Commonwealth of Indiana

Indiana is a constituent Commonwealth of the United Kingdom of America in the old Northwest, bounded by Lake Michigan and the Grand Duchy of Michigan to the north, Ohio to the east, Kentucky across the river to the south, and Illinois to the west. Indianapolis is the capital and the largest city. The population is approximately seven million, and Indiana returns nine members to the federal House of Commons, the second largest interior delegation after Illinois.

Indiana is the crossroads of the Realm and it says so on its own arms. More freight crosses it than any polity of comparable size, more of the Realm’s interior road and rail mileage converges here than anywhere between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, and the polity’s economy, self-image and motto are all built on being the ground other people are getting across.

A crossroads keeps very little. That is the argument this article makes and Indiana makes it about itself. The limestone quarried in the southern hills is in the monumental buildings of a dozen other polities and in almost none of its own. The ore that made Gary came from Minnesota and left as steel for Pittsburgh and Chicago, in a city a corporation built from nothing in 1906 and stopped maintaining sixty years later. Abraham Lincoln spent fourteen formative years here and belongs to Illinois. Eugene Debs founded a party in Terre Haute and did his work in the House of Commons. And in the 1920s a mass movement arrived, bought the Commonwealth’s government at an ordinary general election, held it for four years, and evaporated inside two, leaving almost nothing behind except the fact that it had happened.

That episode is the centre of the article, and the reason is that Indiana was a free polity. It never held enslaved people in any number, never rebelled, was never reconstructed and had no southern account to give of itself. It also wrote the exclusion of Black settlers into its own constitution in 1851, by a separate popular vote that carried the article by a wider margin than the constitution it was attached to. The Register’s account of racial politics in the Realm is largely a southern account, and Indiana is the polity that shows how partial that is.

History

The Ordinance, and why Indiana is a Commonwealth

The country was Miami, Potawatomi, Delaware, Wea, Piankashaw and Shawnee, held under a confederacy that defeated two federal armies in 1790 and 1791 before being broken at Fallen Timbers in 1794. The cessions ran from 1795 to 1818 and cleared the whole polity within a generation; the Potawatomi removal of 1838, driven west from the Tippecanoe country at bayonet point with about forty deaths on the road, is remembered in Indiana as the Trail of Death and is marked along its route.

Indiana was organised as a Territory in 1800 out of the Northwest Territory and admitted in 1816.

Its type was its own convention’s choice, and its neighbours made the same one. The Northwest polities were not chartered. They were made out of western land claims ceded to the Realm, organised under an ordinance that laid down how a territory should become a polity, and admitted on the petition of conventions elected by their own inhabitants, each of which chose the style under which it would join. The Realm has no single rule for its polity types. Ohio, Indiana and Illinois chose to be Commonwealths, and Michigan and Wisconsin, which took ducal houses, did not.

The Lincoln crossing

Thomas Lincoln brought his family across the Ohio into Indiana in 1816, the year the Commonwealth was admitted, and his son Abraham was seven. They stayed fourteen years, in Spencer County near the river, and left for Illinois in 1830.

The Register’s Lincoln article records the removals as ordinary for the period and the class, and notes that they were also the mechanism by which Lincoln passed out of a slaveholding polity into free ones before he was of age. Indiana is where that happened, and it is the fact the Commonwealth has built its Lincoln industry on.

The fourteen years were poor and hard. Nancy Hanks Lincoln died in 1818 of milk sickness, from cattle that had grazed white snakeroot, and is buried on the ridge above the farm. The boy was nine. The country was unbroken forest, the family cleared it by hand, and Lincoln’s own later account of the period was that there was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.

Indiana’s claim on him is real and the Commonwealth overstates it, which its own historians say. He formed his politics in Illinois, made his career there, and sat for it. What Indiana gave him was the crossing and a childhood, and a crossroads is entitled to say that somebody passed through.

New Harmony

Twice in twenty years the same town on the Wabash was given over to people trying to build a perfect society, and both times they failed and left something.

The Harmonists, German pietists under George Rapp, bought twenty thousand acres in 1814, built a town of brick and order, held all property in common, practised celibacy in expectation of an imminent millennium, and prospered so completely that by 1824 they were the most efficient agricultural and manufacturing enterprise in the west. Then they sold the whole thing and went back to Pennsylvania.

The buyer was Robert Owen, the Welsh manufacturer and social reformer, who in 1825 announced a community of equality on the same ground and gathered about eight hundred people to it. It fell apart in two years. Owen had recruited by open invitation, admitted whoever came, written no workable constitution and lived elsewhere for much of the experiment, and the community produced seven successive constitutions in twenty months before dissolving.

What survived was the science. The people Owen brought with him were among the most distinguished naturalists, geologists and educators then working in the Realm, and a number of them stayed. New Harmony held the Realm’s first free public library, one of its first schools open to girls on the same terms as boys, its first kindergarten, and for thirty years the working headquarters of the federal geological survey. A town of nine hundred people supplied the Realm’s earth sciences with their institutional base because a utopian community failed there and its scientists could not be bothered to move.

The exclusion article

Indiana’s second constitution was written in 1851 and it is still the Commonwealth’s instrument. Two things about it require stating and the Commonwealth states both.

