Bailout for Book Industry

Humorist, author (his book on the Pittsburgh Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, is one of the best sports books ever written), and president of the Authors Guild, Roy Blunt Jr., has penned a letter that should be read by every shopper this holiday season. Hope plenty of consumers take Mr. Blount's words to heart in the coming days:

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

The Guild's staff informs me that many of you are writing to ask whether you can forward and post my holiday message encouraging orgiastic book-buying. Yes! Forward! Yes! Post! Sound the clarion call to every corner of the Internet: Hang in there, bookstores! We're coming! And we're coming to buy! To buy what? To buy books! Gimme a B! B! Gimme an O! O! Gimme another O! Another O! Gimme a K! K! Gimme an S! F! No, not an F, an S. We're spelling BOOKS!

Let it Snow!

For the sixth year, I participated in the Indiana Historical Society's annual Holiday Author Fair at the Indiana History Center. This year, I shared a table with Geoff Paddock, author of the IHS Press book Indiana Political Heroes. Since I worked on the book with Geoff, and on the essays in the book that also appeared in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, we had a good time. IHS photographer David Turk snapped this photo of us as we held up our recent tomes.

Geoff almost didn't make the event on Saturday, December 6, due to the snow that blanketed the state. He had a harrowing trip from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis and saw a number of vehicles slide off the highway. The snow may have prevented some people from attending, but there was a steady crowd most of the day and the readers seemed pleased to be able to talk with and get books signed by approximately ninety Indiana authors.

John Beineke, author of the youth biography Going over all the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey, wrote an op-ed about the event that was featured in today's Indianapolis Star. To read the article, go here.

New Kennedy Book Review

My book Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary has received a positive review from H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

Reviewing the book for H-Indiana, the e-mail discussion list on the nineteenth state's history and culture, William Doherty examines the 1968 campaign and compares it to what went on in Indiana's 2008 Democratic primary pitting Barak Obama against Hillary Clinton.

IHS Author Fair December 6

Already in a panic about your Christmas shopping now that the election has wound down? Never fear, the Indiana Historical Society's sixth annual Holiday Author Fair will be from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 6, at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 W. Ohio St., Indianapolis.

The event, free and open to the public, offers a chance for you to get that special someone signed copies of books from a variety of Indiana writers in such fields as fiction, non-fiction, biography, history, poetry, gardening, and children's books. Refreshments will also be served and there will activities available for children.

I will be one of the approximately 90 authors on hand to personally inscribe copies of my books, including Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. Other authors scheduled to appear include Indiana's Poet Laureate, Norbert Krapf; noted historical novelist James Alexander Thom; novelist and short story writer Michael Martone; Abraham Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer; and novelist Mary Mackey.

Some of the authors will give talks during the day. The schedule of talks are as follows:

* 12:30 p.m. Harold Holzer, "Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861."

* 1 p.m. Bill Harley, "Toads, Pirates, and Other Creatures!"

* 1:30 p.m. Norbert Krapf, Selections from Bloodroot: Indiana Poems and The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood.

* 2 p.m. Todd Tucker, "Notre Dame vs. the Klan vs. IUPUI: Anatomy of a Free Speech Controversy."

* 2:30 p.m. Tasha Jones, Selections from Hello Beautiful: A Memoir.

* 3 p.m. Susan Sutton, "The Bass Photo Company Collections: A Family Album for the City."

Vote Early, Vote Often

My wife and I voted early this morning at our precinct on the northside of Indianapolis. It was the first time I could remember having to wait in line to vote in an Indiana election. The whole process went very smoothly and the wait in line was no more than ten to fifteen minutes.

While I was waiting to vote, I could not help but think of how voting used to be practiced in the Hoosier State. Perhaps it was the fact that Indiana might be a key state in the national presidential contest, something it hasn't been for quite some time, but I couldn't help but think of the 1888 presidential election pitting Indiana's own Benjamin Harrison against Grover Cleveland. (For more on this election, see my biography of Indiana historian Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr., where the following information is from.)

Voting in Indiana during the late nineteenth century usually involved a simple process. Under the state's election laws ballots were controlled and furnished to voters by political parties, and not to state officials. These "party ticket" ballots, as they became known, contained the names of only a particular party's slate of candidates. The only state law regarding ballots required that they be printed on plain white paper three inches wide.

The practice of allowing political organizations to furnish ballots, a common one throughout the country in the 1880s, made it easy to bribe a class of voter known as a "floater," a person with no fixed party allegiance who sold his franchise to the highest bidder, be it Democrat or Republican. Party workers could buy these votes for as little as two dollars or as high as twenty dollars in tight elections. These workers could ensure that once a floater was bought, he stayed bought, because, according to Eldon Cobb Evans's history of the Australian voting system in the United States, the workers were "permitted to have full view of the voter's ticket from the time it was given him until it was dropped in the ballot box."

