Category Archives: Newspaper histories

Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Newspaper histories, Project News

Digitizing Newspapers in Indiana: Hoosier State Chronicles

Newspapers are an essential historical resource for researchers, journalists, and genealogists by capturing the lives and events of individuals in a particular area throughout the years as well as reporting national news. However, even under the best climate and preservation circumstances, the longevity of newspapers is hindered by the relatively short lifespan of newsprint, a thinner and lower quality of paper. One solution in the past was the use of microfilm or microforms. According to Managing Microforms in the Digital Age from the American Library Association, “microfilm has been used since the 1940s for the long-term storage of newspaper content because the medium preserves file integrity, maintains the proper sequence of the data, and discourages theft.”[i] Libraries and historical organizations have used these tools for years, but even microfilm has limitations. It takes up a great deal of space, is expensive to produce, and often requires on-site access.

Over the past twenty years, institutions have shifted their focus from microfilm to digital formats. To aid this transition, the Library of Congress, with funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), executed a nationwide newspaper project from 1982 to 2011 called the United States Newspaper Program, which cataloged and collected newspapers nationwide. However, in 2005, the Library of Congress and NEH formed the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) and its digital newspaper database, Chronicling America, which offers free access to digitized historic newspapers from across the country via partnerships with statewide organizations.[ii] Indiana’s largest collection of digitized newspapers are housed within the Indiana State Library’s own database, Hoosier State Chronicles.

As a project, Hoosier State Chronicles focused on digitizing newspapers at the state and local levels- sometimes through the NDNP or institutional partners, but often by partnering with groups endeavoring to save their local papers. The efforts of these smaller organizations have been hindered by the lack of information about how to begin such a process, as well as securing the necessary resources to handle storage, digitization costs, and labor. This blog provides an introduction to the entire process of how newspapers are selected, organized, digitized, and publicly shared through Hoosier State Chronicles. To begin, let us start with the formation of Hoosier State Chronicles and its collection of digitized newspapers.

OUR HISTORY AND COLLECTION

Indiana’s largest public repository of microfilmed newspapers is managed at the Indiana State Library and contains over 3,000 titles. In 2011, the Indiana State Library, Indiana Historical Bureau, and Indiana Historical Society collaborated on the first grant for Chronicling America, which digitized over 100,000 pages of Indiana newspapers. After the initial two-year grant cycle, the Indiana State Library and Indiana Historical Bureau, (now part of the Indiana State Library,) took over future efforts to digitize Indiana papers, eventually creating the Hoosier State Chronicles website in 2015 and receiving three more NDNP grants for digitizing newspapers. This included collaborations with Indiana colleges and universities to digitize partial collections, as well as partnerships with community organizations to digitize local papers through grants.

Today, Hoosier State Chronicles has a collection of over 950,000 pages and 124,000 issues, ranging from pre-statehood (The Indiana Gazette, 1804) to contemporary newspapers (The Muncie Gazette, 2011). The Indianapolis Recorder contains the longest run in the collection with 96 years of newspapers, but because it was a weekly paper, the whole run only contains around 5,000 issues. The largest number of issues for a single newspaper belongs to the Indianapolis News, with over 12,304 issues over 38 years, though The Daily Banner from Greencastle comes in a close second with 10,649 issues spread over 68 years.

An important element of Hoosier State Chronicles is an effort to digitize newspapers across all of Indiana. Of the state’s 92 counties, Hoosier State Chronicles contains newspapers from 54. This is not to say every county in our collection offers an equal number of newspapers or pages. The largest county in our collection by both number of newspapers and pages is easily Marion County, with 25 newspapers and over 43,000 issues. And the smallest? Posey County’s New-Harmony and Nashoba Gazette, or, Free Enquirer with one solitary issue. Does this mean that the counties with lower representation in Chronicles are less important? By no means! Limitations in access to historic newspapers, financial resources, or the quality of the papers have hindered our efforts to share titles from every area in the state. However, smaller or scattered issues may come to us as a part of a community effort to preserve some part of their history digitally. If even one newspaper represents a unique region, time-period, or subject, we absolutely want it to be a part of our collection.

Our collection covers a broad range of eras in Indiana history. The oldest newspapers in our collection begin prior to statehood in 1804 with Vincennes’ Indiana Gazette, the earliest newspaper in the state, as well as its successor, the Western Sun. Two areas of strength for the collection are pre-Civil War and late 1800s newspapers, including early runs of the Indianapolis News, Indianapolis Journal, Indiana State Sentinel, Crawfordsville Daily Journal, and several in Terre Haute and Evansville. In the early 1900s, titles like the Richmond Palladium and Hammond Times provide terrific materials from eastern and northwest Indiana. Greencastle is also an area with multiple papers during these eras, particularly The Daily Banner and associated papers. The latest title in our collection is that of the Muncie Times in 2011, giving us 207 years of collections to share.

Another facet of our newspaper collection is the variety of materials in the collection. Politically, the collection displays contrasting perspectives, with newspapers supporting Republicans and Democrats, Whigs and Socialists. These feature both local and national news, often sharing the statewide perspectives of several parties. In regards to ethnic and racial diversity, we still have a long way to go. As mentioned previously, The Indianapolis Recorder, an African American newspaper, is the longest run in our collection. Additionally, the Evansville Argus and Muncie Times also share African American culture in Indiana throughout the late 30s-early 40s and the 1990s-early 2010s, respectively. Another long run of ethnic and cultural newspapers is the Jewish Post, later called The Indiana Jewish Post & Opinion, with issues from 1933 until 2005. Finally, the Indiana Tribüne has the distinction of being both the only predominantly-German newspaper and the only foreign language newspaper in Hoosier State Chronicles.

While every newspaper occasionally offers controversial news, Hoosier State Chronicles contains one newspaper that is especially difficult for modern readers. The Fiery Cross, a Ku Klux Klan newspaper out of Indianapolis, was published during the early 1920s. Despite its nature as an official newspaper of a hate group, it nevertheless provides insights to the rise of the organization during the 1920s, when they gained immense political power. It also highlights both the explicit and subtle racism and cultural biases of the Klan, particularly against African American, Jewish, Catholic, and immigrant individuals and groups.

One newspaper not included in this list, but that is coming soon to Hoosier State Chronicles is the Indianapolis Times. The Times was an influential newspaper from the 1920s through the 1960s, whose exposure of the Ku Klux Klan’s influence on Indiana politics won them the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1928. They also covered other social issues like corruption in the prison system during the 1930s as well as inadequate care in the mental health-care system and corruption in state road projects in the 1950s.[iii] We are currently digitizing a large portion of the newspaper in two steps. First, 1922 through 1936 is being digitized through a NEH-funded partnership with the Library of Congress Chronicling America project, where these resources will be shared. Later issues between 1936 and the early 1950s are currently being digitized through a partnership with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and a grant from the Central Indiana Community Foundation. Once completed, close to thirty years of this daily newspaper will be available on Hoosier State Chronicles.

DIGITIZING PAPERS: SELECTION

Selecting newspapers can be challenging due to several factors. When assessing where our collection needs to grow, meeting community needs is first and foremost to the process. For the past eight years, Chronicling America and the Library of Congress assisted Hoosier State Chronicles through a NEH grant to digitize nearly fifty newspapers. Yet, sometimes the desire to digitize Indiana newspapers comes from communities. We assist them through the process of securing grants, selecting vendors, and creating appropriate digital resources that can be added to Hoosier State Chronicles. [iv]

Next comes determining what newspapers are readily available for scanning and processing. Oftentimes, this comes from the collection at the Indiana State Library, with over 3,000 newspapers from the state available on microfilm. Using microfilmed reels (1st/2nd generation negative master reels or 2nd generation positive service reels) makes processing faster and the materials easier to ship. However, some newspapers have limited availability due to scarcity of service copies or the lack of original master reels. Creating new-microfilm copies can be difficult due to few companies offering the service at a manageable cost.

