A Hoosier autobiography

Front matter

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A HOOSIER AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Chapter II. Life in Indiana 30

The Richmond Home The Charm of Indiana The Art Association Local Colour A Fox Hunt The Family Dramatic Interests At the Indiana Bar A Scrimmage Railroad Practice Personal Associations Retirement from Practice Reflections

Chapter III. Indiana Associations, Julian, Riley, etc. . . 55 The Tuesday Club George W. Julian Mugwumps Indianapolis Clubs Western Association of Writers James Whitcomb Riley Indiana Society of Chicago Jekyl Island Club Earlham College Swarthmore College

Chapter IV. The State Senate ...,...„ 70 The Campaign The Session of 1883 The Session of 1885 Investigation of the State Treasury- Toleration toward the Negro

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chapter V. Public Questions 84

Woman's Suffrage

Civil Service Reform

The Russian Question

The National Municipal League

Chapter VI. Political Activities— Imperialism .... 100 Early Political Affiliations The Hayes and Garfield Campaigns The Three Cleveland Campaigns Anti-Imperialism The Campaign of igoo

Chapter VII. Life in Washington 109

Other Personal Incidents

Other Washington Associations

The Muskogee Investigation

Chapter VIII. Roosevelt and Taft Campaigns . . . .143 The Roosevelt Campaign, 1904 The Taft Campaign, 1908 ,

Chapter IX. The Progressive Movement 151

The Taft Administration

The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Bill

Ballinger — Roosevelt's Return

The Republican Nomination in 1912

The Progressive Convention and Campaign

The First Wilson Administration

The Campaign of 1916

Chapter X. The Trusts 170

The Chicago Conferences Trusts in the Campaign of 1908 Practical Remedies

Chapter XI. The League to Enforce Peace i79

Preliminary Organisations The League to Enforce Peace The League of Nations

Chapter XII. The World War 190

Preparedness

The Conscription Board

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chapter XIII. Journalism and Literature . . .. ., . 204 Journalism Literary Interests "Life of Governor Morton"

"Maya"

"Protean Papers"

"History of the Langobards"

"Dorothy Day"

"Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction"

"Fighting the Spoilsmen"

Poetry

Chapter XIV. Personalia 213

Whims and Fancies

Some Business Experiences

The Society of Friends

Retrospect

Philosophy of Life

Appendix I. Indiana's Output. Speech before the Indiana Society of Chicago, January 28, 1908 227

Appendix II. Address at the Opening Session of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, D. C, February 18, 1890 233

A Hoosier Autobiography

CHAPTER I

I GLEAN with care the stalks that memory leaves Upon the time-mown fields of earlier years ;

I gather all and bind them into sheaves,

Then winnow them, that from the fruitful ears

Some seed may fall that in its turn will bring

Fresh hope of harvest for a coming spring.

— Autobiography.

INTRODUCTORY

Many years ago I dreamed that my friend, Captain Y., believed he was going to die upon a certain day, and accordingly fixed the time and made all the arrangements for his funeral, which was to be held in the Quaker meeting house at Richmond, Indiana. When the day arrived, his friends assembled; the house was full, and among others came my father, a minister of the Society of Friends, to bear his testimony to the virtues of the deceased. But the Captain's presentiments had not come true, he was still living, and he now determined to preside in person over his own obsequies. He sat "at the head of the meeting" and as my father, accompanied by another Friend, walked up the aisle, he called out that Abijah Jones was welcome but that he did not choose to have Thomas Foulke speak at his funeral. While it seemed to me that a man had the right to manage his own funeral if he were there to see to it himself, I was annoyed at the affront to my father and we walked out of the meeting-house together.

In writing these memoirs I cannot help thinking of that old

z dream. Biography, to be complete, should be a post-mortem account of a man's life and therefore written by another. Is not the man who writes his own biography like one who would take charge of his own obsequies and thus try to forestall an unpalatable obituary?

Yet the man himself knows better than another what he has done and why, and if he be honest, he should be able to give a more faithful account of his career. The main questions are, whether the story is worth the telling and how well it can be told. I cannot say that there is anything very important in the pages which follow. I have seen a good deal of the world from various sides and have taken part in a good many public movements, but so have thousands of others ; and my best hope to justify the narrative is found in the maxim that the life of the humblest man, if reasonably well told, may be of interest to the greatest.

And a certain value may also lie in the point of view. It may be that a man, originally a New Yorker, then a Hoosier by adoption, who has witnessed the significant development of the great Middle West during half a century and who has himself been connected, in their early stages, with many movements then considered radical but since adopted by the country at large, such as Woman's Suffrage, Civil Service and Municipal Reform, and the development of closer international relations — it can well be that this man may, in the story of his life, have some contribution to offer to the history of his own time.

