Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (27 page)

The Klan’s Svengali in Indiana was David C. Stephenson, a former printer’s apprentice and Socialist Party activist who was said to pocket two dollars of each Klansman’s ten-dollar membership fee (“klecktoken,” in Klan vernacular). It was Stephenson who undoubtedly organized the Richmond parade. By 1924 his power and influence in Indiana were unmatched. That fall he threw his support (and the Klan’s money) behind the Republican gubernatorial candidate, a fellow Klansman named Edward Jackson.

Jackson won the election in a landslide. At Jackson’s inaugural ball, Stephenson met Madge Oberholtzer, a twenty-eight-year-old former schoolteacher who ran a state anti-illiteracy program. A little more than two months later, on March 25, 1925, Stephenson invited Oberholtzer to his house on the pretext of discussing state business. He drugged her, forced her into a car, and drove her to Union Station in Indianapolis, where they boarded a train bound for Chicago. In a Pullman compartment, Stephenson attacked Oberholtzer, raping her repeatedly and biting her breasts and genitals so viciously that her flesh was torn. They got off the train in Hammond, Indiana, where Oberholtzer tried to poison herself with mercuric chloride. Stephenson took her back to her parents’ home in Indianapolis, dropping her off with the warning, “I am the law and the power.” Oberholtzer died a month later, either from the poison or from an infection resulting from her wounds. In any event, Stephenson, in a spectacular and lurid trial, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He fully expected his fellow Klansman, Governor Jackson, to pardon him. When he didn’t, Stephenson, enraged, exposed the Klan’s machinations in Indiana politics to the
Indianapolis Times,
helping the paper win a Pulitzer and bringing the Klan’s second wave to an inglorious end.

Until Stephenson’s downfall, the Klan’s political influence was extraordinary, not only in Indiana but throughout the Midwest and, of course, the South. Back in 1922, when he was running for Jackson County judge, Harry Truman himself had paid the ten-dollar initiation fee to join the Klan, membership seeming to be a prerequisite for political success at the time. Informed he could not hire Catholics if elected, Truman, who had commanded many Catholics in World War I, withdrew his application and got his ten dollars back. Later, he claimed he and his old army chaplain, a Dominican priest named Curtis Tiernan, had busted into “many a meeting of the KKK” in Missouri and confronted the speakers. “We were ejected from some of the meetings, but we broke many up.”

At the same time Klansmen were parading through Richmond in the 1920s, down in a hollow west of town, in a shack by the Whitewater River, African American jazz and blues musicians were making some of the most epochal recordings in the history of American music.

Back in 1872, an Alsatian piano maker named George M. Trayser, with the help of two local businessmen, Richard Jackson and James Starr, opened a factory in Richmond. The Starr Piano Company, as it came to be known, quickly became one of the country’s leading piano manufacturers, at a time when the piano was a status symbol akin to the iPhone today. In 1893, the company was acquired by Henry Gennett, a Nashville businessman who moved to Richmond to oversee his new business.

By 1915 Starr was selling fifteen thousand pianos a year. The business seemed impregnable.

Then the phonograph came along.

Thomas Edison had invented the cylinder phonograph in 1877, but it wasn’t until a German immigrant named Emile Berliner invented a machine he called the gramophone that the recording industry began to develop. Berliner’s invention played music recorded on flat discs instead of cylinders. The discs were easier to duplicate and store, and, since both sides could be used, they held more recording space than cylinders. Berliner’s invention touched off a war between the two formats not unlike the Beta/VHS and Blu-ray/HD DVD wars of more recent generations. When the dust finally settled in the late 1910s, Berliner’s format had prevailed.

Back in Richmond, Henry Gennett, the owner of the Starr Piano Company, followed the phonograph wars with intense interest. He knew the phonograph would replace the piano in respectable parlors, and he wanted a piece of the action. By 1916 the company was already manufacturing its own brand of phonograph players. It also established a record division to produce seventy-eight-rpm discs for its (and, of course, other companies') phonograph players. The recording label was named Gennett.

