Auburn's Ignored History

[Mike_Walter]

"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." — William Faulkner

Although the "Auburn, Indiana, Message Board" that I used to edit is not currently active, I had a forum there that I called "Auburn's Ignored History" that I was quite proud of. The purpose was to describe events in Auburn's past that you wouldn't normally see mentioned in tourist brochures or any other kind of civic booster promo, but which either had an impact on our lives or showed us brushing sleeves with the history of the wider world. I want to start posting some of those old articles here for your comments and, equally likely, your slings and arrows. I will try to be gentle in my treatment of things and still get at the truth, although I doubt that the full truth of any community's history is within our mortal grasp.

[HoosierHelen]

I'm not familiar with your previous forum, however, your topic sounds quite interesting to me. Looking forward!

Helen

[Mike_Walter]

The late journalist Jonathan Kwitny, who died in 1998 at age 57, is best known for his biography of Pope John Paul II (Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II, Henry Holt & Co., 1997). Kwitny began his journalism career in Indianapolis, then moved to The Wall Street Journal. His fourth book, Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace (W.W. Norton: 1979), dealt with the penetration of legitimate businesses by organized crime.

One of those businesses was Auburn Rubber Company.

As everybody in Auburn over a certain age knows, Auburn Rubber was the nation's biggest maker of rubber toys and was one of Auburn's three or four biggest employers. In 1959, the town was stunned to learn that Auburn Rubber was moving to Deming, New Mexico.

What the public did not know in 1959 was that the move was financed by a $3 million loan from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund, which was virtually a bank for organized crime. Here's the rest of the story as Kwitny tells it:

"By 1963, the fund had pumped an additional $1.5 million into Auburn [Rubber Company]. Meanwhile, some $350,000 in bonds backed by the fund's loans were issued, apparently as kickbacks, to a mobster with a long arrest record who arranged the deal and to Teamster officials the mobster dealt with. In 1969, Auburn Rubber folded, owing the fund $4.9 million with interest. So the Teamsters foreclosed on the loan and wound up owning the toy factory.

"Soon afterward, the original Auburn borrowers started a competing toy factory across the street, using tools and machinery taken from the Auburn Rubber plant -- apparently without payment to the fund, which held a mortgage on the equipment as collateral for its loans. For a few months in 1970, a new group moved into the old Auburn plant [in Deming], operated it, and left -- apparently without paying the Teamsters any rent. Thus for 11 years, people had been allowed to make money selling toys on $5 million of Teamster financing without ever having to pay the Teamsters fund -- only, under the table, the Teamsters' bosses -- for the opportunity. And $5 million, taken from the pockets of American consumers to help pay pensions for truck drivers and cargo handlers, had instead been diverted elsewhere." (Vicious Circles, p. 189.)

These transactions came to light in the early 1970s as a result of investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice, the Postal Service and the IRS. In 1975, the Justice Department began -- and lost -- a ten-week fraud trial in Chicago against six defendants. The government's case was weakened by the murder a few months earlier of a key witness and by the sheer complexity of the financial schemes that made it hard to pin criminal culpability directly to the defendants.

Anyone who wants to thread their way through the financial labyrinth of the Auburn-Deming deals should read the account in Kwitny's book. Kwitny does not mention any local Auburn names; but the question that should intrigue us and which probably will not be answered (not in this life, at least) is how a company that was a cornerstone of our community ended up as a satrapy in an underworld empire.

[Peaches]

Very interesting. My husband and I take an interest in the history of the Auburn Rubber Company. Aside from the toys, we have several old memorablia. Keep the stories coming!

[HoosierHelen]

Thank you Mike for that history on the Auburn Rubber Plant. I lived in this area all of my life and never knew that story of the Teamster's involvement with that failure.

Interesting. Keep those history stories coming!

