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 33

Epilogue

By the late 1960s, the world had changed, and Pierre Goodrich had a difficult time changing with it. Society and business had become increasingly more complex and resistant to straightforward analysis. In Goodrich’s business dealings, long gone were the days when he could attend City Securities board meetings and read thoroughly every company prospectus presented for board action; such proposals had grown from a few pages in the 1930s to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pages full of legal and technical jargon. (When he served as president of the National City Bank in the 1920s, James Goodrich oversaw the construction of the Railway Exchange Building on Washington Street in Indianapolis. The former governor purportedly had the building erected on the basis of a written contract that amounted to a single page.) Corporate boards increasingly had to rely on hordes of attorneys, accountants, and other advisers just to understand and consummate “simple” transactions. As early as the late 1930s, Pierre had lamented the demise of the general legal practitioner, who was no longer able to function in a society that required more and more specialists.1

Moreover, Goodrich’s coal, telephone, and banking businesses had become increasingly inundated with demands from federal and state regulatory entities—rate commissions and oversight, health, safety, environmental, and labor agencies—for detailed information about everything imaginable that had to do with business operations. Coupled with these demands was the ever-growing attention paid by the media to business practices. Goodrich loathed snooping reporters who wanted to delve into the details of his financial empire. When the sale of the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation occurred in February 1969, the deal, along with a picture of a grinning Pierre F. Goodrich, was reported in Forbes magazine. The article gave the details of the merger, including Pierre’s personal profit. The publicity infuriated him.2

In his later years, Goodrich was described as a “discontented man.” Things had not worked out as he had hoped. First, there were the personal disappointments and tribulations, such as his estrangement from his daughter, Nancy, who lived in Paris until after his death. (She proceeded to hire a string of attorneys, including a former Indiana governor, Matthew Welsh, to contest her father’s will. While her paternal grandparents, James and Cora, had established trust funds that would provide for her comfortably for the rest of her life, she deeply believed that she was entitled to an inheritance larger than the $150,000 her father had left her).3 There was also the death in January 1971 of John Goodrich, a cousin only six months older than Pierre.4 Pierre and John had been very close in childhood, almost like brothers. Moreover, the periodic tax obstacles that impeded Goodrich’s designs for Liberty Fund added to his discontent.5

Second, the situation at his alma mater, Wabash College, continued to deteriorate, at least in Goodrich’s eyes. Beginning in 1970, a number of policy decisions were made on the campus that reaffirmed the wisdom of his decision the previous year to resign as an active trustee: After 137 years of having mandatory chapel, Wabash’s faculty and administration voted to discontinue the twice-weekly service on the grounds that it no longer served as an “education phenomenon” to the students.6 Furthermore, in order to appease black students who were outraged by the firing of a black professor, the college agreed to establish the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies.7 In May 1970, students met in the Goodrich Seminar Room of the Lilly Library to discuss whether to strike against United States action in Southeast Asia and the “political repression of Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party.” The students believed that both acts demonstrated the “callous disregard of the American government for rights.” Within twenty-four hours of the first student meeting, a vast majority of professors supported the protests. Classes at Wabash were suspended for several days.8 It is not known with certainty what Goodrich thought about these incidents, but it is safe to say that they convinced him that the board of trustees had become a weak, ineffective body, with little input into or control over the college’s activities.

Third, on the public front, Goodrich was disappointed about the direction in which he saw the country moving, away from what he believed were the virtues of the free society and toward a growing acceptance of statism, collectivism, and mediocrity. Despite the nation’s temporary alarm over conformity and dependency, memorialized in the 1950s by such popular books as The Lonely Crowd (1950), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), and The Organization Man (1956), Goodrich saw that individuals were, in fact, growing more and more reliant upon big government and large corporations for their subsistence.

Furthermore, the world in his later years was driven by technology. It was constantly moving toward standardization and larger operations, as well as consolidation and centralization of power and influence. The individual was no longer front and center, but a cog in the larger machinery driving society. The term mass seemed to be used to describe many new phenomena: mass communication, mass transportation, mass marketing, mass destruction. Goodrich also believed (despite his vehement protestations to the contrary) that the average person’s behavior was continually being adapted to meet others’ expectations, to win approval, to fit in.

Moreover, despite being warned about the dangerous and growing role of influence peddlers—by, for example, Vance Packard’s books The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), and The Waste Makers (1960)—many Americans were content to be told by slick marketers (the press, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Capitol Hill, Hollywood, and so forth) what to think about politics, business, economics, virtue and morality, the good life, and freedom. This manipulation of thought angered Goodrich, particularly because of the average person’s unwillingness to examine critically the bombardment of hype. Pierre did not appreciate that many people are not interested in challenging the status quo or in doing more than scratching the surface of ideas. Moreover, the 1960s were even worse than the 1950s for libertarians such as Goodrich, for during that decade many of their values were held up to ridicule.

