Dog Eat Dog

He had been in jail since April, 1925. Calendars since then had recorded some 790 different days, but those days had all been much the same to him. They would continue so, too, for he was a lifer. He would be there, in the common phrase, "from now on." Surely an unworthy end for David Curtis Stephenson who through many years had controlled the Indiana Ku Klux Klan which had controlled the politics of Indiana. In the Republican State Convention of 1924 he had patrolled the aisles of the convention hall with a gun on his hip. The men whom he had picked for office held office; the men whom he had opposed had been defeated.*

Then had come the Oberholtzer case. Twelve gentlemen of a jury had found him guilty of having abducted and attacked Madge Oberholtzer, an Indianapolis girl who had committed suicide following her disgrace. It was second degree murder and it brought David Curtis Stephenson a life sentence. Of course, life sentences were largely figures of speech--lifers were usually set free after 20 or 25 years. But even after 20 years he would come out an old man. He would have spent what are generally termed "the best years of a man's life" in the ignominious occupation of making cane chairs in a prison factory. If he came out in 1950--how many of the men who were boys when he was a boy would be still alive?

And the worst of it was that the whole state of Indiana was populous with onetime friends who were leaving him to rot forgotten. Jobholders whose jobs he had secured for them, officials whose offices had come from his bounty--they ignored him now. Back in the fall of 1926 he had threatened to expose some of the less lovely incidents of Indiana statesmanship, had received word that if he kept quiet until after the election he would be "taken care of." He had kept quiet, but his reticence had not been rewarded. In June he had protested against the treatment he was getting in the jail, and an investigating board had found his complaints unfounded. Last week he asked Governor Ed. Jackson for a 90-day parole so that he could personally conduct his plea to the State Supreme Court for a retrial of the Oberholtzer case. Governor Jackson refused his request.

They had double-crossed him, then, had they? They were going to keep him making chairs--they were going to keep him a number, marooned in a prison? Well, then, he would talk. He would give names, dates, conversations. He would disclose the hiding place of documentary evidence proving his statements. It took a lot more than 19 months to fade the signature off a canceled check. When he was through they would "need a new wing for the prison."

So, last week, David C. Stephenson talked. He talked to William H. Remy, Prosecuting Attorney of Marion County (Indianapolis). "There is a vacant chair next to mine in the chair factory. I am lonely and I am yearning for some of my playmates," said Mr. Stephenson. Exactly what else Mr. Stephenson said was not made public, but he must have said a great deal. The conference, indeed, lasted for four hours. Garbled and indirect were the rumors of what occurred. It was said that he told how, for a consideration, he had ordered bills passed or killed in the Indiana legislature, how he had bought municipal elections in return for pre-election promises, how he financed the gubernatorial campaign of Governor Ed. Jackson. One feature of this financing was the payment of $50 a head to various ministers for the privilege of having the then Candidate Jackson speak in their churches. Mr. Stephenson also is said to have discussed Samuel Insull* of Chicago and his relation to Governor Jackson's campaign, although it is not known how much was added to the popular supposition that Mr. Insull contributed $19,000 to the Jackson fund in the expectation that a broad-minded Public Service Commission would later be appointed. Mr. Stephenson also told how one Jack Maroney, political worker for U. S. Senator James E. Watson of Indiana, had last autumn called on him to pass the time of day. It was at that time that Senator Watson rose wrathfully from a sick bed and bellowed at Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, who was trying to investigate Indiana elections and was counting on Mr. Stephenson as Exhibit A. And Mr. Stephenson also mentioned the administration of indicted Mayor John L. Duvall of Indianapolis whom the people of Indianapolis recently rebuffed by abolishing even the office he holds./- Taking one thing with another, Mr. Stephenson appeared to have run along the scale of Indiana politics from deep basso to high treble and to have omitted hardly any of the intervening keys. Most important, most mysterious of his revelations concerned a certain "little black box" which was supposed to contain documents supporting his exposures. Following the conference, Prosecutor Remy left for South Bend, Ind., presumably in search of the hidden box. Meanwhile Governor Jackson also left Indianapolis bound for Kansas where he planned to pay his father-in-law a long visit.

Thus the Indiana explosion. Since it detonated privately, it was difficult to list the dead, the injured. But Mr. Stephenson appeared confident that the state's output of cane chairs soon would materially increase and those to whom he talked reported that he has a most extraordinary memory for facts, for figures, for dates, for names.

*Except Arthur L. Gilliom, Indiana Attorney General and Klan fighter. *Onetime secretary to Thomas A. Edison, now Chicago public utility magnate, accused of having made large contributions to the campaign fund of Senator-designate Frank L. Smith of Illinois who is having difficulty in convincing the U. S. Senate of his fitness to sit with that body. /-They adopted the City Manager plan of government (TIME, July 4). It will not, however, go into effect until 1930 when the mayor's term expires.