The General and the Reporter: George Marshall and Robert L. Sherrod

The telephone call came early in the morning on Saturday, November 15, 1941, in the Washington, D.C., home of Robert L. Sherrod. He had been expecting a busy day, as he needed to pack for a trip to cover U.S. Army maneuvers in North Carolina as part of his work as Time magazine’s military reporter. The 295,000 members of infantry and mechanized units set to clash in the region between the Catawba and Dee Rivers needed to train all they could that fall. Nazi Germany soldiers had already overrun much of Europe and were closing in on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Closer to America’s own shores, German U-boats ruled the Atlantic Ocean, daring even to sink ships from the U.S. Navy.

Sherrod had been in Washington, D.C., as correspondent for Time Inc.’s office in the nation’s capital since 1936 and had seen the staff grow from two people to twelve for the three publications in Henry Luce’s empire—Time, Life, and Fortune. Since June 1941, however, Sherrod had switched from the political beat to covering the slow buildup of American military forces. It had been a long, uphill fight to respectability for an American army that ranked seventeenth in size and combat ability, just behind Romania, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

In the summer of 1941 Sherrod had traveled to the swamps of Louisiana to report on how approximately 400,000 U.S. troops fared in maneuvers—then the largest the army had ever held—that ranged over an area of 3,400 square miles under the direction of General Lesley J. McNair, chief of staff, General Headquarters, U.S. Army.

The reporters covering the maneuvers, including Sherrod, had been impressed with what they had observed of the soldiers, some of whom were equipped not with the modern weapons needed for battle, but ersatz substitutes (wooden signs marked where machine guns, antiaircraft guns, and foxholes should have been situated on the battlefield). “These maneuvers have been very good for the army,” said Sherrod. “There have been a lot of mistakes, but they have learned a lot. It’s a good thing. . . . Their morale is much better than it was two or three months ago. For one thing, they have to work so hard during maneuvers they dont have time to think about morale. Morale among the Armored Forces and Air Forces and among all the Southern troops, who are busting to get into war, is especially high.”

At his house in Washington preparing to cover additional army maneuvers, these in North Carolina, Sherrod was surprised to have his packing interrupted by a telephone call from Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Grogan, the War Department’s deputy chief of public relations. “Can you come to a secret conference with General [George] Marshall at 10:15?” Grogan asked. Sherrod agreed, and Grogan promptly hung up the phone, as he had calls to place to other journalists.

Including Sherrod, seven Washington correspondents—Ernest Lindley of Newsweek, Charles Hurd of the New York Times, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune, Eddie Bomar of the Associated Press, Lyle Wilson of United Press, and Harold Slater of the International News Service—gathered in Marshall’s office at the Munitions Building for what Sherrod remembered as “the most astonishing press conference” he ever attended in a journalism career that spanned more than three decades.

Filing into Marshall’s office, Sherrod observed that the general stood before a massive map of the Pacific, embellished with, as Sherrod noted, “connecting semicircles and quarter circles.” Marshall, the army’s chief of staff since 1939, impressed the Time reporter, who described him as exuding “the same sort of integrity one finds in a [Gilbert] Stuart portrait of [George] Washington.” Marshall started off by saying he was embarrassed at calling a press conference that would not produce any news, as what he had to say had to be considered top secret. Dressed in civilian clothes, as he customarily did in peacetime, the sixty-year-old Marshall told the assembled reporters that there were some things he wanted to tell them, Sherrod recalled, “in order that our interpretations of current and forthcoming events did not upset essential military strategy of the United States. In other words: Be careful what you print.”

Without raising his voice, the general said, “The United States is on the brink of war with Japan.” Sherrod was not surprised by this statement, as anyone who had been reading the newspapers knew that relations between the two countries “had gone from bad to terrible, particularly since President Roosevelt had frozen Japanese assets four months earlier, which effectually cut off Japan’s oil supply.” If war did break out, Marshall said the United States had an asset the Japanese did not know about, as the American military had “access to a leak in all the information the Japanese are receiving concerning our military preparations, especially in the Philippines,” where General Douglas MacArthur had been called back to active duty as commander of army forces in the Far East.

