Penrod and Politics: Booth Tarkington in the Indiana Legislature

Marion County voters faced a dizzying array of choices in the March 1902 Republican primary. Nineteen GOP candidates were vying for the seven spots available to the county in the Indiana House of Representatives. When the dust settled the leading vote getter—polling 10,733 tallies—was a rookie in the fiercely competitive world of Hoosier politics.

Newton Booth Tarkington, however, was no stranger to central Indiana voters, who had been entertained by such Tarkington works as The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), and The Two Vanrevels (1902). The stunning success enjoyed at the polls by this political neophyte was explained rather succinctly by one Washington Township farmer: “We voted for him [Tarkington] as a sort of experiment. The paper said he’s a play writer and some kind of an actor, and we just want to see what sort of a gosh derned fool he’ll make of himself in the Legislature.”

Tarkington’s lackluster campaign provided plenty of opportunities for the farmer’s amusement. “I would as soon be sent to jail as to have to make a speech,” said Tarkington, who buttressed his point by delivering only a few talks (lasting mere minutes in length) during his election effort. Safely ensconced in the Indiana General Assembly following his approximately 4,000-vote triumph over his Democratic opponent, Tarkington won the respect of his fellow legislators. The thirty-three-year-old writer and freshman lawmaker took on his party’s chief elected state official—Governor Winfield T. Durbin—in a bitter battle involving the governor’s attempt to oust the Jeffersonville Reformatory board. Tarkington led the opposition to the so-called Ripper Bill and succeeded in defeating Durbin’s move to replace the old board with his hand-picked cronies. Tarkington’s bold stand won plaudits from across the political spectrum. The Indianapolis News proclaimed: “From the first he [Tarkington] saw the question in its true light, and he has had the courage and independence to stand up for what he believed to be right.”

The writer’s brief (he only served one term in the legislature) switch from literature to politics fit in well with his family’s background. Born in Indianapolis on  July 29, 1869, Tarkington had a father, John Stevenson Tarkington, who served for many years as a judge and enjoyed a one-term stint in the Indiana General Assembly as a representative. Also, the young Tarkington’s namesake, Newton Booth, had made his fortune while living in California where he became governor and served as the state’s U.S. senator.

Although he possessed a strong political lineage, Tarkington, who had attended both Purdue and Princeton Universities, tried to make his way in the world through drawing and writing. Following the sale of a sketch with text to Life in 1895, for which he received twenty dollars, Tarkington collected thirty-one consecutive rejection slips from such magazines as Century, Harper’s, McClure’s, and Scribner’s. “The splendid magazines of the 90’s . . . rejected all of these manuscripts so rapidly that sometimes I thought my poor things must have been stopped and returned from Philadelphia; they didn’t seem to have had time to get all the way to New York and back,” Tarkington recalled.

Tarkington’s early struggles to be a writer proved to sometimes be an embarrassment to him. One day a successful Indianapolis citizen came up to Tarkington and remarked to him: “Booth, I asked your father what you’re doing. He says you’re still trying to be one of these damn literary fellers.” Success came to Tarkington through a familiar source—his sister, Hauté. While visiting New York in 1898 Haute Tarkington showed publisher S. S. McClure her brother’s Monsieur Beaucaire manuscript. Although McClure showed no interest in that work, he did express some enthusiasm for a story about Indiana that Hauté mentioned; a work that became The Gentleman from Indiana. Two weeks after he had sent the story to McClure, Tarkington received a letter in the morning mail from American novelist Hamlin Garland, a writer whose work Tarkington greatly admired. The letter opened with the words the Hoosier had waited years to read: “Mr. McClure has given me your manuscript, The Gentleman From Indiana, to read. You are a novelist.”

