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THE SYSTEM THAT RAN THIS BRANCH · 1940s–1988
For most of the twentieth century, the counter on Michigan Street, Lafayette Boulevard and Main Street 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 the strength the press and official record reached support — and this city, alone among the county's runnings, can put its own branch's directory evidence inside the frame: two managers sharing the bureau in 1949, and the bureau seated inside its manager's insurance agency in 1956. The county-seat branch was among the richest of the system's plums, the largest counter in a county of this size, and the system's arithmetic explains why its holders were worth naming in a city directory at all.
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." Every clause of that account has a South Bend address: the "regular business" beside the branch income is the Bath agency at 212–14 South Lafayette; the earnings "split among a number of the party faithful" is the Butler-and-Shively bureau of 1949; the managers "recommended by the county chairmen" is the roster the directories print without ever printing the recommendation. 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 first clause of that bill is this branch's own: the South Bend bureau was precisely a county-seat branch, and under the failed bill it would have passed to the St. Joseph County clerk or assessor, an elected courthouse officer, in 1943. It failed, and the counter stayed a party appointment for another forty-five years — through the whole documented downtown succession, Lafayette to Main to Michigan again, until the commission takeover of 1988.
Who held the county organization that made these appointments — the St. Joseph County chairmen under whom Butler, Shively, Bath and their successors held the bureau, administration by administration — is not named in the record reached, and this build does not invent them. The county's patronage-era roster stands as a named gap in every running that has touched it (Granger's GAP-BMV-2; Osceola's GAP-O10-BMV-2; Walkerton's GAP-W10-BMV-2; New Carlisle's GAP-NC7-BMV-2); this running discharges the gap for the county-seat branch's holders at directory strength, 1949–1987, and carries the remainder — the chairmen behind the appointments, and the holders of the county's other branches — in the closing article as the county gap's surviving share.