“In other words,” Sherrod quoted Marshall as saying, “we know what they know about us, and they don’t know that we know it.” The reporters did not know it at the time, but they had been given a hint at one of the government’s most closely guarded secrets—American cryptographers had been able to decipher Japan’s diplomatic code, an operation codenamed MAGIC, and could intercept and decode the messages sent from Tokyo to Japan’s overseas embassies (U.S. Navy cryptographers later broke the Japanese Imperial Fleet’s code, helping win the crucial Battle of Midway).

Marshall told the reporters that counter to what the Japanese believed, the United States was not only prepared to defend the Philippines, but that the American military also expected to undertake the offensive against Japan. In addition to sending a large number of advanced B-17 Flying Fortresses to MacArthur, Marshall said shipments were headed to the general that included the military’s new 75-mm gun, as well as tanks and dive-bombing units that had participated in the recent maneuvers in Louisiana.

“This information will be allowed to leak to the Japanese (it is miraculous that they haven’t learned about the Flying Fortresses, but the two attempts that have been made to publish the fact have been thwarted),” Sherrod wrote in a confidential memorandum about the meeting to his Time editor, David Hulburd. “But it must be allowed to leak privately, from the White House or the State Department directly to Japanese officials. . . . If it got out publicly, the Army fanatics in Japan would be in a position to demand war immediately, before we were better fortified.” If the leak went only to the right officials, they could, Sherrod added, say to top members of the Japanese government that the Americans meant to bomb their cities and possessed the means to do so. “In that way,” Sherrod wrote, “no public face-saving would be necessary, and war might be averted. The last thing the U.S. wants is a war with Japan which would divide our strength. The Germans are pushing the Japanese from 19 directions to get them into war with the U.S., as everybody knows.”

Marshall told the assembled reporters that if war did break out with Japan, the United States would “fight mercilessly,” intending to send B-17s on missions to set the country’s paper cities ablaze, and the Flying Fortresses would soon be joined by the new, long-range B-24 Liberator bombers. “Nothing that I am telling you today is publishable, even in hinted form,” Marshall warned the journalists.

One aspect of a war with Japan had gone without mention by the army chief of staff—the role the American navy would play in the Pacific. Given that a number of the country’s fighting ships had been diverted to the Atlantic to meet the U-boat threat, Marshall, in a comment that seems incredible in light of what was to come, stated, according to Sherrod’s account: “The grand strategy doesn’t include the use of much naval force.” (Navy men to whom Sherrod talked to expressed confidence they could “polish off the little bastards” in a matter of three or maybe six months, he recalled.) Marshall believed that U.S. bombers would be sufficient to deter Japanese naval strength, with America’s “high flying big bombers” able to wreak havoc on the enemy. Sherrod noted that army air corps officers were enthusiastic about their bombers’ ability to drop their loads “into a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet” with the aid of the top-secret Norden bombsight. The bombers did display considerable accuracy, he added, at least “on a clear day with no enemy to harass them.”

Gasoline and bombs were already in place at landing fields in Australia, New Zealand, and Borneo, Sherrod reported, as well as a half dozen other spots, and supplies were being sent to India, where the British were not yet prepared to protect shipping in the Indian Ocean. Marshall warned the reporters that the “danger period” for the United States was the first ten days of December. “If we get by that, we’re OK until February,” Sherrod wrote. “By then MacArthur will have plenty in the Philippines.”

(Unfortunately, the dive bombers never made it to the Philippines, nor did the additional B-17s. A few weeks after the December 7 Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, and its subsequent quick dispatch of U.S. aircraft in the Philippines, Sherrod was part of another media conference with Marshall in Washington. His only recollection of that meeting is the general “shaking his head and saying: ‘It’s all clear to me now except one thing. I just don’t know how MacArthur happened to let his planes get caught on the ground.’”)

