A Ship for Peace

In the early afternoon of December 4, 1915, a crowd estimated at anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 braved the brisk weather at a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, in order to witness the sailing of the Scandinavian-American ship Oscar II. The ship was set for a scheduled ten-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean to Christiania (today Oslo), Norway.

As the ship prepared to leave, the crowd sang and cheered as bands played such rousing songs as “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The biggest cheers, however, were reserved for the sponsor of this unusual adventure: famed automaker Henry Ford. The previous summer Ford had declared his willingness to devote his fortune to ending the fighting in Europe between the Allied Powers, led by Great Britain and France, and the Central Powers, dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Unable to discover any just reasons for the war, Ford believed that some nations “were anxious for peace and would welcome a demonstration for peace.” With the encouragement of Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian author, lecturer, and peace advocate, Ford had secured passage on the Oscar II for about sixty delegates in support of his mission. These delegates would attempt to halt the bloody trench warfare being fought with such deadly weapons as the machine gun and poison gas through the establishment of a neutral commission that would offer negotiation among the nations then at war.

Indiana educator and woman’s rights leader May Wright Sewall was one of the more than a hundred people, including such famous individuals as inventor Thomas Edison, reformer Jane Addams, and former president William Howard Taft to receive invitations from Ford to join him on the voyage. The first word of the trip came to Sewall in late November when she received a telegram from Ford, followed three days later by a letter in which the automobile maker spelled out in more detail his reasons for asking her to join him and others on the trip. “From the moment I realized that the world situation demands immediate action, if we do not want the war fire to spread any further,” Ford wrote, “I joined those international forces which are working toward ending this unparalleled catastrophe.”

In describing her fellow delegates for her friends in Indianapolis, Sewall agreed that no one had an “exalted position; not one bearing the stamp of worldwide recognition.” Through their work, however, Sewall said the delegates hoped to accomplish three goals: to secure the public’s attention, turning it from war to peace; to stimulate other private efforts and encourage workers to seek peace in every country; and confirm on all those involved their resolution to work for a permanent peace.

Before embarking on his peace crusade, Ford had met with President Woodrow Wilson to try to convince him to appoint an official neutral commission, which Ford was willing to back financially. Although noting he agreed in principle with the idea of mediation to stop the war, Wilson skillfully avoided endorsing Ford’s proposal.

Press reaction to Ford’s mission had been, at best, mixed. Some newspapers gave the automobile tycoon high marks for his good intentions, but most were skeptical about his chances at accomplishing his mission. The New York Evening Post boldly predicted that Ford’s plan would “be acclaimed by thoughtful hundreds of thousands the world over as a bit of American idealism in an hour when the rest of the world has gone mad over war and war preparedness.” Other newspapers were unstinting in their scorn, calling the effort “one of the cruelest jokes of the century” and “an impossible effort to establish an inopportune peace.”

When the Oscar II steamed away on December 4, it had onboard peace delegates described as “negligible” in standing by some observers. The group, however, included a respectable number with solid reputations, not only Sewall, but magazine publisher S. S. McClure, Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and Judge Ben Lindsey. Also on the ship were approximately 25 students representing institutions as diverse as Vassar, Princeton University, Purdue University, and the University of California at Berkley. There were also fifty members of the press, including reporters from United Press, the Associated Press, and the International News Service.

In assessing her fellow delegates for her friends in Indiana, Sewall acknowledged that no one in the party had an “exalted position; not one bearing the stamp of worldwide recognition.’ [I would argue she missed one person—herself.] She added, however, that none of the delegates were “hair-brained lunatics bent on a fool’s errand—but rather a company of clear-headed but simple-hearted men and women, with no illusions in regard to ourselves but with the faith that any one of us, much more all of us with God, constitutes a majority in the council where each next stop along the path of human progress is determined.”

Through their work, Sewall said the delegates hoped to accomplish three goals: to secure the public’s attention, diverting it from war to peace; to stimulate other private initiatives and encourage workers for peace in every country; and confirm on all involved their resolution to work for a permanent peace.

Once at sea, the delegates attempted to establish a regular routine. Each day at 11:00 a.m. the students met to learn more about the attempt to bring an end to the fighting in Europe. Each session opened with a talk by one of the delegates on a subject in which they were regarded as an expert. The delegates themselves listened to similar speakers daily at 4 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., becoming better acquainted with each other through such gatherings.

Sewall’s optimism and dedication to the peace process impressed other delegates. One of them, John D. Barry, an essayist, poet, and critic, said that in spite of Sewall’s age she proved to be one of the “most useful members of the party, keen, and quick of mind, bubbling over with information and observation, humorous, kindly and above all human.”

