For many years, Sunday made Winona Lake, Indiana his home with his wife and family. It gave him more opportunities to hold revivals in Indiana, especially ones lasting for weeks at a time. One such revival came to Richmond in the spring of 1922. For six weeks, Sunday preached to scores of people in Richmond, “saving souls” and collecting donations from audiences. The Palladium, the city’s premiere newspaper, provided a supplement section in its daily paper for Sunday to share his sermons, stories, and testimonials with the public. It is unclear as to why the Palladium decided to provide such expansive coverage; perhaps a publishing agreement between Sunday’s ministry and the newspaper facilitated the section. An insight into this arrangement might be gleamed from Sunday biographer Theodore Thomas Frankenberg:
Newspapers in any community, whether large or small, must necessarily pay attention to an enterprise which the business men of the town or city are backing to the extent of thousands and thousands of dollars. The element of publicity continues with increasing vigor to the very end of all campaigns, and one of the remarkable features in connection with it is the fact that this publicity is never sought by any direct or overt act — it comes naturally, almost spontaneously, and is easily the fourth factor toward preparing the field for the advent of the evangelist.
In any event, a half-page ad in the Palladium advertised Sunday’s revival and the paper’s forthcoming coverage. “The Palladium will publish a daily supplement giving two full pages of news and pictures regarding the meetings and the sermons in Richmond,” the ad stated. The paper also boasted of its team of reporters who would cover the revivals with a “direct telephone line . . . run from the Tabernacle to the Palladium office in order that there be no delay.” While Sunday’s preaching may have been “old time religion,” the Palladium’s supplement was a modern affair that anticipated the rise of twentieth century American protestant evangelicalism.
The Palladium published its first supplement on April 17, 1922, right after Easter Sunday. Throughout its six-week run, the Billy Sunday supplement followed a predictable pattern. The first page would run a photo of Sunday, often with a quote. The first one, called “I’ve Got a Combative Nature,” quotes the preacher talking about his background in sports and its influence on his preaching. “I was graduated from five gymnasiums. I can go so fast for five rounds you can’t see me in the dust,” declared the Reverend Sunday. The right hand side carried his main sermon, which often focused on a specific topic. For the first issue, Sunday ruminated on what he believed was the “real essence of Christianity,” love:
I will admit that Christianity has fallen away beneath love as the original standard. Love is the dominant principle of the world; love can never be defeated. Love may be checked; love may be prevented for the time being, in accomplishing its aim, but love will drill a tunnel through all the mountains of opposition and reach the goal of a touchdown. Love—it’s the mightiest thing in the world! And the world is starving today for the manifestation of the love of God in the hearts of men and women.
However, Christianity was more than just love to Billy Sunday. It also manifested itself in good works, particularly donations to the church, or in his case, to his revivals. In every supplement, an article or informational table would display the amount of money, in cash and pledges, Sunday’s ministry received for his sermons. The first day, the total collections were $859.71. This wasn’t good enough for the fiery evangelist. “I turned down 25 cities to come here, and it is not fair to me or to the other cities if you do not support me,” Sunday chided. As subsequent issues were published, the money totals and people “saved” became more explicit.
The Palladium’s Billy Sunday supplement also shared with readers some of his best one liners or bits from his sermons. This was a smart move; Sunday was extremely quotable and articulate and would often do more with a sentence than other speakers could do in a paragraph. For example, in the April 18 issue, the Palladium published some of “Today’s Hot Epigrams from Billy Sunday’s Lips.” Here’s some of his best quotes from that issue:
*
I think that God is too busy to pay any attention to the fellow who is trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
*
This is not a world of chance. God don’t wind it up and then throw away the key and let her rip till she runs down. Nothing comes by chance.
*
Christianity is not a simply a creed. Christianity is a creed plus Jesus Christ.
*
Like with the first issue, a picture of Sunday, often in an animated preaching pose, accompanied the quotes. This gave readers a choice; either read the long-form sermons or check out their best bits and quotable lines. This provided Sunday with a wider readership than if he had just provided the sermons as a whole.
One of Sunday’s indispensable lieutenants in his crusades for Christ was Robert Matthews, described by the Palladium as the “custodian of the tabernacle.” However, this was not his only job. Matthews served as Sunday’s secretary, a “buffer between the world and his boss,” as well as his “pianist for the chorus, understudy for Rody [Homer Rodeheaver] as the leader of the choir, and finally a good talker when he has to be.” A native of Kentucky, Matthews graduated from Lake Forest College, received musical education in “New York, Paris, Milan, and Melbourne,” and spent time in the newspaper business before joining Sunday’s staff. The Palladium described Matthews as “faithful to Billy,” further noting that “he is sure that Billy is the greatest man on the face of the earth.” Matthews, along with other staff, made sure that the Sunday revivals went perfectly.
Homer Rodeheaver, known as “Rody,” was Sunday’s musical director. Richmond Palladium, April 20, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.
