Winner on the Wabash

Since early January, Indiana's Governor George North Craig and the followers of Indiana's U.S Senator William Ezra Jenner have been locked in a furious battle in the state's General Assembly (TIME, March 7). Feuding bitterly over control of the Hoosier G.O.P., the Craig and Jenner factions concentrated this year on the issue of toll roads. Jenner forces tried to push through a bill to hamstring toll-road construction, thereby hamstringing the governor's political power and patronage. Last week, after stopping its clocks and stalling for 28 hours and 11 minutes beyond the 61-day constitutional limit on the length of its session, the assembly adjourned at 4:10 a.m., and went home. The winner of the main event of Indiana politics in 1955: George Craig.

Ticking Minutes. In the state house of representatives, a Craig-controlled committee effectively smothered the Jenner forces' road-blocking bill. Thwarted there, the Jenner men made a last stand in the state senate by tacking an amendment onto the budget bill to prohibit the use of state funds for any toll-road purpose. When the budget got to the House-Senate Conference Committee, Craig announced that he would refuse to sign a budget bill that included the amendment. Instead, he would let the assembly adjourn, then immediately call it into special session and present a new budget bill.

Faced with that threat, Lieutenant Governor Harold W. Handley, Jenner's key lieutenant in Indiana, decided that he would issue an ultimatum of his own. He had an antique mantel clock placed on his desk at the front of the senate chamber and announced that he was going to end the session exactly at midnight on the 61st day. If no budget bill had been passed and the Craig administration had no money, that would be just too bad.

Across the State Capitol rotunda, in the house of representatives, Speaker George Diener, a Craig man, was ready with some tricks of his own. He was holding several passed bills that would not become law unless he signed them before the assembly adjourned. If Handley adjourned the senate at midnight, before the budget battle was settled, the Diener-held bills (including a politically potent bonus for Korean war veterans) would be void.

"Face-Saving Cream." Finally, at five minutes before midnight, Lieutenant Governor Handley backed down, turned the mantel clock around so that it faced him; he then stopped the senate's official electric clock. As the overtime hours wore on, the conference committee members wearied of the stalemate, and the Jenner legislators finally capitulated: they agreed to accept a compromise provision that no state funds could be spent on roads that would serve "only" as feeders for toll roads. This was such a minor limitation that jubilant Craig men talked of sending down to the drugstore to get some "face-saving cream" for their foes. Cracked one Craig partisan: "We can build outhouses on the toll roads if we want to."

This week, 1955's, big battle over, Governor Craig's toll-road authority stood without serious limitation, and his control of the Indiana Republican organization was stronger than ever before.

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