Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: We have a whitewashed view of politicians from times past. Our early newspapers fortunately yield priceless perspectives and editorials when gleaning partisan opinions. Unquestioning party loyalty is the grail I seek, but I discover other things. In 1885, “the distinguished U.S. senator from Indiana, Hon. Daniel W. Voorhees, certified that in a case of rheumatism in the back, he obtained instantaneous relief from St. Jacobs Oil. He says it is a remarkable remedy.” Modern comparison: Mitch McConnell gushes over CBD oil. Serving from 1877-1897, the Terre Haute Democrat was an anti-war Copperhead during our Civil War. He favored a negotiated settlement to restore the Union rather than war.

Stilesville correspondent Bourgeois found fault with Voorhees late in 1885. “In 1880 the Hon. Daniel W. Voorhees said the country is suffering from a moral malaria that was poisoning to death the life of the Nation.”

Bourgeois asserted that if Voorhees “should now open his mouth to teach and illuminate the minds of the people, he would say that they are afflicted with a concentrated attack of financial malaria.”

Farmers’ hogs were at risk of pulling prices of only $2.50-$3 per hundredweight. Bourgeois said Voorhees and former Indiana governor (and now vice president) Thomas Hendricks had promised an $8 per capita distribution if Grover Cleveland won the presidency.

In November 1884, Pittsboro correspondent I Bet U C reported incoming Lieutenant Governor Mahlon Manson was “staggering drunk” on the train ride home from Indianapolis to Crawfordsville. “If this constitutes Democracy, we want none of it in ours – the whiskey especially.” I Bet also believed the nation was really hard up “when it has to be represented by such a libertine as our next president (and) such a rebel sympathizer and copper-head as our next Vice President.”

Cleveland, the referenced president, was unmarried at the time of his inauguration, marrying the following year a 21-year-old who was 28 years younger than him.

Party affiliation colored I Bet’s accusation. The county voted for Republican candidate James G. Blaine of Maine by a large margin over Cleveland, 3,003-2,069. Prohibition candidate John P. St. John took 88 votes while the Greenback’s man, Benjamin F. Butler, received 162.

County man Spencer Hiatt unabashedly supported Blaine while condemning Cleveland. “How any man that was proud of the name ‘Republican’ can ignore peerless statesman James G. Blaine, and support the ex-sheriff of Erie County, New York, and the habitue of (deliberate blank space), who never was accused of any suspicion of statesmanship, passes all knowledge.”

Hiatt believed Blaine was the target of “a conspiracy of slander,” while Cleveland was

“a moral leper with a character as black as hades.” I discovered that Sheriff Cleveland personally hanged two prisoners. An on-line encyclopedia entry about that presidential campaign unearthed little to back up Spencer’s slung mud.

Blaine apparently had a reputation scorched by “financial impropriety” (possibly using his office for financial gain), while Cleveland faced accusations of rape and of illegitimately fathering a child 10 years earlier. He acknowledged an affair with a widow and agreed to support the offspring while not sure it was his.

During a Clayton Democratic jollification in November 1884, S.M. Ralston (likely Samuel Moffett Ralston, our eventual 28th governor), “in a flight of oratory and burst of eloquence,” denounced Blaine supporters. “The ministers who hold Mr. Blaine up before the mothers and young men of their churches as a pure man ought to be kicked out of house and home, and go to the graveyard, along the avenue of starvation.

“. . . their influence is as poisonous to society as the bite of the spreading adder . . . the ministers are themselves the most infamous rebels to the welfare of the United States that will disgrace the pits of hell.”

The Republican in turn thoroughly denounced Ralston. He “ought to go to the moral graveyard, along the avenue of moral depravity, drawn in the vehicle of imbecility, by ignorance and licentiousness, and have for his winding sheet the filthiest and most vulgar edition of the Police Gazette . . .”

Ah, rhetoric in those earlier times. Some of our U.S. senators and representatives today can only be characterized by an abundance of sententious blather, pettish biliousness, conspiracy mongering and outright lying.

Paul Miner Lizton