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Independent Indianapolis

The Unsold Capital of Indiana

MAR BUNDY, a Hoosier general, commanded the Second Di

vision A. E. F. in that affair at Château Thierry, which first made the German High Command realize the fighting value of a nation they had supposed commercialized beyond active belligerency. Bundy knew that his troops were not good enough to retreat in the face of the mobile artillery and effective infantry dispositions of the Prussian advance. By all the rules he should have retreated. He ignored the rules, and his reversal of sound military policy, sound tactics, and the sound strategy of Corps Headquarters took the German battle machinery completely by surprise. It "wasn't cricket" to do what Bundy did. He made his stand and, finding the going good, went ahead and won what the "Old Kaspars" of the home country are already describing to many "little Peterkins" as "a famous victory." All victories in retrospect are subject to the cross-fire of conflicting authorities and

By GEORGE MARVIN

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historians; but this, at all events, is what Indiana, his native State, thinks about Omar Bundy.

A corresponding and refreshing independence distinguishes the capital of Indiana. Boosters and promoters will tell you that Indianapolis is one of the hardest communities in the country wherein to put things over or across. And rueful salesmen whose jobs depend upon volume of merchandising complain that, although Indianapolis retailers will buy what they want or need, you can't "sell them" on anything. The Hoosier druggist obstinately persists in providing his customers with what they honestly want rather than filling his shelves with stuff that National advertising campaigns tell them they ought to want. In the Hoosier city of James Whitcomb Riley somehow folks don't fall for everything that comes along. The go-getter goes here more often than he gets. Collectively and individually Indianapolis is unsold.

And yet the sun shines on this city

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Indianapolis's Place Vendome. The Soldiers and Sailors' Monument, commemorating the part taken by an especially militant and patriotic community in all the wars of the Union

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Indianapolis is not sold on selling. One of the few American cities which does not throw all of its municipal eggs into the one basket of size. A strong sense of proportion, of reasonable content, of quality in municipal achievement, and of relative values make this one of the hardest American communities in which to put anything and everything over

nearest of all big cities to the center of population in the United States. Without saying much about it, the capital of Indiana comes pretty close to St. Louis in being the center of most things exploitably United Statesian. On the charts provided by the local commercial bodies places like St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, and Memphis look like way stations in the radial lines converging on the polis of Indiana or appear suburbanly on the edges of congested areas of grain-growing, mineral deposits, commercial timbers, and manufacturing industries. Lots of other thriving cities build their commercial claims on a thinner substratum of fact.

All the more commendable, therefore, is the healthy attitude of mind that most of the citizens of this boostable municipality maintain about themselves and their home town. Astonishing as it must seem, they would rather be than either boost or boom. They say, these Indianapolitans, that they make enough money their own way and they get a lot more fun out of it than people seem to be getting out of noisier neighborhoods. The President of the Chamber of Commerce,

who imports coffee from Brazil for a living, goes down to Brazil to see how his commodity is grown and exported, and has the independent nerve to question New York's port primacy when founded on inefficient terminal facilities. Three times a week, in the warm weather, he knocks off work early in the afternoon to play polo with his two grown sonsand he plays good polo. The general secretary of his Chamber, an aviation colonel in the war, inspires belief in the industrial future of his city by moderate statement and a generous concessionforeign to many chambers-of some advantages in other localities. The editor of the Indianapolis "News" is just as independent in his judgment of civil values as Omar Bundy was in his estimate of the military situation. He says that he and the rest of his staff and the people who read his newspaper get more kick-actually more interest-out of the "News's" better-house-building project than they do out of bathing-beauty contests. He considers his sponsorship of a city plan to provide demonstrations of dwelling-house and landscape architecdwelling-house and landscape architecture, interior decoration and arrange

ment, and the practical advantage of ever newer domestic conveniences is a solid investment in civics; by contrast the bathing-beauty idea is bald and free motion-picture, hotel and resort, and personal advertising. One kind of publicity tends to build up, the other shatters, homes. One strengthens the social fabric; the other is a social upset as contagious as other communicable diseases. It takes some independence to think like that; it takes a whole lot more to come out in the open and actively sponsor such original thinking. Declarations of any kind of journalistic independence are apt-though not always-to hit circulation and estrange advertising. It is mutually indicative of clear thinking on the part of people and paper that the "News" and its policies independently thrive in Indianapolis.

The $200,000 necessary to finance the building, decoration, and landscaping of the five residences sponsored by the "News" were easily raised by the interested parties. When the continuing exhibition and explanation were opened in October, popular support at once substantiated the investment from the many

different points of view of those interested in its contributing ventures. And at the same time equally earnest floaters of bigger schemes fared very badly. In Indianapolis the bull market discounts "the bull." It is hard to get huge lists of subscribers to development or exploitation schemes within the corporate limits, and almost impossible to get a heart-beat for such foreign inflations as Florida. "Drives" get exhausted and drop in their traces. And this very unusual-and, it may be, commendable-state of mind is the reason for what some sales managers might call general apathy.

