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CHAPTER 6
"Willie— Master in Politics"
THIS story has reached a point where I feel like calling on the reader to help me appraise my Indiana experiences. As a man looks back to his youth it is always interesting to see which features of his environment seem to have been most decisive and formative. Part One tried to sketch the obvious influences that surrounded me in Sullivan: home, neighbors, church, school, region. These continued to operate while I was learning my trade as a lawyer and trying my hand at politics, as well as at farming, Masonry, and many other interests.
In attempting to find the factors that motivated me in the first decade after college, let us think for a moment of this same period in the life of the country— the ten or a dozen years before World War I. They were the last days of the sometimes maligned "horse-and-buggy" era.
In my home Frank, the family horse, and my earliest automobiles overlapped for several years. The era of the horse was slowly passing, though we did not realize it at the time, and the automobile was haltingly moving toward the commanding position it holds today. It was still the day of moderate speeds— far from anything supersonic. It was still the day of world peace, a peace that most of us took for granted. We honestly believed that war as a world factor was a thing of the past.
It was still the day of the quiet, patient, and laborious cultivation of field and farm which had built Indiana and the whole Middle West. But industry was growing fast. Almost all my friends were interested in one way or another in things outside the town community— in crops, cattle, timber, coal, manufacturing, transportation, and so on.
We were not so isolated from metropolitan or cultural advantages as one might suppose. We were avid readers of city newspapers, which came regularly into our homes. Even small towns like Sullivan were visited by first-class road shows to an extent hard for the present generation to believe. As for political speechmakers in those days before radio and television, they were always on the road. Those were days of hot political debate, from the country-store circle on up. Old-fashioned oratory, on plenty of occasions other than political campaigns, was in full bloom.