Ford’s goodwill to all on the voyage tamed the hearts of some of the cynical newspapermen. Florence Latimore of Survey magazine later related that a reporter had confided to her that his employers had told him to produce satirical articles about the trip, but after seeing Ford’s face he could not bring himself to follow their orders. Still another newsman told Latimore: “I came to make fun of the whole thing, but my editor is going to have the surprise of his life. I tell you I believe in Henry Ford and I’m going to say so even if I lose my job for it.”

Other reporters remained unconvinced and treated the voyage with derision. A London newspaperman even went as far to send a fake story about Ford being held prisoner in his cabin, chained to his bed by his staff. But when the Oscar II’s captain, J. W. Hempel, who reviewed all messages sent from the ship, took some of the more insulting stories to Ford, he responded kindly, telling Hempel: “Let them send anything they please. I want the boys to feel perfectly at home while they are with me. They are my guests. I wouldn’t for the world censor them.”

Legend has it that one delegate became so upset about what he viewed as an inaccurate report from Hoosier Elmer Davis, covering the voyage for the New York Times, that he called him “a snake in the Garden of Eden.” Davis responded by forming what he described by a Snakes in the Garden of Eden Club.

The real blowup came when the ship received a wireless report about a speech to Congress by Wilson calling for increased military preparedness. In trying to craft a response to the speech, sharp disagreements erupted among the delegates, with some calling for immediate disarmament and others arguing that countries should have the necessary means to defend themselves. Although the argument ended in a compromise, the incident prompted reporters to wire stories back to their newspapers about “mutiny” and “war” breaking out on the peace ship.

Early in the morning on December 18, the Oscar II docked in Christiania, Norway. Physically, Sewall said, Norway gave the delegates a cold welcome, as the weather was reportedly the chilliest in more than a hundred years. The peace expedition had barely had time to settle into its new setting when it received a bitter blow: Ford had decided to go home. Unable to shake the cold he had caught on the voyage, and encouraged to do so by his staff, Ford had decided to leave in time to catch a ship bound for America.

According to Louis P. Lochner, Ford’s private secretary, who had been “deeply shocked” by his boss’s appearance when he visited Ford in his hotel room, the automaker told him: “Guess I had better go home to mother [his wife Clara]. You’ve got this thing started now and can get along without me.” Lochner attempted to convince Ford to stay with the expedition, but failed.

Upon his return to America, Ford told the media he had not deserted the Peace Ship and offered no regrets for sponsoring the expedition. He noted that “the sentiment we have aroused by making the people think will shorten the war.” With Ford’s departure, the delegates turned for leadership to a committee. Policy matters were handled by Schwimmer and finances were the responsibility of Ford staff member Gaston Plantiff. (Ford is estimated to have spend a half-million dollars on the expedition, approximately $15.5 million today.)

The peace expedition spent a week in Stockholm, developing a regular schedule. Each morning at 10:00 a.m. the delegates met to discuss the day’s activities. From 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., the group hosted a reception at the hotel open to the public. The delegates had time to themselves until 4:00 p.m., when the expedition hosted a second public reception.

Sewall observed that visitors to the receptions seemed to fall into four categories: teachers, feminists, social reformers, and students. “I was particularly interested in the university students,” she said, “who, although it was their holiday week, called in great numbers. I was amazed by both the intelligence, and by the lively interest in serious subjects of these young people, whom I was mentally comparing with my young countrymen and countrywomen of student age to the distinct disadvantage of the latter.”

In order to reach the group’s final stop, the Netherlands, the delegates had to travel, via a sealed train, through German territory, a feat accomplished through the help of the American minister to Denmark. Once in the Netherlands, the group selected delegates for a proposed Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation, which had its headquarters in Stockholm and worked to negotiate an end to the war.

With this final task completed, the delegates and students could finally return home. On January 15, 1916, the delegates left port aboard the SS Rotterdam for the voyage back to America (the students had left four days earlier on another ship).

For Sewall, the “spectacular pilgrimage” had been a success, as it had “concentrated the thought of the distracted world upon this hope with a force that assures its achievement.” She felt proud of the work done by her and her fellow delegates. “To have advanced its [peace’s] arrival by one hour,” Sewall said, “is adequate compensation for the cost in money, time and sacrifices of the Expedition if multiplied a thousandfold.”

Sewall’s view was shared in part by one of the reporters aboard the Oscar II, Elmer Davis. Although he considered the trip a “crazy enterprise,” Davis, looking back on the voyage in an essay published in 1939 as Europe seemed on the brink of another war, said that any effort, “however visionary and inadequate, to stop a war that was wrecking Europe, appears in retrospect a little less crazy than most of the other purposes that were prevalent in Europe in 1916.”

