USA > Indiana > Public men of Indiana : a political history, 1890-1920, v. 2 > Part 4
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In 1884 Judge Kopelke was presidential elector for the tenth district and as such voted for Cleve- land and Hendricks, and in 1898 was the Demo- cratic nominee for judge of the Appellate Court of the State.
Julian W. Youche located in Crown Point for the practice of the law in 1872. He had been raised in the State of Ohio, received a high school and college education and graduated in law at Michi-
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gan University. Before taking up the practice he had been a teacher in the Crown Point schools. He was elected and served as prosecuting attorney; was elected to the State Senate in 1882 and served in the sessions of 1883 and 1885; was a member of the Judiciary Committee and was considered one of the ablest lawyers in the legislative assembly; was both an industrious lawyer and great student; was for a time a trustee of the State University. He died in 1901.
Lawrence Becker was born in Westphalia, Ger- many, attended the German public schools until 1879, when his parents, in his tenth year, brought him to America and settled at Hammond, Indiana, where he attended the public schools until 1883, when the family moved to Montana where he worked on ranches and in other lines of industry until 1892, when he returned to Indiana and en- tered Valparaiso University and prepared for en- tering the law practice, graduating from the law department of that institution in 1896, and then opened an office and began the practice at Ham- mond and continued in it until elected mayor of Hammond in 1904, and afterwards was again twice elected mayor, in 1905 and 1909.
In March, 1911, he was appointed judge of the Hammond Superior Court by Governor Thomas R. Marshall, and while serving in that capacity was nominated as the Democratic candidate but was unable to overcome the large Republican majority in the county, though the plurality against him was very small. In March, 1915, he was
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appointed Solicitor of the United States Treasury by President Wilson.
Has for many years been recognized as a Demo- cratic leader of Northern Indiana. He was one of the organizers and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Hammond Public Library. He is well known as a student of municipal government and political science and has drafted many of the laws enacted by the State legislature for the gov- ernment of municipal corporations, and has always taken an active part in the promotion of eivie and industrial affairs of Northern Indiana, and is a prominent member of benevolent orders, among them the F. and A. Masons.
Armanas F. Knotts, a product of the State of Ohio, reared in Pulaski County. After receiving his common school and legal education located at Hammond in 1887 and engaged in the law prac- tice and was elected mayor of the city in 1902, fol- lowing his service as a Republican member of the Indiana legislature at the session of 1899, where he served as a member of the Judiciary Committee and was a recognized leader as a legislator.
In the year 1906 the United States Steel Com- pany decided to extend its manufacturing opera- tions in the Calumet district in Indiana, and em- ployed Knotts to make the purchases of the rights, easements and property it desired to acquire, which ineluded a frontage of seven miles on Lake Michi- gan and adjacent lands, approximating five thou- sand acres.
He ascertained the property ownerships and so
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cautiously conducted his negotiations that he closed the deals and paid for the property, about ten mil- lion dollars, in cash, before it became known for what purpose he made the purchases.
It was not at the time in contemplation by the steel company to found any town or city, but to use the property for railroad tracks and terminals and for the location of manufacturing plants alone. Knotts urged the building of a city as an appro- priate incident to the manufacturing enterprises. Judge Gary, the chairman of the board of directors of the steel company, at first opposed the proposi- tion, basing his opposition upon the failure of the experiment of the Pullman Palace Car Company in the creation of the city it had built to provide homes for its employes near their work.
