CHAPTER 3
George Greenleaf: Community Steward
Father felt a deep commitment to his city, and I believe he left it a bit better than he found it, especially its school system. In his old age he confided his unhappiness with how the city’s leadership had evolved.
“Our city once had a great people, and it no longer has them,” he complained. As he saw it, its business and professional people, its newspaper owners, the board of institutions, were all mediocre. In the heat of one of Father’s political battles, the town’s leading citizen, in money and prestige, tried to buy him off. It may be that I inherited from him my critical view of our institutions generally, large and small, for profit and not-for-profit.
ROBERT K. GREENLEAF
George Washington Greenleaf was, by every account, a remarkable man. He was also Bob Greenleaf’s original template for a servant-leader. A tall, slim gentleman with an angular face and wire rim glasses, he cut a fine figure in turn-of-the-century Terre Haute. Bob described his father as “bright, lean, spare, gentle, soft-spoken.” He followed politics avidly, was involved in his community, worked long hours, and sang baritone in The Rusty Hinge Quartet.
George was descended from people who, to use the words of Hoosier poet Sarah Bolton, “paddled their own canoe.” John and Margaret Feuillevert were French Huguenots (Calvinists) who fled to England in the 16th century, some of the earliest refugees from religious persecution in their home country. In 1634, their son Edmund Greenleaf (“Feuillevert” translates to the English “Greenleaf”) packed up his wife Sarah and their nine children and sailed to America, settling in Newbury, Massachusetts. Their descendents were famous doctors and fighters and not-so-famous merchants and shopkeepers. Edmund and Sarah’s son Stephen (1628–1690), the eighth of nine children, married Elizabeth Coffin, the daughter of Tristram Coffin, who formed the company that purchased Nantucket Island for “20 pounds and two beaver hats.” Stephen and Elizabeth’s oldest son, Captain Stephen Greenleaf, Jr. (1652–1743), became known as “the great Indian fighter” for his brave but injury-ridden service battling Indians and the French. Captain Stephen’s son, Rev. Daniel Greenleaf, (1679–1763), got into trouble with his Congregational Church in Yarmouth when he “talked of worldly matters on the Sabbath.” His great offense occurred after a second Sunday service when he asked for the loan of a horse so he could hurry to Boston and see his oldest son who was near death with smallpox. The patriarchal lineage included another doctor, a shipping merchant and farmer who built the first house, sawmill, and gristmill in the town of Brattleboro, Vermont; an ancestor who died at sea in 1803 while on “a coasting voyage for his health;” and other fine men who led good lives and served their militias when duty called. And so it went through the years.
At least two luminaries sprouted from branches of the Greenleaf family tree. Famed Quaker poet, pamphleteer, abolitionist and suffragist John Greenleaf Whittier (b. 1807) was a descendent of Edmund Greenleaf’s grandson Tistram, who had come to America with his parents at the age of six. Poet T. S. Eliot was two generations closer to Bob’s line than Whittier. Eliot claimed descent from the same “illustrious” Rev. Daniel Greenleaf who not only had quarrels with his church members at Yarmouth but, apparently, also with his wife. At one point she moved twelve of their children to Boston, where she opened an apothecary and grocery so she could earn enough to send several of the children to college.
Samuel Knight Greenleaf established a Midwestern branch of the family when he moved to Ohio in 1832. After his death, his wife Olive, two of her children and their families moved to Paris, Illinois, a small town across the state line from Terre Haute. Olive lived to the age of ninety and was known around Paris as “Grandma Greenleaf,” a pillar of the Baptist Church who took a lively interest in all current events. She was Robert K. Greenleaf’s great-grandmother.
Bob’s grandfather, William Knight Greenleaf, enlisted with the Illinois Volunteers in 1862, was wounded at the battle of Lookout Mountain, and spent the next eighteen months in captivity at the Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where more than 49,000 prisoners died after enduring terrible suffering. He spent his time productively, however, by apprenticing to a Confederate doctor. After the war he moved his family to Terre Haute, where he seems to have had a sort of medical practice.