Finally, Goodrich was disappointed that he had not found greater truths than he had; through all his reading and scholarship, he had come to realize that there were limits to understanding that he could not overcome. As important as liberty, learning, and other fundamental human values and aspirations were to Goodrich, they were not a substitute for spiritual understanding. Spiritual understanding has to transcend reason, and Pierre had a difficult time letting go of his rational side after having worked so hard to develop it. It is interesting how little Goodrich discusses spiritual matters in his writings. I think that was the case not because he thought that religious faith was not tremendously important, but because the notion that man can know anything absolutely, as God knows, seemed to him highly presumptuous. Perhaps he believed that discussion of such matters should not even be attempted.9

Goodrich’s discontent is perhaps best summed up by his good friend, Wabash College president Byron Trippet. In June 1959, Trippet wrote the following for the dedication of the Goodrich Seminar Room in the new Lilly Library:

On his seventy-fifth birthday, in October 1969, Pierre was honored in Indianapolis at a testimonial dinner given by Ben Rogge and several of his other close personal and business associates. Frank Barnett, a longtime friend, former Rhodes scholar, and then president of the National Strategy Information Center in New York, could not attend the dinner, but he sent his birthday greetings. He wrote, in part:

Goodrich’s health and stamina deteriorated slowly in the early 1970s, but he continued to go to the office daily, conducted business, and read for hours. Ben Rogge was very concerned about Pierre’s taking on any more obligations. He intervened, for instance, to see that Goodrich did not accept an offer to serve again on the board of directors of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). Goodrich had been a founding trustee of IHS in 1961.

Shortly after Labor Day in 1973, Pierre was admitted to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. He had not been particularly ill, but he remained in the hospital with a weakened heart and a blood disorder that had caused clotting. For the first few weeks at Methodist, he continued to conduct business from his private room much as he had done before: He talked incessantly on the telephone and kept several secretaries busy taking dictation.12 He was very concerned with labor problems that had developed at the Indiana Telephone Corporation. He knew that no one would win if relations between management and employees worsened.13

On the evening of October 25, 1973, Pierre Goodrich died in Methodist Hospital. Ben Rogge delivered the eulogy at Pierre’s funeral. The music of the great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Goodrich’s favorite, was played at the service.14 Pierre was buried near his father and mother at Fountain Park cemetery in his hometown of Winchester. His final resting place was among the gravesites of several families with whom he was closely associated as a young man—the Edgers, Jaquas, Macys, Moormans, McCamishes, Kitselmans, and Millers—names that were forgotten long ago. Ironically, Pierre was buried in the same cemetery that saw the humble beginning of the Goodrich family’s fortune, the cemetery where, some ninety-three years before, eighteen-year-old James Goodrich earned ten cents an hour moving dirt and planting trees.

After Pierre’s death, the governor’s mansion in Winchester, which Pierre had inherited from his parents, remained unoccupied for three years. The future of the mansion became the source of considerable controversy in Goodrich’s hometown. The house fell into disrepair despite attempts by Pierre’s widow, Enid, to maintain it. Within a short time, the house was besieged by vandals and thieves. They damaged the walls of the structure and stole valuable copper guttering from the roof and outside walls. A citizen’s group called Save the Governor’s Mansion was formed in an attempt to keep the majestic house from total destruction.15

In the spring of 1976, the architectural school of Ball State University presented a proposal to the Winchester Chamber of Commerce. The plan made the mansion the centerpiece of a community revitalization program. Steps were also taken to place the house on the National Register of Historic Places. The future of the mansion, which had been visited by a former president, Herbert Hoover, a Russian princess, and other American and foreign dignitaries, became such a local controversy that Indianapolis television station WRTV aired a report on its evening news about the community’s efforts to save the local landmark. Despite the citizens’ group’s intervention, a decision was made to raze the mansion in late 1976. At a three-day auction in October 1976, most of the Goodrich family’s home furnishings and personal belongings were sold.16

The destruction of the mansion and the sale of the family’s possessions left little physical evidence to remind the community of the significant influence the original five Goodrich brothers had in Winchester. There is still the park that Elizabeth Goodrich donated to the town in honor of her husband, John B. Goodrich, and Pierre’s cousins Perce Goodrich and Elizabeth Terry had a lovely chapel built in the cemetery where most of the Goodrich family members are buried. Yet within one hundred years, a small town’s family dynasty has come and gone.