The first is that it forbade the polity to incur debt at all, in almost unqualified terms, because the convention met in the wake of an internal improvements programme of the 1830s that had built canals nobody used and left Indiana in default on obligations it could not service. The prohibition has been evaded ever since through building authorities and finance corporations the constitution does not mention, and every capital project in the Commonwealth for a hundred and seventy years has been financed by an arrangement designed to avoid a clause nobody will repeal.

The second is Article XIII.

It was ratified separately, and it carried by a wider margin than the constitution it belonged to. The convention, uncertain of the article, put it to the electorate as a distinct question. The constitution as a whole was approved by about eighty thousand votes; Article XIII was approved by about ninety thousand, and it carried every county in the Commonwealth but eleven.

That is the fact this article is built around, and it is not a southern fact. Indiana had almost no enslaved population at any point, was free ground under the Ordinance from the beginning, and voted by a larger majority than it gave its own constitution to keep Black people out of it altogether. The motive was stated openly at the time and was not principally about slavery: it was that a free polity across the river from a slave one expected to receive free Black migrants, and did not want them.

The article’s practical effect was smaller than its wording. It was enforced erratically, mostly against individuals whom somebody wanted removed for other reasons, and the Black communities already in the eastern counties were largely left alone. Its effect was on who came, and Indiana’s Black population in 1860 was under half a per cent, the lowest of any free polity in the Realm.

The Supreme Court of Indiana voided it in 1866, on the Commonwealth’s own constitution rather than on the American Rights Act, which at that date bound federal authority alone and could not have reached a polity instrument. The words nonetheless stayed printed in the constitution until 1881, because voiding an article is not the same as removing it and for fifteen years nobody in the Legislature was willing to move the amendment that would have required members to vote on it by name.

The Quakers, working against their own constitution

The eastern counties around Richmond and Fountain City held the largest Quaker settlement west of the mountains, and they ran the busiest crossing on the whole Ohio boundary.

Levi Coffin and his wife Catharine kept a house at Fountain City through which, by their own count and the count of those who used it, something over two thousand people passed on their way north between 1826 and 1847. The routes ran up from the river crossings at Madison, Jeffersonville and Evansville, through the Quaker settlements, to the lake and into Michigan.

They did it in a polity whose constitution, from 1851, made it an offence to encourage such a person to remain. The contradiction is exact and Indiana teaches it as such: the same electorate that voted ninety thousand to exclude contained the most effective escape network in the interior, and the two facts belong to the same place at the same time and are not reconcilable into a single account of what Indiana was.

The war, and the first secret society

Indiana was loyal and it was not united, and what happened here between 1861 and 1864 is the reason the events of 1924 are less surprising than they look.

The Commonwealth raised men in large numbers and its regiments served throughout. It also contained, in the southern counties settled from Kentucky and the upper south, a substantial population whose sympathies lay across the river, and among them an organised body: a secret order with oaths, degrees, passwords and a governing council, variously called the Knights of the Golden Circle and afterwards the Sons of Liberty, which claimed a membership in the tens of thousands and undertook to obstruct recruitment, shelter deserters and, in 1864, to seize the arsenal at Indianapolis and release the prisoners held at Camp Morton.

The plot was penetrated, badly organised and probably never capable of execution, and the men behind it were arrested in the summer of 1864.

They were tried by jury, in open court, under the ordinary criminal law, and this is the difference that matters. The Indiana conspirators could have been tried before a military commission. Here there was nothing for a later court to correct. Habeas corpus was never suspended anywhere in the Realm during the rebellion, which the war article calls the Realm’s proudest constitutional fact about the period, and Ex parte Craddock had settled in 1863 that a commander in a polity whose courts were open could not detain a civilian on suspicion. The Indiana prosecutions therefore went where they had to go, which was to a grand jury and then to a petit jury at Indianapolis.

Three men were convicted and two acquitted, the sentences were commuted within eighteen months, and the whole proceeding is a matter of public record because it was conducted in public.

That is the point Indiana’s historians make about it now. The Commonwealth’s first capture by a secret order failed and was documented, in open court, with the membership rolls and the correspondence read into a transcript that anyone can consult. Sixty years later the second one succeeded, and was documented again, by ledgers that survived because nobody destroyed them. Indiana has twice been undone by a secret society and twice been rescued by the record, and the polity’s own account of what makes it vulnerable, an open, mobile, joining sort of place with weak institutions and a great many lodges, is offered as the explanation of both.

The interurbans

Between 1900 and 1930 Indiana had the densest network of electric interurban railways in the Realm and one of the densest in the world: some four thousand kilometres of it, radiating from Indianapolis, running down the middle of country roads, stopping wherever a passenger stood, and converging on a nine-track traction terminal in the capital that handled four hundred cars a day.

It was built by dozens of small companies in fifteen years, it made the Commonwealth’s small towns commutable to its cities two generations before the motor car did, and it was gone by 1941 except for a single line.

Nothing about the rise or the collapse was distinctive to Indiana except the scale, and the scale was a function of geography: flat country, close-set towns, one obvious centre, and a polity already organised around getting across itself. The network was built for the same reason the railways and the interstates came, and it died for the same reason the traffic moved to the roads.

