vehicle for his political gospel; but Eggleston invoked the Hoosier
_lingua rustica_ to aid in the portrayal of a type. He did not,
however, employ dialect with the minuteness of subsequent writers,
notably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley; but the Southwestern idiom
impressed him, and his preface and notes in the later edition of
“The Schoolmaster” are invaluable to the student. Dialect remains in
Indiana, as elsewhere, largely a matter of observation and opinion.
There has never been a uniform folk-speech peculiar to the people
living within the borders of the State. The Hoosier dialect, so called,
consisting more of elisions and vulgarized pronunciations than of true
idiom, is spoken wherever the Scotch-Irish influence is perceptible
in the West Central States, notably in the southern counties of Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois. It is not to be confounded with the cruder
speech of the “poor-whitey,” whose wild strain in the Hoosier blood was
believed by Eggleston to be an inheritance of the English bond-slave.
There were many vague and baffling elements in the Ohio Valley speech,
but they passed before the specialists of the Dialect Society could
note them. Mr. Riley’s Hoosier is more sophisticated than Eggleston’s,
and thirty years of change lie between them,--years which wholly
transformed the State, physically and socially. It is diverting to
have Eggleston’s own statement that the Hoosiers he knew in his youth
were wary of New England provincialisms, and that his Virginia father
threatened to inflict corporal punishment on his children “if they
should ever give the peculiar vowel sound heard in some parts of New
England in such words as ‘roof’ and ‘root.’”
While Eggleston grew to manhood on a frontier which had been a
great battle-ground, the mere adventurous aspects of this life
did not attract him when he sought subjects for his pen; but the
culture-history of the people among whom his life fell interested
him greatly, and he viewed events habitually with a critical eye. He
found, however, that the evolution of society could not be treated
satisfactorily in fiction, so he began, in 1880, while abroad, the
researches in history which were to occupy him thereafter to the end of
his life. His training as a student of social forces had been superior
to any that he could have obtained in the colleges accessible to him,
for he had seen life in the raw; he had known, on the one hand, the
vanishing frontiersmen who founded commonwealths around the hunters’
camp-fires; and he had, on the other, witnessed the dawn of a new
era which brought order and enlightenment. He thus became a delver in
libraries only after he had scratched under the crust of life itself.
While he turned first to the old seaboard colonies in pursuit of his
new purpose, he brought to his research an actual knowledge of the
beginnings of new States which he had gained in the open. He planned a
history of life in the United States on new lines, his main idea being
to trace conditions and movements to remotest sources. He collected
and studied his material for sixteen years before he published any
result of his labors beyond a few magazine papers. “The Beginnings of a
Nation” (1896) and “The Transit of Civilization” (1901) are only part
of the scheme as originally outlined, but they are complete as far
as they go, and are of permanent interest and value. History was not
to him a dusty lumber room, but a sunny street where people came and
went in their habits as they lived; and thus, in a sense, he applied
to history the realism of fiction. He pursued his task with scientific
ardor and accuracy, but without fussiness or dullness. His occupations
as novelist and editor had been a preparation for his later work, for
it was the story quality that he sought in history, and he wrote with
an editorial eye to what is salient and interesting. It is doubtful
whether equal care has ever been given to the preparation of any other
historical work in this country. The plan of the books is in itself
admirable, and the exhaustive character of his researches is emphasized
by copious notes, which are hardly less attractive than the text they
amplify and strengthen. He expressed himself with simple adequacy,
without flourish, and with a nice economy of words; but he could, when
he chose, throw grace and charm into his writing. He was, in the best
sense, a humanist. He knew the use of books, but he vitalized them from
a broad knowledge of life. He had been a minister, preaching a simple
gospel, for he was never a theologian as the term is understood, but he
enlisted zealously in movements for the bettering of mankind, and his
influence was unfailingly wholesome and stimulating.
His robust spirit was held in thrall by an invalid body, and throughout
his life his work was constantly interrupted by serious illnesses;
but there was about him a certain blitheness; his outlook on life
was cheerful and sanguine. He was tremendously in earnest in all his
undertakings and accomplished first and last an immense amount of
work,--preacher, author, editor, and laborious student, his industry
was ceaseless. His tall figure, his fine head with its shock of white
hair, caught the attention in any gathering. He was one of the most
charming of talkers, leading lightly on from one topic to another.
No one who ever heard his voice can forget its depth and resonance.
Nothing in our American annals is more interesting or more remarkable
than the rise of such men, who appear without warning in all manner
of out-of-the-way places and succeed in precisely those fields which
environment and opportunity seemingly conspire to fortify most strongly
against them. Eggleston possessed in marked degree that self-reliance
which Higginson calls the first requisite of a new literature, and
through it he earned for himself a place of dignity and honor in
American letters.
A Provincial Capital
A Provincial Capital
THE Hoosier is not so deeply wounded by the assumption in Eastern
quarters that he is a wild man of the woods as by the amiable
condescension of acquaintances at the seaboard, who tell him, when he
mildly remonstrates, that his abnormal sensitiveness is provincial.