George Washington Greenleaf, born in 1870, was the youngest of a large working-class Terre Haute family and a lifelong resident until his death in 1950. George had a distaste for war and zealous patriotism, maybe because of his father’s stories about his Civil War experiences. Bob never knew his paternal grandparents, but he reflected all his life on his own father’s life experience:
Father left school and went to work in a [wagon wheel] factory at age 11, after completing only five grades. His father and two older brothers also worked there. A few years later he apprenticed as a machinist and worked at that trade until he was 48. The earliest part of that career was with The Standard Wheel Works in Terre Haute. This company tried to make a manager of Father and dispatched him on two occasions to open branches, one in Brooklyn, New York (where I was conceived), and one in East St. Louis. Both of these attempts failed. I have often wondered whether Father, bright and hard-working as he was, really didn’t have it in him to be a manager. And I have wondered whether I inherited that from him, except that I knew early that I didn’t want to be a manager and resisted efforts to make me one.
When he returned to Terre Haute, George ran a grocery store. Most of his customers were employed by a nearby glass-blowing plant, and George extended them credit during the hot summer months when the plant was closed. One fall, the workers returned to find their plant permanently shut down without notice. That ended the Greenleaf grocery business, but the workers never forgot his kindness. “I recall the old ledgers being up in our attic,” remembered Bob, “and, through the years, one of these old glass blowers would occasionally run up to pay his bill.”
Mr. Greenleaf next worked in a hardware store until he got the job as machinist at Rose Polytechnic’s Practice Shop. Somewhere along the way he acquired an expensive set of mechanical drawing instruments, which may have indicated aspirations to be a draftsman. Bob eventually inherited these instruments, along with his father’s personal machinist’s tools, and passed them along to his own son.
George Greenleaf was active in politics because he saw himself as a community trustee—one who took responsibility for the wider affairs of his city. He started as a precinct committeeman, serving four years on the City Council and eight years on the school board. He was not without personal ambition but consistently put principle above pragmatism, as he proved in his fight against Donn Roberts.
Donn Roberts was elected mayor of Terre Haute in 1912. He quickly gained control of the city’s officialdom: police, judges, prosecutor, and sheriff. Then he made a fatal mistake. He tampered with the federal election in 1913. “Tampered” may be too mild a word. The mayor and his cohorts flat-out hijacked the election, according to the account of one historian:
On Election Day, 1913, gamblers, gunmen, and local “undesirables” were supplied with phony police badges, and drunken bruisers were made election officials. In every precinct ballots were tampered with and each experienced its share of false registrations. Taylorville, on the west bank of the Wabash River, cast more votes than there were men, women, children, cats, and dogs living there!
Dogs were special favorites for Roberts. His minions registered the names of dogs as voters in every precinct, then hired men to visit each precinct and vote under the appropriate canine’s name. One such “worker” bitterly complained because he voted twenty-one times and was paid for only twenty. He received 25 cents per vote.
A local grand jury said the election was “the most appalling condition of lawlessness that could possibly exist in a civilized community,” but Mayor Roberts was acquitted in what was called a farce of a trial. He and his Democratic machine continued to steal money from the city treasury, engage in construction swindles, and control the city’s red light district. Two years later, George Greenleaf—a Republican on the City Council— and a few other like-minded citizens decided to go to the Feds. In March, 1915, one hundred sixteen people were indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States government. Among them were most of the elected power structure of Terre Haute. It was called the biggest election fraud in American history.
During the trial at the U.S. District courtroom in Indianapolis, the manufacturer of the voting machines used during the election claimed they were tamper-proof. On the stand, George Greenleaf, the wizard mechanic and machinist, demonstrated that the voting machines could, in fact, be tampered with. His son recalled the incident seventy-three years later. “[Father] later said to me that he didn’t think they had tampered with the machines. ‘They weren’t smart enough. Besides, they had enough control over the tabulation process (they had bought off some Republicans) that they didn’t need to tamper with the machines.’”
The whole scene reminds one of a line spoken by Abe Martin, a cartoon character drawn and syndicated by humorist Kin Hubbard of The Indianapolis News: “Now an’ then an innocent man is sent t’ th’ legislature.” This time, Terre Haute was lucky that a few innocent men remained to clean up the city.
On April 18, 1915, Vandalia Railroad train number seven stopped a few minutes at Terre Haute’s Union Station. It was transporting Donn Roberts and fourteen of his cohorts to the federal penitentiary in Leaven-worth, Kansas. Fifteen thousand residents, many of them cheering, came to watch their former mayor smile, bow, and wave as the train chugged westward.