The surviving line runs from South Bend to Chicago and is the only electric interurban left anywhere in the Realm. It survives because it goes to another polity’s city, which the Commonwealth’s transport historians observe without needing to add anything.

Gas, steel, and a city built from nothing

Indiana industrialised late, quickly, and on somebody else’s terms.

The Trenton gas field was struck in 1886 under the east-central counties and was for a decade the largest natural gas field known anywhere. Towns gave gas away free to attract factories, lit flambeaux that burned day and night to advertise the abundance, and exhausted the field in about fifteen years. The glass industry it drew stayed, and the polity has made glass ever since; the gas towns did not.

The Calumet in the north-west is the other half. In 1906 a steel corporation bought a stretch of dune and marsh on Lake Michigan, moved the Grand Calumet river, graded the dunes flat, laid out a town on a grid and named it Gary after its chairman. Within twenty years it was among the largest steelworks on earth and a city of a hundred thousand, and it was owned, planned, policed and housed by the company that made it.

Gary was built for the ore boats and the rail, and neither the ore nor the steel was Indiana’s. The ore came from Minnesota and the steel went to Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh, and the Commonwealth’s role was to hold the ground in between and take the wages. When the industry contracted after 1970 the city lost more than half its population in forty years, and Indiana, which had never regarded Gary as quite its own, was content for a long time to treat the consequences as Chicago’s.

Debs

Eugene Victor Debs was born at Terre Haute in 1855, worked on the railways, organised the men who worked on them, and became the founder of the Realm’s independent labour politics.

The difference here is total and it is worth stating plainly. Debs was never prosecuted for a speech, imprisoned, or left to stand for office from a cell, because the road he needed was open: a parliamentary system with a wide franchise after the Reform Act of 1859 offered a route into government, and Debs took it.

He founded the Social Democratic Party in 1898, sat in the House of Commons for Terre Haute from 1900, led the party for twenty years, and lived to see it merge in 1921 with the Labour Representation Union to form the Labour and Social Democratic Party, which has since formed governments of the Realm. He died in 1926.

Indiana’s relationship with him is the Commonwealth’s usual relationship with its own products. He was born here, formed here and buried here, his house at Terre Haute is a museum, and he did the work somewhere else. The polity votes conservatively now, has done for most of the last sixty years, and claims Debs anyway, which its own commentators regard as either broad-mindedness or forgetfulness depending on who is writing.

The capture

Between 1922 and 1925 the government of the Commonwealth of Indiana was bought, and it was bought lawfully.

The movement that did it was a fraternal order with regalia, a subscription, a weekly paper and a programme, and it had been reorganised after 1920 on a commission basis, so that recruiters kept a share of every membership sold. What it sold in Indiana was not principally the South’s programme. The Black population of the Commonwealth was under three per cent and concentrated in two cities; the enemy the order named here was Catholicism, and after it immigration, drink, and a general and unfalsifiable conviction that the polity’s institutions had been infiltrated. It recruited in Protestant churches, lodges and volunteer fire companies, it ran picnics and band concerts, and it was for a period the largest voluntary association Indiana had ever had. At its height something between a quarter and a third of the Commonwealth’s native-born Protestant men held a card.

It then did the obvious thing, which nobody had expected, and stood for office.

The order did not form a party. It endorsed candidates inside the existing ones, chiefly the Conservative and Crown Union, and it endorsed for everything: the Legislature, the county boards, the school boards, the sheriffs, the mayoralties. Its state organisation ran a card index of the whole electorate. In the general election of 1924 its endorsed candidates took the premiership, a substantial majority of the House of Representatives, a working majority of the Senate, and a majority of the county boards in more than half the Commonwealth.

Nothing unlawful occurred. The candidates were nominated in the ordinary way, the ballots were honest, the turnout was high, and the Commonwealth of Indiana chose its government by the ordinary operation of a free election, as it was entitled to do. This is the fact the Register places at the centre of the article, and it is why the episode belongs in the constitutional history of the Realm rather than only in the social history of a polity.

The ministry that followed governed for two years. It legislated on schools, on parochial education, on aliens, on the licensing of teachers, and on a Bible requirement; it appointed extensively; and it conducted itself, in the recollection of its opponents and the boasting of its supporters, as the executive committee of a private association.

The refusals

The one instrument the Realm possessed was the Crown, and it was used.

Governor Alida Pryor, appointed in 1922 and the second woman to represent the Crown in a polity of the Realm, refused assent seven times in four years. No Governor before or since has refused it so often in so short a period. The measures she declined were the ones the federal law officers advised were repugnant to the Rights Act as it then stood, or to Indiana’s own constitution, or to the Realm’s treaty obligations: the parochial schools bill of 1924, the teachers’ licensing bill and its successor, the aliens registration bill, and three measures on public instruction.

Her position, which she published, was narrow and has worn extremely well. She did not claim a power to refuse a measure because she thought it wicked. She said that a Crown representative may not lend the Crown’s signature to an enactment which the Crown’s own law officers have advised is beyond the polity’s competence, that the office exists for exactly that and for nothing else, and that a Governor who signs such a measure has not been neutral but has taken a side.

