.)


Benjamin Harrison(A younger Benjamin Harrison, Indiana’s only president.)


Lawrenceburg’s James Henry “Jim” Lane became one of the most famous Jayhawk border fighters in Kansas during the run-up to the Civil War.  A fiery abolitionist, Lane served as Lieutenant Governor of Indiana before he became a U.S. Senator from Kansas and a Civil War general.  Wracked by depression, the famous wild and unkempt Hoosier Plainsman committed suicide in 1866 by shooting himself in the head while jumping out of a carriage.


Jim Lane(Jim Lane, Hoosier native and Kansas “Jayhawk.”)


In 1852, Lane was part of the welcoming committee at the State House when one of the most famously hairy men of his time, Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, paid a visit to Indianapolis.  Kossuth — after whom a town in Washington County, Indiana, and a county in Iowa was named — had just escaped from Hungary via Turkey, been carried into exile on the USS Mississippi, and was touring the U.S., where crowds hailed him as a hero of democracy. Kossuth also inspired some Indianapolis men to become “hairy-faced bipeds.”


Kossuth in Washington D.C.(Lajos Kossuth, photographed in Washington, D.C., before he traveled west to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis in early 1852.)


Madison Daily Banner, March 3, 1852 (4)

(Madison Daily Banner, Madison, Indiana, March 3, 1852.)


One famous mustachioed American who often showed up in Indiana was the great boxing champion John L. Sullivan.  Sullivan was from Boston but often came to the small-town Midwest for championship matches and general showmanship.  He and his whiskers showed up in Logansport, Fort Wayne, and other towns in 1896.

Yet even the athletic Sullivan could have paid more attention to his own health.  A heavy drinker for most of his life, the boxer later gave up the bottle and turned Prohibitionist  Yet his overindulgence in food and booze led Sullivan to an early death at the age of just 59.  It was said he died with “barely ten dollars in his pocket.”


John L Sullivan(John L. Sullivan, 1858-1918.)


The Fort Wayne News, August 22, 1896 (The Fort Wayne News, August 22, 1896.)


Here’s another wild but lesser known visitor to the state.  The famous shagginess of Polish pianist and composer Ignaz Jan Paderewski, “Wizard of the Keys,” was something that newspapers often noticed and editorialized.

In April 1902, Paderewski performed at Tomlinson Hall (above the “city catacombs”) in Indianapolis.  This performer led a life as wild and varied as the direction of his hair.  In addition to his global career as a concert artist, Paderewski later become a wine-grower in California and a politician who helped re-establish Polish independence after World War I.  After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1940, he became the head of the Polish parliament exiled in London. Paderewski died in New York in 1941.


Indianapolis Journal, April 6, 1902 (2)

(Indianapolis Journal, April 6, 1902.)


Indianapolis News, November 6, 1900(Indianapolis News, November 6, 1900.)


One last forgotten visitor worthy of note for his ‘stache was the spectacular Captain Jack Bonavita (real name John F. Gentner). The Indiana Tribüne announced Bonavita’s visit to “the Zoo” in 1901.  This wasn’t the Indianapolis Zoo, but the old Zoo Theater, a vaudeville venue that once sat next to the Cyclorama across from the State House.

A famous animal trainer in New York and Hollywood, Captain Bonavita also worked with the silent film industry.  Not long after this photo was taken, he was bitten by one of his trained lions in Indianapolis and spent some time at the City Hospital.  He recovered from that bite in 1901.  Tragically, in 1917, Bonavita was killed by a polar bear he was training.


Indiana Tribune, January 13, 1901

(Indiana Tribüne, January 13, 1901.)


While ladies are often divided on the virtues of male facial hair. . .

(Plymouth Tribune, March 5, 1903.)


. . . if you’re sporting any extra growth this season, Hoosier State Chronicles invites you to  take a bow.

Indianapolis Journal, February 2, 1890

(Indianapolis Journal, February 2, 1890.)

73 Years of The Jewish Post

Jewish Post, May 8, 1936 (3)
Jewish Post, May 8, 1936. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Hoosier State Chronicles has just uploaded over 3,500 issues of The Jewish Post, a historic weekly (now biweekly) published Indianapolis since 1933.  Here’s a bit of the paper’s history — and of Jewish journalism in the Midwest.

While the center of American Jewish culture has always been identified as New York, the Ohio Valley saw the birth of one of the first Jewish-run periodicals in the U.S.  This was Cincinnati’s The Israelite.

