Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 17 December 1950 — Page 47

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"Editorials :

An Expatriate

Sees a Change By ELMER DAVIS I HAVE no doubt that some of you feel that there was something a little inappropriate “in the selection of a speaker for this evening who had left In-

diana 40 years ago, and has had infrequent and casual contacts with the state sinte then; and also one who did not come from the region which has become generally known as the classical and typical Indiana, the up-state flat lands.

I came from the river coun-

ties, which for many years past have been incorporated in the life and culture of the state— thanks to the automobile; but which had not been so incorporated in my day, when the automobile was still a rich man's toy, and there were no roads for it to run ‘on anyway: n those days the river coun‘ties were something separate and peculiar; they had little contact with the classic Hoosier culture upstate, they belonged rather to the river culture, which from Pittsburgh and St. Paul down to New Orleans was pretty much all one piece, a culture which even in the days of the railroad was long dominated by the steamboat.

» ” » THE FLAVOR of life in the river counties in those days was much more the flavor of Kentucky than of Indiana; and in my corner of the state we were still further denationalized; we were part of the tristate metropolitan complex of Cincinnati; and to everybody but the politicians Cincinnati, not Indianapolis, was the center of interest. Yet when you survey the history of Indiana, as state and as territory, for the past century and a half, it is clear that the river counties were an essential and typical part of it, however they differed from what later became the stereotype. . We were after all the first of Indiana, since the first settlers either came across the river from Kentucky or down the river from Pennsylvania; we were building stately homes and reading the classics when up-state Indiana still consisted mostly of swamps and malarial mosquitoes.

» . ~ THAT up-state life—at least

as far upstate as Decatur County—was later depicted by a river-county novelist, Edward Eggleston, in a book which was never popular among his fellow citizens. And for some reason; for while the Hoosier Schoolmaster was true as of the time he remembered, it was no longer true as of .the time the book was published. By that time upstate had caught up with the river counties; and was presently to go far beyond them, in wealth, self-advertise-ment, and self-satisfaction. Yét in those earliest days the river counties had established some traditions to which the whole state has been loyal. In politics, for instance. The Congressman from my district, in Andrew Jackson's day, was

Amos Jacksonian; and it has been reported by those who heard him that when he was denouncing his enemies on the stump, the gritting and grinding of his teeth could be heard 50 yards away. I doubt if -that record "has been improved on by any of present congressional delegation, :

» » ” THE RIVER counties set the Hoosier literary tradition; and it goes back beyond Eggleston or even Julia Dumont. My home town, Aurora, was founded by the first Indiana novelist Jesse Lynch Holman. It is true that his novel, “The Errors of Education,” was not the first Indiana novel; he wrote it while he was still living in Lexington or Frankfort, Ky., before he came across the river. But Aurora, if it was not the place where ‘‘The Errors of Education” was written, has a more melancholy distinction; it was the place where the first Indiana novel was destroyed. In later life Judge Holman became convinced that his youthful work might have a deleterious effect on the morals of young people, so he tried to buy up the whole edition, and very nearly succeeded. It was probably not too difficult a task, since the book, like the stock of certain family corporations, seems to have been closely held. At any rate he seems to have got hold of all but two copies and according to tradition he burned them in the public square of Aurora—now Mary Stratton Park, named for his daughter. It was the first and so far the only bookburning in Indiana; I hope it will be the last.

= t J . WELL, up-state eventually passed the river counties; yet we went on |} our own lives until the automobile finally reunited the state. What that

Maurus Jokal (1825-1904), s Hungarian novelist, was author

of today’s selection from

“The World's Greatest Ohristmas

Stories,” just published by Prentice-Hall. Jokal took time from a legal career to write many works in the Magyar language, which he sought to restore after the Hapsburgs’ fall. The translation

is by Monique Jean.

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"The river counties were something separate and peculiar . . ."

