Look to the rock from which you are hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug.
—Isaiah 51:1
The real Animal House fraternity (not the one in the movie) was at Dartmouth College, where it occupied a sturdy redbrick building with a gray slate gambrel roof and five gable windows. Practically bombproof, the building could withstand everything that the frequently drunk young men of Alpha Delta could do to it. In 1959, the year depicted in the film, frat brother Chris Miller witnessed the apex of the Animal House depravity, much of which found its way into his script for the 1978 film, which inspired imitation at colleges and universities nationwide. Young men and women wrapped themselves in bedsheets for drunken “toga” parties. Food fights became staples of campus life. And across America, the sex anthem “Louie Louie” was bellowed in basements and hallways and from open windows.
Phi Gamma Delta, at Hanover College, was no exception to the Animal House mania. With the same architecture, right down to the five dormers on the third floor, the fraternity house itself was practically a replica of Alpha Delta at Dartmouth. And with a squint, the brothers, among them binge drinkers and drug users, could be imagined as Bluto, Otter, Flounder, and the rest. The exception was Mike Pence, a square-jawed, blue-eyed young man with dark, curly hair and a brand of reticence rare in a college boy. In the movie, he might have been the fellow known as Charming Guy with Guitar, who sat on the stairs and strummed for a gaggle of coeds until the manic Bluto smashed his six-string to smithereens. Pence really did play the acoustic guitar for the young women at his college, but the similarities end there. Guitar Guy wasn’t an Animal House brother, while Pence was in fact the president of his fraternity when a much recalled moment of truth arrived.
It was evening, and beer flowed from kegs that had been procured with much planning and subterfuge. The Phi Gams were up to some happy mayhem when a nemesis straight out of central casting appeared at the front door. Although the associate dean’s arrival threatened trouble, it also sparked excitement as life came to imitate Animal House art. The brothers scrambled to hide the evidence—mostly booze and plastic cups—in the hope of avoiding shame, discipline, and even expulsion. The straight-and-narrow Pence went to the door. If anyone could persuade the dean that nothing was amiss, it was the chapter president. The guy was contemplating the priesthood and so looked the part of the trustworthy young man that all he had to do was lie a little bit—“Oh, no, that keg party was just a rumor”—for the sake of his brothers.
Poised to become a hero in the annals of Phi Gam, Mike Pence looked into the face of authority and immediately ratted everyone out. The sneaking around, the booze, and the scramble to cover it up—Pence spilled it all. Maybe he thought confession, if not contrition, would absolve them. It did not. Punishment was severe, as school officials basically grounded the whole crew for months. The Animal House of southern Indiana became a kind of sober house, and Pence became, in the eyes of some, a narc. Administrators rewarded him with a job offer, which he accepted along with his diploma. (He worked for the admissions office for about a year.) Decades later, the outcome shaded the way his friend from college, Daniel Murphy, described Pence to writer McKay Coppins. “Somewhere in the midst of all that genuine humility and good feeling, this is a guy who’s got that ambition,” said Murphy. He then added that he wondered if “Mike’s religiosity is a way of justifying that ambition to himself.”1
Many politicians have draped themselves in the flag while carrying a cross, but no modern American office-seeker has deployed faith more fully and successfully than Pence. As Murphy spoke, in 2017, his college friend had risen steadily from Indiana congressman to governor to vice president of the United States. All of this he had accomplished while performing as a middling lawmaker and stumbling so badly as governor that despite his party’s big advantages in registration and money, his reelection was in doubt.