She offered her resignation twice and was refused both times.

These are the proudest episode in the vice-regal history of the Commonwealth, and they are the most sustained use of the power in the Realm’s record. They are also, and Indiana says this too, the limit of what the Crown could do: assent could be withheld from bills and could not be withheld from a government. The ministry remained in office, made its appointments, ran its counties and kept its majority, and no instrument existed anywhere in the Realm’s constitution to remove a ministry that commanded a house and had broken no law.

The trial

It ended in a courtroom in Noblesville, and it ended for reasons that had nothing to do with politics.

Dwight Stanton, the order’s Grand Dragon in Indiana and the man who had built the commission structure, was charged in 1925 with the abduction, rape and murder of a young woman who had worked for a Commonwealth literacy programme. She had been taken from Indianapolis on a train, assaulted over a night, and had swallowed poison; she lived for a month and gave a statement before she died, and the statement was admitted.

He was convicted in November 1925 and sentenced to life. He had expected to be pardoned by a ministry he considered his own, was not, and responded by producing his files: the ledgers, the correspondence and the schedule of payments, which named the members, the mayors, the sheriffs and the ministers he had bought and the sums involved. The prosecutions that followed reached a mayor of Indianapolis, several members and a number of county officers.

The order in Indiana collapsed inside two years, from a claimed membership in the hundreds of thousands to a few thousand, and the ministry lost the general election of 1927 heavily.

The Commonwealth’s settled account of this is unsparing and is quoted in every treatment of the period. Indiana was not saved by its conscience, its churches, its press or its constitution. It was saved by a murder, committed by a man vain enough to keep records and vindictive enough to publish them when he was not rescued. Had Stanton not attacked that woman, or had he been pardoned, there is no mechanism visible in the record by which the arrangement would have ended when it did.

The silence, and the return

Indiana then did not talk about it for fifty years.

There was no inquiry, no purge and no reckoning. The members who had held cards stopped paying dues and stayed in their offices, in the county courthouses and on the school boards, and their careers ran on into the 1950s. The Commonwealth’s own school textbooks omitted the episode entirely until 1974. Local histories written in the 1930s and 1940s describe the period without naming the order at all, using formulas like the excitement and the trouble of those years.

The recovery of the record began in the 1970s, in the Commonwealth’s universities, working from the membership ledgers that had survived in county archives because nobody had thought to destroy them. The ledgers are the reason the account is so exact, and they are also the reason the subject remains difficult: the lists are of named men in named towns, most of whom have descendants living in those towns, and the archives that hold them have had to develop access rules that no other holding in the Realm requires.

Indiana now discusses it constantly and does not agree about it. The universities treat it as the central episode of the Commonwealth’s modern history. A good many of the counties treat it as an aberration inflicted on Indiana by an outside organisation, which the ledgers do not support and which is the account most people in those counties were raised on.

Geography

Indiana is small, compact and flatter in the north than in the south, and it divides into three bands that explain nearly all of its politics.

The north is glaciated lake country and the Calumet: level, wet, drained by tile, ending at forty-five kilometres of Lake Michigan shoreline that carry the steel works, the ports and the Indiana Dunes, protected as a national lakeshore in 1966 in a boundary settlement that the Realm’s parks service still describes as evidence of a political compromise rather than of a natural unit. The dunes and the mills alternate along the same shore.

The centre is the till plains: deep, level, black-soiled and among the most productive arable ground in the Realm, growing maize and soya, and holding Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and most of the polity’s people.

The south was never glaciated. It is hills, hollows, sinkholes and caves, cut by the Ohio’s tributaries, thin-soiled and heavily wooded, and it is where the limestone is. It looks like Kentucky across the river, was settled from Kentucky and the upper south, and has voted and spoken like it for two centuries.

The Ohio runs the whole southern boundary and the Wabash most of the western. The Commonwealth is divided between two time zones and has changed its arrangements so often that the question is a standing joke in the Realm.

The crossroads

Indiana calls itself the crossroads and the claim is arithmetically true. More long-distance freight passes through the Commonwealth than through any polity of its size, four of the Realm’s principal interstate corridors intersect within it, and Indianapolis is the only city in the Realm where four such corridors meet at one point.

The polity has organised itself around this for two hundred years and has taken a particular kind of prosperity from it. The National Road came through in the 1830s, the railways converged on Indianapolis because it was central rather than because it was anything else, the interstate system repeated the pattern in the 1950s and 1960s, and the logistics economy repeated it again after 1990.

What a crossroads gets is traffic, and what it does not get is ownership. The article states this because Indiana states it. The limestone from Bedford and Bloomington is in the monumental architecture of a dozen polities and in almost none of the Commonwealth’s own buildings, which are brick. The ore that made Gary was Minnesota’s and the steel was Chicago’s. The motor components made in the eastern counties go into vehicles assembled elsewhere. The distribution centres that now employ more Indianans than the steel industry ever did are owned in other polities and are, in the polity’s own phrase, buildings full of other people’s things.

