Stella Courtright Stimson was sitting in the gallery of the Indiana State Senate in February 1913, watching legislators haggle over a housing reform bill, when she was handed a note. A man was waiting outside looking to speak to her, alone.
Stimson—a 50-year-old churchgoing mother of four with an oval face, high cheekbones, a strong brow and graying black hair—was a familiar sight in the chambers. She was known as a “clubwoman,” an irrepressible joiner of the organizations that presented college-educated women with their primary entry into civil society. She had started with clubs devoted to appreciation of European art and literature, but she became deeply involved with the Indiana Federation of Clubs, which served as a hub for political activity among Indiana women demanding the vote. While they lobbied for suffrage, they found ways to convey their policy preferences to state lawmakers.
For a week at a time, Stimson would decamp from her home in Terre Haute to Indianapolis, where she had a seat on the federation’s Legislative Committee. Now, Stimson strode to the balcony to find a baby-faced man a few years younger than she, a figure who represented everything she detested about the city she called home.
Donn Roberts had started his career at the age of 21 as Terre Haute’s city engineer. A year later, the Democrats who had appointed Roberts were drummed out of City Hall, and Roberts sought work at a private construction company. Political shifts left him struggling to keep government contracts, and he reinvented himself as someone who could deliver votes to favored candidates for any office, regardless of party. He would spend much of Election Day in the Sixth Ward, home to Terre Haute’s red-light district, accompanied by a pack of men who illegally cast ballots at each polling station. When questioned, Roberts insisted that they were his “construction crew.”
After a falling-out with a mayor he had helped elect, Roberts decided to seek the office himself, running as a Democrat. He had already established connections with people who had been neglected by both Democrats and Republicans, and now he promised to champion them—coal miners who packed into Little Italy homes, Syrian immigrants who opened small groceries, laborers who gathered at the Hungarian Workingmen’s Sick and Death Benevolent Society.
He was reaching out to Stimson because of her stature and her influence in Terre Haute. In 1909, she had won a school board seat even though she could not mark a ballot for herself. “I want the support of you women,” Roberts told Stimson, according to her later recollection, “and if elected I will be the best mayor the city ever had.”
Stimson recoiled. Like many cities of the time, Terre Haute had a red-light district filled with illegal activity such as prostitution and gambling. Local politicians often looked the other way as long as the brewers, distillers and barkeeps helped them gain and maintain political power. Stimson saw all this, and it enraged her. In a recruitment appeal for the Terre Haute Civic League, she wrote, “Politics decide whether or not every boy can have every temptation in his very face.” Stimson believed the parallel crusades for temperance and women’s suffrage would remove power from the saloons and restore it to the family home. And she viewed Roberts as a pawn of this saloon culture, which was making Terre Haute “the hellhole of Indiana,” as one East Coast newspaper described it. Roberts had pledged that, as mayor, his administration would ensure a “wide-open city”—in other words, one in which government did little to regulate business or personal conduct.
Stimson told Roberts why she was wary of seeing him in City Hall. “Terre Haute women want good schools, good courts and streets free from gamblers, wicked women and drunken men,” she said. Then she asked Roberts if he would enforce laws already on the books to curtail public drunkenness, betting and prostitution.
“Not as you church women but as most of Terre Haute’s citizens think they should be enforced,” he answered. “A majority of Terre Haute citizens do not want law enforcement. They want the all-night and Sunday saloon, the segregated district and gambling.” (Americans of the time commonly referred to red-light districts as “segregated.”)
Then Stimson, aware of Roberts’ reputation for ballot-box stuffing, wondered aloud whether “there might possibly be something wrong” with the results of the upcoming election. She’d witnessed Roberts’ illegal methods firsthand during the 1909 election. As she ran for the school board, Roberts was working to elect a crony to City Hall. Hundreds of men, many from out of town, moved throughout the Sixth Ward, overwhelming polling places so that the work of Republican and independent inspectors would be useless. As observers tried to challenge the legitimacy of the marauding voters, others just sneaked under the ropes. When a Republican supporter implored officers to block Roberts’ out-of-towners, he was beaten by a mob of 150 men.
Sensing that Stimson was onto him, Roberts changed his approach. “I’m going to be mayor of Terre Haute, and you women might as well support me,” he said.
That bluster sent Stimson home from Indianapolis determined to stop him. What she did next would launch the most comprehensive takedown of a plot to subvert the vote in the nation’s history—setting a precedent for clean elections that still prevails today.