Though we may have microfilmed copies of newspapers in the State Library, it does not necessarily mean all are available for digitization. First and foremost, copyright restrictions limit which newspapers are candidates. Justin Clark, former Project Manager for Hoosier State Chronicles, wrote an extensive blog on the subject last year:

Have you ever wondered why the vast majority of NDNP’s content, and most digitized newspaper content, ends around 1923? It’s for a very simple reason: all works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. No copyright research is necessary for this material; it’s free and clear for you to use. However, NDNP announced in 2016 that it has expanded its date range for newspaper titles, from 1836-1922 to 1690-1963. Thus, post-1923 works are in the public domain if a copyright claim was never filed from 1923 through 1977 or if the copyright was never renewed from 1923 through 1963.

This means that more recent newspapers may be wholly or partially unavailable due to copyright concerns, including advertisements or cartoons that could fall under intellectual property laws. That is why only three newspapers appear in our collection after 1971: the Indianapolis Recorder, the Jewish Post and Opinion, and the Muncie Times. These papers are available in Hoosier State Chronicles with the permission of the newspapers’ owners.

However, even newspapers that fall outside the copyright permissions may have other restrictions. Some newspapers have been sold or given to for-profit organizations for digitization or distribution, giving them exclusive access for digital distribution as long as the copyright is in place. Local communities who digitize through for-profit companies often gain access to the files in perpetuity, but at the detriment to those outside of the community who must pay for the digital version through a subscription. The cost of subscription, as well as restrictions on use, limits the average consumer from being able to view these for research or genealogy. Oftentimes, they are marketed as subscriptions to libraries or other organizations for popular use. Hoosier State Chronicles, Chronicling America, and other organizations involved with the NDNP offer newspapers in their collections for free to the public, giving alternatives to researchers, the public, and local communities.[v]

The last two concerns are intertwined: cost and time. Digitization can be a lengthy process, often taking months or years for larger collections. We will cover more in the next section, but the hours required to create a high-quality digital copy may be beyond the resources of smaller organizations. Additionally, the various costs involved with the acquisition, shipping, scanning, processing, and completing a run of newspapers may be daunting, but finding programs and grants to help relieve the burden is often a major part of starting such a program.

DIGITIZING NEWSPAPERS: PROCESSING

Example of an original document scan and a grayscale edited copy,
which makes the text clearer and more legible. Image Credit: Jill Black, ISL

Once a newspaper is selected and deemed eligible for digitization with no restrictions, the process of assessing the collection can begin. The initial process often involves cataloging each newspaper issue to verify its condition, making sure all pages are included and duplicates are noted, sorting to make sure all images are in order, notating any errors in the original print run, and marking flaws in the microfilm. This step can take months to complete in order to provide a thorough template for individuals digitizing the information and adding metadata (the data that organizes and makes the pages and newspapers searchable), as well as keeping meticulous records to assure everything leaving can be accounted for when it returns.

There are several potential options for the digitization process, and many of these depend on the size and number of reels for the newspaper. If the number of newspapers is small enough, or in a physical medium, it may be handled by a local or state agency like the Indiana State Library, who have on-site digital scanning capabilities. However, for larger runs of newspapers, outside companies will likely be required to handle both the digitization and metadata. While there are many options for vendors, the quality requirements, size of the order, and cost may dictate which vendor to go with.

While the scale of work may vary, the system of digitizing large and small projects is very similar. The images are photographed by a high-quality digital scanner that scans the whole document, captures the fine details, and avoids capturing text bleeding through from the other side. From there, the images will be modified for readability, removing flaws and cropping out extraneous space. Files are usually saved in multiple formats for different uses: TIFF files are the highest quality and provide the archival copy, but are extremely large; JPG or JPG2 files provide usable quality copies at a lower resolution and size than TIFF files; and PDF files, which can vary in quality and size, can be downloaded by the public.

Metadata creation is distinctive from the digital scanning process, and while both systems need to work collaboratively, each could be performed by separate vendors. Metadata is the “data about your data” that gives images their descriptions, allows them to be easily sorted, and provides an order and structure to the files. If you are not familiar with metadata, think about how newspapers are numbered. Each issue of a newspaper has a volume number, an edition and a date that gives you a newspaper’s order of publication. Within each issue, page numbers also keep the newspaper in sequential order. All of these numbers are points of metadata that help us sort and organize the newspaper on a daily basis. They are also points that a computer system needs to know to organize the information when putting the files in order and allowing them to be searched and indexed. XML files act as the directory for metadata to be able to sort these files (see image on right.)

Another aspect of metadata for newspapers is making sure the text in the body of the newspaper is readable and searchable. Thankfully, one tool that makes this process easier is Optimal Character Recognition software, or OCR. OCR scans the printed pages in the images, translates them to text, and allows that text to be searched. Not only does this make the newspapers much easier to use, but it also adds a rough transcription of the pages (see image below).

Example of text transcribed using OCR on the Hoosier State Chronicles website.

Unfortunately, OCR is not perfect. The system works best when text is in standard fonts, in straight lines and columns, contains no illustrations, and is relatively the same size. As you may guess, this is rarely the case, particularly in modern or larger newspapers that contain advertisements, comics, or unusual text fonts. These can also be caused by the condition of the documents when they are scanned or the contrast of images. This occasionally results in gibberish translations or incorrect transcriptions from items the software recognizes as text (like an image). Still, like most technology, the systems improve as time goes on, and OCR is an essential part of making the information in newspapers more accessible.

This image is an example of good OCR. The majority of the text is
recognized (blue highlighted areas) and displays distinctive paragraphs. Image credit: Jill Black, ISL
The blue areas on this image is what the OCR recognizes as spots which contain “text” for the purposes of character recognition. Errors like this are common with illustrations.

Without metadata, digital newspapers are nothing more than images. Metadata orders these images to replicate the experience of reading a newspaper while adding searchable information. The process of adding metadata requires a team with keen eyes to monitor the organization and placement of files during the digitization process, specialized technology that accurately recognizes text, and maintaining the image quality of every single newspaper.

DIGITIZING NEWSPAPERS: REVIEW AND UPLOADING

The process of creating a digital copy and adding layers of metadata can take the same amount of time as the initial review of the collection. Yet, after these are completed, the individual agencies who accept these digital copies must review as much as they can to assure that the highest standards are maintained. If this is done internally, the control process may be easily assured by spot checking the creation process. However, on a larger scale where vendors are utilized, checking to make sure each batch, or group, of digitized newspapers is correct as soon as they are available means you can request corrections before they return the microfilm.

What kind of issues come up? Sometimes the scanning is not at the right quality or resolution, which necessitates a rescan. Maybe the dates, page numbers, or page orders are incorrect in the metadata and the information needs to be reorganized or edited. Occasionally, missing pages or issues that should be there need to be tracked down between the original film reels, the digitized files, and the metadata files. This is why it is important to review and revise everything in smaller groups, or batches, so the process of digitizing, adding metadata, and reviewing the completed material can take place simultaneously. Locally saved materials can be revised as you go, but larger-scale batches may require a remote digital transfer before you begin, or physically shipping off a hard drive.

Maintaining a digital collection of any kind, with thousands of individual newspapers saved in multiple formats, means investing in both external hard drives and backup drives. For example, our current digitization project with the Library of Congress contains portions of the Indianapolis Journal, The Daily Times, and the Indianapolis Times, which collectively require roughly eleven external hard drives and nearly seven terabytes of storage. To make sure everyone who needs these materials has them, we often have three copies: one on an external hard-drive that is shipped to the Library of Congress, one back-up copy on our local computer system for immediate access, and one copy maintained on our website. All three have associated costs, but it is good practice to maintain each for future use.

Hard drives with digitized newspapers for the NDNP are shipped off to the Library of Congress for approval.

Finally, after all batches undergo quality review of their images and metadata, revisions are completed, and the batches are ready, they are sent to the appropriate locations. For the newspapers that are part of the Chronicling America project, they are sent to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., where they undergo a second review to assure the files meet their specifications. Once everything is approved by all organizations, the files can finally be sent to either Chronicling America and/or Hoosier State Chronicles, where they are uploaded for public access.