In spite of admonitions from Marshall that his remarks should be kept in confidence, news reports about the general’s assessment of the coming conflict with Japan slowly began to make their way into print. On November 19, just a few days after Marshall’s media conference, the New York Times ran an article by Arthur Krock that outlined how the long-accepted view that the United States would not defend the Philippines in case of an attack by Japan had been altered and now America had the ability “to attack any far Eastern power that strikes at the island.”

Sherrod also played a role in passing along what he had learned from Marshall, confiding in a friend, fellow reporter Ralph McGill. The two men had worked together at the Atlanta Constitution—McGill, at first, in the newspaper’s sports department and Sherrod as the “greenest cub reporter.” After finishing his assignment covering the army maneuvers in the Carolinas in early December, Sherrod had lunch in Atlanta with McGill, now editorial page editor for the Constitution. Sounding off in all of his Washington wisdom, Sherrod relayed to his friend that the United States was soon “bound to be at war with the Japs.”

On December 2, in his column “One Word More,” McGill passed along to his readers an “interesting story” he had heard—the Japanese had been told by the American government that it was determined to defend the Philippines and could launch a counter-attack on any foe in the Pacific from its bases on the archipelago. “This country is ready to go to war with Japan,” McGill wrote. “Japan now knows it. She knows what some of our plans are. She reportedly knows what we have [militarily] in the Philippines.” McGill went on to write that the Roosevelt administration preferred a course of peace, and saw “no reason to fight Japan so long as Japan does not encroach on our interests.” Still, the columnist concluded, because the Japanese government was firmly “in the grip of a military clique which must fight to survive,” Japan would likely “go to war even though the people do not want it. It looks like war and that soon.”

After his meeting with McGill, Sherrod flew to U.S. Army Air Corps command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, staying there a day or two during a bout of miserable weather waiting for the skies to clear for a flight home to Washington. He arrived in Washington about noon on December 7, immediately going to bed with a cold. “My wife woke me about 3:30 [p.m.], and announced calmly: ‘The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor.’ I knew then I wouldn’t be in the U.S. much longer.” 

He was correct. By February 1942 Sherrod, joined by thirteen other correspondents and photographers from a variety of news agencies, was on his way to Australia on a convoy with army troops sent to bolster the meager defenses against a possible Japanese attack—a situation that correspondent John Lardner of the North American News Alliance grimly recalled as “the unready and peace-loving [the United States] against the swift, hungry, and prepared [Japan].”

Book Signings for Robert Sherrod Book

I will be signing copies of my new book Dispatches from the Pacific: The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod, recently published by Indiana University Press, at a few locations in Indiana.

From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 14, I will be part of the 2017 Indy Author Fair at the Indianapolis Public Library, 40 East St. Clair Street, Indianapolis. Approximately forty authors represented a variety of genres will be at the fair. Also, authors and book lovers are invited to participate in free writing and publishing workshops presented by the Indiana Writers Center immediately following the fair. For a listing of activities, go to Meet An Author, Be An Author.

From noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 2, I will be one of the numerous authors at the Indiana Historical Society's fifteenth annual Holiday Author Fair. The free event will be held at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis, Indiana.

In addition, I will be talking about the book on Nelson Price's radio program "Hoosier History Live!" at noon on Saturday, November 11. Also appearing on the program with me will be Allen D. Boyer, author of the book Rocky Boyer's War. That book examines Allen's father's service in the Pacific with the Fifth Air Force, an account based on the diary kept by First Lieutenant Roscoe "Rocky" Boyer.

Book on WWII Correspondent Robert L. Sherrod Now Available

According to the Washington Post, Robert L. Sherrod’s stories of the Pacific theater of World War II were “some of the most vivid accounts of men at war ever produced by an American journalist.” Now, for the first time, award-winning author Ray E. Boomhower tells the story of the journalist in Dispatches from the Pacific:The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod, an intimate account of the war and the journalists who risked their lives to cover it, recently published by Indiana University Press.