EDITOR'S NOTE—This keen study of the Indiana that was and Indiana today is by Elmer Davis, Hoosier-born writer and radio news analyst. It was presented in an address at the recent opening in the Library of Congress of an exhibit marking the Indiana Territory sesquicentennial. Mr. Davis, native of Aurora, graduate of Franklin College, Rhodes scholar, and former New York Times staffer, became nationally known during World War II as head of the Office of War Information.

life was like down on the river, 50 years ago, has lately been set down in a novel called “Ring in the New,” by Laura Buchanan Harris, who came from Rising Sun. 2 It is river-bank® stuff, but a great deal of it is thoroughly recognizable as a picture of small-town life anywhere in Indiana, or indeed in the Middle West, at the turn of the ‘century. It is incidentally about the best that has ever been

done of life in the river qounties. Our ablest novelist, David

Graham Phillips, while he was an accurate and perspicacious reporter of Fifth Avenue and Wall Street, fell down badly in his one attempt to give a picture of life in Madison and at DePauw. So much for the river counties up till the time I left; but since then, with. good roads and the cars that ride on them making the state all one piece, we have been incorporated into the general picture that Indiana presents to the world.

» - tJ THAT is a remarkable picture—such a clear and familiar picture as perhaps no other

“state in the union has ever pre-

sented. The picture written down in some of Tarkington's novels, some of Nicholson's essays, some of McCutcheon’s cartoons, some of Ade's fables;

and above all in practically all of Riley’s poems—that is Indiana as it has show: itself to the world.

It is an attractive picture; what is more, it is a coherent and credible »icture. It was substantially true, for its time and place; but it dealt with only a part of Indiana— though the larger and wealthier part, the up-state flatlands; and more important, it covers hardly more than a quarter of the commonwealth’'s existence as state and territory—roughly, the 40 years following the Civil War. 3

A picture of an essentially rural culture, though punctuated by and focused on the county seats; a world of stovepipe hats and base-burner stoves, where people got around by horse and buggy and by spring wagon, unless they had to go so far that they took the accommodation train. A centripetal, introspective culture; pretty well satisfied with itself, but with better reason for self-satisfaction than most, a world with no aspiration to the loftier heights—except in such very irregular products as Theodore Dreiser and Eugene Debs, both of them men whosé reach exceeded their grasp;-but which also, in those days, managed to avoid the depths as well, A culture which was satisfied to turn out, as perhaps its most typical product put it, more first-rate and second-rate men than any other state in the country.

» - . . BUT that was only a part of Indiana, in place and time; and the great merit of this exhibition which is opéned here tonight is to remind us of the

hére more of old Vincennes, and of the earlier éxplorations, than

~ "Well, children! One, two, three, four . . . are ‘you all here?” he said when he arrived home within the circle of his family of nine. “Do you know that this is Christmas Eve? A holiday, a very gay holiday. Tonight we do not work, we just rejoice!” The children were 80 happy to hear that they were supposed to rejoice that they almost tore down the house. “Wait now! Let's see if I can’t teach you that beautiful song

ONCE UPON A TIME in the city of Budapest there lived a poor shoemaker who simply couldn’t make ends meet. Not because people had suddenly decided to give up wearing boots, nor because the city council had passed an ordinance directing that shoes be sold

at half price, nor even because his work was not satisfactory. !

Indeed, the good man did such excellent work that his cus-

tomers actually complained that they couldn't wear out anything he had once sewed together. He had plenty of customers who paid him promptly and well enough; not one of them had run away without settling his bill. And yet Cobbler John couldn't make both ends meet. . The reason was that the good Lord had blessed him all too plentifully with nine children, all of them as healthy as acorns. Then, one day, as if Cobbler John hadn't already had trouble enough, his wife died. Cobbler John was left alone in this world with nine children. Two or three of them were going to school; one or two were being tutored; one had to be carried around; gruel had to be cooked for thé next; another had to be fed, the next one dressed, yet another washed. And on top of all this he had to earn a living for all of them. : . - » - = . WHEN SHOES were made for them, nine pairs had to be made all at once; when bread was sliced, nine slices had to be cut all at one time. When beds were made ready, the entire room between window and door became one single bed, full of little and big blonde and brunet heads. “Oh my dear Lord God, how Thou hast blessed me,” the

