104 INDIANAPOLIS REGIONAL CENTER PLAN 2020 PLANNING DOWNTOWN�fS FUTURE TODAY APPENDIX A: HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT Catherwood, Meredith Nicholson and Booth Tarkington led the Indianapolis contingent of authors, many of whom were published by the Bobbs Merril Company, the third largest publishing house in the country. The most colorful mayor of the period (and the most powerful) was Thomas Taggart who firmly controlled on of the most dominating political organizations in the city's history.  Realists knew that if Taggart as behind a project it would succeed, if not they had better look for another project.  Having served as Democratic National Chairman, he returned to the city where he continued to wield political power.  (He built the famous French Lick Springs Hotel that came to be known as the Tammany Hall of the Midwest.) During this time, John Hook established a chain of Hooks Economy Drug Stores that, under the management of his son Augusta Bud Hook, expanded to 123 stores.  William H. Block and Co., L.S. Ayres and Co., L. Strauss and Co. and the Wasson Co. all acquired larger quarters in Downtown.  The city was known as an open shop town with cheap labor and a favorable business climate.  As such, there were fortunes to be made.  The era produced the country's first African American woman millionaire, Madame C.J. Walker. The labor movement found a sympathetic home in Indianapolis.  It became a center for workers union movements and John L. Lewis set up the headquarters of his United Mine Workers Union on the 11th floor of the Merchants Bank Building The issue of labor versus the new capitalism arising in the land was epitomized in the views and lives of two Indianapolis men: David M. Parry and Eugene V. Debs. David M. Parry was the spirit of the new capitalism incarnate.  He believed that it is the business of every man to honestly get all he can.  He was one of the most outspoken foes of organized labor in the country and regarded unionism as outright rebellion against the government that must be put down in any manner necessary. Eugene V. Debs had seen the American Railway Union he had founded crushed by the railroads, politicians and the courts.  He joined the Socialist Party and was five times nominated presidential candidate.  During World War I, he was jailed under the Espionage Act.  Nominated while in jail, he still polled over 900,000 votes an indication of the growing discontent with the form of capitalism prevalent at the time. Representative structures of this time period are the Das Deutsche Haus (1894), the Blacharne Apartments (1895), City Hall (1910) and Cole Motor Car Company (1914). 1917-1940: THE GREAT WAR AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION As the war in Europe loomed more ominously on the horizon, Governor James Goodrich took a series of steps that presumed Americas' inevitable entrance into the conflict.  He called conference of all food producing sectors of the economy to mobilize production and appointed Richard Lieber his military secretary in a move calculated to rally support from the local German population as well as gear the industrial sector for war production.  The Chamber of Commerce set up a war contracts division and railroads mobilized.  Will H. Hays and Tom Taggart were appointed co-heads of the State Council of Defense. Industry roared into full-scale production and the Indianapolis economy once again resembled the boom times of the 1880s with labor in short supply, wages on the rise and most segments of the economy operating at capacity fueled by new money pouring into the city in the form of defense contracts. Indiana's celebration of the Armistice of 1918 was on the grand scale.  The 1920 General Assembly authorized construction of a five-block War Memorial Plaza, anchored by the War Memorial Building (1933), that would also house the headquarters of the newly-formed American Legion.  The Memorial became a landmark equal in prominence to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument three blocks south on the Circle. Supremely satisfied with itself as a world leader and enjoying the affluence of the post-war the nation, along with Indianapolis, launched into what has been described as one of the giddiest, gaudiest, most tasteless, happiest and saddest eras in history The Roaring Twenties.   The excesses of the times also manifested themselves in the rise to prominence and power of locally-based Rev. Seitz Shumaker, superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League and far more tragically D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. As the new sound of Jazz moved north, brought by African Americans who had created it, Indianapolis became a jazz center to rival Chicago in prominence.  From the local scene, legendary figures such as Slide Hampton, J. Johnson and Wes Montgomery, as well as Hoagy Carmichael, went on to national acclaim and Indiana Avenue or The Avenue began to gain the prominence that blossomed in its music of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. It was also a time of continued industrial growth as the economy adjusted well to the post-war era.  New corporations moved to Indianapolis (P.R. Mallory, Westinghouse Lamp and RCA), the first of the State highways ran out of the Mile Athenaeum, c. 1912 Indiana Historical Society, Bass Photo Collection, 19651 Walker Building, 1977 Indiana Historical Society, Bass Photo Collection