indiana

Indiana, often called "the crossroads of America," was a center of commerce even before the arrival of European explorers in the 1670s. Bounded on the north by Lake Michigan and on the south by the Ohio River, the state's several important rivers and portages made it a strategic military location as well. The dominant Indian tribe in the region, the Miamis, lived throughout the state from the early 1600s. They were joined by bands of Shawnee and Delaware Indians in the southern part of the state and by groups of Delaware, Potawatomi, Piankashaw, and Wea in the north. By 1700, the Miamis had settled in several villages throughout the region, including large villages at Kekionga (present-day Fort Wayne), Ouiatanon (near present-day Lafayette), Vincennes, and Vermillion. In 1679, led by the French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the first Europeans reached the region. Eager to establish outposts for the fur trade, the French laid claim to the area and erected military forts at Kekionga (known as Fort Miami, possibly as early as the late 1680s and permanently after 1704), Ouiatanon (1719), and Vincennes (1732). Although they had survived primarily as an agricultural people, the tribes eagerly entered into the fur trade, especially after epidemics from smallpox, measles, and other diseases decimated their numbers and made farming more difficult. By the 1750s, only about 2,000 Indians of various tribes survived in the region.

During the French and Indian War, French claims over the territory were ceded to the British, a concession ratified by the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763. British rule over the region was brief, however. In 1778 and 1779, during the American Revolution, forces led by George Rogers Clark controlled the area after capturing Vincennes. After the Revolution, the United States took possession of the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River in another Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783. The United States reorganized the region under the Ordinance of 1787, recognizing it as the Northwest Territory the following year. In July 1800, the region was divided into an eastern section that later became the state of Ohio and a western section that extended to the Mississippi River on the west and up to Canada in the north. Known as the Indiana Territory, a name that reflected it as "the land of the Indians," the territory later was divided even further to create the Michigan Territory (January 1805) and the Illinois Territory (February 1809). Thus, by 1809, the boundaries of present-day Indiana were secure.

Beginning with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ceded a portion of eastern Indiana to the United States, federal authorities gradually purchased land from various Indian tribes through the 1830s. The governor of the territory, William Henry Harrison, signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809 with the Delawares, Potawatomis, and Miamis, adding the southern third of the territory to federal reserves; other agreements, including the Treaty of St. Mary's (1818) and the Treaty of Wabash (1826), completed the transfer of land from Indian hands. In the meantime, however, major conflicts occurred, most notably with Harrison's victory over Indian forces led by Tenskwatawa (also known as the Prophet) at Tippecanoe in 1811. During the War of 1812, British and Indian forces combined to fight American troops throughout the territory. The last major battle was between Miami and American forces and took place on the Mississinewa River on 17 and 18 December 1812; the battle concluded with the Miamis' defeat.

Early Statehood

With the opening of U.S. land offices at Vincennes (1804), Jeffersonville (1807), Terre Haute (1817), and Brookville (1819), almost 2.5 million acres of Indiana land were sold to speculators and settlers through 1820. Later, additional offices opened at Fort Wayne (1822), Craw-fordsville (1823), and La Porte (1833). With the territory's population reaching 24,520 in 1810, agitation for state-hood gained momentum, and on 11 December 1816, Indiana was admitted to the Union as the nineteenth state. The location of its first capital, Corydon, in south-central Indiana reflected the fact that the overwhelming majority of the state's population resided close to its border with the Ohio River. On 7 June 1820, the capital was relocated to Indianapolis, a site chosen for its location in the geographical center of the state.

In its first decade as a state, Indiana's population surged as migrants from the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia bought newly opened federal lands; later, arrivals from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York joined them. Although slavery was prohibited by the 1816 state constitution, other legal restrictions kept some African Americans from settling in Indiana. By 1830, just over 1 percent of the state's 343,031 inhabitants was African American, a figure that remained steady until well after the Civil War. A surge in the number of foreign-born immigrants, particularly German-speaking arrivals to central and southern Indiana, contributed to well over 5 percent of the state's population after 1850.

With land well suited to farming and raising livestock throughout the state, most of the newcomers settled into agricultural pursuits. Early attempts at industrial concerns included furniture making, farm implement production, and food processing. However, small-town life characterized Indiana throughout the nineteenth century; even up to 1850, the state's largest city, the Ohio River town of New Albany, held no more than 8,181 residents. While the towns of Indiana remained important trading centers for commercial farmers, the state's cultural fabric was constructed by thousands of small family farms. At the end of the antebellum era, more than 91 percent of Indiana residents lived in rural areas. From the predominance of its small-town character, the appellation "Hoosier" was affectionately bestowed upon Indiana's residents from the 1820s onward. Although many folkloric explanations have been given for the term, one of the most likely is that it came from the employment of Indiana canal workers by the Kentucky contractor Samuel Hoosier. The workers became known as "Hoosiers," and the name soon became generalized to describe all Indianians.