In the fall of 1943, armed with only his notebooks and pencils, Time and Life correspondent Robert L. Sherrod leapt from the safety of a landing craft and waded through neck-deep water and a hail of bullets to reach the shores of the Tarawa Atoll with the US Marine Corps. Living shoulder to shoulder with the marines, Sherrod chronicled combat and the marines’ day-to-day struggles as they leapfrogged across the Central Pacific, battling the Japanese on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. While the marines courageously and doggedly confronted an enemy that at times seemed invincible, those left behind on the American home front desperately scanned Sherrod’s columns for news of their loved ones.

“Sherrod’s dispatches to Time and Life magazines brought America’s bloodiest war to a sometimes unknowing and complacent home front,” explains James H. Madison, author of Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys,“Ray Boomhower’s deeply researched and superbly written book makes clear why Sherrod was one of American’s greatest reporters and why his work rings true today.

“Boomhower explores World War II through the light of an extraordinary individual with fresh, sobering insights. Boomhower succeeds again with the saga of Time correspondent Robert Sherrod,” writes Dan Carpenter, freelance writer and former columnist at the Indianapolis Star.

Ernie and Me: An Appreciation

Each August thousands of high school graduates from the Hoosier State and around the country descend upon Bloomington to begin their college careers at Indiana University. That happy lot fell to me in 1978. As a journalism major, I attended many classes at Ernie Pyle Hall, a handsome limestone structure near the university’s Union that housed the journalism department and the offices of the student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student.

Climbing the steps to enter the building, I often noticed a display window that included a photograph of the famous World War II correspondent after whom the structure was named. Although I had heard of the Dana, Indiana, native, I knew little about the man or his career. In fact, before attending IU, if I thought of Pyle at all, the picture that flashed in my mind was not that of the newspaperman but the actor who played him in the 1945 film The Story of G.I. Joe—Burgess Meredith.

A hasty glance at Pyle’s newspaper career left me less than impressed, typifying as it did, as the correspondent’s biographer James Tobin has noted, a cheerleading style of “war journalism that fell out of favor during the Vietnam War and has not recovered since.” Journalism students of my generation received their inspiration not from old-fashioned reporters such as Pyle but instead from modern investigative journalists such as the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, men whose work had helped bring down a president, and David Halberstam, who wrote so honestly and brilliantly about this country’s early involvement in Vietnam.

Nobody is so pure of heart—and so self-righteous—as a freshman journalism student. I began to see the errors of my ways while working for the Indiana State Museum System, which at that time included Pyle’s birthplace home in Dana as one of its state historic sites. While researching Pyle’s life for a brochure about the site, I read a number of his war columns and developed a deep respect for the man most World War II GIs regarded as “the soldier’s friend.” To the millions of Americans on the home front during the war, anxious for news of their loved ones, Pyle’s column offered a foxhole view of the struggle as he reported on the life, and sometimes death, of the average combatant. Later, while working at the Indiana Historical Society, I wrote a youth biography about the Hoosier hero of World War II for the IHS Press.

Because of Pyle’s work, poet and veteran Randall Jarrell said, most of the country “felt, in the fullest moral and emotional sense, something that had never happened to them, that they could never have imagined without it—a war.” At the time of his death in the Pacific on April 18, 1945, Pyle enjoyed a worldwide readership, with his work appearing in four hundred daily and three hundred weekly newspapers.

Nobel Prize–winning author John Steinbeck, a Pyle friend, perhaps summed up the reporter’s work best when he told a Time magazine reporter: “There are really two wars and they haven’t much to do with each other. There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions and regiments—and that is General [George] Marshall's war. Then there is the war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at the Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and bring themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage—and that is Ernie Pyle’s war.”