As Stimson delved into Terre Haute’s charter, looking for a way to stop Roberts, she kept hitting dead ends. Every legal mechanism for maintaining election integrity excluded women. Only a registered voter—which is to say, only a man—could serve as an inspector, clerk or judge of elections, or be present at the counting of votes. If women wanted to help clean up Terre Haute’s politics, they would have to do it from outside the system rather than from within.
In the absence of legal power, Stimson hoped shame would do. She came up with a plan: On the Democratic primary day in March 1913, women volunteers would stand watch outside the polling places and keep a lookout for suspicious or fraudulent activity. Sixty women volunteered to participate. To Stimson’s surprise, most of them were not known suffragists but “merely quiet church women,” as she would later put it. She scheduled them to go out in pairs to priority precincts in the Sixth Ward, rotating in four-hour shifts to cover the entire voting period.
It was the first time many of the women observed voting in action, and some were shocked by the blatant bribery. “I did hear them say that they would not pay $3 for a vote and that $2 was their limit,” marveled Mayme Bisbee, a 49-year-old wife of a tailor and musician. The women’s presence did little to curtail such transgressions. Roberts won the primary, receiving more votes than his four opponents combined.
In October 1913, weeks before the November general election, the city released updated electoral rolls showing 16,000 new registrants—an implausible number equal to more than three-quarters of the city’s entire eligible voting population. Stimson and a small group of women spent a week in the city clerk’s office, manually copying the names and addresses. Others took the lists and canvassed the precincts to hunt down the locations that applicants had listed as residences. Many were stores, schools, vacant lots or homes where the sole inhabitants were female. More than 2,700 of the registrations were fraudulent.
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This article is a selection from the September/October 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine
Because only a registered voter could challenge the eligibility of the voting rolls, Stimson had no recourse to disqualify the fraudulent registrations. Still, she and her group hoped they could apply pressure by observing the voting and catching men in the act of using those fraudulent names. Learning from the primary, Stimson outlined a more proactive approach for Vigo County’s Election Day. She supplied more than 450 volunteers with pencils and notebooks, and produced a one-page election-law summary and a tally sheet for each precinct. She also sent instructions for women to come to the polls with cameras—which had only recently become widely available to consumers—so they could document transgressions. When Roberts won the election, Stimson sent a telegram to the governor, informing him of the cheating. The governor responded that she should take up her concerns with the sheriff. Stimson knew that local law enforcement couldn’t be trusted to enforce election laws, because their careers depended on the favor of the politicians they were supposed to police.
Roberts made this clear when he named a public-safety cabinet of individuals who had been his loyal political associates. He also told the police superintendent to fire two police officers, Michael Hagerty and Patrick Haley, who happened to patrol the streets where allies of Roberts operated their saloons. But Hagerty and Haley refused to turn in their badges. They took their complaint to court, alleging that they were being illegally driven from the force. Upon hearing the claims, the judge, Charles Fortune, appointed a special prosecutor to investigate. His name was Joseph Roach Jr., and less than three years earlier, the judge had helped free him from a life sentence for murder.
The wayward son of a former city councilman, Roach had spent his teenage years as a regular at the city’s gambling tables, where he learned to swindle cash by cheating at cards. At the age of 21, he was prescribed morphine to relieve pain from a chronic bladder problem, and he became hooked. One night in 1905, Roach shot a fellow gambler he believed had stolen from him, earning a life sentence for second-degree murder.
Behind bars, Roach began studying the law, which his well-connected parents used to lobby for his freedom, persuading Judge Fortune to write a letter to the governor on their son’s behalf. Roach was pardoned, and he returned to Terre Haute, where he was soon married and expecting his first child. Roach succeeded in avoiding gambling and drinking, but he couldn’t shake off the saloons in his capacity as an attorney. As he mined his Terre Haute networks for clients, he fell into an easy alliance with Roberts, the saloonkeepers’ favorite mayoral candidate. After Roberts’ victory, rumors circulated that Roach would be appointed city attorney.
The baby arrived just after Roach learned he would not get a job in the Roberts administration, and the two events changed his outlook. “I realized when I saw that boy that he would come up in the polluted political atmosphere of which I was a product,” he later said. “Then I resolved for the sake of that boy and for the sake of hundreds of other boys that I would undertake to clean up Terre Haute.” Roach seized the opportunity to serve as special prosecutor in the patrolmen’s case, declaring that he would also investigate the previous two years’ worth of Vigo County elections. “Roach has served formal notice on Mayor Donn M. Roberts,” reported the Indianapolis Star, “that the city of Terre Haute is not large enough to hold himself and Roberts.”
