The Shadow President Page 4
Like many of his fellow soldiers, Cawley was troubled about fighting fellow Irishmen and he was ambivalent about serving in a force he had felt pressured to join. He eventually decided to leave Ireland for the coalfields of Lancashire, England. He lived in Ashton-in-Makerfield and worked in a pit mine where coal was dug by hand, carted behind horses, and loaded on trains for shipment to the industrial hub of Manchester. It was grueling labor in conditions where the dangers included the ever-present threat of a stray spark causing natural gas or coal dust to explode. In neighboring Haydock, a pit mine explosion had killed more than two hundred men and boys in 1878. The risk Cawley undertook in the mines was comparable to the risk he had faced in Ireland. Naturally, like so many young men in that place and time, he was drawn to the idea of America. When he told his mother, her words to him, handed down through generations, were: “There’s a future there for you.”
With money sent by a brother, James, who was already in New York, Cawley bought a one-way ticket on the RMS Andania, a single-stack Cunard steamer that sailed from Liverpool on March 31. Unlike Cunard’s speedy Mauretania, which could cross the Atlantic in five days, the Andania wasn’t a swift vessel and didn’t arrive at New York Harbor until Wednesday, April 11, 1923.
On the day of Cawley’s arrival, the sky was clear, winds were calm, and a warming sun was coaxing the gardens at Ellis Island to life. The New York Times reported on its front page the killing by Irish Free State forces of a key leader among a dwindling army of rebels. The local news included an item that suggested sectarian strife could be found in Cawley’s new homeland too. PROMISE TO UNMASK KU KLUX IN JERSEY, read a headline about the arrest of Ku Klux Klansmen who had recently set four large crosses ablaze on the New Jersey Palisades overlooking New York.5
The Klan represented the extreme edge of a national anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant campaign, which was given legitimacy by mainstream intellectuals who promoted what was called “scientific racism” in such influential books as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Grant and others ranked nationalities on what was clearly a color scale, with so-called Nordics at the top and Africans at the bottom. His book, which Adolf Hitler came to call “my Bible,” would eventually be discredited as a work of pseudoscience, but in the 1920s, it guided new race-based immigration policies, which favored Protestant Europeans and gave groups like the Klan some legitimacy.6
The greatest opposition to racial extremism could be found in northern cities like New York where the Klan was answered with anti-masking laws and protests organized by groups including the Catholic Knights of Columbus. Three days after Mike Cawley set foot in New York, a Catholic newspaper editor, Patrick Scanlon, confronted John H. Moore, a preacher who had come to Queens from Dallas to promote his anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic version of Americanism. As Moore tried to rouse the crowd, he was met with silence. Scanlon, who jumped up to denounce him, was cheered. Moore departed under police protection.
With anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment high, Irish newcomers like Cawley were caught in a cultural and political crossfire. In 1921, Republicans had moved Congress to establish tighter limits on arrivals from newly free Ireland and most other countries. (Mexico was exempted so farmworkers could move freely.) As ships were turned away from American ports, immigration fell by 50 percent. However, lawmakers eager to make America whiter and more Protestant had kept the door open for people coming from Great Britain. When Cawley was admitted at Ellis Island, his last known address, in England, might have helped him pass through.
Leaving his brother James, who stayed in New York, Mike went to Chicago, where he would discover a big, century-old Irish American community on the South Side. Although Irish Americans dominated politics and civil service, the South Siders were resisting newcomers, including black migrants from the South, who wanted to live in the area. Four years prior to Cawley’s arrival, thirty-eight people were killed in rioting between the two groups. Afterward, an uneasy peace reigned, but competition for housing and for jobs at the sprawling stockyards remained intense.
In Chicago, Mike Cawley discovered that locals had their own versions of Irish drinking songs and identified themselves according to the Catholic parish they attended. There he would meet his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Maloney, who was four years his junior. A teacher whose own parents had come to America from Doonbeg, County Clare, Mary Elizabeth married Mike in 1931. By 1932, they had two daughters, Ann and Nancy—the vice president’s mother. Mike would work as a streetcar and bus driver, earning enough to support his family in a crowded slum neighborhood called Back of the Yards.