Except for the comically ill-prepared Sarah Palin, who ran and lost with John McCain in 2008, Pence had been the least qualified and least known GOP running mate since Spiro Agnew joined Richard Nixon’s ticket in 1968. More remarkably, his ballot mate, Donald Trump, was widely regarded as temperamentally unqualified. But though Trump and Pence presented consistently opposing personas—the big-city vulgarian and the small-town squire—they were alike in essential ways. Each had identified national constituencies that were too small to win an election but so rabid that they couldn’t be shaken from their commitment. In Pence’s case, the core group almost entirely comprised politically conservative evangelical Christians. Trump appealed to antiestablishment voters—he also called them “uneducated”—who had special disdain for elite politicians and the people who voted for them. Both men devoted so much effort to the construction of a façade that these coverings—presented through the mass media—mattered more than the substance of their ideas or their governing skill. Trump held seemingly random and changeable positions on important issues and had never served in government. And while he offered himself as champion of the working class, his economic policies skewed heavily toward the elite. Pence was a long-serving elected official but so inept as a legislator that he couldn’t even get his colleagues to support a bill he sponsored to outlaw child pornography.2
(Pence’s aides had anticipated criticism of his record in Congress and prepared a written response, never released to the public, but obtained by the authors. It cites his advocacy on behalf of his constituents and the praise he had received over the years, from special-interest organizations including the Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth, and the American Conservative Union. “Mike has advocated tirelessly for Hoosiers who have been victims of natural disasters, including ice storms, floods and drought, to receive federal assistance to help get them back on their feet,” the report noted. It did not describe any successful legislative initiatives.)
In addition to the effort they put into image-building, Trump and Pence, each in his own way, had a remarkable ability to build and maintain a convincing self-image. For Pence, as with Trump, the construction project began in childhood, when he showed a certain natural charm and social skill that would carry him through life. While Trump had pushed and shoved and bullied his way into the public eye by whatever means necessary, including promoting his own sex scandal in the tabloid press, Pence was a well-mannered, conventionally ambitious sort. And where Trump squarely fit the boisterous P. T. Barnum American stereotype, Pence was Sinclair Lewis’s George F. Babbitt grown to enormous proportions—the humble man of the Midwest who commits to the American dream, understands how he is supposed to achieve it, and strives to be satisfied with the pursuit.
* * *
Considered through the unfocused lens of family legend and lore, Mike Pence seems a rough blend of ethnic stereotypes. Unlike Trump, whose surname was originally Drumpf and who falsely claimed to be Swedish, Pence was certain of his roots. The U.S. chapter of his father’s German/Lutheran clan, originally called Bentz, starts with an early eighteenth-century immigrant named Michael, who joined a tide of Germans drawn to the Pennsylvania colony by its liberal acceptance of religious and political refugees. Michael Bentz crossed the Atlantic aboard the British ship Loyal Judith in 1732 and settled in the German community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The first change in the family name came upon his arrival in Philadelphia, where a local official spelled it “Pents.” By the time Michael married another German immigrant, Anna Elizabeth Huber, in May 1738, he was going by “Pence.” Nine months later, Anna and Michael had a son, their only child, who was also named Michael.
As frontier farmers, the first few generations of Pences moved to various towns in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa. Hardship was common. Anna Elizabeth died at age twenty-nine. Another Pence drowned when his horse bolted off a ferry crossing the Ohio River. The vice president’s grandfather, Edward Joseph Pence, became a wealthy stockbroker in Chicago. Their grandfather was “a very hard man,” according to Mike Pence’s brother Gregory, because grandfather Edward had denied his namesake son, the vice president’s father, any help with college tuition. A loan from an aunt helped, but money problems forced Edward Jr. to drop out of law school. He served in the army, fought in the Korean War, and then with his young wife, Mary Jane Cawley, moved to Columbus, Indiana, where he partnered in a business that sold oil products and operated gas stations and convenience stores.
Although the family carried a German surname, the Irish side dominated its identity. Mike Pence would speak often of his Irish heritage, and it was his Irish American grandfather who became most important to him among his extended family. The Pences were Irish American because of the vivacious Mary, who occupied the center of homelife and was the main influence on the children. Distinctly Irish in her wit and sociability, she was popular and admired, and she set the standard for her children to meet.3
* * *
Edward Joseph Pence met the slender, auburn-haired Mary Jane Cawley in a bar in Chicago. A young woman four years younger than her suitor, her own family’s immigrant tale had begun with her father’s dream of a better life, free of the poverty and violence of Ireland. Twenty years old when he decided to emigrate, Richard Michael Cawley, known as Mike, was the third of six children. He had been raised in a small stone cottage planted on a hillside at a country crossroads called Doocastle, about fifteen miles south of what eventually would become the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. His father was a tailor.