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‘smaller ones next to them.”

you all as a Christmas present.” » =” »

» . »

THE LITTLE ONES crawled noisily into their father’s lap and up on his shoulders, and waited eagerly to hear the lovely

song. : “Now what did I tell you? stand nicely in line . . . there, .

If you are good children . . . just ..the bigger ones over here and the He stood them in a row like organ

pipes, letting the two smallest ones stay on his lap. “And now—silence! First I'll sing it through, then you join in! Taking off his green cap and assuming 4 sérious, pious expression, Cobbler John began to sing the beautiful melody: “On the blessed birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . .” :

The

boys and giris learned it after one rendition,

though the smaller ones found it a bit more difficult. The © » always off key and out of rhythm. But after a while th~— it. And there could be no more joyous sound than when all the nine thin little voices sang togéther that glorious sou, - :

angels on that memorable night.

Perhaps the angels were still singing it when the melodious voices of nine innocent souls prayed for an echo from above. For surely there is gladness in heaven over the song of childrén,

- - »

BUT THERE was less gladness immediately above them. There, a bachelor was living all by himself in nine roomg. In one he sat, in the other one he slept, in the third one he smoked his

World’s Greatest Christmas Stories .

J Kknow. It's a very beautiful song. I have saved it to give it 10 with. ever increasing Strength. came the. of a certain joy- - inspiring song. At first he tried not to listen, thinking they would

To The Industrial

Maurice Thompson. ever told You see more of the early

Utopian pioneers at New Har-

mony—men whom every Hoosier is taught to reverence but whom .no present-day Hoosier would ever dream of imitating. Father Rapp's utopia was celibate; and the taste for celibacy had disappeared from Indiana long before Dr. Kinsey's day. Robert Dale Owen is a hero because he has been dead a long time; if he lived in Indiana today he would probably be ridden out of town on a rail as a Communist agitator. Yet you see here records of those men and of many others, men of the river counties and

£. of the lake counties as well as

of the great interior; and you realize that in a state whose typical picture is so familiar, and so attractive, there were nevertheless at sundry times and in divers places many other things that were also Indiana. . Ld ~ t 4 THAT stereotyped picture drawn from Riley's poems and the “Gentleman From Indiana” and McCutcheon's Indian-sum-mer cartoon—that picture was already beginning to be out of date in my day; and you can perhaps date fall by one of the best things George Ade ever wrote—"1 Knew Him When." The brief age of the interurbans marked the beginning of the change; Indiana was ceasing to the rural, it was becoming industrialized. Not only Indianapolis — which my father could remember as a clean white city, heated by the gas from Muncie, but which is clean and white no longer—but even the county seats, most of them, have become industrial towns with industrial problems, to which the old Hoosier credo augured no answer. I pass over the brief reign of the Klan, though I should like to believe that the spirit that made the Klan possible is as dead as the paraphernalia of hoods and sheets; but other problems came up with the new age and Indiana, like the rest of the country, is still trying to find the answer. AT that change has meant—one of the things it has meant—I saw dramatized on election night of 1938, when I dropped in on some of my friends at the Democratic State headquarters. The fall of 1938, to anybody who lived in the East, was chiefly memorable for two events—the Connecticut hurricane, which my family and I had survived by the skin of our teeth; and the Munich crisis, which the world survived by the skin of its teeth, but with a pretty clear indication that it would not survive the next one. But Indiana in November was pretty much concentra éd on one thing—would or would not Fred Van Nuys be re-elected to the Senate? At Democratic headquarters that night they thought he was safely in, ‘till strange and incredible news came from Lake County; instead of the 18,000 majority that had been “out of the steel mills and oil refineries they had got only 6000. o ” » NOBODY could that one out, that night; not till

some days later did they find the answer, The Democratic

the others?

its decline and.