Even after the steel door clanged shut on his Kansas cell, Roberts would not resign as mayor. The City Council moved to impeach him. During the debate Roberts’ attorney was asked, “Do you believe that a city of 60,000 inhabitants should be governed by a man who is serving sentence in prison on conviction of a felony?” The attorney replied, “It is not the question at issue. I do not think that this Council should deliberately kick him out of office.” That comment drew huzzahs from many die-hard Roberts supporters.
Unbelievably, Roberts later ran for Governor of Indiana from prison. He was released in 1919, returned to Terre Haute, and almost won another term for Mayor. Then, he dropped out of sight. Young Bob Greenleaf saw him one more time and learned the kind of respect granted his father by his toughest enemy:
I was about 19 and a student at Rose Tech, then a new campus located a couple of miles east of town. I had missed my ride to school late one afternoon and thumbed my way. I was picked up by a workman in his soiled clothes in a battered jalopy. As we jogged along, he asked me my name. When I told him, he said, after a pause, “I’m Donn Roberts.” There was a moment of awkward silence. Then he put his hand on my knee and said, “I want you to know that I have great affection for your father.” Father was deeply moved when I reported this to him. Then he said, “I have often wondered why this rough, tough gang didn’t rub me out, and I concluded it was because I was always friendly with them and respected them as persons. We had heated differences, but we were not enemies.
Several years before Donn Roberts’ trial, George Greenleaf showed his practical compassion after a great tragedy. Around 9:30 p.m. Easter Sunday night, March 24, 1913, a killer tornado hit Terre Haute and leveled a six-block-wide strip across the south side of town, just a few blocks from the Greenleaf home. At 1906 South 9th Street, a house and barn were blown away but a horse was found uninjured in the cellar of the house. The storm wiped out the Root Glass Company, designer and supplier of the original Coca Cola bottle. Twenty-five people eventually died.
Rev. Benson, the Greenleaf family’s pastor at Montrose Methodist Episcopal Church, woke Mr. Greenleaf in the middle of the night and asked him to take over relief efforts at the church. George got dressed, moved into the church for the next few days, and performed admirably. Bob later noted, “That pastor, at that time, would not have rated Father as a pillar of his church. But when he had that kind of problem, he knew where to take it.”
Four days after the tornado, 5,000 Midwesterners had died from the accompanying flood, and few parts of Terre Haute were spared the water or the misery. George took his nine-year-old son along to inspect the damage, a trip Bob remembered vividly:
Terre Haute, as its name implies, is on high ground on the east bank of the Wabash River and well above flooding. There is a bridge across the Wabash River at the foot of Main Street, and a two-mile causeway connects the city to West Terre Haute that is also on high ground. The intervening land was regularly flooded and on this land was a shanty town of squatters called Taylorville. This town was not in the city but was a problem because the squatters were largely indigent people and a source of trouble and expense. After the big flood in 1913, there was a move for the city to buy this land and make a park of it in order to keep the squatters out. One Sunday afternoon shortly after the flood had subsided, Father was one of a committee of three from the City Council who was dispatched to look over this flood land and make a recommendation. I went along.
It was a desolate place. Short rivers ran here and there as a result of the flood. But as we made our way through it, we walked by one shanty that had been propped up again and was occupied. From the open door came the strains of an accordion playing, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” That settled it. The committee returned to recommend that the city neither buy nor try to control this land.
Besides taking his son to City Council meetings, the Rose Poly practice shops, and visits for official business, George made sure Bob was exposed to as much of the real world of work as there was to see in Terre Haute. Bob remembered it all:
During all the years of my childhood, Father devoted many of his Sundays to me. These were the days before so much [plant] security, and we could visit local industries. We made many excursions to the water works, the gas works, the electric generating plant, and the big locomotive repair shops of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Terre Haute was a division point where engines were changed—before diesel), and I have vivid recollections of those places after 70 years.
It was the kind of father-son relationship that was more common in America when the family worked together on the farm, a closeness that tended to disappear after most dads went to work in offices and factories and left their sons at home. Even in Terre Haute during the first twenty years of the century, most fathers probably did not spend as much time with their sons as George Greenleaf did, especially if they had as many responsibilities as this man. Young Bob learned lessons from his father that he would later apply in his own life and pass along to others, especially in his writings on servant leadership. Specifically, Bob described several memorable events where his father demonstrated the power of withdrawal, accessing intuition, and “seeing things whole.” It was a vivid learning experience:
In the era in which I grew up, factories were still powered by stationary steam engines. The driving of individual machines by electric motors was just beginning. Factory power was often distributed to small machines by an elaborate network of overhead shafts, pulleys and belts, and big machines were usually driven by their own individual engines. By this time, Father had acquired the reputation as an expert on the maintenance of these stationary steam engines, and the occasional Sunday venture would be to respond to a call for help with an ailing engine. Two of these visits stand out in my memory.
