Celebrating Statehood: The Indiana Centennial

The fall of 1914 was a bloody one in Europe. The British and German were winding down the First Battle of Ypres and would soon dig in to begin the long and futile period of trench warfare. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, however, it was an election year. On November 3 Hoosiers trooped to the polls and “for a time the war dropped into the background as all Indiana played the election game,” wrote Cedric C. Cummins in his book on public opinion during World War I.

In addition to the usual candidates on the ballot, voters had the chance to register their opinions on two special issues: a convention to alter the state’s constitution and whether to celebrate the state’s centennial in 1916 by appropriating two million dollars for the construction of a memorial building to house the state library and other historical agencies. Both measures suffered defeat at the polls.

Democratic governor Samuel M. Ralston, who became a leading force behind the state’s eventual centennial observance, believed the memorial plan was rejected not because Hoosiers were against celebrating the event, but because they objected to the amount of money sought for the building.

Ralston was proven right; in just two years, backed by the efforts of the Indiana Historical Commission and thousands of volunteers, Indiana residents would see the creation of state parks, the beginnings of an improved statewide road system, the creation of permanent memorials in numerous communities, and an overall awakening of interest in the nineteenth state’s history.

At Governor Ralston’s request, the 1915 Indiana General Assembly agreed to appropriate $25,000 and create a nine-member Indiana Historical Commission to promote the centennial celebration. The legislature’s financial support of the commission marked the first notable state commitment of funds to history in Indiana. Of the $25,000, $20,000 was earmarked for the promotion of centennial activities, while the remaining amount went to collecting, editing, and publishing Indiana’s past.

The IHC first met on April 23 and 24, 1915, in Governor Ralston’s Statehouse office. An illustrious group joined Ralston on the commission, including James Woodburn of Indiana University, Reverend John Cavanaugh of the University of Notre Dame, and Charity Dye, an Indianapolis schoolteacher. The commission employed Professor Walter C. Woodward of Earlham College to direct the centennial celebration.

The commission set out to educate the state’s citizens about the centennial. Special bulletins were sent to county school superintendents asking for their cooperation; direct appeals were made to teachers in the summer and fall of 1915; a weekly IHC newsletter began publication; and commission members addressed various clubs, civic organizations, churches, and historical societies (Dye alone gave 152 talks).

The IHC also turned to film to get its message across to the public. Realizing it had neither the necessary funds nor skills needed to undertake such an enterprise, the commission called upon the public for help. Citizens soon responded by forming the Inter-State Historical Pictures Corporation, which contracted with the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago to produce a movie titled Indiana. The seven-reel picture featured famed poet James Whitcomb Riley telling the story of the state’s development to a group of children.

To encourage former Indiana residents to return to the state for the centennial, the commission used the services of noted humorist and author George Ade. Honored, or “burdened,” Ade joked in speeches touting the centennial, with the chairmanship of the committee to “sound the call and bring all the wandering Hoosiers back into the fold,” he set about recruiting contributions from a veritable who’s who of Hoosiers for a book.

Titled An Invitation to You and Your Folks from Jim and Some More of the Home Folks, the book, published by Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis, contained messages from Governor Ralston, Vice President Thomas Marshall, Meredith Nicholson, and Booth Tarkington. Gene Stratton-Porter contributed the poem “A Limberlost Invitation,” and Riley the poem “The Hoosier in Exile.”

With its publicity campaign on its way to being a success, the commission had to turn its sights to how best to state the actual celebration; keeping in mind the lack of funds, it was clear that such events would have to be financed locally. The IHC turned to staging historical pageants. These dramas appealed strongly to the commission because they could both focus attention on Indiana’s history and bring communities together.

The commission hired William Chauncy Langdon, former first president of the American Pageant Association, as the state pageant master. Langdon’s main duties were to write and direct three pageants, one at Indiana University, another at the old state capital of Corydon, and a final one at Indianapolis. Historical studies were made, music was especially composed, and costumes were designed “for the sole purpose of producing in the sequence of its various scenes a clear, beautiful and inspiring drama and a truthful impression of the development of the State of Indiana,” noted Langdon.

