“An Unusual Case” Dan Shay, Clarence Euell, Gertrude Anderson, and the Limits of Hoosier Progressivism

DAVID JONES

ne of Indianapolis’s most prominent landmarks, a physical embod- Oiment of the city’s Hoosier boosterism and cosmopolitan aspira- tions, the English Hotel and Opera House had loomed over Governor’s Square (later Monument Circle) since its completion in 1880. Built by William Hayden English, an Indianapolis businessman, congressman, and one-time Democratic candidate for Vice President of the United States, the hotel’s facade featured two towers and bas-relief sculptures of

______David Jones is a doctoral student in African history at the University at Albany, where he received his master’s degree in United States history in 2007. A former researcher at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, Jones is the author of Joe DiMaggio: A Biography (2004) and the editor of Deadball Stars of the American League (2007). The author wishes to thank Dr. Amy Murrell Taylor and Dr. Richard Hamm of the University at Albany, as well as the anonymous reader of an early draft, for their assistance in the planning and writing of this article. For help in gathering the materials used to complete this manu- script, he acknowledges the staffs at the Indiana State Library, Indiana Historical Society, the library for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Clark County (Ohio) Public Library, the University at Albany Library, Indiana historian Glory-June Greiff, and baseball historian Dick Thompson. Finally, he thanks Eric Sandweiss, Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes, and the rest of the staff of the IMH for their assistance and support throughout the editing of this article.

INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 103 (December 2007) 2007, Trustees of Indiana University. 350 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

The English Hotel and Opera House, Indianapolis, 1915 The hotel occupied the entire northwest quarter of Monument Circle. The hotel cafe, site of Clarence Euell’s murder, stands to the right of the lobby entrance in this view. Bass Photo Company Collection, Indiana Historical Society

past Indiana governors. Its 2,500-seat theater, whose 100-foot-long entrance corridor was graced by frescoed walls, marble pillars, and a grand staircase, had hosted the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and George M. Cohan. But when Indianapolis Police Lieutenant Herbert R. Fletcher and Sergeant John Sheehan stepped into the English Hotel lobby late in the evening of May 3, 1917, they were not hunting for celebrities or enter- tainment. In the corner of the lobby, across from the sweeping marble staircase and large mirrors, sat Clarence Euell, a 30-year-old waiter employed at the hotel cafe. Euell was doubled over in pain, moaning as blood seeped out of his abdomen from a single gunshot wound. Soon an ambulance would arrive to take him to City Hospital, but within an hour, Euell would be dead. Fletcher and Sheehan went upstairs to the room of Dan Shay, 40, a former major league baseball player and current manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, a minor league club in the American Association. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 351

Immediately the officers noticed the abrasions on Shay’s face; they could smell the liquor on his breath. He was either intoxicated or dazed, or both, the officers concluded. To most of their questions Shay proved unresponsive, though he did make one statement that both Fletcher and Sheehan would later repeat in open court: “The nigger called me a —— and made a pass at me and I shot him.”1 More than six months later, Shay would display far more elo- quence following his acquittal of second-degree murder charges by an Indianapolis jury. After declaring that he had known all along he would be acquitted, Shay added, “I felt any fair-minded man would look at the case in the same light the jury did. I want to thank the jury publicly for their verdict; the judge, for his many courtesies extended; my attorneys, who so diligently defended my position, and the people in general, the people of Indianapolis, who understand the situation. Of course it was in some respects an unusual case, but now I am glad it is all over.”2 To anyone familiar with the unequal treatment of African Americans in courts throughout the United States during the twentieth century, the story of Shay’s acquittal for the murder of Euell, a black man, is typical: despite eyewitness testimonies to the killing and the defense’s inconsistent, shifting explanations of the event, a jury of Shay’s white male peers found the former major leaguer not guilty, thereby implicitly accepting the defense’s argument that Euell, the “bad nigger” from Indiana Avenue, had been responsible for provoking Shay and causing his own death. Knowing that the trial occurred just a few years before the astounding rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Indianapolis, and that both the trial judge and at least one member of the jury would later become Klan members themselves, makes the outcome of the trial seem entirely foreordained. However, a closer examination of the social concerns of Indianapolis’s white community, the events surrounding Euell’s death, and the arguments made by both the prosecution and defense at Shay’s trial reveals a more complicated picture. Certainly the defense manipu- lated the jury by playing on white fears of black men, but the prosecution engaged in demagoguery of its own. Shay’s trial took place a few months after Indiana passed legislation prohibiting the sale of alcohol in

______1Indianapolis Star, November 17, 1917. 2Indiana Daily Times, November 22, 1917. 352 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

the state. Accordingly, the prosecution offered the jury a stereotype of Shay, the son of Irish-Catholic immigrants, as a man whose addiction to alcohol had clouded his judgment and endangered the community. For nearly two weeks in a Marion County courtroom, the prosecution appealed to the community’s suspicion of the immoral outsider who haunted Indianapolis’s bars and brothels, threatening the social fabric by drinking to excess and consorting with loose women, while the defense attempted to exploit the jury’s racial fears. Seen from both perspectives, the trial becomes less a contest over evidence, testimony, and eyewitnesses to the shooting itself, and more a conflict between the racial and moral prerogatives of Indiana’s overwhelmingly white Protestant community. The trial centered not on facts (which were never in dispute) but on competing images of the body: on one side, the oversexed, angry, and hulking black male; on the other, the dissolute, red faced, drunken Irishman whose very breath communicated the poison that threatened the community.3 Jurors were called to choose between these two images; the choice that they made reflected their understandings of the prevail- ing social order, what made it function, and what (or who) posed its greatest threat. That they ultimately chose racial defense over social reform should not cloud our ability to see the complexity of the contrasting images that vied for their favor during the course of the trial. Though the trial’s outcome was predictable, it was not inevitable. The discourses of racial and social threat that suffused Shay’s murder trial were themselves mediated by the presence of Gertrude Anderson, a white prostitute who had accompanied Shay to the English Hotel and witnessed the events leading up to the shooting. For the defense, Anderson performed the ideal function of reminding the jury of the threat that black male sexuality posed to white female virtue. For the prosecution, however, Anderson presented a formidable problem. Her

______3A potent point of discourse, trials are arenas invested with state power, where various representations of truth circulate and compete. In some trials, legal discussion is situated around the body or depictions of the body vis-a-vis class. See Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1995), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London, 2001), and The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. (New York, 1990) for an analysis. In other cases, race and gender help to constitute discourse about the body. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004) assesses the way images of female slaves’ bodies were used in discussions about race, reproduction, and gender in the New World. This discourse, she argues, ultimately shaped relationships between slaves and slaveholders. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 353

low social status and her profession served as markers of the social dis- integration which Shay symbolized, but her gender made her a dangerous and elusive target. Despite numerous insinuations, the prosecution proved unwilling to challenge her virtue directly or to ask her why she had decided to accompany Shay to the hotel on the night of the shooting. Anderson’s role in Indianapolis’s vice industry was thus relegated to the margins of the trial, occupying an uncomfortable space marked by innuendo and clouded in silence. The tasks of filling the gaps in Anderson’s testimony and of making sense of the entire trial were left to the jury, to the citizens of Indianapolis, and to the city’s press. In a year when harrowing reports from the European front domi- nated the news cycle, the arrest of Dan Shay and his subsequent trial and acquittal gave the citizens of Indianapolis a sensational diversion, as the affair was chronicled extensively, sometimes breathlessly, by the city’s three daily newspapers: the Indianapolis News, the Indianapolis Star, and the Indiana Daily Times. In addition, three African American weeklies, The Freeman, the Indianapolis Colored World, and the Indianapolis Recorder, provided more limited coverage of the case and its aftermath,4 reflecting not only their smaller circulation, but also the precarious position of Indianapolis’s black community, members of which often relied on the patronage of white city officials to maintain their marginal economic standing and their access to political power. These papers strug- gled to tell the story in a way that allowed them to survive in the context of Indiana’s long and turbulent history of racial conflict.