Pierre’s influence, however, is still felt in his home community in nonmaterial ways. The Winchester Foundation remains in operation, supporting local community art, music, and literary projects, as well as national organizations.17 Also, the Pierre F. Goodrich Scholarship Fund, benefiting graduates of the local high school, was established in 1988 by Enid Goodrich in memory of her husband.18 Of course, Goodrich’s most important legacy, Liberty Fund, continues to have an important influence nationally and abroad.

It is a shame that Pierre Goodrich did not live to see the successes that have been achieved by Liberty Fund. At the time of his death, Liberty Fund was still very much in its infancy, having held only a handful of seminars. But in another way Goodrich is fortunate: How many people have their most important work continue after they have died?

Through his contributions, Pierre Goodrich has helped us realize that we know too little to be dogmatic and too much to remain passive in the protection of our cultural heritage. Pierre Goodrich knew a great many things, and we can benefit from his example if we are prepared to pursue rigorous study and take appropriate action. The essence of the Goodrich family’s legacy is an abiding faith in man’s ability, through concerted effort and reflection, to bring about and maintain social progress. As for Pierre, he believed deeply that staunch individualism was the necessary foundation for a flourishing Western democratic society. Clearly, the Goodriches were an original American family.

Shortly after Pierre’s death, many testimonials were written. The board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education, on which he served for more than twenty years, paid a fitting tribute, which read, in part:

In a memorial resolution by the Indiana Telephone Corporation, the board recognized Goodrich’s pioneering contributions to the telephone industry, concluding:

But perhaps the most fitting remembrance was written by Anna Marie Gibbons, a reporter at the time for the Winchester News-Gazette. Ms. Gibbons had known Pierre ever since she was a young girl, asking precocious questions of him when he would visit her father, John Macy, Jr., Pierre’s first law partner:

Appendixes

APPENDIX A

The Goodrich Family Tree

The Goodrich Family

APPENDIX B

Liberty Fund Book List

APPENDIX C

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Pierre F. Goodrich often gave a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” to friends and associates. The pamphlet he gave, which contained the poem, also included the following introduction.

What are the foundations of our beliefs and actions? History has built the civilization we enjoy by accumulating small pebbles of wisdom based upon experience. Every once in a while, some misguided action tears down years or centuries of progress by ignoring or misunderstanding the basic truths that underlie all that has gone before.

Rudyard Kipling, with his gift as a poet and prophet, has put this into focus in his poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” Although written in 1919, it is pertinent to the conditions that exist in the world today. His “Gods of the Copybook Headings” are, in effect, those rules of human conduct that are so well defined by centuries of experience that they have become immutable. To disregard them, says Kipling, will inevitably lead to failure and destruction.

• • As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
  • I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
  • Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
  • And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
• • We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
  • That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
  • But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
  • So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
• • We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
  • Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
  • But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
  • That a tribe had been wiped off its ice-field, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
• • With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
  • They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
  • They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
  • So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
• • When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
  • They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
  • But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
  • And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
• • On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
  • (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
  • Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
  • And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
• • In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
  • By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
  • But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
  • And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
• • Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
  • And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
  • That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
  • And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . .

• As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
• There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
• That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
• And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
• And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
• When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
• As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
• The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Bibliography

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[1. ]See Harry T. Ice, History of a Hoosier Law Firm (Indianapolis: privately printed, 1980), pp. 143–44.

[2. ]Gilbert Snider, interview, December 23, 1991. The magazine erroneously reported that Goodrich’s share of the sale would amount to a personal take of $44.5 million. See “Going, Going, . . . Gone!” Forbes, February 15, 1969, p. 55.

[3. ]Goodrich’s daughter brought suit in Marion County Probate Court, Indianapolis, contesting her father’s will. See “Pierre Goodrich Will Contested by His Daughter,” Indianapolis News, December 6, 1973, p. 34, col. 6; “Goodrich Daughter to Contest His Will,” Indianapolis Star, December 7, 1973, p. 37, col. 6; “Goodrich Estate More Than $2 Million,” Muncie (Ind.) Star, January 3, 1974, p. 19, col. 5; “$2,179,368 Listed in Goodrich Estate,” Indianapolis News, January 4, 1974, p. 23, col. 3; “Goodrich Property Sale to Be Private,” Indianapolis Star, December 3, 1975, p. 43, col. 7 (reported the sale of a Stradivarius violin appraised at forty thousand dollars and a Vangelisti violin appraised at three thousand dollars).

[4. ]See “John B. Goodrich” (obituary), Winchester (Ind.) News-Gazette, January 7, 1971, p. 4, col. 1.