 

Eli Lilly, Archaeology, Glenn Black, and the Indiana Historical Society

In the fall of 1930 a staff member of the Smithsonian Institution, Frank Setzler, assistant curator for archaeology, ran across a visitor from the Hoosier State. Setzler, who had worked as a surveyor for the Indiana Historical Society before migrating to Washington, DC, had been won over by the man’s passion for the subject, so much so that he wrote a letter to his old boss, Christopher B. Coleman. “I think the [archaeology] committee will be very fortunate to have such a man working with it,” Setzler told Coleman. “He seemed earnestly interested in the work and willing to learn all there is to know. . . . More men of his type will certainly boost archaeology in Indiana.”

Setzler was correct. The man he was writing about, Eli Lilly, businessman and future president of his family’s Indianapolis pharmaceutical company, certainly boosted archaeology in the state through his own efforts researching and writing about the subject, but also from his financial support of the archaeology program through the IHS. Subsequently, Lilly became more and more involved in the IHS’s other activities, serving as its president from 1933 to 1946 and as a trustee until his death in 1977; writing books on a variety of Indiana subjects (Prehistoric Antiquities of Indiana, published in 1937); supporting significant publications from other authors (as examples, R. C. Buley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840 and the multivolume The Diary of Calvin Fletcher); paying the salaries and/or underwriting the education of such prominent staff members as Glenn A. Black and Gayle Thornbrough; and offering significant sums (without publicity) for the organization’s endowment, as well as expanded facilities. As Setzler noted, Lilly’s association with the IHS had “been among the pleasantness that I have had in this lower mundane institute.”

Before Lilly’s involvement the IHS had experienced some difficult times since its creation on December 11, 1830, when more than half the members of the legislature and several Indiana Supreme Court judges had gathered at the Marion County Courthouse to consider forming a historical society to collect and preserve material about the nineteenth state’s past. John H. Farnham, one of the IHS’s founders and its corresponding secretary, said at the initial meeting that those in attendance fully impressed with the importance and necessity of collecting and preserving the materials for a comprehensive and accurate history of our country, natural, civil and political, many of which are of an ephemeral and transitory nature, and in the absence of well directed efforts to preserve them are rapidly passing into oblivion.”

Unfortunately, the IHS failed to achieve all Farnham, who died in a cholera epidemic in 1833, had hoped for despite several tries at reorganization and leadership attempts from such notable Hoosiers as John Brown Dillon and John Coburn. “Its existence has been very quiet,” Indiana historian Jacob P. Dunn Jr. said of the group. “So quiet at times as to suggest death.” Dunn, along with fellow amateur historians William H. English and Daniel Wait Howe, worked to revitalize the organization in the 1880s, and began its long tradition of publishing monographs. Further assistance to the IHS’s mission to collect “all materials calculated to shed light on the natural, civil, and political history of Indiana” came in 1922 with a generous $150,000 bequest from Delavan Smith to establish a memorial library in honor of his father, William Henry Smith (after whom the IHS’s library is named), as well as donating items on Indiana history collected by both Smiths.

Lilly’s enthusiasm for archaeology and increasing role with the IHS led to a lasting friendship with Black, a former salesman, “estimating engineer” for an Indianapolis company, and musician, which, in turn, led to the organization’s involvement in saving one of the state’s most important archaeological sites—Angel Mounds, located on the Ohio River in Vanderburgh and Warrick Counties and built between 1000 and 1450 AD by people of the Mississippian culture. The two men admired one another, with Lilly saying that as he saw it, Indiana archaeology depended on Black, while Black wrote in 1960 that Lilly was the “one person essentially responsible for what has been achieved in the field of prehistory through the Indiana Historical Society during the last three decades.”

Self-educated in archaeology, Black first became familiar with Lilly in May 1931 when he served as a driver and guide for a tour of the state’s most important archaeological sites in southern Indiana with William King Moorehead, the well-known director of the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology in Andover, Massachusetts. “The memory of the three delightful days in your expedition,” Lilly later wrote Moorehead, “will always be a happy one.”

Both Lilly and Moorehead were impressed by Black. “Mr. Black is an intelligent and willing worker and I am certain will make good. I predict a future for him,” Moorehead wrote Lilly, who hired Black to do archaeological work and initially funded his field expenses and $225 per month salary. To improve Black’s credentials with others involved in the field, the IHS, with Lilly’s approval, sent the young man to study from October 1931 to May 1932 at the Ohio State Museum under Henry C. Shetrone, an expert in the mound builders. 

