CHAPTER 4
Religious and Hoosier Heritages

I treasure the Judeo-Christian tradition. I do not value it above other traditions, but it is the one in which I grew up. The great symbolic wisdom of this tradition grows on me day by day. I regret the dogma that people have built around this tradition, which limits access to it. I cringe when I think of the wars that have been fought and may yet be fought because of the human tendency to forge hard doctrine out of the stories by which the wisdom of people and events, which make our tradition, have been handed on to us.… Much as I value the tradition in which I live, I feel a compelling obligation to leave it a mite better than I found it.¹

ROBERT K. GREENLEAF

Through the years, interest in the spiritual component of Robert Greenleaf’s writings has been growing. Organizational development pioneer Peter Vaill says that Greenleaf was one of the first to openly bring spirituality into formal thinking about organizations and management. “There are a number well-known leadership theorists, psychologists, and communications experts who are personally quite spiritual and religious,” 41 he explained, “but the face they present to the world is a face of science, of reason, of the technical skill dimension. All of that skill goes out the window when the going gets tough unless there is a spiritual dimension behind it, a deeper valuing, and a more profound sense of mission and vision.”²

Bob Greenleaf’s own views on religion and spirituality were iconoclastic. They evolved through the years, but their first anchors were his father and a dynamic Methodist minister with a muscular, social-activist brand of Christianity.

George and Burchie Greenleaf were not particularly religious, but their South 18th Street house was near the Montrose Methodist Episcopal church at 17th and College Avenue, and the whole family joined in 1912.³ The Methodists were among the first to evangelize the Terre Haute mission field in the 19th century. They were still strong during Bob’s boyhood, boasting four churches in the city.⁴

The attraction of Montrose Methodist to the Greenleafs was its minister, twenty-nine-year-old John G. Benson. Benson was a handsome, brown-haired man with gifts of oratory. He was minister at Montrose from 1910 to 1913. By all accounts, Rev. Benson kept the excitement going with a men’s chorus, youth activities, social functions, outreach programs, and social activism. When Rev. Benson left Montrose Methodist in 1913, the church had 176 baptized adults, 46 baptized children, and 37 children under instruction for baptism and membership.⁵ Reflecting back on these times at the end of his life, Bob Greenleaf judged preacher Benson “a remarkable young pastor.”⁶

For the three years of Benson’s pastorate, Bob and June were involved in a range of church activities. They lost interest when Benson left, but during Bob’s last two years of high school and first two of college, he and his sister joined the Centenary Methodist Church in downtown Terre Haute, where they were active in the choir, Sunday School, and some of the church’s social programs.⁷

Although Robert Greenleaf never referred to his experiences with the Methodist Church as important to his own ideas about organizations, the Methodists exposed him to a denomination with a “genius for a methodical approach to religion,” a community of believers that engaged in the kind of pragmatic service that was echoed in Greenleaf’s later, mature approach to organizations.⁸ 42

Rev. Benson and the Terre Haute Methodist churches were grounded in the deep traditions of founder John Wesley’s “Social Gospel.” Methodism emerged during the painful human upheavals that attended the birth of the Industrial Revolution in 18th-century England, where Wesley saw the same kinds of wretched people who were profiled by Charles Dickens. After a personal experience that transformed his academic religious interest into the burning fire of a true believer, Wesley not only preached the necessity for personal salvation, but emphasized the importance of Christians uniting to improve society. He thought that believers should take practical steps to help the needy and directly address the structures of society that caused such misery—all for the sake of making Christ’s Kingdom on earth a here-and-now reality. In short, he pulled off the trick of combining personal piety and social activism. For his efforts, he was ostracized by his own Episcopal church.

Believing the Gospel’s mandate to transform all of society, Wesley had a big problem: how (in God’s name) could he do such a thing? Organization! He gave compulsive attention to disciplined beliefs and organizational structures that, operating together, might make the Gospel a social reality. The name “Methodist” was originally a derogatory term applied to these peculiar people who had a method for everything. Wesley and his brother Charles wrote hundreds of hymns that grounded the movement in common ritual. In America, Frances Asbury organized both the connections between separate churches (“connectionalism”) and the “itinerancy” of traveling preachers who braved storms, bandits, and Indians to bring the Gospel to unbelievers.⁹ Historian John Baughman further explains: “All the societies were tied together by Circuit Riders, Quarterly Meetings, Annual Conferences, and every four years, a national General Conference. Procedure was succinctly spelled out in the Book of Discipline prepared and revised by General Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church.”¹⁰

