Indiana's Bloody Eighth

...Given the curious variety of the Eighth District, the problem any congressman faces in having to make himself known in only one term, and the notorious fickleness of the electorate, several Republicans went scrambling after McCloskey with three signing up for the primary...

...But then the Eighth District in its current configuration would have tried the abilities of Lincoln, who, after all, had a hard time winning elections in Illinois...

...Stuck off along the byways are such hamlets as Santa Claus, Loogootee, Zipp, Popcorn, Pinhook, Pumpkin Center, Bushrod, Beehunter, Bramble, and Poseyville...

...What Rick Mclntyre portrays is the model of a bright, attractive, competent Republican of the rising generation-just the sort of fine young man you'd want to marry your daughter, join your Rotary club, handle your case, or lead your son's Scout troop...

...So much for reasonableness...

...For all its hills and hollows, southwestern Indiana is scarcely the dark side of the moon...

...Sons and daughters of the region regularly grope their way toward the light...

...A former radio announcer whose plummy tones made him sound safe and sincere, Deckard was unable one night in late October 1982 to see a tree for the vodka...

...The new tally favored Mclntyre by 34 votes, and Simcox stamped his admission ticket to Congress...

...His dour, pensive look suggests the bookish loner who muses over Thomas Merton, Hans KUng, and Walker Percy...

...Or not...

...Somewhere in his set of mind there may also be a tincture of liberation theology, but probably not enough to put the archabbey at St...

...With the abundance of timber, there is still plenty of lumbering going on, and veneer plants, furniture factories, piano makers, and related concerns claim a sizable share of the district's economy...

...What would have roused talk in an earlier day is that McCloskey is not a Hoosier, born and bred...

...At least next time they'll know for certain what Congress has done for them lately...

...The soil has the right properties for raising strawberries and blueberries around Campbellsburg and the delectable Decker melon in Knox County...

...To the surprise of those who supposed McCloskey would side with Walter Mondale's special-interest/advocacy liberals, he was among the first congressmen to endorse Gary Hart for the 1984 presidential nomination...

...On the basis of this total, Indiana's secretary of state declared Mclntyre the official winner and promptly gave him a certificate of election-the second time Simcox had so anointed him...

...The odd man out, Bill Thomas, counterproposed that a ballot showing at least one clerk's initials or even just the number of the precinct should be eligible for the recount...

...He has brought this off with an attentiveness to constituent groups that combines the solicitude of old-style ward-heeling with the conscience-strickenness of a worker-priest...

...What it appears to signify is that the House Republicans, especially those lately arrived, are not only determined to stand their ground, but also to take the offensive whenever they can...

...In point of fact, he has sought to hold onto his seat in Congress with such furious passion that his very life seems to depend on it...

...So sharp were the exchanges on the House floor and reportedly in the cloakroom that the patina of comity was plainly rubbed raw...

...the gene pool...

...In the Hoosier National Forest-southern Indiana is still North America's largest deciduous woodland, or so Miss Elsie Sweeney used to claim-where Orange, Dubois, and Crawford counties come together, there is the crappie-laden Patoka reservoir...

...Though he is short on animal magnetism, McCloskey is decidedly long on determination...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1985 out to be polite, restrained, fairly fought, and, to old-timers of the Eighth District, disappointing for all of that...

...On the whole, grudging toleration is the order of the day, a condition Francis Xavier McCloskey had to count on when he first ran for Congress in 1982...

...Despite the fact Indiana law requires each valid ballot to have the initials of both election board clerks, Representatives Panetta and Clay decided that disputed ballots without either the clerks' initials or even precinct numbers would be counted so as to "be fair to voters...

...Although McCloskey may be the first Roman Catholic elected to the seat, it was not an issue that came up in respectable company, which in this part of Indiana is often hard to come by...

...If not a brass-bound intellectual he seems a reflective man, bemused by the antics and indignities of politics...

...However, there is still enough pasture land to support both feeder and dairy cattle in various parts of the district...

...Manufacturers of substantial volume are Westinghouse, RCA, General Electric, Otis Elevator, and Cook, Inc...

...Religious differences persist, what with German Catholic parishes alongside Baptist, Methodist, and Disciples of Christ congregations throughout the hinterlands...

...Invoking the sacrosanct name of Lincoln is an old Hoosier dodge, favored by Republicans, but used by Democrats in necessity...

...It should likewise be noted that the Indiana Democrat most admired for his statesmanship, Lee Hamilton of the adjoining Ninth District, has not only failed to detect such principle throughout the proceedings, but has opposed the seating of Mclntyre in partisan language, a practice to which he is little given...

...But after much scurrying and dragooning, the Democrats summoned enough of their forces to beat it back by a vote of 168 to 167...

...One is moved to dwell on such attributes because men of lesser mettle would be driven to distraction by the events of recent weeks...