The consequences are not all bad and Indiana does not pretend they are. The Commonwealth has full employment more often than not, a cost of living among the lowest in the Realm, and an economy that has never depended on a single industry the way West Virginia’s or Michigan’s has. What it has not had is capital that stays, and the argument about whether that is a fault of the polity or a description of its geography is the oldest one in its public life.

Constitutional system

Indiana is governed under the Constitution of Indiana of 1851, its second, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889 in 1891, amended fifty-one times, and never replaced.

It is a document written by people who had just been frightened twice: by a programme of public works that bankrupted the polity in 1841, and by the prospect of free Black migration across the Ohio. The first fear produced the debt prohibition and the second produced Article XIII, and the Commonwealth’s constitutional history since has been the story of working around the one and expunging the other.

The debt clause forbids the Commonwealth to contract debt except in narrow emergencies. It has never been repealed and has been comprehensively evaded: every road, university building, prison and stadium in Indiana for a century has been financed by a building authority or finance corporation that owns the asset and leases it back to the polity, an arrangement the courts upheld in 1937 and have declined to disturb since. Indiana’s officials describe the constitution as forbidding debt and requiring rent.

A convention has been proposed for 2030, the first serious proposal since 1935, and the question is expected to be put to the electorate in 2029. Its promoters want the debt clause, the county structure and the amendment procedure addressed. Its opponents point out that the last two conventions Indiana held produced a bankruptcy and an exclusion article respectively, and that the Commonwealth’s record at constitutional conventions is the worst in the Realm.

The Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, for five years. The incumbent is Alma Rutledge, formerly a judge of the Court of Appeals, appointed in 2024.

The office is quiet now and Indiana’s is the most consequential vice-regal history of any interior polity, for the reasons set out above. Pryor’s seven refusals between 1923 and 1927 are the record for the Realm, her published letter of 1924 is in the constitutional casebooks, and every Governor of Indiana since has been appointed in the knowledge that the office was once the only functioning check in the polity.

No Governor has refused assent since 1927.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of Indiana, holding office on the confidence of the House of Representatives and governing from Indianapolis. The office has been held since 2023 by Owen Prather, Conservative and Crown Union, with a majority of nineteen.

Indiana has been governed by the Conservative and Crown Union for forty-one of the last fifty years, which is the most durable single-party dominance of any large polity in the Realm. The reason is arithmetic rather than ideology: the polity’s growth is in Indianapolis and its suburbs, its Legislature is apportioned to counties that are mostly losing people, and the opposition’s vote is concentrated in four cities.

The Legislature’s dominant party and the polity’s largest city have been on opposite sides for most of the last three decades, and a great deal of Indiana’s governing consists of the Commonwealth legislating about Indianapolis.

The Legislature

The legislature is the Indiana Legislature: a House of Representatives of one hundred members elected for two years and a Senate of fifty elected for four, half retiring every two.

Its sessions are short by constitutional design, sixty-one days in odd years and thirty in even, on the same nineteenth-century theory as Kentucky’s, and with the same result: an enormous volume of legislation compressed into a fortnight in March, most of it amended into shape in conference and voted on by members who have not read it.

Its most-used instrument is the preemption statute, by which the Commonwealth forbids its cities and counties to legislate in a named field. Indiana has more of these on its books than any polity of the Realm, covering wages, tenancies, firearms, plastics, employment conditions and the regulation of short-term letting, and every one of them was passed after a city did something the Legislature disliked. The polity’s cities describe the practice as government by veto and the Legislature describes it as uniformity, and both are correct.

Counties and local government

Indiana has ninety-two counties, laid out between 1790 and 1859 on the day’s-ride principle and never consolidated, and it grants them a moderate home rule that is subject to the preemption practice described above.

The distinctive feature is the township, of which Indiana retains a thousand and eight, more than any polity of the Realm. Each has a trustee, a three-member board, its own levy, and two functions: poor relief and, in the rural ones, fire protection. They are the oldest continuously functioning unit of government in the Commonwealth and among the least defensible: several administer relief budgets smaller than the cost of administering them, a number have been found by the polity’s auditors to have spent more on the trustee’s office than on the poor, and the total cost of the tier exceeds what it distributes in roughly a quarter of them.

Abolition has been recommended by every commission since 1967 and has never passed. The township trustees are the most effective lobby in Indiana politics, they are distributed one to every part of the Commonwealth, and each of them is somebody’s neighbour.

The counties are more consequential and less loved. The county council and the board of commissioners divide fiscal and executive authority between two separately elected bodies, an arrangement unique to Indiana, which produces deadlock often enough that the Legislature has had to provide a tie-breaking procedure.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Indiana has five justices, the smallest high court of any large polity in the Realm, appointed by the Governor on the advice of the Premier from lists settled by a judicial nominating commission and confirmed at a retention vote after two years. Below it sit a Court of Appeals and a unified trial court in each county.

Indiana adopted the commission and retention system in 1970, replacing contested partisan judicial elections, and the reform was carried in the same session as the first serious historical treatment of the 1920s, which is not a coincidence: the argument that persuaded the Legislature was that a judiciary chosen by the same machinery as the Legislature had been in 1924 was not a check on anything.

Two lines of decision are cited outside the polity.