Although too young to serve in World War I, Cawley had lived through the violence that began in 1919 with the Irish war for independence. Tubbercurry, the market town closest to Doocastle, was a hotbed of rebellion. Men from the town and surrounding farms joined so-called flying columns, which freed prisoners, burned public buildings, and attacked police. After one battle in which a police inspector was killed, British forces, aided by a civilian militia known as the Black and Tans, went on a rampage and burned several buildings, including a church. Although Ireland won independence with the treaty of 1921, fighting continued as factions vied for control. Cawley joined the Free State army force that battled with former comrades and others who had opposed the treaty.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
* * *
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 Little 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.
* * *
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 populated 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.)
The other Miller, call him the Main Street Miller, had transformed a modestly successful family business, Cummins Engine Company, into an industrial giant with licensing deals and new plants around the world. By the 1960s, the company was selling engines for trucks, ships, farm equipment, and other purposes in more than ninety countries. At the same time, Miller created and quickly expanded the Cummins Foundation, which began to fund local charities, cultural institutions, and scholarships. The foundation supplied low-cost financing for the local school system, bought equipment for the fire department, and most notably brought in world-renowned architects, including I. M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, Robert A. M. Stern, César Pelli, and others. These architects created a showcase of more than three dozen public buildings and houses of worship. This baby boom–era construction that was followed by the end of World War II brought significant development; Columbus’s population more than doubled from about twelve thousand to twenty-six thousand from 1945 and 1970.
Adding public art, like Henry Moore’s huge bronze arch, and parks designed by great landscape architects, Miller arranged Columbus in the way that a boy might arrange the layout of a model train set. When locals wanted more recreation options, he gave them a municipal golf course fashioned by the preeminent designer Robert Trent Jones. When housing grew scarce, he purchased 1,200 acres of farmland, pasture, and woods and created a planned community, including the most expensive new construction in the region, built around three man-made lakes.
In every instance, Miller made sure his efforts provided opportunities for all, regardless of race, religion, or politics. In this sense, he counterbalanced one of Indiana’s other great engines of social action, the John Birch Society of Indianapolis, which was founded in 1958 by two immensely wealthy men, Robert Welch and Fred C. Koch. (Koch’s sons David and Charles would later build the most formidable private political network in the country.) The Birch Society promoted paranoid conspiracy theories, including one that insisted that communists controlled President Eisenhower, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and almost everyone else in government. This was an embarrassment to Miller and Indiana’s other more sober leaders.
As word of Miller’s efforts extended beyond Indiana, journalists, academics, government officials, and politicians came to his Athens on the Prairie to study what he had accomplished. This attention eventually led Esquire, then one of the most influential magazines in the country, to place a photo of Miller on its cover with the headline THIS MAN OUGHT TO BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Inside, a long article illustrated with fifteen photos—Miller on a private jet, Miller at the New York Stock Exchange, and so on—exclaimed that the American cognoscenti, including Mayor John Lindsay of New York City, wished Miller would run for office. “He’s one of the great people of this world,” said Lindsay.
At home in Columbus, Miller’s star turn in a national magazine became a point of pride, and fifty years later, locals still cited the endorsement as evidence that their city had been formed and led by a civic genius. In the twenty-first century, people in Columbus extolled Miller’s early leadership in race relations and recounted how, beginning in the 1950s, Cummins had opened its doors to African American factory workers and actively recruited black executives. By the 1970s, when this effort was well under way, Columbus and the larger Bartholomew County remained among the least integrated places in America. Blacks in the 1970 census represented 513 out of 27,547 people—less than 2 percent of the population. With Miller’s efforts at recruiting blacks at Cummins, the black population of Columbus had tripled forty years later.