Although slavery in Indiana had been outlawed by the constitution of 1816, legislators worked to make sure that the state remained “white man’s country.” In 1831, the General Assembly passed a law stipulating that any African American entering the state without a certificate of freedom would be declared a fugitive slave, turned over to the sheriff, and advertised as a runaway.5 By 1850 delegates gathered in convention to adopt a revised state constitution, influenced by strong support from the

______4Unfortunately, 1917 to 1926 are the “lost years” for the Indianapolis Recorder, as no known copies of the newspaper have survived either in their original form or in microfilm. Undoubtedly the Recorder, the most radical of the black newspapers, covered the incident, though to what extent is unknown. 5Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis, 1957), 58. 354 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

state’s southern counties for the passage of Article XIII, which stated that “No negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.”6 Though Article XIII was only sporadi- cally enforced after ratification of the new constitution the following year, it did severely curtail black migration into the state. Where Indiana’s blacks had comprised just 1.1 percent of the state’s population in 1850, that figure had dropped to 0.8 percent a decade later.7 The Indiana Supreme Court struck down Article XIII in 1866, and soon tens of thousands of African Americans, most of them former slaves, began streaming into the state from Kentucky. Between 1860 and 1880, the state’s black population increased from 11,428 to 39,228. By 1900, the number exceeded 57,000.8 Indianapolis’s black population grew in the same period from just 498 to nearly 16,000 with migrants seeking better employment opportu- nities and education for their children.9 Local authorities used intimida- tion tactics to corral the arriving blacks within their own neighborhoods, generally on or adjacent to Indiana Avenue.10 One of the nineteenth-century arrivals was James Euell, father of Clarence, who first appears in the city directories in 1888. By that time, James had been married to his wife Jennie for four years, and their first child, Clarence, was two years old. Both James and Jennie had been born in Kentucky in 1851, indicating they were probably former slaves. Once in Indianapolis, James, Jennie, and Clarence settled on Hadley Drive, just off Indiana Avenue, in the northwest quadrant of the city. The 1900 census shows that two other children had joined then-13- year-old Clarence in the Euell family: 10-year-old Ida, and 9-year-old Julia; all three of them were attending a segregated school.11 James

______6At the time of the convention, southerners still represented the largest regional contingent in the Hoosier state. A review of the 1850 census shows that 44 percent of Indiana’s population hailed from the South, compared to 31.4 percent from Ohio, 19.9 percent from the Mid- Atlantic states, and 2.7 percent from New England. James Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 62. 7Figures derived from Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900, 44. 8Ibid., 206. 9Ibid., 229. 10Carolyn M. Brady, The Transformation of a Neighborhood: Ransom Place Historic District, Indianapolis, 1900-1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 9-23. 11All schools in Indiana at the time were segregated. U.S., Twelfth Census: 1900: Series T623, Roll 388, Book 1, pp. 311a-312, http://www.heritagequestonline.com. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 355

worked as a “day laborer,” an occupation he had held since his arrival and would maintain for the next 30 years. The city’s best jobs remained closed to blacks, despite their increasing education, and most white unions similarly excluded African Americans from their ranks. Although he was educated, Clarence Euell would hold only one job: waiter at the English Cafe.12 The Great Migration that occurred between 1900 and 1920 did not produce a remarkable surge in Indianapolis’s African American population as it did in nearby urban centers such as Chicago or Detroit. Indianapolis’s black population increased by 59 percent during these decades, compared with 148 percent for Chicago and 611 percent for Detroit.13 In addition, as African American migrants moved into Indianapolis, so did their white counterparts, and in significantly larger numbers. The city’s white population increased by 126,233 during the same period; the black population increased by 18,747.14 Those white migrants who did enter the city came overwhelmingly from Indiana’s rural counties, and predominantly from the southern part of the state.15 Not surprisingly, the white migrants brought with them their own ideas and prejudices about race relations, and as a result Indianapolis’s racial climate became noticeably more tense. As one migrant explained to Ray Stannard Baker, “There are too many Negroes up here; they hurt the city.” Another white resident added prophetically, “I suppose sooner or later we shall have to adopt some of the restrictions of the South.”16 In the summer of 1901, a gang of more than 150 white men chased black citizens out of suburban Indianapolis’s Fairview Park, beating them with clubs and rocks. A dozen blacks were injured in the riot, but

______12Based on a review of the Indianapolis City Directories, 1900-1917. See, for example, R. L. Polk and Co.’s Indianapolis City Directory 1917 (Indianapolis, 1917), 513. 13Carolyn M. Brady, “Indianapolis at the Time of the Great Migration: 1900-1920,” www.car- olynbrady.com/indymigration.html. 14Derived from population figures published in David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, eds., The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 1504-1510. 15Between 1900 and 1920, the population of Indiana’s central counties grew by 23.2 percent, with Marion County’s increasing by 76.5 percent. The population of the Gary-South Bend-Fort Wayne corridor increased by 25.6 percent. Southern Indiana’s population decreased by 0.6 percent. Clifton J. Phillips, Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880-1920 (Indianapolis, 1968) and http:// www.census.gov/population/cencounts/ in190090.txt. 16Brady, The Transformation of a Neighborhood, 23. 356 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

authorities brought charges against only three assailants; two were acquitted, and the third paid a $25 fine.17 In 1917, the same year that Dan Shay shot and killed Clarence Euell, an 18-year-old black man suffered a fractured skull when a white co-worker struck him over the head with a hammer after he drank from a water cup intended for “whites- only” at the glass factory where he worked.18 Racial violence was not the only social problem plaguing the Hoosier state in the early twentieth century. A rampant vice industry also signaled brewing social tensions. Prohibition activists expressed a belief that the abolition of the saloon was a progressive measure that would help protect Christian homes—and especially Christian women—from the pernicious influence of alcohol.19 Deploying language that reflected their conviction that prohibition would mark a new era in the moral life of the state and the nation, temperance advocates hailed the prohibition victory as nothing less than the triumph of good over evil. As the Indianapolis Star editorialized:

If the saloon ever had any defense, it has lost it. Deaf to the voices of sorrow, blind to the light that has come into the world, it has written its own doom in the desperation it has roused in its victims. The promise of mercy is to him that showeth mercy, but none can be expected now where none has been shown. They who have sown the wind must reap the whirlwind.20