BOYHOOD

Many New Yorkers have been born and reared in other parts of the country — in New England, in the South, in the Mississippi Valley, some of them in Indiana — why then should not a man who has spent the bulk of his life in Indiana call himself a Hoosier, though he be a native of the city of New York?

I was born in that city on November 20, 1848, at No. 76 Rivington Street. It was a neighbourhood which was then quiet and respectable, though not at all fashionable, but which has since become part of the tenement house district of the metropolis.

BOYHOOD 3

My father, Thomas Foulke, was at the time principal of a ward school, then the largest in the city, with an attendance of some two thousand pupils. He was, however, a man of some little property and not altogether dependent on the meagre salary of his calling. He belonged to a Pennsylvania family which had settled in Gwynedd Township, Montgomery County, about fourteen miles from Philadelphia, over two hundred years ago. Edward and Eleanor Foulke, the original founders of the family in America, were among the colonists brought over by William Penn. Edward belonged to an old Welsh family, which traced its descent back to the time of Henry IT, and some of whose members were well known to English history.

He was a farmer and became a Quaker about the time of his emigration. His descendants for several generations nearly all belonged to the Society of Friends, and my father and grandfather were both ministers of that Society.

I was an only child. My mother, Hannah S. Foulke, was the daughter of Abraham Shoemaker, a New York merchant. He also was a Friend, a man of excellent business ability but very much of a recluse, seeing few people and visiting not at all. His wife, Margaret Shoemaker, was much more active and took an interest in many public questions, particularly in the anti-slavery movement. They both lived to be over ninety years of age.

My parents resided with them and with a brother and sister of my mother. The house was for a time one of the stations on the "underground railroad," for we used to help fugitive negroes on their way to Canada and we were once involved in litigation on account of assistance thus given.

At a later time my father was the principal of Friends' Seminary, an academy established by the Society in a building adjoining the meeting-house in Rutherford Place in New York. I attended school there for a number of years and was graduated in 1864.*

1 The incidents of my early life, my school days and the Quaker customs and traditions which they illustrate, are more fully contained in the first book of "Dorothy Day" (Cosmopolitan Press, 191 1, pp. i to 116), the statements of which are based on facts, though the actual names are not given.

QUAKER INFLUENCES

Born and reared as I was in a family of old-fashioned Hicksite Quakers, the views and traditions of their simple and earnest religion became part of my life, and although I have since discarded most of these, some still remain with me.

The Society of Friends has no written creed; its paramount doctrine is the belief in the "inner light," the conviction that God reveals himself directly to all who seek His guidance, not only upon questions of dogma and of moral and religious duty, but often as a special providence guiding and protecting the lives of His followers. The supreme injunction of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, was "Mind the Light." It was generally considered that the ministers of the Society in their sermons uttered not simply their own thoughts but a message which had been given to them by a higher power.

Besides this fundamental idea, there were other things of a more practical nature to which the Society was devoted, and enquiries respecting these things were made periodically in their various meetings by means of certain formal "Queries," asking, for instance, whether Friends were careful to keep their obligations and not extend their business beyond their ability to manage it; whether they observed temperance and sobriety in their lives, etc. The principles of peace and non-resistance and a deep regard for human liberty, involving opposition to negro slavery, were also among the unwritten tenets of the Society.

We used to entertain at our house many of the Friends who took part in the various yearly and quarterly meetings which were held in New York. So numerous were our guests that, in addition to those we could accommodate in our various bedrooms, the attic of the house was devoted to them, cots and improvised beds being placed there, and the women's quarters being carefully screened off by curtains.

The broad brims, plain bonnets, and drab suits were there in abundance. My father himself wore the peculiar garb of the Quakers with high collar and curving front lines of a coat that was always made of black broadcloth; his silk hat, with a brim a little wider than the prevailing fashion of the day, was glossy

QUAKER INFLUENCES $

and well brushed, and his black stock looked always fresh and new. I have sometimes wondered whether there was not almost as much pride of appearance shown in this garb as in the costumes of the "world's people."

The eminent ministers of the Society, Lucretia Mott, John Hunt, David Barnes, Richard Cromwell, and others, were often with us, and my youth was spent in an atmosphere of mysticism and deep religious faith. There were wonderful stories of divine revelations given to these servants of the Lord, and we were impressed with the supreme importance of heeding the "inner light" which, it was believed, shone upon the faithful in their daily lives.