Although he was civic-minded and thought that diversity was a public good unto itself, Miller also thought that his efforts were good for business. Cummins benefited from his efforts to make the community more welcoming to outsiders. He readily admitted that his effort to make Columbus a “forward thinking” community helped Cummins hire business, legal, engineering, and manufacturing professionals recruited from around the world. People who came to interview for positions inspected the schools, neighborhoods, and amenities, liked what they discovered, and happily settled in what they imagined to be an ideal place. Miller also profited personally from projects like an upscale housing development called Tipton Lakes, which he built on the outskirts of the city.13
* * *
Thanks to Miller and the ethos he created, Mike Pence grew up in a city dedicated to progress: good education, public art, and architectural masterpieces made possible by J. Irwin Miller. Yet Columbus was a company town, and the days proceeded as they did in countless small midwestern cities. Shift times at Cummins set the pattern for local traffic on workdays, while church services determined the rhythm of life on Sundays. Civic and fraternal organizations, including the Lions Club, Loyal Order of Moose, Knights of Columbus, and Kiwanis, thrived, and the local papers, The Herald and The Republic, were filled with reports on school activities and Little League scores. One of the biggest developments in the city was the construction of a second high school, opened in 1972 to accommodate expanding enrollments. At that moment, a rivalry was established between what were then named Columbus North and Columbus East. Students at East, who were sent to the new school, thought the crosstown kids looked down on them. In a state where basketball games were practically blood feuds, East’s first victory over North was such a big event that more than forty years later, people who had been there still got excited talking about the game.
Mike Pence entered North High School and tried to succeed as an athlete. According to his own estimate, Pence was overweight by fifty pounds but this claim may be a latter-day legend devised to show he had triumphed over adversity. In fact, a review of the publicly available photos casts doubt on this claim. According to his own estimate, he barely made the football team. (His standard, self-deprecating quip about this experience—”I was one grade above the blocking sled”—was something he would start saying in 1988 and keep saying for decades.) Fortunately for Pence, North was a big school with lots of extracurricular activities. He joined the student newspaper as a cartoonist and showed some flair for drawing panels that featured a recurring everyman character named Mortimer who got into the kind of trouble that a good boy like Mike Pence generally avoided. The creation of Mortimer gave Pence a bit of local notoriety. The debate club made him almost famous.
High school debaters like to say their game is football for nerds, which means it is a highly competitive endeavor that requires poise, quick reflexes, and more aggression that a casual observer might imagine. Like that rare high schooler who can throw a football fifty yards, Mike Pence was a natural and already accomplished before he ever enrolled at North. Carefully dressed for each debate—one outfit was a denim leisure suit with a wide collar and an attached belt—he was remarkably composed. In middle school, he did so well in an Optimists’ debate that he advanced to a regional competition. When he reached the high school team, he finished near the top in competitions all over the state.
Each debate experience helped Pence grow more confident in his skill; he discovered which methods worked and grew more knowledgeable about the subjects assigned, which generally revolved around civics—the Constitution was a popular topic—and current events. One of Mike’s favorite resources was an odd little book called Growth and Development of the American Constitution, a self-published volume by a Columbus-born author whose future works would include Apocalypse: The Revelation—A Historical Rendition. Intended as a junior college textbook, Growth and Development of the American Constitution never entered wide circulation, but Mike Pence read it over and over, and it informed his debate presentations.14
Nothing a high schooler might try would be better preparation for a life in politics than the debate club. Pence’s success also brought a measure of local fame for him and his family, as each top finish produced at least a snippet in the newspaper, which often reported he was the “son of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Pence.” By his senior year at North High School, Mike apparently had shed the excess pounds he claimed to have brought with him from middle school and grown his wavy hair out so that it fell over his ears. In a school where the big men on campus were athletes, he was invisible to classmates like Mike Harris, captain of the football team, who would say, “I didn’t really know who he was.” But among the earnest nerds, Pence did stand out. He was so self-confident that he ran for class president and actually won. (Pence began to mention to classmates that he might one day become president of the United States.) His gift for public speaking earned him the emcee’s spot in the annual talent show, and when he won the state championship in public speaking, the Kiwanis Club asked him to give a talk at its weekly meeting. Finally, at the end of his senior year came a trip to Seattle and a national tournament. The Optimists, Kiwanis, Cummins Engine Company, and others contributed to pay for a teacher to accompany him.
