The Cathedral Builder: A Biography of J. Irwin Miller

By Charles E. Mitchell Rentschler

The decision to write this first-ever biography of J. Irwin Miller stemmed from learning that his children in 2010 had given his papers to the Indiana
Historical Society, of Indianapolis, IN, with the intent of helping the public become more familiar with this giant 20th century American industrialist.
Known as the Irwin-Sweeney-Miller Collection, the bequest contains 554 boxes of archived, but not digitized, material which took 85 days to sift through
manually, page-by-page, the author motivated by the same rush French farmers must get when their hog finds that occasional truffle. Cited in 45% of our
foot-notes, the ISM collection not surprisingly was the single biggest source of data for this book.


Next in importance were interviews with more than 80 people (five already deceased) across a broad spectrum of Miller’s life — care-giver to Congressman,
pilot to pastor, banker to board member. Most helpful of all was Miller’s son, William I, (Will) Miller, who granted us seven interviews. Additionally, the
author relied upon a handful of books about institutions that fundamentally grounded his life, including Cummins Engine, Yale University and Christian
Theological Seminary.


Nearly forty years living in the Columbus IN area and associating with “the engine company” as, sequentially, employee, supplier and investment analyst
have provided the author with unique insights. As a measure of his conectedness, the author knows (or knew) 34 of the 61 persons interviewed for The Engine
That Could, the company-sponsored history of Cummins, published in 1997.


The author knew Miller personally because their wives were actively involved in running the Columbus branch of the Indianapolis Art Museum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496956095

Charles E. Mitchell Rentschler

Charles E. Mitchell (“Charlie”) Rentschler graduated in 1961 from Princeton University, where he was managing editor of the Daily Princetonian and wrote an honors thesis for the history department on “The Decline of the Protestant Ethic: A Comparison of Working Class Attitudes toward ‘the American Dream’ in the 1880s and 1950s.” He spent six years in the US Marine Corps Reserves, attaining the rank of sergeant, and graduated from the Harvard Business School. Rentschler has been involved with Cummins Engine Co./Cummins Inc. for nearly forty years. Starting in 1976, he worked in manufacturing management for nine years, ran a six-hundred-employee iron foundry business (Cummins being its largest customer) for fourteen years, covered Cummins as a Wall Street investment analyst for twelve years, and spent three years writing this book. He and his wife, Suzie, have lived in the Columbus area for four decades. Rentschler was a director of Hurco Cos. in Indianapolis and Accuride Corp. in Evansville, Indiana.

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© 2014 Charles E. Mitchell Rentschler. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/17/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5610-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5611-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5609-5 (e)

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Contents

Prologue

I      

1 A Long Line of Christians and Capitalists

2 A Foundation in Faith

3 On-the-Job Training

4 All Is Fair in Love and War

II      

5 The Changing of the Guard

6 The Man and His Passions

7 An Icon of Architecture Is Born

8 The Search for Purpose

III      

9 A Leader Emerges

10 Crunch Time for the Engine Company

11 Miller for President?

IV      

12 Stepping Down… But Not Out

13 Miller’s Big Miscalculation

14 The Passion Projects Live On

15 One Last Fight

16 Saying Good-Bye

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

To my wife, Suzie, our three children, their spouses, and our three grandchildren

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Photographed in his 40s, Miller exuded naval bearing from his wartime experience.

Provided by the Indiana Historical Society

Prologue

J. Irwin Miller was a bit of a paradox. He was fiercely competitive both in business and leisure, yet he was loath to fire or demote people who weren’t performing.¹ He was fluent in the dead languages—Latin and Greek—but never bothered learning French, German, or Spanish.² He was a lifelong Republican, nominally, but inclined toward socialism. He rarely told people what to do, preferring to ask them questions until they figured things out for themselves.³ He was a self-proclaimed big-picture guy, yet he could dive deeply into such details as the shrubbery outside a new Cummins facility in Minnesota⁴ or the stationery for North Christian Church.⁵

Yet J. Irwin Miller was a consummate manager of his time. He was able to leverage himself by keeping his office remote from his business and pro bono interests, delegating work to highly intelligent, hardworking aides, minimizing staff meetings, and avoiding customer visits, among other things.⁶

The thoughtful arrangement of his time permitted Miller to do what his religion, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), instructed its members to do—preach the word of God (which he did in 164 speeches he wrote and delivered over his lifetime) and perform good works, mainly, in addition to serving as CEO of Cummins Engine twenty-six years, helping guide the National Council of Churches, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. Yet there was still time to raise his family, take summer and winter vacations, travel to faraway places, and entertain interesting people.

But people who knew Miller well defined him, above all else, as a Christian. His successor as Cummins’s CEO, Henry B. Schacht, described his longtime boss as a deeply religious human being [whose] most simple philosophy is to do unto others as you would have others be responsible to you. He is a deeply philosophical person and well schooled in Christian beliefs, and he practices them every day.⁷

Drawing from a deep wellspring of Christianity on both sides of his family (his two grandfathers were ministers), Miller was always concerned about the other guy—championing the rights and needs of people of color, women, and gays decades before it was expected and accepted, doing what he could for the poor, looking out for the hourlies instead of their supervisors in his factories, the enlisted instead of the officers in the navy, and the downtrodden instead of the well-off in the world in general. Each year, Miller gave 35 percent of his income and 5 percent of Cummins’s profits to charity.