That company, about the year 1881, laid out the town of Pullman and on grounds adjoining its manufacturing works constructed water works, gas works, and other utilities such as are required for city dwellers and constructed great blocks of buildings for residence purposes equipped with all conveniences for living, surrounding them with beautiful lawns, flowers, fountains, and other orna- mental attractions. It exercised the police and other powers of municipal corporations for the pro- tection of the occupants of its many mansions, com- posed exclusively of employees of the Pullman company, and it was believed they would be con- tented and happy in such homes, but it developed a few years later that this contentment and happi- ness had to be purchased at an excessive price by
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the occupants of these palaces in which they were only tenants and subjected to all the ills that usually follow from the relation of landlord and tenant. The car company not only charged high rentals for these homes and their conveniences, but required the occupants to purchase their food at the com- pany's markets and it deducted all the charges each payday from the wage-earner's pay check, leaving them but little if anything of their earnings. These conditions in a few years culminated in the great Pullman car strike of 1894 that was joined in by sympathetic strikes of laborers in all other labor departments of the railroad service, and continued until suppressed by the military forces of the United States called out by the order of President Cleveland, and soon afterwards the sovereign State of Illinois, in quo warranto proceedings, deprived the Pullman company of the rights and privileges of acting as a municipality, and its magnificent mansions that fronted the Illinois Central Railroad and were the show places so greatly admired stood uninhabited and as so many tombs.
Knotts was so familiar with all of these condi- tions and so well supplied with facts about working people, their ways of living, and their desires for home ownership that makes patriotism, that he was able to convince Judge Gary and other officials and managers of the steel company that if they would follow his plans in building a city and leave it to the people to run it they need have no fears of the Pullman experience, and they assented to his plans and the great head of the great steel com-
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pany was honored by its being named Gary, orig- inally incorporated as a town under the control of a board of trustees until it gained the necessary population to become incorporated as a city.
Knotts was the possessor of engineering skill and artistic tastes as well as legal talent and selected sites for parks, locations for residences separated from the manufacturing plants, laid out streets, sewers, sidewalks, planted shade trees and selected ornaments for the city to be. Among his designs was a deep tunnel that brings water by gravity to the center of the city where it is distributed. All pipes and conduits are located in the alleys and nothing under the streets so that they never need be torn up. In short, the city he planned was dif- ferent from any other, but more durable and beau- tiful than cities generally are in their infancy, and it has maintained all the magnificence and splendor that he designed for it. Its population grew so rapidly that it now, according to the census of 1920, contains 55,378.
Judge Elbert H. Gary, a man of great attain- ments, well known among men of large affairs throughout the world and an authority on world problems, had the keen foresight to discover the great advantages that would come to the giant steel corporation, of which he is the head, by acquiring the location that Indiana afforded, midway between the vast ore beds of the Superior region reached by water, and the great coal fields of the east and south by rail. At this place steel can be made 38 per cent cheaper than in Duluth and 25 per cent
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cheaper than in Pittsburgh, as he once pointed out in a public address.
The output of the Gary steel mills has broken all production and cost records since the world began, and the producing capacity of its mills have kept pace in progress with the growth and increase of the city that is now so well known throughout the world.
The Gary steel plant, which is the greatest in the world, was built under the supervision of its present general superintendent, William P. Glea- son, one of the foremost steel men in the country.
Col. Walter J. Riley, banker and manufac- turer of East Chicago, Indiana, was born in Chi- cago in 1875, the son of the late Lyman and Cathryn Riley. After attending school in Chi- cago young Riley finished his education at the De La Salle Institute. In early manhood he went to Colorado and engaged in business. Then he re- turned to the Chicago district and was employed by the New York Central Railroad. He next went to Wyoming and entered the mercantile business. Returning from the West he came to Indiana Har- bor, a new settlement in the north part of East Chicago, in 1904, and began his career as a real estate salesman. It was while at Indiana Harbor that Mr. Riley began the study of law at night, was graduated from the Kent College of Law and was admitted to the bar in Indiana. In addition to his real estate and law business he displayed a talent for banking, attracting the attention of the late C. W. Hotchkiss, a railway executive, who had
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much to do with the development of the city of East Chicago. Mr. Riley became associated with Mr. Hotchkiss in the banking business.
In 1909 Mr. Riley became vice-president of the newly founded First Calumet Trust and Savings Bank. In 1914 he established and became presi- dent of the First State Trust and Savings Bank of Indiana Harbor. In 1916 he also became presi- dent of the First Calumet Trust and Savings Bank, and in 1918 acquired control of and became presi- dent of two more banks in East Chicago, the First National and the First Trust and Savings Banks. In 1921 the First State Trust and Savings Bank was nationalized, becoming the United States National Bank.