This is, indeed, the hardest lot, to be called a “mudsill” and then
rebuked for talking back! There are, however, several special insults
to which the citizen of Indianapolis is subjected, and these he resents
with all the strength of his being. First among them is the proneness
of many to confuse Indianapolis and Minneapolis. To the citizen of the
Hoosier capital, Minneapolis seems a remote place, that can be reached
only by passing through Chicago. Still another source of intense
annoyance is the persistent fallacy that Indianapolis is situated on
the Wabash River. There seems to be something funny about the name
of this pleasant stream,--immortalized in late years by a tuneful
balladist,--which a large percentage of the people of Indianapolis have
never seen except from a car window. East of Pittsburg the wanderer
from Hoosierdom expects to be asked how things are on the Waybosh,--a
pronunciation which, by the way, is never heard at home. Still another
grievance that has embittered the lives of Indianapolitans is the
annoying mispronunciation of the name of their town by benighted
outsiders. Rural Hoosiers, in fact, offend the ears of their city
cousins with Indianopolis; but it is left usually for the Yankee
visitor to say _Injun_apolis, with a stress on _Injun_ which points
rather unnecessarily to the day of the war-whoop and scalp-dance.
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.
Indianapolis was long a place of industry, thrift, and comfort, where
the simple life was not only possible but necessary. Its social
entertainments were of the tamest sort, and the change in this respect
has come only within a few years,--with the great wave of growth and
prosperity that has wrought a new Indianapolis from the old. If left
to itself, the old Indianapolis would never have known a horse show or
a carnival,--would never have strewn itself with confetti, or boasted
the greatest automobile speedway in the world; but the invading
time-spirit has rapidly destroyed the walls of the city of tradition.
Business men no longer go home to dinner at twelve o’clock and take a
nap before returning to work; and the old amiable habit of visiting for
an hour in an office where ten minutes of business was to be transacted
has passed. A town is at last a city when sociability has been squeezed
out of business and appointments are arranged a day in advance by
telephone.
The distinguishing quality of Indianapolis continues, however, to be
its simple domesticity. The people are home-loving and home-keeping. In
the early days, when the town was a rude capital in the wilderness, the
citizens stayed at home perforce; and when the railroad reached them
they did not take readily to travel. A trip to New York is still a much
more serious event, considered from Indianapolis, than from Denver or
Kansas City. It was an Omaha young man who was so little appalled by
distance that, having an express frank, he formed the habit of sending
his laundry work to New York, to assure a certain finish to his linen
that was unattainable at home. The more the Hoosier travels, the more
he likes his own town. Only a little while ago an Indianapolis man who
had been in New York for a week went to the theatre and saw there a
fellow-townsman who had just arrived. He hurried around to greet him at
the end of the first act. “Tell me,” he exclaimed, “how is everything
in old Indianapolis?”
The Hoosiers assemble at Indianapolis in great throngs with slight
excuse. In addition to the steam railroads that radiate in every
direction interurban traction lines have lately knit new communities
into sympathetic relationship with the capital. One may see the real
Hoosier in the traction station,--and an ironed-out, brushed and
combed Hoosier he is found to be. You may read the names of all the
surrounding towns on the big interurban cars that mingle with the
local traction traffic. They bring men whose errand is to buy or sell,
or who come to play golf on the free course at Riverside Park, or on
the private grounds of the Country Club. The country women join their
sisters of the city in attacks upon the bargain counters. These cars
disfigure the streets, but no one has made serious protest, for are not
the Hoosiers welcome to their capital, no matter how or when they visit
it; and is not this free intercourse, as the phrase has it, “a good
thing for Indianapolis”? This contact between town and country tends to
stimulate a state feeling, and as the capital grows this intimacy will
have an increasing value.
There is something neighborly and cozy about Indianapolis. The man
across the street or next door will share any good thing he has with
you, whether it be a cure for rheumatism, a new book, or the garden
hose. It is a town where doing as one likes is not a mere possibility,
but an inherent right. The woman of Indianapolis is not afraid to
venture abroad with her market-basket, albeit she may carry it in
an automobile. The public market at Indianapolis is an ancient and
honorable institution, and there is no shame but much honor in being
seen there in conversation with the farmer and the gardener or the
seller of herbs, in the early hours of the morning. The market is so
thoroughly established in public affection that the society reporter
walks its aisles in pursuit of news. The true Indianapolis housewife
goes to market; the mere resident of the city orders by telephone,
and meekly accepts what the grocer has to offer; and herein lies a
difference that is not half so superficial as it may sound, for at
heart the people who are related to the history and tradition of
Indianapolis are simple and frugal, and if they read Emerson and
Browning by the evening lamp, they know no reason why they should
not distinguish, the next morning, between the yellow-legged chicken
offered by the farmer’s wife at the market and frozen fowls of doubtful
authenticity that have been held for a season in cold storage.