Lilly subsequently paid Black’s salary as the IHS’s archaeologist through contributions to the organization, the only way, he noted, he could “get credit on my income tax.” As usual for such contributions, Lilly made it a condition that he receive no publicity for his generosity. The investment certainly paid off. As Coleman wrote Lilly in November 1938, Black was so “thoroughly devoted to archaeology and such a fine person in every respect that it is difficult to put a money value on his services.”

One of Black and Lilly’s major achievements was securing the approximately 400-acre Angel Mounds site from destruction—a process that Black described as including “a long period of interest, watchful waiting, diligent effort, and sacrifice on the part of the a few people in Indiana in whose hearts was a wish that this site be preserved at all costs.” The site had fascinated Lilly for many years and he had included a description of it in his book Prehistoric Antiquities of Indiana and wondered why no significant archaeological investigations had been made there. “What would we not give to reverse the film of prehistory to a view of the teeming life within this village, its boisterous play, sweat-producing work, revered ceremonies, bloody wars, and the general way of living?” he asked, urging the state to rescue Angel Mounds from possible oblivion and thus saving for posterity “another of our pre-Columbian heritages.”

The Angel Mounds site had attracted national interest in the early 1930s, with Black accompanying a National Park Service official, Vern Chaterlaine, on a tour of the area with an eye toward acquiring it for the government. In August 1932 Lilly met with Coleman and other IHS officers to discuss the idea of purchasing the private properties “at a reasonable price” and having the organization’s archaeological committee manage the site. Black noted that Lilly had agreed to assume the expense, upkeep, and explorations at Angel Mounds for a few years, and then the IHS might possibly “give the mounds to the State or Nation as a park.” That attempt failed.

Six years later, with Evansville growing and the danger increasing that Angel Mounds might be swallowed up by development or possible encroachment from flood-prevention projects, there was an increased urgency to buy the site. Black set out to obtain support for doing so from Evansville civic organizations, politicians, and media. “Enthusiasm varied, naturally,” Black recalled, “but no one voiced opposition to the proposal that the site be saved, explored and, ultimately, restored.” Black and others also lobbied the Evansville Plan Commission to prevent, if it could, for a reasonable time, “further realty development in the neighborhood of the mounds.” He noted that this step had to be taken as a precautionary measure “to prevent spiraling land prices in the event that the attempt to acquire the property failed at that time.”

Although both the Evansville Courier and Evansville Press cooperated with Black’s effort in every way, including publishing editorials backing the project and cartoons with Courier staff artist Karl Kae Knecht, sufficient public donations never materialized (only $127 had been collected locally). “It made it very difficult, and embarrassing,” Black reflected, “to approach ‘outsiders’ when financial support in Evansville was completely lacking.” With “great reluctance,” and knowledge that options on the land purchases were soon set to expire, Black wrote to Lilly in early October 1938, including a statement covering the amount of funds needed to complete the land purchase, as it was “barely possible that we may receive unsuspected support at the last moment and we shall not give up trying until that time arrives.”

Lilly, who previously had donated $11,000 to the IHS to be “borrowed” for some land options set to expire in July, went even further with his generosity, giving the organization another $57,000 to, as he noted, “prevent the destruction of the mounds at Evansville.” In 1939, under Black’s direction and with the assistance of workers funded by the Works Progress Administration, archaeological excavations began at Angel Mounds. (Today the site is owned and operated by the state of Indiana, and Indiana University’s Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology does research and excavations.)

Preservation of Angel Mounds came at just the right time. Black had noted that while he and others were trying to raise the money necessary to purchase the land holdings, they continually stressed that in Indiana and around the country, “we were . . . destroying our heritage at an alarming rate.” An expanding American economy and population, he was sure, meant that large archaeological sites such as Angel Mounds were sure to be lost. “Even spots of green in the form of fields and woods, adjacent to centers of population density,” he noted, “would be rarities.” Black said he and others did not know, in 1938, how “prophetic we were being,” as in the future the site would be encroached upon by expanding residential areas.

After saving Angel Mounds, Lilly kept a keen interest in progress at the site and continued his close friendship with Black. Lilly’s interest included such mundane matters as controlling weeds at the property by allowing Black to purchase the proper equipment needed to handle the problem, as well as making sure that the house Black and his wife occupied on the site had the necessary sanitary facilities. “It seems to me that we cannot ask Mr. and Mrs. Black to reside in those parts without such equipment,” Lilly wrote Coleman in March 1939, “and I move you, sir, that we instruct him to have proper arrangements made and charged to the archaeological funds.”