City newspapers also emphasized the role that prohibition would play in protecting the state’s (white) women, who, presumably, were among the chief victims of the liquor business. The Indiana Daily Times applauded “the good women of Indiana” who had played “a large part in the great forward movement of the . . . bill.”21 More strikingly, the Star declared that “the triumph of prohibition in the Indiana legislature is a

______17Ibid., 21-23. 18Indiana Daily Times, November 14, 1917. 19The Indiana General Assembly had overwhelmingly passed a prohibition measure in February 1917. 20Indianapolis Star, February 3, 1917. 21Indiana Daily Times, February 3, 1917. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 357

victory for the church, the school, and the home. It is a victory for sad- eyed women and half-clad children, upon whom has dawned the promise of a brighter day.”22 Absent from the celebration of Indiana’s impending move to dry statehood were the voices of minority communities, particularly Roman Catholics and African Americans. The logic of the temperance fighters suggested that blacks should have been especially pleased by the elimi- nation of the saloon, since such establishments were more common in poor Indianapolis neighborhoods than elsewhere. There is much evidence to suggest, however, that the African American community in Indianapolis viewed the measure with a marked degree of ambivalence, and that temperance movement leaders were oblivious to the impact of prohibition on black communities.23 The new world envisioned by the state’s Progressives obscured sig- nificant cleavages in the community’s racial, social, and religious com- position. It was built upon the image of the idealized white woman, whose virtue would guard the state from sin, and whose innocence would, in turn, be protected by the state’s new laws. Ultimately, the Progressives’ vision left them unprepared for what happened on May 3, 1917, when the drunken son of an Irish saloonkeeper walked into the English Hotel cafe accompanied by a white prostitute, a pistol resting in his hip pocket.

Dan Shay was a product not of Indianapolis, but of Springfield, Ohio, located 130 miles due east of the Hoosier capital. Springfield, like Indianapolis, became a haven for Kentucky-born African Americans after the Civil War, and the racial tensions introduced by their arrival became a pronounced feature of Springfield’s daily life during Shay’s childhood. Born on November 8, 1876, Shay was the fourth child of Daniel and Ellen Shay, Irish immigrants.24 As members of the city’s working

______22Indianapolis Star, February 3, 1917. 23A major concern for African Americans was the loss of jobs that would accompany prohibition and the consequent close of the “saloon businesses.” The Freeman, February 10, 1917. 24At the time of the 1880 census, Daniel Shay Sr. was unemployed, though in the coming years he worked in a variety of jobs. U.S., Tenth Census: 1880: Series T9, Roll 1066, p. 21, http://www.heritagequestonline.com. A review of the Springfield city directories for the 1880s reveals that Shay, like Clarence Euell’s father, worked as a common laborer (1881-1884), a 358 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

class, the Shays would have been in direct competition with Springfield’s burgeoning African American population, whose growth had far out- paced that of the white population between 1860 and 1880.25 Such growth, although waning by century’s end, prompted sociologist Edwin Smith Todd to note that “the animosity on the part of the whites toward the colored is strong and growing; and on the part of the colored race there is a growing jealousy of rights, real or supposed.”26 One of the most divisive issues in Springfield during Dan Shay’s childhood was the integration of the city’s public schools. In two public referenda held in the spring and fall of 1882, local voters had overwhelmingly vetoed an integration proposal, but by 1885, when Shay was 9 years old, a Republican school board voted to allow blacks to attend the schools nearest their homes. To Todd, looking back from the per- spective of nearly two decades, the plan was “provocative of trouble. Oftentimes white parents refuse[d] to permit their children to sit by the colored in the school room.”27 No record reveals how Shay or his parents perceived these events, but Todd’s study makes clear that the racial climate in Springfield had worsened by the turn of the century. During the same year Todd’s research was published, a white mob lynched a black man accused of killing a white police officer and then torched the city’s black neighborhood, destroying many homes and businesses.28 Violence re-erupted in 1906, when reports that black residents had attacked several whites prompted white mobs again to set fire to black neighborhoods.29 By then, however, Dan Shay had left Springfield, achieving fame in the world of professional baseball and thus becoming one of the city’s

______foreman for a stone quarry (1885-1886), a saloonkeeper (1887), and, after that failed, again as a common laborer (1888-1890). In another indication of the family’s economic struggles, Ellen Shay took up work as a domestic servant in the homes of several members of Springfield’s elite upper class. 25In his 1904 study of Clark County, Ohio, sociologist Edwin Smith Todd reported that Springfield’s black population had increased by 344.6 percent from 1860-1870 and 92.3 percent from 1870-1880, both rates of increase far exceeding the city’s white population, which grew by 69.9 percent from 1860-1870, and 60.7 percent from 1870-1880. Edwin Smith Todd, A Sociological Study of Clark County, Ohio (Springfield, Ill., 1904), 46. 26Ibid., 66. 27Ibid. 28New York Times, March 9, 1904. 29Ibid., February 28, 1906. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 359

most favored sons. Beginning in 1895, he played for minor league teams throughout the Northeast30; in 1901, he briefly reached the major leagues with the Cleveland Blues (later the Indians), before spending the next two seasons with St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco. After opening the 1904 season with Portland, Oregon, Shay’s contract was purchased by the St. Louis Cardinals, who used him as their regular shortstop for most of the season.31 A flashy fielder and speedy runner, Shay became known as “Scrappy Dan” for his hard-nosed play and aggressive base-running style. He was an inept hitter, however, never batting better than .256 in his major league career. A shattered, eventually amputated, pinky finger further limited his effectiveness, and forced a one-year hiatus.32 He reemerged on the roster of the 1907 New York Giants, batting just .190 in 35 games before drawing his release. Shay never again played in the major leagues. He toiled in the minors as a part-time player for two seasons before landing a string of minor league managerial positions from 1909 to 1917. In between two managerial stints with the Kansas City Blues of the American Association (1909-1911 and 1915-1916), Shay suffered personal tragedy when his wife was killed in a car accident in Salt Lake City. Now the widowed father of a son and a daughter who were sent to live with relatives, Shay took to drinking.33 He returned to managing the Kansas City Blues, but when they finished only fifth in the American Association, Shay left Kansas City and signed a contract to manage the Milwaukee Brewers. Aside from his personal misfortunes, nothing in Dan Shay’s professional history could have predicted his violent outburst against Clarence Euell on May 3, 1917. Just three weeks into his tenure with the Brewers, Shay’s club was off to an uneven start, having just lost two straight to the Indianapolis Indians. But if Shay was discouraged by his club’s lackluster performance, it would have been a familiar kind of frustration: having