With more than five hundred competitors accompanied by teachers and coming from every state, the scene in Seattle resembled a national spelling bee. When a virus attacked, afflicting many of the competitors with fever and other symptoms, the drama of the event increased. Though so sick his coach, Deborah Shoultz, reported he almost collapsed “after every round,” he finished third in one category—impromptu speech—and returned a hometown hero.
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Like most young people, Mike Pence wavered in his ambitions, one moment imagining he might get into politics and the next considering broadcasting. Whatever his choice, he knew he would do well to stay in his father’s good graces. When his older brother Gregory had come home from college and opted to sleep in rather than get up for Sunday mass, Ed Pence suddenly decided to stop helping to pay his son’s tuition. This decision replicated what the elder Pence had experienced himself, when his own strict father refused to support his education. “He was black and white,” Gregory Pence told Jane Mayer. “You were never confused where you stood.”
When it came time for him to apply to colleges, Mike Pence thought about attending Indiana University, but when he sought advice from a local radio host, he was encouraged to consider smaller schools. He wound up at Hanover, a 1,100-student liberal arts school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Founded in 1827 at the time of religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening, the college was initially a seminary and would maintain its conservative Christian culture. Fraternities and sororities dominated campus life, further reinforcing the traditional feel of the place. Pence joined Phi Gamma, became house president in his sophomore year, and made the fateful keg party decision that signaled where he stood when it came to choosing between his frat brothers and the campus authorities.
Already a very well-behaved and religious young man when he arrived at Hanover, Pence became even more serious about his faith. On his weekly walk to and from Catholic services, he talked with a friend about becoming a priest. Then, in the spring of his freshman year, he went on a weekend trip to Wilmore, Kentucky, outside Lexington, where the tiny Asbury Theological Seminary hosted an annual Christian music festival. Named after the Greek symbol for fish, which stands for Jesus’ work as a fisher of men, the Ichthus Festival had begun in 1970 and regularly attracted more than ten thousand attendees. Many were high school students whose parents permitted them to attend what was billed as the Christian Woodstock because, unlike the original festival in upstate New York, Ichthus promised a (mostly) drug-free, sex-free experience.
At Ichthus, Pence heard conservative Christianity’s answer to pop rock and folk music. The bill included Daniel Amos, a band that was moving away from a country-inflected style to a rock-and-roll sound, and Phil Keaggy, who began his career in 1960s mainstream music, where he had real success. After a hiatus, during which he lived in a cultlike Christian commune, he returned to performing but focused on evangelical-themed music. The headliner at Ichthus ’78 was Larry Norman, regarded as the Bob Dylan of Christian music. Like Keaggy, Norman had played secular music and was so successful that he had opened for the likes of the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. When his group, People!, failed to advance after its only hit single, a cover of the Zombies’ song “I Love You,” Norman became a salaried songwriter at Capitol Records, experienced a spiritual conversion, and began walking the streets of Hollywood to discuss his faith with whomever he met. In 1978, Norman was at the top of his career as a Christian artist and would soon play on the lawn of the White House at President Carter’s request.
For a young Catholic who had, no doubt, heard some awful guitar masses growing up in the 1960s, the Christian music at Ichthus would have been a revelation of sorts. Evangelical acts of the time played loud and sang with emotion. Many of the musicians poured the drama and struggle of their lives into their lyrics. Phil Keaggy, for example, spoke openly of taking plenty of drugs before becoming a born-again Christian. Others were radical in a way that resonated with young people who recognized the hypocrisy around them. One of Norman’s most popular songs, “Christmastime,” mocked the commercialism of the modern American holiday. The performances at Ichthus went on for two days and included some traditional gospel groups. Mike Pence was moved by what he saw and heard and would credit his experience in Kentucky with beginning his conversion to evangelicalism.