Angel Mounds proved to be a busy place in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as Black, who called the effort one of “the most rewarding experiences” of his life, oversaw excavations at the site by workers hired through the federal government’s Works Progress Administration, with the Indiana Historical Bureau serving as the project’s sponsor.

Largely untrained in archaeological practices, the 277 men, most in their thirties and forties, who toiled at the site from April 27, 1939, to May 22, 1942, for the public works project processed approximately 2.3 million archaeological items. “There were men from farm, factories, and offices. . . . There was a retired minister, a trained tree surgeon, and one paroled homicide [convict],” Black recalled. “But so far as we were concerned, we made it a point to ignore backgrounds and concentrate on the tasks at hand. We considered one of these tasks to relate to the men themselves—to explore their personal potential and get as much out of them as possible.” In his time with the WPA workers, his admiration and respect for their “inherent ability, ‘native’ honesty, and ingenuity increased tremendously.”

In 1944 Black joined Indiana University as a lecturer, eventually teaching three courses: North American archaeology, Ohio Valle archaeology, and archaeological methods and techniques. With the end of World War II, Black wanted to restart field work at Angel Mounds. “A conviction grew that the site was actually an outdoor classroom of almost inexhaustible proportions; why not use it as such,” Black exclaimed. With the approval of the IHS and IU, field schools were held at Angel Mounds each year from 1945 through 1962, giving students practical training that paid “dividends in the years which they devote later to field archaeology,” said Black, who was recognized for his outstanding work in archaeology with an honorary degree from Wabash College in 1958.

The hard work Black engaged in took a toll on his health. After experiencing some trouble with his heart in the early 1940s, he received a letter from Lilly telling him to take time off from Angel Mounds if his doctors advised him to do so. “One Glenn Black is worth all the mounds, villages, and camp sites in the Mississippi Valley so do listen to reason,” Lilly wrote. “Do be sensible, young fellow, and reassure your old friend that you are doing the very best for yourself—and all of us.”

Black, who succumbed to a fatal heart attack on September 2, 1964, came to hold Lilly with the esteem a son has for a father, and the two men, and their wives, often visited each other’s homes and took vacations together. “You have been my ‘father,’ friend and councilor,” Black wrote Lilly in 1958. “More than anything else I have wanted to please you and give you no cause to regret that we ever took that first archaeological trip together in May 1931.” A touched Lilly replied that if he had a son, he would want him “to have character and abilities equal to yours.”

Lilly made certain that Black’s achievements at Angel Mounds were recognized, including his research on the work at the site. The archaeologist had almost finished the project before his death, and his friend did all he could do, including financially, to see the work published, helped in no small part by contributions from Doctor James H. Kellar, Black’s student and the first director of the Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology at IU, and HIS editor Gayle Thornbrough. In 1967 the IHS published Black’s two-volume work, Angel Site: An Archaeological, Historical, and Ethnological Study. The book received wide praise, with Ethnohistory describing it as “a landmark in New World archaeology.” The Lilly Endowment had helped fund the construction of the Black Lab at IU and provided aid to build an interpretive center at Angel Mounds.

Until his death on January 24, 1977, Lilly continued his long association with the IHS, including a million-dollar donation to help build an addition to the Indiana State Library, dedicated in October 1976, which provided space for the IHS staff and library. Upon Lilly’s death, the IHS learned that its longtime benefactor had left the organization in his will 10 percent of his holdings (309,904 shares of stock) in Eli Lilly and Company. He ensured that the institution could continue to play a major role in championing Indiana history in the future, as it did with Angel Mounds. Lilly’s foresight provided the IHS with the means to consistently operate as one of the leading private state historical societies in the country. Lilly’s decades of involvement and support had elevated IHS to be worthy of John Farnham’s founding vision in 1830.

 

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.”
           
 

Top Ten Books for Hoosiers

A number of years ago, I came across an online article with the intriguing title “10 Books Every Minnesotan Should Have Read by Now.” The piece touted Minnesota’s “historically rich literature community,” and included in its listing works by a diverse group of authors, including Laura Ingalls Wilder, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tim O’Brien, and Carol Bly.

Intrigued, I wondered, if I was asked, what ten books might I select for a “10 Books Every Hoosier Should Have Read by Now.” After all, Indiana has just a rich literary tradition as the Land of 10,000 Lakes—something shown in great detail in a Literary Map of Indiana developed by the Indiana Center for the Book for the state’s bicentennial in 2016.  The hardest part in compiling such a list would be to keep it to just ten books. Leaving out some worthy choices, here are my selections, in no particular order:

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace: One of the best-selling books of all time, and one of the best researched. Wallace could not have written such a classic without his experiences in battle during the Civil War.