Although only a few minor engagements of the Civil War touched Indiana soil, the state's unity was tested by its commitment to the Union's cause. With so many recent migrants from southern states, support for the Confederacy ran high during the conflict's early days. However, a majority of residents—especially antislavery Quaker migrants from the Carolinas who came to the state in the 1810s and 1820s—eventually made the state a stalwart supporter of the Union. After the war, political allegiance shifted back once again, and the state remained roughly divided between the Democratic and Republican parties, a trait it retained through succeeding generations.

While Indiana engaged in the internal improvement craze of the 1840s with heavy state investment in canal building, the state's geographic importance between the agricultural centers of the Midwest and the markets of the East became more apparent after the Civil War. While the Ohio River trade favored the growth of Evansville and New Albany in the first half of the nineteenth century, railroads covered central and northern Indiana by the 1880s. Indianapolis and Terre Haute ranked as major rail centers. The latter city witnessed the formation of the American Railway Union by Eugene V. Debs in 1893, one of the first labor unions of industrial workers in the United States. Rail traffic also spurred commercial and manufacturing growth throughout the state. In 1852, the Studebaker brothers founded a blacksmith shop that made South Bend the site of the largest wagon works after the Civil War; the company would produce automobiles under the Studebaker name in the northern Indiana city until 1963. Another city, Muncie, gained fame as the site of the Ball Brothers Company; relocated to Indiana from New York in 1886, the factory immediately became the leading producer of glass jars and canning instruments in the United States. The most dramatic urban development, however, occurred in the northwestern corner of the state. Founded and built largely to serve the U.S. Steel Corporation's mills, the city of Gary grew from its inception in 1907 to have over 100,000 residents by 1940. The refineries of the Standard Oil Company in Whiting, opened in 1889, along with numerous other major steel and metal works throughout the area made northwest Indiana's Calumet region the most heavily industrialized in the state.

Like many state capitals, Indianapolis owed most of its early growth to its status as a center of government. Located on the White River, with insufficient depth to allow commercial navigation, the city had to wait until the railroad era to take advantage of its strategic location in the center of the state. Although hampered by a lack of natural resources in the immediate area, Indianapolis eventually developed a diverse manufacturing base to supplement its role as a center of government and commerce.

Hoosier Values

Even as the state edged into urbanism, it retained much of the small-town values from its early days. As explored by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in their classic sociological study of Muncie, Middletown: A Study in ModernAmerican Culture (1929), typical Hoosiers valued consensus and conformity, even as they embraced modern conveniences at home and at work. Although Middle-town's residents respected differences in religion and politics, they were suspicious of beliefs deemed foreign or strange. The source of both the state's strength and weakness, these dichotomous characteristics were the basis for some of the best literary works produced by Indiana writers, including native sons such as Booth Tarkington, James Whitcomb Riley, and Theodore Dreiser.

Increasingly, the white, Anglo-Saxon character of small-town Hoosier life became more heterogeneous in the twentieth century. In 1920, a bare majority of the state's almost three million residents lived in urban areas. Foreign-born residents represented over 5 percent of the population; the Great Migration of African Americans northward after World War I increased their presence to almost 3 percent. These demographic changes, along with a conservative reaction to the spread of Jazz Age culture in the 1920s, fueled a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. The state became the midwestern center of the organization in the 1920s. Under the banner of patriotism, combined with directives against Roman Catholics, the foreign-born, and African Americans, the Klan attracted upwards of 300,000 Hoosier members by 1923 in urban and rural areas alike. By the following year, Klan-endorsed candidates controlled the Indiana legislature and the governor's office as well. Only in 1925, after the conviction of Klan leader D. C. Stephenson for murder and rape, did the organization relinquish its hold on Indiana politics. A 1928 Pulitzer Prize–winning campaign by the Indianapolis Times against the Klan finally purged it from legitimate political circles.

Industrial Strength

Aside from the conservative politics of the decade, the driving force in Hoosier life was the state's continuing industrialization that linked it firmly with the national economy, especially the automobile industry. By the end of the 1920s, steel production was the state's largest industry, with automobile and auto parts manufacturing and electrical component production ranked just behind it. Most northern and central Indiana cities were tied to the auto industry with at least one automobile or parts production factory employing their citizens, while the Calumet cities continued to expand their steel output. To the south, Evansville became a major center of refrigeration unit production. The state's natural resources also continued to make Indiana a center of limestone, sand, and coal output, particularly throughout the southern part of the state.

Given the economy's growing dependence on durable goods manufacturing by 1930, the onset of the Great Depression hit the state hard. Industrial employment plunged to almost half its pre-Depression level by 1932, as employers such as U.S. Steel, which had doubled its production capacity in the 1920s, shut down. In the midst of New Deal attempts to revive the economy, Hoosier workers responded with a number of organizational efforts to form labor unions. A sit-down strike at Anderson's Guide Lamp factory in 1936 and 1937 led by the United Auto Workers (UAW) was a pivotal action in forcing General Motors to recognize the right of workers to collectively bargain through their unions. Anderson became a bastion of UAW support in politics and society, while Evansville witnessed the rise of the United Electrical Workers and the Calumet region, the United Steel Workers. As it had been since the 1890s, the United Mine Workers remained a strong force in the lives of thousands of Hoosiers in the coal mining towns of southern Indiana.