The number of floating votes in Indiana was estimated to have been ten thousand in the 1880 election and as high as twenty thousand in 1888. Indiana University professor R. H. Dabney, in a letter to The Nation, went as far as to assert that the floating vote in Indiana during the 1888 election reached as high as thirty thousand. He told of one Bloomington resident who attempted to buy butter on election day but was told by a storekeeper that none was available—it had all been bought the day before to "butter sandwiches for floaters—for it would seem that even the Hoosier floater cannot live by free whiskey alone."

Indiana party workers went to unusual lengths to capture the floating vote. Thomas R. Marshall, Indiana governor and vice president, noted in his memoirs that it was not unusual “to corral what was known as the floating vote, fill it full of redeye, lock it up the night before election and march it to the polls early the next morning." A veteran poll watcher, Marshall knew of one Republican who planned to keep a floater in his room all night to guarantee that he voted the GOP ticket the next day. An enterprising Democrat, however, set fire to a nearby woodshed and cried out that the Republican's store was on fire. When the Republican ran off to make sure his business was safe, Marshall said, "the Democrats stole his chattel."

Attempts by both parties to capture the floating vote played a key role in the 1888 presidential contest in Indiana. In spite of Harrison's favorite son status, the state was up for grabs with both sides maneuvering desperately to win. The Indianapolis Journal reported in a November 2, 1888, editorial that it was the floating vote "that the machinery and work of the contending parties are designed to influence . . . and nobody but a ninny-hammer would dream of anything else." Walter Q. Gresham, who had battled Harrison for the Republican presidential nomination, was informed by Chicago attorney Robert T. Lincoln that W. H. H. Miller, Harrison's law partner, and Harrison's son, Russell, had visited Lincoln and asked for money to use for bribing Indiana voters. "The purchase of votes," Gresham wrote Noble Butler, "is carried on by both parties with little effort at concealment. If the thing goes on unchecked a catastrophe is inevitable. What is to become of us?"

With Cleveland and Harrison running neck and neck, the Republican campaign in Indiana and throughout the country was rocked by the uncovering of the infamous "blocks of five" letter from William Dudley, a Hoosier Civil War veteran who served as GOP national committee treasurer in the 1888 election. In the letter, which was sent to Indiana Republican county chairmen, Dudley warned that "only boodle and fraudulent votes and false counting of returns can beat us in the State [Indiana]." To counter this threat, he advised GOP workers to find out which Democrats at the polls were responsible for bribing voters and steer committed Democratic supporters to them, thereby exhausting the opposition's cash stockpile. The most damaging part of the letter appeared in a sentence that became synonymous with political corruption. Dudley advised: "Divide the floaters into blocks of fives, and put a trusted man with necessary funds in charge of these five, and make him responsible that none get away."

This political dynamite in Dudley's letter managed to find its way to the opposition camp, albeit with a little help. A Democratic mail clerk on the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, suspicious about the large amount of mail being passed from GOP headquarters to Indiana Republicans, opened one of the letters, recognized its value to his party, and passed the damaging contents on to the Indiana Democratic State Central Committee chairman. The letter was printed in the Indianapolis Sentinel on October 31, 1888, under a banner headline reading "The Plot to Buy Indiana." Although an indignant Dudley and other top Republican officials declared that the letter was a forgery—and later claimed, correctly, that someone had been opening their mail—its contents received nationwide attention.

Fanning the partisan flames even further, the Sentinel offered Dudley one thousand dollars if he came to Indianapolis and swore that the letter published by the newspaper was a forgery; an offer Dudley never accepted. The letter's revelations about political underhandedness, however, came too late to derail Harrison's campaign. The Hoosier Republican eked out a 2,300 vote plurality in Indiana. Cleveland won the nationwide popular vote, but Harrison handily captured the electoral college (233—168), and with that victory became president.

After the election Harrison seemed blissfully unaware that political shenanigans might have played a role in his election. He told U.S. senator Matt Quay of Pennsylvania, GOP national chairman, that "Providence has given us the victory." Quay, a veteran politico who considered the new president a "political tenderfoot," was unmoved by Harrison's oratory. He later exclaimed to a Philadelphia journalist: "Think of the man! He ought to know that Providence hadn't a damned thing to do with it." The president, Quay said, might "never learn how close a number of men were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him President."

RFK Book Interview

I was recently interviewed by Marshall Poe, University of Iowa associate professor of history, for his blog New Books in History, which features discussions with historians about their work, and particularly their new books. The interview examined my book Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary, published this past spring by Indiana University Press.

"Writing Out Loud" Appearance at Michigan City

What to know what teacher inspired my love of history, why I decided to write a biography of Hoosier astronaut Gus Grissom, or what kind of computer I use to write my books? The answers to these and many other questions can be found by attending the twenty-fourth season of the Michigan City Public Library's "Writing Out Loud" program. I will be the featured author to be questioned at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 1, at the library, 100 East Fourth Street in Michigan City.

The program's format includes about twenty minutes of questions followed by a reading from the author. I will be reading a selection from my book Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. I will then take questions from the audience.

For more information on the program, call the library at (219) 873-3049.