The first was a paper mill that made heavy brown craft paper. This big long mill produced paper in large wide rolls. The mill was powered by an enormous engine. Its flywheel (as I recall it) was about 15 feet in diameter and the shaft a foot through. The problem with this engine was that when it started or stopped, it vibrated heavily and really shook up the place. Once carrying its load, it ran fine.
I recall Father just standing there looking at the engine and saying “start ‘er up” or “shut ‘er down,” not listening to the chatter of the folks who were trying to tell him all of the analytical approaches they had taken to try to solve this problem. After about five minutes of watching intently as this engine was started and stopped, he asked for a sledge hammer. When this was brought, he crawled in beside this big flywheel and gave a few sharp cracks to the keys that locked the wheel to its shaft. He crawled out and asked them to start ‘er up—and she purred. All that was wrong was that these keys had worked loose so that whenever the engine started or stopped, that big flywheel shifted a little bit on its shaft and really shook up the place.
On another Sunday Father was called to a dairy that had a new steam pump with an engine problem. This pump had a small engine that had come from the factory in a crate and had been connected to the live steam by a local plumber. When the steam was turned on, the engine made no response at all—a curious reaction for a steam engine that would be expected to make some movement, even if it did not work well. I remember Father just standing there and looking at that engine for several minutes and, again, not listening to the chatter of the operators of the dairy. Finally he said, “Unless somebody has invented an engine the likes of which I have never seen, this is the first steam engine I ever saw that had a bigger intake than it had exhaust.” All that was wrong was that they were putting the live steam into the wrong end of the engine.
Seventy years later I wrote an essay acknowledging my debt to E.B. White, the great writer who made the New Yorker magazine. I noted that he had the gift of seeing things whole; moreover, he had alerted me to the importance of that gift at age 25 when it was a most valuable learning. In my tribute to White, I noted that my father also had that gift, but he didn’t have White’s writing expertise to make an idea memorable. But my awareness of that gift in my father when I was quite young, reinforced by White whom I read and reread for 50 years, has been a bastion of strength to me all of my adult life.
In the course of my formal education, I don’t recall ever having heard anything about this essential idea of “seeing things whole.” But then, for the most part, my teachers were not artists. White and my father stand out clearly in my memory as being artists—very different kinds of artists, but true artists, both of them. And together, their models have been powerful influences on my cutting out distractions, and withholding conclusions or actions until a clear insight emerges out of the wholeness.
George Greenleaf used his personal political ambitions as a vehicle for service. In 1916 he made a run for County Clerk of Vigo County, an election that he lost. Bob suspected the effort put him in debt, even though his father never mentioned it. It was a major loss, because the position held more political power and paid more money than George’s previous elected positions. In his later years, George told his son, “If I had won my last big contest for office, that would have put me in the big money, and I would not be here today. I am lucky that I lost.”
George returned to his role as a school board trustee. Then, in the fall of 1918, he accepted an appointment to the office of Inspector of Factories, Buildings, and Workshops for the State of Indiana at a salary of $2,000. On October 14, school board attorney Henry Moore gave an opinion that Greenleaf’s new position disqualified him to remain on the board, because it would violate a state law disallowing any person to hold more than one lucrative office. The newspapers were already speculating about who his replacement might be. They were premature.
George Greenleaf was out of town when the move was made against him. He returned two days later and vowed to fight for his job. Indiana’s Attorney General issued an opinion in Greenleaf’s favor, but the local folks didn’t seem to think this mattered. The board insisted that the fact that Attorney General Stansbury even gave an opinion upheld their view that he was a state employee (Greenleaf was actually an appointee) and was no longer a member of the school board.
One can understand their nonchalance. By law, the Terre Haute School Board was limited to five members. Mr. Greenleaf, who had been elected to the board by the largest majority in history, often questioned the board’s leaders and voted against them. In response, the majority “machine” on the board allowed a trustee whose term had expired to remain on the board—as chairman!—and then seated an additional unelected person as a voting trustee. As a result, two “members” of the board were unelected and illegally empowered. No matter. This was Terre Haute.