The “yards” were the vast and infamous stockyards of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, where cattle, pigs, and sheep were slaughtered at a rate of one million per year and workers labored in what Sinclair called an “inferno of exploitation.” (Winston Churchill wrote a glowing review; Jack London called it the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of “wage slavery.”) The Jungle accomplished more for meat safety than for workers and the Back of the Yards. However, shortly after Cawley settled there and his daughters were born, activist Saul Alinsky began collaborating with Catholic clergy to organize workers. After a violent struggle—Alinsky’s car was shot up—a strong union was installed at the yards and pay and conditions improved. He then helped ethnic groups set aside their differences to form a community council that gradually transformed Back of the Yards into a middle-class community. Though demonized as a communist or a socialist, Alinsky rejected both philosophies, saying, “I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself.” His work involved prodding the poor toward improving their own lives and then moving on.7
As life in Back of the Yards improved, Cawley finally decided to become a citizen, taking the oath in 1941. He became a Franklin Roosevelt/John F. Kennedy Democrat whom relatives in Ireland regarded as a “real Yank,” but he retained a touch of a brogue throughout his life and recalled enough Gaelic to teach his grandson Michael Richard to recite the Gaelic version of Humpty Dumpty. Young Mike Pence didn’t speak until he was three but soon demonstrated his grandfather’s gift for gab.8
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Mike Pence was the third of six siblings—four boys and two girls—and was born in Columbus in 1959. His mother, Nancy Cawley Pence, was a charming, sociable, and well-liked homemaker. His father, whose law school dreams had been dashed, went to work as an executive in the Kiel Brothers business, first in Indianapolis but then to the small central Indiana town, about forty-five miles south of the capital. The city-bred Nancy hated Columbus at first but adjusted well to this new life. The Pences lived first in a new subdivision built to accommodate the demand created by veterans who were starting families and needed housing. Built at a cost of $12,000, the squatty brick ranch house at 2744 Thirty-first Street had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and an attached garage set on less than a quarter acre. The tiny backyard ended where a vast cornfield began. To the east, a winding stream called Haw Creek, once home to otters and still fascinating to adventurous children, made its way south toward the Flatrock River. A few blocks south of the subdivision, U.S. Route 31 led to downtown Columbus. This highway, which began at the Canadian border, connected the heart of agricultural America from Mackinaw on Lake Michigan to Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico. (Today, the road can be seen as a strand that links politically conservative “red” America from north to south.)
As with many who lived along Route 31 at the time, though, the Pences were Democrats who would gradually follow their conservative social values into the Republican Party. Homelife was based firmly in the 1950s, not in the 1960s. Greg Pence, one of Mike’s older brothers, would recall for Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that the Pences whipped their children with a belt if they lied, demanded that they stand when an adult entered the room, and expected them to remain silent at table.
Perhaps because of the strict discipline, by every outward sign, the Pences were an ideal family. Ed Pence was a community leader whose firm sponsored Lit
tle League teams and made sure locals were well supplied with heating oil and gasoline even in the midst of the Arab oil embargoes of 1967 and 1973. Ed Pence did have the habit of getting tickets for speeding and errant driving, which earned him occasional mention in the local newspaper. He once also reported to police that one of his credit cards and a coat were stolen at the local Holiday Inn, and another time that the tires of his car had been slashed while parked at home. Nancy Pence was locally famous for organizing community events at the private Harrison Lake Country Club. She served for years as den mother for Cub Scouts Pack 3 and was an officer of the Modern Home Demonstration Club.
Created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Modern Home clubs were intended to promote public health and social stability and establish a link between the federal bureaucracy and families across America. The government provided members with program ideas, materials, and even a creed that required members to pledge themselves “to create a home which is morally wholesome, spiritually satisfying, and physically healthful and convenient.” The Moderns, as members were called, used USDA materials to coach one another on home economics—Space Savers for Kitchens was one topic of interest. Nancy Pence often hosted the club at her home and offered history lessons on the regular Song of the Month. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, she gave a presentation on radiation exposure and family health.
Radiation worries aside, the Pence family enjoyed the good life. After Ed Pence became part owner of Kiel Brothers, the family left their modest one-story home for a much bigger house in Parkside, an upper-middle-class Columbus neighborhood. One more move brought them to a seven-bedroom house, which, at five thousand square feet, was three times the size of the median newly built American home and set on one and a half acres. In this same time period, the Pences showed up in the local paper’s pre-Christmas features on a regular basis. PENCE CHILDREN SHOPPING WITH OWN MONEY was the banner headline across the top of page 39 of The Republic two days before Christmas 1972. Other years, readers learned of the Pences’ holiday trips to Chicago to visit relatives and their stay-at-home Christmases when Mike would play the role of Santa Claus and the whole crowd—Ed, Nancy, and six children—would sit down to a home-cooked turkey dinner.