[5. ]After Pierre’s death in October 1973, several tax problems developed with regard to income and estate taxes. The Internal Revenue Service initially sought capital-gains taxes of $6.8 million on two trusts valued at $26.1 million owned by Goodrich. As part of those trusts, the IRS disallowed more than $19.5 million in charitable deductions to four foundations that Goodrich had set up and to Wabash College. The IRS finally settled for roughly $1 million. Claude Warren, Jr., interview, July 5, 1993 (Warren, along with his father and several other lawyers, performed the financial work on Pierre’s income and estate tax filings). See also “IRS Settles Estate Claim for 1 Million,” Indianapolis Star, July 24, 1975, p. 30, col. 1; Lou Hiner, “IRS Reviews Goodrich Tax,” Indianapolis News, May 18, 1978, p. 40, col. 1.

[6. ]See Robert S. Harvey, ed., These Fleeting Years: Wabash College, 1832–1982 (Crawfordsville, Ind.: Wabash College, 1982), pp. 169–71.

[7. ]“The Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies,” ibid., pp. 162–63; Edward B. McLean, interview, February 15, 1997.

[8. ]See “Students Strike to Protest Cambodian Invasion,” in These Fleeting Years: Wabash College, 1832–1982, pp. 157–59.

[9. ]Goodrich does discuss religious beliefs in the Basic Memorandum, but he devotes little space to them. One of the passages most relevant to the author’s observation is the following: “Religious beliefs and theories must be commented on. Certain rational processes often take place in arriving at the religious beliefs and theologies which each individual holds. However, man’s ignorance and imperfection, as herein referred to, are so extensive that in the end the particular belief enters the area of mysticism and pure belief. This is distinguished from anything which is completely arrived at by observation and reason” (pt. 3, p. 60).

[10. ]The quotation comes from “Goodrich Seminar Room,” the program that was prepared for the dedication, which took place on June 4, 1959.

[11. ]Barnett’s letter is attached to a memorandum that Ben Rogge sent to Thaddeus Seymour, then president of Wabash College. See memorandum to President Seymour, November 17, 1969, and the attached letter from Frank Barnett, dated September 19, 1969, Ben Rogge Collection, Archives, Wabash College.

[12. ]Ruth Connolly, interview, October 25, 1991, and July 30, 1993.

[13. ]Frank Jessup, telephone interview, February 27, 1993.

[14. ]This information was provided by Roseda Doenges Decker, a board member of Liberty Fund who attended the memorial service (letter to author, September 3, 1996).

[15. ]The Reverend Richard Merriman, then minister of the Winchester Main Street Christian Church, was the unofficial leader of the citizens’ group that sought to keep the governor’s mansion from being torn down. What transpired in the fall of 1976 is rather sad. Apparently, Pierre’s widow, Enid, could not understand why all of a sudden there was such a great interest in the Goodrich mansion, when the house had remained essentially empty for the previous thirty-five years. Pierre was the only one who ever used it during most of that time, and after his death the mansion remained unoccupied for three years. Moreover, apparently Enid had no love for the house, since she had never been welcomed into it while Pierre’s parents were alive. Therefore, although it was apparently structurally sound, the beautiful mansion was torn down in the winter of 1976, and a community landmark was lost (Richard T. Merriman, telephone interview, March 19, 1993).

[16. ]Most of Pierre’s possessions were sold at a public auction that took place on October 25, 26, and 27 at the Randolph County 4-H fairgrounds south of Winchester. See “Goodrich Sale Begins,” Winchester (Ind.) News-Gazette, October 26, 1976, p. 1, col. 3.

[17. ]Moreover, the foundation has helped fund construction of a new addition to the local library, which includes a room named for James P. Goodrich. See Janet Fuller, “Library Is Given Foundation Grant,” Winchester (Ind.) News-Gazette, April 15, 1993, p. 1, col. 5.

[18. ]The award provides nearly a full college scholarship to at least one graduating senior annually from Winchester Community High School. Winners since the inception of the scholarship are Jeffrey Chalfant (1988); Steve McCord (1989); Charles Stonerock and Karine Oswalt (1990); Catherine J. Hall, Katrina E. Horner, and Brian N. Peters (1991); T. Meeks Cockerill (1992); Molly C. Smith (1993); Melanie L. Martin (1994); Gary Campbell (1995); and Scott K. Stranko, Wendy R. Holder, and Dawn M. Love (1996).

[19. ]“Tribute to Pierre Frist Goodrich,” December 3, 1973. Pierre F. Goodrich file, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.

[20. ]See “Pierre F. Goodrich Memorial Resolution,” ITC Highlights, November 12, 1973, p. 6.

[21. ]Anna Marie Gibbons, Winchester (Ind.) News-Gazette, October 28, 1973, p. 1, col. 1.