______30These teams included Olean, Rochester, Albany, and Cortland, New York; and Brockton, Connecticut. 31Information on Shay’s minor league experience came from the private newspaper clipping files of the late Tom Shea. Baseball historian Dick Thompson, who manages the files, generous- ly shared the information upon my request. 32Washington Post, August 2, 1905. 33Indiana Daily Times, May 4, 1917. 360 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

lived in the game of baseball for twenty years, Shay would have known well the ebbs and flows of the long season. Indeed, he enjoyed an excel- lent reputation in his profession. True, he did drink and did own and carry a gun, but in these habits he was hardly unique among baseball men. Superstar Ty Cobb was known to sleep with a pistol next to his pillow. What made Shay a likely candidate for racial violence was not his exceptionality, but his typicality. The son of poor white Irish immigrants, Shay had come of age in a segregated world: all the baseball leagues he had played in or managed were whites-only. The hotels he slept in, the restaurants in which he dined, were strictly segregated, except for their black waiters and porters, who were expected to provide prompt, efficient, and humble service. As Shay would later explain, “I was not in the habit of serving myself.”34

The afternoon contest between the Indians and Brewers at Washington Park on Thursday, May 3, 1917, took just one hour and 48 minutes, as Indianapolis pitcher Clint Rogge used an array of curveballs and breaking pitches to hold the Brewer bats to just one run in a 3-1 Indians victory. After the game, Shay showered and dressed in the clubhouse and headed out for an evening on the town. He went to the saloon of John Heinlein, a friend who had provided Shay with betting tips for horse races over the past two years. While there, Shay consumed a beer and five mixed drinks. Heinlein would later testify that Shay appeared drunk, based on his “flushed look.” Louis Baseman, the bartender at the saloon that evening, added in testimony that he saw Shay move a pistol from his overcoat pocket to his hip pocket.35 At approximately 6:30 p.m., Heinlein accompanied Shay to the “manicure parlor” of 36-year-old Gertrude Anderson at 157 North Illinois Street. Anderson would later testify that, for the next two hours, she gave Shay a manicure. Married twice and estranged from her second husband, Anderson had lived in Colkinsville, Idaho; Kansas City; San Francisco; Louisville; and Denver before settling in Indianapolis.36

______34Ibid., November 21, 1917. 35Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1917. 36Despite her peripatetic lifestyle, Anderson insisted that in each stop along her travels she had been with her mother, and listed her various means of employment as milliner, hairdresser, LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 361

The lobby of the English Hotel, Indianapolis, c. 1915 Clarence Euell sat here awaiting medical treatment after imploring the hotel cafe manager, “Won’t you send me some place to die?” Bass Photo Company Collection, Indiana Historical Society

After his two-hour manicure, Shay accompanied Anderson to the English Hotel, where he was staying, and the couple found a table at the hotel cafe. Waiter Clarence Euell took their order for food and drinks— sirloin steak, potatoes, salad, and, for Shay, four “Bronx cocktails.”37 Shay ordered a cup of coffee to round out his meal. As Euell brought the coffee to the table, Shay demanded more sugar, even though there were already two sugar bowls on his table. Shay, Anderson, and several witnesses would offer widely differing accounts of what happened next, but the most consistent and seemingly reliable testimony came from Elizabeth Braskett, the white cashier working at the cafe that night. She remembered that Euell had responded to Shay’s request for

______manicurist, and vendor of metal polish. Interestingly, at the time of the shooting she lived at 219 Indiana Avenue, just a few blocks away from Clarence Euell’s apartment at 329 Indiana Avenue. Ibid., November 18, 1917. 37A mixed drink that includes gin, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, and orange juice. 362 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

more sugar by saying, “You’ve got sugar,” and then shoving one of the bowls in front of Shay’s plate. Euell then took the lid off the bowl, and brought two more sugar bowls over to the table. Shay, offended by Euell’s disrespectful manner, muttered “Smarty.” He then said something else that Braskett did not hear, but which caused Euell to stop, turn around, and stare back at Shay. “I don’t like that remark you made to me,” Euell said. “What do you mean you don’t like that remark?” Shay retorted. As Euell started to walk away, Shay called him back to the table. When Euell approached, Shay arose from his chair, declared, “I will now show you what I meant by that remark,” then pulled out his pistol and fired a single bullet into Euell’s abdomen.38 When Shay fired his weapon, Anderson and Braskett both ran from the dining room and into the kitchen, exiting the cafe through a back door. Euell, doubled over in pain from the gunshot wound, managed to grab hold of Shay’s wrist before he could fire his pistol again. Euell then wrestled Shay to the ground, pinned his head against the floor with his foot, and began bashing it. Hearing the gunshot, the white manager of the cafe, Herbert Miller, ran into the room. When he saw that Euell had Shay pinned to the ground and was beating his head against the floor, Miller commanded, “Don’t do that, Clarence.” According to Miller, Euell then looked up at his boss and replied, “Why shouldn’t I, Mr. Miller? He’s shot me and I’m bleeding to death inside.” Mark Byrd, a black waiter also employed at the cafe, took the gun from Shay and gave it to Miller, who placed it in the manager’s safe. After calling the police and an ambulance, Miller told Euell to wait in the kitchen. But the injured Euell soon returned to his boss and implored, “Won’t you send me some place to die?” Miller told Euell to sit out in one of the big chairs in the lobby, where the police later found him.39 Meanwhile, several of Shay’s players who had been loitering in the lobby, unaware of the dispute until they heard the gunfire, rushed into the cafe, grabbed their manager, and escorted him upstairs to his room. It was there that officers Fletcher and Sheehan found and arrested him. Shay was taken to police headquarters and booked on assault charges.

______38Indianapolis News, May 4, 1917. 39Indianapolis Star, November 16, 1917. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 363

The police then intended to bring Shay to City Hospital, so that Euell could positively identify him as the shooter, but on the way to the hospital the authorities received word that Euell had died. With that, the squad car turned around and headed back to the station.40 The city’s African American community reacted to word of the shooting with sorrow, anger, and indignation, though much of it would go unrecorded by the two weekly black newspapers—The Freeman and the Colored World—for which 1917 editions still survive in library archives. Because they represented a community constantly endangered by the racial prejudices of the city’s white majority, The Freeman and the Colored World had to register their outrage with humility and restraint. Their policy was influenced not only by fear of white violence, but also by business concerns. George L. Knox, the African American publisher of The Freeman, owned a barbershop that catered only to whites. If his paper became too militant, he could face a boycott that would ruin both his shop and his paper.41 The Freeman’s May 12, 1917 issue carried a brief notice of Euell’s death, noting that at the English Hotel “everyone, both the guests and employees, spoke highly of Euell, saying he had always conducted himself properly and bore a good reputation.”42 The Colored World would not even go that far: in its May 12 issue, mention of Euell appeared only in the paper’s weekly list of deaths. Other than that he died from a “gunshot wound of abdomen,” no other details were provided.43 In an editorial published the previous week, the Colored World had lambasted African American newspapers that chose to run such “unscrupulous” headlines as “White wife kills colored husband” and “Colored family ordered to leave town because one member struck a white man.” Instead, the paper urged the black press to deal out “whole- some advice to the race,” and to publish only news that was “fit . . . for their consumption.”44 The clear, though unstated, implication of the editorial was that any news that carried the potential to incite black anger, such as the killing of Clarence Euell, should be avoided.