Founded in July 1854, and today printed under the title The American Israelite, this paper is the oldest surviving Jewish news organ in the country.  After the London Jewish Chronicle, begun in 1841, it is the second oldest in the world.  Cincinnati’s The Israelite was the brain child of pioneer Austrian rabbi Dr. Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), who was also one of the founders of Hebrew Union College, the oldest Jewish seminary in the Americas.  During World War II, HUC attracted one of the great Jewish theologians and Civil Rights leaders, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who called the Midwest home for a few years while serving on the school’s faculty.


The Israelite, September 16, 1859
The Israelite, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 15, 1859.

Jewist Post, July 16, 1937 (4)
The Jewish Post, July 16, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Before 1900, small towns in the Midwest and South were often home to much larger Jewish communities than today.  Even seemingly far-flung rural places like Woodville, Mississippi; Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Harlan, Kentucky, had sizable Jewish populations.  With the plantation economy of the South closely tied to the shipment of products up and down the rivers between New Orleans and the Midwest, Jewish merchants settled all over the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.  Though most Jews later left for opportunities in cities, the Institute of Southern Jewish Life has documented the fascinating history of Jews in small-town America.

Some settled in Indiana.  One of the first European Jews to come here was Louis (Ludwig) Dembitz, an immigrant from Prussian Poland who practiced law in the thriving river town of Madison, Indiana, around 1850.  When the great Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth visited Madison in 1852, Dembitz translated his speech (given in German).  He later edited a German-language newspaper in Louisville, the Beobachter am Ohio.  Louis Dembitz was also the uncle of Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court.  Brandeis, who died in 1941, changed his middle name from David to Dembitz to honor him.  In 1855, the judge’s parents were married at a now-defunct synagogue in Madison, Indiana.


Weekly Reveille (Vevay, Indiana), August 11, 1853
Weekly Reveille, Vevay, Indiana, August 11, 1853.

Even tiny towns like Ligonier in Noble County occasionally had small Jewish populations early on in their history.  One of the first Jews in the Wabash Valley was the Vincennes trader Samuel Judah (1798-1869).  Descended from a family of Spanish Jews who moved to Canada and New York, Judah bought land in Terre Haute in the 1820s and went into politics.  In 1840-41, he served as Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives.

Before Chicago grew into a huge metropolis after the Civil War and before trains eclipsed river traffic, life in the Midwest was largely focused on the Ohio Valley.  Indianapolis’ Jewish Post, in fact, began in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1930.

Expanded and printed in several different state editions, this paper was created by long-time owner and editor Gabriel Murrel Cohen (1908-2007).  Born in Louisville, Cohen earned a Bachelor’s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1930 — the same year he went home to Kentucky to start The Jewish Post at age 22.  Though Cohen moved his editorial offices moved to Indianapolis in 1935, he kept a printing office in Louisville into the 1940s and often carried ads for businesses in “Falls City.”

Advertised as “A Journal for Indiana Jewry,” in fact for years this was really a bi-state paper.


Gabriel Murrel Cohen
Kentucky-born, North Carolina-educated Gabriel Murrel Cohen moved the Jewish Post to Indianapolis in 1935, when he was 27. He died in 2007.

Jewish Post, September 14, 1939 (2)
The Jewish Post, September 14, 1939. Hoosier State Chronicles. This issue celebrated the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. “Falls City” was one of the Ohio Valley’s most popular brews from the end of Prohibition in 1933 until the original brewery closed down in 1978.

The year 1933 was a momentous one for beginning a Jewish newspaper in the Midwest.  The state had only recently been freed up from the grip of the powerful Ku Klux Klan, which dominated Hoosier politics until about 1927.  In a battle spearheaded by newspapers like the Indianapolis Times — which urged Hoosiers to remember that “Indiana is not Russia” — the Klan had just fallen from power when the first issue of The Jewish Post came out.  A decade earlier, the KKK’s mouthpiece, The Fiery Cross, was printed in the Century Building, under the editorship of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson — a professional anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, racist, and one of the most powerful men in America.  A mainstream organization in the Twenties, the KKK touted “100% Americanism,” Protestantism, anti-immigrant attitudes, and female purity, as well as the federal prohibition of alcohol.

Franklin Roosevelt repealed Prohibition in 1933, the year The Jewish Post was first printed under the editorship of Leonard Rothschild.  In late 1935, Gabriel Cohen’s Spokesman Company bought Rothschild out.  Originally based at 505 West Washington Street, the editorial offices briefly moved to the East Side by 1936, when Cohen was based at 2101 East Washington Street in a building that later housed the dingy California Nite Club.  Cohen and his staff were back downtown in 1937, operating in the Majestic Building and Meridian Life Building.


