The provincial American and other papers

by Meredith Nicholson

Indianapolis—like Jerusalem, “a city at unity with itself,” where the tribes assemble, and where the seat of judgment is established—is in every sense the capital of all the Hoosiers. With the exception of Boston, it is the largest state capital in the country; and no other American city without water communication is so large. It is distinguished primarily by the essentially American character of its people. A considerable body of Germans contributed much first and last to its substantial growth, not only by the example of their familiar industry and frugality, but in later years through their intelligent interest in all manner of civic improvement, in general education, and in music and art. Only in the past decade has there been any perceptible drift of undesirable immigrants from southeastern Europe to our city and the problems they create have been met promptly by wise agencies of social service. There was an influx of negroes at the close of the war, and the colored voters (about seventy-five hundred in 1912) add considerably to our political perplexities.

Indiana was admitted as a State in 1816, and the General Assembly, sitting at Corydon in 1821, designated Indianapolis, then a settlement of struggling cabins, as the state capital. The name of the new town was not adopted without a struggle, Tecumseh, Suwarro, and Concord being proposed and supported, while the name finally chosen aroused the hostility of those who declared it unmelodious and etymologically abominable. It is of record that the first mention of the name Indianapolis in the legislature caused great merriment. The town was laid out in broad streets, which were quickly adorned with shade trees that are an abiding testimony to the foresight of the founders. Alexander Ralston, one of the engineers employed in the first survey, had served in a similar capacity at Washington, and the diagonal avenues and the generous breadth of the streets are suggestive of the national capital. The urban landscape lacks variety: the town is perfectly flat, and in old times the mud was intolerable, but the trees are a continuing glory.

Central Indiana was not, in 1820, when the first cabin was built, a region of unalloyed delight. The land was rich, but it was covered with heavy woods, and much of it was under water. Indians still roamed the forests, and the builder of the first cabin was killed by them. There were no roads, and White River, on whose eastern shore the town was built, was navigable only by the smallest craft. Mrs. Beecher, in “From Dawn to Daylight,” described the region as it appeared in the forties: “It is a level stretch of land as far as the eye can reach, looking as if one good, thorough rain would transform it into an impassable morass. How the inhabitants contrive to get about in rainy weather, I can’t imagine, unless they use stilts. The city itself has been redeemed from this slough, and presents quite a thriving appearance, being very prettily laid out, with a number of fine buildings.” Dr. Eggleston, writing in his novel “Roxy” of the same period, lays stress on the saffron hue of the community, the yellow mud seeming to cover all things animate and inanimate.

But the founders possessed faith, courage, and hardihood, and “the capital in the woods” grew steadily. The pioneers were patriotic and religious; their patriotism was, indeed, touched with the zeal of their religion. For many years before the Civil War a parade of the Sunday-school children of the city was the chief feature of every Fourth of July celebration. The founders labored from the first in the interest of morality and enlightenment. The young capital was a converging point for a slender stream of population that bore in from New England, and a broader current that swept westward from the Middle and Southeastern States. There was no sectional feeling in those days. Many of the prominent settlers from Kentucky were Whigs, but a newcomer’s church affiliation was of far more importance than his political belief. Membership in a church was a social recommendation in old times, but the importance of religion seemed to diminish as the town passed the two-hundred-thousand mark. Perhaps two hundred thousand is the dead-line—I hope no one will press me too hard to defend this suggestion—beyond which a community loses its pristine sensitiveness to benignant influences; but there was indubitably in the history of our capital a moment at which we became disagreeably conscious that we were no longer a few simple and well-meaning folk who made no social engagements that would interfere with Thursday night prayer-meeting, but a corporation of which we were only unconsidered and unimportant members.

The effect of the Civil War upon Indianapolis was immediate and far-reaching. It emphasized, through the centralizing there of the State’s military energy, the fact that it was the capital city,—a fact which until that time had been accepted languidly by the average Hoosier countryman. The presence within the State of an aggressive body of sympathizers with Southern ideas directed attention throughout the country to the energy and resourcefulness of Morton, the War Governor, who pursued the Hoosier Copperheads relentlessly, while raising a great army to send to the seat of war. Again, the intense political bitterness engendered by the war did not end with peace, or with the restoration of good feeling in neighboring States, but continued for twenty-five years more to be a source of political irritation, and, markedly at Indianapolis, a cause of social differentiation. In the minds of many, a Democrat was a Copperhead, and a Copperhead was an evil and odious thing. Referring to the slow death of this feeling, a veteran observer of affairs who had, moreover, supported Mr. Cleveland’s candidacy twice, recently said that he had never been able wholly to free himself from this prejudice. But the end really came in 1884, with the reaction against Blaine, which was nowhere more significant of the flowering of independence than at Indianapolis.