CONCLUSION

Starting a new digital newspaper collection is often a large undertaking, but the established specifications, technologies, vendors, and programs throughout the United States show interested organizations that it can be done. If you are looking for how other organizations have handled this process, check out the list of organizations that have been awarded NDNP grants on the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/awards/.  Ultimately, the goal of digitization is making documents more accessible to the public, reducing damage to original sources, thus providing more contextual resources to our understanding of history.

A special thanks to Connie Rendfeld, Chandler Lighty, Justin Clark, Leigh Anne Johnson, and Jill Black in the creation of this document.

[i] Canepi, Ryder, Sitko, and Catherine Weng. “Microforms in Libraries and Archives” from Managing Microforms in the Digital Age, American Library Association, 2013. Accessed on July 16, 2018. http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/collect/serials/microforms01

[ii] The program currently hosts newspapers from 46 states and Puerto Rico, and Indiana has 59 newspapers on the site as of today.

[iii] For more information on the Indianapolis Times, see notes from the Indiana Historical Bureau’s marker at: https://www.in.gov/history/markers/4115.htm

[iv] One source of funding is that of Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grants, which are funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Science (IMLS), of which the State of Indiana distributes funds. For more information on the availability of these grants, check out the State Library page at https://www.in.gov/library/lsta.htm, or contact Angela Fox at (317) 234-6550 or anfox@library.in.gov.

[v] The Indiana State Library and Hoosier State Chronicles have partnered with Newspapers.com in the past to digitize a large number of newspapers. In exchange for three years of exclusive access, over 1.5 million pages of Indiana newspapers are now digitized and accessible via the Indiana State Library’s Inspire website by following the links to Newspapers.com.

Business and Industry, Civil War, Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Literature History, Newspaper histories, Women in the news

Montgomery County Newspapers: A Short History

Montgomery County, Indiana has a rich, colorful history of newspapers, both in their coverage and the personalities that ran them. In this post, we will share some highlights of this heritage and emphasize some of the papers that are available in Hoosier State Chronicles (HSC).

Crawfordsville Record, February 8, 1834. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The earliest paper from Montgomery County in HSC is the Crawfordsville Record. Editor Isaac F. Wade and printer Charles S. Bryant published its first issue on October 18, 1831. As Herman Fred Shermer noted in an article about Montgomery County publishing, the “type and presses for the Record plant were brought by freight wagons from Cincinnati, Ohio” and the cost of the publishing the first issue was approximately $400. While Wade and Bryant intended for the Record’s first issue to arrive in September, they were delayed a month because the printer required a capital “D” for typesetting. Wade, as a good Whig, believed that having that capital “D” was essential, as the paper would regularly refer to “Democrats and the Devil.” The paper ran until 1838, after the death of subsequent publisher William Harrison Holmes. A brief revival of the paper in 1839-40, led by William H. Webb and Henry S. Lane, never regained the paper’s subscription base and it ceased altogether.

Henry S. Lane. NARA/Wiki Commons.

Speaking of Henry S. Lane, he also co-founded one of Crawfordsville’s premier Whig newspapers during the 1840s, the People’s Press. Lane, along with a consortium of political and business leaders, established the People’s Press to be the official Whig party newspaper for Montgomery County. They recruited Pennsylvanian William H. Bausman as its editor. It ran from 1844 until 1848, when its “apparent financial success” waned due to “bad editorial management.” It then ran for a short, six-week stint as the Tomahawk until the paper was bought out by publishers Thomas Walker Fry and Jeremiah Keeney.

Crawfordsville Journal, September 14, 1865. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Out of the ashes of the People’s Press and Tomahawk, Fry and Keeney founded one of Montgomery County’s standard papers, one that still continues today (albeit in a different form). The Crawfordsville Journal started publication on July 27, 1848. Originally a Whig paper, the Journal embraced the newly-formed Republican Party in the mid-1850s. The Crawfordsville Review, founded in 1841 and purchased by Charles H. Bowen and Benjamin F. Stover in 1854, served as the Democratic foil to Journal’s Whig perspective.

Crawfordsville Review, September 16, 1865. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The Journal’s Jeremiah Keeney and the Review’s Charles H. Bowen (Stover sold out to Bowen six months after their acquisition) maintained a years-long feud in their respective papers. As a recent article in the Crawfordsville Journal-Review noted, Keeney and Bowen exchanged pointed barbs at each other in the press. Here’s a few additional examples we found in Hoosier State Chronicles. In the June 7, 1855 issue of the Journal, Keeney wrote an editorial called “Clean Streets,” where he commended the public workers who swept the streets but then derided Bowen’s supposed quibble with cleanup. “Count Bowen and his clique are probably the only men in town, who will object to cleanliness, and the protection of shade trees,” Keeney declared. Keeney preferred name for the Review’s editor was “Count Bowen,” likely a jab at his purported leadership status in the town.

Crawfordsville Journal, June 7, 1855. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Bowen didn’t take insults lightly and routinely shot back at Keeney in the Review. In its October 7, 1865 issue, Bowen slammed Kenney for his comments on Democratic leaders in the county and threw his own rhetorical venom at the Journal’s publisher. Bowen wrote that Keeney’s targets should:

 [P]ay no attention to the filthy slang of this poor miserable creature, half idiotic and totally irresponsible, he should be passed by with total indifference and regarded only as a canker, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle upon the body of a corrupt and depraved humanity which purity should shun as a pestilence.

Bowen certainly elucidated his point, in the most elaborate way possible. Imagine if these two men were alive today, trading jabs on Twitter or in Facebook comments. Some things don’t change, after all.

Crawfordsville Review, October 7, 1865. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Bowen wasn’t the only eccentric owner of the Review. Bayless W. Hanna, who purchased the newspaper in 1883, wore many hats, including newspaper man, diplomat—and music box operator. A short write-up from the Terre Haute Daily News noted that, “Bayless Hanna, with his monkey and box, was seen going down Eighth street [sic] this morning bound for the rural districts.” The very next week, the Daily News wrote about him again and it was even more interesting:

Bayless Hanna was seen to-day walking down Main street with his music box, following a one-armed soldier who had a hand-organ in a little boy’s express wagon. The soldier would occasionally stop in front of a business house and play a tune, while Bayless and Rodgers would stare with mouth wide open, at the wonderful machine.

He operated the Review for two years before President Grover Cleveland appointed him Minister to Iran and then Minister to Argentina, a position he held until his death in 1889. He died in 1891, in Crawfordsville.

Bayless W. Hanna. Find A Grave.

At a time when women were often delegated to domestic pursuits, Mary Hannah Krout completely bucked the trend. Born in Crawfordsville in 1851, Krout descended from a long-line of accomplished scholars. Specifically, her grandfather served as the state geologist and taught natural science at Butler University. However, her intellectual passion was writing, particularly poetry. She was a published poet in local newspapers as early as 10 years old and gave lectures in her teenage years.    This culminated in her decades-long work in newspaper journalism, with positions at the Terre Haute Weekly Express, the Crawfordsville Journal, and the Chicago Inter-Ocean, where she covered the Hawaiian revolution of 1893. Alongside her newspaper work, she authored eight books and helped Susan Wallace finish Lew Wallace’s Autobiography.

Mary Hannah Krout. Internet Archive.

As for Lew Wallace, a post about Montgomery County and newspapers wouldn’t be complete without a quick discussion of its most famous son. Wallace’s tenure during the Civil War received differing perspectives from the Crawfordsville newspapers. This stemmed from Wallace’s own political evolution; he started the war as a Democrat and ended it a Republican. This changed his relationship with the Crawfordsville Review, who held it against him in editorials. For example, a short piece in their May 19, 1866 issue took umbrage with his military assignment during the second French intervention in Mexico. The Review wrote:

Lew Wallace, who has been rusticating in our city for several weeks past, left suddenly for New York a few days since. Rumor has it that he is about to join a filibustering expedition against Mexico. Should he be so unlucky as to suffer capture by the French mercenaries of Maximillian, we trust he may be granted a fair trial before a drum-head court martial. We should regret very much to hear of his being arraigned before a civil tribunal.