These same ideas were used by local communities in developing their own pageants. The commission gave what help it could, securing centennial chairmen in all but three of Indiana’s counties, with each responsible for selecting a county committee to plan the work. The plan worked. Director Woodward reported that forty-five county or local pageants presented in 1916 were seen by an estimated 250,000 people, and anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 Hoosiers participated in the performances.

Along with the week-long pageant in Indianapolis, capital residents had the chance to hear from President Woodrow Wilson as part of activities for Centennial Highway Day on October 12, 1916. Invited to speak by Governor Ralston, a vigorous supporter of roadway improvements, Wilson arrived in the city by presidential train (which was late). While in Indianapolis, the president reviewed an automobile parade before delivering a speech on the need for good roads to 10,000 people at the Fairgrounds Coliseum.

Perhaps the commission’s crowning achievement came with the development of Indiana’s first state parks. The movement began in April 1915 when Governor Ralston received a letter from Juliet V. Strauss, a nationally known writer living in Rockville, Indiana, appealing for help in saving the Turkey Run area in Parke County from being sold to timber interests. The commission created a special parks committee with Richard Lieber, who would become the first director of the Indiana Department of Conservation, as chairman.

While talks for purchasing the Turkey Run property for the state were under way, the commission learned of the opportunity to purchase the rugged area of McCormick’s Creek in Owen County. A total of $5,250 was raised, one-fourth of which by Owen County residents, and McCormick’s Creek became Indiana’s first state park. The commission later acquired the Turkey Run property.

When the last notes of the various pageants faded away and celebrants packed their costumes, the commission attempted to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by the centennial observance. Although a 1917 bill calling for the establishment of a permanent state agency for history failed, the commission was resurrected following World War I to organize a county-by-county war history. Since that time, Indiana has funded a state historical agency (today known as the Indiana Historical Bureau).

           

Ed Breen: Hoosier Journalist

As a teenager growing up in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Edward E. Breen, and many other citizens of the town, were attracted to the downtown one day by news of a major fire. While watching firefighters struggle to put out the flames, Breen noticed a woman with a Minolta Autocord camera around her neck and a power pack slung over her shoulder, without hesitation or explanation, march past the police barricades and into the gaggle of police and firemen.

The woman was Helen Strode, police reporter for the Fort Dodge Messenger and Chronicle, who later served as Breen’s mentor when he became a journalist. “I really liked the idea of going past the barricades, going where others were denied and where I might find something interesting,” Breen recalled.

From the time he started work as a part-time and summer employee at his hometown newspaper through years of dedicated work for the Chronicle-Tribune in Marion and The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Breen found plenty of interesting material to report on and photograph. In a career that included stints as reporter, photographer, city editor, graphics director, features and special projects editor, and managing editor, Breen recognized that the discussions regarding the balance between word and picture content in newspapers ignored the fundamental point: “The purpose and function of each is totally different,” he said. “But both are tools of equal importance in carrying a message to the reader of the printed page.”

Breen has been recognized by his peers as a “pioneer in the early days of full-color newspaper photography, one of those people who made the rest of us realize what was possible,” noted Jack Ronald, publisher of the Portland Commercial Review. Emmett K. Smelser, who first met Breen forty years ago, noted that a visit to the Chronicle-Tribune’s newsroom showed why that newspaper was “considered a national leader in the bold use of color and offset printing,” and why Smelser described his colleague as the “epitome of a news professional—dedicated to his craft, his community and his state.”

Breen’s commitment to the Hoosier State also includes being one of the co-founders of the Mississinewa Battlefield Society, longtime board member for the Indiana Historical Society, columnist for the weekly Marion News Herald, and featured commentator and co-host for WBAT radio’s daily “Good Morning Grant County” program. Not a bad list of accomplishments for someone who had to teach himself how to type to secure his first job in journalism.

In the autumn of 1960 Breen was working as a drugstore soda jerk after classes were finished at his Saint Edmond High School in Fort Dodge and on weekends. One of his customers for the out-of-town newspapers for sale in the store each Sunday was the sports editor of the local newspaper. He asked Breen if he might be interested in working Friday nights in the sports department, taking call-in high school games from the area and writing three-paragraph summaries and statistics. Breen jumped at the opportunity, but came up short when the editor asked him if he could type. He answered “yes,” and spent that weekend teaching himself three-finger typing, started at the newspaper the next Friday night, and “haven’t left the newsroom (in some form) for 56 years,” he said.

