The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Family Life and Early Background
• Chapter 1: An American Family
• Chapter 2: Origins
• Chapter 3: Youth and Experience
• Chapter 4: Initiation Into Politics
• Chapter 5: The Early Years, 1894–1900
• Chapter 6: Entering the Business World
• Chapter 7: The Early Years, 1901–1916
• Part II: James P. Goodrich the Consummate Politician
• Chapter 8: The Political Years
• Chapter 9: The 1916 Campaign
• Chapter 10: Years As Governor, 1917–1921
• Chapter 11: The Middle Years, 1916–1923
• Chapter 12: The Great Russian Famine, 1921–1923
• Chapter 13: Emissary to Russia
• Chapter 14: Return to Russia, 1925
• Part III: Businessmen With the Midas Touch
• Chapter 15: The 1920s
• Chapter 16: The 1930s
• Chapter 17: Companies! Companies! Companies!
• Chapter 18: Ayrshire Collieries Corporation
• Chapter 19: The Ecologist
• Chapter 20: The Later Years, 1940–1960
• Chapter 21: The Later Years, 1960–1973
• Part IV: Pierre F. Goodrich Crusader and Philosopher
• Chapter 22: Associations and Causes
• Chapter 23: Wabash College
• Chapter 24: The Mont Pelerin Society
• Chapter 25: A Scholar’s Life
• Chapter 26: Education In a Free Society
• Chapter 27: Moral, Political, and Metaphysical Beliefs
• Chapter 28: Why Liberty?
• Chapter 29: Liberty Fund, Inc.
• Part V: The Goodriches Assayed
• Chapter 30: Who Was Pierre F. Goodrich?
• Chapter 31: Defining Influences
• Chapter 32: Why Did They Work So Hard? Work, Ideas, Citizenship, and Virtue
• Chapter 33: Epilogue
• Appendixes

Chapter 2

Origins

James putnam goodrich was born on February 18, 1864, in Winchester, Indiana, toward the end of arguably the most significant event in American history: the Civil War. His middle name was taken from the name of his maternal grandmother, Jane Gray Putnam Edger, a common practice at the time. James’s delivery into the world occurred just two weeks before President Abraham Lincoln appointed a little-known general and former tanner, Ulysses S. Grant, commander in chief of the Union forces. The future Indiana governor was preceded by two older brothers: Ernest, who died shortly after birth in 1860; and Percy Edgar “P. E.,” who was born in 1861. Three younger Goodrich brothers followed: John Baldwin (1866), Edward Shields (1868), and William Wallace (1871).

The origins of the Goodrich family are worth noting. More than one hundred years earlier, in the mid 1700s, three Goodrich brothers crossed the Atlantic Ocean from England to the United States. The three men were descendants of an aristocratic clan that had sided with the Royalists and King Charles, fighting Oliver Cromwell at Goodrich Castle on the River Tyne in the mid 1600s. Ruins of Goodrich Castle exist even to this day.1 Regarding the origin of their family name, Calvin and Percy Goodrich wrote: “The meaning usually given to Goodrich is ‘rich in Godliness.’ Yet an early definition of ‘good’ was ‘gather.’ That which was gathered was ‘goods.’ So a Goodrich of the Saxon day in England may have been a notable accumulator of personal possessions rather than a man distinguished for sanctity and good works.”2 The possible dual origin of the name seems appropriate for a family who would build a financial dynasty in the midst of post-Reformation religious values.

The three Goodrich brothers arrived in Massachusetts, but one, Edmund B. Goodrich, eventually settled in Petersburg, Virginia. The sequence of generations from there is complicated because of the number of children who are named for a father or mother.

Edmund B. Goodrich had eight children, including a son, John Baldwin Goodrich. John Baldwin Goodrich, born in 1783, became a teacher, lawyer, and land conveyor. He practiced law with Baldwin Pearse, soon to be his father-in-law, beginning in approximately 1800. John B. Goodrich later became president of the Blacksburg Virginia Academy. Today, the successor of that institution is known as Virginia Polytechnic Institution (VPI). In 1802, Goodrich married Rebecca Pearse of Ambrose County, Virginia, the daughter of Baldwin Pearse. Rebecca was just thirteen when the couple married. Between 1803 and 1828, they had fourteen children, including Edmund Baldwin, who was born about 1805 and was named for his paternal grandfather.