Much like with Keeney and Bowen’s feud, the Review‘s strongly-worded opprobrium against Wallace emanated from intense political partisanship.

Lew Wallace, in full dress uniform. General Lew Wallace Study & Museum.

Another Crawfordsville paper, Thomas C. Pursel and Robert B. Wilson’s Evening Argus, first rolled off the press in 1882. “Argus” as a term seems relatively antiquarian to our ears; nevertheless, its etymology is fantastic. Originally a name for the “giant with 100 eyes” from classical mythology, it eventually meant “watchful guardian.” It seems safe to assume that the latter definition applies more as a name for a newspaper than the former. The daily newspaper had a brief three year run under the solo title of the Argus. In 1885, Walter E. Rosebro and Samuel M. Coffman purchased it and merged it with their paper, the News, to make the Argus-News. It continued to appear in weekly and daily formats until 1900, when Coffman purchased the Review. He dropped Argus from the name and re-branded the paper as the News-Review, which ran for eight years before abbreviating the title to the Review. Coffman later embarked on another newspaper venture, the Crawfordsville Daily Progressive, but it languished and he filed for bankruptcy in 1917.

New Richmond Record, October 15 1914. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Outside of the county seat, one of the more interesting Montgomery County papers available in Hoosier State Chronicles is the New Richmond Record. It ran from 1896 until 1924 under the sole ownership and editorship of Edgar Walts. Here’s an account of its publication from the A. W. Bowen’s History of Montgomery County (1913):

It is a six-column, six-page paper, run on a gasoline propelled power press. It is independent in politics, and makes a specialty of as much local news as is possible to furnish its readers with. It circulates in Montgomery, Tippecanoe and adjoining counties. It meets the requirements of the town and with it is connected a good job department.

During its run, the Record often praised its subscribers for continuing to patronize the paper, in a segment called the “Record’s Honor Roll.” The “honor roll” listed all the “new subscribers and renewals to THE RECORD during the past week” from Montgomery County, Indiana, and across the country. His “honor roll” likely helped circulation; by 1920, the Record had a circulation of 500 (for a town whose population was 496, but whose readership likely extended into rural Coal Creek Township and the rest of the county).

New Richmond Record, January 7, 1915. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Today, readers in Montgomery County patronize two major newspapers. The Crawfordsville Journal-Review, founded in 1929 with the merger of two flagship county papers, publishes a Tuesday-Saturday print version and an online version.  The Paper of Montgomery County, established by Journal-Review veteran reporter Gaildene Hamilton in 2004, also delivers a daily print version and online version.

In all, Montgomery County’s newspapers often displayed the rough-and-tumble political winds of the nineteenth century, an era whose partisanship and vitriol mirrors our own. It wasn’t, however, the only part of their story. Montgomery County also facilitated forward-thinking pioneers like Mary Hannah Krout, Samuel Coffman, and Edgar Walts. Like much of history, Montgomery County’s heritage of newspapers exemplifies a nuanced, intriguing legacy.

Business and Industry, Literature History, Newspaper histories

Allen County Newspapers: A Short History

This month, the Indiana Historical Bureau is focusing on the history and culture of Allen County, Indiana. Here at Chronicles, we thought it would be an apt time to share some of Allen County’s newspaper history.

Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel, April 23, 1879. Newspapers.com.

Fort Wayne, Allen County’s central city and the second-largest city in Indiana, produced most of the county’s newspapers. Thomas Tigar and Samuel V. B. Noel founded the Fort Wayne Sentinel, publishing its first issue on July 6, 1833. The Sentinel’s two publishers came from completely opposite political backgrounds. Tigar’s views aligned with the Democratic Party while Noel identified as a Whig. So, in an effort to avoid political conflicts, the paper initially started as an independent publication. Over the decades, the Sentinel changed hands and political affiliations routinely. For example, when Noel sold his stake to Tigar, it became a Democratic paper; when Gordon W. Wood owned it in the late 1830s, it switched to a Whig perspective. After decades of mergers, name changes (it was called the Times-Sentinel for a while), and multiple owners, the Sentinel merged with the daily News in 1918 and became the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, the name it is still published under today.

Fort Wayne News, August 10, 1915. Newspaper Archive.

As for the News, William P. Page and Charles E. Taylor founded the Republican-leaning daily in 1874. Page made a 28-year career at the News, overseeing the development of weekly and daily editions. In 1902, he sold the paper to a partnership of entrepreneurs incorporated under the aegis of the News Publishing Company. This ownership maintained the paper until 1918, when it merged with the aforementioned Sentinel. Other notable Fort Wayne papers include the dailies Gazette (1863–1899), Journal (1881–1899), and Times (1855–1865).

Daily Gazette, July 1, 1884. Newspapers.com.

Fort Wayne’s prominent German immigrant population created a market for a slew of German language newspapers. One of the first was Der Deutsche Beobachter von Indiana, starting in 1843. Owned by Thomas Tigar (founder of the Sentinel) and edited by Dr. Charles “Carl” Schmitz, it published out of the offices of the Sentinel for a short time before it folded. The Demokrat, founded in 1876 by editor Dr. U Herrmann (possibly Dr. Alexander Herrmann, a physician in Fort Wayne during the time; “U Hermann” may have been a misprint.) and publisher Fred Schad, ran as a daily paper out of offices at 86 Calhoun for a few years. Catholic Germans were served by the weekly Weltbürger starting in 1883 until 1887. The Freie Presse-Staats-Zeitung, founded in 1908 with the merger of the Freie Presse and the Indiana Staatszeitung, was one of the only German-language papers in Indiana to survive the anti-German sentiments prevalent during World War I. The paper continued publication until 1927.

Indiana Staatszeitung, January 13, 1872. Newspaper Archive.

Fort Wayne is not the only newspaper hub in Allen County. There’s a few smaller towns where newspapers were published, particularly in the eastern part of the county. In Grabill, there was the bi-monthly Cedar Creek Courier (1949-1981) and the weekly Review (1907-1918), which emphasized local news. Monroeville provided its newspaper-reading public with the weekly Breeze (1883-1944), originally called the Democrat (1869-1883), and the News, which began in 1946 and still runs as a weekly today. Finally, New Haven published some key papers for the county, including the Allen County Times, founded in 1927 and still publishing today.

Publisher William Rockhill Nelson. Encyclopedia Britainnica.

Alongside all of its newspapers, Fort Wayne produced two of the twentieth century’s most prominent publishers. William Rockhill Nelson, born in Fort Wayne on March 7, 1841. Nelson studied at Notre Dame (he did not graduate) and earned admittance to the bar in 1862, before he decided to enter the newspaper business. He and his business partner Samuel E. Morss purchased the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel in 1879 and published it for around nine months. From there, Nelson followed the old maxim “go west young man,” and he and Morss moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Nelson and Morss founded the Kansas City Evening Star in 1880. By 1885, the newly-renamed Kansas City Star became one of the Missouri’s most widely-read papers in the state. By the time of his death in 1915, Nelson’s estate totaled $6 million and his family ensured that his wealth supported the creation of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, which opened to the public in 1933.

Publisher Samuel E Morss. Find A Grave.

As for Morss, he sold his stake of the Star to Nelson within a year and a half. After traveling in Europe, he returned to the US and spent a few years as an editor at the Chicago Times. He came back to Indianapolis in 1888, to purchase and run the Indiana State Sentinel. He maintained his position with the Sentinel, with the exception of serving as Consul-General of the United States to France under President Grover Cleveland, until his death in 1903. Unexpectedly, he died after a fall from the third-story window of his Sentinel office, likely the result of a heart attack.

George Jean Nathan, co-founder and publisher of the American Mercury. Alchetron.
American Mercury, October 1924. UNZ.org.

