Category Archives: Medical History

The 20% Solution: An Unlikely Breakthrough in Eye Surgery, 1884

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), oil on canvas, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art. {Painting depicts surgery in front of a class of medical students; note the man applying a rag, likely soaked with ether.]
Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), oil on canvas, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art. [Painting depicts surgery in front of a class of medical students; note the man applying a rag, likely soaked with ether.]
By 1884, Indianapolis newspapers were reporting on the success of eye surgeries and procedures, including tattooing the cornea, by using a brand new anesthetic… cocaine.

Dr. Carl Koller, photograph, circa 1885, accessed the Foundation of the American Academy of Opthamology
Dr. Carl Koller, photograph, circa 1885, accessed the Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology

According to A. Grzybowki’s 2008 article “Cocaine and the Eye: A Historical Overview,” doctors had been experimenting with coca leaves in Europe since the 15th century.  However, it wasn’t until the 19th century that they learned to extract the active component: cocaine.  Early studies focused on the “many physiological and pathological effects,” as opposed to any numbing effects.

An Austrian ophthalmologist named Carl Koller is credited with discovering the effective use of cocaine as a local anesthetic for eye surgery in 1884. Koller found that a cocaine solution applied to the cornea left the eye temporarily unable to move or feel pain.  Before this discovery, it was almost impossible to operate on the eye because of its involuntary movements. His findings, published on September 18, 1884, were widely accepted and reproduced in the United States. Newspapers throughout the Midwest began reporting on the wonder drug almost immediately.  In fact, the first articles we found in searching Hoosier State Chronicles date to only one month after Koller’s discovery. The rising popularity of the drug was apparently driving up the cost.

The New Anesthetic in Indiana Apothecaries

As early as October 1884, the Indianapolis News listed the price of the “new and successful anesthetic.”

Indianapolis News, October 24, 1884, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.
Indianapolis News, October 24, 1884, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.

The following month, the Daily Wabash Express noted that 18 karat gold cost about $16 an ounce while cocaine cost $224 an ounce.

[Terre Haute] Daily Wabash Express, November 30, 1884, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[Terre Haute] Daily Wabash Express, November 30, 1884, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.
In December 1884, a Bloomington dentist wrote a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis News  encouraging his Indianapolis colleagues that they advertise their use of the new anesthetic in an article titled “Try Cocaine.” This tongue-in-cheek letter is referencing the high price of cocaine.  Thus, he jokes that if the city doctors advertise this expensive service, “great will be the reward reaped from their country cousins,” as most people would rather deal with the physical pain and the cost.

Indianapolis News, December 25, 1884, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles
“Try Cocaine,” Indianapolis News, December 25, 1884, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles
cocaine-indianapolis-news-december-26-1884-4-hsc
S.C., “Try Cocaine,” Indianapolis News, December 26, 1884, 4, Hoosier State Chronicles.

In response to the “country cousin” dentist, an Indiana man with the initials “S.C.,” also wrote to the editor of the Indianapolis News about the new anesthetic.  He wrote: “Hydrochlorate of Cocaine has been in use in the United States about two months . . . The anesthetic solution requires four grains in 100 drops of water.” He too complains about the high price and predicts that it will go up more, encouraging some patients to “grin and bear it” without the pain reliever.  S.C. continued: “The writer has a sample which he uses, not as a reward reaper, but to facilitate matters in examining ‘sore eyes.’ It has wonderful analgesic power in many directions, and physicians and dentists are using is as fast as they can obtain a supply – and a paying customer.”

Cocaine Solution and Eye Surgery

Antonio Baratti, engraving, 1772, National Library of Medicine, accessed U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections, https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101425480-img
Antonio Baratti, engraving, 1772, National Library of Medicine, accessed U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections.
cocaine-article-long-indianapolis-news-march-18-1885-2-hsc
“Surgery without Pain,” Indianapolis News, March 18, 1885, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.

In March 1885 the Indianapolis News reprinted “Surgery without Pain,” from the New York Tribune, describing the success of one “prominent eye surgeon” at the New York Post Graduate School of Medicine using cocaine as an anesthetic. When asked by the reporter if he uses the drug in surgery, the doctor replied: “Well, I should say so; in operations upon the eye I feel now that I could not get along without it. In general practice it has driven ether and chloroform out of the field. It is not only a wonderful discovery, but it is astonishing how rapidly it has risen into favor.”

The surgeon went on to tell the story of Dr. Koller’s recent discovery of cocaine as a local anesthesia in September 1884 and its immediate experimental adoption in the US.  He stated: “There is hardly a field in which it has not been used with success. Too much cannot be said in its praise in surgical operations upon the eye, ear and nose.”

"The New Anaesthetic," [Terre Haute] Saturday Evening Mail, February 21, 1885, 8, Hoosier State Chronicles.
“The New Anaesthetic,” [Terre Haute] Saturday Evening Mail, February 21, 1885, 8, Hoosier State Chronicles.
On February 21, 1885, the [Terre Haute] Saturday Evening Mail ran an article detailing the history and medical uses for cocaine, including eye surgery.  By dropping a cocaine solution “2 to 20 percent” the eye was made insensitive  “and the most trying operations may thus be performed . . . without pain.” The article also contained a deadly-sounding recipe for a crystallized version of the drug that not only used ether, but also lead.

Indianapolis News, April 15, 1885, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.
Indianapolis News, April 15, 1885, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.

On April 15, 1885, the Indianapolis News also reported on “Cocaine, the new anesthetic” and how a patient not only “submitted to the ball of his eye being punctured by a delicate spearhead knife,” but also “chatted pleasantly with the operator” during the surgery.

Surgery Under
“Surgery Under Cocaine,” Indianapolis News, June 2, 1885, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.

One June 2, 1885, the Indianapolis News ran a story claiming a patient felt “no pain during the section of ciliary or optic nerves” when a 20% cocaine solution was applied before the operation and dropped on the eye throughout.

cocaine-dog-eye-surgery-greencastle-times-march-14-1889-8-hsc
“The Use of Cocaine,” Greencastle Times, March 14, 1889, 8, Hoosier State Chronicles

The Greencastle Times reported on a doctor who used cocaine for eye surgery in 1889, only this time the patient was “a very fine hunting dog, who had got a thorn in his eye.”  The good doctor applied a 5% cocaine solution to the dog’s eye, removed the thorn, and the dog “soon trotted home as well as ever.”

Tattooing the Eye

Crawfordsville Review, December 11, 1897, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles
Crawfordsville Review, December 11, 1897, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Perhaps most interestingly, the Crawfordsville Review reported that “the latest discovery of scientific medical men is that the human eye may be tattooed any color.” The procedure is recommended for blind or “dead” eyes in order to “restore it to its natural appearance, so that nothing but the closest scrutiny can detect the difference between it and its fellow.” The eye was covered thickly with India ink and then punctured “by means of a little electrical machine which operates a specifically made needle.” Of course, this 19th-century medical miracle was also brought to us by cocaine.  According to the article, “The operation of tattooing is performed by first treating the eye with cocaine until it becomes absolutely senseless to pain.”

Indianapolis News, February 10, 1900, 6, Hoosier State Chronicles.
Indianapolis News, February 10, 1900, 6, Hoosier State Chronicles.

The following year that this very procedure was successfully performed by a surgeon at the nearby Miami Medical College in Ohio.  The Indianapolis News reported, “Miss Ada Duhrens . . . has had the color of the pupil of her eye restored by tattooing with india ink.”  We can only assume she has cocaine to thank for the “lost color restored” in her eyes.

Advertisement, Terre Haute Saturday Evening Mail, October 24. 1885, 3.
Advertisement, Terre Haute Saturday Evening Mail, October 31, 1885, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles.

By this time, cocaine was also being used as an anesthetic for nose, throat, and for dental procedures. It was completely unregulated. Anyone could walk into a pharmacy and purchase cocaine powder or tablets. It was also the main ingredient in many “stimulating tonics” designed to combat fatigue and even soothe kids’ tooth aches. Ads appear throughout Indiana newspapers in the 1880s promoting it as a cure for hay fever, hair loss, and recommending cocaine lozenges as essential for speakers and singers.

Later, it turned out, there were some complications with the wonder drug.

 Edward Jackson, Essentials of Refraction and the Diseases of the Eye (Philadelphis: W. B. Sanders, 1890), 136, accessed U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections.

Edward Jackson, Essentials of Refraction and the Diseases of the Eye (Philadelphis: W. B. Sanders, 1890), 136, accessed U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections.

For more information on cocaine and eye surgery see:

  1. Grzybowski, “Cocaine and the Eye: A Historical Overview,” Ophthalmologica 222: 5 (September 2008, accessed Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers, https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/140625
  2. Goerig, D. Bacon, and A. van Zundert, “Carl Koller, Cocaine, and Local Anethesia,” Reg Anesth Pain Med 37:3 (May-June 2012), accessed PubMed.gov, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22531385

More Freaks of the Storm

Lightning daguerreotype, 1847


Yesterday’s post set us to hunting:  as blizzards and ice give way to spring lightning and wind, how many other weird weather phenomena lie hidden in the news?  Obviously, we’ve never believed that history is boring, so we wondered:  how often did our ancestors get killed by lightning or blown away by a stiff breeze?

Here’s a few fascinating stories from the annals of meteorology in the Midwest and beyond.

The image above, thought to be the oldest photograph of lightning, was captured in St. Louis, Missouri, by T. M. Easterly in June 1847, eight years after Jacques-Louis Daguerre announced his invention of the daguerreotype in Paris.  At a time when cameras often required exposure times of thirty seconds or more, it’s amazing this was taken at 9:00 P.M.

At the height of the new art form’s popularity, daguerreotypes entered the realm of lightning lore.  As part of a growing fascination with photography (Greek for “writing with light”), those tales (including a few of the “tall” variety, surely) were soon making the rounds of American newspapers.  Yet there was actually a good scientific explanation behind so-called “lightning daguerreotypes” — and they weren’t the kind Easterly was making in St. Louis.