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut: Another book forged from a Hoosier’s experience during wartime, this time Vonnegut’s capture by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in Word War II. Harrowing and extremely funny.

The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington: Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and set in a fictionalized Indianapolis. Tarkington captures the wholesale changes in American society during the beginning of the twentieth century.

Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List, by Michael Martone: Short, sharp vignettes of Indiana lore told with affection and regret by a Fort Wayne native who has left the state, but is not forgotten.

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, by Jean Shepherd: Yes, Indiana, the Calumet Region is part of us. The quintessential Hoosier coming-of-age story. Quirky fun with a leg lamp, a Red Ryder air rifle, and a Fourth of July firework for the ages.

The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1850, by R. Carlyle Buley: Winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for history, the book, written by the son of a Hoosier schoolteacher, portrays in vivid detail the “beliefs, struggles and way of life” of those who settled what became the nineteenth state.

The Negro in Indiana before 1900: A Study of a Minority, by Emma Lou Thornbrough: A groundbreaking work still relevant today by one of the preeminent historians of the state and a dedicated teacher at Butler University. 

Brave Men, by Ernie Pyle: Nobody wrote about war and the strange and awful things it does to those trapped in it than Pyle, who witnessed at firsthand “wholesale death and vile destruction” as he reported from North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and the Pacific.

Indiana:An Interpretation, by John Bartlow Martin: A bracing anecdote to feel-good histories that came before, Martin’s work offers not comfort, but challenge to the enduring myth of the average Hoosier. Not for the faint-hearted.

A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America, by James H. Madison: The noted chronicler of Indiana pours onto the page all of the horror of the state’s most terrible nights, when two African American teenagers were lynched in Marion. A sobering look at America’s struggles with race.

* Honorable mention: Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary, by Ray E. Boomhower: My examination of Kennedy's last-minute, longshot run for the Democratic nomination for president, which kicked off in the Hoosier State and included his famous April 4 speech in Indianapolis announcing the death of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

 

 

 

Covering a Coup: Malcolm W. Browne in Saigon

The first sign of trouble came on a clear Friday afternoon, November 1, 1963. Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, had been “empty and silent” for the traditional noon siesta when Malcolm W. Browne, Associated Press bureau chief, received a tip from a source at the U.S. Embassy. He learned that rebellious Army of the Republic of Vietnam troops had surrounded the central police station and the country’s naval headquarters on the riverfront was also under siege.

 
Browne drove his office’s Land Rover at “breakneck speed” to the navy compound. He ignored the base’s security guard, traveling past him for a half block until he heard yelling and the unmistakable sound of someone “chambering a round in his carbine.”
 

Uncertainty reigned, however, until 3:00 p.m., when Browne and his staff heard planes roaring over their office. With the AP office located only a short distance from the Gia Long Palace, the official residence for President Ngo Dinh Diem, “the combined sound of the strafing and heavy antiaircraft guns was shattering,” Browne remembered. An incoming shell came close to hitting the journalist as he tried to get a better view of the action, but a guard loyal to Diem saved Browne’s life by pulling him through a hole in a wall to safety.
 
Edwin Q. White, who had come from AP’s Tokyo bureau to bolster the staff, dispatched the first bulletin describing the heavy gunfire at the presidential palace and reports about ARVN troops in full battle gear deployed throughout the city. In his article, delivered out of the country with the assistance of the American and South Korean embassies, White predicted that the firing could well signal the start of a military coup against Diem’s government. “Marines in battle dress with heavy weapons and artillery surrounded national police director headquarters about 1350 [1:50 p.m.],” he wrote. “Other police headquarters throughout city were taken over by marines, apparently without resistance.”
 
As White remained at the office, Browne, Roy Essoyan (from AP’s Hong Kong bureau), and Bill Ha Van Tran set out to discover what was happening. “We did a lot of walking, running and crawling, machinegun fire and shrapnel snapping just overhead,” Browne recalled. “There was action everywhere, and no telling where the fire was going to come from next.”
 
The gunfire grew more intense as the sun set. Browne and his colleagues were able to identify where the hotspots were and which units “were clearly on the offensive against government troops and which ones were trying to counter-attack. So, it was pretty confusing. The whole city was divided up into a patchwork of different loyalties and different uniforms and plenty of shooting.”
 
The AP bureau’s “indefatigable” messenger, Dan Van Huan, sidestepped numerous firefights, said Browne, risking his life to keep messages flowing to White at the AP office. “We all think it will be nice to get back to the relative peace and safety of the normal war operations against the Vietcong,” joked Browne.