Helen

[Mike_Walter]

Thank you Mike for that history on the Auburn Rubber Plant. I lived in this area all of my life and never knew that story of the Teamster's involvement with that failure. Helen

Let's be careful about just how the Teamsters were or might have been involved. A former office employee of Auburn Rubber once told me that since Teamster drivers made deliveries to the local plant and picked up shipments here, there was a certain "mutual awareness" between the union and the company. But just who approached whom when the company ran into financial trouble is something I don't know. What we do know is that the Central States Pension Fund financed the company's purchase by a group of third parties who simply did not repay the loan. That's a classic ploy of racketeers. While the government failed to prove complicity by pension fund trustees, rank-and-file Teamsters were the victims because it was their money that vanished. As for the question of just what kind of financial trouble Auburn Rubber ran into, the local rumor was that it involved malfeasance, although I have never heard how much or by whom.

[Mike_Walter]

This falls into the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" category. Ralph Austin Bard was the Chicago financier who headed the investment group that bought the Auburn Automobile Company from Frank and Morris Eckhart and then sold it to E.L. Cord. We all know about Cord's subsequent career as a high-profile corporate raider and stock manipulator, but does anyone in Auburn remember Bard or what he did later?

Bard became President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Assistant Secretary of the Navy and continued as Under Secretary during the early months of the administration of President Harry S. Truman. Bard was so highly regarded that he was made one of eight members of the Interim Committee, a sort of High Council of the Wise appointed to advise Truman on what to do with the atomic bomb. Besides Bard, the other members were Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson; James F. Byrnes, former US Senator and former Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court soon to be Secretary of State; Will Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and former big-time cotton trader; Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution; Karl Compton, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Conant, President of Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, President of the New York Life Insurance Company.

As you can see, this was a very high-octane bunch. Not surprisingly, they advised Truman to drop the bomb on a Japanese city as soon as possible and to do so without warning. Since this was advice that the President could have heard in any bar that he might have cared to stroll into, you have to wonder why he needed the committee to tell him this at all, except maybe to provide the appearance of solemn deliberation at this, the Dawn of the Atomic Age.

But Bard, a man of conscience, had second thoughts. Although he never suggested that the bomb should not be used, he wrote a famous memorandum to Stimson urging that Japan be given two or three days' warning.

"The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling," Bard wrote, adding that he felt "that the Japanese government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender."

Bard's character as a quiet, self-effacing man made his dissent speak louder than those simple, honest words might sound, and his important contribution to winning the war proved that he was no pussycat; but his advice was disregarded and two bombs were dropped -- with tens of thousands of casualties -- before Japan surrendered.

Might Bard's proposed warning, coupled with the strike on Hiroshima, have persuaded Japan to surrender before the second bomb was dropped? We cannot know, not in this life at least. But it should be of more than passing interest that the former owner of a struggling automobile company in Auburn, Indiana, motivated by nothing more than simple decency, spoke courageously for an alternative which, even if it had failed, would have eased a burden that still weighs heavily on America's conscience.

Note: The full text of Bard's "Memorandum on the Use of S-1 Bomb" is found at http://www.doug-long.com/bard.htm.

[Mike_Walter]

This week's flood moves me to post a revised version of a letter of mine about the history of Cedar Creek that appeared in The Evening Star, March 11, 2002:

Cedar Creek has existed about 13,000 years. Upper Cedar Creek, the part in DeKalb County, probably began as a drainage channel at the northwestern edge of the Erie Lobe of the last glacier; but it's possible that it formed at the southeastern edge of the earlier Saginaw Lobe and later took drainage from the Erie Lobe.

Upper Cedar Creek originally connected to the Eel River, which was and still is a tributary of the Wabash. But Cedar Creek had a mind of its own and decided one day to seek romance and adventure by hanging a sharp left turn at Cedar Canyon, at the other end of which was the St. Joe River, obviously the life partner that Cedar Creek was hankering for.

What came between Cedar Creek and the Eel was gravel, a whole humongous lot of it that washed out of Cedar Canyon in a torrent of water fed by the melting Erie Lobe and the ancient lake it created: Lake Maumee, the ancestor of modern Lake Erie. When the flow subsided, Cedar Creek was free to rush down the canyon to its destiny with the St. Joe, a younger stream that formed at the base of the Fort Wayne Moraine when Lake Maumee stood about where New Haven is today.* This makes lower Cedar Creek one of a select number of streams that has actually reversed its direction of flow.