On January 12, 1914, Judge Fortune formally impaneled a grand jury, which would meet in secret over the coming months. Roach got to work chasing the leads from Stimson’s group. He seized a wagon’s worth of cast ballots and tally sheets, and sent deputy sheriffs around town with summonses and subpoenas, interviewing scores of witnesses who testified about their own involvement—and placed Roberts at the center of the plot.
The conspiracy, Roach learned, operated out of a Queen Anne mansion on Ohio Street, with a large, hand-lettered red sign above its porch reading “DEMOCRATIC HEADQUARTERS.” At trial, Roach would call this building “The House of a Thousand Crimes.” Witnesses would testify that Roberts administered his plans from a room on the second floor. On the wall was a map of Terre Haute, where Roberts set goals for each precinct of how many new “voters” he needed to see added to the rolls before the registration deadline a month ahead of Election Day. Using an Indianapolis city directory and a pile of blank voter registration cards, his operatives jotted down out-of-towners’ names and matched them to local addresses, or to saloons, brothels, abandoned buildings or empty lots that no one called home.
Cars of young men, including some below the legal voting age of 21, idled in the unpaved alley behind the building waiting to be handed a stack of cards. Then they headed off on a tour of precinct registration boards, each man submitting a registration card under a false name, before they all drove to the next precinct. This usually proceeded without problem, although at one church serving as a precinct a Roberts operative was told to “beat it” when the address on his form happened to belong to the registration clerk’s home.
In some precincts, Roberts had ensured that the ballot boxes arrived pre-stuffed. In others, he relied on 35,000 sample ballots printed on the same paper stock and color as real ballots. The headline “Sample Ballot” could simply be torn off and the remainder submitted as a vote. On Election Day, the sample ballots were distributed to two types of fraudulent voters. “Repeaters,” who worked alone, came back to the same co-conspiring precinct and cast multiple ballots under different names over the course of the day. “Floaters,” who traveled in packs from precinct to precinct, cast one fraudulent vote at each before moving onto the next.
The grand jury indicted Roberts and four others on charges of creating fraudulent registrations. In February, the defendants began facing open trials, even as the grand jury continued its work in secret. When Roberts’ trial began at the end of March, Roach used his opening statement to tell a sweeping story about corruption in Terre Haute. “It was in this rotten political atmosphere that Roberts entered the political arena,” Roach said. “He was a man with a mind peculiarly constructed. Equipped with an intelligence acute for employing sinister methods, it made him valuable for putting through rotten deals in politics.”
Roach then began to reconstruct the stolen election in forensic detail. The 2,700 fraudulent registrations produced by Democratic headquarters before the general election, he established for the jury, were twice Roberts’ margin of victory citywide.
At the beginning of April, the grand jury issued still more indictments against Roberts. But just a few weeks later, Judge Fortune suddenly dismissed the grand jury altogether. The newspapers later explained the dramatic reversal: Roberts had arranged for the state’s Democratic Party boss to make Fortune a deal, offering to promote him to state probate commissioner.
On May 7, Roach issued his closing arguments in the Roberts trial. After deliberating less than 30 minutes, the trial jury returned with an acquittal. The news was greeted with a cacophony of fire bells and gunshots that the Spectator compared to a New Year’s celebration. Roberts associates fanned out to saloons, where free beer flowed for days.
Roach was home when he learned what had happened in court. For four days, his infant son had been ill with stomach troubles and fever. As soon as the case went to the jury, Roach headed to the bedside of the child whose birth had motivated him to take the case in the first place.
At 2 a.m., when the Roberts parade was on to the saloons, Thomas Marshall Roach’s minuscule eyelids closed over his blue eyes. He was pronounced dead at the age of 4½ months. A small group of friends, including members of the prosecution team, stood outside the home hoping to keep at bay a marauding mob who had been heard yelling, “On to Roach’s!”
Roach was unharmed, but after that night, he announced that he was resigning as special prosecutor, and he dismissed all the standing indictments against Roberts and various co-conspirators. Yet he continued working the case in private. He had his junior law partner, W.L. Ballard, scour federal codes at a law library for a statute that could compel federal officials to act.