John Baldwin Goodrich died from a fall from a horse in September 1828. His death left Rebecca, at age thirty-nine, a widow with fourteen children. The sale of John Baldwin’s assets occurred in February 1829. After his debts were paid off, Rebecca was left with only two hundred dollars. Two and a half years later, Rebecca decided to leave Blacksburg to join other family members near Fort Wayne, Indiana. Therefore, in December 1831, the Goodriches sold their one slave and packed up all the personal possessions they could load onto two horse-drawn wagons. Led by Rebecca, a willowy woman who never weighed more than ninety pounds, the Goodriches left Blacksburg and headed northwest by foot, destined for northeastern Indiana, a distance of almost four hundred miles. One of the grandchildren in the Goodrich clan was a three-month-old baby, John B. Goodrich, who would become James Goodrich’s father.3

The Goodriches had crossed the western tip of West Virginia, the frozen Ohio River, and much of southern Ohio before they entered eastern Indiana in January 1832. The “roads” were little more than muddy Indian trails and animal paths. As one Hoosier “poet” wrote about the poor traveling conditions in a local tavern registry:

• The Roads are impassable—
• Hardly jackassable;
• I think those that travel ’em
• Should turn out and gravel ’em.4

It was not a road, however, but a river that kept the Goodrich family in east-central Indiana. They were traveling northwest of Winchester, Indiana, on their way to Fort Wayne, when one of their wagons broke down as they attempted to ford the White River. Winchester served as the county seat of Randolph County, which, until 1823, stretched clear to the Michigan state line, some 120 miles northward. It was on the outskirts of Winchester that the family chose to settle, some seventy miles south of Fort Wayne. According to legend, when the broken wagon impeded the Goodriches’ journey north, the diminutive matriarch, Rebecca Goodrich, exclaimed to her family that she had had enough of the arduous journey and they would go no farther, “one swamp being as good as another.”5

The Goodrich family settled in Randolph County only sixteen years after Indiana had become a state. Thickly wooded and sparsely populated, the county had been occupied by Miami and Delaware Indians until the 1840s. In 1846, the federal government marched the tribes’ remaining members to Toledo, Ohio, to begin what was known as the Trail of Tears. They were subsequently loaded on rafts and floated down the canal system to Cincinnati, Ohio, and from there to St. Louis, Missouri, on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Many died along the way. Eventually, the Miamis were transported to Kansas and, later, to Oklahoma, where they ended up on reservations.6

In the early 1800s, the Goodriches were one of several hundred pioneer families that had come to eastern Indiana from the Carolinas and Virginia. Winchester was a deeply religious community. In February 1832, it was the site of the largest branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Indiana. The founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, visited the Winchester branch of more than one hundred believers in July 1834. He performed several baptisms of converts in the Mississinewa River, north of Winchester. When several members of the Mormon congregation left for Missouri in the spring of 1832, the Goodrich family bought land northeast of Winchester from a departing Mormon farmer.7

One of the first written references to a Goodrich family member is contained in a history of Jay County, just north of Randolph County. The reference reads: “In 1834, the families scattered over the south part of the county began to think their settlement of sufficient importance to be under the restraint of law. Prior to this they had enjoyed unlimited freedom. When Mr. Goodrich, Collector of Randolph County, came to collect taxes, every man positively refused to pay. The collector laughed, said that any one who dared come out there to open a forest, ought not to pay tax, and returned.”8

Edmund B. Goodrich, who was James Goodrich’s grandfather, may well have been the tax collector referred to. He also studied law and served as judge of the Randolph County Probate Court. He is described by an early Randolph County history as “a strong temperance man, and a leading member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.”9 His son, John Baldwin Goodrich, who was just three months old when the Goodriches left Virginia for Indiana, also grew up to become a lawyer in Randolph County. In the 1850s, John Goodrich practiced law with his uncle, Carey Goodrich, and with Enos L. Watson. Enos Watson would become the father of James E. Watson, future United States Senate majority leader and lifelong friend of James P. Goodrich.