The revivals benefited additionally from a well-organized schedule of prayer meetings, led by Florence Kinney, a graduate of Dr. Wilbert W. White’s Bible Training School in New York City and dedicated lieutenant to Sunday. Kinney believed that, “Souls can be saved and individuals converted in those neighborhoods, just as well as at the big tabernacle meetings.” Kinney and Reverend Alfred H. Backus organized Richmond into 10 sections, each with their own superintendent responsible for prayer meetings. Kinney herself taught Bible study classes during the week, scheduled “immediately after the afternoon sermon.” These individualized, personal meetings reinforced Sunday’s sermons, gained new converts, and emboldened the already converted. In this regard, Sunday’s bureaucratic approach echoed the modern evangelical enterprises of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell decades later.
“Come Up to Help the Lord,” hand-written proclamation from Reverend Sunday. Richmond Palladium, April 21, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.
In the supplement for April 21, the Palladiumpublished a hand-written proclamation from Sunday, calling for evangelism in Richmond. “The history of the church is the history of revivals—the Church was born in the revival at Pentecost,” Sunday declared in his letter. He also summoned all of Richmond to join his revival. “I issue a proclamation,” Sunday wrote, “to the forces of truth, morality, righteousness in and out of the churches of Richmond ‘come up to the help of the Lord, against the and devil and all his hosts.” He signed it with his name and “Psalm 34,” which, among other verses, stated that “The Lord redeemeth the soul of his servants: and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate.” Sunday fervently believed that the message of Christianity would fail unless the people actively worked for the propagation of its message.
Billy Sunday’s tabernacle in Richmond, Indiana. Richmond Palladium, April 18, 1922. Hoosier State Chronicles.
To hit home this message, the Palladium ran a small chart, starting in the April 19 supplement, chronicling the money raised and those “saved” at the daily services. Between the afternoon and evening services on April 21, the ministry collected $344 and preached to 4,900 attendees. However, by the weekend’s end, the collection ballooned to $3,183.36 and attendance expanded by 19,700 people. As an aside, the paper also noted that the “foregoing does not include pledges, which will swell the total.” The chart began including converts with the April 26 issue, where 119 “’hit the sawdust trail,’ the first converts of the Richmond campaign.” Within days, the paper named the converted as “trail hitters,” a term used throughout the rest of Sunday’s revival in Richmond. By the time Billy Sunday’s six weeks in Richmond came to a close, his ministry claimed 5,876 “tail hitters” and $34,658 in collections. Not too bad for an old baseball slugger turned champion for the Lord.
Yet, despite his calls for moral behavior and rejection of modern life, there was one group with which he was incautiously naive: the Ku Klux Klan. On May 14, 1922, 12 Klansmen in white robes approached the pulpit during Sunday’s evening service. They stood silent as they handed the reverend an envelope containing a “commendation and $50 in bills.” Sunday took the letter, merely replied “I thank you,” and said to the audience after they left, “I don’t know how you felt, but I commenced to check up on myself.” The Palladium reported that Sunday was “dumbfounded,” even though this was not his first encounter with the Klan. “The klan [sic] has made a present to Mr. Sunday in every city he has been in during the last year. . . . Even the Klan in Sioux City did the same thing,” Sunday confidant Robert Matthews told the press.
The Muncie chapter and the provisional Richmond chapter of the Ku Klux Klan signed the letter commending Sunday for “the wonderful work that you and your associates are doing in [sic] behalf of perpetuating the tenets of the Christian Religion throughout the nation. . . .” The Palladium further noted that this was “the first time in the history of Richmond that the Ku Klux Klan had appeared. . . .” It also would not be their last time. According to historian Leonard Moore, 4,037 men from Wayne County, of which 3,183 were from Richmond, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Of Richmond’s 26,000 residents, over 12% belonged to the Klan during the decade. Sunday’s interaction with the Klan was not an aberration, but rather a sign of things to come.
As for the Reverend, he shrugged off the “dumbfounding” incident, declared that he did not belong to any secret fraternal organizations, and said that “if you behave yourself they won’t bother you.” In an odd turn, Sunday never readdressed the incident, but instead criticized the liberal wing of Baptist Christianity. “It’s the liberal bunch that don’t like me, and I don’t want their backing,” Sunday shared with his audience before he called for attendees to come forward to be saved.” Sunday’s apparent lack of moral clarity on the issue of the Klan does not imply an endorsement of its politics; it only demonstrates that Sunday was not aware of the implications of associating with them. Nevertheless, Sunday’s actions remain problematic.
Billy Sunday’s residence at Winona Lake, Indiana, 1920. Indiana Memory.
About 1,500 saw Mr. Sunday off to his home at 10:20 o’clock Sunday evening. As the train started. Billy Sunday was shaking hands with a member of the crowd and was pulled off the steps to the platform. He managed to catch the steps of the end car as it passed and Richmond’s last sight of the evangelist was as he stood on the platform, waving goodbye.