Rumors, plots, and heralds from above absorbed the attention of Saigon residents in the days leading up to the coup and even afterward. Conspirators seemed to be everywhere, scheming away in each other’s homes, in nightclubs, and in the countryside. “Everybody knew that something was coming,” Browne recalled.
 
Browne even wrote an article, sent over the AP wires, about a rumor that the Vietnamese expected the sun to start revolving strangely in the sky. Large crowds of office workers, shoppers, and strollers jammed into the city’s central markets, only to be scattered by the police. He reported that the sun’s abnormal motion was supposed to be the sign of a Buddhist miracle. Officials were suspicious about the rumor, believing it had been spread “as a test, to see how fast crowds could be assembled at key places in the city,” he added.
 
When mutinous ARVN units finally struck on November 1, plots and counterplots continued rose and fell. Rebel officers sometimes lied to their men about the true purpose of their movement into the capital. A colonel admitted to newsman Stanley Karnow of the Saturday Evening Post that he told his platoon leaders the police “were plotting to overthrow Diem and we were going to save him.” A mystified paratrooper asked his commander who they were supposed to fight and received the answer: “Anyone who opposes us is the enemy.”
 

Confusion also marked attempts by rebel forces to convince government supporters to join their cause. Browne uncovered the story of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, Diem’s naval commander, whose schedule that day was supposed to include an official dinner commemorating his birthday. Early Friday Quyen had been summoned to report to general staff headquarters by Major General Duong Van Minh, one of the key coup leaders. “Quyen drove to the headquarters near Saigon airport, where he undoubtedly met military commanders who were to lead the successful coup later in the day,” Browne reported.
 
Declining to join the rebellion, Quyen sped from the scene in his car toward Bien Hoa, hoping to rally loyalist forces. “Several jeeps and a civilian car were seen following Quyen outside the city,” wrote Browne. “The pursuit continued for eight miles outside city limits, and ended when a burst of submachine gun fire riddled Quyen’s vehicle. His body was laid out in the road and then taken away in a civilian car.”
 
That afternoon Quyen’s staff learned of his death from a revolutionary naval officer, who called upon his colleagues to surrender. Fighter aircraft attacked ships docked nearby, and the craft responded by blazing away at the airplanes with their deck guns, downing one plane, Browne reported. “But about 15 minutes later,” he added, “the naval command staff agreed to give in, and signed a document pledging loyalty to the revolutionaries.”
 

As Browne rallied his AP staff to cover the coup, two of his top men, reporter Peter Arnett and photographer Horst Faas, both away from Saigon, did all they could to get to the capital. Returning to South Vietnam after a trip to Cambodia on an Air Vietnam passenger jet, Arnett recalled that the plane had flown into Vietnamese airspace at 3:00 p.m. when he felt it starting to veer away from its destination. “I banged on the pilot’s cabin door and my fears were confirmed by the captain, who was talking with an air traffic controller; a coup d’etat was in progress; bombers were in the air over Saigon, blasting the Presidential Palace,” Arnett remembered. “I would miss the biggest story of my life because Tan Son Nhut Airport was closed to all traffic.”
 
Thinking fast, Arnett argued with the pilot, pointing out that the aircraft “had a right to land on its own soil” and raising terrible fears about the fate of the crew’s families amid the chaos. Arnett’s arguments worked, and the plane’s captain guided his craft to a safe landing.
 
An airline bus took Arnett most of the way to the AP office before its driver lost his nerve and made his passenger disembark. “Gunfire roared and ricocheted around me,” Arnett recalled. “I could see soldiers firing from upper-story windows at the Gia Long Palace. Our three-story office and apartment building had been turned into a fort with soldiers firing their weapons at the palace across the street, protecting themselves behind makeshift sandbagged emplacements in the parking lot and the first-floor balcony outside my apartment door.”
 
Bursting into the AP office, Arnett saw White, known by his colleagues as “unflappable Ed,” calmly puffing away on a cigar while typing; the rest of the staff had left. “The others are at the Caravelle [Hotel] and I’m holding the fort, which is something I’ve said plenty of times in the past but for once is true,” White told Arnett, who took advantage of a lull in the fighting to make his way to the Caravelle.
 
White remained at his post until 6:30 p.m. when, as Browne noted, “he decided things were getting a little too hot.” Later that night, a shell hit an M48 tank parked in front of the AP’s office, igniting the tank’s ammunition and causing it to burn throughout the night.
 
When he arrived at the Caravelle, Arnett discovered Browne and Essoyan on the hotel’s upper floors, where they had a spectacular view of the fighting going on at Gia Long and the barracks housing its guards. “The rumors and the speculation of months past were coming true before my eyes and I watched it all with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other,” Arnett remembered.
 