George Jean Nathan, another native of Fort Wayne, played a key role in the literary life of Americans during the 1920s and 30s. Born in 1882, Nathan spent his early years in Fort Wayne before he moved east, to study at Cornell University (he graduated in 1904). Nathan’s most enduring legacy stemmed from his relationship with noted journalist and provocateur H. L. Mencken. Nathan served as the co-editor with Mencken of the Smart Set from 1914-1923. They then founded the American Mercury, a magazine of literature, political commentary, and satire, in 1924. Nathan contributed drama criticism, particularly his views on playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw, for the Mercury as well as his own publication, Theatre Book of the Year. He died in 1958.

The homepage of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. News-Sentinel.com.

Today, a few major papers serve the people of Allen County. Fort Wayne provides two daily papers: the Journal-Gazette, which publishes a paper version and maintains a website, and the News-Sentinel, celebrating 184 years of print publication. Both papers are published by Fort Wayne Newspapers, Inc., but maintain separate editorial staff. In New Haven, the Bulletin shares local news on its website without publishing a paper version. Grabill’s Courier Printing Company publishes the East Allen Courier, “a weekly free-circulation newspaper delivered to over 7,000 homes or businesses in Grabill, Leo, Harlan, Spencerville, and Woodburn.” In all, Allen County newspapers embody a rich journalistic heritage and continue to provide the news to over 355,000 residents.

Business and Industry, Law Enforcement History, Newspaper histories, Political History

The Indianapolis Times: A Short History

Indianapolis Times, October 11, 1965. Indiana State Library.

The Indianapolis Times began publication as the Sun in 1888, described by the Ayer’s newspaper directory as the “only one-cent paper in Indiana.” Fred L. Purdy served as its first editor and owned a minority stake in its publishing; J. S. Sweeney owned the majority stake. It ran daily under this title until 1899 and its circulation grew to 12,823 by 1898. In 1899, it was renamed the Indianapolis Sun  and continued its daily publication. During this time, it also maintained a professional partnership with the Scripps-McRae wire service out of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Indianapolis Sun, July 3, 1888. Newspaper Archive.
The Indianapolis Sun building at 123-125 East Ohio street. Google Books.

In 1910, Rudolph G. Leeds, Indiana newspaper magnate  and editor of the the Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, purchased the Sun. From 1913-1914, George H. Larke and William D. Boyce owned the paper, and altered the title slightly to the Evening Sun. Its daily circulation grew to 34,453 at this time. On July 20, 1914, Boyce and new co-owner John W. Banbury renamed as the Indiana Daily Times. By 1915, its circulation increased to 46,384.

Indiana Daily Times, July 20, 1914. Indiana Historical Bureau Historical Marker File.

In 1922, Scripps-Howard publishing purchased the Times and it was renamed the Indianapolis Times, the title it kept until it ceased publication in 1965. Roy W. Howard served as the president of Scripps-Howard publishing from 1922-1964, overseeing not only the Times but the United Press International worldwide wire service. Alongside in-house journalism by Times staff, many articles published during this period came from the Scripps-Howard wire service, Newspaper Enterprise Association.

Roy W. Howard, president of Scripps-Howard publishing from 1922-1964. IU Media School.
Indianapolis Times, November 1, 1924. This front page editorial explains the Times’ dedication to exposing the Ku Klux Klan and its influence on state politics. Indiana Historical Bureau Historical Marker File.
The Indianapolis Times building on 200 West Maryland Street. Indiana Historical Bureau Historical Marker File.

Over the next forty years, the Indianapolis Times earned a reputation for its “crusading” journalism. In 1927, under the editorship of Boyd Gurley,  the Times published numerous articles exposing the collusion and corruption between the Indiana state government, Governor Ed Jackson, and the Ku Klux Klan. In particular, it exposed the direct corruption between Jackson and Klan leader D. C. Stephenson. The Times earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for “exposing political corruption in Indiana, prosecuting the guilty and bringing about a more wholesome state of affairs in civil government.”

Indianapolis Times, May 8, 1928. Indiana Historical Bureau Historical Marker File.
A page from the May 14, 1928 issues of the Indianapolis Star commending the Times for its Pulitzer Prize. Newspapers.com.

During the 1930s, the Times advocated for children’s needs, raising money for charities that supplied coats and other clothing items to children hit hard by the Great Depression. In the recession of 1961-62, the Times helped 4,000 Indiana residents find jobs through its publishing of free employment ads. Alongside its Klan coverage, the Times also covered multiple scandals, from corruption in the state’s highway fund and voter fraud in congressional districts to exposing falsely reported Indianapolis crime statistics. It even published coverage during the 1960s that advocated for better lunches in public schools, through the use of the federal school surplus program.

Indianapolis Times, December 2, 1930. Indiana Historical Bureau Historical Marker File.
Indianapolis Times, April 8, 1961. Indiana Historical Bureau Historical Marker File.

Despite its successful journalism and philanthropy, the Times lacked the resources and circulation to compete with Indianapolis’s rival dailies, the News and the Star. On October 11, 1965, the Indianapolis Times ran its final issue and suspended publication. Its final daily circulation totaled 89,374, with a Sunday circulation of 101,000.

The front page of the last issue of the Indianapolis Times, October 11, 1965. Indiana State Library.

While the Indianapolis Times ceased publication over 50 years ago, it maintains a legacy of good journalism and civic integrity. Due to its immense impact on the community, the Indiana Historical Bureau shared the newspaper’s history with future generations of Hoosiers via a historical marker originally placed in 1979, and replaced in 2013.

The Indiana Historical Bureau marker for the Indianapolis times. Indiana Historical Bureau.
Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Labor History, Newspaper histories

A Socialist’s Poem on Heaven

With the 2016 presidential primaries upon us, there’s more buzz than usual this year about a word with deep roots in Hoosier history — socialism.  And, as always, religion remains a factor at the polling booths.  This is also the first time in about a century that a major presidential candidate has openly disavowed “organized” religion.  The last candidate to do so was Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist, skeptic, and native Hoosier who ran for president five times just before and after World War I.  (Debs ran his last campaign from a federal prison in Atlanta in 1920, where he’d been sent for opposing the military draft.)

The topics of socialism and religion were hot as ever back in Debs’ day.  In some ways, that debate looks eerily familiar, with skeptics accusing churches of abetting social inequality, and believers often firing back with equally broad strokes about the dangers of revolution.  While plenty of American labor activists were religious — including major voices like Mother Jones and Terence Powderly — Debs and many more were agnostic.  Indiana Socialist, the newspaper of the Marion County Socialist Party in Indianapolis, tended toward religious skepticism, often printing ads for books that questioned Christian beliefs and especially church authorities. Since most American workers were Christian, however, Socialist leaders were wary of alienating them, and Debs found much in the ethics of the New Testament to applaud.

Some of the barbs thrown at religion are about as nuanced as the ravings of any old street preacher.  But some it even believers might find stirring.  In July 1913, on the heels of a Fourth of July visit by Mother Jones to Irvington on Indianapolis’ East Side, Indiana Socialist published just such a poem.

Indiana Socialist, April 26, 1913

(The “Socialist literature wagon” once sat at the corner of Market and Pennsylvania streets in downtown Indianapolis.  Indiana Socialist, April 26, 1913.  The Socialist Party of Indianapolis’s 1913 campaign platform called for such things as public playgrounds, urban beautification, and equal pay for equal work. The newspaper estimated that Marion County, Indiana, alone had about 8,000 Socialist voters in 1913, plus others whom it alleged were kept from voting by their employers.)

The poem’s author was Henry M. Tichenor (1858-1924). Along with fellow Midwesterners Clarence Darrow and Robert Ingersoll, Tichenor was one of the most outspoken American freethinkers of his time.  An influential Socialist writer and editor in Missouri, Tichenor loathed organized Christianity.  Contrary to popular belief, many Americans were disgruntled with churches a century ago, and Tichenor’s popular, down-to-earth style made him popular even in the Midwest, whose radical history runs almost as deep as its reputation for staunch conservatism.

Henry M. Tichenor

(Harry M. Tichenor in 1914.)