Among the ministers who were with us at Yearly Meetings and on other occasions was my grandfather, Joseph Foulke, a hale and genial old man with a round, moon-like face, his drab waistcoat covering an ample "bay-window." He was always a welcome guest at the houses of Friends, who entertained him when he travelled from place to place, as he often did, in the work of the ministry. The Quaker preachers received nothing for their services, they even paid their own expenses, and my grandfather, when he deeded his farm to his eldest son, reserved a small annuity which enabled him to do this gratuitous service and to deliver such messages as he believed had been entrusted to him by his Divine Master.

He had a great assortment of charming anecdotes, generally about Friends and their odd ways and sayings, which always drew around him a circle of interested listeners.

His childlike faith stayed with him up to his final hour, and amid the sufferings of his last illness he was filled with the calm assurance that he had fought the good fight, that he had kept the faith, and that there was laid up for him the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, would give to those who served Him.

But in spite of these early surroundings I became distrustful, even in boyhood, of the supernatural agencies of which I heard so much. Sometimes, led by some shining example which had been set before me, I would open the Bible at random with the hope that the "inner light" would shine for my instruction from some particular passage, but I commonly came upon a verse telling me that Shaharaim begat children in the country of Moab, or describing the preparation of the shew bread; or if, relying upon the intimations of the "inner light," I took the second omnibus in place of the first one, I never could find that any accident happened to either of them, until at last I came to believe that my own common sense was a safer guide for daily conduct than any other kind of illumination.

Although these notions of spiritual interposition gradually grew faint and finally disappeared, yet the habit of following personal convictions of duty became deeply imbedded in my nature. Such convictions, however, were not always well balanced; they were much stronger in regard to some things than to others just as important. Where they were strong, I instinctively and inevitably followed them; when this was not the case I often fell short in my conduct.

About the time of the close of the Civil War, we moved from the house in Rivington Street to one in Thirty-eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, then very far "up-town."

OUR SUMMER HOME

Our summers were usually spent at Long Branch, where my aunt, Ann S. Dudley, had a cottage. The rest of the family lived with her during the hot months for nearly a score of years. Long Branch was quite a primitive place in those days. There were no railroads, and only a single steamboat running from New York. It left at a different hour each day so as to sail up the shallow waters of the Shrewsbury inlet at high tide. It often ran aground and we sometimes remained fast for hours; on one occasion, all night long.

The place was then a quiet, rural neighbourhood with a few summer hotels stretched along the low bluff by the shore. Our cottage was about a mile back from the sea. It stood upon the side of a small hill that rose like an ocean swell from out the plain. The hill was crowned by our summer-house, from which there was a remarkably fine view not only of the sea but of the distant Highlands of Navesink. Nearer were the hills of Rumson

OUR SUMMER HOME 7

Neck and Red Bank, with woods, fields and farmhouses in the foreground. Among these the Shrewsbury inlet wound its glistening, snake-like course, and one branch of it came almost up to the foot of our hill, where it disappeared among the tall green rushes. I had a little attic room where I studied and wrote, though my life was mostly out of doors, and I recall with delight the bathing, the sailing, the fishing, the picnic in the woods, the clambake by the river, the dance at night in the hotel, the tete-a-tete upon the beach. I loved especially the cool evenings of the early autumn, and always returned to the city with regret. There is one figure that stands out very clearly in my memory of those days at Long Branch. It is that of the venerable Bishop Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who was, I think, next to Henry Ward Beecher, the most eloquent pulpit orator in America. He lived for two or three summers in a little cottage just at the end of our lane on the opposite side of the highroad. Here I visited him occasionally and was much impressed with his benignant personality. For a few years President Grant had a summer cottage on the beach; he was expected one Sunday at the village church, but did not come. Possibly in anticipation of his presence, Bishop Simpson had prepared a sermon which seemed to me, as I listened to it, the most impressive I had ever heard. It was apparently extemporaneous, but had evidently been carefully planned beforehand. The text was, "Abel, being dead, yet speaketh." The bishop passed in brief but eloquent review the great events in the history of the world since Abel's day — the changes wrought by time, war, civilisation, and religion in all the races of men. "And yet," he said, "the voice which spoke in those primaeval days is speaking still and will continue to speak until the latest generation." This was the great preacher's illustration of the power of human influence. He compared it to a pebble dropped in the still waters of a pool, whose widening circles spread on every side until they kissed the shores. He reminded us of the principle of physics that no force, wherever exerted, is entirely lost, and he drew from this theme the inevitable moral that each man in every act of his life should so conduct himself that his influence would work for the glory of God and the welfare of mankind.

He spoke also of the "cloud of witnesses" by whom our acts were seen, picturing in fancy the clouds that developed themselves into cherub faces, as in Raphael's paintings of the Madonna. His sermon was a poem, and he held us for an hour and a half captive to the spell of his oratory.