Methodist organization was a brilliant approach for America’s untamed frontier and worked especially well in Indiana, proving Greenleaf’s maxim that “organizations are how you get things done.” The Methodists had the muscle to launch mission efforts to start new churches and provide support to failing ones. All the Methodists in the state—or the country if necessary—could rally behind a disaster relief effort in a local community or a massive political effort. Furthermore, there was able leadership in the church. By the turn of the century, the overwhelming majority of Methodist clergy were college educated, most with advanced 43 seminary training in theology and homiletics (“preaching”).¹¹ In Indiana, the church concerned itself with furthering higher education through universities like DePauw in Greencastle, alleviating suffering through institutions like Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, and upholding personal morality, the hot issues being temperance and secular temptations. Methodists also took positions on current social issues, as outlined in their 1908 Social Creed which called for “industrial arbitration, factory safety, abolition of child labor, protection of women workers, reduction of hours of labor, and a guaranteed living wage—the application of the Golden Rule to the whole of society.”¹²

George Greenleaf, the labor officer and city council member, would have been impressed by such positions to the extent that they were acted upon, and Rev. Benson did work diligently to apply the Social Creed to Terre Haute life. In 1912, Benson’s immediate superior in the church, Greencastle District Superintendent James Campbell, reported on a Terre Haute “Labor Parliament” which was led, in part, by Rev. Benson. Twenty thousand copies of the Labor Creed were distributed in the city. Ministers of other denominations were enlisted to devote weeks of sermons to the labor issues of the day, which can be seen in some of the titles: “One Day’s Rest in Seven,” “Brotherhood, the Social Solvent,” “The Crime of Child Labor,” and “The Religious Significance of the Labor Movement.” Ministers spoke in factory shops and labor union meetings. The climax came with a three-day rally in May, highlighted by a speech by Dr. H. F. Ward, Secretary of the Methodist Federation for Social Service.¹³

The following year, the Methodist Annual Conference heard how Rev. Benson and others were moving beyond rallies and directly into the social structures.

44Superintendent Campbell was not exaggerating the corruption in Terre Haute’s city government. At that time, the shenanigans of mayor Roberts and his political machine were coming to light. In 1913, taking a stand was a dangerous thing to do.

In the Methodist Church, young Bob Greenleaf saw both the glories and the shadows of a highly structured organization. Unlike Baptist churches, which were “congregational,” with ultimate power residing in each local congregation, the Methodist church was organized like a corporate pyramid. Every Bishop held the power of appointments—deciding where each minister would serve—and appointments were decided each year during the Annual Conference.¹⁵ Because of its clear lines of authority and its flexibility, the church could quickly rally the necessary resources to meet emergencies like floods and tornados. On the other hand, because of its internal needs, the church could also lose sight of its true mission, at least in the eyes of Mr. Greenleaf. After Rev. Benson moved on to another church, the Greenleafs dropped active participation in Montrose Methodist. This withdrawal raised a few eyebrows with the congregation, especially when Mr. Greenleaf’s financial pledge to the church’s Every Member Canvas dropped accordingly. Bob remembered the day the issue came to a head:

George Greenleaf’s judgment of the church was based on outcomes. Doing good was doing good, whether it was accomplished by labor unions, political parties, or churches. For him, commitment to an abstract theological position was not enough to justify involvement in any church. This working man liked to see concrete results and was willing to invest his scarce resources in the people, institutions, and systems that produced 45 them. His attention to results was echoed decades later in Robert Green-leaf’s formulation of the “best test” for a servant-leader, which judged the actions of the servant by both motives and outcomes.¹⁷

Another interesting parallel exists between Bob Greenleaf’s later thinking and Methodist belief. In The Servant as Leader Greenleaf wrote, “Everything begins with the initiative of an individual.”¹⁸ He goes on to say that one chooses to serve and lead.¹⁹ The Methodist Church of his youth also believed that everything began with a personal “conversion experience”—metanoia—a clear moment when one’s priorities are realigned because of a personal choice to follow God’s will and live out an intimate relationship with God through Jesus. This concept echoed the experience of John Wesley, whose heart was “strangely warmed” at Alders-gate Church in London. William James wrote about the conversion experience, and it is still a cornerstone of admission to membership in the traditions of many Protestants.²⁰