...It surely does...

...Meinrad and Haubstadt, effusively German enough to make a Uruguayan emigre feel at home...

...When the wheat was sifted from the chaff, the figures were Mclntyre, 114,278...

...Although Rep...

...While Morgan may have been sadly mistaken about the Southern Hoosiers of the 1860s, the inhabitants of the present day have turned their political coats so often in recent years it scarcely pays an incumbent to get his trousers mussed by trying to warm the seat...

...All the while, McCloskey, prickly as a bramble-bush, dodged in and out of scrapes with the insurgent Democrats on the city council who were discomfited by his spells of moderation and reasonableness...

...The ruckus over the wreck knocked down his lead in the polls and boosted McCloskey into office, to the tune of "What a little moonshine can do...

...If the Republicans needed to be reminded of what they were up against, that came quickly on March 11 when Chairman Leon Panetta and his fellow Democrat, William Clay of Missouri, met with the lone Republican, William Thomas of California, to force the task the House Administration Committee had set them...

...Speaker O'Neill was nettled by this ploy to the point of flabbergastion...

...New Harmony, the spiffily renovated village on the Wabash where Robert Owen conducted his short-lived Utopian community...

...This knobby terrain of hillocks and steep ravines emerged after the breaking off of the last, great glacier...

...Alcoa in Warrick County...

...moreover, it attested to the sense and savvy of a very junior state legislator...

...From that vantage point the late Seth Denbo, Republican chairman of the Eighth District for almost 25 years, could keep track of strange movements from any direction that threatened to reform his rascaldom...

...Not even John Hunt Morgan's Confederate raiders caused enough trouble to sound that alarm...

...Cold comfort was all that southwestern Indiana could count on this winter...

...The Democrats] have created a set of rules to count what they want to count...

...The action of the House Democrats can be regarded as a violation of due process, a deprivation of the citizens' right to representation, and an interference in the government of a state...

...Perhaps McCloskey has smelled the spore of yuppies in the woods, maybe down around Shoals where there's less algae in...

...When the House refused to seat Mclntyre, it referred the matter by a vote of 221-180 to its administration committee, which in turn assigned the mess to a three-man election task force chaired by Leon Panetta, Democrat of California...

...From Bloomington, the home of Indiana University and other enterprises of transcendent merit in the northeastern corner, to Evansville, the district's largest city and hometown of the state's present governor, in the southwestern pocket on the Ohio River, is a grinding drive of 120 tortuous miles...

...All these facilities draw their workers from far afield into the surrounding counties...

...At comes as no surprise that anyone who dares to represent Indiana's Eighth Congressional District must confront a welter of contending forces...

...The Democrats said no, their way was the right way...

...Kent Owen INDIANA'S BLOODY EIGHTH As George Ade once said, "A lot of good men come from Indiana, and the better they are the faster they come...

...Corn and soy bean production per acre falls way below the output of the state's central counties, and the farms are much smaller...

...It was as if the urban style of Philadelphia's Bill Green, Sr...

...Bedford, limestone capital of the known world and site of half-finished pyramids and like doodads...

...Acting under the different rules circuit judges set for them, the 15 recount commissions disallowed ballots not initialed by precinct workers, those improperly marked by voters, those not properly sealed in special envelopes, those obviously mismarked or mutilated...

...Despite his unabashed boyishness, he has the gift of even-temper, making him seem older than his years...

...Coming to Bloomington from Philadelphia in the early sixties to work as a newspaper reporter, he started to college at Indiana University and earned a law degree, began a family, went into practice with a good firm, and, when the 18-year-olds got the vote and local Republicans were at their customary loggerheads, he won his first of three elections as mayor...

...Promptly after the dismissal, Indiana Attorney General Linley E. Pearson filed suit with the US...

...Supreme Court against the House of Representatives at the behest of Governor Robert D. Orr...

...Younger than McCloskey by nearly 17 years, he had spent two terms in the Indiana General Assembly without obvious loss of moral fiber...

...But volatility is another matter, and Colonel Morgan himself had supposed there were rebel-sympathizing copperheads in such numbers that they would desert the Union if they were to receive any real encouragement...

...Obviously, I was wrong" to suppose the recount would be fair...

...Although he was hardly a wunderkind in the style of Birch Bayh or Bill Ruckelshaus, Mclntyre did compile a sound record, especially with his "rainy day fund" bill, which helped to stabilize the state budget...

...Such a feat of power politics in its highhandedness is unmatched in Indiana's often raffish dealings with Congress...

...In early March Judge June L. Green dismissed the lawsuit because the court "cannot interject itself into a matter which is within the primary dominion of the House of Representatives to judge the election of its members...

...What accounts for this outlandish behavior is an intriguing puzzlement...

...Kimball International (office systems, keyboard instruments, furniture) in French Lick...