They found it in an untested, five-year-old law that deemed it a federal offense when “two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” The law had its roots in the Enforcement Act of 1870, designed to keep the Ku Klux Klan from interfering with Southern elections. After a political deal put an end to Reconstruction in 1877, the Justice Department stopped enforcing voting rights in the South. But in 1909, Congress overhauled the federal penal code and excavated the 1870 statute, elevating election conspiracy from a misdemeanor punishable by $500-per-vote fine to a potential felony with a ten-year prison sentence.
Roach went to Indianapolis to explain the Terre Haute situation to U.S. District Attorney Frank C. Dailey, who in turn persuaded federal judge Albert B. Anderson that his court had jurisdiction to deal with it. But the lawyers agreed that Roach could not just bring evidence he had presented in a county court before a federal jury. An 1882 Supreme Court case had ruled that the feds could prosecute fraud only when voters also cast ballots for the House of Representatives.
There had been no House races in 1913. But there would be in 1914. That fall, judicial officials would also be on Vigo County ballots, and Mayor Roberts had a lot riding on the contests for prosecuting attorney and sheriff. Anderson and Dailey waited to see what Roberts had planned.
Stella Stimson, too, was looking ahead to November 1914. Describing the aftermath of Roberts’ trial, she wrote, “The night parade of gamblers, drunkards, saloon men and debased women can never be forgotten by the decent citizens who were forced to see and hear it.” She started organizing for the next Election Day, this time with Roach’s guidance. She abandoned the quixotic goal of deterring fraud to focus instead on gathering evidence that could stand up in a court proceeding. Her team continued to monitor new names added to the rolls during the registration period, walking the streets to verify voters’ addresses. Based on their findings, they produced a poll book for every precinct, with dubious registrations marked in red pen to indicate which voters should be challenged. In Precinct A, 60 new voters had been registered to a one-room saloon. Another saloon was supposedly home to 100.
Stimson arrived at the Precinct A polling station at 5:30 a.m., before the polls opened. The regulars dismissed her as part of the Election Day tableau. Jack Hines, a saloonkeeper serving as Roberts’ committeeman, brought out a chair for her and delivered sandwiches at noon, refusing money when she insisted on paying for her lunch.
Stimson documented everything she saw in her flowing cursive script. There were floaters who could not recall the false name under which they were supposed to vote and repeaters who changed their clothes between visits. A one-legged repeater took an expansive approach to his costume over the course of eight visits. On his first visit, he had a peg leg; on the second, a cork leg; on the third, his stumped half-leg was visible; on the fourth, he affixed a metal extension. On other stops he brought a crutch and glasses, respectively, as disguise.
Roberts had enlisted both white and Black men in his scheme. When Stimson pointed out that there were only 18 registered African American voters in the precinct but 300 showing up at the polls, Hines dismissed her with a racist response: “I don’t see how you can tell—all colored folks look alike.” Yet Stimson’s presence appeared to serve as some form of deterrence. “You can’t get by this time,” Hines told a group of would-be repeaters. “The lady says she knows you.”
Throughout the day, Stimson heard reports of mayhem at neighboring polling places. At one, someone beat up the Republican candidate for county prosecutor. At another, a shootout between two election board members sent a deputy sheriff to the hospital. Across the county, there were arbitrary arrests of Republican and Progressive poll watchers. Precinct A was relatively peaceful, although far from a model democracy. Stimson managed to document 70 votes she believed were cast by repeaters. She deterred others “by her forcible argument and appeals to their manhood,” as one newspaper reporter put it after watching her in action. But Republican and Progressive inspectors were successfully barricaded from the polling place. “Because almost every city and county official was in the conspiracy, nothing could be done but get the evidence,” Stimson reflected after. “It was for this, the women stayed.”
As crowds gathered outside newspaper offices, waiting for the results to be projected onto screens, Stimson and her fellow clubwomen gathered to distill their observations and send a telegram to the authorities. This time, there was someone ready to listen. Within days, Dailey appeared before a federal grand jury in Indianapolis, where he presented the women’s evidence of a conspiracy to steal Vigo County’s judicial election.
As Christmas approached, Roberts grew resigned to an eventual showdown with U.S. District Attorney Dailey. The mayor did not seem to think an indictment would hurt him. He had managed to turn his previous acquittal in county court into a galvanizing event for his supporters. Triumphing over the feds could strengthen what many believed would be an inevitable campaign for governor in 1916.
“The old maids and the women who wear the pants are all against me,” Roberts told a reporter in December 1914. “I don’t agree with them. A woman can’t brook opposition. If you don’t agree with them there’s hell to pay.”