The first is the exclusion cases of 1866, in which the court held Article XIII void as repugnant to Indiana’s own bill of rights, without reference to the American Rights Act, which at that date could not have reached a polity constitution. The judgments are careful, narrow and unmistakably reluctant, and they are the earliest example in the Realm of a polity court striking down its own instrument’s most popular provision.

The second is the lease-back jurisprudence running from 1937, which held that an asset owned by a building authority and rented to the Commonwealth is not a debt of the Commonwealth. It is the most consequential piece of public finance law in the Realm and it is universally regarded, including by the judges who have applied it, as a fiction that has been useful for ninety years.

Economy

Indiana has the most manufacturing-intensive economy of any polity of the Realm, measured as a share of output, and has had for a century.

Motor components are the largest sector. Indiana does not assemble many vehicles and it makes an enormous number of the parts that go into them, in the eastern and central counties, for plants in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and beyond. The sector employs about a tenth of the workforce and is the polity’s principal exposure to any change in how vehicles are made.

Steel persists in the Calumet at about a third of its 1970 employment and roughly its 1970 tonnage, the difference being the electric furnace and the continuous caster. Indiana still produces more steel than any polity of the Realm.

Pharmaceuticals and orthopaedics are where the money now is. Indianapolis holds one of the Realm’s principal pharmaceutical companies and its research establishment; Warsaw, a town of fourteen thousand in the north, produces something approaching a third of the world’s artificial hips and knees, an industry that began there in 1895 with a splint maker and compounded locally for a century. It is the single most surprising economic fact about the Commonwealth and the one its own government mentions most.

Logistics is the growth sector and the ambiguous one. Indiana’s position has drawn distribution centres at a rate exceeded nowhere in the Realm, and they employ more people than the steel industry ever did at wages substantially below what the works paid. The crossroads has turned out to be a low-wage business, which is the polity’s sharpest current argument.

Agriculture is maize, soya and hogs on the till plains, highly capitalised and employing few. Limestone from the southern quarries is a small industry with an outsized reputation.

Transport

Indiana’s transport is the reason for the polity and needs little explanation. Four principal interstate corridors intersect at Indianapolis; the freight rail network of the eastern interior converges here; and the Commonwealth holds the Realm’s second-largest air cargo hub at Indianapolis, after Louisville a hundred and eighty kilometres south, which makes the corridor between them the densest concentration of express freight anywhere on earth.

The ports are at Burns Harbor on Lake Michigan and at three points on the Ohio, and Indiana is one of a small number of polities with access both to the lake system and to the river system, which is a fact its port authority mentions in every publication it produces.

Passenger rail is poor and has been since 1971. The Commonwealth’s own commuter line between South Bend and Chicago is the only electric interurban railway to survive anywhere in the Realm, having outlived a network of them that once covered the whole polity, and it survives because Chicago needs it.

Welfare, health and education

Education in Indiana is a two-tier story that the Commonwealth finds uncomfortable.

Its universities are outstanding. The public university at Bloomington, the land-grant institution at West Lafayette, and Notre Dame at South Bend, which is the foremost Catholic university in the Realm, together enrol about two hundred thousand and draw students from every polity. Purdue’s engineering faculty has supplied more of the Realm’s aerospace and astronautics personnel than any institution.

Its schools are ordinary and its outcomes are near the Realm’s median, with a wide gap between the suburban districts around Indianapolis, which are among the best-funded in the interior, and the rural south and the Calumet, which are not. Indiana has more school corporations than any comparable polity and has resisted consolidation for the same reason it has resisted township abolition.

Health is middling to poor. Life expectancy is below the Realm’s median, smoking rates are among the highest in the interior, and the polity’s public health spending per head has been the lowest or second-lowest in the Realm for thirty years, which its own health commissioner has repeatedly said in public. The NHSA guarantee applies and the delivery gap is rural and southern.

The Calumet carries a distinct burden. A century of steel, oil refining and chemical manufacture on the lake shore has left the largest concentration of contaminated land in the Realm’s interior, and the health data for the townships beside the works are the worst in the Commonwealth by a wide margin. Remediation has been running since 1980 and is expected to run past 2050.

Welfare is administered through the townships at the point of relief, which is the arrangement described above and the reason Indiana’s poor-relief system is the most fragmented in the Realm: a thousand and eight separate authorities apply a thousand and eight interpretations of need, and the polity’s ombudsman has reported on the resulting inconsistency in every one of the last fourteen years.

Cities

Indianapolis

Indianapolis is the capital and the largest city, about nine hundred thousand within the consolidated city and county and two and a half million in the metropolitan area, which makes it the third city of the Realm’s interior after Chicago and Columbus.

It exists because somebody drew it. In 1820 a commission was sent to choose a capital near the centre of the Commonwealth, found a place on the White River that appeared navigable, laid out a city on a plan of four diagonal avenues radiating from a circular centre, and moved the government there in 1825. The river turned out not to be navigable at all. A single steamboat reached the town in 1831, ran aground on the way back, and no other ever came.

