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 New Carlisle 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 printed here at boundary size — the strength the press and official record reached actually support — because it is the system under which this township's licensing was transacted for two generations, and the system whose map, drawn by politics before it was drawn by traffic, explains why the county's one outlying seat stands in Walkerton and not here.

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, shared with the sibling runnings, in the closing article. 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 organization that controlled the patronage would not surrender it. The township-trustee clause is the closest the patronage century ever came to seating a licensing counter in a place like New Carlisle: under that failed bill, Olive Township's trustee would have held the township's licensing business. It failed, and the counters stayed in the cities for another forty-five years.