The Berkshire County Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), May 28, 1858

The Berkshire County Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), May 28, 1858 (2)

The Berkshire County Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), May 28, 1858 (3)

(The Berkshire County Eagle, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, May 28, 1858.)


What most witnesses of lightning strikes didn’t know in the 1850’s is that these patterns on the skin weren’t “daguerreotypes,” but Lichtenberg figures.  Also called keraunographs and lightning flowers, they can look exactly like tree branches, plants and sometimes round coins.  (Where the cow shape or the number 44 came from is a bigger mystery.) Named for the 18th-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a student of electrical discharges, the figures often occur after any high-voltage jolt through insulated material like the human body.  Not unlike photographs, they can be produced and preserved in glass, resin and wood as 3-D “electrical trees.”  They also remain behind as scars.


Lichtenberg figure

(Lichtenberg figure on a man who survived a lightning strike.)


Stories about “lightning daguerreotypes” and freak weather accidents spilled into ghost lore, which flourished during the heyday of American spiritualism in the mid- to late-1800s.  A branch of Christianity that involved communicating with the dead through mediums, spiritualism was surprisingly mainstream.  Some of its older American forerunners were the Shakers, part of a unique utopian movement with roots mostly in New England.  (There was also a short-lived Shaker community on the Wabash River north of Vincennes around the time of the War of 1812.  Much of its membership was African American.)

The Shakers incorporated all kinds of unusual spiritual phenomena into their unique faith and believed that their founder, an English textile worker and single mother named Ann Lee, was the second coming of Christ.  They certainly believed in spirits and spirit possession, so the following story (either from New Hampshire or Connecticut) probably wasn’t too out of the ordinary.


Indianapolis Leader, February 28, 1880

(Indianapolis Leader, February 28, 1880.)


Even as metal daguerreotypes and tintypes gave way to the age of Kodak and the paper photograph, stories about human, animal and other images etched by lightning onto some kind of light-sensitive backdrop didn’t immediately go away.  Like Shaker Sam’s lightning-blasted spirit, this story — originating in the Charlottesville (Virginia) Chronicle — also appeared in 1880.  It borders on the supernatural.


The Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois), April 13, 1880

(The Pantagraph, Bloomington, Illinois, April 13, 1880.)


As we showed in yesterday’s post, wind can be as fearsome and downright bizarre as any lightning bolt.  “Freaks of the storm” — from flying cows to airborne newborns — would fill a small book, some of it tragic, but a lot of it funny.  Here’s a few more tales of the wind.

When a tornado blasted Drake, Oklahoma, in 1917, it wiped out a whole family — almost…


Drake, Okla. - Indianapolis News, June 2, 1917

(Indianapolis News, June 2, 1917.)


Mattoon, Illinois, was also hit hard that week, probably as part of the same “patriotic” storm-front — which, as it barreled east from the Plains, wasn’t done pulling tricks.


Mattoon, IL -- Indianapolis Star, May 28, 1917

(Indianapolis Star, May 28, 1917.)


Tornadoes had a knack for randomly sparing some delicate, highly-breakable objects — from babies and chicken eggs to caged birds and loose photographs — while demolishing large buildings and whole towns.  This twister struck Louisville, Kentucky in 1890:


Louisville tornado -- Greencastle Daily Sun, June 17, 1890

(Greencastle Daily Sun, Greencastle, Indiana, June 17, 1890.)


A farm animal in Minnesota was less fortunate than the song birds in Louisville, but the farmer who got picked up by this 1892 cyclone was lucky the pig was there.


Southeastern Minnesota -- Indianapolis Journal, June 18, 1892

(Indianapolis Journal, June 18, 1892.)


Tornadoes could be symbolically choosy — and a little morbid — about what they carried away or spared.  Take the cyclone that plowed through part of Omaha in March 1902… and the one that cut up a small Iowa town in 1895.


Sandusky Star-Journal, March 11, 1902

(Sandusky Star-Journal, March 11, 1902.)


The Register, Rock Valley, Iowa, May 10, 1895

(The Register, Rock Valley, Iowa, May 10, 1895.)


A big windstorm tore through downtown Indianapolis one Sunday evening in June 1929.  A girl just born to Mary Hubbell at 30 North Lansing Street that afternoon nearly got killed three hours later when a telephone pole crashed into the small house.  It came careening through the roof “just above the bed in which the mother and child lay.”  Both escaped with small bruises. The Indianapolis News reported that “In all the excitement, members of the Hubbell family have been unable to decide on a name for the new arrival. ‘We are so glad that my wife and baby are not badly hurt, we haven’t had time to think of a name,’ the father explained.'”

It was a wild time.


Indianapolis News, July 1, 1929 (1)


Indianapolis News, July 1, 1929 (5)

(Indianapolis News, July 1, 1929.)

“No Imported Patriots”: James Whitcomb Riley, the Irish, and the Klan

Riley stamp 1940

For most Americans, the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley is no longer a household name.  He’s mostly remembered for “Little Orphant Annie,” an 1885 poem about an Indiana girl who warns children against misbehaving, scaring them with the refrain: “The gobble-uns’ll get you Ef you don’t watch out!”

Riley died a hundred years ago this July.  When President Woodrow Wilson got the news at the White House, he is said to have broken down in tears, then sent an express telegram to the poet’s family in Indianapolis.  As Riley’s body lay in state at the Indiana Capitol in July 1916, thirty-five thousand people filed past.  American children, who adored the old man, were devastated.  The press overflowed with eulogies.  Novelist Booth Tarkington, another once-famous Hoosier name in American letters, eulogized Riley in the Indiana Daily Times, calling him “the first and foremost distinctively American poet, and at the time of his death . . . the greatest American.”  The New York Sun mourned: “The Hoosier Poet blew heart bubbles . . . In his verses Indiana spoke to the world.”  And the Philadelphia Inquirer noted: “There is no doubt that he was the most popular poet of this generation in America… If there is a child today that is not regaled with ‘Orphant Annie’ that child is to be pitied.”


Riley and Children
Riley with children and a puppy, circa 1915. Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis was named in his honor.

Though Riley was mostly known for his folksy childhood lyrics, he was also a civic-minded poet, fierce in his defense of the downtrodden.

In 1898, during one of those periodic battles over immigration that heat up American politics, the “Poet of Childhood” grappled with anti-Irish prejudice — though it wasn’t personally directed against him. Riley, whose own grandparents came from Ireland to Pennsylvania before moving to the Midwest, defended the valor and patriotism of the “Sons of Erin” who fought in the Civil War and Mexican War.  In so doing, he took aim at the religious and ethnic hostility of nativist groups like the American Protective Association, a cousin of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Irish, especially Irish Catholics, were frequently misunderstood and feared as disruptors of society.  Long before the Civil War, American nativists like the Know-Nothings had been actively exploiting fears about the Irish and “Rome,” alien forces ready to undermine American democracy and Anglo-Saxon values.  Though some of those fears may sound downright bizarre today, Irish immigrants were often mired in poverty, violence and alcoholism, facts that scared their neighbors. While the brutal living conditions of many Irish were no myth, catastrophic events like the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s were partly to blame.  With their situation made worse by the greed of landowners and brutal utilitarian social theories, many of Ireland’s sons and daughters were reduced to sub-human conditions. Millions  went overseas or found themselves driven into the arms of death.

The Irish had been targeted by some of the worst 19th-century science and philosophy.  Racialized by other whites during the early days of Darwinism, the “native” Irish in particular were type-cast as little better than apes, doomed by biology itself to crime, degradation and — some theorists hoped — gradual extinction.  One famous drawing compares the “Anglo-Saxon” features of English nurse Florence Nightingale to the ape-like face of “Bridget McBruiser” across the Irish Channel.

That drawing, however, was an American drawing, published in Samuel R. Wells’ New Physiognomy (New York, 1866).  Wells was one of the foremost American phrenologists of his time, studying “character” as he imagined it to be written on the human face and skull.  It took decades for the science of head bumps and nose shapes to be debunked as nonsense, but the fallout proved catastrophic for many immigrants.


Contrasted Faces
Books like Wells’ New Physiognomy gave rise to even more damaging scientific theories about racial types — strange fantasies that fed the growth of American eugenics, the Second Ku Klux Klan, and even Progressivism. Wells also authored books about farm animals, gardening and witchcraft.

Bad science and hyper-patriotic conspiracy theories were the target of one of James Whitcomb Riley’s lesser-known poems, “Brother Jonathan Lectures His Adopted.”  That poem appeared in Songs of Two Peoples, an 1898 collection set partly in New England, partly in Ireland.

Originally written in broad New England dialect, “Brother Jonathan” recounts the anti-Catholic ravings of a recent Northern Irish immigrant voting for “the fust time” at a small-town polling booth in America. Jonathan showed himself an eager campaigner against foreign influence, “tearin’ up an’ deown’ on platforms,” lashing out at Rome’s priests who “eat heretics at feasts” — dark tales from European history carried by folklore and immigrant ships into American election booths well into the 1960s and even beyond. Catholics, Jonathan warns, were gearing up to crush the American public school system and democracy.  He gets a stinging rebuke from the embodiment of Uncle Sam, “His Adopted.”


Brother Jonathan
Songs of Two Peoples, Boston, 1898. Like Brother Jonathan, many popular anti-Catholic lecturers who touted Americanism a hundred years ago were recent immigrants or not even citizens. Several wrote books that were later promoted by the Klan.

Though Riley’s poem is set just after the Civil War, it spoke to the issues of 1898, when America’s generously open door did bring many problems. Yet the looming figure of “Brother Jonathan” was still fresh decades later when George R. Dale, the brave editor of the Muncie Post-Democrat, reprinted it as part of his long battle against the powerful Hoosier Klan.