In addition to practicing law, John B. Goodrich became politically active, serving as county Republican chairman and road commissioner. He was elected Randolph County clerk in 1861 and was reelected in 1865. In 1859, John B. Goodrich married Elizabeth Edger, who had grown up in nearby Deerfield, Indiana. They had both attended the Winchester Seminary in the 1850s. At that time, public schools for general education had not yet been established; in many communities, seminaries provided both basic secular and religious education. Before her marriage, Elizabeth Edger had also attended Liber College in Portland, Indiana, a small academy begun in 1853 by a zealous Presbyterian minister.10 She was a redheaded beauty whose Protestant father, Edward Edger, was born in county Derry, Ireland, before his family immigrated to the United States in 1807.11 Edger had married Jane Putnam in November 1833, and they had two sons and five daughters, including Elizabeth.12

James Goodrich’s maternal grandfather, Edward Edger, lived a remarkable pioneer life. In the 1820s, prior to locating in Indiana, he piloted steamboats down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. In the 1830s, he drove hogs from Indiana to the Carolinas. And for many years he traded with local Indians in northern Randolph County, floating the goods he traded for down the Indiana river system by raft to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and eventually to St. Louis. There he would sell the goods, pocket the gold payment, and walk hundreds of miles back to his home in Randolph County. Edward Edger also became a small-time banker. He even dabbled in politics, serving one term in the Indiana General Assembly (1843–45). In 1860, he started a grain operation on the very spot on which his grandsons would establish in 1898 the Goodrich Brothers Grain and Hay Company. His wife, Jane Putnam Edger, was a devoted member of the Presbyterian Church.13

James Goodrich’s father, John B. Goodrich, was a deeply religious Congregationalist who was the superintendent of his local church’s Sunday school. He was also the father of five surviving sons. In 1938, James Goodrich wrote about his father in his unpublished autobiography: “Often men would come to me in the early years of my life and say to me, ‘if you are half as good a man as your father was, you will be all right.’”14 Thus, the seeds of political involvement and religious heritage were planted early in the Goodrich family history. The significance of this religious heritage may be illustrated by a vignette. When James Goodrich was campaigning for governor in 1916, a local man by the name of John Callahan came to him and said that he owed his life to Goodrich’s father. Callahan told James Goodrich,

Toward the end of 1871, John B. Goodrich became ill with tuberculosis. He finally left his family in October 1872 to travel south in the hope of regaining his health, but he died in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 2. John B. Goodrich, deceased at forty-one, left his widow, Elizabeth, thirty-two, with five sons: Percy Edgar, eleven; James Putnam, eight; John Baldwin, six; Edward Shields, four; and William Wallace, sixteen months.16

The Goodrich family owned approximately five hundred acres of Randolph County farm ground at the time of John Goodrich’s death. Nonetheless, the Goodriches were far from being a wealthy family. It was through the strength of Elizabeth Edger Goodrich, who never remarried but raised five rambunctious and strong-willed sons by herself, that the family slowly gained wealth and influence in Indiana. The Goodrich brothers were known throughout their lives as tough business competitors. They worked in concert for their mutual benefit. This sense of familial protection, of looking out for each other, had been instilled in the brothers from their childhood. James Goodrich recounts the stability his mother brought to these five fatherless boys:

All the Goodrich brothers enjoyed successful business careers, but none of them had the financial acumen or ambition that James possessed. Even as a small boy, James Goodrich had learned to turn a profit through painstaking physical labor. He worked long, hard hours on the family’s farms in the 1870s and 1880s: He planted and harvested crops, ditched fields, sawed and piled wood for neighbors for fifty cents a cord, ran a threshing machine, and baled hay.18 Life on a farm in post–Civil War times was difficult, requiring unusual ingenuity and frugality. James Goodrich recalled:

Life was not all hard work and drudgery, however. In the Goodrich brothers’ free time, they managed to entertain themselves by playing cards and marbles, attending local dances, and attempting to play musical instruments. In July 1876, when James Goodrich was just twelve years old, he and his older brother Percy, who was just fourteen, traveled alone to Philadelphia to attend the country’s Centennial Exposition. They stayed for ten days, visited Liberty Hall and the Liberty Bell, and saw what was then considered a bawdy performance by a woman who appeared on stage “clad [only] in tights from head to foot.”20 Roughhousing was not uncommon for the boys either. James Goodrich recalled:

James Goodrich’s boyhood seems to have been marked by hard work, study, and a desire to get ahead. In only a few years, he would be exposed to the most important activities of his successful life: business and politics.