One of the biggest reasons for that success was the daily newspaper coverage he received in the Richmond Palladium. “The papers in this town have done better in covering this campaign from every angle than any other city have been to,” Sunday told the Palladium on his final day in Richmond. This is no exaggeration. The Palladium gave Sunday six weeks of uninterrupted newspaper coverage in a special supplemental section, a unique experiment in the newspaper’s near-200 year history. They printed his sermons almost verbatim, alongside other stories, quips, and updates on the prayer meetings and the amount of people “saved.” The Palladium‘s wall-to-wall coverage of Sunday’s revivals foreshadowed today’s network of newspapers, magazines, television stations, and internet media devoted to religious programming. Thus, the Palladium’s “Sunday Supplement” underscores the immense influence of Billy Sunday and evangelical Protestantism in the Midwest during the early 20th century.
San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1923, p. 10, accessed via Newspapers.com.
The San Francisco Chronicle asked Americans “who have a wide experience and many points of contact with 1922” to predict the trials and triumphs Americans would experience 100 years later.* Probing prominent individuals like a pastor, architect, social reformer, author, film producer, educator, and politician, the paper concluded that there are “plenty of ifs and buts, but in general the prospect for a century hence seems rosy.” As a historian at the dawn of 2022, some of the predictions seem amusingly off-base, like author and critic Henry L. Mencken’s certainty that the U.S. “will be a British colony. . . . The American who will be most agreeably discussed by Anglo-American historians in 2022 will be Woodrow Wilson, the first premier of the United American Colonies.” Notorious moving picture producer D.W. Griffith was equally shortsighted when he stated, “I do not foresee the possibility of instantaneous transmission of living action to the screen within 100 years.” (Inventor-turned reluctant Fort Wayne businessman Philo Farnsworth would transmit the first “electronic television image” just a few years later in California).
Some musings proved surprisingly prescient, like those of architect Thomas Hastings, who wondered, “Will civilization relapse, perhaps through the medium of another world war, into semi-barbarism?” The telephone was only just beginning to be used in households—World Wide What?—when Hastings urged readers to consider “the probability of revolutionizing inventions—even the discovery of forces which we know nothing about now.” Famed birth control activist Margaret Sanger—who reportedly called upon Indianapolis reformer Roberta West Nicholson to help found the city’s first Planned Parenthood clinic—was arguably correct in her belief that access to birth control would result in:
happier homes, greater mutual respect between husband and wife, honeymoons lasting two or three years before children arrive, with husband and wife thoroughly equilibrated to one another, because there has been time for mutual understanding and development before parenthood is entered upon.
The Evening World (New York, New York, February 15, 1922, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
Among the soothsayers was Mary Garrett Hay, a Charlestown, Indiana native, trailblazing suffragist, and, by 1922, head of New York City’s League of Women Voters. The accuracy of her predictions prompt a look back at her life and career, both of which were far ahead of her time, so to speak. Hay informed the San Francisco Chronicle that in 2022:
The life of even the average woman will be broader and better. Woman’s drudgery in the household will be eliminated, her care of the family will be lessened, as new inventions come in and new methods of work. Women, like men, will do the tasks for which they are best fitted by temperament, gifts and training.
Technological advancements have certainly liberated women from household drudgery. And women have increasingly stepped away from the home and into the public sphere due to a redefinition of the “tasks for which they are best fitted by temperament, gifts and training.” Hay occupied this sphere throughout her life, beginning around 1880, when as a young woman she worked as a drug clerk in Charlestown.[1] Hay later supported herself as a writer, reform speaker, and political consultant in New York City, having eschewed the institution of marriage and accompanying division of labor (Again defying gender norms, she had a long-term relationship with renowned suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt).
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 21, 1908, 24, accessed Newspapers.com.
Described as a “born executive,” Hay flexed her entrepreneurial skills when in 1908 she formed the Women’s Travel Bureau. Drawing on twenty years of navigating railroad networks across the U.S. for her suffrage campaign, Hay formed a company that appealed to the unique needs of female travelers, such as featuring safe accommodations and advertising women’s events. Hay told the New-York Tribune that since the 1893 Columbian Exposition, women increasingly used rail travel for a brief reprieve from the demands of family life. This was made possible, she said, because “‘women have for the first time in history begun to earn good salaries.'”[2] The Travel Bureau is one of many examples of Hay carving out opportunities in a male-dominated field by pairing her expertise with public demand.
While Hay’s prediction alluded to shifting gender norms, she made clear in the Buffalo Times that the shift must be more immediate, telling the paper, “‘It is the right of every human to have a career in the home and in the field-and the two are not mutually exclusive.'” She stated bluntly, “‘If men are willing to let their wives go out in quest of careers in the field as well as in the home they are reasonable husbands.'” The paper added that Hay “advocates women taking paid positions even after they are married and employing servants to do the housework far more efficiently than they could ever do it themselves.” In 1926, she argued that not only should women be allowed in the workforce, but that some were better suited for it than the home, noting:
I’ve known many women who were very inefficient mothers but excellent business women. They could manage what we call a man’s job and make a conspicuous success of it, and be absolutely beaten by housework or the rearing of their children.[3]
Of course, in order to work in the professional field, jobs needed to be available. Hay worked to create these as a member of the Committee for Extending Business Opportunities to Women, formed around 1915, because “the entrance of women into various fields of work has been effected with so much difficulty.”[4]
The Evening World (New York, New York), August 25, 1921, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
In the second half of her prophesy for the San Francisco Chronicle, Hay predicted:
Politically, women will be powerful. They will share with men the real constructive work of government. Many will hold office. If there is not a woman President, the thought of one will shock no one. It will seem natural and proper to elevate women to whatever positions they have the ability to fill. Co-operation will be the magic word in 2022.