With his literary career firmly established, Tarkington next turned his attention to the political arena. From an early age, Tarkington, like many other Hoosier children, had been schooled by relatives to dream about future success as a United States senator or even president. “Politics was the field for greatness,” he mused. Reminiscing about his decision to embark on a political career for Saturday Evening Post readers in 1933, Tarkington remembered expressing his interest in becoming a legislator to his friend Sam Jordan, a GOP insider. The next thing Tarkington knew, his name had been entered in the March 1902 Republican primary and he discovered “with no inconsiderable mystification that . . . my name led all the rest.”

Actually, Tarkington’s decision to enter the political world had received more serious attention from the author than he later revealed. According to his biographer, James Woodress, Tarkington, as the son of a Civil War veteran, felt strongly that good citizens had a duty to run for public office. Along with helping to serve the public, Tarkington’s move into politics aided his literary career, providing him with “laboratory conditions for studying human nature in its less attractive moments. It revealed to him the vast fictional possibilities of contemporary life and inspired his first stories that fall entirely within the precincts of realism,” noted Woodress.

In spite of his belief in a solid citizens’ duty to run for office, Tarkington harbored few convictions that campaigning for the job should be particularly arduous. He instead turned his attention to matters of the heart; he married Laura Louisa Fletcher, the daughter of one of Indianapolis’s leading bankers, in June 1902. In fact, just two weeks before the November 4, 1902, election, he and his new bride were happily vacationing at Lake Maxinkuckee, Indiana. Returning to Indianapolis, Tarkington discovered that Republican party leaders were far from pleased about his unusual campaign strategy. They were able to persuade him to behave like a normal candidate and give a few speeches before the balloting commenced. “You’ll be elected all right, anyway [without the speeches]—but I was under the impression you wanted to know something about politics,” Jordan informed the rookie candidate.

On the evening of October 24 Tarkington made his inaugural appearance as a political candidate at a firehouse on Twenty-Fourth Street and Ashland Avenue in Indianapolis’s Second Ward. Appearing with fellow Republican legislative candidates Ralph Bamberger and Oran Muir, Tarkington spoke for less than two minutes in a speech that did not win high marks for eloquence. “He would stammer out a sentence, laugh at the effort and then fall headlong into another sentence. He held his fedora in his hand, and it served as a comforter in a moment of peril,” the Indianapolis News reported. Tarkington made no bold promises in his speech but merely emphasized the necessity for people to exercise their franchise come election day—a theme he repeated at his second campaign appearance shortly afterwards at a firehouse on Sixteenth Street and Ashland Avenue.

Tarkington’s easy manner captured the crowd at the Sixteenth Street station, who also enjoyed his definition of a pessimist. “It has been said,” he told the voters, “that a pessimist is a man who faces two evils and chooses both. If in the coming election a voter objects to both candidates and refused to go to the polls, he is worse than a pessimist. Again I urge that we get out the vote.” Tarkington’s speech was met with both applause from the crowd and the ringing of fire bells, which probably created more excitement than anything that had gone on previously.

Asked for his comment about his maiden appearances as a candidate, Tarkington told an Indianapolis Sentinel reporter that his experience reminded him of the amateur actor who played Hamlet and was asked by his friends if he had been called before the curtain. “The actor replied: ‘They dared me to come before the curtain.’ That is the way I felt. I felt that I was dared to come before the curtain, and I came,” said Tarkington.

After having survived his baptism under fire, Tarkington continued to meet and greet voters throughout the district, including a group of farmers at a country auction. Accompanied by veteran politico Lew Shank, the city-raised Tarkington almost made a fatal error as he prepared himself for the occasion. Hoping to show his respect for the voters, the well-bred writer had planned on wearing a silk top hat to the gathering. GOP leaders convinced Tarkington that wearing such attire at a country auction might bring ruin upon the entire Republican ticket come election day. Even without the hat, Tarkington, and the tiny cigars he handed out to his potential constituents, made quite an impression. One farmer commented to his friends: “Durned little cigar! But I’m glad to see it. It shows that he’s the man we wanter put in the Legislature. Cos why? ’Cause he’s ekenomical.”