PREPARING FOR COLLEGE

During the winter and spring of 1865 I had to prepare for college, for it was decided to send me to Columbia in the fall. I knew little Latin and not a word of Greek, and a formidable task was before me to be completed between November and June. I secured as tutor a thorough drill-master in Greek verbs and in the rules of syntax, and after I had got into the swing of it I was able to take a hundred and fifty lines of Homer at a lesson, and by June I had gone over the whole ground required. I was greatly flustered, however, in the examination by the awe-inspiring presence of Prof. Charles Anthon, and made a flat failure in Plutarch and the Anabasis. But when he called for Homer, there was something in the rhythm of the hexameters that ended my confusion. I knew them so well that I couldn't get them wrong, and after I had answered all his questions correctly, he wrote "Passed" upon my card, with the remark, "You may thank old Homer for that. He saved you."

COLLEGE LIFE

Columbia College at that time was in temporary quarters. It had moved from its former home in College Place and was occupying an old building on Forty-ninth Street that had formerly been used for a Blind Asylum. The campus in front was large enough for a "rush" between Freshmen and Sophomores, and a little later we had the vacant square between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets and between Fifth and Sixth avenues for our games of baseball and football. Much of the adjacent neighbourhood was occupied by squatters with their shanties perched upon the rocks, a very convenient thing for us boys when we wanted to buy hens or geese to throw into the lecture rooms during examinations.

COLLEGE LIFE 9

The curriculum was not like the present one with its many optional courses. We all had to fit into the same bed. The classics, history, literature, logic, mathematics and some rather rudimentary work in chemistry, physics, etc., constituted, with "The Evidences of the Christian Religion," the principal branches of instruction. The president was Dr. F. A, P. Barnard, a kindly, broad-minded old man, who was at that time laying the foundation for a fuller recognition of the sciences. Dr. Anthon was professor of Greek; he was a noble-looking man — a prince of old-fashioned pedagogues — with his jokes, his tyrannies, his prejudices and partialities, and with them a bonhommie so strong and winning that we were devoted to him. To me at least he gave an inspiration and a love for the Greek language and literature which have lasted through life. Say what you will about the uselessness of Greek in general education, I would rather lose all the rest of what I learned in college than my rich experience of this one language. The memory of Dr. Anthon's classes is an enduring delight.

Another stimulating instructor was Professor Peck, the head of the department of mathematics. He was a short, stout man, with keen, incisive voice, awkward — sometimes tumbling headlong over the globes and other furniture of his lecture room; but he had wonderful powers of inspiration in a branch of learning which is not likely to arouse enthusiasm. He once became very eloquent in a demonstration upon mathematical grounds of the inevitable evolution of the solar system from a large body of gaseous matter distributed irregularly through space. He too was one of the men we loved, and this in spite of his irascibility. There was a tradition that he had once challenged to personal combat, then and there, a student whom he had detected in some dishonourable act. He used to denounce the pranks we tried to play upon him for their lack of originality. We might make him the object, he said, of any practical joke we liked, if it were really new and good, but to witness our stale and stupid performances year after year wearied his soul. We respected this view of the matter, and as no one could invent anything new, we left him in peace.

Another favourite of ours was Dr. Schmidt, professor of Greek and Roman antiquities. He was a thin, prim, precise old man, but with a delicious sense of humour. Once he fell upon us suddenly while we were chucking some geese up a flight of steps leading to Professor's Nairne's room. "O gentlemen," he said, "please desist! Your labours are unnecessary. There are quite enough of these here now!"

The college statutes seemed almost as long as the Mosaic law and stood before us as a constant temptation to break their commandments. Punishments were prescribed with mathematical precision. Three admonitions made one warning, and after three warnings the culprit had to go.

I was involved quite early in the toils of this rigid code. I had been in college only two weeks, when, in the geometry class, I found a fellow-student in some trouble over a proposition in Euclid and tried to help him out. We were caught. It was Friday afternoon about half-past twelve. "You will appear before the faculty at one," said Professor Van Amringe. We trembled and were silent. At the appointed hour we waited around the President's door as men might await trial before inquisitors. Suddenly we were ushered into the awful presence. The professors were seated in a semicircle with President Barnard in the middle and Van Amringe, the secretary, at a table by his side, while the two wings, with Anthon, Drisler, Joy, Nairne, Rood, and the rest, stretched around us as if to enclose us in their fatal clasp. We were made to stand up in the middle of this semicircle. Van Amringe had written out the charge, and it was read to us with great solemnity. What had we to say? There wasn't anything to say. A confession of guilt was our only refuge, and we were told to retire while the faculty deliberated upon our doom. We went out and stayed around the door for ten minutes. We were told to re-enter and were informed that an admonition would be inflicted upon us and that we must return in one week from that day to have it administered. So a week later back we came, but during this time we had become greatly hardened. The admonition did not seem nearly so terrible as in those first awful moments. The good Dr. Barnard delivered it to us quite mildly, considering, no