[* ]Edmund B. Goodrich, James Goodrich’s grandfather, was one of approximately fourteen Goodrich family members who made the harrowing trip from Blacksburg, Virginia, to Randolph County, Indiana, from December 1831 to January 1832. His letter was sent to a relative in Virginia. It is quoted in full in Calvin Goodrich and Percy E. Goodrich, A Great-Grandmother and Her People (Winchester, Ind.: privately printed, 1950), pp. 24–26.

[1. ]James P. Goodrich, “Autobiography,” James P. Goodrich Papers, box 4, pp. 1–2, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

[2. ]Calvin Goodrich and Percy E. Goodrich, A Great-Grandmother and Her People (Winchester, Ind.: privately printed, 1950), p. 60.

[3. ]John Baldwin Goodrich was the son of Edmund B. Goodrich and the grandson of John Baldwin and Rebecca Goodrich. See Goodrich and Goodrich, A Great-Grandmother and Her People, pp. 21–23, and Ebenezer Tucker, “The Goodrich Family,” in History of Randolph County, Indiana (Chicago: A. L. Kingman, 1882), p. 313.

[4. ]From the reminiscence of J. H. B. Knowland, cited by George S. Cottman in “Internal Improvement in Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 3 (1907): 20.

[5. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” pp. 23–24. The Goodrich wagon broke down on what is now the Fidler Farm, last owned by Eugene Fidler.

[6. ]See Stewart Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent People, 1654–1994 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996), pp. 108–13.

[7. ]Many members of the Mormon faith left Winchester in the fall of 1831 and the spring of 1832 to join fellow believers in Missouri, but some of them remained in Winchester until at least the end of the 1830s before heading west. For a history of the Winchester branch of the Mormon Church, see LaRene Gaunt, “The Pioneer Saints of Winchester, Indiana,” Ensign (of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), October 1992, pp. 56–59; “Blooming Where Planted,” Ensign, July 1993, p. 68; and “Mormons Led by Joseph Smith Through City in May of 1834,” Winchester (Ind.) News-Gazette, September 22, 1984, p. 3, col. 6.

[8. ]M. W. Montgomery, History of Jay County (Chicago: Church, Goodman, and Cushing, 1864), p. 6.

[9. ]Tucker, History of Randolph County, Indiana, p. 313.

[10. ]For a brief history of Liber College, see Michael McBride, “College Long Gone, But History Still Strong,” Muncie (Ind.) Star Press, January 13, 1997, sec. D, p. 1, col. 1. From 1859 to 1868, more than 850 students, mostly from Jay County, attended Liber College.

[11. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” pp. 3–8. In his autobiography, James Goodrich repeatedly refers to the strong religious convictions of his parents.

[12. ]“Edward Edger,” in Randolph County History: 1818–1990 (Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing, 1991), p. 504.

[13. ]Richard Wise, “Goodrich Grandfather Lived Eventful Life,” Winchester (Ind.) News-Gazette, February 17, 1984, p. 1, col. 2.

[14. ]James Goodrich’s memories of his father were few and vague because of his father’s early death. He does mention in his unfinished autobiography, however, that he was constantly reminded by local citizens of his father’s outstanding character. Goodrich, “Autobiography,” p. 5.

[15. ]Ibid., pp. 5–6.

[16. ]Ibid., pp. 3–5.

[17. ]Ibid., p. 8.

[18. ]Ibid., pp. 14–18.

[19. ]Ibid., p. 11.

[20. ]Ibid., pp. 21–22.

[21. ]Ibid., p. 20.