As it grew dark, Browne saw tracers and shells streak through Saigon’s skies, with many hitting the palace, while others fell short, bringing down power and telephone lines. Leaving the hotel as the battle continued to rage, Arnett came upon children running around collecting spent cartridges from the sidewalks, two U.S. soldiers who stopped him to ask directions to the nearest bar, and two drunk Americans walking near the National Assembly building, one of them loudly complaining, “Tell them to knock that off, they’re scaring everybody.”
 
Walking to the Rex Hotel, which housed American troops, Arnett found its officers mess crowded with soldiers, who had been warned by authorities to stay off the streets. “They were whiling away the time rolling dice or playing the slot machines,” he noted. Later, on a suggestion from Browne, Arnett made his way to the U.S. military mission, where he stayed for the rest of evening. He even received a briefing about the coup from an American intelligence officer, “a rare display of generosity toward the media,” Arnett recalled. The official had been impressed by what he had seen from the anti-Diem forces, telling Arnett that it showed that the Vietnamese could “run a pretty good war if political considerations are removed.”
 
While Browne and Arnett tried to stay safe in the embattled city, Faas was in Ca Mau, on a patrol with South Vietnamese Rangers. A U.S. adviser accompanying the Rangers heard a report on his radio telling him to prepare to pull his forces from the field, as a coup had broken out. “Oh shit,” Faas remembered saying, “I’m two hundred miles away from Saigon and that’s the story that’s developing and I’m down here in Ca Mau. Get me out of here as quickly as possible.”
 
Faas hooked up with Steve Stibbens, a Marine photographer for Stars and Stripes, and they were able to get tickets for a flight to Saigon. Unable to land there because of the fighting, the plane diverted its flight to the port city of Vung Tao, located about sixty miles southeast of Saigon. Faas and Stibbens commandeered a jeep from the Vietnamese and drove as fast as possible to the capital, getting there after the newly established 7:00 p.m. curfew.
 
Dressed as he was, in a helmet and makeshift uniform, Faas discovered he had little trouble passing through roadblocks or driving around rebel units scattered throughout the city. Finding the AP office empty, he remembered feeling guilty about being late for such a momentous story.
 
Shortly after midnight, Saigon “became still and dead as a city under the plague,” Browne reported. Downtown streets seemed deserted, and the guns fell silent. The lull allowed a dinner-jacketed headwaiter at a leading hotel, White wrote, to calmly seat a few guests, laughingly explaining to them that “service might be [a] little slow because some restaurant help had left.” A dog’s loud barking betrayed “stealthy movement in the shadows,” Browne observed. “No lights showed from inside the waiting palace.”
 
At about 3:00 a.m., intense gunfire broke out, with large shells from distant artillery hitting a building behind the telecommunications center. Browne could also see tanks moving through the streets, slipping “across the main boulevards from the west and from the riverfront, taking up positions just outside the palace walls.”
 
The final assault on the palace began at 4:00 a.m. “The blast of cannon, machineguns and rapid-fire pieces blended into a continuous roar,” he reported. “The dark shapes in the streets spat clouds of green, yellow and blue fire, and great blobs of red flame marked the exploding shells. Buildings near the palace became infernos, and answering fire from the palace set two armored vehicles afire.”
 

Finally, at 6:37 a.m., Browne recorded, the drained, grimy palace guards surrendered, hoisting a white flag, which was greeted with “a thunderous cheer” by the rebel forces. Faas followed as Vietnamese marines stormed into the palace, smashing chandeliers, tearing down Diem’s portraits, and firing their weapons, though there was no need to do so as the opposition had collapsed. By 9:00 a.m. Faas decided he had taken enough photographs and turned his attention to finding a place to develop his film.
 
With the AP office’s darkroom out of action (the power and telephone lines were out), Faas went to a local photo shop, scaring the store’s staff when he burst through the front door in his makeshift uniform. He used the store’s equipment to develop approximately twelve photographs. With the photos in hand, he walked to the Post, Telegraph and Telephone office to transmit his work with the assistance of an employee he knew, Madame Binh.
 
Talking to Binh, Faas learned that he was the first photographer to arrive, beating his colleagues. “They had mistakenly believed that the post office, because it was occupied by troops, had been closed; it hadn’t been closed. The troops went through it,” he recalled. “The coup troops made a few propaganda broadcasts, occupied it with their people, but the personnel continued as normal.” By 4:00 p.m. a line opened and Faas was able to send his photographs to the outside world. “I happened to be a hero when I thought I would be almost fired,” he remembered.