Confirming Hay’s point, many Americans in 2016 were shocked not that Hillary Clinton was poised to become the country’s first female president, but that she lost the election in a stunning upset—despite winning the popular vote. The glass ceiling came closer to being shattered when Kamala Harris was elected the first female U.S. Vice President in 2020 and when she briefly became the first woman imbued with presidential power in 2021 when President Joe Biden went under anesthesia for a medical procedure.
In fact, Hay’s own name had been floated as a U.S. presidential candidate in the 1910s. This was, in large part, because of her organizational and political prowess, particularly in recruiting members for the Republican Party.[5] Described as “the big boss of New York,” the G.O.P. appointed Hay to influential positions, soliciting her insight about issues important to women and strategies for mobilizing them to the polls.[6] Friend and fellow Hoosier— and Warren Harding’s presidential campaign manager—Will Hays appointed her chairman of the Republican Women’s National Executive Committee.[7] In this role, she was tasked with organizing “the women in the nation for the Republican Party as she had organized for suffrage. She was sought after at all political gatherings, and was made a delegate to every kind of convention.”[8]
Topeka Daily State Journal, January 29, 1920, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
From lobbying for Indiana W.C.T.U. branches to heading a West Coast speaking tour organized by Susan B. Anthony to bringing to the Albany legislature “tenement house suffragists to illustrate how much women need the vote on the lower East Side,” Hay evolved from a social reformer to a political organizer.[9] She envisioned women’s influence extending beyond ratification of the 19th Amendment and viewed the political realm as a source of women’s professional fulfilment.
In her “Politics, A Profession for Women” essay for Catherine Filene’s 1920 Careers for Women, Hay wrote that politics “lacks the stultifying effect attaching to most occupations for women. Politics for women means a life of real vitality and worth.” She noted that “women who were trained by suffrage campaigns” were qualified for “good positions” within political parties. Strengths inherent to women, Hay argued, intersected well with those required of the political sector, such as the “ability to judge and handle people . . . sagacity, resourcefulness, power to discern the true from the false, common sense, imperturbability, [and] wide experience with human nature.” Having earned a reputation as an exceptional orator, Hay delivered a speech in 1926 in which she stated governmental work was tantamount to “housekeeping on a large scale.”[10] Because of these convictions, Hay used her sway within the Republican Party to bring more women into politics, although, the Times-Tribune noted, “she frequently found herself a[t] storm center by her insistence that leaders of the party permit women workers to join in the inner councils.”[11]
While she predicted that “Politically, women will be powerful,” Hay wanted not only “political equality between the sexes,” but “equality in every single thing in life.” This sentiment paralleled U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s belief that “women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”[12] Hay worked for their systemic inclusion, including in higher education, law enforcement, jury duty, and prison reform.[13]
Oakland Tribune (California), November 29, 1927, 28, accessed Newspapers.com.
In this sense, Hay’s approach to equality was unique for the period, as historian William O’Neil argued, “’the postsuffrage feminists failed to see that the woman problem was part of a larger social question involving sex roles in American society and the entire order.’” Furthermore, these reformers “’asked only for legal equality without addressing themselves to the whole range of problems facing women who tried to make a notch for themselves in a man’s world.’”[14] Hay, “one of the best known leaders in the fight for the emancipation of women,” proved the rare exception.[15]
Her 1928 death would exacerbate this void in leadership for women’s equality. But in the nearly 100 years since her passing, her vision has been realized to a meaningful extent, as women increasingly occupy significant roles in the workplace and government. Perhaps she was able to envision the ideals and gender norms that would become fairly commonplace by 2022 because she embodied them herself.
Sources:
This post draws on the research notes for the Mary Garrett Hay historical marker.
* Unless otherwise specified, all material is drawn from the San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1923, p. 10, accessed via Newspapers.com.
[1] “Mary G. Hay,” Clark County, Indiana, Census, 1880, accessed Ancestry Library Edition.
[2] Departure of Trains Schedule, National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, New Orleans, March 19th to 25th, 1903, Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911, Scrapbook 3 (1897-1904), Rare Book and Special Collections Division.; “Women Conduct Tourist Bureau,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 21, 1908, 24, accessed Newspapers.com.; “Women Who Travel,” New-York Tribune, August 4, 1908, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
[3] Cynthia Grey, “Cynthia Says Home and Country Should Be Managed Jointly,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), April 19, 1926, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
[4] “Mary G. Hay,” Clark County, Indiana, Census, 1880, accessed AncestryLibrary.; “Mary G. Hay,” 1910 United States Federal Census, New York, accessed AncestryLibrary.; “Women Form to Open New Fields,” Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News, January 2, 1915, accessed HeinOnline.