Unlike the Marxist intellectuals who twisted Socialism to serve the greed of dictators and party elites, Tichenor was no high-falutin’ “comrade” inventing totalitarian “Newspeak” — the language of George Orwell’s memorable dystopian lampoon, 1984.  Yet his long, comic tirades against “holy humbug” (books with titles like The Life and Exploits of Jehovah) are basically the scribblings of a humorist, not a serious historian.  They probably never bothered anyone except fundamentalists who insisted on a literal reading of every story in the Bible.

In 1913, Tichenor was a regular poetry contributor to the St. Louis-based National Rip-Saw, “America’s Greatest Socialist Monthly.”  He was also cranking out fiery anti-capitalist pamphlets with titles like “The Rip-Saw Mother Goose,” “Rip-Saw Socialism Songs,” and “Woman Under Capitalism.”  That year he started printing a socialist journal of his own, The Melting Pot, a political and comic firecracker.

The International Socialist Review, April 1913

(The International Socialist Review, April 1913.)

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The Good Green Earth - Tichenor

(Rhymes of the Revolution, 1914.  Courtesy Debs Collection, Indiana State University.)

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Indiana Socialist, July 5, 1913

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Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Labor History, Newspaper histories, Women in the news, World War I

A Short History of Hammond’s Lake County Times

It’s not cold enough in Indiana this year to get your tongue stuck to an icy flagpole.  But every holiday season, we Hoosiers are reminded that the comedy classic A Christmas Story (1983) is set in our fair state.

Though filmed in Cleveland, Ohio — where the original Ralphie Parker residence was sold on eBay in 2004, restored to its 1940 appearance, and turned into a museum — the tale is based on the semi-fictional remembrances of Hoosier writer Jean Shepherd. Born on Chicago’s South Side, Shepherd grew up just over the state line in East Chicago and Hammond, Indiana, where he graduated from high school in 1939.  After serving with the Army Signal Corps in World War II, the future author began his radio broadcast career at WJOB in Hammond before moving to Cincinnati and New York. Many of Shepherd’s stories began as on-the-air reminiscences before they appeared in Playboy.  Some would have been picked up by listeners in the Midwest.

If Ralphie’s dad, played by the late Darren McGavin, read any newspaper by the light of that short-lived leg lamp, it would probably have been the Hammond Times.  Hoosier State Chronicles will soon be uploading a long run of the Lake County Times, renamed the Times in 1933. Meanwhile, here’s a bit of its history. Who knows? It might even turn up some colorful background material on Jean Shepherd’s classic A Christmas Story.

June 12, 1920
Lake County Times, June 12, 1920. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Seventy years before Ralphie Parker came onto the scene, the young lumber port of State Line, Indiana, wasn’t producing enough news to keep a local newspaper afloat.  Most of its early settlers came from Germany and spoke and read English poorly.  The town’s success — and eventual name change — was overwhelmingly due to George H. Hammond, a Detroit butcher whose 1868 patent for refrigerated rail cars helped him rival Chicago’s great slaughterhouses. Mammoth stockyards along Lake Michigan attracted both immigrants and tourists to the greater Chicago area.  (When Rudyard Kipling visited the Windy City in 1899, he wrote a horrified description of the “disassembly line” at Philip Armour’s slaughterhouse.)  Abundant local lakes and rivers provided the ice that helped meatpacking thrive.

Yet the Hammond Packing Company’s preference for hiring German butchers and sausage-makers indirectly handicapped the development of an English-language press in northern Lake County. Most German residents of the “Hoosier Coast” got their news from thriving German-language newspapers in Chicago and Milwaukee. Even Hammond’s own Deutsche Volks-Zeitung didn’t start publishing until 1891.  It died out sometime before 1911.

Hammond Harbor
Hammond harbor during its days as a minor lumber port.

Though northwest Indiana soon became an industrial powerhouse, this was one of the last corners of the state to be settled.  In 1900, lumbermen, farmers, and engineers had barely cleared the forests and drained the swamps that defined the landscape of the Calumet region (or simply “Da Region,” in local parlance.)  Gary, whose steel mills made it Lake County’s most important city, was founded only in 1906.

The Hammond Packing Company burned down in 1901 and was never rebuilt.  Steel, railroads, and retail took over.   Ironically, the rapid development of Lake County led to “Da Region” becoming a cradle of American conservation, as nature enthusiasts and city dwellers successfully fought to save the famous Indiana Dunes — a favorite Chicago playground — from destruction.

April 17, 1920
Lake County Times, April 17, 1920. Hoosier State Chronicles.

In 1906, Hammond’s floundering English press got a boost when Sidmon McHie (1863-1944), a wealthy Chicago grain and stock broker, bought the struggling Hammond Times.  The enterprising McHie turned the paper around, using it to promote Lake County’s young industries and businesses.  At that time,  Calumet was fertile ground for venture capitalists like McHie.  As a 1943 tribute to him put it, the energetic owner used the paper to “get Hammond to believe in itself.”

Sidmon and Isabel McHie
Sidmon and Isabel McHie had a marriage even more colorful and tempestuous than Ralphie’s parents. U.S. Passport application, 1921.

Not content with marketing the news only to Hammond, McHie changed the paper’s name to the Lake County Times and pushed sales in Whiting, Gary, Indiana Harbor, and East Chicago. The daily’s circulation, which stood at just 137 when McHie bought it in 1906, jumped to 5,000 within a year and almost exceeded 10,000 in 1920.  As an investment scheme, McHie circulated many copies for free simply to promote the city.  By the time A Christmas Story was set in the early 1940s, the paper was reaching 130,000 readers — probably including “Old Man Parker” himself.

McHie (whose first name is often misspelled Simon and even Sidney) hired Chicago sportswriter Hugh E. Keough to be the Lake County Times’ first editor.  Best known for his Chicago Tribune sports column (“In the Wake of the News”), Keough served as an official at Midwestern and Southern horse-racing tracks, whose decline led him back into newspaper work by 1906.  Keough and the witty Ring Lardner were two of Chicago’s best writers on baseball.  Keough’s tenure on the Lake County Times was short-lived, however.  He was replaced by Percy A. Parry (who had emigrated to the U.S. from Wales at age nine.)  For decades, Parry and his brothers were part of a “dynasty” of Lake County news editors.

While Gary was becoming known for its mills, Sidmon McHie and his editors on the Lake County Times helped transform Hammond into a shopping mecca for northwest Indiana.  It’s no coincidence that the plot of A Christmas Story revolves around one of Hammond’s great department stores — where the line to see a drunken Santa Claus and some evil elves “stretched all the way back to Terre Haute.”

Lake County Times, July 9, 1920
Lake County Times, July 9, 1920. Hoosier State Chronicles.
1937 Hammond Indiana directory
Though Hammond is referred to as “Hohman” in A Christmas Story, this was an avenue named after one of the city’s German founders. 1937 Hammond City Directory.

With a stock broker and capitalist at the helm, the Lake County Times became a colorful, flamboyant paper and enjoyed strong sales. While not known for deep investigative journalism at the time, the paper does provide a window into the social issues of the 1910s and ’20s – from the scandalous rise in American divorce rates to labor struggles at Indiana’s burgeoning steel mills.  Much of its “reporting,” however, was syndicated — and wasn’t serious news, anyway.

Lake County Times, December 6, 1922
Lake County Times, December 6, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.
Dick -- Lake County Times, March 25, 1920
Lake County Times, March 25, 1920. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The Lake County Times wasn’t especially friendly to labor movements or to socialism.  During the lead-up to America’s entry into World War I in 1917, it also joined in the vilification of Germany.  The Hammond paper helped stoke up public fears during the 1919 “Red Scare,” which involved a crackdown by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on anarchists, Communists, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, whose politics were suspect in the wake of the Russian Revolution and a wave of anarchist bomb plots.  Gary, which participated in the great steel strike of 1919 and was home to thousands of Eastern Europeans, was deeply involved in the “Red Scare.”