Hamstrung as Pyle was by the restrictions imposed by U.S. Army censors, he nevertheless attempted to convey to his readers the hardships endured by those in uniform. Although Pyle’s columns covered almost every branch of the service—from quartermaster troops to pilots—he saved his highest praise and devotion for the common foot soldier. “I love the infantry because they are the underdogs,” he wrote. “They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.”

The Hoosier reporter’s columns not only described the soldier’s hardships, but also spoke out on his behalf. In a column from Italy in 1944, Pyle proposed that combat soldiers be given “fight pay,” similar to an airman’s flight pay. In May of that year Congress acted on Pyle’s suggestion, giving soldiers 50 percent extra pay for combat service, legislation nicknamed the Ernie Pyle bill.

In spite of the warmth he felt for the average GI, Pyle had no illusions about the dangers involved with his own job. He once wrote a friend that he tried “not to take any foolish chances, but there's just no way to play it completely safe and still do your job.”

Weary from his work in Europe, Pyle grudgingly accepted what was to be his last assignment, covering the action in the Pacific with the navy and marines. He rationalized his acceptance, noting, “What can a guy do? I know millions of others who are reluctant too, and they can't even get home.”

After Pyle’s tragic death on Ie Shima, Edwin Waltz, the reporter’s personal secretary at Pacific Fleet headquarters, went through his personal effects and discovered a draft of a column Pyle had handwritten in anticipation of the war’s end in Europe. The column, which was never published, reveals as does no other piece of writing the terrible personal toll the conflict took on him. He wrote that buried in his brain forever would be the sight of cold, dead men scattered everywhere: “Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.” For the reader at home, Pyle wrote, these men were merely “columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.” Pyle and his colleagues, however, saw them, and they saw them by the uncountable thousands: “That’s the difference.”

Writing and Editing Advice from the "Indianapolis Times"

From its start in 1888 until it ceased publication on October 11, 1965, the Indianapolis Times produced "lively and sometimes courageous journalism" for its readers, engaging in a variety of crusades against corruption in local and state government and campaigning for better school lunches for Indianapolis students.

The newspaper also waged an often lonely fight against the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s--a time when that racist organization held considerable political power throughout the state. The Times won a 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its work in "exposing political corruption to Indiana, prosecuting the guilty and bringing about a more wholesome state of affairs in civil government." 

In comparison to other newspapers in the city, which had stodgy reputations, the Times, noted one of its former reporters, John Bartlow Martin, was "lively, aggressive, liberal and leaning Democratic, more fun to read and work on. The Times hired you young, paid you little, and promoted you fast." The newspaper's 1954 style book, which gave tips for its reporters and editors, offers tips that are applicable to those engaged in those activities today.

For its reporters (the "Wallpaper Department"), the Times, part of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper chain, recommended them to be, most of all, accurate; dependable; to use good taste;to  read, study people, dig under the surface of things; and to be truthful. "Write your stories as you would tell them to people whose attention you want to catch," the style book said. "If you ramble, they get bored. The same is true with writing." It also reminded its writers to be fair and to keep their opinions out of news stories: "Listen to both sides. Reporting is incomplete with only accusations--hear the defense. It may spoil what you thought was a good story, but its saves you from the worst error--a biased story."

To be a complete reporter, the newspaper believed that their writers needed to remember that their jobs were not done with "just the gathering and writing of your stories. The entire paper is your responsibility. READ IT EVERY DAY--ALL OF IT. Know what it is in it." If reporters followed this dictate, and wrote as they should, the Times believed neither the writers nor subscribers would want to miss any issue. "If you're bored," the style book noted, "pity the poor character who pays the newsboy for the wallpaper you turn out."

For its editors, which the newspaper playfully called "the butchers," the Times advised them to take pride, "not glee," in their work trimming reporter's copy and to always remember that editors and reporters were on the same team, "fight together." While all copy could be cut, as there were "no sacred cows" on the newspaper, it advised the editors that stories could also be expanded. "Edit always in the interest of lucidity and good taste," the style book continued. "Whack, expand, rephrase or rewrite, but do not edit the writer's personality out of the story. The finished product must be the best efforts of many people."