In 1924, Dale found Riley’s poem as apt as ever.  Dale was at the start of a practically one-man battle against the KKK in his town, using humor to transform the Muncie Post-Democrat into a rollicking 1920s version of The Onion.  Though Dale faced routine death threats and assaults from Klansmen, the Muncie editor bravely tore into chauvinism at a time when the Klan was as much against new waves of Eastern and Southern European immigration as it was opposed to African Americans coming up from the South.  Dale slightly abbreviated Riley’s poem — missing the fact that Brother Jonathan was an immigrant himself and had brought Old World animosities across the Atlantic, a prelude to the Irish “Troubles.”


James Whitcomb Riley -- April 25, 1924(Muncie Post-Democrat, April 25, 1924. Hoosier State Chronicles. The A.P.A. was the American Protective Association, an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic secret society founded in Iowa in 1887.  It had a membership of over two million in the 1890s and was a forerunner of the Second Klan. A.P.A.-affiliated newspapers like The Menace and The Yellow Jacket landed on millions of American doorsteps.)


Though many Irish immigrants were racists themselves, stirring up some of the worst race riots of the 1800s, George Dale found an ally in both history and the Catholic Church.  Virtually every issue of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson’s Klan paper The Fiery Cross contained attacks on the church, sharpest during the Indiana gubernatorial election of 1924, the year Dale reprinted “Brother Jonathan” in Muncie.  It’s not surprising that, since they were long targeted by nativists, Catholics became a major force in undermining the Klan and helped hobble half-baked social and medical theories like eugenics. (The barely-concealed “science” of white supremacy, eugenics had deep roots in Indiana.)

While Riley was of Irish descent, he wasn’t Catholic himself — in fact he wasn’t much of a church-goer at all.  Yet Riley knew plenty of immigrants: they were his neighbors in Lockerbie, an Indianapolis neighborhood first called “Germantown” and settled partly by refugees from Europe’s 1848 revolutions.

But even Riley’s support had a dark irony in it.  A frequent visitor at his house in Lockerbie was Indiana Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. The son of French immigrants, Debs was a champion of the working class but often hostile to the new wave of immigration, which he thought undermined American labor and played into the hands of big business.  Debs may have been right about the effect of cheap labor on the American workers’ movement, but history repeated itself in a sad way when even the great Socialist leader made disparaging remarks in 1891 about Chinese and “Dagos” (Italians). They “fatten on garbage,” Debs said, live “more like a savage or a wild beast,” and “are able to underbid an American workingman.”  It took years for Debs to temper those views, as even the Socialist Party succumbed to nativism and fear of the “degraded foreigner.”


Riley house
Riley’s house in Indianapolis around 1960. During the days of urban renewal, the Lockerbie neighborhood fell into bad shape, but fortunately its decline was turned around by the 1990s. The green ivy that once covered the poet’s house, though, is long gone.

Ketchups of Yesteryear

Madison Daily Courier, February 20, 1850

While browsing through an old issue of the Madison Daily Courier (February 20, 1850), we stumbled across this eye-catching inventory from James Roberts’ store in the antebellum river town of Madison, Indiana.  Two unusual items stood out: mushroom catsup and walnut catsup.  What on earth was the history of these things?

In the days before H.J. Heinz, a former horseradish salesman, muscled in and mastered the art of making a pure, healthy tomato ketchup, Americans enjoyed an amazing variety of ketchups or “catsups.”  Many antebellum Hoosiers could have bought these at the store.  Others would have been able to make them from scratch using ingredients often available in Hoosier fields and forests.

Like many American families, the ketchup family isn’t native to the New World.  Both the word and the condiment likely came from China or Malaysia, where ke-chap referred to a brine of pickled fish or shellfish.  East Asian ketchups were salty or soy-based and had a liquid consistency, unlike often-stubborn tomato ketchup, a “non-Newtonian” fluid that needs a thump to get moving.

The first known mention of the word ketchup in English comes from a dictionary of slang from 1690, where it’s defined as a “high East-India sauce.”  In fact, British East India traders are credited for bringing the sauce back from Asia.  Word-sleuths, however, think that ketchup might have come from an Arabic word, kabees, also referring to a pickling sauce.

One Englishman, Charles Lockyer, gave advice to other traders in the Orient on how to get the best deals on lucrative soy sauce and ketchup — in 1711.


Charles Lockyer, An Account of Trade in India (1711)

Charles Lockyer, An Account of Trade in India (1711) 2

(Charles Lockyer, An Account of Trade in India, 1711.)


It’s hard to believe anyone would sail all the way to Asia and back in a wooden boat just for ketchup — or that King George and George Washington were throwing ketchup on their food.  But eighteenth-century Britain and America were definitely familiar with the ketchup “family.”  In fact, catsup, once thought to be an Americanized version of the word, was actually a misspelling by the Irish satirist and Anglican priest Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, who used it in a comic poem in 1730.

Eliza Smith, one of the bestselling English cookbook writers, describes how to make ketchup in her book The Compleat Housewife, or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion. Smith died around 1732, but her cookbook came out in many editions and was the first one ever printed in the American colonies.  In 1742, a year before Thomas Jefferson’s birth, the cookbook was reprinted in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Yet Smith’s recipe for “English Katchup” didn’t call for a single tomato. Instead, you needed mushrooms, anchovies and horseradish.  The vinegary result tasted and looked something like Worcestershire sauce.  It took a week to make.


The compleat housewife

(Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife, London, 1727.  The book was re-printed in Williamsburg by William Parks, who ran one of the first paper mills and thus helped turn out some of the earliest American newspapers, including Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. This instructional video on 18th-century cooking will tell you how to put together a mushroom ketchup that would have been familiar to Americans almost 300 years ago.)


Ketchup’s historic association with pickling sauces and fish was still strong in the mid-1800s, when grocery stores like James Roberts’ just downstream from Cincinnati were advertising the arrival of seafood and condiments from the East Coast.  Much of that food came aboard steamboats floating down from Pittsburgh — future ketchup capital of the world (but not yet…)

For generations, many Europeans and Americans were literally scared of tomatoes and tomato-loving worms, believing both to be the source of a deadly poison.  Part of the reason why the tomato was once considered a “poison apple” was that wealthy Europeans ate it off pewter plates high in lead content.  Botanists and cultivators slowly dispelled these myths.  By the 1870s, doctors and plant-growers had sparked a craze for the tomato as a medical cure-all.  Before the 1830s, though, that lingering fear of the tomato was one reason why it was slow to be accepted into the family of ketchups.


Evansville Daily Journal, December 4, 1848

(Evansville Daily Journal, December 4, 1848.  Incidentally, the cans that lobsters, fish and catsups were packed in might have caused health problems.  Cans sealed with lead have been considered a possible cause of the medical disaster that led to the death of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic in 1845, just three years before this ad came out.  Post-mortem tests on 138-year-old bodies of crewmen, mummified in the Canadian permafrost, gave evidence of lead poisoning when they were exhumed, amazingly intact, in 1984.)


What were some of the other varieties of ketchup?

Walnut ketchup still occasionally makes it onto the table and usually tastes something like A-1 Steak Sauce.  Charlotte Mason, a Revolutionary-era chef in England,  promoted fermented varieties of walnut ketchup in The Lady’s Assistant, a cookbook published in London in 1787 and available in the U.S.  You’d have to plan your dinners well in advance, though.  Like distilled liquor, some fermented ketchups take several months to make.  Fortunately, Charlotte Mason definitely believed in bulk cooking — and some varieties would “keep for years.”


Charlotte Mason, The Lady's Assistant (1787)

(Charlotte Mason, The Lady’s Assistant, for Regulating & Supplying the Table, London, 1787.  “Eschalot” was an old word for shallots. Harvesting green walnuts is tough due to the time-frame — a small window in late June and early July, another reason to make it in bulk.)


Just as beer- and whiskey-lovers have been rediscovering all the varieties of alcohol that Americans enjoyed before Prohibition put the nix on brewers and distillers, foodies are unearthing some of the ketchup varieties that once existed in Old American cooking.

These included concord grape ketchup (including this recipe from western New York for grape catsup applied to sweet potato fries and/or Greek yogurt) and lemon ketchup.  An unusual historic recipe from 19th-century New Hampshire tells how to make cucumber ketchup.  One chef touts a tangy peach ketchup calling for ingredients as diverse as cinnamon, sugar, chili, molasses and vinegar.  Oyster ketchup was often made directly from oysters, but other oyster ketchups were made from tomatoes and meant to be put on oysters.  Van Camp Packing Company in Indianapolis and the Loudon Packing Company in Terre Haute were once major producers of oyster ketchup.


Greencastle Herald, July 27, 1911

(Recipe for a fermented version of lemon catsup, Greencastle Herald, Greencastle, Indiana, July 27, 1911.)


Since fermentation was often involved, ketchup sometimes began to be treated like wine.  The Indiana Palladium in Lawrenceburg (future home of Seagram’s Distillery) reprinted a clip from an article in the United States Gazette of Philadelphia about the tomato and its use in regulating digestion.  This was around the time that the health benefits of the once-misunderstood “poison apple” were finally being promoted. The author praises a “very choice bottle” of fermented tomato ketchup, bottled by his family six years earlier — in 1827.


Indiana Palladium, October 18, 1834

(Indiana Palladium, Lawrenceburg, October 18, 1834.  Castor was a common purgative used to open up the bowels.  Ketchup, especially ketchup compounds sold as medicine, was also thought to cure both constipation and diarrhea.)


The tomato’s fortunes were on the rise.  But until Henry Heinz came along, eating tomato ketchup could still put your life in jeopardy.  The problem lay in poor sanitation at factories and bottling plants — and the issue of how to keep tomato ketchup red.

Writers around the time of the Civil War described the disgusting horror show that sometimes came pouring out of ketchup bottles:  yeasty, moldy, bacteria-laden filth.  Food poisoning and even death weren’t an uncommon fate after consumption of “putrid, decomposed” tomato ketchup.  Amazingly, manufacturers — including Charles Loudon in Terre Haute — often used coal-tar dye, an ingredient in road construction, to preserve the tomato’s bright red appearance.   It was only in 1882 that writers began to point out the dangers of coal tar.  Aware of ketchup nightmares, Gardener’s Monthly that year encouraged American families to steer clear of industrial ketchup and keep on making their own.  A further danger came from boric acid, once used as a food preservative and now used in athlete’s foot medication and insecticide.