Gennett records were recorded in a small wooden studio that sat next to the railroad tracks that ran through the Starr complex in Richmond. Huge draperies were hung on the walls to afford at least some soundproofing, though many recording sessions were still interrupted when trains passed. Some audiophiles swear they can hear the sound of passing trains in the background of old Gennett recordings.

Since the bigger record labels like Victor and Columbia signed the most famous names in the music business to exclusive contracts, Gennett recorded lesser-known artists who happened to be passing through town, usually on their way to or from gigs in Indianapolis or Chicago. Fortunately for Gennett, as well as posterity, some of the musicians who passed through Richmond in those days went on to become legends in jazz and blues: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jelly Roll Morton. Their recordings for Gennett have become landmarks in American music.

The performers were not lavishly compensated. Many received a flat fee of fifteen to fifty dollars per recording session. The Gennett label, however, flourished. The records, recognizable by a parrot logo on the cover, sold for about a dollar each in hundreds of stores nationwide. Advertised under the dubious slogan “The Difference Is in the Tone,” Gennett sold three million records in 1920.

The emergence of radio, and later, the Great Depression, hit the Starr Piano Company hard, and Starr sold its recording division to Decca Records in 1935. The company was finally sold at auction in 1952, and the Richmond factory was closed.

Around noon, Ora and Lowell Wilson spotted the Trumans’ Chrysler heading into Richmond on East Main Street. They pulled it over.

“Sheriff,” asked Harry with some exasperation, “what did I do wrong?”

“We just wanted to welcome you to Richmond,” said the elder Wilson, who added that it would be awfully nice if Harry and Bess would pose for a picture with him in front of the Madonna of the Trail statue. Harry had come to Richmond to help choose the site for the statue back in 1928, when he was president of the National Old Trails Road Association. He had been scheduled to return to Richmond later that year for the dedication of the statue, but, just a few days before the October 28 ceremony, he sent his regrets, saying he was “very busily engaged in politics” at the moment. Seventeen years later, on April 2, 1945, it was announced that Truman, now vice president of the United States, had accepted an invitation to speak at a soil conservation conference being held by the local Kiwanis club in Richmond on May 9. Again Truman would have to send his regrets. Roosevelt died on April 12. Instead of speaking about soil conservation in Richmond, Indiana, on May 9, 1945, Truman, now president, was in the Oval Office signing a bill extending the draft. He had announced the surrender of Germany just the day before.

So, by stopping in Richmond (albeit involuntarily), Harry was making good on unfulfilled obligations. The Wilsons escorted the Trumans to Glen Miller Park, where the
Palladium-Item
photographer snapped a picture of Ora, Harry, and Bess posing in front of the larger-than-life Madonna. (The park was named after a local businessman, not the big band leader.) Afterward, the Wilsons escorted the Trumans to the Leland Hotel in downtown Richmond, where Harry and Bess had lunch. At their table, they posed for another picture for the
Palladium-Item
photographer. After the customary plea for “one more shot,” Harry turned to Bess and said, “This may break the camera,” bringing a wide smile to Bess’s face. Harry was in a jovial mood. He told the photographer that Manley Stampler, the state trooper who had pulled him over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “got the wrong man.”

After lunch, the hotel provided the Trumans a room so they could rest a bit before resuming their journey.

On the whole, Richmond treated Harry much better than it treated another former president who came to town. In June 1842, a little more than a year after leaving the White House, Martin Van Buren passed through Richmond on his way to Indianapolis. He was on a tour to gauge support for another presidential bid. He didn’t find much in Richmond, mainly because he had vetoed several bills to fund improvements to the National Road, which had been extended through Indiana in 1834. By the time Van Buren became president, the road had deteriorated so badly that Hoosiers called it a “buttermilk lane.” But Van Buren, like Monroe before him, did not believe it was the federal government’s responsibility to repair the road. David P. Holloway, the editor of the
Richmond Palladium,
did not encourage the town to roll out the red carpet for Van Buren. In an editorial ahead of the former president’s visit, Holloway wrote, “To welcome such a man whose official conduct has spread misery and desolation throughout the land and is seeking power again to enthrall the people is repugnant.” On June 9, Van Buren gave a speech in Richmond that Holloway dismissed as “cold and indifferent.” That night, a “mysterious chap” partially sawed through one of the crossbars underneath the former president’s carriage. The next morning, Van Buren was about two miles west of town when the crossbar snapped. The former president was forced to walk through deep mud for help. “Perhaps it might cure him of his oppositions for the old National Road’s completion,” sniffed Holloway. (Something similar is said to have happened to Old Kinderhook a little farther west in Plainfield, Indiana, as well.)

