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

“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 eyewit- nesses 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 con- trasting 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 repre- sentations 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 danger- ous 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.

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