Indiana [antikvár]

THE HOOSIER STATE"It is decidedly un-Michigan-like," one Indiana writer suggested back in 1922 while ruminating about his home territory. "Although it tinges off toward Illinois on the west and Kentucky on the south, the community is neither nebulous nor indefinite. It is individual."But what about Ohio, to the eastis it like Ohio? Ah yes, "the Buckeye State," said Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley, "where a Hoosier is scrutinized as critically as a splinter in the thumb of a near-sighted man."No, it is not at all like Ohio. Another Hoosier savant, Kin Hubbard, explained what happens when you cross the line from Ohio into Indiana: "I'm told by transcontinental tourists who cross Indianny west on the ole historic National road that they no sooner hit Richmond on the eastern border till plots fer novels an' rhymes fer verses come o'er 'em so fast an' thick that they kin hardly see the road, an' often go in the ditch."Part of the Indiana legend is that practically everybody in the state is a writer. They tell outlandish stories about this. They claim that a visiting eastern writer once thought to coddle his Hoosier audience by inviting any local authors present to join him on the platform during his lecturewhereupon everyone in the audience stood up and moved forward.They add that when he recovered from his shock and noticed one old man still seated at the back of the hall and inquired about him, the others said, "Oh, he writes too. He's just deef and didn't hear what you said."The truth is that the old man wasn't deef, he was contrary. This is the chief Hoosier character trait, when all is said and done. Administer any sort of academic or journalistic poll, and Hoosiers will check off the boxes indicating that they are "shrewd," "independent," "conservative," "tradition-oriented," and so on. They do so because there is no box labeled "contrary."I once knew an old farmer who lived up by Fortville who was contrary, in the classic sense. His name was Frosty Moore. "Frosty Moore is the salt of the earth," one of his neighbors announced one day while we were standing on an old trestle bridge, looking down at the water, "but he's so contrary, if he fell in the crick, he'd float upstream."Hoosier contrariness is different from other forms. It is a mixture of stubbornness, skepticism, and occasional downright foolhardi-ness carried to such an outrageous degree that it reverses itself all over again and becomes sensible and calm.Who else, in February of 1779, would have marched across Illinois country through two hundred miles of freezing, waist-high floodwaters to make a surprise attack on the British garrison at Vincennes? George Rogers Clark and his men did, and it worked, too. They weren't quite Hoosiers, since the state didn't exist yet. But the first chance they had, they settled in the territory. They were among the first to become Hoosiers by convincement.Similarly, in the 1820s, who else would have built a governor's mansion inside a circle at the center of the newly surveyed capitol called Indianapolis and then elected a series of governors who absolutely refused to live in it? And who else, one hundred and fifty years later, would have built an enormous, domed sports stadium in downtown Indianapoli's before having a major-league team to play in it? But Hoosiers liked the idea. When a contest was held to name the stadium, they sent in thousands of entry blanks insisting that it be called "The Hoosier Dome."For that matter, who else would have laid out a two-and-a-half mile automobile racetrack where thirty-three cars go around in circles for five hundred miles but only once a year? Such things happen all the time in Indiana. Hoosier contrariness has its own logic.Take the state's literature, of which the Hoosiers profess to be so proud. Probably the two most critically respected writers ever to come out of Indiana are Theodore Dreiser and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Throughout his career, Dreiser championed the poor and the disadvantaged. Vonnegut insists that his notions about world peace and disarmament were all acquired within a ten-mile radius of the Circle in Indianapolis where he grew up. Hoosiers respect their achievements but dislike their politics. Some are not willing to consider either writer as being quite representative of the state.Possibly the two least critically respected writers ever to come out of Indiana are James Whitcomb Riley and Gene Stratton Porter. (She, in case you have forgotten, was the author of Freckles, Laddie, and Girl of the Limberlost.) Hoosiers cherish them dearly, maintaining not one but two restored homes, or shrines, for each writer. Riley's are in Greenfield and Indianapolis, in the central part of the state; Porter's are farther north, in Geneva and Rome City. This is contrariness of an advanced order. No other state could match it.But then, no other state has a greater mystique, with the possible exception of Texas. Alongside the figure of the rangy, sunburned cowboy, dusty and ornery, and prone to the telling of tall tales, one may set the equally mythic figure of the backwoods Hoosier, gangly and rednecked, contrary rather than mean, neighborly when you finally get to know him, and also a teller of tall tales.Abraham Lincoln, who was born in Kentucky but grew to manhood in southern Indiana, was just such a figure. Eugene Debs, the great Socialist leader from Terre Haute, was another. For contemporary examples, try Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics, choreographer Twyla Tharp, novelist Marilyn Durham, or Dave Letterman of late-night television.Get any of them on a basketball court, too, and they'll shoot your socks off.One of the more curious statistics about Indiana is that it produced more Mercury astronauts than any other state. Gus Grissom and Frank Borman, both among the nation's earliest space17