Jasper County Democrat, Volume 17, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1915 — WHERE THE TRUTH LIES. [ARTICLE]

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES.

Lake County Tinies: Terre Haute is an example of. a city that is making Indiana, a by-word. It is. so steeped and soused in municipal rottenness that it makes the average wellinformed Hoosier blush when the city is mentioned in a gathering where outside state citizens discuss Terre Haute.

The city is an example, lurid in the extreme of municipal governments rum with the soft pedal. Whenever anything happened in Terre Haute it was always “for Heavens-sake-keep-quiet-abdut -it nobody’s-business-but-our-own.” The newspapers were gagged and bridled. Lake county knows what it is to have some of its cities ruled by corrupt practices reputable newspapers were asked to keep quiet. There is always a crowd which is condemning the newspapers for exposing these conditions. This newspaper has been roundly damned in the past because it has refused to be silent over reeking municipal rottenness. It has been all but mobbed. Other papers have had the same experience. There is always some party or person trying to put a Maxim silencer on a newspaper. In commenting on this condition the Fort Wayne News says: “The Terre Haute newspapers complain that Terre Haute is being given a great deal of very unpleasant and unprofitable advertising by the federal court’s investigation of the recent election frauds. The expression is hardly felicitous. A federal grand jury investigation could not injure Terre Haute in any manner if it were not that Terre Haute's conduct had been decidedly reprehensible. If everything there had been above criticism a grand jury investigation would have merely added to the city’s laurels by proving such a celestial state of. affairs. Therefore, the investigation at present in progress is unpleasant and unprofitable only in that, it tends to give added publicity to a condition of shame without parallel in Indiana. “It isn't the grand'jury investigation that’s the matter with Terre Haute, but rotten social conditions which exist there today and which have existed there for many years, first endured then pitied, and finally embraced by the civic spirit of that modern Gomorrah. Lawlessness anu immorality are enthroned there, not because the bestial and bandit eleriient is the more numerous, but because it has the whip hand. The. merchants, the lawyers, the doctors, the ministers, the journalists, the real estate men, apd all other men engaged'in reputable pursuits have always deprecated “crusades" and have insisted upon the soft pedal policy, going on the theory, that “it would hurt business” to have a showdown. As a consequence the lowbrow element has simply taken that city and today, so long have they been steeped in the environment of iniquity, the better people actually deprecate and deplore the ‘unpleasant advertising’ that would give promise of a civic regeneration there if only there were those virile enough and true enough to seize the opportunity that will be presented when the federal court gets through with some of those who have done so much to make the name of Terre Haute a by-word and a reproach not only in Indiana but throughout the whole United States.” „