In 1917 Mr. Riley was appointed by Governor Goodrich to be a colonel in the Indiana National Guard and a member of the governor's staff.
Colonel Riley is also president of the O. F. Jor- dan Company, a manufacturing concern, and is identified with a number of other real estate and industrial enterprises. He is a director of the Chicago Trust Company and of the Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville Railroad Company (Monon Route). In a civic way Colonel Riley has served as judge of the City Court of East Chicago, president of the Board of Public Works, and is chairman of the Interstate Harbor Commis- sion, which was named by the States of Illinois and Indiana and by the United States to investigate the port facilities in the Chicago and Northern Indiana district.
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Thomas F. Knotts. Prior to the year 1906 the territory now occupied by the city of Gary was the uninhabited space of sand barrens and patches of scrubby oaks. Considered valueless for any pur- pose until the far-seeing Elbert H. Gary got a glimpse of the great lake that borders it and selected it as the location for what was to be the seat of industry of the great steel corporation, when he engaged Armanas F. Knotts to pur- chase it.
Thomas F. Knotts, to acquire a status as a resi- dent of that territory, resigned his position as a police commissioner at Hammond to become one of the trustees of the town to be located there as the governing municipality until it could grow to a population to become a city, which it did within three years, when it had a population of nearly ten thousand, and he became its first mayor and con- tinued in that office until 1915.
He was born in Highland County, Ohio, and came with his parents to Indiana in 1866. His parents resided on a farm near Medaryville in Pulaski County, where he grew up and attended the public schools and then taught school in Indiana for eight terms and then went to North Dakota territory and for four years was a superintendent of Indian schools and high schools. Returning to Indiana in 1879 he entered Valparaiso University, completing his courses in commercial teaching and scientific education in 1884.
In 1891 he became identified with Lake County by taking up his residence in Hammond, where he
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remained until the town, now the city, of Gary was formed.
He was not only identified with the growth and enterprises of that city and one of the greatest contributors to its prosperity, but also became con- spicuous as a Democratic leader in Northern Indiana, differing politically with his brother Armanas. His death occurred in 1921.
Gen. William G. Haan of the United States Army, now retired, was a Lake County boy, a graduate from the Crown Point High School and from the National Miliary Academy at West Point, became prominent in the World War as the com- mander of the 33d Division of National Guard troops and during the final days of the war was one of the six corps commanders of the American Ex- peditionary Forces. More of his record appears in the pages devoted to the World War.
Roswell O. Johnson was elected mayor of Gary on a non-partisan ticket in 1913 and has since been twice elected to that office. In 1916 he made a vigorous campaign and creditable race for the Re- publican nomination for governor of Indiana. Has been prominent and influential in Republican polities of the State since 1896. He is a native of Adams County, Indiana, where he was educated in the public schools and read law at Decatur. Graduated from the Indianapolis Law School and located in Gary in 1910.
Walter Blakesley Conkey was the founder of the largest printing and book binding establish- ment in America and located it at Hammond.
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W. B. CONKEY President The W. B. Conkey Company
Printers
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SECTION OF PARK SURROUNDING PLANT
Indiana, in 1898. He was the son of Willard and Emma Tobey Conkey. His great grandfather, Silas Conkey, was a fifer in Colonel Woodbridge's Massachusetts Regiment in the Revolutionary War. !
He attended school in Philadelphia after leaving his birthplace at Sterling, Canada, and in 1872 went to Chicago where he learned the printers' trade. At the age of nineteen years he established his own publishing business in West Monroe street, Chicago, and later moved to South Dearborn street where he occupied two eight-story buildings and had more than 1500 employes. The organiza- tion and operations of printers' unions resulted in a long contest with him because of his advocacy of the "open shop" and for many years he carried on the fight with labor unions and advertised exten- sively the faet that his printing place was non-union, and at the same time, to disarm his antagonists and free himself from their domination, determined to make his working plants at Hammond ideal in respect to living and working conditions, and to that end acquired a tract of forty acres of land at the southeastern boundary of that city, utilizing twelve aeres of it for the location of his buildings and making a beautiful park and playgrounds for his employes on the remaining part of the tract.