[5] Joan Moody, “What Will They Do With It?,” Everybody’s Magazine (November 1919): 113, accessed GoogleBooks.
[6] “Cheers Greet Women as They Enter Politics,” Indianapolis Star, April 3, 1919, 1, 8, accessed Newspapers.com.
[7] “Mary Garrett Hay’s Watchword to Women in Politics Was: ‘Be Nice to the Men’; Fought for Suffrage from Girlhood,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 2, 1928.
[8]Indianapolis Star, April 3, 1919, 1, 8.; Brooklyn Eagle, September 2, 1928.
[9] “Suffrage Leaders Get Together Now,” Star-Gazette
(Almira, NY), March 5, 1910, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
[10] Cynthia Grey, “Cynthia Says Home and Country Should be Managed Jointly,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), April 19, 1926, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
[11] “Mary Garrett Hay,” The Times Tribune (Scranton, PA), September 1, 1928, accessed Newspaper.com.
[12] “They Will Stand on Their Rights,” Boston Globe, February 27, 1908, 10, accessed Newspapers.com.
[13] “Mainly About People,” Daily News (New York), January 6, 1922, 41, accessed Newspapers.com.; “Women and the Jury System,” The Scranton Republican, February 28, 1922, accessed Newspapers.com.; “Leagued Together for Law Enforcement,” Oakland Tribune, November 29, 1927, 28, accessed Newspapers.com.
[14] Quoted in Winifred D. Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 119-120.
[15]Buffalo Times, July 9, 1922, 52, accessed Newspapers.com.
The life of Hoosier industrialist Henry Ulen seems like a movie—a person of little education and resources who uses his raw talents and savvy to build a massive business empire, who then comes back to his hometown to share the fruits of his success. Perhaps it was his years drifting from town to town on the railroads as a young man that inspired a sense of community, of needing a place to call one’s own. As such, his business ventures were all about providing places with the tools they needed to build communities and wealth of their own. And today, over 120 people still call the town of Ulen home, with the golf course still serving as a hub that brings the community together. The life, work, and charity of Henry C. Ulen exemplified the true meaning of “Hoosier Hospitality.”
Music: “Forest” by Vlad Gluschenko, “Wanderlust” by Scott Buckley, “Chess Pieces” by Silent Partner, “Saturday Groove” by John Deley, “Lake Eerie” by Silent Partner, and “Purpose” by Jonny Easton
George Ade, courtesy of Indiana State Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection.
Kentland, Indiana native George Ade is best known as an author who came to prominence during the Indiana Golden Age of Literature. He was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, authored over twenty books, and even penned several successful Broadway productions. But in Newton County, he was known as “just plain George Ade, everybody’s friend.” In the early 20th century, Ade returned to Newton County and built what would become a cultural mecca – a source of support in hard times and a place of celebration in the good.
Even in an age of notable Hoosier authors, humorist George Ade stood out. Compared to contemporaries like Lew Wallace, Meredith Nicholson, and Booth Tarkington, he employed more of an “every man’s” style, peppering his work with vernacular and popular references. This made his work relatable to the masses in the early 20th century, but a bit difficult to decipher today, as seen in the excerpt below.
Excerpt from Fables in Slang, “The Fable of the Slim Girl who Tried to Keep a Date That Was Never Made,” courtesy of HathiTrust.com.
Ade began writing his “Stories from the Streets and Town” column for the Chicago Record in 1893, inspired by the daily goings-on he witnessed as a reporter on the streets of Chicago. By 1896, the column became popular enough to warrant a selection to be published as the book Artie. Subsequent collections Pink Marks (1897) and Doc’ Horne (1899) soon followed and further boosted the column’s popularity. It was Ade’s “Fables in Slang” that rocketed him to national fame, though.
1900 Satirical ‘More Fables’ by George Ade – (1899 Fables in Slang sequel), is courtesy of etsy.com.
Ade’s first fable, “The Fable of Sister Mae, Who Did As Well As Could Be Expected,” was published in the Record on September 17, 1897. “A Fable in Slang” came a year later and was the true beginning of the column, rocketing him to national fame. These humorous stories, each of which concluded with a satirical moral, such as “in uplifting, get underneath,” earned him the moniker the “Aesop of Indiana.” When the collected Fables in Slang was published in 1899, it became his most successful work up to that point.
With the dawn of the new century, Ade made a career move from columnist to playwright with the opening of The Sultan of Sulu. This first Broadway success was followed by others in quick succession. The County Chairman (1903), The Sho-Gun (1904), and The College Widow (1904) all garnered critical acclaim and helped to establish the musical comedy genre.