As a result of this hydrological divorce and second marriage, Cedar Creek got the gold mine and the Eel River got the shaft, with Cedar Creek taking 175,000 acres away from the Eel's watershed. Geologists have tended to side with the Eel in this story, branding Cedar Creek's behavior an act of "stream piracy."

Unlike the Eel, which gained notoriety in 1790 as the site of one of the two battles in which Chief Little Turtle's Miami warriors made short work of U.S. forces under General Josiah Harmar and Colonel John Hardin, Cedar Creek led a relatively quiet existence until about a century ago when the people of DeKalb County, in the "progressive" spirit of the time, decided to improve on nature by employing a steam dredge to straighten and deepen the channel. It was a mistake.

It's pointless to censure our forebearers for this decision. They did what everybody else was doing and thought they were doing good. They did not see the broad, shallow Cedar Creek valley as an asset to be conserved, but as a wasteland to be "reclaimed." Nature made Cedar Creek shallow and meandering (there was a cranberry bog where the fairgrounds are today), but a human standard of efficiency dictated that a narrow, deeper channel was better. Channelization increased both runoff velocity and taxable property values on the creek's original flood plain. It also increased potential economic loss from even limited flooding and provided permanent work for contractors whose job it has been to keep nature from putting the creek back the way it was.

Lower Cedar Creek, however, escaped the dredge, partly because most of it was in another county and partly because the creek's gradient begins to increase sharply as it approaches Cedar Canyon. From river mile 13.7, roughly at County Road 68, to its confluence with the St. Joe at Cedarville, Cedar Creek looks somewhat like it always did. That's why lower Cedar Creek was included in 1997 in Indiana's Natural, Scenic and Recreational River System, one of only three streams in the entire state to make the cut. The same stretch of Cedar Creek was also designated an "outstanding state resource water," the only water in Indiana's Great Lakes area besides the Dunes National Lakeshore and Lake Michigan itself to qualify.

This special status doesn't give lower Cedar Creek much legal protection, certainly not nearly as much as natural and scenic rivers have in Michigan, but it's part of the reason why county surveyors and drainage boards can't just do as they please there; although they certainly did a lot of damage before five years of litigation decided that they acted illegally. (See http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2...ions_d_12.html).

As late as 1988, Cedar Creek was home to 27 species of mussels. (There are only eight mussel species in the whole continent of Europe.) But a decade later, only four of 26 species previously identified near Cedarville could be found; and near Waterloo, only six of 11 previously-identified species were found. In between, no living or freshly-dead specimens of any mussel species were located. (See USGS Fact Sheet 124-00, What Makes a Healthy Environment for Native Freshwater Mussels?)

Modern Cedar Creek is the remnant of an ancient ecosystem with a complex history. Despite human misuse, it retained a remarkable vitality until just a few years ago. People opposed to invading Cedar Creek with heavy machinery seem to be aware of this history. Supporters of industrial-style stream management seem not to be, or at least seem indifferent to it, as if acknowledging the creek's antiquity concedes too much to the other side. One might think that our county leaders would take pride in Cedar Creek's special status. Instead, they seem to view it as a nuisance and possibly even nonsense.

For my part, I've grown to regard Cedar Creek with something of the awe and reverence I would have for a giant sequoia: a living thing, incredibly ancient by human standards, that will probably last in one form or another for hundreds of centuries more.

*An alternative explanation is that headward erosion by a tributary of the St. Joe cut into the watershed of the ancestral Eel River, capturing the flow of Cedar Creek. See The Three Faces of Cedar Creek by Dr. Jack a Sunderman.

Scenic River Segment of Cedar Creek
Photo by Mike Walter

[HoosierHelen]

Again...I have enjoyed with great interest the details you have contributed in your story Mike.

Thank you so much. IF you ever have history of the Spencerville area, I have a personal interest in this.

Blessings to your contributions!
Helen