Pence would eventually say that the concert brought about a “deep realization that what had happened on the cross in some infinitesimal way had happened for me.” He never offered details about the private and personal suffering this comment suggested. However, the transformation he felt at Ichthus led him toward a more outwardly pious life—more in line with the small-town Indiana Protestants he grew up with and less and less like his Catholic grandfather from Chicago. He voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 because he admired Carter’s religious bona fides and considered Ronald Reagan an actor unqualified for the presidency. Soon after Reagan took office, however, Pence underwent a political conversion similar to his religious one. Soon, Reagan was his hero and role model, and Pence embraced the GOP so fully that, like his religious fervor, it became an obvious and powerful part of his identity. The appeal, as Pence would explain it, was more a matter of perspective and style than specific policies. “His broad-shouldered leadership inspired my life,” said Pence.
In Indiana, being a Republican would make Pence’s path to political success much easier; the GOP had won the governor’s office in four straight elections and, save for 1964, dominated the vote for president going all the way back to 1940. Republicans also controlled both houses of the state assembly by big majorities. Inside the party, evangelical Protestant Christians of the sort Pence met at Ichthus were the largest religious group. Their influence was growing with the recent development of political groups like Moral Majority, which turned church congregations into hotbeds of activism. Pence claimed it all as he embraced his new faith, but he hedged his bets by retaining some Catholic identity.
He would call himself a “born-again, evangelical Catholic,” combining two generally exclusive faiths into one that suited him. This was an unusual but not unique choice, as Protestant conservatives were luring Catholics into new so-called megachurches where members could attend lively services and access gyms, schools, adult education classes, and sports leagues. As a self-proclaimed evangelical Catholic, Pence sought to have it all, including a religion that did not require the moral action inherent to Catholicism, while retaining a connection to his roots. By all accounts, his deeply religious Catholic mother was not pleased, but among the believers in his new faith, Pence could count on finding instant and broad acceptance.15
Embarked on a religious journey that would lead him away from the Catholic Church, Pence set aside the idea of the priesthood and focused on the political ambition he harbored while still in high school—he wanted to be president of the United States. The choice was a matter of matching talents to vocation. In 1994 Pence would tell the Indiana Business Journal he believed his best assets were “my gifts: to articulate, to advocate.”16 The logical direction for a former high school debater was law school, but he encountered his first roadblock after graduation—he failed the admissions test for the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Hanover College, where his tattling had aided administrators, came through with a job in the admissions office, which gave him two years to study and then pass the exam on his second try at the Indianapolis school. Once admitted, though, he hated his law school classes. “It was a bad experience,” he later said. On a personal level, though, the move to Indianapolis changed his life. He attended St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, where one day he spotted Karen Sue Batten Whitaker, a pretty young woman who sometimes played the guitar at mass. He fell in love.17
Two years older than Pence, Karen was a second-grade teacher and had been previously married. Ambitious and competitive, she too had competed in speech contests in her high school days, but she had also been an excellent student while he had bumped along with a B average. Whitaker had met her first husband, John Steven Whitaker, at Butler University. They were married at Big Bend National Park in Texas and then returned to Indiana, where he studied medicine. After they were divorced, Dr. Whitaker became a drug company executive responsible, in part, for the development of the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis. He later said the marriage ended because he and Karen grew apart. “We were kids,” he told The Washington Post in 2016. “We probably didn’t know what we were doing.”
After she had dated Mike Pence for almost a year, Karen expected they would one day marry. She bought a small gold cross, had it engraved with the word “Yes,” and placed it in her purse. Determined to propose in a memorable way, he bought a ring and hid it inside a loaf of bread, which he brought on a walk to feed the ducks who floated in a local canal. When the moment arrived, he fished for the ring and asked for her hand. She gave him the cross. The loaf of bread, shellacked to preserve it, became a memento. Their June 1985 wedding was at St. Christopher’s, a Catholic church two blocks from Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Karen had seven attendants. Mike was accompanied by a best man and six groomsmen. The reception party was held at a modest venue called the Midway Motor Lodge, where a Plexiglas dome covered the swimming pool and the restaurant overlooked a small lake.
Newly married, Pence returned to law school and a clerk position at a local firm. The law would be not a career but a step on the road to fulfilling his political ambitions. Karen returned to teaching second graders at Acton Elementary School in southeast Indianapolis. Mike graduated from law school in 1986 and was ready to make his move in politics. Karen was ready to help.