______40Ibid., May 4, 1917. 41Brady, The Transformation of a Neighborhood, 15. 42The Freeman, May 12, 1917. 43Indianapolis Colored World, May 12, 1917. 44Ibid., May 5, 1917. 364 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Nonetheless, much of the city’s African American community was incensed by the news of Euell’s death. In its May 19 issue, the Colored World reported that a group of black citizens had met at Willis’s A.M.E. Chapel “for the purpose of both raising the necessary funds and hiring legal talent to take charge of the prosecution in the Clarence Euell case.” That such a meeting was held suggests that black activism was aroused by Euell’s death, and that these activists did not trust the prosecutor’s office to vigorously pursue the case on its own.45 Meanwhile, the professional baseball fraternity mounted a legal fund to help pay for Shay’s defense. On May 7, the Milwaukee Journal reported that Joe Tinker, Columbus manager and one-time Chicago Cub, had announced the fund. Soon, “players, managers and club own- ers alike” were making contributions. The day after the shooting, Milwaukee owner A. F. Timme told reporters that he would back his manager “to the limit,” but within a week, as the gravity of the charges against Shay became clear, Timme hired another manager.46 Shay used the money from the defense fund to hire the power- house law firm of Ryan, Ruckelshaus, and Ryan to represent him against what were now charges of second-degree murder. Just one day after Euell’s death, Shay’s defense had become clear: he had shot Euell in self-defense. As the Indianapolis Star reported on May 5, Shay told police detective James F. Quigley that Euell had used “vile language” and that when Shay “attempted to call the waiter down for uttering the words in the presence of the woman who was with Shay, the negro came toward him with his fist clenched.” Because Euell appeared “greatly angered” and Shay “believed he was about to be injured,” Shay pulled out his pistol and fired the fatal shot. This account contradicted the story of clerk Elizabeth Braskett, which had appeared in the newspapers the previous day. Shay’s narration would also change during the trial, as he embellished his version of events to make Euell

______45The Colored World cautioned the citizens against “elements of people who would and do solic- it in the interest of something all the time. But the most dangerous are the professional para- sites who come into your meeting seemingly in good faith, give empty pledges and go out and ‘clean up.’ This is by playing on credulity [sic] of some people who believe in fair play and seem to think that every member, especially of our race, is alright.” The clear, but unstated, agenda of the paper was to discourage any activity that could further poison the city’s already polluted racial waters. Ibid., May 19, 1917. 46Milwaukee Journal, May 7, 1917. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 365

appear even more threatening, and thus his self-defense plea more credible.47 The Star also reported that Shay had told Mike Kelley, the manager of the St. Paul team who had come to visit him in the county jail, that “the woman” (Gertrude Anderson) would confirm his account of the shooting. Yet Anderson, who had slipped out the back door of the cafe after the shooting, seemed to have vanished. For two days, Indianapolis newspapers carried headlines about the disappearance of the “mysteri- ous woman” who allegedly held the key that could unlock the mystery of Clarence Euell’s death.48 When she reappeared on May 6, Anderson gave two conflicting accounts of the shooting. To Claude M. Worley, special investigator for the criminal court, she provided a version of events that largely corroborated Shay’s tale. The Indianapolis News reported that Anderson had told Worley that Euell was “rude and gruff from the beginning. . . . He slight- ed us in every way. We were forced to ask for napkins. He seemed not to want to wait on our table. He stood about in a defiant manner and watched us. Mr. Shay had said nothing to him which could have pro- voked him, except to ask for the napkins.” When Shay asked for more sugar for his coffee, Anderson now claimed that “the negro was slow to respond and surly.”49 “Finally,” Anderson told Worley, “the waiter came close to Shay and cursed him. ‘You want to be careful around here, I am a smart fellow,’ the waiter said.” According to Anderson, Shay responded innocent- ly, “I have said nothing to you.” Anderson told Worley that she then became frightened and fled the table, but as she did so “I saw the negro double up his fist and start to strike at Shay, who was sitting down.” She heard the fatal shot while running to the kitchen, she explained.50 The same afternoon that she told this story to Worley, Anderson appeared under oath before the grand jury. Described by the news as a “reluctant witness,” Anderson made no mention in her grand jury account of Euell having said anything threatening to Shay, nor did she mention having seen the waiter clench his fist prior to the shot.

______47Indianapolis Star, May 5, 1917. 48Ibid. 49Indianapolis News, May 5, 1917. 50Ibid. 366 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

According to the News article, Anderson testified that “she did not see Euell strike Shay, and did not hear Euell threaten to strike Shay.” The testy exchange between Euell and Shay was also missing from her testimony. “I did not hear Shay make any remark to Euell before he shot him, and Shay was still sitting at the table when I left,” Anderson told the grand jury. Comparing her statement to Worley with her sworn testimony before the grand jury, the News concluded that there was a “wide variance” between her two accounts and added that her versions were “apparently not consistent.”51 The News was willing to point out the obvious inconsistencies in Anderson’s tales, but another of the city’s papers, the Indiana Daily Times, purposefully elided them. The Times’s headline declared “Woman Tells Grand Jurors of Shooting,” while two subheads read, “Declares Colored Waiter Insolent” and “Statement Made to Claude Worley Strong Defense for Ball Manager.” The article, which ran several columns, repeated Anderson’s statement to Worley virtually word-for-word—as if it were an established fact, rather than a subjective eyewitness account— but made no mention of what she had said under oath before the grand jury. Only the last two paragraphs of the story mentioned the testimony of other witnesses, including Braskett’s incriminating account. The grand jury testimony of three African American waiters, Eugene James, Mark Byrd, and George Scott, who had also been working with Euell that night, was not reprinted at all. The paper merely noted that they “also testified.”52 The Times account set the tone for the newspaper coverage to come. The testimony of white witnesses would be prominently featured by the city’s three dailies, while the voices of black witnesses would go almost completely ignored. Though the Times characterized Anderson’s statement to Worley as a “strong defense for Shay,” the grand jury nonetheless indicted him on second-degree murder charges on May 11. Denied the opportunity to post bail, Shay would spend the next six months in the county jail, awaiting trial. The lengthy interlude undoubtedly afforded Shay and his attorneys the opportunity to review their prospects for the coming trial. At first glance, the outlook for Shay appeared grim. It would be difficult to convince a jury that the shooting of an unarmed man had been an act

______51Ibid., May 7, 1917. 52Indiana Daily Times, May 5, 1917. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 367

of self-defense, and Shay’s initial story that Euell had called him a name and then approached him in a threatening manner was unlikely to meet the legal threshold for establishing self-defense as a justifiable motive for the killing. The testimony of Braskett painted Shay as the aggressor in the affair, and the other “star witness” in the case, Anderson, while defending Shay’s conduct toward Euell, had also managed to contradict her own story within the span of a few hours. If convicted, Shay would face a prison term ranging anywhere from 20 years to life. Undoubtedly, at some point between the May indictment and the start of the trial in November, the defense realized that to attain an acquittal they would have to embellish and exaggerate Euell’s conduct toward Shay. Furthermore, they would have to plant in the minds of the jurors the idea that Euell was a frightening man—physically strong, irrational, contemptuous of white privilege, and disrespectful toward white womanhood. They would have to insinuate that Euell posed a dangerous threat not only to Dan Shay, but to all the whites of Indianapolis, and that the killing of Euell represented not just an act of self-defense, but one of race-defense. This image of the black man as savage beast coexisted with his cari- cature as Sambo—an innocent, docile, respectful, and emasculated creature who was extolled for his “childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness.”53 Novelist Thomas Dixon, whose 1905 novel The Clansman would form the basis of D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, gave form to the more alarmist image of the black male as “half-child, half-ani- mal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit . . . a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger.”54 It was representations such as Dixon’s that would serve as the foundation for the defense’s case. Clarence Euell was no happy-go-lucky Sambo, Shay’s attorneys would insist, but rather a ferocious, irrational creature whose anger had been inexplicably unleashed against the innocent and unsuspecting Shay, and whose lustful passions posed a threat to Anderson, and by extension, all the white women of Indianapolis. That Anderson was actually a prostitute who had lived in the city for only a