A rule of thumb for the Times was that "our newspaper is always a gentleman." Still, even a good newspaperman could make a mistake. The style book advised its employees never to try to cover mistakes. "Report them to the desk for quick correction," the book noted. "That will save your and our reputation for integrity, and it may prevent a libel suit." Although a newspaper had a constitutional right to freely publish and to make comments, it also had to be "truthful and the comments fair, unbiased, uncolored and truly supported by the facts."

"Advanced Ideas": The Early Fight for Equal Suffrage in Indiana

During the spring of 1878 Indianapolis society crackled with “mysterious whisperings” concerning a proposed meeting involving women in the community with “advanced ideas” about their proper place in society. A secret call drew ten people—nine women and one man—to a gathering at Circle Hall.

Although the issue of improved rights for women had been seriously debated in Indiana as far back as the 1850s—and Indiana had been one of the first states in the country to form a woman’s suffrage organization—most respectable citizens considered the idea radical at best.

“Had we convened consciously to plot the ruin of our domestic life,” noted one participant, “which opponents predict as the result of woman’s enfranchisement, we could not have looked more guilty or have moved about with more unnatural stealth.” The conservative atmosphere that dominated Indianapolis could be seen from the group’s taking more than two hours to discuss whether or not the new society should take a name for itself that would clearly advertise its goal, or one that would hide it from the outside world.

About a month after this initial meeting, twenty-six people attended a second gathering and formed the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society. The society consisted of men and women “willing to labor for the attainment of equal rights at the ballot-box for all citizens on the same conditions.”

The Society followed a path blazed by such early pioneers in the fight for women’s rights as New Harmony’s Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, who fought in the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850 and 1851 to include in the new state constitution provisions guaranteeing a woman’s right to hold property. Indiana’s early property laws, said one Indiana historian, were based upon an English common law tradition that viewed women as “perpetual juveniles.”

Owen wrote Susan B. Anthony that although he campaigned on behalf of property rights for women while in the legislature, he did nothing in regard to suffrages. “In those days,” he said, “it would have been utterly unavailing.”

Owen had a solid basis for his pessimistic outlook. Many of his fellow delegates at the constitutional convention were appalled by his efforts to enhance property rights for women. One delegate claimed that if the convention adopted Owen’s measure, “it would be to throw a whole population morally and politically into confusion. Is it necessary to explode a volcano under the foundation of the family union?” Another delegate rather piously stated that he opposed Owen’s proposal, “not because I love justice less, but women more.”

Writing about the views of that time, Indiana historian Jacob P. Dunn Jr. said that those women who were brave enough to advocate on behalf of for votes for their sex “were subjects of almost universal condemnation and ridicule, and the great majority of women shrank from anything that savored of political publicity.”

There were some in Indiana, however, bold enough to consider the shocking notion that a woman should be allowed to vote. At an anti-slavery meeting in Greensboro in 1851, Amanda Way, an abolitionist, prohibitionist, and licensed minister, offered a resolution declaring that women were “being oppressed and degraded by the laws and customs of our country, and are in but little better condition than chattel slaves.”

To help remedy the situation, Way, who when asked once why she never married replied, “I never had the time,” called for holding a women’s right convention. In October 1851 at Dublin, Indiana, a group of women met for a “full, free, and candid discussion of the legal and social position of women,” said Way.

A year after the Dublin meeting during a convention in Richmond, the Indiana Woman’s Rights Association was formed. Elected as the organization’s vice president, Way insisted that unless women demanded their political, social, and economic rights—including suffrage—they would continue “in the future, as in the past, to be classed with criminals, insane persons, idiots, and infants.” In 1859 the association presented a petition to the Indiana General Assembly, signed by a thousand men and women, seeking for women not only the same property rights as men, but also asking that the state constitution be amended to extend the right to vote to women. The legislature accepted the petition and passed it along to a committee, which, to no one’s surprise, decided that the time was not yet right to grant Hoosier women such privileges.