His buildings were constructed of brick, steel and glass with concrete floors, on a plan that made them perfeet in details in respect to light, sanita- tion and pure air, and so as to afford an abundance of room and the best appliances for the use of
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employes in carrying on their work. They cover an area of 600,000 square feet filled with the latest and best machinery of every kind known in the art of printing and book binding. Every oppor- tunity to purchase homes at low prices near the working place has been given employes and a number of them own their own homes and their wants and interests are provided for by a Welfare Department that the W. B. Conkey Company established and maintains. Nearly every foreman as well as executives of the company have learned their trade with it and are stockholders in it.
But all of these acts did not satisfy the demands of labor unions, and in 1908 the plants were unionized. A street car line runs from these plants directly to the city of Chicago, passing through the marvelous industrial districts of East Chicago, Indiana Harbor and Whiting on the right, and Pullman, West Pullman and Kensington on the left, through South Chicago and the great resi- dential portion of the south side of Chicago to the heart of the city. The fourteen trunk line railroads passing through Hammond give it the greatest possible rail shipping facilities and besides the nearby harbors are conveniently reached for water transportation.
The location of the Conkey plants was soon fol- lowed by the hundreds of others now turning out manufactured products in that city, and the name of Walter Blakesley Conkey is highly honored as the one that stimulated its quick and substantial growth. A short time before his death, which
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SHADY REST FOR EMPLOYEES DURING NOON HOUR
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LAKE. SUPPLYING WATER FOR AUTOMATIC SPRISKLER SYSTEM
occurred in February, 1923, he published a book of his own authorship, entitled: "What a Business Man Should Know About Printing and Book Making." This book, based on his long years of experience abounds in instructive suggestions upon every phase of the subjects with which it deals and its author declared that: "If there is an inanimate object that possesses a living soul, it is a book; and my thought was that the birth of this book into life should be under the most perfect and beautiful surroundings and this motive was the basis of our action in building our plant."
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CHAPTER IX
To William Henry Harrison, a lineal descendant .of Benjamin Harrison, a member of the Con- tinental Congress, is the sovereign State of Indiana indebted for the transfer of three million acres of its fertile soil to American ownership under a treaty that he negotiated with Indian tribes in 1811.
To quiet the title to it he fought and won the victory in battle over the Indian chief Tecumseh and his warriors on the banks of the Tippecanoe River in 1812, an event that made him a hero of the war and President of the United States in 1840.
Benjamin Harrison, his grandson, became Presi- dent forty-eight years later. Indiana cast a majority of its popular votes for William Henry Harrison over Martin Van Buren in 1836 and again in 1840 and for his grandson over Cleveland in 1888. It was not the faet of the relationship to distinguished ancestors that enabled General Ben- jamin Harrison to contribute the great part he did in historic annals.
He made his own way in the world without the aid of ancestral inheritance except in so far as he was supplied with its blood in his veins.
Soon after his graduation from Miami Uni- versity in Ohio, the state of his birth, he engaged
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in the law practice at Indianapolis and was long regarded as one of the ablest and most successful lawyers of the State. He became official reporter of the Supreme Court by election of the people in 1860. That office was one to which young law- yers aspired with a view of furthering their legal education, and was sought and well filled by Gen- eral Harrison, as it has been by other able lawyers, such as Albert G. Porter, Gordon Tanner, Michael C. Kerr, James B. Black, Francis M. Dice, John W. Kern, John Q. Griffiths, Augustus N. Martin, and many others. When the war for the Union was declared General Harrison gave up that office to become a soldier. He was among the first to enlist and asked others to follow where danger was and never flinched in facing it.