______53George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 111. 54Ibid., 280-81. See also Thomas Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots (New York, 1902) and The Clansman (New York, 1905). 368 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

short while did not matter. During the trial, the defense would carefully project Anderson’s “innocent” sexuality onto the menacing figure of Euell, whose very body would serve as a symbol for all the racial and sexual perils that threatened the community’s moral order.55 Simultaneously, the prosecution busied itself concocting a trial strategy to exploit white Protestant fears of saloons, booze, and loose women. Just as Euell’s aggressive masculinity posed a threat to Indiana’s social order, Shay’s alcoholic rampage through the city and his familiari- ty with its vice industry symbolized the menace that was tearing at the social fabric of the community. The passage of the prohibition bill earlier in the year made the argument a timely one. It also drew on the first editorials about the shooting to appear in white newspapers. The Indiana Daily Times, which would support Shay’s position by the time of the trial, had initially been quick to condemn the ball manager: “Danny Shay is not likely to obtain much sympathy in his present serious plight. . . . He played the part of a lawbreaker in the first place when he went armed among peace-loving folk, and he acted the role of the sulky and brutal bully when he displayed an arrogant and intolerant temper toward a waiter who happened to be colored.”56 Condemning Shay’s “pistol-toting,” the Indianapolis News displayed the same progressive temperament that had informed its support for prohibition (although at this stage the paper offered no comment on Shay’s drinking). “We have advanced in civilization beyond the pistol-toting age,” the News declared, “and those who have not moved up with us must take the con- sequences of lagging behind.”57

______55In making this argument, the defense would be planting seeds in ground already fertilized by American popular culture throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. The reign- ing world heavyweight champion for seven consecutive years, Jack Johnson consciously exploited the myths, fantasies, and fears about black male virility. His use of clothing to accen- tuate his physique and his womanizing were seen as threats to white feminine virtue. When Johnson claimed the heavyweight championship of the world in 1908, a call quickly went out for a “great white hope” who could defeat him and prove the superiority of the white race in the ring. The former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, professing his deep hatred for blacks, agreed to come out of retirement to fight Johnson. The fight, held in Reno on July 4, 1910, ended when Johnson knocked Jeffries halfway out of the ring. Johnson’s victory added to the fear of black masculinity and its threat to racial hierarchy. It was this perceived threat that the Shay defense would exploit to set their client free. 56Indiana Daily Times, May 5, 1917. 57Indianapolis News, May 4, 1917. That the prosecution chose to emphasize Shay’s insobriety not only reflected the contemporary concerns of average citizens, it also anticipated the appeal LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 369

From November 14, when both sides made their opening arguments, through the jury’s verdict eight days later, the courtroom of Marion County Criminal Court Justice James A. Collins was packed, and the halls outside the room were filled with spectators, both black and white, interested in the proceedings. Until Shay’s only son, Dan Jr., arrived in Indianapolis for the last days of the trial, no member of Shay’s family was present for the proceedings. Although the victim’s aged parents, James and Jenny Euell, sat behind the prosecution throughout the trial, no reporter bothered to talk to them or to elicit their opinion on the case. The opening statements of both the prosecution and defense anticipated the arguments that would dominate the trial. In his opening remarks, the lead counsel for the prosecution, Alvah J. Rucker, outlined the case against Shay. Through the testimony of Braskett, as well as several corroborating witnesses (including the three black waiters) “the state will show the attack was vicious and unprovoked and that Euell was unarmed.”58 The same evidence that had emerged in the newspapers in the hours after the killing would comprise the prosecution’s chief material argument against Shay. This argument would be framed, however, by details of Shay’s drinking prior to the shooting. Rucker noted that Shay had consumed “several drinks, including Bronx cocktails, and that [he] drank his own and those of [Gertrude Anderson],” and that the drinks had caused him to be “rough and disorderly in the cafe.”59 Michael Ryan, lead counsel for the defense, began his opening statement with the promise that “no attempt will be made on behalf of the prisoner to drag into the case race, color, or politics.” Ryan then immediately proceeded to bring race into the trial. As the Indianapolis Star reported, Ryan “stated the defense will offer testimony to show that Shay’s companion, Mrs. Anderson, preceded him into the cafe by several minutes, and that while at table alone Euell ‘smiled at her and practiced arts of coquetry.’” Furthermore, the Star reported, “Mr. Ryan recited that

______of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when more than 40,000 white men would join the hooded order in Indianapolis, more than one-quarter of the city’s eligible population. As Leonard Moore demonstrates, Indiana’s Klan during the 1920s was primarily a populist movement focused on defending “traditional” values and upholding prohibition. Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansman: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 11. 58Indianapolis Star, November 15, 1917. 59Ibid. 370 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Daniel Shay, c. 1917 The prosecution portrayed Shay as a “dissolute, red-faced, drunken Irishman whose very breath communicated the poison that threatened the community.” Courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame

Euell was a giant in strength that was employed because his ferocious strength and ability to fight allowed him to quell disturbances between other colored employees of the cafe. The attorney asserted that the defense will prove that Euell was insolent in his service to the prisoner and his dinner guest” and that he treated the couple with “disrespect in his manner.” Ryan concluded that on the day of the shooting, Euell had been involved in other quarrels, and that at the time of the shooting, Euell had attacked and threatened to kill Shay.60 The prosecution took two days to present its case. Braskett again testified to what she had seen transpire prior to the shooting. Her testimony remained substantially the same as the version first reported in the papers six months before: that Shay had shot Euell after the latter had objected to Shay’s abusive language. Waiters James Johnson and Mark