After being “tossed out” of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1964, Breen found a job as a photographer at the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald. It was there that editor Jim Geladas, a pioneer in the photojournalism world of the 1960s, gave the young Breen the direction and education he needed to become a professional photographer and, “to an extent, a writer.” A former Marine, Geladas ran his newsroom that way. “You learned, by God, or moved on,” said Breen. “He asked much and gave much.”

After marrying Ruth Joanne Schiltz on February 27, 1965, Breen moved to Wisconsin and edited the weekly Plymouth Review. He was there when Dick Martin, who had been his Sunday editor in Dubuque, started as editor of Marion, Indiana’s Leader-Tribune (the morning newspaper that preceded the merger with the Marion Chronicle into the all-day Chronicle Tribune). Martin asked Breen to come to Marion to be a reporter/photographer for $110 a week, a slightly better offer than one he had received from the Milwaukee Journal. “I told Martin I would stay two years,” Breen said. “That was 50 years ago.”

Martin cared deeply about the craft of storytelling and saw that Breen understood how to tell stories with pictures, was a “reasonably good writer,” and gave him the freedom to do both, often on the same assignment. Martin assembled “a sort of magic-moment staff” in Marion, Breen recalled, including Gene Policinski, Phil Witherow, Jerry Miller, and others, that resulted in winning the Hoosier State Press Association’s Blue Ribbon daily newspaper award for several years in a row. Personal honors also came Breen’s way, including Indiana News Photographer of the Year in 1967 and numerous photography and writing awards from the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors and the Hoosier State Press Association.

Breen moved to the Journal Gazette in August 1995, working as that newspaper’s assistant managing editor for photography and graphics until retiring in July 2009. Craig Klugman, Breen’s editor for nearly fifteen years, noted that his friend liked to say his job at the Fort Wayne newspaper was to “walk around the newsroom, coffee cup in hand, assuring younger staff members that things would be OK. Ed did that, certainly, but he did much more.”

Klugman worked directly with Breen on the newspaper’s Sunday “Perspective” section. The editorial board met every Monday to discuss what was coming up on Sunday. This put Breen in a difficult position, said Klugman, because the editorial staff, by definition, had to talk about positions, while Breen, as a member of the news staff, had to remain objective.

“But Ed handled the problem perfectly,” said Klugman. “He stayed out of any discussions of what we would say. But he always had an answer for how the paper would illustrate a story or essay (not to mention how to focus some of our wide-ranging ideas).” Breen, Klugman added, always “carried himself like the pro he was,” and, even today, more than a decade after leaving daily newspaper journalism, Breen “feels an irresistible pressure to tell stories, to speak truth to power, and to inform.”

Reflecting on his career in newspapers, Breen mused that he had been there for enough of the good years to understand both the importance of journalism and “the joy of doing it well. As John Quinn put it so elegantly, ‘It’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on.’”  

 

The Battle of Ap Bac

The future looked bright for Captain Kenneth Good. His superiors had recommended the thirty-two-year-old West Point graduate to leave his role advising troops with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to serve as an American representative on a guerrilla warfare team in Malaya. Once the popular Good had completed his duty in Asia, the road seemed clear for his future posting to the prestigious U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

“That man would have been a general one day,” Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, Good’s commanding officer, predicted to Associated Press bureau chief Malcolm W. Browne. “He was one of the most competent, knowledgeable officers in the country.”

Good’s position as senior adviser to the Second Battalion, Eleventh Regiment of the ARVN’s Seventh Division, however, was the last he ever held. A bullet from a Viet Cong gunner struck Good in the shoulder during a fierce engagement near a small village named Bac—later cited as Ap (meaning “hamlet”) Bac in newspaper accounts—in the Dinh Tuong Province, located approximately forty miles southwest of Saigon. Although he received immediate aid and joked with his comrades despite his wound, Good later died from loss of blood and shock.

Good was one of three Americans killed in the January 2,1963, battle that saw VC forces, cleverly concealed in well-dug foxholes and bunkers, shoot down five U.S. helicopters and inflict casualties of approximately eighty killed and more than a hundred wounded on South Vietnamese forces under the command of Colonel Bui Dinh Dam. “Troops of nearly every description were involved on the government side; there were regular army troops, paratroopers, civil guards, self-defense corpsmen and others,” Browne recalled.