On October 18, Greenleaf went to court and got a temporary restraining order to prevent the board from unseating him. In response, the board held a secret meeting and ousted Greenleaf anyway, appointing one of their buddies as his successor. Judge John Cox held board members in contempt. The case dragged on for weeks, while school board attorneys sought and were granted four postponements. The judge’s final judgment was to hold board members in contempt, scold them, and instruct them to go home and “straighten out this mess.” It was a lenient sentence by any standard.
The board was still not impressed. A week later, they had done nothing. Finally, on February 12, four months after the brouhaha began, Judge Cox ordered Greenleaf reinstated as trustee. Board members received no punishment for their actions.
Through all this, George Greenleaf continued to attend every board meeting. He was not recognized by the Chair, but he spoke anyway, an early version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a common man speaking and acting with dignity in the face of corrupt officials who had violated his profound notions of fairness and decency.
George traveled in his state position. He had an office in the Indiana Capitol building and kept a room in Indianapolis. He came home on weekends, but Bob often visited him in the big city. George kept this job for two years. Bob later wrote about his father’s tenure:
I recall that near the end of his tenure, he observed that his greatest difficulty in enforcing the building code (exits, fire escapes, etc.) was with churches and church-related institutions. It seemed to him that because their purposes were noble (as they saw it), the laws did not apply to them. Some of his long-held negative ideas about churches may have been showing. When he resigned, he saw Governor Goodrich and thanked him for not interfering with him in the enforcement of these laws. The Governor replied, “It was not because I wasn’t asked.”
After two years as a state inspector, Father resigned in order to accept the position of Superintendent of the Practice Shops at Rose Tech where he had worked as a machinist for so many years. A faculty title went with this: “Assistant Professor of Shop Management.” The supervision of buildings and grounds was also his responsibility. He kept this position until he retired at age 77, in 1947. I am sure that he would never have gotten that appointment had he remained as a machinist in those shops. His political effort ultimately paid off in personal terms.”
George Greenleaf continued to be an inspiration to his son until his death at age eighty. Even though Bob seldom traveled back to Terre Haute, he continued corresponding with his father and often reflected on his father’s life, especially after he and Esther moved into a retirement home.
Few old people I have known—and I live among a lot of them— could match the peace and serenity of Father’s last years. I believe he looked back on his life with satisfaction of a life well lived and obligations (including care of Mother and family) well met. I have thought much about those final three years—from retirement at age 77 to his death at age 80—as I have moved into my own old age. But the immediate cost of that last big political loss (in 1916), as I see it now in perspective, was high. I suspect that during his two years of illness after that loss, he accepted the reality that he was not going to make it into the big time. But when he worked it out, as he clearly came to see it, he was better off than if he had succeeded in his last big try. I judge his life, in total, as one of profound success…
Just a few days ago, my wife and I recalled our first meeting with him after we were married. We were married in September of 1931 and visited him that Christmas. During our conversation with him, only one short sentence came through, “In the course of your relationship I urge you both to keep sweet.”
In the course of his life, whether dealing with the man he put in the penitentiary or with his erring wife, he kept sweet. There were probably other instances in which his ability to keep sweet made a difference. Somehow, during his life, he may have had other mottos to follow—but I suspect that this one characteristic of his, probably acquired early in his life, seemed to him wholly sufficient for leading a good life. And it was something the two of us would remember after 56 years—right to the very end.
The last essay Robert Greenleaf wrote before his death was My Life With Father, a tribute to the man who embodied so much wisdom, courage, responsibility, and calm during his lifetime. In it, Bob acknowledged the grounding afforded him by a father who served his community and cared for his son:
Father lived by an ethic that prompted him to work to leave the world better than he found it. He knew there were forces that were constantly working to tear it down. They could not be checked by preachment alone. Only people, individual people, who exerted constructive influences within life situations (like his labor union and political party) could offset the destructive influences and help shape a better future. He did not share Eugene Debs’s revolutionary ideas, although he respected Debs as a person. In fact, he respected all persons.
As I enter my 84th year, I now see my life with my father as the years of my formation. These years are the rock on which I stand as I sum up my life… In my last talk with Father in the hospital a few days before he died, I sat holding his hand and there was a boom of a salute somewhere. Father heard the noise and asked, “What was that?” I said, “This is Veteran’s Day and that was a salute somewhere.” Father replied after a pause, “I don’t like war.” This was about the last thing he said to me.