Tarkington’s unique campaign efforts continued all the way up to election day, usually a busy time for most politicians. The “literary politician,” as the Indianapolis News referred to him, seemed supremely confident about his chances. As voters, including his father, trooped eagerly to the polls election morning to cast their ballots, Tarkington, up late the night before, decided to catch up on his sleep instead of making last-minute pleas for votes (or working at the Second Ward’s polls as he was assigned to do by GOP officials). In a story headlined “Candidate Tarkington Slept Peacefully While the Ballots Fell,” the News reported that by 1:45 p.m. election day, Tarkington had “finished his breakfast and his toilet, strolled over to the polls and cast his ballot.” The author may have known something the newspaper did not; he swept easily into office over his Democratic rival.

Having proved himself to be always good for a laugh during the campaign, Tarkington at first appeared to follow the same route in the Indiana legislature. Early in the session, fellow Republican Charles Warren Fairbanks asked Tarkington to place his name in nomination for the U.S. Senate. Overwhelmed by such an honor falling upon a freshman legislator, a puzzled Tarkington asked his friend Jordan why Fairbanks had selected him. “He’s so sure of being elected,” Jordan told his protégé, “he wants to show everybody that nothing on earth can stop him.” After finishing his nominating speech, Tarkington caught a glimpse of his father in the packed galleries. “His face was suffused and I had the unfilial impression that he was trying not to laugh contagiously,” Tarkington remembered.

The chuckles at his expense stopped, however, when Tarkington engaged in a bitter fight over legislation backed by Governor Durbin that would have removed the board at the Jeffersonville Reformatory, which somehow had displeased Indiana’s chief executive. This naked grab for power came after a campaign that saw the GOP pledging to keep politics out of running state institutions. At first, Tarkington led a lonely fight to stop what became known as the Ripper Bill, which had already made its way successfully through the state senate. “The opposition in the House was laughed at because its numerical beginnings were small, and it became known that the Governor and all his faction were determined upon the passage of the measure,” Tarkington recalled in a review of the legislative session he wrote for the Indianapolis News. But the supposedly inexperienced legislator rallied others to his cause, including a good portion of the House’s Marion County delegation.

The unexpected opposition to this seemingly innocuous piece of legislation disturbed Durbin and his allies, who hit back at the “anti-rippers” with all the power at their command. “They [the governor’s forces] had many resources,” noted Tarkington, “the opposition had only the advantage of fighting for a principle worth fighting for, but that was advantage enough.” Another advantage enjoyed by the governor’s opponents was strong support from the state’s newspapers, which backed their efforts.

Tarkington soon became identified by the media as the acknowledged leader in the ripper legislation battle. He faced tough odds in fighting Durbin’s pet bill. Although confident he could convince enough House members to vote against the measure, Tarkington did express some fear that the governor’s power to award supporters and punish opponents might make his job tougher. Also, the political newcomer had to endure some underhanded maneuverings by the bill’s proponents, who charged that Tarkington had received money from Tobe Hert, the Jeffersonville Reformatory’s former superintendent, in order to buy enough votes to defeat the bill. According to an article about the issue in the Indianapolis Sentinel, Tarkington wasted no time in quashing the allegations against him. “He [Tarkington] collared several of the friends of the men who have made the insinuations and told them that libel suits would be the portion of his traducers if they did not stop such talk,” the Sentinel reported.

Tarkington’s principled stand worked; the governor’s forces capitulated in a “secret” meeting held on  January 27, 190,3 at Indianapolis’s English Hotel. In order to avoid what would be a humiliating defeat, Durbin had agreed to a compromise (actually total subjugation on his part) whereby the old bill was shelved for legislation providing that the reformatory’s superintendent and board could only be removed by the governor following the filing of written charges and a hearing. The insurgents, as Tarkington proclaimed the bill’s opponents, “dictated the terms of surrender, which (it was tacitly agreed) should be called, for political measures and out of courtesy, ‘a compromise.’”