______60Ibid. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 371

Byrd corroborated Braskett’s testimony, saying that they did not see Euell strike Shay prior to the shot being fired. On cross-examination, Byrd admitted that he had contributed to the legal fund established for Euell following his death. Other than this admission, the defense failed to crack the testimony of the eyewitnesses to the shooting.61 The prosecution’s decision to call on cafe manager Herbert Miller provided the defense with its first opportunity to gain the offensive. In his cross-examination of Miller, defense attorney Ryan asked a series of questions about the dead waiter’s reputation for “quarrelsomeness.” “Had you been told by Policeman Leroy Clements that Clarence Euell was a dangerous man and should not be kept at your place?” “Did you see Euell pick up a water carafe and threaten to strike a guest, and was that guest subsequently ordered to leave the cafe?” “Did Floyd Reidenbach, a policeman, tell you ‘This is a bad nigger’ and did you tell him, ‘I keep him here to handle bad niggers?’” The prosecution’s objections to each question were sustained. But the jurors heard the questions and were free to draw their own conclusions. Other than this prejudicial behavior, the defense never submitted any evidence supporting its allegations, and the newspapers covering the trial did not carry any items that supported the charges. But their point was not lost on the jury: the insinuation was that Euell was a dangerous threat. Looking to recover from the Miller debacle, the prosecution coun- tered by bringing saloon owner John Heinlein to the stand. The prosecution hoped to use his testimony to establish Shay’s insobriety on the evening of May 3, while playing to community fears of saloons and liquor. Heinlein, however, proved a reluctant witness, insisting that he did not recall if Shay appeared drunk on the night of the shooting. Heinlein’s testimony at trial contradicted his grand jury testimony, which was read into the record: “Did [Shay] have the appearance when he went with you to Mrs. Anderson’s that he may have been drinking?” “Yes, he looked like that,” Heinlein had answered. “From what in his appearance did you determine he looked like a man who had been drinking?” “His face was flushed.”

______61Ibid., November 16, 1917. 372 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Heinlein’s earlier statement to the grand jury was echoed by the trial testimony of another witness for the prosecution, Walter Benjamin, who told the court that on the evening of the shooting Shay’s “face was flushed and he appeared tired.”62 Through this peculiar discourse, with its emphasis on the color of Shay’s face, the details of his expressions, the prosecution was not providing any additional evidence of Shay’s culpa- bility for Euell’s death. Those details had already been provided by Braskett and the other eyewitnesses to the shooting. Rather, the prosecution’s emphasis on Shay’s drinking only makes sense within the context of a larger discourse, prominent in Indianapolis that year, over the pernicious influence of alcohol on the community’s traditional values. Implicit in the image of Shay’s reddening face was the lingering fear that such ugly transformations could harm not only Shay and Euell, but also the innocent women and children who lived in a city capable of shelter- ing such morally suspect individuals as Heinlein and Anderson. After the prosecution rested its case, the defense quickly went to work countering this argument with a complex of contrasting physical images that placed the blame for the shooting on Euell himself. Anderson played a critical role as the mediator for this argument, but now her innocence, rather than her promiscuity, would help the jury identify the real threat to traditional values exposed by the shooting. Anderson’s testimony, demeanor, and wardrobe all signified her new- found role in Shay’s defense. As the Indianapolis Star described her appearance in court, “Mrs. Anderson was dressed modestly in black, the somberness of the costume being relieved by touches of white at the col- lar and sleeve edges. She spoke with a slight lisp and had to be instruct- ed by the court to speak sufficiently loud for the jury to hear on several occasions. There was no trace of embarrassment in her manner in either the direct or cross-examination.”63 To accompany her modest dress, Anderson brought a new version of the shooting to her testimony, embellishing her earlier versions with details about Euell’s behavior towards her prior to the shooting. She told the jury that after Euell had seated her at a table, “He walked away some distance, stood looking at me and smiled. I turned my head.” During their dinner, Anderson said Euell “stood a short distance away, with his

______62Ibid., November 17, 1917. 63Ibid., November 18, 1917. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 373

arms folded, shoulders back, nose back, sneering and looking at Mr. Shay.” While claiming that Shay’s manner toward Euell was “gentle” when he asked for more sugar for his coffee, she said that Euell was “angry” when he brought more sugar over to the table. Anderson then testified that Euell called Shay an unprintable name, and added “I’m a smart fellow. You want to be careful.” According to Anderson, Shay responded to this insult politely, saying “I don’t understand. What do you mean? I’ve said nothing to you.” It was at this point, Anderson claimed, that Euell had clenched his fist and approached the table. “I saw his fist going past his body and I ran. When I was about a third of the way to the kitchen entrance I heard the shot.”64 On cross-examination, prosecuting attorney Eph Inman attempted to highlight the inconsistencies between Anderson’s trial testimony and her grand jury statements, but was stopped by defense objections. Inman then returned to the issue of the color in Shay’s face prior to the shooting, in a dialogue that simultaneously insinuated the impropriety of Anderson’s relationship with the ball manager. “How far apart did you sit when Shay’s hands were being manicured?” Inman asked. Anderson replied, “About thirty-six inches from my chest to his.” “Did you smell liquor on his breath?” “No sir.” “Was his face red?” “Pink.” “Did Shay pay you?” “Yes.” “How much?” “The charge was 50 cents. He gave me a dollar and told me to keep it all.” “A sort of tip,” observed Inman. “The first I ever got at that location,” retorted Anderson.65 Under Inman’s cross-examination, Anderson also admitted having visited Shay several times in jail, insisting that she had gone to “distrib- ute religious literature.”66 At the conclusion of her testimony, the Indiana Daily Times declared that Anderson had “successfully withstood the

______64Ibid. 65Ibid. 66Ibid., November 20, 1917. 374 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

cross-examination of the prosecution.”67 Indeed, through her conserva- tive dress and quiet demeanor, Anderson deflected the prosecution’s insinuations about her virtue, demonstrating the vulnerability of the state’s emphasis on Shay’s intoxication. Temperance was a powerful argument so long as it could be connected to broader social concerns of moral decay and licentiousness. When Inman failed to aggressively interrogate Anderson about her relationship with Shay, the logic of the prosecution’s case foundered against the unimpeachable image of white female submissiveness and virtue. Next, Dan Shay took the stand in his own defense. In his version of the event, which differed substantially from the one he had given the police the day after the shooting, Shay explained that he had shot Euell after the waiter struck him in the face with a sugar bowl. According to Shay, following the dispute over the sugar, Euell exclaimed, “I’ll kill you, you ______.” Shay testified that when he spoke these words, Euell’s attitude was “decidedly angry, vicious, and ferocious.” After Euell smacked Shay across the face with one of the sugar bowls, he pulled out his pistol and shot the waiter.68 The prosecution brought Braskett back to the stand to testify that the sugar bowls on the table were not disarranged after the shooting.69 But during his cross-examination of Shay, defense attorney Inman focused not on the inconsistencies between Shay’s statement to the police on the night of the shooting and his testimony at trial, but rather on the manager’s drinking. Shay admitted drinking a gin fizz in Heinlein’s saloon on the morning of May 3, and a glass of beer at Heinlein’s establishment in the afternoon. According to the Indianapolis Star, Shay “admitted having drunk three of the four Bronx cocktails served at his table during the dinner in the cafe, but denied he was intoxicated.” According to the Star, “Shay gave his testimony quietly, seemingly with perfect assurance, and was in nowise disturbed by the severity of the cross-examination.”70 The prosecution’s emphasis on Shay’s drinking—which seems bizarre given the vulnerability of the defense’s many contradictory