H.J. Heinz

(H.J. Heinz around the time he moved beyond the horseradish business and forever changed the ketchup industry.)


By the 1870s, Henry Heinz of Pittsburgh was sparking a revolution in the ketchup, sauerkraut, and pickle business.  Heinz’s family had emigrated from Kallstadt, Bavaria, hometown of Donald Drumpf’s ancestors.  Unlike many Gilded Age business moguls, Heinz was a political progressive and took great strides to improve life for workers at his plants — and to keep bacteria out of his customers’ food.

With a good knowledge of advances in chemistry and public health, by 1906 Heinz was turning out a preservative-free ketchup (i.e., no coal tar!) and used transparent jars so his customers could see exactly what they were buying.  Heinz was proud of his factories: even in notoriously polluted Pittsburgh, his employees had access to showers, swimming pools, gardens, medical stations, fresh laundry, free manicures and lunchtime open-air concerts.  He offered free life and health insurance to workers and free tours to the public because — like his bottles — he felt he had nothing to fear from transparency.  The Heinz Company hired thousands of women, and Heinz raised their wages against the advice of his business committee.  He also took out ads in women’s magazines to warn the public about the dangers of certain food preservatives.


Heinz factory

(Women at the Heinz Factory in Pittsburgh, circa 1901.)


Knowing that quality food and happy workers meant bigger profits, the ketchup mogul was a major force behind getting the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906, a year after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, an exposé of meatpackers, came out in a Socialist newspaper in Kansas, Appeal to Reason.  (That paper’s editor, by the way, was Julius Wayland, a native Hoosier who once nearly got lynched in Versailles, Indiana, for his Socialist views.)

Heinz’s revolution — a “red” one, indeed — soon spread to the Midwest. Today, Red Gold in Elwood, Indiana, is the top ketchup producer in the U.S., beating out even Heinz.  And the Hoosier State itself ranks second only to California in tomato processing.  To think that it all began with a 17th-century Asian fish sauce…


Tomato farmers, Loudon Packing Company

(Laborers pick tomatoes for the Loudon Packing Company of Terre Haute.  Loudon had hometown competition in the ketchup business from Hulman & Company — whose owner, Tony Hulman, later bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.   By World War II, however, Loudon’s company had won minor fame itself by becoming the first major producer of V8, once made in Terre Haute.)


It Helps to Squash 'Em, Karl Kae Knecht, August 10, 1942

(Evansville cartoonist Karl Kae Knecht helped enlist tomatoes during World War II.  Indiana tomato production “splatters” Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito, Evansville Courier, August 10, 1942.)


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The Black Stork: Eugenics Goes to the Movies

The Black Stork 4

From 1917 into the 1920s, Hoosier movie-goers had a chance to see one of the most controversial — and arguably infamous — silent films ever produced, The Black Stork, later renamed Are You Fit To Marry? Identified by one film historian as among the earliest horror movies, The Black Stork was based on a real and gut-wrenching medical drama from 1915.

Billed as a “eugenics love story,” the movie’s script was authored by Chicago journalist, muckraker and theater critic Jack Lait.  Lait worked for news mogul William Randolph Hearst, the very man who inspired the lead figure in Orson Welles’ great 1941 movie Citizen Kane.  Hearst, king of American “yellow journalism,” relished controversies, which sold newspapers and theater tickets. His film company, International Film Service, produced The Black Stork.

Many Americans today have never heard the word “eugenics,” a once-popular scientific theory spawned by Victorian understandings of evolution and heredity in the wake of Charles Darwin.  The word comes from the Greek for “well-born” or “good stock” and refers to the social interpretation of scientific discoveries purporting to show how harmful genetic traits are passed on from parents to children — and how healthy children could be bred. Eugenics wasn’t strictly the same as science itself, but a social philosophy based on the discoveries of Darwin, the monk-botanist Gregor Mendel, and Darwin’s nephew, geneticist Francis Galton. Yet many scientists and doctors got involved with this social philosophy.

Once fairly mainstream, support for eugenic theories plummeted after the defeat of Hitler, its most notorious advocate. Aspects of eugenics — like the forced sterilization of repeat criminals, rapists, epileptics, the poor, and some African Americans — continued in twenty-seven American states into the 1950s and even later in a few.  The last forced sterilization in the U.S. was performed in Oregon in 1981.


U.S. Eugenics Advocacy Poster, 1926
U.S. eugenics advocacy poster, 1926. The authors ranked just 4% of Americans as “high-grade” and “fit” for creative work and leadership.

Indiana played an enormous role in the history of eugenics when the Hoosier State became the first to enact a compulsory sterilization law in 1907 — a law that lumped the mentally handicapped in with sex offenders, made it virtually illegal for whole classes deemed “unfit” to reproduce, segregated many of the disabled into mental hospitals, and enshrined white supremacy. Though the Indiana law was struck down in 1921, those ideas were hugely popular with many academics and activists all across the political spectrum.

Indiana Historical Bureau state historical marker.

Especially notable, the Indiana Eugenics Law wasn’t pushed by those designated as white racist “hillbillies.” “Poor white” Indianapolis slum-dwellers, in fact, were very much targeted by the eugenicists of the early 20th century.  Promoters of these spurious theories included mainstream biologists, doctors, many reform-minded Progressives, women’s rights advocates, college presidents, even a few Christian ministers and Socialists. The list of widely-admired people who spoke out in favor of simplistic eugenic proposals included Helen Keller, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Sir Winston Churchill, Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger, author Jack London, IU and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, Alexander Graham Bell, and the civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois.  One of the few well-known anti-eugenics crusaders was Senator William Jennings Bryan, a Christian Fundamentalist who lost caste with Progressives in the 1920s for opposing the teaching of evolution.


Murder rankings
American eugenic “scientists” blamed murder rates on heredity, ethnicity, and imaginary racial types like “Dinaric” and “Alpine.” “Pure Nordic,” the type idealized by Hitler, was deemed the least prone to criminal activity. Time would prove that theory wrong.

Eugenics, however, was neither “liberal” nor “conservative.” Americans of all political stripes supported its basic premise — the preservation of social order and the engineering of more a “humane” society.  Strong support for eugenics came from Americans concerned about the proliferation of poverty and urban crime and who sought a reason to keep certain nationalities from entering the U.S.  Eugenics did not begin to go out of favor until 1935, when scientists from the Carnegie Institute in Washington demonstrated the flimsiness of other scientists’ work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.  Yet even as eugenicists placed human reproduction on the level of horse- and livestock-breeding, the genetic abolition of any individual deemed “feeble-minded” — and the destruction of hereditary and sexually-transmitted diseases — was packaged as a positive goal, a social benefit to all, even to those who underwent involuntary sterilization and were occasionally killed.


Better Baby Contest, Indiana State Fair, 1931
Better Baby contest, Indiana State Fair, 1931. Eugenicists put reproduction and marriage on the level of agriculture and sought to manage human beings like a farm. Better Baby contests began at the Iowa State Fair in 1911.

Euthanasia was one component of eugenics.  Alongside the “positive eugenics” campaign for “Better Babies and Fitter Families,” “negative eugenics” partly revolved around the controversial view that infants born with severe disabilities should be left to die or killed outright.  In 1915, a case in Chicago plunged Americans into a heated debate about medical ethics.

That November, Dr. Harry J. Haiselden, chief surgeon at the German-American Hospital in Chicago, was faced with a tough dilemma.  A woman named Anna Bollinger had just given birth to a child, John, who suffered from severe birth defects.  John had no neck or right ear and suffered from a serious skin ailment, all judged to be the result of syphilis likely passed on by his father. Dr. Haiselden knew that he could save the child’s life through a surgical procedure.  But since he was familiar with the conditions into which Illinois’ “feeble-minded” were thrown after birth, he convinced the child’s parents to let John die at the hospital.  When the news came out that the doctor wasn’t going to perform the necessary surgery, an unknown person tried to kidnap the child and take it to another hospital.  The kidnapping attempt failed and John Bollinger died.


South Bend News-Times, November 18, 1915
The South Bend News-Times called “Baby Bollinger” a martyr, but later carried advertisements for the doctor’s film. South Bend News-Times, November 18, 1915. Hoosier State Chronicles.

While the Catholic Church, one of the few vocal critics of eugenics, was the only major group to initially protest the surgeon’s decision, Haiselden was soon called before a medical ethics board in Chicago. He nearly lost his medical license, but managed to keep it.  Public opinion was sharply divided.  Chicago social worker and suffragette Jane Addams came out against Haiselden.  Short of the death penalty for murder, Addams said, no doctor had the right to be an unwilling person’s executioner.  “It is not for me to decide whether a child should be put to death. If it is a defective, it should be treated as such, and be taught all it can learn,” she added.

Many of Haiselden’s critics, such as Addams, pointed out that if eugenicists had had their way, they would have killed some of the great “defectives” in history, like Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevksy, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, children’s writer Edward Lear, and even the eugenicist Harry Laughlin himself — all of them epileptics.  (Biologist Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor and one of the science’s greatest advocates, had suffered from epilepsy since childhood.)

Support for Dr. Haiselden, however, came from many famous social activists.  Among them was Helen Keller — advocate for the disabled, a Socialist, and a eugenics supporter (at least in 1915.) Keller, who was blind and deaf since the age of one but thrived against all odds, published her views on the Haiselden case in The New Republic. She thought that children proven to be “idiots” by a “jury of expert physicians” could and perhaps should be put to death. Chicago lawyer and civil liberties crusader Clarence Darrow — who famously went up against eugenics critic William Jennings Bryan at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial — made no bones about his support for the surgeon: “Chloroform unfit children,” Darrow said.  “Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.” Indiana Socialist Eugene V. Debs also supported Haiselden’s decision.