In this city the man with thirty, forty, or fifty thousand dollars acquired by honest industry is apt to be satisfied. In the midday or the early evening of life he wants to buy himself a livable place in the country, put his surplus in safe, low per cent bonds, and educate his children. He wants to go on working, but at a more leisurely pace, which is part of the earnings of his youthful effort. He does not characteristically buy land in distant swamps nor liquidate everything and flivver to southern California. For him relative values are not obscured by prosperity; he does not capitalize "progress." Just because some one, orally or in full-page spreads, tells him a certain thing is thus and so, that the Joneses are all using or wearing or doing it, doesn't make that thing or style or project necessarily desirable or useful for him.

Well, you take some thousands of citizens thinking like this, and, what is much more important, living consistently with their thinking, and you are apt to get a fairly robust and independent public

opinion. And this public opinion expresses itself in ways which support the belief that Americanism is something that cannot altogether be sold. For example, the plan adopted for the city of Indianapolis was largely influenced by the plan of the National capital at Washington. The same engineer, Alexander Ralston, assisted in surveying the capital of Indiana, located, by the intersection. of all diagonals, at the exact geographical center of the State. And at the very center of this Versailles spider-web of radial avenues and rectangular streets rises the Indiana State Soldiers and Sailors' Monument.

This, with its flanking fountains and the wide Circle, with bordering buildings architected concavely round it, is the Place Vendôme of Indianapolis. Commemorating Indiana's contribution to all the wars of this independent Union of States except the very last and greatest World War-its dignity has a touch of the foreign in it; the high column and the Circle, planted in the very bull's-eye of business, keep nevertheless a detachment like that in reverent places of older civilizations. Foch and Joffre, Marshals of France, caught this aroma of age; foreigners being ballyhooed round the city are apt to let the Belt Line, the plants, and the speedway go by cold, and then warm to the familiar beauty of Monument Circle.

Realizing the value of this architectural point, a number of alert Indianans got a measure introduced to appropriate $20,000 for illuminating the monument. They were going to focus a battery of terrific searchlights upon it, as the ancient Alamo is bedizened out of the

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kindly night of San Antonio and Niagara Falls is made a nightly portent of green and orange, blue and red exploiting. But Indianapolis defeated the bill. Colonel Oran Perry, the Civil War veteran superintendent who sells visitors tickets to be carried up in the elevator by another veteran the 284 feet of shaft to its summit, said "they weren't going to commercialize his monument." And the independent citizens of Indianapolis felt the same way about it.

A tapering spire at one point in the periphery of Monument Circle stands up as another mark of civic independence. Old Christ Church, ivy-grown and lawnsurrounded, stubbornly holds its own on one of the most valuable "undeveloped" plots of real estate in the city with something of the fortitude with which old Trinity commands Wall Street in New York. It hasn't been possible to boost Christ Church out of the business heart of the city, any more than it is possible to boost the healthful spirit of grace out of the hearts of unselfish people.

A city differentiated by people of this kind from the standardized trend of things dependently American might be expected to do something independent in the way of a Great War memorial. That is precisely what they have done, although the people of the county and the State have joined with them in dedicating seven whole blocks of State, county, and city property in the center of the municipality to the most extensive and the most expensive of altars raised by a peace-loving people to honor war. Indiana takes itself very seriously as a war State, and the seriousness appropriately focuses in the capital. They say it has

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Bridges over the White River as beautiful as those spanning the Seine at Paris. Indianapolis spends a lot of time and money trying to build a city wherein one may contentedly live while making a living

always been the first of the States to furnish its full quota in every war. The first shot in the Great War was fired by a Hoosier; the first soldier killed overseas was an Indiana volunteer-so runs the rubric. It is a clear matter of record that the first call in this State in 1917 was almost completely filled by volunteers. Indiana did not wait for the draft. The military spirit has always run strong in this commonwealth, and the military spirit emanates from the impulse of giving. You cannot sell it. It is an ingredient of the kind of Americanism that doesn't express itself on billboards.

One sound reason for the prevalence of the independent military spirit is that Indiana has always been comparatively a small neighborhood State like Kansas. Everybody knows everybody else. Nobody is appallingly rich, and there is a corresponding scarcity of objects for charity. Indianapolis has been colonized very largely from other smaller towns in Indiana. Just as it was customary to say that there were more Germans in Milwaukee than in Munich or more "Wops" in New York than in Naples, so you may say, with an even greater measure of truth, there are more Terre Haute folks in Indianapolis than in Terre Haute.

With this military tradition and independent mentality it seems appropriate that Indianapolis should be the National headquarters of the American Legion. The Legion building, dedicated on July 7 last year (1925), is the only completed edifice in the architectural scheme of the Memorial plaza to be grouped round a proposed central shrine in the form of a tremendous campanile. In it are housed. the administrative offices of Legion headquarters and the Council Room, where, as in a small senate, forty-eight desks. are inscribed in gold with the names of the States and several others with the designations of the dependencies and Territories-Porto Rico, Philippine Islands, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Panama Zone-which sent their contingents to fight with the A. E. F. Sitting once a year together there, the military delegates of all the constituent semi-independent Americas that owe allegiance to the Stars and Stripes face the symbolical battle painting by Reni-Mel called "America."