Bob’s friend Peter Drucker noticed this emphasis when they became friends years later. “Bob was always out to change the individual, to make him or her into a different person. I was interested in making people do the right things, in their actions and behaviors.”²¹ While Greenleaf never reported having a conversion experience in the Methodist tradition, he did experience a series of luminous moments at critical junctures, which changed his life forever, and he consistently urged people to change themselves first before embarking on plans of action.²²

Along with the emphasis on a conversion experience, Methodist theology stresses personal introspection before engaging in ministry or social action. In Methodist language, one is “called” to action or a “burden” is placed on one’s heart to become involved in clergy or lay ministries. In other words, the Holy Spirit will speak in the quiet of one’s inner, sacred space: guiding, directing, luring, giving inspiration when required. Bob often wrote about inner guidance as the deepest source of effective leadership, both religious and secular:

As an adult, Bob would not usually employ the kind of confrontational activism he saw in the Methodism of his youth. His temperament and strategies tended to be more subtle. He would, however, always remember the social vision that guided the Methodist mission and the integrity that moved its leaders to action.

Bob noted that the root of the word “religion” comes from re ligio— meaning to “rebind.”²⁴ Here is his full definition of religion: “Any influence or action that rebinds or recovers alienated persons as they build and maintain serving institutions, or that protects normal people from the hazards of alienation and gives purpose and meaning to their lives—is religious. Any group or institution that nurtures these qualities effectively is a religious institution, regardless of the beliefs it holds.”²⁵ Many, if not most, theologians would dispute this definition since it omits the content of beliefs and fails to confront the ultimate source of the religious impulse; in other words, there is no theology of God. Bob’s definition is operational rather than philosophical, but he came by it honestly—from his father.

Using his own definition, one could argue that Bob’s earliest and strongest “religious” influence was George Greenleaf acting as servant to his community. Bob concluded that his father’s actions were more important than his doctrines:

By the time he reached high school, Bob’s outlook had been molded by another powerful shaping force—his identity as a Hoosier. Throughout his life, Bob embraced his Hoosier heritage with pride. It is easy for non-Hoosiers to dismiss this attachment as a quaint but unimportant detail of one’s early history. Discarding that heritage, however, would be as big a mistake for a Hoosier as it would be for, say, a native Texan. Like Texans, Hoosiers have a strong sense of place. It means something different to be from Indiana rather than from New England, the West, or even another Midwestern state like Illinois or Iowa. Robert Kiefner Greenleaf absorbed 47 the identity of “Hoosier” in his bones, and it helped shape the servant theme that became his lasting legacy. Understanding Indiana also helps us understand Greenleaf’s grounding as a writer, his preference for evolution over revolution, his use of humor, his lifelong affinity for working men and gadgets, his interest in cooperatives, and his sometimes-bemused attitude toward those who held formal leadership positions.

So, who’s a Hoosier? The origin of the word is lost to history. By some accounts, the term came from a call that pioneers made when a stranger approached an isolated cabin. With their distinct nasal twang, which one can still hear today in southern parts of the state, the settler yelled, “Who’s yere?” Another story is that the word was adapted from the word “husher,” because early residents of the state, especially the brawny river-men on the Ohio, liked to “hush” their opponents. In the early days of statehood (Indiana was the nineteenth state, admitted to the Union in 1816), a German contractor named Hoosier set up shop on the Indiana side of the Ohio river opposite Louisville. One authority believes his workers came to be called “Hoosiers” and took the name north with them as they settled other parts of Indiana. Yet another possibility is that the term came from “husar,” a Celtic word that means, “uncultured hill people” or an “uncouth rustic.”²⁷ The term reached national consciousness in 1839 when John Finley published his poem, “The Hooshier’s Nest.”

Later, the Hoosier mythology was further defined by numerous works of literature, including Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster, George Cary Eggleston’s The First of the Hoosiers, James Whitcomb Riley’s dozens of poems describing a sentimental, rural Indiana, and Meredith Nicholson’s book, The Hoosiers. The quintessential Hoosier of literature was a person of the land. In northern Indiana, Gene Stratton Porter found success in 1909 with her first sentimental “Limberlost” novel, celebrating the natural glories of a dense swamp near Porter’s home.