Clarence Darrow    Helen Keller
(Clarence Darrow and Helen Keller supported Haiselden.)


Harry Haiselden held onto his job, but bolstered his position and kept the firestorm of public discussion brewing by starring as himself in a silent film based on the Bollinger case.  The Black Stork came to hundreds of American theaters, including many Hoosier ones.  Because public health workers and eugenicists often gave admonitory lectures before and after the movie, separate showings were offered for men and women.  Young children weren’t allowed to attend, but a South Carolina minister encouraged parents to bring their teenage children — so they could see what might come from sexual promiscuity, criminality, drinking and “race mixing.”  Some theater bills added the catchy subtitle: “The Scourge of Humanity.”


South Bend News-Times, November 9, 1917
The Black Stork enjoyed several screenings at the Oliver Theater in South Bend. South Bend News-Times, November 9, 1917. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The movie’s plot was partly fictional and not entirely based on the 1915 Bollinger euthanasia case.  The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette gave its readers the basic story line, which came with an interesting twist near the end:

The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 12, 1917 (2)

The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 12, 1917 (1)
The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 12, 1917.

The “taint of the Black Stork” was obviously bad genes and heritable diseases. Haiselden’s silent film has been called one of the earliest horror movies, though its promoters billed it as educational and even romantic in nature. It fueled the eugenics movement’s campaign about defectives but also tackled an ethical dilemma that’s still alive today:  is it ever humane to kill a person without their permission, on the grounds that the victim is doomed to live a miserable life and be only a “burden on society”?


The Black Stork 5


Since American eugenics was supported by known racists and would later be directly cited by the Nazis as inspiration for their  “racial science,” it’s uncomfortable to look deeper into it and realize how much turf it shares with Progressivists’ real concern for the treatment of the poor — and of mothers, some of whom would have been forced to raise severely disabled children. Some Americans thought the best way to eradicate poverty and disease was to eradicate the poor themselves by restricting their right to pass on the human “germ plasm” to the next generation.  Eugenics and even euthanasia became, for some, a way to avoid social reforms.  “Nurture vs. nature” lost out to inescapable hereditary destiny.

The Black Stork’s title was eventually changed to Are You Fit To Marry?  It ran in theaters and roadshows well into the Roaring Twenties.  It’s hard to believe that eugenicists begged Americans to ask themselves honestly if they were “fit to marry.”  One wonders how many Americans voluntarily abstained from having children after deeming themselves “unfit”?

Ads show that the film was screened at at least three theaters in Indianapolis (including English’s Theatre on Monument Circle) as well as at movie halls in Fort Wayne, East Chicago, Whiting, Hammond, Evansville, Richmond and probably many other Hoosier towns.


The Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 27, 1920.

The Black Stork 6


The “eugenics photo-drama” reminded Americans of the dangers that “bad” heredity posed not only to their own families, but to the nation.  When The Black Stork was shown in Elyria, Ohio, just a few months into America’s involvement in World War I, it clearly drew from the well of fear-mongering that linked crime and disease to alcohol, immigration, prostitution and rumors about German traitors and saboteurs — all clear threats to Anglo-Saxon ideals. Eugenics and euthanasia, by “saving our nation from misery and decay,” clearly got hitched to the wagon of nationalist politics. Viewing The Black Stork, like supporting the war effort, became “a solemn duty.”


The Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, Ohio), December 17, 1917
The Chronicle-Telegram, Elyria, Ohio, December 17, 1917.

German scientists were promoting “racial hygiene” long before the Nazis came to power in the 1930s.  Fascism’s scientists and propagandists would also draw heavily on the work of British and American eugenicists — and point to laws like Indiana’s when opponents criticized them.  Racial Hygiene, in fact, was the title of an influential textbook by Hoosier doctor Thurman B. Rice, a professor at IU Bloomington, a colleague of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and one of the founders of IU Medical School in Indianapolis.  In April 1929, Rice wrote an editorial in the Indiana State Board of Health’s monthly bulletin, entitled “If I Were Mussolini,” where he supported compulsory sterilization of “defectives.”


Thurman B. Rice 2
“If I Were Mussolini,” Monthly Bulletin of the Indiana State Board of Health, April 1929.

The Black Stork wasn’t the last film about euthanasia and eugenics. In 1941, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, commissioned one of the classics of Nazi cinema, Ich klage an (I Accuse).  The plot revolves around a husband who learns that his wife has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.  He gives her a drug that causes her death, then undergoes a trial for murder.  The film’s producers argued that death was not only a right but a social duty.  A tearjerker, Ich klage an was intended to soften up the German public for the Nazis’ T4 euthanasia campaign, which led to the deaths of as many as 200,000 adults and children deemed a burden to the nation. (There’s some further irony that Ich klage an’s cinematic parent, The Black Stork, was based on events at Chicago’s German-American Hospital.)

Eugenics captivated Americans and Europeans for a few more decades after the Bollinger case. British writer G.K. Chesterton, a Catholic convert and a fierce opponent of eugenics, probably deserves the last word here. Chesterton called eugenics “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.”


Chesterton at Notre Dame, 1930
G.K. Chesterton in South Bend, Indiana, October 1930, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame. Dr. Harry Haiselden himself once gave an address to South Bend’s Fork and Knife Club in May 1916.

In his 1922 book Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State, Chesterton quipped that society has never really had all that much to fear from the “feeble-minded.” Rather, it’s the “strong-minded” who hurt society the most.  Tearing into eugenics advocates in Britain, Germany and America, Chesterton spotlighted their frequent class prejudices, then skewered them brilliantly:

Why do not the promoters of the Feeble-Minded Bill call at the many grand houses in town and country where such nightmares notoriously are?  Why do they not knock at the door and take the bad squire away?  Why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac prize-fighter?  I do not know;  and there is only one reason I can think of, which must remain a matter of speculation. When I was at school, the kind of boy who liked teasing half-wits was not the sort that stood up to bullies.

Dr. Harry J. Haiselden was involved in the deaths of at least three more disabled infants.  He died of a cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Havana, Cuba, in 1919.


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“The Notorious and Diamond-Bedecked Dr. Lighthall”

Dr. J.I. Lighthall (2)

Today, rural towns often have doctors with American Indian surnames.  But in the 1800s, an “Indian doctor” meant something totally different.

For decades after the Civil War, so-called “Indian medicine shows” rolled through cities and country towns across the U.S.  These shows were something like the medical version of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Leading them, there was usually a wild-looking doctor — typically a white man claiming to be Native American or at least to have studied herbal healing with “Indian medicine men.”  What the shows really dispensed was exotic flare: banjo-playing minstrels, brass bands, even freak shows.

The traveling outfits also raked in thousands of dollars by touting medicinal cure-alls for common ailments, as Indian doctors announced their ability to cure practically all known ills — from dysentery, headaches and “private diseases” (venereal in nature) to dreaded cases of tuberculosis, cholera, and cancer.  Elixirs were only part of the lure. These doctors often doubled as dentists and yanked rotten teeth by the thousands.  In the days before anesthetics, brass bands covered up patients’ screams inside the wagon.  Music and entertainment also helped drown out the protests of local doctors and dentists, whose business these shows cut in on.

While the heyday of the medicine shows came after the Civil War, the “Indian doctor” phenomenon goes back farther than that, piggy-backing off the dearth of professional doctors in pioneer settlements and the primitive state of “scientific” medicine itself. Southerners who moved to the midwestern frontier had often lived for a while in Appalachia, where white settlers took an interest in traditional medicine practiced by the Cherokee and Choctaw. German and Scots-Irish settlers also had a medical heritage of their own going back to medieval Europe.


Indian Guide to Health

(This early Indian Guide to Health [1836] contains some of the often bizarre knowledge gleaned from medicine on the Appalachian frontier. The author was an early Hoosier doctor, Squire H. Selman — alias “Pocahontus Nonoquet” — who studied with the Kentucky doctor-adventurer Richard Carter.  Son of an English physician and a métis woman, Carter enjoyed one of the most thriving medical practices on the Ohio Valley frontier.  Selman went on to practice medicine in Columbus, Indiana.)


It’s a curious fact that one of the first doctors in Indianapolis was a 24-year-old “Indian doctor” from North Carolina.  The man also had an unforgettable name:  Dr. William Kelley Frohawk Fryer.  (In 1851, the Indiana State Sentinel thought his initials stood for “Dr. William Kellogg Francis Fryer,” but we sincerely hope that it really was “Frohawk.” That name appears on the cover of his own book.)

Dr. Fryer claimed to have studied medicine with Native Americans and was remembered by Indianapolis historians as an Indian doctor “of ancient memory.”  Some of his repertory of cures, however, apparently came from “pow-wow,” an old form of Pennsylvania German faith healing.  That practice was known as Braucherei or Spielwerk (spell-work) in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, and pow-wow practitioners (Brauchers or Hexenmeisters) drew on spells and folk remedies that probably go back to the world of Roman Catholic folk healing, forced underground in Germany after the Reformation. (The word pow-wow was either of Algonquin origin or a mispronunciation of the English “power” but had nothing to do with Native American medicine.)  The first book on pow-wow, published by German immigrant Johann Georg Hohman in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1820, anthologized many of these magical healings, talismans, and charms, based partly on occult “white magic” meant to ward off “black magic” or witchcraft. Pow-wow used esoteric words, sometimes from the Bible, as a form of healing and was explicitly Christian in nature, even reminding some of Jesus’ miracles accomplished via saliva.  Brauchers allegedly cured livestock by putting magical words into their feeding troughs.


powwow_3
From John George Hohman’s Der Verborgene Freund [The Long-Lost Friend], 1820. The book is still in print.

Pow-wow, which claimed to cure “both men and animals,” became an unorthodox form of spiritual medicine among Lutherans, Amish, Mennonites and Dunkers at a time when university-trained doctors were hard to come by even on the East Coast. Sometimes called “Christian voodoo,” pow-wow might even figure into the origin of the hex signs you can still see on barns.  (It led to a “Hex Murder Trial” in 1929.)  As a form of medical treatment, pow-wow’s heyday is long-gone, but it is still practiced on the sly in rural eastern Pennsylvania and was probably once part of folk medicine in the rural Midwest, wherever Pennsylvania Germans settled.


hex postcard

(Some scholars believe the hex tradition came out of pow-wow.)