January 3, 1920
Lake County Times, January 3, 1920. Hoosier State Chronicles.
Lake County Times, January 16, 1920 (1)
The “Red Raids” took place just a few weeks before Prohibition came into effect nationally. Though still too early for a Red Ryder BB gun, “Red Rye” and its dangerous bootleg derivatives drove liquor underground until the law’s repeal in 1933. Lake County Times, January 16, 1920. Hoosier State Chronicles.
November 22, 1919
Lake County Times, November 22, 1919. Hoosier State Chronicles.

That last clip reminds us that women were at the forefront of Prohibition.  Yet even during the days of “Saharization,” the Lake County Times published colorful stories about the Jazz Age’s rejection of Victorian norms.  Divorcées, flappers, fast cars, and heartbreaks worthy of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel were often sprawled across the front page.

Publisher Sidmon McHie made national news in 1923 and again in 1935, when aspects of his own tempestuous marriage came to light. Daughter of a St. Louis multimillionaire and reportedly also a beauty queen at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Isabel Mulhall had briefly been a theater actress, got divorced, and “hastily” married Sidmon McHie in New York in 1906, when he was living at the Waldorf Astoria.  By the 1930s, however, the wealthy couple, who lived in New York and Illinois, ended up estranged.

Part of their divorce proceedings centered on a generous winter-time gift that Isabel had made to farmers near Battle Creek, Michigan, in March 1935.  But long before her flamboyant Depression-era “giveaway,” she had been generous to dogs.

In 1923, Isabel announced that she was willing her vast fortune to create a hospital for abused animals. While an earlier free animal hospital in New York City actually predated the New York Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children by a good eight years, the American public and press unfairly lampooned Mrs. McHie as a sour old eccentric who hated human beings.

The Ogden Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT), February 11, 1923

(The Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah, February 11, 1923.)

The Ogden Standard-Examiner was one of the few papers to treat her with any kind of fairness.  Speaking to a reporter, she told about a cruel child that had mercilessly tortured a puppy, a scene that could have come straight out of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.    As she began to think about her own mortality and draw up a will, Isabel McHie considered leaving a large bequest to a “home for incurable children.”  But if the newspapers are correct, the hideous “screechings” of an Episcopal boy’s choir in New York put an end to that — or was it the child that broke a puppy’s leg on purpose?  (The McHies had no children of their own.)

Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA), May 1, 1923
Oakland Tribune, Oakland, California, May 1, 1923.

Though it never came into being, rumors had it that this would have been the largest animal hospital in the world.  A provision in the will specified that McHie’s own ashes be placed next to a marble bust of herself, carved by an Italian sculptor, and that the honored bust and ashes would sit in the entrance to the animal hospital.

In return for her generosity, she got hate mail.  Letters accused Isabel McHie of being “wicked” and that the money could have done more good for humans.   Why give money to “dumb animals”?  Some critics speculated that her motives came from a desire to have “revenge on mankind.”  McHie’s response?  Animals taught humans to be more humane.  (It’s ironic, however, that some of her fortune probably derived from the prosperity of Hammond, named for a butcher.)

Lenoir News-Topic (Lenoir, NC), February 27, 1923
Lenoir News-Topic, Lenoir, North Carolina, February 27, 1923.
Decatur Herald (Decatur, IL), January 16, 1923
Decatur Herald, Decatur, Illinois, January 16, 1923.
The Ogden Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT), February 11, 1923 (5)
The Ogden Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT), February 11, 1923 (6) The Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah, February 11, 1923.

Maybe the sneering news stories had an effect on her.  Maybe it was her pending divorce suit or ill health.  Or maybe she was just tired of being rich.  In any case, in March 1935, the 60-year-old Isabel McHie decided to dispose of a large amount of her wealth — before anybody else criticized her will.

On March 20, she withdrew $175,000 of her own or her husband’s money and boarded a passenger train from Chicago’s Dearborn Street Station to Montreal.  She was also carrying about $500,000 worth of jewels with her in a bag.

Somewhere outside Battle Creek, Michigan, a conductor noticed Mrs. McHie feeding unbelievably large bills through a ventilator — in currency denominations “as high as $10,000.”  This, after all, was one of the worst years of the Great Depression, and the wealthy philanthropist was literally throwing a fortune out the window. Reporters wrote that she also tossed $100 bills into the aisle of a Pullman car.  Most of the money seems to have been recovered, but farmers along the railroad tracks in southern Michigan eagerly joined the search for anything left of the money-throwing spree.

Marshall Evening Chronicle (Marshall, Michigan), March 21, 1935
Marshall Evening Chronicle, Marshall, Michigan, March 21, 1935.
Decatur Herald (Decatur, IL), March 21, 1935
Decatur Herald, Decatur, Illinois, March 21, 1935.

Arrested as “hysterical,” Isabel McHie was taken to a hotel in Hammond, where police wanted to investigate hospital records that she tried to withhold.  She later sued the Grand Trunk Western Railway for physical assault and false imprisonment — for a million dollars. Sidmon McHie was vacationing at the mineral springs in French Lick, Indiana, when his wife started throwing money away.  Their divorce was soon finalized.  Isabel McHie died in New York City on April 25, 1939. Contrary to the belief that she hated human beings, most of her estate went to Seeing Eye, Inc., an organization that trained guide dogs for the blind.

The Hammond Times’ owner didn’t survive his ex-wife by long. Sidmon McHie owned a vast stock farm and golf course on the Kankakee River near Momence, Illinois.  His obituary notes that “McHie, despite his advanced age, insisted on driving his own automobile because he said that to employ a private chauffeur would remove a man from an essential occupation.”  (World War II was still on.)  On August 25, 1944, the 81-year-old McHie was hit by a train while driving his car.  He died five days later.  McHie’s nephew, James S. DeLaurier, took control of the Hammond Times.

The Times dropped Hammond from its name in 1967 and began representing all of northwestern Indiana.  It moved its offices to Munster in 1989. Today, the Times of Northwest Indiana is the second-largest newspaper in the state, ranking only behind the Indianapolis Star. Local editions cover Munster, Crown Point, and Valparaiso.

Hoosier State Chronicles expects to have almost two decades of the Lake County Times uploaded and searchable on our website by mid-January 2016.

Contact:  staylor336 [AT] gmail.com

African-American History, Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Newspaper histories, Women in the news

“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 Cross.  And 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

Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Newspaper histories

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. 
Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Newspaper histories, Project News

The German & Appalachian Roots of the Brazil Daily Times

Brazil Daily Times, June 30, 1909

Attention Clay County chroniclers and Brazil back-story buffs!  The first batch of the Brazil Daily Times is now going up on Newspapers.com.  (Uploading may take a week or more and will include a run of issues from 1907-1931.)  Indiana residents can access this content for FREE via INSPIRE.  If you need help accessing the content, read our related blog post.

Here’s a short side note on the history of the Daily Times, ancestor of today’s Brazil Times.

Small-town newspapers often have interesting pedigrees.  Brazil’s is no exception.  When the Daily Times’ debut came on December 1, 1888, it was under the editorial leadership of a man named Robert Henkel.

Bob Henkel came from one of the original German families of the American South.  Their involvement in printing, preaching, and pioneering went back many generations.

Though William Travis wrote up the editor’s genealogy in his 1909 History of Clay County, Travis’ version is full of mistakes.  Yet as the chronicler knew, Henkel’s story links Clay County history back to 16th-century Germany.

Bob Henkel’s fascinating family lineage was prestigious, going at least as far back as Johann Henckel, a German Catholic priest at the time of the Protestant Reformation.  While Europe’s spiritual foundations were being shaken up by the monk Martin Luther, Johann Henckel, who served as Hofprediger (court preacher) and spiritual guide to some members of the Hapsburg royal family, was exchanging letters with the Dutch reformer, humanist, and priest Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Mary of Hungary 2

William Travis mistakenly writes that Henckel was Father Confessor to a certain Queen Mary of Norway.  Actually, this was Queen Mary of Hungary, sister of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.  Mary later served as Hapsburg Governor of the Netherlands during the height of the Reformation.  Henckel, while friendly to Protestants calling for reform, ultimately swayed Mary away from becoming a follower of Luther.