A capital on an unusable river with no port, no falls, no mine and no natural advantage should have failed, and instead it became the crossroads, because the railways had no reason to prefer anywhere else and every reason to converge on the middle of a populous polity. By 1860 eight lines met there. Indianapolis is a city that was invented, failed at its stated purpose, and succeeded at one nobody had planned.

It is now a government, medicine, insurance, sport and logistics city, it consolidated with its county in 1970, and it is the engine of Indiana’s growth and the standing object of its Legislature’s attention.

Gary and the Calumet

Gary, Hammond, East Chicago and Whiting form an urban region of about half a million people on the lake shore, physically continuous with Chicago and economically part of it.

Gary itself is the hardest place in the Commonwealth. Built by a corporation in 1906 for a hundred thousand people, it holds about sixty-eight thousand now, having lost more than half its population since 1970. It is over seventy per cent Black, having become so through the Great Migration into the mills and the departure of everyone who could leave afterwards; it elected one of the Realm’s first Black mayors of a substantial city in 1967; and it has the largest inventory of abandoned building in the Realm relative to its size, including a cathedral, a hotel and a railway station standing open to the weather.

Indiana has never known what to do about Gary, and for forty years was content to treat its difficulties as belonging to Chicago, which is thirty kilometres away and in another polity. That position is no longer tenable and no alternative has been agreed.

Fort Wayne, South Bend and Evansville

Fort Wayne, about two hundred and seventy thousand, is the second city: a defence electronics, insurance and manufacturing town at the head of the Maumee portage, which is why the fort was there.

South Bend, about a hundred and three thousand, is Notre Dame and what is left of a motor industry that made the Studebaker until 1963 and left the city with the largest single industrial closure in its history. It has recovered further than Gary and less than it wanted.

Evansville on the Ohio, about a hundred and seventeen thousand, is the south’s city, a river port and manufacturing town that is nearer to four other polities’ capitals than to its own.

Bloomington and the limestone country

Bloomington is the university town, about eighty-five thousand plus students, and the quarry country around it and Bedford produced the limestone that faced a great deal of the Realm’s monumental architecture, including a substantial part of New Westminster.

Almost none of it is visible in Indiana. The stone went out by rail to be somebody else’s building, and the quarries left behind are water-filled holes that the Commonwealth has slowly turned into swimming places and nature reserves. The industry’s own museum is in a former mill.

Demographics

Indiana’s population is approximately seven million and it grows slowly and unevenly: the Indianapolis metropolitan area accounts for nearly all of the Commonwealth’s net growth, the Calumet and the rural south lose people, and about half the counties have fewer residents than in 1980.

The population is about ten per cent Black, concentrated in Indianapolis, Gary and the Calumet, and almost absent elsewhere, which is a distribution laid down by Article XIII and by the industrial migrations that followed it: Indiana’s Black population in 1860 was under half a per cent, the lowest of any free polity in the Realm, and almost the whole of the present community descends from people who came north to the mills after 1916. Hispanic residents are about eight per cent, in the Calumet and the horticultural counties.

Ancestry elsewhere is German above all, then English, Irish and Polish, the last concentrated in the Calumet and South Bend. The Amish and Mennonite settlements of Elkhart and LaGrange counties are the largest concentration in the Realm’s interior and among the largest anywhere, and they have shaped the local economy: the recreational vehicle industry of Elkhart, which builds most of the Realm’s caravans and motor homes, employs a substantial Amish workforce in a trade that requires no electricity on the shop floor.

Indiana is Protestant with a large and geographically concentrated Catholic minority, in the Calumet, South Bend and the old French settlements at Vincennes. The Catholic share is the fact that made the 1920s possible, and the article says so.

Society and culture

Basketball is the polity sport and it is the school game. Indiana’s relationship with basketball is not like Kentucky’s, which is a university rivalry; it is the high schools, and the gymnasiums are the evidence. Nine of the ten largest high school gymnasiums in the Realm are in Indiana, several of them in towns of under five thousand people, and a number seat more spectators than their towns have residents. The single-class tournament that let the smallest school in the Commonwealth play the largest ran from 1911 to 1997, and its abolition in favour of divisions by size is still resented in the small counties, which regarded it as the one arena where a crossroads polity’s smallest places could beat its largest.

The 500 at Indianapolis, run since 1911, began as a test track. The speedway was built by manufacturers who wanted somewhere to prove components and discovered that people would pay to watch, which is the crossroads pattern again: the industry that the track was built to serve has mostly gone, and the race remains and fills a hundred and thirty thousand seats.

Music is Cole Porter from Peru, Hoagy Carmichael from Bloomington, the Jackson family from Gary, and a gospel and soul tradition out of Indianapolis and the Calumet that fed Chicago and Detroit.

Writing is Theodore Dreiser from Terre Haute, Kurt Vonnegut from Indianapolis, and a persistent Indiana genre of the small-town novel, most of it affectionate and some of it not.

Food is pork above all, the breaded tenderloin, sugar cream pie, persimmon pudding in the southern counties, and a sweetcorn season that the Commonwealth takes seriously.

Political tensions

Indianapolis against the rest. The capital and its ring hold a third of the Commonwealth’s people, produce nearly all of its growth and most of its revenue, and are governed on terms set by a Legislature in which they can be outvoted by counties that are losing population. The preemption statutes are the mechanism and there are more of them here than anywhere in the Realm. This is Indiana’s central modern argument and it is not close to settled.