In 1839, the year Dr. William Kelley Frohawk Fryer published his own Indian Guide to Health in Indianapolis, the Hoosier capitol city was just a few steps out of the wilderness.  Fryer believed in “vegetable medicine.”  He would probably have been able to find most of the roots and herbs he needed for medications in the swamps, bottomlands, and woodlands that still covered Marion County.  There’s even some evidence that he provided medical treatment in exchange for plants.  A clip from the Indiana State Sentinel in June 1886 states that he ran a place called “The Sanative House,” probably near his home on “South Illinois Street, near the Catholic school on Georgia.”  But Dr. Fryer was long gone by 1886. In the late 1840s, the young doctor moved down to Mobile, Alabama, then to New Orleans, where he advertised his manual on health (printed in Indianapolis) for sale nationwide.  Early front-page ads in the New Orleans Daily Crescent also carry glowing testimonials (maybe fictional) from his former patients back in central Indiana.


The Daily Crescent (New Orleans), July 25, 1850 (4)
W.K.F. Fryer claimed to have relieved more than 100,000 patients from ailments as diverse as stuttering, yellow fever, and cancer. He was still in business in New Orleans in the 1870s, when his name appears in the city directory on a list of physicians. This ad appeared on the front page of The Daily Crescent, July 25, 1850.

As the number of college-trained doctors and dentists back East grew after the Civil War, “Indian doctors” were squeezed out to the West and Midwest — where many claimed to have learned their trade in the first place, straight from Native American healers and shamans.  (It’s hard to say how many of these claims are true, but a few of them probably are.)  Yet “folk doctors” weren’t necessarily bad and provided the rudiments of medical care to some patients who couldn’t afford a university-trained physician, who simply had no access to one, or who (like African Americans) were even cruelly experimented on by the medical establishment.

J.P. Dunn, an early Indianapolis historian, wrote that Indiana was a “free-for-all medical state” until 1885.  During the 1800s, American doctors and state and local officials gradually began driving “quack” doctors out of business (or at least out of town) by requiring all practitioners to hold medical licenses.  The establishment didn’t always succeed at this. As early as 1831, legislators in remote Arkansas Territory tried to outlaw quackery.  Their law, known popularly as the “Medical Aristocracy Bill,” was vetoed by the territory’s one-armed governor John Pope, a former Kentucky senator.  Pope objected to it on the grounds that it violated “the spirit of liberty” and said: “Let every man be free to employ whom he pleases where he alone is concerned.”  The governor also took a swipe at college-trained “professionals,” pointing out that

many who have gone through a regular course in the medical schools are grossly ignorant of the theory or practice of medicine. They are mere smatterers in the science. With a piece of parchment in their pocket, and a little superficial learning, they are arrogant, rash and more dangerous quacks than those who adopt the profession from a sort of instinct, or a little practical observation.

Pope may have been right.  Whether educated or not, pioneer doctors sometimes killed whole families by accident.  (My great-grandmother’s grandfather, one of the first settlers of Rosedale, Indiana, was orphaned in 1846 by a doctor who prescribed a deadly concoction of some sort to his parents and one of his brothers.  As late as 1992, then, there was a Hoosier woman still living who had actually been raised by a man victimized as a young boy by pioneer medicine.)


Williams gravestone
“All died September 15, 1846.” Boatman Cemetery, Parke County, Indiana.

In 1885, Indiana finally passed a law requiring doctors either to show that they had studied at “some reputable medical college” or had practiced medicine in the Hoosier State continuously for ten years preceding the date of the act.  In April 1885, the Indiana Medical Journal endorsed this new law, saying: “It will probably make a few of the hundreds of quacks who now infest Indiana seek more congenial climes, and if enforced will prevent quacks from other states from settling within our borders.”

Yet the number of known Indian doctors operating in the state that year was low:


The Waterloo Press, June 12, 1884
The Waterloo Press, Waterloo, Indiana, June 12, 1884. “Accouchar” was a misspelling of accoucheur, a male midwife or obstetrician.

As J.P. Dunn pointed out, the tough question became: what was a “reputable medical college?”  County clerks, not medical organizations, issued doctor’s licenses.  Dunn wrote that since a county clerk only got paid if he issued a license, “he was usually liberal in his views” about the meaning of the word “reputable.”  A state examination board for licensing doctors wasn’t set up in Indiana until 1897.

By then, one of the most outrageously colorful Indian doctors had already had his day in the Hoosier State and gone to his own grave.

For a few summers in the early 1880s, Dr. J.I. Lighthall, “King of Diamonds,” crisscrossed the Midwest sporting a flashy, diamond-studded suit, selling his herbal remedies and often giving them away to the poor, while also earning notoriety as a “tooth-yanker.” Lighthall caught the interest of the press and annoyed local doctors in Terre Haute, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Richmond, Seymour and Columbus.


The Indian Household Medicine Guide, 1883
Dr. Lighthall’s Indian Household Medicine Guide was published from his home base of Peoria, Illinois, in 1883.

At the beginning of his Indian Household Medicine Guide, Lighthall claimed he was born in 1856 in Tiskilwa, a small Illinois River town north of Peoria. He announced that he was of one-eighth Wyandot heritage on his father’s side and had left home at age eleven to go out West to study botany with the Indians. If that’s true, in the 1870s the teenage Lighthall lived with tribes in Minnesota, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma, picking up ethnobotanical knowledge on the Plains.  He also grew out his hair, cultivating a look that some women, at least, found sultry and exotic.


Dr. J.I. Lighthall
This poster was printed by Cullaton & Co., Richmond, Indiana, where the twenty-something Dr. Lighthall was “Curing hundreds of people daily, at his Camp on Main St.”

By around 1880, Lighthall had set up shop in Peoria, Illinois.  His mother apparently cooked barrels-full of his herb-, root-, and bark-based medicaments, then bottled them and shipped them by railroad or wagon.  When it came to naming his drugs, he skipped the big Latin and Greek words of modern pharmacology and came up with colorful names like “King of Pain” and “Spanish Oil.”  Some were probably cut with whiskey, cocaine, opium, and morphine. Lighthall also offered an array of 19th-century popular medicine’s omnipresent “blood purifiers” and “liver regulators,” miracle liquids commonly advertised in mainstream newspapers — partly to keep journalism itself afloat when subscriptions lagged.

As his business picked up, the doctor put together a brass band and went into makeshift dentistry on the street.


Indiana State Sentinel, February 3, 1886
Indiana State Sentinel, February 3, 1886.

Educated skeptics abounded, but some of his herbal medications might actually have proven beneficial as “home remedies” for less serious ailments.  The official medical view is that some patients were probably cured by the “placebo effect.” Curiously, one of the real health benefits of Lighthall’s medicine shows was that he got sick people to laugh.

Although the “doc” gave off an aura of the Wild West, most of his short career as an “Indian doctor” was spent in Indiana and Illinois. Lighthall typically rolled into a town and stayed for a few weeks or months, long enough to garner local notoriety.  However angry the doctors and medical establishment got, “common folk” kept flocking to his medicine wagon. Dr. Lighthall’s entertainment troupe, newspapers reported, resembled a circus and was made up of about 60 “Spaniards,” “Mexicans” and “half-breeds” — and some Hoosiers from Fort Wayne.

Cleverly, Lighthall sympathized with the poor, sometimes handing out free medicine bottles wrapped in $10 and $20 bills to customers who couldn’t afford them.  While the doctor won fame for such “charity,” thousands of others forked out their nickels and dimes for entertainment — money Lighthall would throw into the air to attract an even bigger crowd.  Others came to have their teeth rapidly yanked, often for “free.”  Yet in spite of all the freebies, within a year or two, Lighthall was rumored to be worth about $150,000 (maybe ten times that much in today’s money.)  He wore clothes and a hat studded with valuable diamonds and cut an impressive appearance in public.  Women were attracted to him.  He put his gems on display at a Louisville jewel shop.  A Kentucky hat store sold a line of Lighthall-inspired Texas hats.

Lawmen and doctors tried to do him in, but usually failed.  A court in Decatur, Illinois, summoned him to appear in October 1883 for illegally practicing medicine there.  Ironically, he had just come back to Decatur from Terre Haute, where “the Philistines” and Indiana’s “sun of civilization” drove him back over the state line.


Decatur Daily Republican, July 27, 1883
Decatur Daily Republican, July 27, 1883.

Decatur Daily Republican, August 23, 1883
Decatur Daily Republican, August 23, 1883.

The Daily Review (Decatur, IL), October 17, 1883
The Daily Review, Decatur, Illinois, October 17, 1883. Though the doc was fined, he later produced a bogus diploma from the “University of Tennessee at Clarksville.”

The following summer, July 1884, Dr. Lighthall’s show rolled into Fort Wayne and camped out for a few months “near the baseball park. . . The joint resembles a circus.”


The Fort Wayne Sentinel, July 25, 1884
The Fort Wayne Sentinel, July 25, 1884.

The Fort Wayne Sentinel, July 28, 1884
The Fort Wayne Sentinel, July 28, 1884.

His tooth-yanking sometimes got him into legal trouble, as when he got sued for allegedly breaking a man’s jaw in Indianapolis during a complicated dental extraction.  Lighthall’s apparent love for the ladies also turned public opinion against him.  While camped out along East Washington Street in Indianapolis in 1885, he got booked by the cops for being “rowdy” at a “house of ill fame.”  Locals accused him of trying to get two young girls near Fountain Square to run away with his troupe and “go on the stage.”

However dangerous and perhaps lecherous he might have been, Lighthall provided heavy doses of entertainment.  On a trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in early 1885, the doctor got into a bloody tooth-yanking feud with a Frenchwoman engaged “in a similar line of business.”  She was dressed as an “Indian princess.” The bizarre fight that followed deserves to be restored to the annals of history.