There was perhaps no man in either public or private life in Indiana who had more loyal friends than did he. Their fondness for him grew out of their personal contact with him. The soldiers of his 70th Indiana Regiment that he commanded as colonel until his promotion as brigadier-general almost worshipped him, while others who did not enjoy that intimate acquaintance with him some- times misconstrued the elements of modesty and dignity in his character and thought him austere and aristocratic. Dignity was once defined as a peculiar carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind, but that definition had no application to General Harrison. He was neither a poser nor given to effusiveness in his greetings of others, but his seeming reservedness of manner was a cause
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for his failure to attract the popular support that he deserved when he sought the Republican nomina- tion for governor in 1876. He was defeated in the convention by Godlove S. Orth, who possessed directly opposite traits of character, as he had been by Gen. Thomas M. Browne in 1872. In the cam- paign that followed in 1876 Orth withdrew from the race, leaving his place to be filled by the Repub- lican State Central Committee and Harrison was the selection to meet defeat at the polls by "Blue Jeans" Williams, the Democratic nominee. His defeat did not weaken him in the estimation of his friends, who demanded that he be made United States Senator and he was elected by the legislature in 1881. His creditable service as a senator soon drew to him a following in that body that declared for him for President, and he was nominated by the Republican National Convention in 1888 and elected. His term as senator expired in 1887 and he was a candidate for re-election. The legislature of that session was composed of 74 Republicans and 76 Democrats, and on joint ballot he received the 74 Republican votes while David Turpie received the 76 Democratic votes and was elected and again elected by the legislature of 1893.
The campaign of 1888 was conducted with vigor and determination by both parties, but had none of the scandalous features of that of 1884.
The death of Hendricks in 1885 had deprived the Democrats of his persuasive influence. McDonald and Gray were not in agreement as to which of them should succeed him in leadership. McDonald
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was a personal friend of Harrison and did not be- come active in the campaign against him and Gray had hoped to become senator and failing in that because of Turpie's election then hoped to be nom- inated for vice-president when the honor went to Judge Thurman, and he did not become an en- thusiast in opposing Harrison. Cleveland was not greatly admired by the friends of Hendricks, who complained because he had been ignored in the administration. Cleveland did not show his memory the respect of attendance at his funeral. He had made many enemies of former Union soldiers by going fishing on Decoration Day, by vetoing pen- sion legislation and by directing his Secretary of War to return Confederate flags that had been captured as trophies of war to the Confederate States or to the Confederate regiments from which they had been taken, and besides no specific act had been accomplished during his administration that could be pointed to with pride.
These facts all inured to the advantage of Gen- eral Harrison, who also got the benefit of State pride in having one of its own citizens as a con- testant for the presidency. His failure to succeed himself as President can be accounted for in some measure because of the consequences resulting from the usage in party polities that in effect takes from the President the right of making his own selection for Secretary of State and requires him to accept as his chief advisor a rival for the presidency, as was the case when Seward was made Lincoln's secretary, when Blaine was made secretary in the
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cabinets of both Garfield and Harrison and when Bryan was made Secretary of State in the cabinet of President Wilson.
As the time approached for the Republican National Convention to be held in 1892, Harrison's choice for the nomination was regarded as a cer- tainty by the people generally, but Blaine coveted the honor and when the convention was assembling at Minneapolis resigned from the cabinet in a spite- ful mood and many of his sulking friends became supporters of Cleveland for the second term or refused to vote.
So far as Harrison's executive acts formed the records of his administration, they were without fault and met with public approval, but the con- gress that had been elected with him brought about great complaints because of the enactment of the tariff law that William McKinley was the author of. It imposed very high tariff rates and so in- creased the cost of living that it was repudiated by the people at the Congressional election of 1890, when the political majority was reversed and given to the Democrats, and McKinley was also defeated. It is a noticeable fact that when the Republican party gets in power and increases tariff rates it is usually defeated at the next election, and when the Democrats get in and reduces them it meets the same fate.
During the Harrison administration a number of foreign troubles arose that required much diplo- matic skill in settling them. Among those was one with the South American Government of Chile,
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