A handsome clan filled with six bright and outgoing kids, the Pences may have been the closest one could get to a Columbus, Indiana, version of the Kennedys. Like matriarch Rose Kennedy, Nancy Pence was a demanding, even tough parent. (One of Mike Pence’s peers would describe her as “a nice lady who you also knew would take you outside and kick your ass if you did something she didn’t like.”) Nancy encouraged her children to make the family proud. They all succeeded, though Mike was the star. In 1966, seven-year-old Mike walked the runway at the downtown Crump Theatre, modeling outfits for the Tempo department store spring fashion show. In 1972, Mike appeared before the local chapter of the Optimist Club, which met at a shopping center cafeteria, to compete in a debate contest. Combining the boosterism of the Gilded Age and the metaphysics of nineteenth-century spiritualists, the Optimists were founded in 1911. The first chartered chapter was in Indiana. The organization’s ten-point philosophy was a forerunner of Rev. Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, which would be embraced by the future president Donald Trump. The Optimists’ credo called on members “to look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.” Club members were implored to “forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future” while offering “every living creature you meet a smile.”9
At the debate contest one of young Mike’s competitors, Monica Gratz, deviated a bit from the Optimists’ creed. She spoke about civil rights issues, recommending Black Like Me, a popular book at the time by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who had his skin darkened temporarily to pass as a black man and described his experience in the Deep South. She won the girls’ division despite the controversial theme. Pence, hewing to the spirit of the Optimist Club, focused on the world’s problems and declared his generation ready to solve them. He won the boys’ prize and went home with a silver-colored trophy.10
Mike Pence’s trophy-winning optimism was consistent not only with the club that sponsored the debate but also with his family’s ethos of sunny expectations. Their happiness was reinforced by their deep involvements in the life of St. Columba Roman Catholic Church, where the sacraments offered the promise of spiritual renewal and various lay organizations filled a social calendar. The children attended parochial school through eighth grade, and all the Pences did volunteer work for the parish and its various organizations. The male Pence children were altar boys, and Mike eventually became president of the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO). While in office, his main initiative was a lawn-mowing/weed-cutting project intended to eliminate hiding places for virus-carrying mosquitoes. He devised it after learning that mosquitoes transmitted encephalitis and that infants, like his youngest sister, were especially vulnerable. The tender heart that motivated Mike Pence to defend the babies of Columbus from mosquitoes also moved him to join a group of high schoolers who volunteered to help care for two brothers named Mark and Mike Reardon, who had muscular dystrophy. Mark and Mike Reardon both died before they reached nineteen.11
Between the CYO, school, and all the activities St. Columba offered, Mike Pence and his siblings had a sense of belonging and opportunities to excel. In general, the church sheltered local Catholics from religious prejudice in a region where an old-fashioned evangelical Protestantism predominated. “We were discriminated against,” said Nancy Pence when she was interviewed by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Gregory Pence would recall that bigoted kids had thrown rocks at him simply because they knew he went to St. Columba.
Anti-Catholic sentiment had a long history in southern Indiana. It had surged in the 1920s when one in five male adults in Columbus belonged to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which marched against blacks, Jews, and Catholics and advocated for a white, Protestant, American-born country. For a brief period in the middle of the decade, the election of a Klansman governor had given the KKK control of state government. This reign ended when newspapers reported allegations of sexual assault made against the state’s top Klan leader. Although scandal eroded the Klan’s political power, it continued to terrorize black citizens. In 1930 thousands of white Hoosiers attended the lynching of two black men—Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith—in the farm town of Marion. Arrested on charges of rape and murder, the men were dragged from jail by members of a mob who had used sledgehammers to break through the walls of the building. The hanging, abetted by police, inspired the lyrics to the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday. No one was charged in the lynching, which was witnessed by a substantial portion of Marion’s population and documented by a photographer who worked ten days straight to print enough photos, on postcards, to meet the demand for souvenirs. The Marion spectacle was the last lynching in the state, but KKK activity continued into the 1970s.12
The Klan was active in Columbus in 1975, eight years after the Supreme Court struck down so-called anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. A cross was planted on an interracial couple’s front yard there, with the words RACE MIXING IS A DISEASE scrawled on it. In 1977, Klansmen patrolled the border with Mexico as self-appointed citizen security officers, and forty members of the organization rallied in front of the courthouse in Columbus. Counterprotesters gathered to reject their message that day, and the KKK presence was an affront to the man who occupied the most important address in town, which sat in view of the landmark building. Built to be a dry goods store in 1848, 301 Washington Street is a two-story, redbrick building that became a bank before it was repurposed as an office for J. Irwin Miller, chairman and president of the most important corporation in the region, Cummins Engine Company.
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At once a capitalist and a progressive social engineer, Miller was the man most responsible for creating, in Columbus, a widely held belief in the city as an ideal place populate
d by good people like the Pences and others who presented to the world a well-polished and wholesome image. Everyone in Columbus, including schoolchildren such as Mike Pence, knew about his benevolence and public service. Businesspeople and politicians alike understood that his support could yield great benefits and his opposition was practically the kiss of death any ambition.
Miller dedicated much of his personal fortune to the task of making Columbus a better place. Along the way, he became a power broker who determined much of what could and couldn’t happen in the city. He was able to do this because, under his leadership, Cummins became a global, industrial powerhouse that provided the cash he needed to carry out his mission. In true midwestern style, Miller maintained a low-key, even modest public profile and avoided the spotlight. All the while he showed that a strong local leader could use his money to shape not only a physical landscape but also the social and political reality of the people who inhabit it.
Until 1967, Joseph Irwin Miller was essentially two men, and neither was very widely known. The first Miller, call him the Wall Street Miller, prowled the precincts of power in New York, where both his midwestern charm and his education at Yale (he majored in Greek and Latin) and Oxford were recognized as great assets. He was a Yale trustee and served on the boards at AT&T, Chemical Bank, and Equitable Life Assurance. Miller raised money for Dwight Eisenhower but was friendly with Lyndon Johnson, funded civil rights organizations and, as president of the mainline National Council of Churches, supported Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington. (Miller, having abandoned the church where his grandfather had preached against other forms of Christianity, advocated interreligious understanding.)