Congressman Ralph Harve

(lef) Sen. Homer: &. Capsharl,iand: Eimer

exhibit,

analyst, at the opening in the Library of Congress of the Indiana Territory sesquicentennial

leaders in Lake County were all Poles; but a large percentage of the voters were Czechs; and they had voted Republican in Indiana because they dis approved of the attitude of the Polish Government in the Munich crisis. That was the sort of thing Tom Taggart never had to worry about. Yet even that night, there was proof that Indiana had not entirely changed. Men were going around Democratic headquarters with downcast eyes and darkened faces, ’till all at once everybody brightened up. Word had come that the returns from Vigo County would be delayed. They were delayed for two or three days; and when they came in, by happy coincidence, they were just enough to put Fred Van Nuys over, So I went away feeling that even in this world which had se vastly changed, and not for the better, Indiana in some ways was still itself. :

» » ” INDEED there had been proof of that 18 months before—in the spring of 1937,

when the great wave of strikes —organizing strikes, steel strikes in particular—spread

through the Middle West. There was bitterness and violence on both sides; plants were occu-

pied by sit-down strikers; other strikers were shot down—retail shootings in Ohio and Michigan, wholesale shootings in Chicago. There were steel strikes in Indiana too; and CUff Townsend who was then governor settled them peaceably within three days—without violence, without bloodshed; and unfortunately without national publicity. 2 ’ The metropolitan newspapers in those days were not interested in the peaceful settlement of industrial disputes; all they cared about was brickbats and blood. But it was a demontration that even in the new industrial age, the Hoosier temperament was disinclined to go to extremes, » »

n WHETHER that temperament is a virtue or a fault has never been much debated-the cult of the first-rate secondrate man, the avoidance of extremes, whether of virtue and wisdom or of vice and folly: The argument has perhaps little point any more since it has come loose at one end; Indiana may still produce no saints and heroes, but the recent return to the news of Mr. D. C. Stephenson is a reminder that we no longer avoid the other extreme.

"The automobile finally reunited the state."

This man had neither wife nor children but more money than he could count. Sitting in room number eight that night, this rich man was wondering why life had lost its taste, Why did his soft spring bed give him no peaceful dreams? : Then, from Cobbler John's room below, at first faintly but

Yet we did one man —the late Wendell Willkie— who was not afraid to go out on a limb for the things he believed in; who was not afraid even of that thing which Hoosiers of his generation and mine, and of the generation before us, were taught to fear above everything else; he was not afraid of being laughed at. He was a prophet not with out honor, save in his own country; but it is still to be seen whether he will have a successor, Hoosiers no longer laugh as much as they used to; and they seldom laugh at the right people. ” » y THE OLD tight, introspective, satisfied Hoosier culture, which never aspired to the heights but never descended to the depths — which cultivated, about as well as any society has ever cultivated it, the doctrine of moderation in all things, of the golden mean—tnat is gone, It had no answer to the problems of a new age—an age in

which not only Indianapolis and Ft. Wayne, but New Castle and Clinton, are industrial cities: in which at one time almost the largest city south of Indianapolis was Camp Atterbury, with half its population consisting of soldiers from other states, and the other half of Italian prisoners of war,

The new ‘age was one in which Madison could be selected as the subject of a motion pieture to be shown =ll over the world, illustrating not the homogeneity of Middle Westérn Sa) tir, but the harmony in & population could live though its ancestors were of many nationalities. Not Gary, not South Bend; but Madison For better or worse, the world had broken into Indiana; and Indiana had broken out into the world.” An age in which I saw the Paris Opera House, which I had known well in other ecircumstances and in earlier years, filled with American soldiers, listening to other American"

more thinking.