The Daily Gazette (Fort Wayne, Indiana), March 31, 1885

The Daily Gazette (Fort Wayne, Indiana), March 31, 1885 (2)
The Daily Gazette, Fort Wayne, Indiana, March 31, 1885.

Lighthall may have engaged in just such a “contest” in Indianapolis:

Decatur Daily Republican, July 14, 1885 (2)
Decatur Daily Republican, July 14, 1885.

After he left Louisville and the Jeffersonville area one summer, moving north to Seymour and Columbus, the Jeffersonsville News reported that local dentists were busy repairing the damage Doc Lighthall had done to Hoosier jaws.

For better or worse, the Indian doctor’s (and yanker’s) own days were numbered.  By January 1886, he had headed south for the winter, encamping in San Antonio, where he was reported to be successfully filching Texas greenhorns of their greenbacks. Tragically, a smallpox epidemic broke out in un-vaccinated San Antonio that month.  The 30-year-old’s medical knowledge couldn’t save him.  He “died in his tent” on January 25, 1886.  Several men from Fort Wayne who were performing with his troupe may also have succumbed to small pox.


The Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 27, 1886
The Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 27, 1886.

News of his demise quickly flashed over Midwestern newspapers, in towns where he had become well-known in days just gone by:

Decatur Daily Republican, January 26, 1886
Decatur Daily Republican, Decatur, Illinois, January 26, 1886.

Though rumor had it that Lighthall owned an expensive mansion and a medicine factory back in Peoria, he was buried at San Antonio’s City Cemetery #3, not far from The Alamo.  Fittingly, there are bellflowers carved onto his gravestone:


Lighthall grave
Findagrave.com

He’s been forgotten today, but Dr. J.I. Lighthall’s fame briefly lived on, with at least one Hoosier writing to ask if he was alive or dead in 1888:

Indianapolis News, March 5, 1888
Indianapolis News, March 5, 1888.

“Indian doctors” weren’t yet on their way out the door when Lighthall died in Texas in 1886.  In 1900, in spite of efforts to regulate the practice of medicine, the patent medicine business was still reckoned to be worth about $80 million a year.  Several major traveling shows thrived into the 1950s.  By then, industrial pharmaceuticals and the discovery of antibiotics had launched medicine into a new era, but the entertainment aspect of the business kept it alive until radio and television killed it off.

Whatever the medicine shows did for the human body, they were definitely good for the soul, as the early 20th-century troupes helped fuel the rise of jazz, blues and country.  In 1983, folklorist Steve Zeitlin and filmmaker Paul Wagner were still able to find some old medicine show performers in a rural North Carolina town — the subject of their documentary Free Show Tonight.


Contact:  staylor336 [AT] gmail.com

Onions vs. Cancer

anti-onion gas mask

What’s the connection between Quakers, whalers, cancer and onions?  Here’s some unexpected medical history from the Hoosier State.

While flipping through a few of the oldest Indiana newspapers, we ran across several “vintage cures” — including a couple of surprising ones for cancer, a disease that was as feared in 1816 as it is now, though the pioneers suffered from exponentially lower rates of it.

Oddly enough, the first remedy here, which claims to be able to treat cancer with onions, might not be bogus.

Modern medical research agrees with “folk” doctors on one thing, at least:  regardless of the real havoc wreaked on your breath, garlic and onions are potent cancer-fighting foods.  These veggies rank up there with broccoli, wild berries, ginger, olive oil, and a daily glass of wine as one of nature’s best weapons against tumors.

Onions have figured into medical practice for far longer than chemotherapy and radiation.  Alternative practitioners and cancer patients often claim that vegetable-based remedies are at least as effective as chemo and radiation therapy — and they avoid the psychological side effects.  Red onions, containing high amounts of a “flavonoid” called quercetin, are a strong antioxidant, antihistamine, and natural antibiotic.  Quercetin helps protect cells and DNA against damage and reduces cholesterol and inflammation. Not only do onions lend a hand in preventing cancer to begin with, they seem to help rid the body of it.


onions 2


Believe it or not, an onion remedy for cancer appears (as a reprint) in Indiana’s oldest newspaper, the Vincennes Western Sun.  This 1811 remedy — published when Vincennes was still the capital of Indiana Territory and just a few months before the Battle of Tippecanoe — isn’t too far off from the “onion juice therapy” still touted in alternative medicine.

It’s doubly interesting that the list of “signers” who vouched for the cure is headed by a woman, Jane Starbuck.


starbuck

(Western Sun, Vincennes, Indiana, June 29, 1811.)


Genealogical records indicate that the Jane Starbuck who had apparently gotten involved in “folk medicine” and tried to help cancer patients was probably a Quaker named Jane Taylor Starbuck (1755-1834).   Her “receipt” (i.e., recipe) for an onion-based cure made its way into the Vincennes Western Sun by way of a copy of the Raleigh Star that was brought from North Carolina to the Wabash Valley and read by editor Elihu Stout.  (The Western Sun contains almost no local news, which would have traveled by word of mouth in a small place like Vincennes.  Stout, however, was always eager to pass on news from back East and down South.)

Jane Taylor Starbuck lived in Guilford County, North Carolina, birthplace of several thousand Quakers who began moving north to Indiana just before the War of 1812.  Most came for new land, but many came to get away from slavery, which most — not all — Quakers opposed.  Jane Taylor Starbuck seems to have stayed in the South, but her son Edward Starbuck, who also endorsed the cancer cure, joined the Quaker exodus to the Midwest.  Edward, born in 1777, settled just east of Fountain City in Wayne County.  His brother William Starbuck, another Quaker pioneer, is thought to have bought twenty-one slaves in North Carolina before he came north — a clever move against slavery, perhaps, since he set them all free when they got to Indiana.  (Even free African Americans moving north often traveled with and settled near Quakers for protection.)

If the name “Starbuck” means more to you than coffee, you’ve probably read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  The Starbuck family, into which Jane Taylor married in 1776, were prominent whalers on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.  While the Starbuck who served as chief mate of Captain Ahab’s doomed Pequod — sunk by the white whale in the South Seas — was a fictional cousin of these Hoosier pioneers, Melville’s story was based on the very real fate of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that was crushed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820.  The Essex’s crew, floating around the Pacific Ocean on rowboats, were reduced to cannibalism and drew lots to see who would die next.  One of the unlucky victims was a teenage sailor from Nantucket, Owen Coffin.


moby dick 2


Now if the name “Coffin” means more to you than a casket, maybe you’ve visited the home of the “President” of the Underground Railroad, Levi Coffin, in Fountain City, Indiana.  Coffin’s house is just a few miles from Edward Starbuck’s farm.  One of the bravest men in Hoosier history, Levi Coffin was another ardent Quaker from Guilford County, North Carolina.  He moved to Indiana in 1826 and began funneling escaped slaves toward Canada almost as soon as he arrived.

Like the Starbucks, Levi Coffin was originally from New Garden, North Carolina, but had Nantucket family roots. He almost definitely knew Jane Taylor Starbuck and her son Edward. (Both families belonged to the New Garden Quaker Meeting.) Coffin himself was a cousin of Jane Starbuck’s husband, William, who was a Nantucket native, reared among the whalers and seafarers of colonial Massachusetts.  From his Indiana farmhouse, Levi Coffin showed as much fearlessness as his New England cousins and grandparents did sailing the remote seas.


Levi Coffin

(Levi Coffin, 1798-1877, who with his wife Catherine fought the cancer of slavery and survived to see its death, lived just north of Richmond. Their Indiana home has been called the “Grand Central Station” of the Underground Railroad.  They helped thousands evade slave catchers.)


In his memoirs, Coffin mentions an Edward Starbuck.  He and the man who offered a cancer remedy in 1811 appear to be one and the same. (Coffin wrote that an Edward Starbuck also helped him found an anti-liquor society in Fountain City — then called Newport — in 1830, when the fugitive slave conductor was also beginning a “War on King Alcohol.”)  Edward Starbuck himself lived on a farm between Whitewater and Fountain City, a few miles from Ohio.  At some point, Starbuck apparently left the Quakers to become a Methodist minister.

Here’s the onion cure — which called for more than onions, by the way.  It also required puccoon root (blood root), used in both European and American Indian pharmacology for generations as an antibiotic.  (American Indians also used it as a dye.) The Western Sun of Vincennes printed this alleged cure on June 9, 1811.


Western Sun, June 29, 1811 (1)

Western Sun, June 29, 1811 (2)

Western Sun, June 29, 1811 (3)

Western Sun, June 29, 1811 (4)

(Western Sun, Vincennes, Indiana, June 29, 1811.)


A decade later, “cures for cancer” were still coming out in American newspapers.  The 19th century turned out to be a golden age of questionable — if not downright dangerous — panaceas, some of them offered by doctors, some by quacks.  Even some university-trained practitioners swore they could make a patient cancer-free.

It’s hard to blame anybody for trying, but this cure, reprinted in the Richmond Weekly Intelligencer in 1822 and which seems to recommend some kind of cauterization, would be impossible to vouch for.


Richmond Weekly Intelligencer, August 28, 1822 (1)

Richmond Weekly Intelligencer, August 28, 1822 (2)

(Richmond Weekly Intelligencer, August 28, 1822.)


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War and Peach

Peach Stones 1

With Christmas Eve approaching, you might have the tune “Chestnuts Roasting Over an Open Fire” playing somewhere. A hundred years ago, chestnuts were actually on the path to becoming a rarity, as a huge blight that was killing off chestnut trees began dramatically reducing their numbers.  The blight got so bad that chestnut trees nearly became extinct in the U.S.  Yet as World War I was still raging in Europe, American chemists found a clever new use for chestnuts — alongside coconut shells, peach stones, and other hard seeds.  Disturbingly enough, this was for use in the gas mask industry.