Also available to aid in the fighting were American-made M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with powerful .50-caliber Browning machine guns. Unfortunately, as Browne later learned, a M113 on the move made for a “very unstable platform” for the unfortunate soldier manning its top-mounted Browning. A gunner could fire a long burst and wind up missing his target at a range of only a hundred yards. 

The well-prepared enemy held their fire as the first few flights of U.S. Army H-21 Shawnee helicopters ferried in troops to the designated landing zone. Then, a chopper crewman recalled, the treeline “seemed to explode with machine-gun fire. It was pure hell.” The lumbering, banana-shaped H-21s made fine targets for the VC and were riddled with bullets. The ARVN troops they dropped off to fight had nowhere to hide. “When those poor Vietnamese came out of the choppers, it was just like shooting ducks for the Viet Cong,” recalled a U.S. officer.

Unprotected by any armor shielding, eight gunners on the M113s were cut down by well-aimed fusillades. Looking over the battlefield, an American adviser pointed out to a reporter that the enemy had selected its fighting positions with great care, so much so that it looked like a “school solution” from the infantry training school at Fort Benning on how a unit should prepare a defensive position. The VC units involved—more than 300 men of the 514th Regional Battalion and the 261st Main Force Battalion—took their time, before leaving the battlefield, to collect their dead and wounded, as well as grabbing expended brass shells to reload for later use.

Peter Arnett of the Associated Press and David Halberstam of the New York Times had a bit of luck when it came to arranging transportation to the scene of the fighting. Steve Stibbens, a U.S. Marine combat correspondent for Stars and Stripes newspaper, had been visiting with Arnett in the cramped AP office in Saigon when Halberstam walked in. Tipped off to the fierce fighting, the two civilian reporters convinced Stibbens to change into his U.S. Marine Corps uniform and drive them out of the capital to the battlefield in his Ford Falcon automobile. “The uniform helped get us past roadblocks and checkpoints on the way to Tan Hiep airstrip, the staging point for the Ap-Bac action,” Stibbens remembered.

Arnett reported that the road became “jammed with long lines of cars and buses undergoing security checks at heavily guarded bridges and villages.” Arriving at Tan Hiep, the trio came upon a chaotic scene, with jeeps, trucks, and helicopters jockeying for space on the small runway. For the first time in the war, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter told the reporters, the enemy forces “had stood their ground and fought back rather than hitting and melting away into the countryside.”

Inspecting the battlefield, Arnett recalled that he saw twenty-one holes in one of the downed U.S. helicopters. “On its deck lay the open wallet of one of the dead Americans, a 21-year-old door gunner,” he wrote. “There was a picture of his wife and child.” Watching a procession of ARVN casualties limp off a medical-evacuation helicopter, veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who had flown to Tan Hiep on a Helio L-28 spotter aircraft, saw soldiers wrapped with “bandages across chests, wads of bandage on arms or legs, eyes covered with the bandage—the wretched cordwood of wounded men, their faces frozen with shock.”

Later, a chopper pilot Tregaskis knew described Ap Bac as “about the worst engagement I was ever in.” United Press International reporter Neil Sheehan asked Brigadier General Robert York, who had come to assess the situation, for his opinion. York gave a curt and honest answer: “What the hell’s it looks like? They got away—that’s what happened.”

As for Sheehan, who had to dodge friendly artillery rounds that fell short of their target, taking cover with York, he considered what had happened “the biggest story we had ever encountered in Vietnam.” Although unnamed in press accounts, Vann, the senior American adviser to the Seventh Division, had lambasted the ARVN’s lack of aggressiveness, describing what had occurred as “a miserable damn performance, just like it always is.” He added that the South Vietnamese “won’t listen—they make the same mistakes over and over again in the same way.”

What happened at Ap Bac degenerated into another war of words between the young Saigon reporters and top U.S. military officials in Vietnam, with the press considering the engagement a defeat for President Ngo Dinh Diem’s government, while the top brass viewed Ap Bac as an ARVN victory. General Paul Harkins, who visited the battlefield the day after the initial fighting, had confidently predicted to newsmen at the scene, “We’ve got them in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.”