Jewish Post, March 1933
The Jewish Post, March 1933. Hoosier State Chronicles.

While the new 4-page paper carried local news of Jewish interest from Indiana, Kentucky and the U.S., during the 1930s and 1940s its front pages focused on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the plight of European Jews.

Yet The Jewish Post didn’t  only announce the perils of anti-Semitism overseas and at home.  The paper also affirmed Jewish identity in Indianapolis and helped Hoosiers get to know themselves and their neighbors better.

A regular feature in early issues of The Jewish Post was a series of biographies of prominent — and promising — Indiana Jews.  The paper typically ran these profiles ran every week.  One focused on Ed Rose, a 20-year-old staff writer on the Indiana Daily Student at IU-Bloomington, in July 1937.


Jewish Post, July 16, 1937
The Jewish Post, July 23, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Jewish Post, August 20, 1937 (2)
The Jewish Post, August 20, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Jewish Post, August 20, 1937
The Jewish Post, August 20, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.

In 1937, Gabriel Cohen also serialized “A History of the Jews of Indianapolis” by Harry Dale, a story that begins in 1856, when fourteen men began looking for a site for a Jewish cemetery.  Split between several local congregations, these officially separate burial grounds are known colloquially as “Kelly Street” and located just off South Meridian in a part of the Old Southside that was once heavily German, with some Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Greek households among them.


Jewish Post, August 13, 1937
The Jewish Post, August 13, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Gabriel Cohen’s Jewish Post also gave attention to the development of Zionism, the effort to set up a homeland for Jews.  After World War II, that place turned out to be Israel, but Zionists once considered spots as far away as Saskatchewan and South America, as well.

Over the years, The Jewish Post took up the cause of interfaith  unity.  In its early days, it also covered the concern loss of Jewish identity in the face not just of the Holocaust, but of Americanization.  Cohen’s paper ran occasional articles that document both the evolution of American Jewish identity and the struggle of Jews to stay true to their historic roots.

One interesting example came with the extremely rare production of a Yiddish play in Indianapolis.  In March 1934, Maurice Schwartz, father of the “Golden Age of Yiddish Theater,” performed on stage at English’s on Monument Circle downtown.  Schwartz was a Ukrainian-born actor raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  In 1918, he founded the Yiddish Art Theatre  At English’s Theater, Schwartz played a lead role in the Yoshe Kalb, which told the story of a Hasidic mystic.  Before Schwartz’s death in 1960, he went on to work with a struggling young Jewish actor named Leonard Nimoy, who came from a Ukrainian Jewish family in Boston spoke Yiddish fluently.  The man who played Star Trek’s Mr. Spock remembered Schwartz as his “theatrical father.”


Jewish Post, May 11, 1934
Jewish Post, May 11, 1934. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Jewish Post, May 15, 1936
Jewish Post, May 15, 1936. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Jewish Post, May 15, 1936 (2)
Jewish Post, May 15, 1936. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Indianapolis didn’t have the only Jewish newspaper in the Midwest in those years.  An even earlier paper, Chicago’s The Sentinel, dated back to 1911.  In 1921, Milwaukee saw the birth of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (digitized on Newspapers.com).  The Ohio Jewish Chronicle began in Columbus in 1922, followed by the Detroit Jewish News in 1942 and the St. Louis Jewish Light in 1947.

In 1948, Gabriel Cohen expanded his paper nationally.  In addition to the original Indiana edition, he ran a special Missouri edition from 1948 until 1992.  Along with its Indiana edition, the National Jewish Post & Opinion is still in print today.


Jewish Post, June 18, 1937 (2)
Shapiro’s has long been the cornerstone of Indianapolis delicatessens, though it’s the last of the Jewish businesses of the Old Southside. The Jewish Post, June 18, 1937. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Jewish Post, November 2, 1962
The Jewish Post, November 2, 1962. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Based on West 86th Street in Indianapolis, the newspaper is now a biweekly.  In addition to its longstanding commitment to interfaith dialogue, The Jewish Post & Opinion defines its mission as “To support Israel and to fight anti-Semitism. To heal and repair the world (tikkun olam). To protect, promote, and preserve time-honored Jewish values such as ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”

In cooperation with IUPUI’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the staff of The Jewish Post & Opinion, Hoosier State Chronicles has brought 73 years of this historic journal’s Indiana edition online — from the very first issue in 1933 all the way up through 2005.


Jewish Post, November 9, 2005 (3)
The Jewish Post & Opinion, November 9, 2005. Hoosier State Chronicles.