Not yet 40 years old, Ade had earned a fortune and retired from the hustle and bustle of life in Chicago to a sprawling fourteen room Tudor-style mansion near Brook, which he dubbed “Hazelden.” Here, he continued to write while he hosted political rallies, such as the 1908 Taft Rally, entertained local and national celebrities, and treated the residents of Newton and surrounding counties to lavish parties. The Muncie Star Press noted that Ade “wasn’t a swimmer and he didn’t dance, but on his farm place . . . he built a dance pavilion and a swimming pool.” Along with the dance pavilion and swimming pool, Hazelden featured a pool house, greenhouses, barns, and, by 1910, a golf course and country club.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Just two months after the U.S. entry into World War I, Ade wrote a plea to his community:
It seems that every part of the country, including Newton County, will have to take an important part in the great war now raging. . . Some can give more than others, but every man that can give something and fails to do so, will have to carry in his soul a reasonable doubt as to his good citizenship. Give to the Red Cross this week.
And what George Ade had to give, other than money, was Hazelden. The estate assisted the war effort in small ways, serving as the meeting place for the Newton County Red Cross Executive Committee, and hosting knitting bees, which made socks for soldiers. But in July 1918, Ade pulled out all the stops for Red Cross Day. A dozen airships, carrying military personnel from the Chanute Air Force Base near Rantoul Illinois, were early on the scene for the festivities. Thousands came from as far away as Indianapolis, South Bend, and Chicago to enjoy the grounds on a day with what newspapers of the day called “George Ade Weather.” Fundraisers included a golf tournament, where fans could bid for the chance to caddy for their favorite player and golf balls were auctioned off afterwards. Proceeds from the day totaled over $5,000 (nearly $100,000 today).
George Ade, courtesy of Alchetron.com.
Described in the Chicago Tribune as a “two fisted drinker,” and “one of the most gregarious men who ever lived,” Ade wasn’t afraid of a good time, and after the war years, he turned his attention to just that. On July 4, 1919, an estimated 15,000 revelers flocked to Brook, effectively doubling the population of Newton County for a day. Attendees brought picnic lunches, were treated to music by Bensons Orchestra, brought in from Chicago, and played a few games of “Cage Ball,” a mix of American football and soccer that became popular during the war. The evening was topped off with a fireworks display.
Perhaps the most beloved event on the Hazelden calendar was the annual Children’s Picnic, which featured activities such as baseball games, tug-of-war, dancing, and daylight fireworks. For one day each summer, all children under twelve years old from Newton and surrounding Counties were invited to take in the sprawling grounds. If a child’s family could not afford clothes and transportation to the event, Ade would furnish a new outfit and send a car to get them. The Lafayette Journal and Courier described the 1926 event:
There were clowns, imported for the occasion, magicians, organ grinders and monkeys, fancy divers and swimmers, vaudeville artists and Punch and Judy shows. Each of the 600 children present received a fancy paper cap to wear, and all feasted on ice cream and lemonade.
Annual Children’s Picnic, 1928, Indianapolis Star, September 28, 1930, 10.
For forty years, from when the home was finished in 1904 until Ade’s death in 1944, the humorist presided over scenes such as that described above time and time again. Local obituaries nearly without exception included reminiscences about the community gatherings hosted amongst the lavish gardens on the manicured grounds of Hazelden. But after Ade died following a heart attack, the estate sat empty for nearly two decades until it was acquired by the George Ade Memorial Association. It was subsequently renovated and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
Inside Hazelden, courtesy of Indiana Landmarks.
Today, Hazelden continues to serve as a gathering place for Newton County residents. The George Ade Historic Preservation Commission oversees operations of the estate, which is available to be rented out and often hosts graduation parties, birthday celebrations, and even weddings. The Commission is in the planning stages of a renovation of the mansion, carriage house, and grounds so it can better meet the needs of the community. If you are interested in learning more about this project or would like to rent out the home, contact Commission Chairperson Krissy Wright.
Note: This post was written using the marker notes for the Indiana state historical marker for George Ade, which can be found here.
Today, we drive over rivers and creeks in a few seconds and barely know their names. But before modern transportation severed so much of our connection to waterways, human contact with rivers practically defined life in water-rich Indiana.
One lost industry that had a brief “boom and bust” over most of the eastern U.S. a century ago was closely tied to the life of the rivers. If you’re keeping a list of industries (like steel and auto manufacturing) that have declined and even vanished from the Midwest, add one more: pearl button making.
Consumers today rarely give a thought to where buttons come from. How synthetic goods are made (i.e., the zippers, plastic buttons, and Velcro that partly replaced shell around 1950) may seem less “romantic” than the work of pearl fishermen hauling shiny treasures out of Midwestern streams in johnboats. Yet in spite of its nostalgic appeal, the pearl button industry also wreaked havoc on the environment and on workers in factories.
(This photo taken on the Wabash River at Vincennes, Indiana, around 1905 shows a pearl fisherman in his boathouse. He kept a “cooker” on hand to steam the mussel shells open. “The meat was fed to hogs or used as bait.” Shells were sent off to button factories.)(Man on a johnboat on the Rock River outside Beloit, Wisconsin, circa 1911. Mussels would clamp down on hooks and not let go until they were cooked off. The rods were often made out of cast-off gas pipes. Photo by Lloyd Ballard. Beloit College Archives.)