COLLEGE LIFE ii

doubt, our youth and inexperience, for he told us that the offence we had committed, although great, was not the most unpardonable in the category of college misdemeanours. What we afterwards saw convinced us that this was true. The admonition was long, eloquent and edifying, and if we were not the better for it, the fault was ours.

This was the only time I was ever "caught" at anything — not that there were no other offences far worse than this trifling dereliction. There were pranks quite too numerous to record here, but after this first experience I became wiser in covering up my tracks and was indeed soon considered by the faculty one of the model students, a reputation I little deserved. I have never had any remorse, however, for these escapades, and I look on them even to-day with more satisfaction in their success than shame at their depravity. Some of the other students were not so lucky. Conkling, for example, a fellow with a long, solemn face, was always caught and got warnings and all sorts of things for the most trifling offences.

In the various classrooms I sat next to Hamilton Fish, Jr. This was not on account of any particular affinity we had for each other, but because Fish and Foulke both began with F. On my other side was Montague Geer, afterwards rector of St. Paul's in New York. Fish was the son of the distinguished Secretary of State under Grant. During our first year he used to be called "Fresh Fish" by the upper classmen to distinguish him from his brother Nicholas, then a Junior. Fish was by nature a politician. He was the leading spirit among the Delta Psi's in our class. This fraternity had secured a large number of members and was proceeding to appropriate entirely too many of the offices, as the rest of us thought. So the members of the Delta Phi (to which I belonged), together with those of the Psi Upsilon, made up a slate for the next four years, distributing the class presidencies, orations. Goodwood cup, etc. We allotted a number of places, not unreasonably large, to those who didn't belong to any of the fraternities. Then we went to these neutrals and told them of the iniquity of the Delta Psi's in appropriating so many positions, and at first we got their support, but somehow this plan of ours leaked out and they became lukewarm. I was candidate for the class presidency in the Sophomore year, but was defeated by a majority of one, after a campaign as intense as if the fate of the world depended on it. I never had good luck in winning elections, but, notwithstanding this, at the end of the four years I had filled as many offices and delivered as many "orations" as any other man in the class. A New York newspaper remarked of one of these speeches that it represented the "usual fervid style of college eloquence." To judge from a sample which I now blush to read, the description was accurate. But the style was popular then. After my class-day "oration" my companions tried to lift me on their shoulders and carry me around in triumph. I have always been sorry I didn't let them do it. In my Junior year I presided at a memorable "impeachment" trial held from day to day, in which some of my colleagues in the Delta Phi were convicted, with others, of issuing an unauthorised Columbiad, or College annual, and the impartiality of my rulings was questioned (with perfect justice) by the men on the other side. After conviction, however, the culprits were all "pardoned" and restored to membership.

At the end of the Freshman year I found myself at the head of the class, a place I retained during the three remaining years, taking by virtue of this rank the right to deliver the Greek salutatory poem at Commencement. There were some inconveniences attached to this position; for instance, I had to keep the attendance roll at chapel, and I sat in a special chair in front of the chancel to be seen of all the faculty and with no chance furtively to prepare for the next recitation. The Greek salutatory too was a nuisance. There was no opportunity to distinguish one's self in a language that nobody could understand, and after working for weeks over reluctant hexameters it was not flattering to have Dr. Drisler rewrite nearly the whole thing.

I also won a number of prizes — a Greek prize of three hundred dollars, for instance, for the best examination on iEschylus' Agamemnon. A number of my classmates offered to bet me two to one that I would win it. I was not so certain, and I "hedged" by betting a hundred dollars that I would not, so that in any event I was sure of two hundred. This money I soon spent in

LAW SCHOOL 13

two weeks of delight with some boon companions in the White Mountains.

In the Philolexian (our principal literary society) George L. Rives (afterwards Assistant Secretary of State under Cleveland) and I once contended for first and second prizes when there were no other competitors. We agreed beforehand to divide the money whichever way the thing went and then paid no further attention to the matter.

During these four years of college life I became a good deal of a scamp, and had it not been for a foundation of better principles which sometimes asserted themselves in later life, I might well have fallen permanently into evil ways. It is not wise to trust a boy with a night key and with all the money he wants and then hope that he will turn out safe and sound.