Bob Greenleaf was born in a period when it was never hotter to be a Hoosier. Indiana was at the height of its political, literary, and industrial powers. It could be argued that he left the state when it was in decline. Historians have identified Indiana’s “Golden Age” as the period from about 1880 to 1920. Hard as it is to believe now, national politicians coveted the state’s support during those years because it was both a bellwether state and a swing state. From the end of the Civil War until 1920, Indiana voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election but 48 two. Furthermore, in every election but two from 1868 through 1920, a gentleman from Indiana appeared on the national ticket seeking the presidency or vice presidency.²⁸

For all its rural mythology, Indiana was industrialized rapidly between 1880 and 1920. Because the Ohio and Wabash rivers enfold the bottom third of the state, commerce developed earliest in these areas. The Old National Road, running east-west, and the Michigan Road, going north-south, intersect in Indianapolis, a capital city that was chosen by sticking a pin in the exact center of the state, an area that proved to be a wilderness swamp. (The White River, which runs through Indianapolis, was never fully navigable.) Because of its location on the Wabash, Terre Haute is one of the older industrial cities in the state. One hundred twenty miles north, Lake Michigan was the attraction for U.S. Steel, which built its mills in Gary between 1906 and 1908. During Bob Greenleaf’s time in Indiana, the state was a major manufacturer of automobiles. Over two hundred makes were produced there, including marques widely considered America’s finest: Duesenberg, Cord, and Auburn. Light and heavy industries attracted and kept a large population of skilled craftsmen. Knowing something about machines was simply expected of red-blooded Hoosier males during Bob Greenleaf’s childhood.

In literature, Indiana authors were all the rage. Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, wrote George Ade in 1911 that “it is difficult to fire off a shot-gun in Indiana without injuring a large section of the literary class of America.”²⁹ An entire generation of Indiana writers made their mark as scribblers of sentiment, evoking nostalgia for a past that was fast disappearing with the industrialization of the state. With the publication of his book of poems The Old Swimmin’-Hole, and ‘Leven More Poems in 1882, James Whitcomb Riley helped popularize the style and also gave the world a record of the Indiana dialect of the day, discerned by his keen ear while traveling the state as a sign painter, dramatist, and pitchman-entertainer for patent medicine traveling shows.

In 1880, Lew Wallace of Crawfordsville, about forty miles east of Terre Haute, gained instant fame with Ben Hur, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Other popular Hoosier authors included Gene Stratton-Porter, Mary Hartwell Catherwood, Maurice Thompson, Meredith Nicholson, Charles Major, George Ade, and Booth Tarkington, the latter being one of Bob’s favorite authors. Some Hoosier natives blossomed outside their state: Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Eggleston, 49 William Vaughn Moody, and David Graham Phillips. The poet Max Ehrmann, author of “Desiderata,” was a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney in Terre Haute whom George Greenleaf would have known. This curious proliferation of authors has never been fully explained, but the identity of “Hoosier” does give a writer a place to stand. Bob Greenleaf was always in good literary company.

Sentimentality has always been joined by a parallel emphasis in Indiana’s literature—humor. Hoosiers don’t like pretense, and humor is one way they deflate it. It has always been so. Lafayette’s George Ade, a popular author and playwright when Bob was a young pup in Terre Haute, put an appropriate edge on the rustic Hoosier. In Fables in Slang and other books, Ade profiled Hoosiers who appeared to be country rubes but outsmarted the city slickers every time. His contemporary, Frank McKinney, a cartoonist for the Indianapolis News under the pseudonum of Kin Hub-bard, gave the world Abe Martin, a cracker-barrel philosopher who stood for common sense and good-natured insight into the borders of darkness and grandiosity within each of us.

• “We’re all purty much alike when we git out o’ town.”
• “We’d all like t’ vote fer th’ best man, but he’s never a candidate.”
• “It’s th’ good loser that finally loses out.”
• “It’s no disgrace t’ be poor, but it might as well be.”³⁰

Bob’s close friends often commented on his ability to be wry, funny, serious, and hopeful at the same time. You can find people like that on the street corner of any small town in Indiana. Hoosiers are sometimes suspicious, but are not thoroughly cynical. The Hoosier ethic is to give ordinary people the benefit of the doubt and most politicians the doubt of many benefits. They have been, and remain, hospitable to strangers, deeply patriotic, convinced of the essential goodness of people, and more open to eccentricities than outsiders might suppose. Furthermore, they dearly love the geography of their land, which has few astounding vistas but offers instead an abundance of fertile, rich soil in the north and lovely, rolling hills in the south. William Hershell, a well-known reporter for the Indianapolis News, wrote a poem called “Ain’t God Good To Indiana?” which praised the state’s virtues. It is widely quoted in the state, and even inscribed on a plaque in the Statehouse rotunda.