That couldn’t be said of the rest of the Henckel family, who emigrated to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early 18th century.  As Appalachian frontier folk, the fervently Lutheran Henckels (later spelled Henkel) also helped settle the “German belt” of North Carolina at a time when English took linguistic third place in the western Piedmont.  Until the early 1800s, German and Scottish Gaelic — not to mention Cherokee — were commonly-spoken languages in backcountry Carolina.

Ambrose Henkel Printing Press
Ambrose Henkel’s printing press, which he set up at age twenty in the mountains of Virginia.

Printer’s ink must have been mingled with Bob Henkel’s blood. Around 1807, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley town of New Market, Virginia, the Indiana editor’s great-grand uncles, Ambrose and Solomon Henkel, set up one of the first German-language presses in the American South.  (The Virginia Historical Society has a great webpage showing some of the beautiful work done by these craftsmen.)  From 1807 to 1809, Ambrose published Der Virginische Volksberichter und Neumarketer Wochenschrift, a small, short-lived weekly newspaper printed in the heavily German-speaking area around the famous Luray Caverns.  The Henkel brothers’ press in New Market is considered the oldest Lutheran printing house in America.  The brothers also published educational books, like an 1819 ABC Book in the collections of the College of William and Mary.

Geschichte der Lutherischen Kirche in America
Der Virginische Volksberichter was printed with the motto “Ich bring das Neu’s / So gut ich’s weiss!” — I bring the news, as best I know it!”

Ambrose and Solomon’s father, the Reverend Paul Henkel, was a celebrated Lutheran minister who preached in both German and English.  One of the pioneers of Lutheranism in America, the North Carolina-born Paul Henkel sowed the seeds of his church in the trans-Appalachian West during travels out to Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana.  William Travis claims that he served as the first president of Ohio State University in Columbus.  This is wrong, but Henkel did help establish education in the early Midwest.

Rev Paul Hinkel
Reverend Paul Henkel was editor Robert Henkel’s great-grandfather.
Confirmations-Schein-Amrose Henkel, 1827
Confirmation certificate printed by Ambrose Henkel in Shenandoah County, Virginia, in 1827.

Several members of this prominent family of Virginia Germans were drawn into the conflict between North and South. A few trained as doctors at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious medical school before the Civil War.  Caspar C. Henkel served as an assistant surgeon in Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s brigade during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign.

It should come as no surprise that the Lutheran minister Paul Henkel’s great-grandson, Brazil Daily Times editor Bob Henkel, was born in apt-sounding Germantown, Ohio, in 1866, just a year after his Confederate relatives back in the Virginia mountains lost the war.  Henkel was raised, however, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he became a printer’s apprentice at age sixteen.  Robert eventually bought the Crawfordsville Daily Journal, briefly moved out to Coldwater, Kansas, where he married Josephine Cole, then back east to Rockville and La Porte, Indiana.

Robert Henkel -- Indianapolis News, February 5, 1930
Indianapolis News, February 5, 1930.

In 1888, Robert established the Brazil Daily Times, ancestor of the town’s current paper.  Under the umbrella of the Henkel Publishing Company, he served as its editor until 1912.  William Travis claims that the Clay County paper was established with capital investment amounting to just $1.60, “with no type, paper or any other supplies with which to establish the venture.”  Within a few years, however, Henkel and his partner “had all modern devices known to the printer’s art.”

At a time when most American newspapers were at least loosely affiliated with a political party, the Daily Times‘ editor kept it independent of partisan politics and was much admired for his honesty and support of the best political candidates, regardless of what party they belonged to.

Bob Henkel moved to Indianapolis in 1912.  In 1918, he bought the Indianapolis Daily Live Stock Journal and published it until he died of pneumonia on February 4, 1930.  Henkel was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery.

Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization, Newspaper histories

Conservation and Digitization of the Indiana Gazette

As a conservator, I have had many people ask me why conservation and preservation programs are funded “since we have digitization”. While it is a common misconception that digitization is “forever”, many people also do not realize that there are often times when collections materials must undergo conservation treatment before they are digitized. Some items are just far too fragile or unstable to survive the process.

Here at the Indiana State Library, I recently performed treatments on two special newspapers from our collections that had been selected for digitization and upload to the Hoosier State Chronicles database. Before treatment, I discussed these issues of Indiana Gazette with Chandler Lighty, the Project Manager of Hoosier State Chronicles, who explained just how rare and historically important they are:

“In 1804, Elihu Stout moved to Vincennes to publish the laws of the Indiana Territory.  Stout also printed the first newspaper in the territory, the Indiana Gazette on July 31, 1804.  He published the paper until April 12, 1806.  Shortly thereafter a fire destroyed his press.  No copy of the first issue of the Gazette is known to exist.   Original issues of the Gazette are scarce, and are preserved at repositories across the country including the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard University, and the University of Texas-Austin.  The Indiana State Library is fortunate to house two original issues of the Gazette from February 15, 1806, and April 12, 1806.  These two issues are not very remarkable for their content, which was primarily eastern U.S. and European news.  Aside from their advanced age, they are most remarkable for their purpose.  When Stout first published the Gazette, he helped create a literate and informed public in Indiana over 200 years ago.  After losing his press, Stout re-established a newspaper over a year later, which he titled the Western Sun.”

My first inspection of these important, historical newspapers revealed that they shared similar issues, despite being printed on two very different kinds of paper: creasing, heavy surface dirt, acidic discoloration from the aging process of the paper, tears and losses, and a lot of fly specs (a polite term used in conservation for “fly poop”).

Starting with surface cleaning, I then moved on to removing the fly specs. Removing fly specs is a meticulous business involving scalpel blades, a microscope, and a steady hand.

Microscope image of the removal of fly specs with scalpel (Indiana Gazette, No. 20, of Vol. 2, April 12, 1806, Indiana State Library Newspapers Collection)
Microscope image of the removal of fly specs with scalpel (Indiana Gazette, No. 20, of Vol. 2, April 12, 1806, Indiana State Library Newspapers Collection)

The removal process was very successful, and the papers were much cleaner (and, perhaps, less icky) than before.

In the next phase of treatment, I decided to wash both newspapers. The issue from April 12, 1806 (No. 20 of Vol. II) was suffering from a lot of acidic discoloration as well as very large tide lines where the paper had previously suffered some water damage. The other issue, from February 15, 1806 (No. 14 of Vol. 2), had several areas with smaller tide lines as well as residue stains (possibly from an adhesive). Washing paper as a conservation treatment is very controlled and involves several techniques that professional conservators have been trained to perform. Do not attempt to wash paper at home! In all cases, all media (such as printing and writing inks, in this instance) and the paper is tested carefully prior to washing to ensure that  no inks will run, bleed, strike-through, or fade during the washing process.

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After washing and pressing dry, all tears and losses needed to be mended. Conservators often use wheat starch paste as an adhesive because it ages well and can be made thicker for strong adhesion or thinner for adhesion with flexibility. Japanese paper is also the preferred paper for mending in paper conservation because of the way it is made: Japanese paper tends to have longer fibers than western papers, making it possible to use incredibly lightweight papers that still remain strong when mending. After mending, the papers were humidified and pressed one last time before handing them back over to Chandler for digitization.

These images, taken in the Martha E. Wright Conservation Lab here at the Indiana State Library before and after conservation treatment, will give you a better understanding of how conservation treatment improved both the readability of the papers as well as their stability and longevity*.

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The issues featured above are available for viewing in Hoosier State Chronicles here and here.  You can read and crowd-source the higher resolution versions online. One of my favorite parts explains just how many ways you can pay for your subscription:

Excerpt from Indiana Gazette, No. 20, of Vol. II, April 12, 1806, Indiana State Library Newspapers Collection
(Before treatment) Excerpt from Indiana Gazette, No. 20, of Vol. II, April 12, 1806, Indiana State Library Newspapers Collection

 

*Please note that colors presented on computer screens are not precisely accurate, and may look slightly different from one screen to another.