______67Indiana Daily Times, November 22, 1917. 68Ibid., November 20, 1917. 69Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1917. 70Ibid., November 21, 1917. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 375

explanations of the killing—makes sense once understood in the context of the trial. The case was not about whether Shay acted in self- defense, but whether the killing could be justified for extralegal reasons, as an act of racial defense against an oversexed black bully whose passions threatened community values and white womanhood. The prosecution’s best hope for defeating this argument was to demonstrate that Shay himself had already transgressed those moral boundaries through his drinking and the nature of his relationship with Anderson. In the end, neither the defense nor the prosecution rested its case on the merits of the law. By legal standards, the most important witness at the trial should have been Braskett, the cashier who had witnessed the entire confronta- tion between Shay and Euell and whose account of the event never changed. Instead, the trial hinged on the performance of a different woman, Anderson, who defense lawyers hoped would come to seem a symbol of the unique threat that Euell posed, the menace that justified his death. Though Anderson’s suspect background and her status as an outsider within the community provided the prosecution with an opening to emphasize the threat Shay’s behavior posed to community values, her status as a white woman ultimately trumped all other factors, making the case a question of race rather than booze, of fears of miscegena- tion rather than concerns over prohibition.71 In his closing statement, assistant prosecutor Claris Adams lambasted the defense for their tactics. “Here comes the defense and seeks to color the facts with the prejudice the man who was shot was colored,”

______71Among others, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore has explored the ways in which ideas about white female virtue were employed in “white supremacy” campaigns in the South in order to accen- tuate the threat that black masculinity posed to the racial order. As Gilmore writes, “When white men created and exaggerated the danger of black rapists, they underscored white women’s dependency on white men, a tactic that put both black men and white women in their places. White men invoked danger and restriction just when white women sought pleasure and freedom. Thus, as the white supremacy campaign reasserted the New White Man’s power over black men, domination of white women became a byproduct.” Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 96. Likewise, Grace Elizabeth Hale has shown how images of white female virtue could override class divisions and social policy in the broader project of creating “whiteness” and defining and enforcing “blackness,” particularly through the spectacle of lynching. See, for example, Hale’s description of the lynching of Sam Hose, the logic of which rested on the elevation of a “good and common farm wife” into a “woman of ‘refined parent- age.’” Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890- 1940 (New York, 1998), 209-215. 376 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Adams declared. “And now, mark you, what I am about to say and mark how I say it. I scarcely know how to couch what I hope to say. [Attorney for the defense] Michael Ryan violated every precept of law that defines the duty of an attorney for the defense in a case like this. The defense sought to introduce into this case the lust of conquest of white women on the part of the dead man. Ah, they seek to prejudice you in that respect.” It was a stinging oratory, a call for the jury to look beyond the prejudicial rhetoric of race. One last time, Adams repeated the prosecution’s main argument: “Murders are nearly always the result of drunken brawls,” Adams insisted. “It is the combination of a gun and a drink that results in death to some innocent person.”72 The defense, confident of victory, focused its closing statement on the prosecution’s strongest card with the jury, Shay’s drinking on the night of the shooting. Rather than challenge the relevance of the prosecution’s emphasis on Shay’s alcohol consumption and the minute partic- ulars of his facial expressions, defense attorney John Holtzmann confirmed their validity by arguing that the state had simply failed to demonstrate that Shay was drunk. “[The prosecution] said they would prove Mr. Shay was drunk on the night of the shooting. They have fallen down,” declared Holtzmann. “They did seek to prove it by putting John Heinlein, poor, besotted John Heinlein, on the stand. . . . I wouldn’t con- vict a sheep-killing dog upon the testimony of such a man as John Heinlein.”73 The jury began its deliberations at 11 p.m. on November 21. By 9:00 the next morning, they had reached a verdict. At the announcement, the Indiana Daily Times reported, “there was a loud clapping of hands” in the courtroom, a display quickly silenced by the pounding of Judge Collins’s gavel. Now a free man, Shay shook the hand of every member of the jury. “His eyes shone with happiness,” the Times reported, “and yet at times he brushed away the mist from his vision.”74 While Shay’s friends celebrated the outcome, the Times noted, “the negroes seated in the room . . . showed no desire to participate in the demonstration.”75

______72Indiana Daily Times, November 21, 1917. 73Ibid. 74Ibid., November 22, 1917. 75Ibid. LIMITS OF HOOSIER PROGRESSIVISM 377

Shay’s acquittal came as no surprise to most observers of the trial. The Times, which had been pulling for Shay throughout the trial, reported on the eve of the verdict that “Danny Shay is not worried over the future. . . . The tension of his testimony on the witness stand is over. Now he endures only the indictment of the prosecuting attorney.”76 The Freeman, which had hoped for a different outcome, admitted “there was the thing of facts and the evidence, making a very hard row for the prosecution to hoe. The witnesses are the thing in law, meaning sometimes the miscarriage of justice. . . . Clarence Euell had no witnesses that were strengthful. Without being discourteous to those who were supposed to be on his side it may be said he had none.” While declaring the trial “a farce,” The Freeman added, “We do not wish to have it appear that our race is without hope in our courts. Nor do we wish it to appear that our white people are wholly free from prejudice when such is not the case. We do wish it to appear that everything considered the Negroes’ relation to the courts in Indiana is nearly ideal.”77 Perhaps because it was not in the same compromised position as The Freeman, the Indianapolis News delivered a more stinging indictment of the Shay verdict. “It seems that the waiter ‘smiled’ and even ‘leered’ at the woman with Shay, that he was inattentive, etc.,” the paper editorialized. “The penalty for these affronts is not death. Yet the verdict warrants the killing.”78 As the News sensed, the Shay verdict demonstrated the limits of the progressive spirit that had informed Indiana’s enactment of prohibition and excited the imaginations of reformers around the state. Tested by the righteous fervency of temperance, with its denunciations of saloons and liquor, its insistence on protecting the sacred Christian home, the peculiar logic of the color line had proven intractable. The Shay trial exposed the contradictions within and between these ideolo- gies precisely because both relied on the protection of white womanhood in order to retain their saliency, and during the trial both prosecution and defense sought to paint the portrait of Gertrude Anderson that best conveyed the truth upon which these belief systems operated. The jury’s verdict, and Indiana’s subsequent history of racial

______76Indiana Daily Times, November 21, 1917. 77The Freeman, December 1, 1917. 78Indianapolis News, November 23, 1917. 378 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

turmoil, indicated which ideology remained paramount. The Progressive movement would fade in the coming years, and Indiana would repeal its prohibition statutes in 1933, but the state would remain, for many of its inhabitants, the “white man’s country” envisioned by the territory’s founders. While the city of Indianapolis licked its wounds, Dan Shay attend- ed his own. Following his acquittal, Shay indicated that he was ponder- ing “several” managerial offers, but in fact he never managed a baseball team again, though he would find occasional work as a scout. With no family to call his own (his children remained with relatives), Shay migrated to Kansas City, where he found work as a clerk in city hall and continued to struggle with alcoholism. Set free by a jury of his peers but still imprisoned by the torments of his past, Dan Shay ended his life with a gunshot to the head on December 1, 1927, in Kansas City’s Majestic Hotel. He left no suicide note.79

______79Springfield News-Sun, December 2, 1927.