In later life, Bob Greenleaf wrote, “As a theoretician, I’m an idealist. As a practitioner, I’m a gradualist.” That position is right out of Hoosier 50 history, revealing parallel strains of conservatism and populism. The state learned gradualism the hard way, and canals were the teachers.

In 1836, the Indiana legislature, in a sincere effort to lift Indiana out of the mud and isolation of pioneer days, voted to spend millions of dollars to build canals. Their timing was wretched. Railroads were the up-and-coming transportation technology, and the state went broke. Hoosiers, profoundly embarrassed, vowed it would never happen again in their state. In 1851, citizens ratified a new constitution that forbade the state from ever going into debt for either capital or maintenance items. Until the last years of the twentieth century, Indiana was the only state in the union to have such an iron-clad provision.³¹

This single event goes a long way toward explaining how Indiana became a state of gradualists rather than agents of bold change—they had been burned once. In his book The Indiana Way: A State History, Indiana historian James H. Madison explains how the “Indiana way” is the middle way—the way of moderation, not radicalism. While the state has changed (sometimes slowly) with the times, it has continued to affirm the bedrock lessons of its past.³²

To this day, the lessons Hoosiers learned from the canal fiasco can be seen in public policy and everyday attitudes: state government should be watched and limited. Local action is best. Evolution is better than revolution. Take your time and think things through. If you can’t afford it, don’t do it. (The pioneer phrase was: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”) The best public officials are those who save money. Healthy suspicion of power is part of good citizenship. Think about goals and outcomes before you act. All of these themes can be seen in Greenleaf’s mature theories about power, leadership, and management.

Greenleaf always considered himself an idealist rather than a dreamer, but Hoosiers have always had room for a few dreamers. New Harmony, Indiana, a hundred or so miles down the Wabash from Terre Haute in the southwest part of the state, hosted two major communities of visionaries. In 1814, George Rapp and his German band of “Harmonists” created a commercially successful settlement in the Indiana wilderness. The Harmonists, believing themselves God’s chosen people, renounced personal property and sex in exchange for farming, manufacturing, and communal living made civil by schools, a library, a printing press, and the pleasant sound of French horns to awaken them each morning. In 1824, they were 51 bought out by the wealthy Scotsman Robert Owen. Owen was focused on this world, but no less of a dreamer than Rapp. To his mind, private property was only one of many evils impeding the establishment of ideal human communities. He believed that religion and the traditional family structure brought out the worst in people. Hundreds of Europeans, including many of the leading intellectuals of the day, agreed. The keelboat Philanthropist that brought Owen to New Harmony also brought William Maclure, father of American geology, and Thomas Say, a giant in American zoology. Indiana was going to be home to the first model community! Historian James Madison summarized the community’s vision:

Unfortunately, the seamier aspects of human nature got in the way. Not everyone wanted to work, or was capable of it. Bad management was exacerbated by ideological disputes. Owen’s New Harmony community, an economic failure, lasted two years, but it gave the nation its first kindergarten, an approach to education based on understanding concepts and integrating them into everyday experience rather than rote memorization, and an early seeding of the idea of equality. It also gave the state the Owen children, who distinguished themselves in various ways in nineteenth century Indiana life.

Stories of the accomplishments and failures of the New Harmony experience were well known in Bob Greenleaf’s youth. It was a good grounding for later life when he would develop an interest in the Cooperative Movement in America and abroad.

Lovely landscapes also have shadows, and Indiana is no exception. The word “Indiana” means “land of the Indians,” but Native Americans were treated as abominably there as anywhere else in America.³⁴ After the War of 1812, settlers felt safe to live in the state and began repeating the old American story of taking lands by force or forced treaty and moving out the Indians. Chief Menominee and his fellow Potawatomi were forced to leave Indiana for Kansas in 1838. Even then it was called “The Trail of 52 Death.” The Miami faced a similar fate. By the year 1850, commonly called the end of the Pioneer Period, only a few hundred native Americans remained in the state that has a name that honors them above that of any other state.