David C. Stephenson, who was so instrumental in the rise (and fall) of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, was released from prison in 1950, after serving twenty-five years for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. He was arrested on a parole violation shortly thereafter and returned to prison. He was paroled again in 1956. In 1961 he was charged with attempting to molest a sixteen-year-old girl—in Independence, Missouri, of all places. He was fined three hundred dollars and ordered to leave the state. He died five years later in Jonesboro, Tennessee.

The Ku Klux Klan has never come close to approaching the heights of its popularity in the 1920s. In 2007, however, the Anti-Defamation League reported that the Klan “has experienced a surprising and troubling resurgence due to the successful exploitation of hot-button issues, including immigration, gay marriage, and urban crime.” Indiana, the report notes, was one of the states “notable for active or growing Klan chapters.”

The remnants of the Starr Piano Factory in Richmond, Indiana. The Gennett Records logo is still visible on the building.

After it was abandoned in 1952, the sprawling Starr Piano Factory along the Whitewater River quickly fell into disrepair. Most of the structures were torn down in the 1960s and ‘70s. All that remains is the factory’s sixty-foot-tall smokestack and the shell of a building once used for making player pianos. The Gennett Records parrot logo is still clearly visible on the building.

The Leland Hotel, where the Trumans stopped for lunch, still stands, though it has been converted into a retirement home. The seven-story brick building on the corner of Ninth and South A is now known as the Leland Residence—“The Elegant Retirement Community.” Its residents belong to that rapidly vanishing segment of the American population with firsthand memories of the Truman presidency.

Residents of the Leland are served meals in what used to be the hotel’s restaurant. I called the home to see if it would be possible for me to have lunch there, as Harry and Bess had. “Of course you can,” said the cheerful manager, Judy Sherrow. All she asked in return was that I give a brief presentation on the Trumans’ trip to the home’s residents. In other words, I was to be an “activity.” It struck me as a perfectly reasonable exchange, and I agreed at once.

Lunch was served at eleven-thirty in the morning. (It seems the elderly, in Richmond, Indiana, at least, like to take their meals early. At the Leland, dinner is served at four-thirty.) I sat at a small table with Judy and one of the home’s residents, a woman recovering from a recent fall and having difficulty mastering the walker she was now forced to use.

“I’m not used to needing help!” she said.

“It’s just part of the process of getting old,” said Judy reassuringly. She spoke in a soothing tone perfectly suited to her position.

“Well, I don’t like it,” the woman said.

Then, out of the blue, the woman insisted Judy guess her age. Judy was hesitant, but the woman prodded her. “Seventy-seven,” Judy proffered.

“No,” said the woman, now suddenly quite pleased.
“Eighty-seven!”

Over grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and chicken soup, Judy told me about the Leland. Built on the site of an old casket factory in 1928, it was widely regarded as the finest hotel in all of Indiana when it opened. But it couldn’t compete with the motels that sprouted on the outskirts of town in the 1960s and ‘70s. It closed in 1984, reopened in 1986, closed again in 1990, reopened again in 1993, and finally closed for good in 2000. It was reborn as a retirement home in 2001, which is when Judy was hired. I asked her what she’d done before that. She smiled. “I ran a nursery school for twenty-eight years,” she said. “The jobs really aren’t that different. You just need to meet their needs and try to make them happy.”