Following the formative period, which may be said to have ended with the Civil War, came an era of prosperity in business, and even of splendor in social matters. Some handsome habitations had been built in the ante-bellum days, but they were at once surpassed by the homes which many citizens reared for themselves in the seventies. These remain, as a group, the handsomest residences that have been built at any period in the history of the city. Life had been earnest in the early days, but it now became picturesque. The terms “aristocrats” and “first families” were heard in the community, and something of traditional Southern ampleness and generosity crept into the way of life. No one said nouveau riche in those days; the first families were the real thing. No one denied it, and misfortune could not shake or destroy them.

A panic is a stern teacher of humility, and the financial depression that fell upon the country in 1873 drove the lesson home remorselessly at Indianapolis. There had been nothing equivocal about the boom. Western speculators had not always had a fifty-year-old town to operate in,—the capital of a State, a natural railway centre,—no arid village in a hot prairie, but a real forest city that thundered mightily in the prospectus. There was no sudden collapse; a brave effort was made to ward off the day of reckoning; but this only prolonged the agony. Among the victims there was little whimpering. A thoroughbred has not proved his mettle until he has held up his head in defeat, and the Hoosier aristocrat went down with his flag flying. Those that had suffered the proud man’s contumely then came forth to sneer. An old-fashioned butternut Democrat remarked, of a banker who failed, that “no wonder Blank busted when he drove to business in a carriage behind a nigger in uniform.” The memory of the hard times lingered long at home and abroad. A town where credit could be so shaken was not, the Eastern insurance companies declared, a safe place for further investments; and in many quarters Indianapolis was not forgiven until an honest, substantial growth had carried the lines of the city beyond the terra incognita of the boom’s outer rim.

Many of the striking characteristics of the true Indianapolitan are attributable to those days, when the city’s bounds were moved far countryward, to the end that the greatest possible number of investors might enjoy the ownership of town lots. The signal effect of this dark time was to stimulate thrift and bring a new era of caution and conservatism; for there is a good deal of Scotch-Irish in the Hoosier, and he cannot be fooled twice with the same bait. During the period of depression the town lost its zest for gayety. It took its pleasures a little soberly; it was notorious as a town that welcomed theatrical attractions grudgingly, though this attitude must be referred back also to the religious prejudices of the early comers. Your Indianapolitan who has personal knowledge of the panic, or who had listened to the story of it from one who weathered the storm, has never forgotten the discipline of the seventies: though he has reached the promised land, he still remembers the hot sun in the tyrant’s brickyards. So conservatism became the city’s rule of life. The panic of 1893 caused scarcely a ripple, and the typical Indianapolis business man to this day is one who minds his barometer carefully.

Indianapolis became a city rather against its will. It liked its own way, and its way was slow; but when the calamity could no longer be averted, it had its trousers creased and its shoes polished, and accepted with good grace the fact that its population had reached two hundred thousand, and that it had crept to a place comfortably near the top in the list of bank clearances. A man who left Indianapolis in 1885, returned in 1912—the Indianapolitan, like the cat in the ballad, always comes back; he cannot successfully be transplanted—to find himself a stranger in a strange city. Once he knew all the people who rode in chaises; but on his return he found new people flying about in automobiles that cost more than any but the most prosperous citizen earned in the horse-car days; once he had been able to discuss current topics with a passing friend in the middle of Washington Street; now he must duck and dive, and keep an eye on the policeman if he would make a safe crossing. He is asked to luncheon at a club; in the old days there were no clubs, or they were looked on as iniquitous things; he is carried off to inspect factories which are the largest of their kind in the world. At the railroad yards he watches the loading of machinery for shipment to Russia and Chili, and he is driven over asphalt streets to parks that had not been dreamed of before his term of exile.

Manufacturing is the great business of the city, still sootily advertised on the local countenance in spite of heroic efforts to enforce smoke-abatement ordinances. There are nearly two thousand establishments within its limits where manufacturing in some form is carried on. Many of these rose in the day of natural gas, and it was predicted that when the gas had been exhausted the city would lose them; but the number has increased steadily despite the failure of the gas supply. There are abundant coal-fields within the State, so that the question of fuel will not soon be troublesome. The city enjoys, also, the benefits to be derived from the numerous manufactories in other towns of central Indiana, many of which maintain administrative offices there. It is not only a good place in which to make things, but a point from which many things may be sold to advantage. Jobbing flourished even before manufacturing attained its present proportions. The jobbers have given the city an enviable reputation for enterprise and fair dealing. When you ask an Indianapolis jobber whether the propinquity of St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Cleveland is not against him, he answers that he meets his competitors daily in every part of the country and is not afraid of them.