Indiana has a mixed history on race relations, much of it shameful. Indiana was a free state that went with the North during the Civil War, but many people south of what is now Route 40, which bisects the state geographically and, in many ways, culturally, weren’t overjoyed about it. The General Assembly became so contentious that Governor Oliver Hazard Perry Throck Morton—better known as Oliver P. Morton—ran the state government during the war with a military autocracy. The state treasury was a strongbox in the corner of his office, filled with borrowed money. Seventy-four percent of Indiana’s males capable of bearing arms fought with honor in the Civil War, most as volunteers but many as conscripts. Those who were drafted and did not report were promptly jailed unless they could pay the state $300 or provide a human substitute.³⁵

By the end of the war, the high-handed Morton had arrested civilians and tried them in military court, scared the free speech out of many opponents (especially Democratic newspaper editors), supported Lincoln in his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and succeeded himself as governor, the latter act probably as illegal as all the others. Today there is a prominent statue of Morton at the entrance to the Indiana Statehouse, praising him as Indiana’s great war governor.

Morton’s vilification and subsequent glorification reveals an interesting facet of the Hoosier character that persists to this day. Indianans admire a strong-willed person, but they also want to limit damage. They savor an old-fashioned political scrap as a high form of Midwestern entertainment but equally enjoy judging and denouncing it. This ambivalence toward public policy and personages directly affected George Greenleaf’s role as a public servant fighting political corruption in Terre Haute. It probably helped Bob Greenleaf to not be overly impressed by top executives or the country club crowd he encountered in the higher echelons of AT&T.

The end of slavery did not mean the end of racism in Indiana. By 1924, the year Robert Greenleaf moved away to finish college, the Ku Klux Klan claimed a half-million members in the state. D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana, controlled state government, as well as most local municipalities. The Klan’s power began to unravel the 53 following year when Stephenson was sentenced to life imprisonment for second-degree murder, but it is fair to say that Indiana has never been a conspicuous leader in promoting race relations. Bob Greenleaf, like his father, seems to have escaped the worst of the racial prejudices that were so common during his childhood that they were barely given a second thought.

Greenleaf’s home town of Terre Haute may have the juiciest history of any city in the state. Because of its location on the Wabash river and its intersecting roads and railroads, Terre Haute for years claimed the slogan “Crossroads of America,” a phrase that Indianapolis rudely stole and uses to this day. It has also been known as “Prairie City” and “Pride City.” City fathers once tried out the slogan “Terre Haute Gets My Vaute!” but wisely discarded it.³⁶ Through the years, informal sobriquets gained greater fame: “Hogalopis” (after the pork packing plants), and “Sin City,” a name slapped on Terre Haute by the Saturday Evening Post in 1961.³⁷

The city sits in the middle of a large bituminous coal field that has been home to generations of tough miners and even tougher labor disputes. From the days of the French voyageurs to the years of massive European immigration, Terre Haute’s location made it more cosmopolitan than the more isolated Indiana hamlets and more diversified in its industry. It also had more than its share of saloons and houses of ill repute.

When Bob was five years old, Mayor Bidwell was impeached for not enforcing laws regarding saloons and prostitution. The political and legal fun continued with a succession of scandals until Bob left the state. Apparently the geographic “high ground” did not always apply to public life. Fortunately for the city, however, most of her citizens held to those stable Hoosier values of home, hearth, and decency. George Greenleaf was one of the more important of those community stewards.

Robert Greenleaf’s later views on the need for trust between leaders, managers, and employees were not modeled on the Terre Haute of his youth. Or maybe they evolved partly in reaction to his experience of endless confrontations in Terre Haute. Coal miners, bricklayers, railroadmen, construction workers, electricians, and pork packagers—all had their rugged unions. Labor leaders had to be tough enough to tackle owners and managers on the issues of safety, working conditions, child labor, and benefits. Eugene Debs often led the charge. Labor tension continued in Terre Haute after Bob Greenleaf moved away. In 1939, the city was the scene of America’s last general strike. The militia was called in to handle 54 23,000 workers who were convinced that local industrialists were “unscrupulous and fascistic.”³⁸

The Terre Haute of Greenleaf’s youth was a microcosm of Indiana’s parallel impulses. It was a site of growth and prosperity, a cauldron of unrest and tension. It was home to thousands of Klan supporters and friends of the socialist Debs. It was, at the same time, rural and agricultural in mindset, urban and industrialized in commerce. It was a wide-open town whose majority supported the temperance movement. In the arts, Terre Haute was home to musician “Scatman” Crothers (born in 1910) and Paul Dresser, composer of the state song, “On the Banks of the Wabash.” On the other hand, it was also the birthplace of Dresser’s brother, Theodore Dreiser, whose harsh realism in novels like Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy was anything but idyllic.

In Terre Haute, Bob Greenleaf had plenty of practice with paradox.