During the last year of the “War to End All Wars,” the Gas Defense Division of the Chemical Warfare Service of the U.S. Army began issuing calls for Americans to save fruit seeds.  As refuse from kitchens and dining room tables, these would typically have been classified as agricultural waste.  Conscientious Americans began to put out barrels and other depositories for local collection of leftover seed pits.  These came from peaches, apricots, cherries, prunes, plums, olives, and dates, not to mention brazil nuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, chestnuts, and butternuts.  In the rarer instance that Americans had any spare coconut shells left over, these came in handy, too.


Peach Stones 3


How on earth could seeds and shells contribute to the war against Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany?

World War I was the first conflict to involve the use of toxic chemicals meant to incapacitate and kill soldiers.  Soldiers were warned that death would come at the fourth breath or less. Fritz Haber, a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his research into the creation of synthetic fertilizers, also helped spearhead German use of ammonia and chlorine as poisonous weapons used in trench warfare. (Haber’s wife, also a chemist, committed suicide out of shame at her husband’s promotion of poison gas.)  Haber additionally pioneered a gas mask that would protect German soldiers from their own weapons. Ironically, Frtiz Haber was Jewish.  He later fled Germany in 1933 during the rise of Adolf Hitler, a few years before the poisons he experimented with were used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews and others during World War II.

Haber, however, wasn’t the only chemist at work on a gas mask. One such device was invented by a mostly-forgotten American chemist from the Hoosier State, James Bert Garner.


James Bert Garner
Hoosier chemist James Bert Garner around 1918.

Garner was born in Lebanon, Indiana, in 1870, and earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Science at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, where he studied under Scottish-American chemist Dr. Alexander Smith.  (Like many doctors and scientists, Dr. Smith had done his own graduate studies in Munich, Germany, in the 1880s.  He taught chemistry and mineralogy at Wabash for four years until moving to the University of Chicago and Columbia University.)  Dr. Garner served as head of Wabash’s chemistry department from 1901 to 1914, the year World War I erupted. The Hoosier chemist then took a job at the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research at the University of Pittsburgh.

After reading an account of a toxic gas attack on French and Canadian soldiers during the Battle of Ypres in 1915, Garner began working on a more effective respiratory mask than was then available.  Primitive versions of gas masks and protective apparatuses designed to ward off disease had been around for centuries, from 17th-century plague doctor’s outfits to a mask pioneered by the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt in 1799, when Humboldt worked as a mining inspector in Prussia.  In the 1870s, Irish physicist John Tyndall also worked on a breathing device to help filter foul air, as did a little-known Indianapolis inventor, Willis C. Vajen, who patented a “Darth Vader”-like mask for firemen in 1893.  (Vajen’s masks were manufactured in an upper floor of the old Indianapolis Public Library.)


Gas mask diagram
This diagram of a World War II-era gas mask shows the importance of the charcoal filter “which absorbs the gas and retains the fumes.”

While working at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Institute, Dr. Garner advanced a method for air filtration that he had first experimented with at Wabash College and the University of Chicago.   Garner’s mask, co-designed by his wife Glenna, involved the use of a charcoal filter that absorbed sulphur dioxide and ammonia from the air stream. Garner’s World War I-era invention wouldn’t be his last attempt to reduce the deadly impact on the lungs of dangerous substances.  In 1936, he patented a process to “denicotinize” tobacco.

Manufacturers of Garner’s masks found that coconut shells actually provided one of the most useful materials for filtering toxic poison. With a density greater than most woods, hard fruit seeds and nuts were also found useful in the creation of charcoal filters.  All over the U.S., local Councils of Defense, citizens’ committees (sometimes highly intrusive) were set up to promote production of war materiel and monitor domestic waste.  These committees encouraged Americans to hang onto seed pits for Army use.


Peach Stones 2
Photo from “peach stone” campaign, 1918. U.S. National Archives.

Popular Science Monthly, December 1918
Popular Science Monthly, December 1918.

Popular Science Monthly, December 1918 2
Popular Science Monthly, December 1918.

“Cleaned, dried, and then subjected to high temperature,” reported Popular Science Monthly, “the stones become carbonized, and the coal, in granulated form, is used as an absorbent in the manufacture of gas-masks.”  Charcoal rendered from fruit seeds, coconut shells, etc., was found to have a “much greater power of absorbing poisonous gases than ordinary charcoal from wood.”

How many seeds were needed?  One source cites a government call for 100 million of them.  In a letter from J.S. Boyd, First Lieutenant in the Chemical Warfare Service of the U.S. Army, which appeared in the Indianapolis News in September 1918, Boyd informed the public that “Two hundred peach stones, or seven pounds of nut shells, will make enough carbon for one mask.  Think of that!  And one mask may save a soldier’s life.”  At this rate, a hundred million peach stones could produce 500,000 gas masks.

Tolstoy’s classic novel needed a new title: War & Peach.


Variety of gas masks
Variety of gas masks used on the Western Front during First World War. Garner’s was just one of them.

The seed-collection campaign quickly took to American newspapers.

In Indianapolis, the Marion County Council of Defense urged local consumers and businesses not to waste products and labor during Christmas shopping.  (The waste of certain human lives for political ends seemed to bother them less, and the Indiana council worked to censor all criticism of the war from pacifists and socialists.)  At the committee’s urging, local restaurants, hotels, and stores, including L.S. Ayres and the William H. Block Co. — the largest department stores in Indianapolis — collected agricultural leftovers in bins out front.  The Block Co. advertised its support for the peach stone campaign during a September call to “Buy Christmas gifts early.” Fortunately, the war was over by Christmas 1918.


Indianapolis News, September 21, 1918
Indianapolis News, September 21, 1918.

Local Councils of Defense chided businesses and Christmas shoppers for wasting labor and even kept up some surveillance on them.  Department stores were forbidden to hire extra help during the 1918 Christmas season, meaning no special workers could carry customers’ purchases back to their homes.  The councils explicitly asked Hoosiers to carry their own packages and urged managers and employees to report any business that was hiring “extra help” for the holiday.


South Bend News-Times, October 19, 1918
South Bend News-Times, October 19, 1918.

South Bend News-Times, September 3, 1918
South Bend News-Times, September 3, 1918.

Emphasis on gathering peach stones in particular picked up momentum in September 1918, since that month marked the beginning of harvest time.  As for wild nuts, children all over the U.S., including the Boy Scouts, scoured American forests for walnuts, hickories, and butternuts. One photo in Popular Science Monthly showed a “gang bombarding a horse-chestnut tree” and stated that they were “enlisted in war work.”  Children brought nuts and seed pits to 160 army collection centers.


Popular Science Monthly, December 1918 3
Popular Science Monthly, December 1918.

A call for peach stones in the film magazine Moving Picture World encouraged movie theater owners to offer special matinées to support seed-gathering.  The magazine suggested keeping admission at the regular price, but with the donation of one peach stone required for entry.  Once inside, moviegoers were likely to see a slideshow from the Army’s Gas Defense Service as a “preview.” One theater owner in Long Island was especially generous to children. Children, however, apparently took unfair advantage of him:


The Moving Picture World, October 12, 1918
The Moving Picture World, October 12, 1918.

The call for seed pits should have come earlier.  Ninety-thousand soldiers died from toxic gas exposure in the First World War, with over a million more suffering debilitating health problems that often lasted for the rest of their lives.  Almost two-thirds of the fatalities were Russian.  And chemical warfare had just begun.

Though propaganda pinned the barbaric use of chemicals squarely on the Kaiser’s armies, the British used toxins during and after the war.  Under Winston Churchill — War Secretary in 1920 — the RAF dropped mustard gas during its attempt to put down Bolshevism in Russia, the same year that Churchill is alleged to have authorized the use of deadly gas in fighting an Iraqi revolt against British rule in the Middle East.  One English entomologist, Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, was allegedly curious about the use of bugs in “the next war” to spread disease behind enemy lines.

During World War II, the U.S. briefly experimented with the creation of biological weapons.  At the Vigo Ordinance Plant, an ammunition facility in Terre Haute, the Army looked into the production of deadly anthrax in 1944 as part of the little-known U.S. biological weapons program.  According to some sources, those chemicals were meant to have been used in proposed British anthrax bombs, which would have killed entire German cities. Fortunately, the end of the war came before any significant amount of the material was ever produced.  The Vigo County plant was later acquired by Pfizer.

As for native Hoosier chemist James Bert Garner, he kept on inventing, attempting to save lives in spite of the brutality of war. Garner lived with his family in Pittsburgh, where he worked as director of research for the Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel Company — the company that built the Gateway Arch in St. Louis starting in 1963.

Garner, however, died in 1960 at age 90.  Sometimes cited as the inventor of the gas mask — though he was really just one of many — he is buried at Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery.

In spite of his efforts, chemical warfare has gone on to kill millions.


Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 11, 1919
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 11, 1919.

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The Black Hole of Indiana

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922


Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922 (5)

Muncie Post Democrat, August 4, 1922 (4)

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

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

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


Muncie Post Democrat, March 23, 1923


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


Muncie Post Democrat, March 23, 1923 (2)


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


Contact:  staylor336 [AT] gmail.com

Movember: A Medical Moment

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


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

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

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

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

It was good business for the barber, at least.


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

(Indianapolis Journal, November 16, 1902.)


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Jewish Post, September 14, 1939

(The Jewish Post, September 14, 1939.)


Indianapolis Journal, May 3, 1892

(Indianapolis Journal, May 3, 1892.)


Fort Wayne Daily News, August 29, 1896

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


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


Lew Wallace(Major General Lew Wallace.)


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


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


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


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


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


Madison Daily Banner, March 3, 1852 (4)

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


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

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


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


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


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

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


Indianapolis Journal, April 6, 1902 (2)

(Indianapolis Journal, April 6, 1902.)


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


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

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


Indiana Tribune, January 13, 1901

(Indiana Tribüne, January 13, 1901.)


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

(Plymouth Tribune, March 5, 1903.)


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

Indianapolis Journal, February 2, 1890

(Indianapolis Journal, February 2, 1890.)