North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

By Wesley R. Bishop

Booth Tarkington would still recognize his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, which he described in The Turmoil as “a midland city in the heart of fair open country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily in the fog of its own smoke.” Although the city has undergone significant changes since he grew up there more than a century before, the spirit of the city, a spirit he often strove to capture in prose, is still very present. The Turmoil, first published in 1915, is not Tarkington’s most well-known work, but it makes a strong case to be the novel that best understands the sprawl of Indianapolis. Even in the twenty-first century, the city feels less like a compact entity and more a conglomeration of different parts haphazardly tied together by long avenues that serve as borders for racial, geographic, and socioeconomic divisions.

Often these expansive streets — 38th Street, Keystone Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, Meridian Street — feel less like connections within the city and more like corridors racing somewhere else, kicking up smog from endless exhaust. Again, Tarkington’s words feel familiar:

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: ‘Wealth! I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean — but I will get Wealth!’ . . . And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.

I read The Turmoil this past year, a year of considerable unrest. COVID, the George Floyd protests, and the fallout from the final year of Trump’s presidency swirled together, clogging the air, suffocating all in its path. It felt like monumental, terrifying, history was being recorded on an hourly basis.

Yet the thing that most stood out to me as I read Tarkington from my apartment in Indianapolis was the almost audible cries of the American nation’s demands for continued growth. Not just businesspeople, but school administrators and customers and politicians, all demanding quick reopenings, defying mask mandates, and adding another level of grime to an already perilous situation. These calls for “wealth” — much like we see in The Turmoil — happened while we all could see the impacts of COVID. Air quality, smog or virus laced, be damned. Things needed to be open. To stop economic activity — shopping, working, selling — was to die even if going forward meant actual death.

Tarkington’s acknowledgement of social issues often earned him notice from contemporary readers and some critics. The Turmoil was followed by two other novels — The Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander — that dealt with the issue of America’s transition into a new industrial age. These novels all take place in a fictionalized Indianapolis, and ultimately, The Turmoil’s major characters conclude that despite the hurried rush of growth and development, the United States could (and probably would) continue to move forward culturally. Today it reads as incredibly optimistic, but as I drive through the city over a hundred years later, I think Tarkington was essentially correct. It is not an admission I expected to make.

Indianapolis and the United States have been violently remade in the process of industrialization, and as Tarkington saw the rise of the industrial belt, residents of the Midwest’s rust belt are watching the tail end of that process. From rise to fall, to remaking again, again, again. Yet despite that, we still make art, we still think, we still strive for beauty and dignity.

As Tarkington notes, though, this is not a smooth process. The social classes that Tarkington discusses are still very much present in the city. The Indianapolis police department, a frequent subject of protests and calls for change, patrols the vast spread of the city. Even more sprawling than in Tarkington’s lifetime, Indianapolis often feels like a city held together by nothing more than geography.

At the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, marchers crossed 38th Street, a de facto border within the city that separates the city’s working class from its wealthiest residents. Marchers transgressed that border, going so far as to stand outside the governor’s mansion on North Meridian Street. I remember that night as my phone dinged with messages from friends and colleagues. Many in the city understood that a reckoning may be about to begin, where the wealthy and sheltered were being forced to see the cost of this inequality. Yet the protesters after chanting turned away from the mansion and began the long trek back to the center of Indianapolis.

What lies in store for us, the subjects of a tumultuous age? It’s impossible to say. Yet, like Tarkington’s novel, I remain largely optimistic that despite whatever dirt- or pandemic-congested state waits for us we will have (and must have) our ability to create meaningful representations of our lives — that, after all, is culture. We must do it, even as the giants pant violently for wealth.

Wesley R. Bishop is a historian, poet, and editor living in northern Indianapolis. He is an assistant professor of American history at Marian University Indianapolis and is the founding and managing editor of The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship.

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