Gary and the Calumet. A city of sixty-eight thousand in a region of half a million, with the Realm’s largest abandoned-building inventory and its worst interior contamination, in a polity that spent forty years describing the problem as Chicago’s. There is now general agreement that this was untenable and none at all about what replaces it.

The wage question. Warehousing employs more Indianans than steel ever did, at wages substantially lower, and the Commonwealth’s competitive position rests on that being true. Whether the crossroads economy is a success or a trap is the question underneath most of Indiana’s economic politics, and the two parties do not divide on it cleanly.

The memory of the 1920s. The universities treat the capture as the central episode of the Commonwealth’s modern history and a good many counties treat it as something done to Indiana from outside. The ledgers do not support the second account and the second account is what most people in those counties were taught. This is the argument the Register expects to be live for another generation.

Lake Michigan water. Indiana draws from the lake and sells treated water inland, and the diversion limits under the compact governing the basin are contested by the polity’s inland counties, by Illinois and periodically by New Albion.

The southern counties, Appalachian in economy and outlook, poorer than the rest by a wide margin, and treated by Indianapolis as an afterthought in a way their members say aloud in every session.

The convention of 2030. The proposal is live, the electorate will be asked in 2029, and the argument is genuinely open: the debt clause and the township tier are indefensible, and Indiana’s two previous conventions produced a bankruptcy settlement and an exclusion article.

Assessment

Indiana is the polity that things pass through, and the Register’s judgement is that this is a description of its geography, an account of its economy, and the nearest thing available to an explanation of what happened to it in 1924.

The material case is straightforward. A crossroads takes traffic and keeps little. Indiana’s limestone is in other polities’ buildings, its ore was Minnesota’s and its steel was Chicago’s, its components go into other people’s vehicles, and its distribution centres are full of other people’s goods. The Commonwealth has had, in exchange, a century of steady work, low costs and an economy that has never collapsed the way its neighbours’ have, which is not nothing and which Indiana is entitled to say is a reasonable bargain.

The political case is harder and the Commonwealth makes it against itself. A polity whose organising idea is transit has weak institutions of its own, and Indiana’s are weak by design: a constitution written out of two fears, a debt clause evaded by fiction for ninety years, a thousand townships nobody can abolish, sessions too short to legislate properly, and a judiciary that until 1970 was chosen by the same machinery as everything else. In 1924 a private association walked into that arrangement, bought it at an ordinary election, and governed a polity of the Realm for two years without breaking a law.

The Crown was the only thing that worked, and it worked partially. Governor Pryor refused assent seven times and could not touch a ministry that commanded a house. What ended the episode was a murder and a vain man’s ledgers, and Indiana’s own account, which is unsparing and correct, is that the Commonwealth was not saved by anything it can take credit for.

Set against that is the other Indiana, which is present throughout and is not a mitigation. The same electorate that carried Article XIII by ninety thousand votes contained the Coffins at Fountain City and two thousand people who passed through their house. The same polity that produced the ledgers produced Debs, and New Harmony’s library, and a Governor whose published letter of 1924 is in the casebooks because it was right. These are not stages in a progress. They are simultaneous, and the Commonwealth’s honest position, which it has reached only in the last fifty years, is that both are Indiana and neither cancels the other.

What the crossroads finally did keep was the record. The membership ledgers survived in county courthouses because nobody thought them worth destroying, and they are the reason the account is exact enough to be uncomfortable. A polity that had kept less would have found it easier to believe the story it told itself for fifty years.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of Indiana is a gold flaming torch on a dark blue field, encircled by thirteen gold stars in an outer ring and five in an inner half-ring, with a single larger star above the torch for the Commonwealth itself and rays rising from the flame to touch the outer stars. The polity’s name is lettered in gold above the large star. The proportion is 2:3.

The torch is liberty and enlightenment and the rays are their spread; the thirteen outer stars are the original colonies of the Realm, the five inner are the polities admitted before Indiana, and the nineteenth and largest is Indiana, admitted nineteenth.

The design was adopted in 1917 out of a public competition held for the Commonwealth’s centenary, and the winning entry came from an architect at Mooresville. It is by common consent among the best polity flags in the Realm and is one of a small number to survive the twentieth century without a seal being added to it, which its own designers attributed to the fact that the competition rules had forbidden lettering and the Legislature had then added the name anyway and stopped there.

The motto is the Crossroads of the Realm, which Indiana adopted formally in 1937 and had been using informally for a century. It is the only polity motto in the Realm that describes a location rather than a virtue, and the Commonwealth is entirely aware of what that implies.

The State bird is the cardinal, the tree the tulip poplar, the flower the peony, and the stone, uniquely among the Realm’s polities, is a building material: Salem limestone, named for the town it was first quarried near.

Trivia

See also

• Commonwealth of Ohio
• Commonwealth of Illinois
• Commonwealth of Kentucky
• Grand Duchy of Michigan
• State of Arkansas
• Abraham Lincoln
• Labour and Social Democratic Party
• American Rights Act