Success in the ripper fight did not come without a price. On February 18, 1903, Tarkington introduced House Bill 382, which provided job training as broom makers for indigent blind people at the Indiana Industrial Home for Blind Men. Under the legislation, the state board of charities would pay the home $4 per week to support each blind person during the time he learned the trade—an annual cost to the state of only $2,080. “The bill was introduced,” said Tarkington, “because of the letters from blind men received at the industrial home; the substance of the letters might be given in a sentence: ‘If I could learn the trade I could keep out of the poor house, and I don’t want to go to the poor house.’”

Supported by such luminaries as Helen Keller, the bill breezed through the House by a 70-7 margin and won passage in the Senate by a 26-11 vote. Tarkington’s stand against the governor, however, came back to haunt him. On March 12, 1903, Durbin vetoed the measure. Although he noted it would be “unnatural” for anyone to be unwilling to help improve “the condition of afflicted persons,” Durbin claimed that if the bill became law “it would be held as a procedure for the establishment of innumerable institutions of similar character, thereby imposing upon the taxpaying public a burden they would not and could not assume in justice to themselves.”

Durbin’s opposition came as no surprise to Tarkington, who was fast learning the ins and outs of politics. During debate on the bill in the House, he had discovered that a local politician “of the most practical type, and reputed to be conscienceless,” had been working to see that the legislation failed. When asked by Tarkington why he opposed the measure, his fellow representative argued forcefully that the bill would be “bad for humanity,” as it might enable the now prosperous blind men to marry blind women and produce blind children. Although exasperated by the lawmaker’s faulty logic, Tarkington did tell a friend he was impressed that this supposedly unscrupulous politician at least opposed the bill for “what he believed to be the good of humanity.” The friend set the gullible writer straight, informing Tarkington: “You darned fool, he’s got [owns] a broom factory!”

Tarkington did not simply laugh off Durbin’s action. Vacationing at French Lick Springs after the legislature adjourned, the writer blasted the governor’s veto, asking a reporter, “is it not the helpless who should be helped first of all, especially if they are helped to help themselves?” He noted that several House members had informed him that because he led the opposition to Durbin’s pet bill the governor would veto Tarkington's legislation. Despite giving the governor the benefit of the doubt, noting Durbin had been greatly overworked as the legislative session ended, Tarkington did ruefully indicate he regretted that “my own lack of foresight and knowledge of character should have prevented my prevailing upon one of the governor’s political friends in the house to introduce the bill, thus to have saved a worthy and benevolent measure.”

The future Pulitzer Prize-winning author had a short political career. Although there had been calls for him to run for mayor in Indianapolis, Tarkington had decided, according to Woodress, to run for the Indiana Senate, or, if that failed, to return to the legislature as a state representative. But after returning from his French Lick Springs vacation, Tarkington was struck by typhoid fever. 

The illness cut short the writer’s promising life in politics, but his stint in the state legislature did provide Tarkington with enough inside material to produce numerous short stories on politics’ inner workings, which were collected in the publication In the Arena: Stories of Political Life (1905). The book’s realistic portrayal of politics’ seamier side caught the attention of another gentleman turned politician: President Theodore Roosevelt. The president invited Tarkington to lunch at the White House and issued what the author termed “a long & generally favorable comment” about the stories. “I just sat & purred—too pleased to eat,” Tarkington wrote his father about the meeting.

           

Roosevelt was most pleased by the book’s preface, which issued a clarion call for “more good men” to become involved with politics. With his Indiana legislative experience behind him, Tarkington featured in the preface a political veteran ruminating on what was needed in politics. The old-timer compared those who complain about politics being too dirty a business for gentlemen to become involved with were “like the woman who lived in the parlour and complained that the rest of her family keep the other rooms so dirty she never went into them.” Tarkington, who kept intact his belief in good government in spite of all the corruption and folly he had seen, also issued a pointed, if somewhat naive, prescription for politics’ ailments: “When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.”