The patronage era: the branch as the party's property

THE SYSTEM ON THIS GROUND · 1940s–1988

For most of the twentieth century, the counter a Granger farmer walked up to in South Bend was not a state office in the modern sense — it was a party office: Indiana's license branches were run through the county organization of the governor's party, the branch manager was commonly the county chairman himself or his designee, and the fees the counter took in helped oil the machine that appointed him. That system, whole for St. Joseph County, is this section's to print — at the strength the press and official record reached actually support.

The mechanics were described in the open press while the system was at its height. In November 1958 the United Press International reported that the governor controlled appointment of the heads of "about 185 auto license bureaus," called the system "a lush type of patronage," and laid out the money: "Even in the smaller counties the license branch manager makes as much as $5,000 a year, usually in addition to the revenue from his regular business or salaried post. The earnings in some larger cities are reported to reach $25,000 or more, but these usually are split among a number of the party faithful... Many of the managers are county chairmen and others are men or women recommended by the county chairmen." St. Joseph County, one of the state's largest, stood at the rich end of that table by the report's own arithmetic — but the county's own managers, administration by administration, are not named in the record reached, and this build does not invent them: the roster is a named gap, with the Tribune's archive and the Polk classified sections as its settlers. The politics of that November were a raid: Senate Democrats, fresh from Vance Hartke's Senate victory, moved to strip the Republican governor of the license patronage, and Governor Harold Handley answered in Churchill's cadence — "I shall keep control of the automobile license patronage... I was not elected governor to preside over the liquidation of the Republican party in Indiana."

The raids were old by then. In February 1943 the Indianapolis Times reported a bill that would have taken the branches from the state organization — county-seat branches to the county clerks (in a revised version, to the county assessors) and "the outlying ones to the township trustees" — and judged it dead on arrival, because "the state G.O.P. organization which now controls the important license bureau patronage through Mr. Alexander has no desire to turn it over to county and township officials, regardless of their political affiliations." The 1943 bill matters to this ground for its geography: the system's reformers imagined township-level counters as the alternative to the party's branches — which is the closest the record comes to a branch on Granger's own soil. It was a bill. It did not pass. The outlying counters of St. Joseph County stayed where the party kept them, in the cities.

What the patronage branch looked like at human scale survives best, in the record reached, in the counties touching this one — printed here as the system's regional texture, expressly not as St. Joseph County's roster. The South Bend Tribune's obituary of Franklyn J. Deisch (December 24, 2010) records that he "served as Indiana State license branch manager at Nappanee from 1948-50" — Nappanee, in Elkhart County, across Granger's east line — alongside years on the Elkhart County election board and three decades in party and commissioner work: the branch managership as one jewel in a party man's crown. The Tribune's obituary of Jacquelynn Zentz (January 5, 2008) records a branch manager of the Marshall County License Branch, the county adjoining St. Joseph on the south, "for 28 years" — a tenure spanning the system's last decades, held from the county seat at Bremen. Between those two notices the system's whole shape is visible: a local party figure, a counter in the county's town, fees and jobs flowing through the organization. St. Joseph County ran the same system at larger scale; the names of the men and women who held its counters are owed by the gap named in the closing article, and by South Bend's and Mishawaka's own runnings.

Sources:

1. Decatur Daily Democrat, November 20, 1958 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — Eugene J. Cadou, United Press International, on the 185 license bureaus, manager earnings, the county-chairman pattern, the Bitz raid, and Governor Handley's answer.
2. Indianapolis Times, February 4, 1943 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the clerk/assessor/trustee bills and the state organization's control of license-bureau patronage "through Mr. Alexander."
3. South Bend Tribune obituaries via Legacy.com — Franklyn J. Deisch (December 24, 2010), Nappanee license branch manager 1948–50; Jacquelynn Zentz (January 5, 2008), Marshall County License Branch manager for 28 years. Neighboring counties' record, printed as texture, not as this county's roster.