Spurred on by lucrative federal contracts to industrial employers during World War II, the state's emphasis on manufacturing investment continued into the postwar era. By 1958, over 40 percent of the state's total earnings came from the manufacturing sector, a rate that far outpaced the national average. Even as the national economy moved away from durable goods manufacturing, Indiana remained a bastion of manufacturing strength: in 1981, the national economy derived less than 17 percent of its earnings from durable goods production, while in Indiana, the rate was over 31 percent. Although the manufacturing sector provided many Hoosiers with high-wage jobs and advantageous benefits, the state's dependence on the industrial sector came under criticism during the recession from 1979 to 1982. With prohibitively high interest rates and energy prices, many industrial corporations failed to reinvest in new technology and equipment; as a result, many of the so-called "smokestack industries" lost their competitive advantage during the recession. About one-quarter of the employees in the durable goods sector lost their jobs in Indiana, and unemployment rates in Muncie and Anderson topped 18 percent in 1982.

While those without a college degree had previously obtained high-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector, public leaders were concerned that the state's economy might not provide such opportunities in the future. Calls for greater access to Indiana's system of higher education prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s. Although the Purdue University and Indiana University systems had expanded greatly with branch campuses around the state after World War II, in 1990 the college attendance rate of 37 percent continued to trail the national average of 45 percent. Indiana also ranked low on the number of college graduates who completed their degrees and remained in the state's workforce.

As it emerged from the recession of the early 1980s, Indiana's manufacturing base contributed to the recovery and the state remained one of the top five producers of aircraft engines and parts, truck and bus bodies, steel, surgical supplies, and pharmaceuticals. In 1999, manufacturing jobs made up 23.4 percent of nonfarm employment. While the overall number of manufacturing jobs in Indiana increased throughout the 1990s, the service sector became the single largest provider of nonagricultural jobs, with a 24.3 percent share. Agricultural production, once a mainstay of the state's development, represented just 1.8 percent of Indiana's economic output in 1997. In Indianapolis, the Eli Lilly Company, making products from insulin to Prozac, ranked as the state's largest corporation, with global sales approaching $11 billion in 2000. Overall, the Hoosier economy was the nation's eighteenth largest in 1997; with 27 percent of its manufacturing workforce making products for export, Indiana ranked fifteenth in the nation as an exporting state.

At the millennium, Indiana had 6,080,485 inhabitants, making it the nation's fourteenth most populous state. African Americans comprised the state's largest minority group, with 8.4 percent of the total population; 87.5 percent of Hoosiers identified themselves as white. Indianapolis had a population of more than 750,000 people, but no other city other than Fort Wayne had more than 200,000 residents. Indeed, Indiana's reputation remained rooted in a small-town, Hoosier identity. Steve Tesich's portrait of town-and-gown relations in Bloomington, the subject of the coming-of-age movie Breaking Away (1979), won an Academy Award for best screenplay. Hammond resident Jean Shepherd's wry reminiscences of the 1940s served as the basis for the movie A Christmas Story (1983). The movie Hoosiers (1986), based on the basketball team from the town of Milan that won the state championship in the 1950s, also thrilled audiences who rooted for the underdog team. Few other states follow high school and college sports teams so avidly. Basketball remains the top Hoosier pasttime, and Indianapolis waged a successful campaign to become the home of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1999. The NCAA Hall of Champions museum, along with the annual five-hundred-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, has added to the city's popularity as a tourist destination.

While the ascendancy of Dan Quayle to vice president in 1988 led some observers to herald a period of Republican dominance in the state, Indiana voters remained steadfastly centrist in their habits. The Indiana legislature typically was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. After a twenty-year run of Republican governors, the Democrat Evan Bayh in 1989 began the first of two terms as governor. In 1998, Bayh went on to the U.S. Senate in a landslide victory with 63 percent of the vote. He was replaced by another Democrat, Frank O'Bannon, who in 2000 won another term in office with 57 percent of the vote. Like Bayh, the state's senior senator, Republican Richard Lugar, was regarded as a political centrist, holding conservative views on fiscal matters while avoiding stridency on foreign relations or public policy issues. Avoiding the political extremes, both senators embodied the central values of their Hoosier constituents.

Bibliography

Cayton, Andrew R. L. Frontier Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Critchlow, Donald T. Studebaker: The Life and Death of an American Corporation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929.

Madison, James H. The Indiana Way: A State History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

———, ed. Heart Land: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Nelson, Daniel. Farm and Factory: Workers in the Midwest, 1880–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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