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Chapter 4: Initiation into Politics - Dane Starbuck, The Goodriches: An American Family [2001]

Edition used:

The Goodriches: An American Family (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Chapter 4

Initiation into Politics

I became interested in politics at a very early age. I remember as far back as 1876, the campaign when [Rutherford B.] Hayes was really defeated for President by [Samuel J.] Tilden but through maneuvering of Oliver P. Morton and others Hayes was counted in. I was only twelve years old at that time but I distinctly remember one great rally that they held in Winchester.

james p. goodrich, “Autobiography”

In the early 1890s, James Goodrich was described in a Randolph County history as “a rising young lawyer of Winchester.”1 He had been appointed city attorney by the town council at the “huge” salary of $50 per year. In 1888, James’s share in his private legal practice with Macy and Jaqua amounted to $720; he wrote to Pierre that only “by the practice of the most rigid economy [were we] able to save a small portion of that.”2

Although James Goodrich was extremely busy practicing law, he also took an interest in a number of community and fraternal groups. The first was the Granger movement, which he had first joined locally in 1881. The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was established in 1867 to broaden the educational awareness of America’s farmers and to further their interests. By 1875, the National Grange claimed more than 800,000 members in 20,000 local chapters.3 Goodrich also took part in the Knights of Labor, which he was a member of from 1882 until 1894. His association with the labor organization was significant. It gave him an appreciation for the common worker. Goodrich found that while the laborer might not be able to articulate why he thought as he did, he generally reached the right conclusion by instinct. Once a month, James Goodrich would join members of the local chapter on the third floor of the Knights of Labor building, located on the south side of the town square. There the local body debated the issues of the day: secret ballot, woman suffrage, child labor, prohibition, workmen’s compensation, and other matters.4 Goodrich was also a member, along with James Watson, of the Winchester chapter of the Knights of Pythias, a secret fraternal order that engaged in philanthropic activities. James Watson became even more active in this organization than Goodrich, rising to the position of grand chancellor of the order in Indiana in June 1893, the youngest head of the order up to that time. In 1892, Goodrich became a Mason, joining the Winchester Lodge, No. 56.5

In the late 1880s, James Goodrich became deeply involved with politics. Through his uncle Ches Macy, Goodrich learned the art of politicking. Besides serving in the Indiana General Assembly as the joint senator from Delaware and Randolph counties from 1885 to 1889, Macy served at the time as Randolph County Republican chairman. James Goodrich recalls his political indoctrination:

[Uncle Ches] was interested in young men and had a lot of young fellows around him all the time doing the “leg work” and acquiring experience in politics. Nearly all of those in active political life were then members of the Grand Army of the Republic. They were still fighting the Civil War. . . . I was invited into political meetings, or caucuses as we called them, after my uncle became County Chairman and I had great fun hauling in voters and running errands for the County Organization.6

Goodrich’s early participation in politics and law enabled him to associate with local men, mostly attorneys, of great talent and ambition. Besides Macy, these men included Thomas Browne, former general, Republican gubernatorial candidate, and Sixth District congressman; James Watson and his father, Enos Watson, who served in the Indiana General Assembly (1867–69, 1879–81); James S. Engle, who served in the Indiana General Assembly during the time that he was law mentor to Goodrich and James Watson (1885–87); Silas Canada, who served in the General Assembly during the four years in which James acted as Republican county chairman (1896–1900); Union B. Hunt, elected secretary of state (1899–1903); Leander J. Monks, who served as judge on the Indiana Supreme Court from 1895 to 1913; and Frederick S. Caldwell, who would serve as a judge on the Indiana Court of Appeals from 1913 to 1919. Moreover, Isaac P. Gray, who lived just ten miles east of Winchester in Union City, was a former Civil War general, state senator (1868–70), lieutenant governor of Indiana (1876–80), and governor (1880–81, 1885–89). Gray went on to become a Democratic presidential candidate in 1892 and 1896, and United States ambassador to Mexico from 1893 to 1895.7 All of these men from Randolph County were active in law or politics when James Goodrich was just getting his start.

In 1886, Goodrich began his own foray into politics. He was elected precinct councilman and practiced pragmatic politics as he had been taught. Clearly, it was a time before election laws and political ethics as we know them today. Goodrich writes:

Those were the days of open ballot. There was no hesitancy about buying votes and men such as I have mentioned not only countenanced it but engaged in it either directly or indirectly [as a] patriotic duty [where] ends equalled means. The floaters would be with “spirits” and led to the polls early in the morning. It was with a great deal of pride that occasionally I was permitted to lead one of the floaters down to the polls and when there handed him a ticket which he gave to the election clerk and then returned to the headquarters to receive his reward.8

By this time, James Goodrich had become intoxicated himself, not with alcohol, but with the “spirits” of politics. He followed national, state, and local elections with keen interest, but without any apparent desire to become a candidate himself. In 1890, Ches Macy was elected Republican chairman of Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District. As Macy had been Goodrich’s most important mentor in law, so he was in politics. During these early years, James Goodrich met such national political figures as Benjamin Harrison, who was elected president in 1888; William Jennings Bryan, Democratic presidential nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908; Mark Hanna, a wealthy Ohio industrialist who became national Republican Party chairman; William McKinley, who was elected president in 1896; and Theodore Roosevelt, vice-president under McKinley and later the twenty-sixth president of the United States.9 Contact with these national figures would cause James Goodrich to think about his own political future.