.. ‘Which Of The Nine?" |

pipe, in the fourth he dined, and who knows what he did in all children please not sing any more? And for this sacrifice he asked

Cobbler John to accept one thousand florins. Master John had never even heard the words, “One thousand florines,” spoken, never in all his lite. Now he felt, the money be-

ing pressed into his hand.

. vr ¥. > x » i; HIS EXCELLENECY went back to his room and his boredom.

soon stop. But when they started all over for the tenth time, he could stand it no longer. Crushing out his expensive cigar, he went down in his dressing gown to the shoemaker's flat. . They had just come to the end of the verse when he walked in. Cobbler John respectfully got up from his three-légged stool and greeted the great gentleman,

” ” » » ” Ld “YOU are John, the cobbler, aren't vou?” the rich man asked “That I am, and at your service, Your Excellency. Do you wish to order a pair of patent leather boots?” : “That isn’t why I came. How very many children you have!” “Indeed, I have, Your Excellency—Ilittle ones and big ones. Quite a few mouths to feed!” “And many more mouths when they sing! Look here, Master John—I'd like to do you 2 favor. Give me one of your children. I'll adopt him, educate him as my own son, take him traveling abroad with me, and make ‘him into a gentleman. One day he'll be able to help the rest of you.” Cobbler John stared wide-eyed when he heard this. These were big words—to have one of his children made into a geéntleman. Who wouldn't Le taken by such an idea? Why, of course, he’d let him have one. What great good fortune. How could he réfuse? :

. ” N° - » vy “WELL, then, pick out one of them quickly, and let's get it over with,” said the gentleman. Cobbler John started to choose. “This one here is Alex. No, him I couldn't let go. He is a student and I want bm to become a priest. Li next gue? That's a girl, and of course Your Excellency doesn't want a girl. hth Ferenc? He already helps me with my work. I couldn't do without him. Johnny? There, there—he is named after me. I couldn't very well give him away. FERNS “Joseph? He is the image of his mother—it's as if I saw her every time I look at him. This place wouldn't be the same without him. And the next is another girl—she wouldn't do. Then comes

: little Paul: he was his mother's favorite. Oh, my poor darling

- would turn in her grave if I small—they'd

ve him away. And the last two are too be too much trouble for Your Excellency . .."” ‘He had reachéd the end of the ;

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And Cobbler John stood staring incredulously

put the key into his pocket and was silent. The little ones wers silent, too. Singing was forbidden. . The older children slumped moodily in théir chairs, quieting the smaller ones telling them they weren't allowed to sing any more because it disturbed the fine gentleman upstairs. Cobbler John himself was silently walking up and down. Impatiently he pushed. aside little Paul, the one who had been his wife's favorite, when the boy asked that he be taught again that beautiful song because he had already forgotten how it went. : “We aren't allowed to sing any more!” Then he sat down angrily at his bench and bent intently over his work. He cut and hammered and sewed until suddenly he caught himself humming: “On the blessed birth of Our Lord Christ . . , ” He clapped his hand over his mouth. But’ then all at once he was very a hammer down on the workbench, kicked his \ opened the chest, took out the thousand florin bill and ran up the stairs to His Excellency’s apartment. es ¥ =» : = a “GOOD, kind Excellency, I am your most humble servant. Please take back your money! Let it not be mine, but let whenever we please, because to me and my children that is wo much more than a thousand florins.” With that he put the bill down on the table and rushed breath lessly back to his waiting family. He kissed them other; and lining them up in a row just like organ himself down on his Jow stool, and they again with heart and soul: “On the blessed birth of Our Jésus Christ , ;. " Si ee Re i They couldn’t have been happier If they had owned the whole of the great big house, fi ; But the one who owned the house was pacing through his nine rooms, asking himself how it was that those people below eo be so happy and full of joy in such a tiresome, boring world as this,

BLESSED BE THE BIRTH

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