"A cut above the ordinary"

The Legion in Indianapolis had the good luck to be officered by the substantial men in the community. These men had the independent courage to stand out against the State bonus. They were the representatives of a volunteer, rather than a draft, citizenship, and as such

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bodied and able-minded survivors of a war not fought for gain or aggrandizement should be subsidized for their love of country. Accordingly, these men took counsel together how best to get away and keep away from the bonus idea and put in its place something substantially enduring for the whole community something to be proud of. The local Legion then began this high cause, and the compelling shove came with the coupling up of the general municipal move for a worthy memorial to the Legion's standard. Several cities claim the "low-down" on foreign-born influence, but it is safe to say that Indianapolis

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stands in the first rank of integrated citizenship; it had also the local physical lay-out with two exceptionally fine municipal buildings-the Library and the Federal Building at either end of a condemnable Mall requiring a big sacrifice of real estate values to condemn it for unprofitable-in-dollars-and-cents patriotic use. And it had the condition of mind belonging to the independent capital of a war State proud of its patriotism.

The State of Indiana may not, under provisions of the Constitution, assume bonded indebtedness, and the money for bonded indebtedness, and the money for this patriotic undertaking had therefore to be raised by taxation direct.

It was so raised. Indianapolis isn't the only capital that excites general rural apprehension about appropriations for urban or metropolitan expenditure. The Memorial measure had to be fought through a Legislature that wanted to be shown. It was so fought. All the newspapers in the city and most of those in the State got behind a measure involving ten million dollars to be raised by taxes. In the phraseology of salesmanship, the whole community is "sold on it" now. It would be more in accordance with the facts and with the independent personality of an unsold city to say that Indianapolis is given to it now.

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

The Fletcher Cult
By JAMES L. FORD

HE news that J. S. Fletcher has inaugurated the new year with a novel from his pen will cheer the hearts of a great army of readers. I discovered long ago that detective and mystery stories appealed with peculiar force to men engaged in intellectual pursuits clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, and doctors-and that nearly all of these were devotees of the Fletcher cult. Therefore in one respect, at least, I am of the intellectual class, for I simply live from Fletcher to Fletcher and have made a close study of his style and his method of first creating and then carrying on through a series of chapters of equal length a tale that grows in interest until the very last page. There is character study in his work too, and a love of nature and of the picturesque and charming phases of the English country. When he describes a village inn and mentions the good things to eat and drink that the landlord sets before his guests, I always wish that I might spend a week-end there. In just such an inn Mr. Fletcher lays the scene of the first chapter of his new novel, and here two of his principal characters have a clandestine meeting and sit down to a meal of the sort that the author knows so well how to describe. I confess to a slight sense of chagrin when I realized that one of these characters was a German of the polite spy type so frequently encountered during the war and the other a handsome young Englishwoman of good birth who had some

1 The Amaranth Club. By J. S. Fletcher. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $2.

J. S. Fletcher

how fallen under his spell. I feared that the author had retrograded and was about to spring upon us a conventional tale of espionage with a possible ending on the battlefield. As portrayed by Mr. Fletcher, Otto Von Roon was a German of the most polished type, handsome, well groomed, and of distinguished bearing. One could easily imagine him capable of obtaining a strong hold on Mrs. Hilda Tressingham, the sister of an impoverished English nobleman, and herself floundering in a sea of debt. During the meal we learn the purpose of the

clandestine meeting to which Von Roon has summoned the other. There is to be an election in a near-by town, and he wishes her to help the cause of a young manufacturer who holds office as Civil Lord of the Admiralty. She must render herself indispensable to him, promote his interests in every possible way, and be in a position to procure from him something which. Von Roon ardently desires.

Mrs. Tressingham, who is possessed of other qualities besides beauty and charm, plays her part in the campaign with such skill that young Ellington is returned to Parliament while his wife falis under the spell of the elder woman. Mrs. Tressingham rents her brother's town house to them, herself renovates it in a tasteful manner, and then installs as Mrs. Ellington's maid a woman named Parmenter whom she has often employed in a confidential capacity.

About this time we are introduced to the Amaranth Club, ostensibly a fashionable supper club of the kind with which London has long defied the Early Closing Act, and no sooner have we passed its portals than the interest of the tale quickens and we realize that this is something more than a mere rehash of espionage fiction. The Amaranth is a proprietary club, founded, owned, and managed by one Barthelemy, an admirably drawn type of the smooth and polished alien, evidently of no particular land or race, but thoroughly at home in the smart London world from which he draws his clients. It would be difficult to imagine anything more decorous in the way of supper clubs than the Amaranth. Its proprietor slavishly obeys every municipal law devised for the control of institutions such as his. Situated in a

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