After this high-water mark, which included the first woman speaker to appear at the legislature, the women’s rights movement in Indiana came to a standstill because of an overriding national emergency—the Civil War. The Woman’s Rights Association held no meetings from 1859 to 1869, years, association minutes noted, when suffragists were giving their time, labor, money, and even lives to the cause of freedom. The association reconstituted itself after the war as the Indiana Woman’s Suffrage Association and sponsored its first meeting in ten years from June 8 to 9, 1869, at Indianapolis’s Masonic Hall. The gathering received positive notices from the Indianapolis Journal, which noted, somewhat condescendingly, that the assembly “compared favorably with the best that have ever been conducted by our own sex.”

Women still faced a long road to equal rights in the state. In the 1870s Zeralda Wallace, the widow of Governor David Wallace and president of the Woman’s Christian TemperanceUnion’s Indiana chapter, attempted to present to the state legislature a petition supporting temperance signed by thousands of Hoosier women—she faced “open contempt” by the lawmakers. One legislator even went as far as to tell Wallace that since women held not political power, her petition “might as well have been signed by 10,000 mice.”

By the 1880s, however, the tide seemed to shift. In December 1880 the Indianapolis suffrage society issued a letter to each legislator and to leading newspapers in the state indicating that during the next session of the Indiana General Assembly the group would seek action on the suffrage question. Suffragists were determined to make a two-pronged attack on the legislature. One was to seek passage of a bill that would “immediately authorize women to vote for presidential electors.” The second involved approval of an amendment to the state constitution allowing women to vote in all elections.

Although the presidential elector bill, introduced by Marion County representative John W. Furnas, passed two readings in the House, it fell three votes short of making it past a third reading.

Failure in one area, however, did not mean the dashing of all the suffragists’ hopes. The regular legislative session had expired before lawmakers had the opportunity to act on important state matters. Therefore, the legislators had to remain in Indianapolis for a special session from March 8 to April 16. The special session gave Indiana women the opportunity to pursue their second route for winning the right to vote: amending article two, section two of the state constitution to give women the vote in all elections.

On March 15 Furnas introduced a resolution in the House outlining a constitutional amendment giving Hoosier women the right to vote. The resolution passed the House on April 7 and, one day later, the Senate followed suit by approving the resolution.

The battle for woman’s suffrage in Indiana, however, was far from over. According to the terms of Indiana’s constitution, any amendment to it had to be passed by two consecutive legislatures and then sent on to voters for their approval. Recognizing the difficult road ahead, the Indianapolis suffrage group worked feverishly to attract supporters to its cause.

When the Indiana General Assembly opened for business in January 1883, the suffragists faced firm opposition from the Democratic Party, which controlled both houses of the legislature. Instead of risking a direct vote against the suffrage and temperance amendments, Democrats argued that all the proposed constitutional amendments, which seemed to have been approved by the previous legislature, had in fact not been legally adopted because they had not been properly entered in the journals of either the House or Senate. A majority report from the senate judiciary committee claimed that there was no evidence in the journals to indicate that either the houses of the legislature “referred, or intended to refer, a proposition to amend the Constitution to this Assembly.”

Suffragists were disappointed by the legislative defeat, but sought every opportunity over the years to prove that women could be a factor in state politics. They had to wait a long time, however, until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920, to achieve their goal of equal suffrage for their sex. 

May Wright Sewall and the Girls' Classical School

During the late nineteenth century, Indianapolis experienced a boom in both its population and industry. In spite of this, the city had, as historian and author Claude Bowers noted, “the charm of a large country town.”

One of the most fashionable avenues in the community was Pennsylvania Street. Mary McLaughlin, who lived in a comfortable home on that street, remembered that maple trees lined the roadway, offering cool shade even on the warmest days. The street was also a place where mule-driven streetcars kindly stopped for passengers in the middle of the block, “as they never seemed to be in a hurry to get downtown,” McLaughlin remembered.

