Columbia City: The Vice President's Town
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
Columbia City is a small county seat in Whitley County, northeastern Indiana, and it might have passed through history without much notice, except that it produced a Vice President of the United States whose offhand remark became one of the most quoted lines in American political history.
Thomas Riley Marshall came to Columbia City after graduating from Wabash College in eighteen seventy-three, read law under a local judge, passed the bar, and proceeded to practice here for almost thirty-five years. He was, by his own admission, little known outside of Whitley County when he ran for governor of Indiana in nineteen oh eight. He won, served two successful terms, and then in nineteen twelve, Woodrow Wilson chose him as a running mate largely to balance the ticket with a moderate, amiable Midwesterner.
Marshall served as Wilson's Vice President from nineteen thirteen to nineteen twenty-one. He was known as a wit in an era when Washington was short on them. The famous line came during a long and tedious Senate debate. As a senator droned on about what the country needed, Marshall leaned over to a clerk and murmured, loud enough to be heard: what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar. Newspapers picked it up and ran it everywhere. Cigar manufacturers sent him cases of product. The line has never died.
Marshall's old home in Columbia City, built in eighteen sixty-four, was purchased by the Whitley County Historical Society in nineteen fifty-eight and operates today as a museum. A historical marker on the old Lincoln Highway route commemorates the Vice President who governed Indiana, served through a world war, and watched helplessly as Wilson suffered a stroke, a crisis that forced Marshall to navigate the most delicate constitutional question of the era: when, if ever, should a Vice President step in?
He chose restraint, and Columbia City claims him still.
