CORRUPTION: Dog Eat Dog

He had been in jail since April, 1925. Calendars since then had recorded some 790 different days, but those days had all been much the same to him. They would continue so, too, for he was a lifer. He would be there, in the common phrase, "from now on." Surely an unworthy end for David Curtis Stephenson who through many years had controlled the Indiana Ku Klux Klan which had controlled the politics of Indiana. In the Republican State Convention of 1924 he had patrolled the aisles of the convention hall with a gun on his hip. The men whom he had picked for office held office; the men whom he had opposed had been defeated.*

Then had come the Oberholtzer case. Twelve gentlemen of a jury had found him guilty of having abducted and attacked Madge Oberholtzer, an Indianapolis girl who had committed suicide following her disgrace. It was second degree murder and it brought David Curtis Stephenson a life sentence. Of course, life sentences were largely figures of speech—lifers were usually set free after 20 or 25 years. But even after 20 years he would come out an old man. He would have spent what are generally termed "the best years of a man's life" in the ignominious occupation of making cane chairs in a prison factory. If he came out in 1950—how many of the men who were boys when he was a boy would be still alive?

And the worst of it was that the whole state of Indiana was populous with onetime friends who were leaving him to rot forgotten. Jobholders whose jobs he had secured for them, officials whose offices had come from his bounty—they ignored him now. Back in the fall of 1926 he had threatened to expose some of the less lovely incidents of Indiana statesmanship, had received word that if he kept quiet until after the election he would be "taken care of." He had kept quiet, but his reticence had not been rewarded. In June he had protested against the treatment he was getting in the jail, and an investigating board had found his complaints unfounded. Last week he asked Governor Ed. Jackson for a 90-day parole so that he could personally conduct his plea to the State Supreme Court for a retrial of the Oberholtzer case. Governor Jackson refused his request.

They had double-crossed him, then, had they? They were going to keep him making chairs—they were going to keep him a number, marooned in a prison? Well, then, he would talk. He would give names, dates, conversations. He would disclose the hiding place of documentary evidence proving his statements. It took a lot more than 19 months to fade the signature off a canceled check. When he was through they would "need a new wing for the prison."