There was another rising young attorney and political star of Winchester by the name of James who had his sights on statewide and national office. By the early 1890s, James Watson had already confided in James Goodrich that he wanted someday to become governor of Indiana and, later, president of the United States. Watson’s first two ventures in politics, however, were complete failures. He withdrew in 1892 as a candidate for joint senator of Randolph and Delaware counties when a Republican Party leader threatened to disclose an incriminating letter that Watson had written to him. Recognizing that he had made too many enemies in Randolph County to pursue a successful political career there, James Watson left his law practice with Macy and Goodrich at the end of 1893.

Watson moved to Rushville, Indiana, the county seat of Rush County, approximately sixty miles southeast of Winchester. He next sought election as Indiana’s secretary of state in 1894. His nomination, made by Goodrich, failed at the state Republican convention. Shortly after his attempt to gain the secretary of state’s post, Watson announced himself as a Republican candidate for Congress. Miraculously, Watson beat a popular thirty-year incumbent in the November 1894 election. Watson’s success was partially a result of his indefatigable campaigning: He had been speaking for the Indiana Republican Party since the age of twenty; in one year alone (1888), he had given more than one hundred political speeches in some forty-six Indiana counties. Watson also attributed his success partially to his ability to address in their native language the large German constituency of his new district. In support of his childhood chum, James Goodrich garnered the backing of the Republican National Committee, and he personally contributed five hundred dollars to Watson’s congressional campaign.10

Ironically, once Watson made it to Washington, D.C., he was none too pleased with the position he had campaigned so exhaustively to gain. In a typically humorous letter to Goodrich, Watson dispels the idea that any glamour was involved in the position.

My Dear Friend:

. . . I am disgusted with the entire life of a Congressman. A member from Indiana is no more than a Fourth-rate Pension Attorney and a distributer of garden seeds and public documents. He has no time to give to questions of great interests. He has no time in which to study the needs of the people or to devote to matters of public legislation. He is simply a dog, and every fellow in his district in the whole state can bawl: “Sic! sic! Take him Towzer!” And he is compelled to take him or lose his job.

The fact is that Congressional life is not what it is supposed to be. Distance lends enchantment to the view. There is a glamor about it which conceals its real character. I came here, expecting something of that kind, because Tom Brown had opened my eyes to it, but it is much worse than I anticipated. . . . We have no time for study. We have no time for intellectual pursuits. We simply answer letters, frank documents and send out garden seeds. It is a life of drudgery and there is nothing easy or delightful about it.

At the same time, I may desire to return. If I do, I shall simply do the best I can when the race comes. If I am beaten, I am out of politics forever. If I win, Heaven only knows what my future will be, but whatever comes, Jim, and whatever may be the changes or mutations of the future, I have never had a friend of whom I have thought more than yourself, and no matter what the days to come may bring forth, that friendship shall remain unchanged.11

Goodrich began to experience politics firsthand himself, making his maiden political speech in 1896. He addressed a crowd of some two thousand in Winchester. He spoke on the issue of whether the country should have two standards of monetary value—one gold, the other silver. The topic now seems archaic and of little consequence. Yet at the time, the “subject of the Gold Standard vs Free Silver at the ratio of 16 to 1 was discussed everywhere where two or more people were gathered together,” Goodrich claimed. He went on to state that the national debate was “the greatest educational campaign ever held in America.”12

James Goodrich’s exposure to local politicking would provide him with experience and lead to bigger opportunities in the realm of politics—leading the Indiana state Republican Party, serving on the national Republican Party’s executive committee, and gaining the governor’s office. He had thrust himself into what was then the great American pastime.

[1. ]“James P. Goodrich,” History of Delaware and Randolph Counties (Chicago: A. W. Bowen, 1894), p. 886.

[2. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” p. 28.

[3. ]For a more extensive discussion of the significance of the Granger movement, see T. Harry Williams, Richard N. Current, and Frank Freidel, A History of the United States: Since 1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), pp. 180–84.

[4. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” pp. 24–25. There is a discrepancy regarding when Goodrich ended his association with the Knights of Labor. On page 25 of his autobiography, he writes that he ceased to be a member in 1894, when he was forced to resign because he had become a member of the Randolph County Bar. Goodrich actually became a member of the bar in November 1886.

[5. ]“James E. Watson,” History of Delaware and Randolph Counties, pp. 996–98; regarding James Goodrich’s connections to Freemasonry, see “Indiana’s Masonic Governors,” The Indiana Freemason 40 (October 1962): 9.

[6. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” p. 30.

[7. ]“Isaac P. Gray,” in Randolph County History: 1818–1990, pp. 518–19; Wilber D. Peat, “Isaac P. Gray,” Portraits and Painters of the Governors of Indiana, 1800–1978 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1978), p. 50.

[8. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” p. 31.

[9. ]Goodrich states in his autobiography that he met Harrison, McKinley, and Hanna. See “Autobiography,” pp. 33, 41. Florence Dunn, niece of James Goodrich and ninety-seven years old when she was interviewed in 1992, told the author that she and James Goodrich had met William Jennings Bryan when he came to speak in Winchester at around the turn of the century. She said that she had, in fact, ridden on Bryan’s lap on the train from Union City to Winchester (interview, July 18, 1992). Since Goodrich was Republican chairman of the Eighth Congressional District when Theodore Roosevelt spoke at a rally in Winchester on October 11, 1900, the author assumes that Goodrich had met Roosevelt by that time.

[10. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” pp. 34–35.

[11. ]Letter from Watson to Goodrich, February 4, 1897, James P. Goodrich Papers, box 28.

[12. ]Goodrich, “Autobiography,” pp. 40–41.