...Or so they supposed...

...So much for state law...

...and Whirlpool and Mead-Johnson Pharmaceuticals in Evansville...

...Mclntyre, the members of the body- hewing to party lines, of course-voted to seat neither claimant...

...But, as they say back East, it all remains to be seen...

...Unlike the rest of Indiana-which has a higher percentage of land in tillage than any other state-the 15 southwestern Indiana counties are only marginally agricultural...

...District Court in Washington against Speaker O'Neill, 221 Democratic congressmen, and the officials of the House, asking that their actions be declared "null and void on the grounds that they violate the rights of free speech and association and due process...

...In short order, all 15 counties in the district reopened the sealed boxes, machines, and envelopes, and court-appointed special commissioners tallied the returns all over again...

...Halting in speech but wry of humor, McCloskey has a whiff of the overage seminarian about him...

...McCloskey seemed to have the slightest of edges two days after the election, the Indiana secretary of state Edwin Simcox, a Republican of serious mien, declined to certify him as the winner, preferring to wait until after a partial recount...

...This may be one of those occasions when a man must rise above his principles...

...On March 4 when the House was supposed to nod through a "pro forma" session, Minority Leader Robert Michel of Illinois, usually an ingenuous fellow, surprised a skeleton garrison of Democrats by introducing a resolution on a privileged motion that would have seated Mclntyre forthwith...

...Only in passing did that have to do with the weather, which was ferociously arctic enough to make the hardiest Hoosier hunker down indoors and stay put...

...That piece of work is an example of fiscal conservatism and prudent planning...

...Of course, the prize exhibit is still the boy who in 1816 settled with his family on Little Pigeon Creek near Gen-tryville in Spencer County and left 14 years later when he was 21 for the richer land and better chances of Illinois...

...For Hoosiers who thought they'd seen everything there was to see in politics, it is, indeed, a revelation...

...Scattered round and about are such arresting places as French Lick and West Baden, spas once frequented by statesmen and gangsters athirst for Pluto water, though now more celebrated as Larry Bird's hometown...

...For one thing, there is no appealing to a single economic interest that unifies the entire district...

...All told, more than 5,000 votes were disqualified, almost 96 percent of which came in the nine counties in which the recounts were in the hands of Democrats...

...Which, when it comes to pigeon-holing, puts him in with the neoliberal problem-solving technocrats...

...His coolness is apparent in his speech, public and private alike: deliberate but not stilted, well-phrased but not packaged...

...One of them, Ron Mazzoli of Louisville, Kentucky, made a telling defection, because his influence is said to be on the rise among his colleagues...

...In Congress McCloskey has worked out a nifty balancing act, managing to play off the interests of small business, big business, agriculture, mining, education, environmentalism, economic development, and everything else in between against one another...

...It is also the source of the Patoka River croup, which is said to cause chronic twanginess...

...Or they declined to throw out such ballots, depending on whether they thought they could determine the voter's intention...

...In eastern Greene County at Solsberry, Cotton Yoho holds court at his general store and keeps the Republican flame while his son, Lavon, the current GOP county chairman, tends to business at the state highway garage over at Bloomfield...

...On the Wabash River, which bounds the district along its western length, is Vincennes, former capital of the old Indiana Territory, whence William Henry Harrison marched off to glory...

...Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Assemblies of God, Pilgrim Holiness, and exotic growths of Primitive Baptists are the more numerous sects, although the mainline denominations set the tone of the small towns...

...Neither is digging for ginseng roots, which are supposed to possess curative and aphrodisiacal powers...

...The lay of the land is mainly at fault, because except for river bottoms it pitches and rolls and juts up too abruptly to let a plow cut a straight, level furrow...

...Out of the fray came Richard Mclntyre, Bedford attorney in practice with his wife, sixth-generation Hoosier, family businessman, clean-cut and presentable to a fault...

...For Republicans and fair-minded Democrats, the Eighth District affair is not to be treated as merely another procedural matter to be disposed of routinely...

...Plucky folks who hanker for Indiana comestibles search the woodlands for persimmons, pawpaws, wild mushrooms, and morels, but it isn't big business...

...That was all he could swear for the time being, because when Rep...

...His bearing is self-possessed, his manner friendly but not heartily familiar...

...Meinrad on red alert...

...That is, according to the arbitrary will of the Democratic majority, regardless of all other considerations...

...Despite fears that he would usher into city hall a rabble of radicals a la Berkeley, Madison, or Boulder, McCloskey became ever more pragmatic, accommodating, and engagingly approachable, much to the disbelief of almost anyone with a bank account...

...So does the strip mining industry-or, as corporate spokesmen prefer to say, "surface mining"-which maintains a durable presence in the western part of the district...

...and Richardson Dilworth had emerged in the unlikeliest of places...

