Indiana Republican Party - History

History

In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln won all of Indiana's thirteen electoral votes with 51.09 of the popular vote. When the American Civil War broke out, Indiana had a strong, pro-South Democratic Party in the Indiana General Assembly that, for the most part, claimed to be pro-Union but anti-abolition. Governor Oliver P. Morton(elected 1861), had a close relationship with President Lincoln, who called him the "shrewdest person I know." At the 1862 Loyal War Governors Conference in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Morton put his full support behind Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

A backlash followed the passage of the emancipation, leading to a defeat of Republicans in the 1862 mid-term elections. With a Democratic majority Morton feared with was sympathetic to the Confederacy, he began to take steps to circumvent the General Assembly and mobilize Indiana in the war effort. When Morton stepped beyond the scope of his constitutional powers by establishing a state arsenal, the Democratic legislature moved to remove the his command of the militia to them. Fearing that with control of the militia, the Democrats would attempt to secede from the Union, Madison helped Republican legislators flee to Kentucky and prevent a quorum. Unable to pass appropriations bills, the paralyzed government of Indiana teetered on bankruptcy until Morton once again stepped out of the scope of his powers and acquired millions of dollars in federal and private loans to keep the government running, support Indiana's role in the war effort, and circumvented the Democratic Assembly.

For the remainder of the Civil War, Morton made efforts to keep Indiana secure by suppressing elements he saw as anti-union or sympathetic to the South. Much of the searches, arrests, and even disrupting the Democratic State Convention (in what would later be called The Battle of Pogue's Run) earned Morton much criticism, calling him a "dictator" and "underhanded mobster." As the war ended and the Republican Party received an overwhelming majority in the government, Morton's questionable conduct during the war were made moot and he continued to serve a second term until 1887.

The party's darkest stain was after the First World War, following a rush of immigrants of eastern and southern European descent into the United States. Unlike the first Ku Klux Klan that rose in the South during the Reconstruction era to terrorize newly freed slaves, this new Klan that started in Georgia in 1915 was highly nativist organization that hid its racism in the cloak of family values and patriotism. Staunchly anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic, and of course prejudiced against African Americans, the new Klan spread into Indiana in the 1920s under the Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. Under Stephenson's leadership, the Klan flourished in Indiana and infiltrated both the Governor's Office and much Republican Party in the General Assembly. With over two-hundred and fifty thousand white males (approximately forty-percent of Indiana's population) paying their Klan dues in Indiana, Stephenson amassed a fortune estimated from two to five million dollars.

In 1922, when the Klan-dominated General Assembly tried to pass a Klan Day in the Indiana State Fair, Republican Governor Warren T. McCray vetoed the bill and earned the ire of Stephenson and the Klan. The peak of their power and influence was in 1925, when the Klan had McCray arrested, imprisoned, and thrown out of office on a charge of mail fraud and replaced with Republican Governor Edward Jackson. Stephenson is infamous for his words "I am the law in Indiana."

The Klan quickly fell apart under the revelation that Stephenson had abducted, raped, and murdered Madge Oberholtzer. More of a populist organization that believed in the Klan's image of defending the race and "Protestant Womanhood," the Klan's power and influence in both Indiana and its politics dissolved quickly. Governor Jackson refused to pardon Stephenson for Oberholtzer's death, so Stephenson retaliated from prison by revealing evidence that Jackson had received bribes from the Klan. Despite calls for his resignation for being associated with the Klan, Jackson's trial resulted in a hung jury.