No trap sprung; the guerillas had slipped away into the countryside and the remaining ARVN soldiers appeared to be too discombobulated to track them down. Hearing the general’s remark, Halberstam wondered, as he would on many other occasions in Vietnam, if “Harkins believed what he was saying, or whether he felt it should be said.”

In a later statement, the general defended the mettle of ARVN soldiers, indicating that anyone who criticized their fighting abilities was “doing a disservice to thousands of gallant and courageous men who are fighting so well in the defense of their country.” Although U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting acknowledged there had been some “snafus” that were the fault of Vietnamese commanders, he downplayed the battle’s significance, believing “it was blown out of all proportions by the American press.”

Nolting also criticized Vann for “spilling his guts to the American press and having it spread all over the headlines that the South Vietnamese Army, despite all that the Americans had done to train and supply them, were basically cowards and they couldn’t win. I don’t believe that.” The ambassador added that Vann’s comments to reporters were “emotional and not fair.”

Hoping to put a positive spin on the battle, Admiral Harry Felt, Harkin’s superior due to his position as commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, commented upon a visit to Saigon from his headquarters in Hawaii that he did not believe what he had been reading in the newspapers about Ap Bac. Felt insisted to the press that South Vietnamese forces had won the battle. Spying Sheehan in the crowd, Felt told him: “So you’re Sheehan. I didn’t know who you were. You ought to talk to some of the people who’ve got the facts.” A stubborn Sheehan was ready with an answer: “You’re right Admiral, and that’s why I went down there every day.”

Felt later told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Sheehan’s work typified the “bad news . . . filed immediately by young reporters without checking the facts.” A top-secret report authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior military leaders within the U.S. Defense Department, said the journalist’s reports were merely “ill-considered statements made at a time of high excitement and frustration by a few American officers.”

Veteran combat reporter Tregaskis, the author of the best-selling World War II book Guadalcanal Diary and a dedicated supporter of the American involvement in Vietnam, admitted that there probably were many mistakes made at Ap Bac, as “there always are in a battle.” He protested that critical news stories produced by “younger and brasher correspondents” such as Sheehan could do a lot of harm with the American public.

Tregaskis acknowledged that Ap Bac had been a setback to the South Vietnamese cause, but he also pointed out that the VC had suffered a similar defeat earlier at Phuoc Chau, where the ARVN had crushed a guerrilla force, leaving behind 127 dead with very few casualties on its own side. “At Ap Bac, the VC, apparently a very well-disciplined and well-dug-in outfit did it to our side—but not quite as badly [as Phuoc Chau],” Tregaskis noted. “That’s the way war goes, a bloody business any way you look at it.”

Of course, as Browne noted, the VC certainly regarded Ap Bac as a triumph for its cause. The 514th emblazoned the hamlet’s name in gold letters on its battle flag and propaganda posters from the Communists, “professionally printed in four colors, bloomed throughout the [Mekong] delta, all glorifying the fighters at Ap Bac.”

A few weeks after the engagement, Browne wrote an analysis of the battle that offered U.S. officials, who spoke to him with the understanding they would not be named, the opportunity to talk about their frustrations. “It’s the same old story,” one official told the AP bureau chief. “Americans don’t know Asia exists until some Americans start getting killed.”

Most people Browne talked to believed that the negative political and public reaction to the “bloody clash” in the Mekong Delta came about through “a basic ignorance of the situation.” A high-ranking official conceded that the conflict in Vietnam may have been presented to the American public in an “over-simplified form,” with some believing that the war against the Communists had already been won. “On balance things are going well, but it’s not that simple,” the official told Browne.

A military adviser made sure to point out to the reporter that military leaders in Washington, DC, had been told several times that “this is not a simple war that you win in conventional ways. They see it in a thousand reports every day and they’ve learned the correct jargon about guerrilla warfare—how politics are important and all that. They think they understand, but they don’t. The questions they ask show it.”

Browne also acknowledged the anger felt by some Americans in Vietnam about the press coverage: “The setbacks are always on page one, but the victories—some of them less spectacular—see little print. This is going to be a long, hard struggle, and it’s time people got used to the idea.”