...Monroe and Lawrence counties continue to be major sites for limestone quarrying-there's probably more of this part of Indiana, or at least its underpinnings, now in Washington, New York, and Chicago than is left in situ-but the industry is hardly what it used to be...

...Despite the rumors, Ken-tuckians had nothing to do with the accident...

...Such an outcome, McCloskey claimed, bore all the sinister marks of a GOP conspiracy, and he swore to seek redress in the House of Representatives...

...The day after the election, McCloskey had the lead by 72 votes, but as soon as Gibson County votes were straightened out (one precinct had been counted twice), Mclntyre had surged ahead by 34 votes...

...However, five Democrats discerned a matter of higher principle and cast their lots with the Republicans...

...Nowadays, however, no one seems to get riled up anymore over the Papist Menace, which was the Hoo-siers' keenest prejudice in the late 'teens and twenties when the Klan was last seriously able to work its mischief...

...And to be believed...

...There are still a few Quaker meetings, long-settled Amish and Mennonite communities, a couple of Unitarian discussion groups, and enough snake-handling brethren of dauntless agility to ward off conventionality...

...Even so, serenity and grace do not enfold him, for his temper simmers and his tongue has a keen edge...

...Four days later on February 11, Mclntyre filed suit in the U.S...

...The Democratic incumbent, Francis X. McCloskey, a 45-year-old former mayor of Bloomington, fought his Republican challenger, 28-year-old Richard D. Mclntyre, a Bedford lawyer, to a draw...

...According to Pearson, like Orr, a Republican, "Our suit is based on the abridgment of Indiana's constitutionally guaranteed rights to due representation in the Congress and to conduct elections in the state...

...Sprawling across the northern third of Martin County is Crane Naval Ammunition Depot, one of the Defense Department's larger installations...

...Like the district itself, that combines about the right amounts of orneriness and hoss sense...

...Maybe the best proposal to date, one that bespeaks the old Hoosier spirit, is that the citizens of the Eighth District should withhold their taxes for every day they go unrepresented in Congress...

...Michael J. Fallahay (the Libertarian party candidate, and Gaelic to boot), 691...

...McCloskey, 113,860...

...Ungainly of gait and gesture, gawky and slouching, McCloskey deflects any hint of slickness or polish by appearing inventively ordinary-which may, all in all, be his settled strength, especially in the hinterlands of southwestern Indiana, where commonness is a mark of superiority...

...On the whole, the McCloskey-Mclntyre contest-barely Celtic in style, even at several removes-turned Kent Owen is a writer living in Bloomington, Indiana...

...The predicament is irksome...

...Vommentators in distant places have taken to calling the 15-county district "The Bloody Eighth...

...This monument to man's dream of perfectibility bears the distinction of having been created by socialists, but revived and sustained by capitalists, thanks to Jane Blaffer Owen's Humble Oil fortune...

...Hence for all the comic aspects of the controversy, there is a question of serious import: Can the Democrats frustrate the half-million people of Indiana's Eighth District and the authority of the whole state...

...surgical appliances) in Bloomington...

...Carpenter school buses at Mitchell...

...By the start of his third term, McCloskey was in good shape to try to unseat Joel Deckard, the Eighth District's Republican congressman from Posey County...

...For sheer quirkiness the Eighth District is hard to beat, but not to be beaten in...

...When his majoritarian colleagues gave no sign of yielding, Thomas took his leave from the force: "On any point of substance, I'm going to lose 2 to 1...

...While McCloskey often gives the impression of a man looking for the nearest fire exit, Mclntyre holds his own with assurance...

...Labor unions make their demands known, but lack the clout of the UAW in Kokomo, Anderson, or Indianapolis...

...Jim Wright, the Democratic majority leader, objected to the seating of the certified Mr...

...As George Ade once put it, "A lot of good men come from Indiana, and the better they are, the faster they come...

...What really vexed the half-million residents of Indiana's Eighth Congressional District was that there was no one to represent them in Washington City, although they had certainly tried to elect a congressman back in November...

...Probably the biggest cash crop that isn't marketed in the usual ways is marijuana, grown in outlying, tucked-away patches...

...Throughout the lengthening tug-of-war Mclntyre has proved himself an exemplar of civility...

...Hence no one was sworn in for the Eighth District of Indiana, leaving its citizens unrepresented and its routine business in the nonpartisan care of the Clerk of the House...

...Indiana boasts that it destroys more of the stuff than any other state...

...Taking to small-town politics as to a Philadelphia Mummers' parade (which it often resembles), the mayoral outlander introduced to Bloomington government a level of professional efficiency and effectiveness previously regarded as unnatural...

...Q.E.D...

...They are no longer going to let Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright, and their liegemen work their will without a pitched battle...

...The Eighth sits atop too damned many fault lines, any one of which can split apart at any time...