At the time of European settlement, midwestern rivers abounded in mussels. As many as 400 species probably lived in the Ohio Valley in 1800. The Mound Builder cultures that once occupied the American heartland found many ways to use mussels and left behind enormous refuse piles — what archaeologists call “middens” — in their towns, which almost always sat beside creeks and rivers. They were large towns, too. In the year 1200, Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from the future site of St. Louis, was bigger than medieval London.
Among Indiana’s early settlers, “diving” for pearls hidden in freshwater mussels dates back to at least 1846, when farmers at Winamac founded a small stockholders association to try to market shells taken from the Tippecanoe River. They sent a man to St. Louis and Cincinnati to ask about the value of freshwater pearls. Prices were low at the time and the “Pulaski County Pearl Diver Association” went bust.
Though a few button factories existed in Indiana before the Civil War — relying on shell, horn, and bone — the American freshwater pearl boom didn’t really gain momentum until 1900. In that year, a pearl frenzy erupted along the Black and White Rivers near Newport, Arkansas. Arkansas’ pearl boom had all the hallmarks of an old-time gold rush. A writer for the Indianapolis Journal reported in 1903:
Within the past three years more than $3,000,000 worth of pearls have been taken from the Mississippi Valley. . . The excitement spread from the land to the river steamboats. Their crews deserted them, and sometimes their captains, and the Black River was the scene of the wildest excitement. New towns were built and old ones were increased to the size of cities. Streets were laid out, banks and mercantile establishments were started, mortgages were lifted, money was plenty and times were prosperous. . . New York pearl dealers flocked there in great numbers.
The writer tells a story, perhaps exaggerated like much of his account, that an African American family who had lived in poverty made enough money pearling to build a large house and hire white servants. He also mentions that New York dealers were often ripped off by sellers masquerading Arkansas pearls as Asian.
Arkansas’ rivers were quickly “pearled out,” but the pearl boom spread and reached its peak around 1905-1910. Southwestern Indiana is almost as close to Arkansas as it is to Cincinnati. When the Southern boom died down, the hunt for pearls came north. The Jasper Weekly Courier reported in October 1903 that pearls had been found in the Wabash River at Maunie, Illinois, just south of New Harmony. “The river is a veritable bee hive and scores are at work securing mussel shells. The price of shells has risen from $4 to $15 a ton and an experienced man can secure a ton in a day. Farmers find it difficult to get farm hands.”
“Musselers” found an estimated $7000 worth of pearls in the Wabash in the first week of June 1909. Charles Williams, a “poor musseler,” found a “perfect specimen of the lustrous black pearl and has sold it for $1250. Black pearls are seldom found in freshwater shells.”
(The steamboat City of Idaho docked at Vincennes, Indiana, around 1907. For a few years, a small button factory on Willow Street produced as many as 3,000 buttons a week from mussel shells harvested along the Wabash. When the factory closed, mussel fishermen sent shells by steamboat and train to the large button manufacturers in Muscatine, Iowa.)
Vincennes experienced an explosion of musseling in 1905, as pearl hunters converged on the Wabash River’s shell banks. Eastern buyers came out to Indiana and frequently offered $500-$1000 for a pearl, which they polished into jewelry in cities like New York. A thousand dollars was a lot amount of money at a time when factory workers typically made about $8.00 a week. But with several hundred people eagerly scouring the riverbanks, the best pearls were quickly snatched up. For about a decade afterwards, “mussel men” and their families focused on providing shells for button manufacturers.
Interestingly, the shell craze caused a squatters’ village to spring up in Vincennes. A shanty town called Pearl City, made up of shacks and houseboats, sat along the river from 1907 to 1936, when as part of a WPA deal, its residents were resettled in Sunset Court, Vincennes’ first public housing.
At Logansport on the Wabash, patients from the Northern Indiana Insane Hospital spent part of the summer of 1908 hunting for pearl-bearing mussels. “One old man has been lucky, finding several pearls valued at $200 each. Local jewelers have tried to buy them but the old man hoards them like a miser does his gold. He keeps them in a bottle, and his chief delight is to hold the bottle so that he can see his prizes as the sun strikes the gems.” In and around Indianapolis, hunters discovered pearls in Fall Creek and the White River, especially around Waverly, southwest of the city.
Though every fisherman sought to find a high-value pearl and make a tiny fortune, the boom’s more prosaic side — button-making — eventually won out. From the 1890s to the 1940s, hundreds of small factories across the Midwest turned out glossy “mother-of-pearl” buttons. The industry especially flourished along a stretch of the Mississippi near Muscatine, Iowa, called the “button capital of the world.” Muscatine’s button industry was founded by John Boepple, a master craftsman from Hamburg, Germany, who immigrated to Iowa around 1887. Muscatine’s factories turned out a staggering 1.5 billion buttons in 1905 alone. About 10,000 workers were employed by button factories in the Midwestern states.