Although she remembered a number of famous people who frequented the neighborhood, including Benjamin Harrison, elected as president in 1888, and several Indiana governors, McLaughlin in particular recalled a woman whom she often saw “coming up our street, often carrying a large bag of books, and walking briskly along”—May Wright Sewall. It was not surprising that McLaughlin frequently spied May strolling down the sidewalk, as the McLaughlin home on Pennsylvania Street was just one door down from the Girls’ Classical School, which had opened in 1882 and which May ran with her husband, Theodore.

Until its closing in 1907, the school offered Indianapolis’s girls an education equal to that found for boys in the Indianapolis Classical School and one based on the entrance requirements established for admission to such nationally known women’s colleges as Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. A college graduate herself, May believed that higher education was “a means to some of the largest and noblest ends, but it is also in itself a noble end.”

The Girls’ Classical School opened with forty-four students in attendance in September 1882 on the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph streets. The school, which eventually attracted pupils from across the country, taught its students something different from the usual courses girls had been taking in other schools, including such subjects as painting, drawing, and music.

Earlier schools for women organized in the city, such as the Indianapolis Female School and Miss Hooker’s Female School, had concentrated on teaching students how to act like ladies rather than to train their minds for serious study. The Girls’ Classical School offered two four-year courses of study, classics and English, with an additional year for pupils preparing for college entrance examinations. The course also included French and German, and the school emphasized that “Music, Painting, Drawing and similar branches” would not be offered.

May served as principal and also taught literature at the school. She took a firm hand in running the operation. “There was no nonsense about Mrs. Sewall,” one student remembered. The pupil noted that May used to come into her classroom, and after briefly speaking to the teacher, she talked to the students, all the time looking at them “through a large magnifying glass which enlarged her eye” and transformed her into “a Cyclops of most forbidding appearance.”

In opening a school with high standards, May, with her husband’s support, had given herself, as one Hoosier education historian noted, an ample “opportunity to apply some theories of her own in the education of girls.” One of these theories involved physical training for her students, something not usually offered to girls who attended school during the nineteenth century.

After a visit to the school, a reporter from the Indianapolis News came away with the opinion that a “spirit of happiness is suffused through the school.” The reporter was particularly impressed by the senior class of girls, noting the following: “They are not the kind of girls who lose their temper and self-possession under difficulties. They are not the sort of person who scream at trifles, nor do they call everything ‘lovely’—cabbages, waterfalls and all—and they are not the ones who wear shoes a great deal too small when they are young, and require shoes a great deal too large when they are old. They appear permanently well poised, mentally and bodily.”

The discipline shown by pupils at the Girls’ Classical School came about in no small part from the strict way in which May ran the school. Reminiscing about their former school, students—the daughters of Indianapolis’s leading businessmen and socially prominent mothers—described May as “a bit of a tyrant,” whose stern look could strike terror in their young hearts.

During school hours, students maintained a strict study schedule, with set hours for subjects such as reading, geography, writing, spelling, arithmetic, foreign languages, gymnastics, and grammar. Known for her promptness, May expected the same behavior from her students, often reminding them that school started at 8:30 a.m., and not a minute later. To those who claimed they did not have the time to work out a problem or translate a sentence, May always replied: “You mean you did not budget your time—you had all the time there was. You wasted it.”

May also offered advice to parents on how students should act outside of the classroom. In a letter sent to parents she noted that the hours of 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. should be set aside as a time for students to relax, but only in a certain way. She warned parents not to let their daughters waste their free time by visiting friends, shopping, or attending society parties.

May’s strict standards could, however, be too much on occasion, even for someone as sure of herself as famed suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Once while visiting May in Indianapolis to discuss suffrage matters, Anthony also toured the girls’ school. Writing about the visit in her diary, Anthony noted: “Mrs. Sewall introduced me to the girls of her Classical School as one who has dared [to] live up to her highest dream. I did not say a word for fear it might not be the right one.”