Tip County

Tippecanoe County sits in central western Indiana. This story is about the people of Tip County, as the residents call the place, and about one man in particular, James Elroy "Roy" Emerson, whom his friends call Roy or Roy E., the newly elected county prosecuting attorney.

Interstate 70 out of Indianapolis going west to Saint Louis, Missouri, bisects Tippecanoe County. High school students say North Tip is the sophisticated part of the county, running from the interstate north to the Crawford County Line. South Tip, on the other side of the interstate, is mostly rural — good farmland and lowland running through the Eel River country to the White River. South Tip people resent the airs of North Tip residents.

Tippecanoe County is home to some 220,000 souls, give or take a few hundred. James Elroy Emerson (hereafter referred to in our story as Roy) knows this to be a fact because he's just run for prosecutor there — it's a bigger county than meets the eye. The voting rolls carry many fewer residents than people, and there are still many hundreds on the city, village, and township clerks' election rolls who don't vote in Tip County anymore, having previously taken off for Terre Haute and points west.

Industry has come to Tippecanoe County within the past decade, recent additions being a vehicle assembly plant and a large steel plant to supply steel plating to the vehicle assembly factory. The auto company bought up a huge chunk of farmland east of Terre Haute, built a truck-and-bus plant there, and brought in a few thousand auto workers to staff the productions lines. The steel company, in building its factory to supply sheet metal to the auto plant, took another hunk of farmland out of production and set up a sheet-metal-and-rolled-steel manufacturing facility within a short commute to the auto factory.

The industrial complexes are in Tippecanoe County and in Terre Haute's county, Monroe. A political compromise brought them there — the elected boards of county commissioners from both counties got into a bidding war for the plants and offered so many tax abatements that the state's governor became alarmed, got into the act, cracked a few heads, and forced a compromise between the county boards. So that's why the auto company's plant is in Monroe County and the steel company's facilities are in Tippecanoe County.

Following the construction of the steel plant, an influx of workers came into the area. Line workers and craft people from the mills of Youngstown and Pittsburg were glad to get steady work in Tip County, even though they were far away from relatives and friends in their beloved Allegheny Mountains. Jobs at both factories drew unemployed people and underemployed individuals from throughout Indiana and Illinois, and a goodly portion of the new hires migrated from the upper southern states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

As a result of the infusion of newcomers, there was a distinctly southern flavor in and around the auto and steel plants, and many an old Rebel battle flag could be seen fluttering from radio antennae of trucks in factory parking lots. Country and western is the music of choice, and Walmart (built in a minimall at the Decatur exit from Interstate 70) does a booming business in work shirts and blue jeans. Chevy and Ford trucks are the most popular means of conveyance, and God help anyone who parks a Japanese car in a plant employee parking lot. It'll get keyed or have tires flattened quicker than the owner can say Toyota.

Tip's Politics

One would think from all this building that Tippecanoe County would vote Democratic, influenced by the labor unions and the new workers. But it doesn't; Tip County is solidly Republican, and it has been for as long as anybody can remember.

Up in the county seat, Decatur in North Tip, the country reapportionment boards have done their jobs well over the years, crafting and gerrymandering the voting districts so that Republican control was assured. The county legislative body — called the County Board of Commissioners — has been solidly Republican for decades, except for one session in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, when the voters took out their Depression-bred frustrations on the Republican farmer-legislators in the old county board of supervisors and voted in some union people.

But the union people lasted only one term, and pretty soon it was back to business as usual at the courthouse, with the Republican old guard in control. This political oligarchy changed when James Elroy Emerson was elected as county prosecutor.

As industry began to remold the countryside, more minorities began to appear — members of labor unions with money in their pockets and middle-class values in their minds. There had always been African Americans in Tippecanoe County because one of the many termini of the prior century's underground slave railroad ended in nearby Vincennes, and church people in Tippecanoe County made welcome the escaped slaves and their families in Decatur and the surrounding communities.

Many former slaves were given small pieces of land to work, and they farmed them until they got legal titles. They and their offspring stayed on the land, generally maintaining low profiles, except for those few who migrated into the cities and villages of Tippecanoe and took the menial jobs to which they were consigned by racial segregation.

Mexican American migrants worked the fields of Tippecanoe County to bring in the crops, but this was a seasonal group, and only a few got off the migrant trail and settled down. Those who did so generally put down their roots close to Decatur, although a few hundred permanent Mexican American residents located in and around Dansville, a large village in South Tip.

Making steel is hot business, and some hardy Eastern Europeans (Croats, Romanians, Bulgars, and Ukrainians) came down to the steel company from Chicago and took jobs as puddlers and ladle operators. None but these seemed to be able to stand the intense heat around the furnaces.

Irish immigrant farmers had worked the fields for many generations as tenants, and some got titles to their own land. Most of the Irish, though, worked for German titleholders, and the Irish children didn't want to do tenant farming as their parents had. Instead, when the Irish kids finished high school or dropped out before graduation, they migrated away to get trade and vocational education; if they returned to Tippecanoe County, they generally settled in the cities and villages.

There were merchant families of English origin and Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe who came to Decatur and, after years of hard work, acquired their own grocery, drug goods, and laundry businesses. There were just a few Asian Pacific Islander Americans.

Roy's Family

Mother and Father Emerson were a mixture of several nationalities, so it isn't possible to say they were German, Irish, or Scandinavian. As far as Mother and Father Emerson were concerned, they were just Americans and spoke only the English language.

Both of Roy's parents were educated through grade school but had very little high school education. They came from poor families in Pittsburg and had to go to work to help their parents, who were not in the best of health. Paul Emerson, Roy's father, was a...