John Boepple lived to see the industry’s impact on rivers like the Mississippi. In 1910, the industrialist turned conservationist began work at a biological station established by Congress at Fairport, Iowa, to help repopulate mussels by reseeding riverbeds. Congress’ role was simply to preserve the industry, not to save decimated species. In 1912, the embattled mussels had their revenge: Boepple cut his foot on a shell and died of a resulting infection.
Although Iowa dominated the American button industry, numerous tiny factories popped up in small Indiana towns, including Mishawaka, Lawrenceburg, Leavenworth, Madison, and Shoals. (Shoals was named for its founder, Frederick Shulz, not for the mussel shoals on the White River.) Taylor Z. Richey, writing from Cannelton, Indiana, described how the work was done along the Ohio River in 1904. Many factories did not create the actual buttons, merely the “blanks” that were shipped out to Iowa.
Created by Robert Ervin Coker, 1921, courtesy of University of Washington, accessed Wikipedia.(In 1910, three buttonworks in Leavenworth, Indiana, employed twenty-four families — most of the population of the town. This two-story Greek Revival building had once been City Hall. Long chutes connected upper windows to wheelbarrows below. Discarded shells were burned to produce lime. “Old” Leavenworth was permanently wiped out by the 1937 Ohio River Flood. Image courtesy of Crawford County Historical & Genealogical Society.)(Workers at a button factory along the Ohio River at St. Mary’s, West Virginia, circa 1910. The man on the far left, second row, in the black apron is Andrew Jackson Wigner, the great-grandfather of Trisha Johns who submitted the photo, accessed https://www.wvgenweb.org/pleasants/workmen.htm)
Working in the button industry was far from quaint and actually proved a hazardous job. Exposure to hydrochloric acid and poor ventilation took a big toll on workers. Author Jeffrey Copeland notes that. there were more cases of pneumonia, typhus and gangrene among button factory laborers than in any other industry. Children as young as eight worked sixty-hour weeks carrying buckets of shells and acid to soften the material up. Eye injuries and loss of fingers often occurred as workers “stamped” the buttons out of shells or operated lathes. Even before the industry reached its turn-of-the-century heyday, gory accidents (such as this one, reported in the Jasper Weekly Courier in 1874) made it into the newspapers:
A French girl, sixteen years old, was caught by her long hair in a revolving shaft at a button factory in Kankakee, Ill., the other day, and the left side of her head was completely scalped. A severe concussion of the brain was also sustained. Her condition was considered critical.
Partly under the leadership of a young activist named Pearl McGill, labor unions in Iowa battled it out with factory owners, culminating in Muscatine’s “Button War” of 1911, a fight that involved arson and the killing of police. In Vincennes in 1903, however, the usual pattern of Progressive-era labor politics seemed to go the other way around. The Indianapolis Journal reported that Eugene Aubrey, owner of a pearl-button factory at Vincennes and allegedly a member of the Socialist Party, fired worker Charles Higginbottom for serving in the militia during Evansville’s bloody July 1903 race riot, when many African Americans were gunned down. The Journal went on to accuse Aubrey of being a secret anarchist.
In his semi-fictional Tales of Leavenworth, Rush Warren Carter described a small-town Indiana button factory in those years. A boy named Palmer Dotson quits school at 16 and gets a job working under superintendent “Badeye” Williams. (Factory workers often lost eyes.) “Cutting buttons was not a business that developed one’s mind or elevated his thoughts,” Carter wrote. “The cutting process was a dull routine to a background of everything but enlightened conversation. Talk about your ladies’ sewing circles. When it came to gossip, [women] were not in the same league with the men in the button factory, who chewed and rechewed every real or imagined bit of gossip until it had been ground to a fine pulp.” Dotson died of tuberculosis at 21. A co-worker decided that opening a saloon would be preferable to stamping buttons.
In 1917, a silent movie based on Virginia Brooks‘ popular novel “Little Lost Sister” was playing at The Auditorium in South Bend. The plot begins in a sordid rural button factory in “Millville” (probably in Iowa), where the heroine, Elsie Welcome, has big dreams about getting out and going to Chicago. A classic stand-off with the foreman ensues:
Although Iowa’s factories were still running in 1946 (the year actor Ronald Reagan chose Muscatine’s Pearl Queen), exhaustion of shell banks all over the Midwest was killing the industry fast. Japanese innovations increased competition after World War II. Synthetic plastics — which were cheap and could withstand washing machines better than shell — were pioneered in the 1920s and eventually took over the industry in the mid-1950s. Instead of smelly buckets of shells, workers handled tubs of polyester syrup. Then, two snazzy new inventions, zippers and Velcro, even cut into the demand for buttons outright.
Indiana’s factories, which had been shipping blanks to Iowa for years, had all gone out of business by the end of World War II. The last independent buttonworks in the U.S., the Wilbur E. Boyd Factory at Meredosia on the Illinois River, closed in 1948. Iowa’s button industry hung on until the mid-1990s, when Chinese innovations in pearl cultivation finally caused it to collapse.