On December 24, 1914, U.S. Marshal Mark Storen arrived in Terre Haute with a thick stack of arrest warrants. He headed to the newly opened Deming Hotel—recently described by a visiting film and stage actor as “the most modern hostelry I’ve struck outside of New York”—and prepared to convert it into a jail. Over the course of the afternoon, every arriving train brought more deputy marshals and Indianapolis patrolmen to Storen’s operation. Just past nightfall, Storen summoned his team to the fourth floor, where he had established a command post in a corner room that looked out over the red-light district. Neighboring rooms would be used to handle detainees, while the hotel’s kitchen was placed on call to begin producing meals for the prisoners.
The next morning, as Storen’s deputies fanned out to commence what would almost certainly be the largest election-crime dragnet in American history, Storen placed a phone call to City Hall. While many members of his government were being arrested, the mayor received an invitation to turn himself in. Roberts walked alone the five blocks to the Deming, where he was held in Room 421.
After Roberts’ wife signed over their house to post bail, his patrons pulled together a defense team led by Congressman Augustus Owsley Stanley, a favorite of liquor interests beyond his home state of Kentucky thanks to his aggressive opposition to Prohibition. To ensure he could cover the $15,000 in legal fees, Roberts called a nighttime meeting. He barked orders at his lieutenants—all of whom also faced charges as part of the conspiracy. One was instructed to rustle up money from gamblers, another from the Hungarian and Romanian communities. Roberts himself headed to Washington to shore up his defense. “I can raise more hell in a short time than any other one man down there,” he boasted.
Stanley arranged for a group of prominent Southern Democratic lawmakers to meet Roberts, to make his plight their own. “The Southern congressmen are endeavoring to keep the case out of the United States courts, for if the methods of electing congressmen can be looked into in Indiana why not in Georgia or Louisiana?” observed W.E.B. Du Bois’ magazine the Crisis. “A Kentucky senator will, it is said, defend the accused, and in many ways this extraordinary case will prove to the world how deeply America believes in democracy.”
On March 8, 1915, Judge Anderson gaveled in United States v. Aczel, named for Alexander Aczel, a Hungarian-born saloonkeeper who, despite being known around town as Alex Steele, had the misfortune of immigration documents that placed him first alphabetically among those standing trial. All faced the same four conspiracy counts. (Some were also charged with postal fraud.) Over the three months since Storen’s dragnet, 88 had pleaded guilty, helping both to build the government’s case and to thin the unmanageable number of defendants to 28. “The conspiracy was systematic and careful, strong in nearly every aspect,” Dailey told the jury in his opening statement, “but weak in that it was thoroughly dishonest and required too many actors.”
Many of Terre Haute’s leading clubwomen, who had cracked the conspiracy open, watched Dailey’s fiery introduction. They all happened to be in Indianapolis for a gathering of suffragists from across the Mississippi River Valley and skipped out on their own conference to observe the trial’s opening day.
The following week, Stimson returned to the courtroom as the prosecution’s first female witness, where she read from her meticulous notes from Precinct A, including a list of instances in which repeaters failed to recall their own false names.
On April 6, the jury found every defendant guilty on every count. The following week, Judge Anderson summoned all 116 defendants back for sentencing. It was left to the judge to establish a hierarchy of culpability before assigning individual punishment. “Everybody knows that the guiltiest man is the defendant Roberts,” Anderson told the stuffed courtroom. He sentenced the mayor to six years in federal prison and a $2,000 fine. Within weeks, Roberts had been impeached and removed from the mayor’s office. (He was replaced by a successor so loyal that his son had been named Donn Roberts Gossum.) Roberts was released on parole before his sentence was complete, and he returned to Terre Haute. He never succeeded in becoming governor.
Stanley, meanwhile, appealed the convictions to a federal appeals court. In February 1916, the Seventh Circuit rejected the appeal; Roberts submitted a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices refused to take up the case, but the following year the court cited U.S. v. Aczel in another case that affirmed Congress could claim a role in protecting the right to vote. That precedent helped build the foundation for the Voting Rights Act and for prosecuting election crime.
“Because of the American voters’ growing intelligence and interest in government, elections are cleaner, political ‘bosses’ are not so much in evidence as they were even a few years ago,” Stimson wrote in 1919, shortly before women gained the right to vote. “It is generally conceded that the rapidly increasing woman’s vote will demand ‘good principles, good men, good government.’ Will 20th-century democracies endure? Their women will decide the question.”