Ed Booth, his assistant for several years in the 1970s, says the most impressive thing about his boss was his deep sense of moral outrage at injustice done to others.⁸ Susan Hanafee, author of Red, Black and Global, recounting the 2001 closure of Cummins’s original plant in Columbus, Indiana, recalls Miller’s reaction: Just make sure you treat the people right.⁹ Carolyn McKin Spicer, who was the housekeeper and cook for the Millers for twenty years toward the end of their lives, said, I’ve never known anyone as kind, as compassionate, and as caring [as Miller].¹⁰

An example of Miller’s selflessness is the story of his interment as personally told to us by John Bean, his since-deceased, longtime pastor. He recalled that Miller wanted to be buried on the grounds of North Christian Church (of which Miller was far and away the biggest benefactor). He wanted the congregation to let him construct a crypt either underneath the church or in the woods, but the congregation wouldn’t go for it. So Miller gently backed off.¹¹ He would be laid to rest in his family plot in Columbus’s City Cemetery under a modest headstone not fifteen yards from Sixteenth Street.

Miller, as a Christian, believed payback for leading an exemplary life on earth was spending eternity in heaven. Six days before his eighty-fifth birthday, addressing a group of architects in Indianapolis, he exhorted them to emulate the cathedral builders of the twelfth century… laying in their lifetime no more than footings and foundations, if this is all they could get done, believing they could look down on their completed church from heaven when they left this life.¹²

Just five years earlier, in the riskiest financial act of his lifetime, Miller had pledged nearly 60 percent of his family’s net worth to rescue Cummins from a hostile takeover and likely liquidation. [Cummins’s] long-term future, he continued, will probably not be fully realized in my lifetime, but I am excited about its possibility and the jobs it will create, whether I am around or not.¹³

I      

1

A Long Line of Christians and Capitalists

In 1909, the year J. Irwin Miller was born, the most imposing building in his hometown of Columbus, Indiana, was its 150-foot-tall ltalianate courthouse.¹ It took up a full city block and would likely be the first object to catch the eye of anyone visiting the seat of Bartholomew County.

However, huge courthouses were common in the state. By 1900, sixty of Indiana’s ninety-two counties had erected new government buildings in a frenzied drive to be the biggest, gaudiest, or most costly.² Columbus’s downtown at the time consisted of just three or four square blocks with a couple dozen stores to serve the surrounding area—predominantly farming, with some light manufacturing.

The soil in Bartholomew County was not nearly as black and fertile as the soil in the northwest part of Indiana, but it still appealed to the Scotch-Irish who’d moved up from Kentucky for its cheap land—the incentive was very good to clear forty to fifty acres.³

The Midwest was on the verge of a boom as Americans put themselves in cars en masse with the arrival of the assembly line for Henry Ford’s Model T. But the citizens of Bartholomew County witnessed industrialization mainly from a distance—the population of Columbus increased by a mere 860 persons in the first two decades in the new century… to fewer than 9,000 residents, making it the 36th largest community in the state,⁴ a mere backwater.

The town did have passenger rail service—not only the steam-powered Pennsylvania but also an electric interurban (the Columbus, Indianapolis & Southern Traction Co.) that, interestingly, paralleled each other forty miles north to Indianapolis and twenty-five mile south to Seymour. Thus, few that there were (usually wealthy) travelers going east (say, New York City) or west (say, Saint Louis) would need to connect either through Indianapolis or Seymour.⁵

As a rule, people in Columbus and in the country got around locally either on foot or horse and buggy—cars were far too expensive and unreliable and stored inside in winter since roads were often impassable. In fact, decades later, Miller recalled that there was a hitching rack around the west side of the courthouse when I was a little boy, and I remember teams of oxen hitched there because [it] was the only way to get to town from Brown County [to the west] during the winter months.⁶

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Columbus’ Italianate courthouse was tallest building in town in 1909, the year Miller was born.

Provided by Rhonda Bolner, Columbus, Indiana

An exception was Columbus’s most prominent citizen and leading banker, and Irwin Miller’s great-grandfather Joseph Ireland Irwin. A year before young Irwin was born, he had purchased a large eight-cylinder Packard car.

At eighty, Joseph Ireland Irwin was retired and widowed, and his success was hard won. He had grown up on a hardscrabble farm north of Columbus, but using profits from a succession of real-estate deals, he had managed to buy a dry goods store, wherein he created a bank (ultimately Irwin Bank). He later teamed up with his only son, William Glanton Irwin (W. G.), in building the Interurban that was such a success that he attracted a buyer for his line, none other than Sam Insull, who paid well for the CI&S in 1912, at just about the time that W. G. was cannily deciding that the automobile was turning Interurban railroads into a poor business.⁷ W. G. turned his attention to Irwin Bank, located kitty-corner across from the courthouse at Third and Washington Streets.

The family came from staunchly egalitarian roots, and in Bartholomew County during the Civil War, this raised a red flag. Bartholomew was Southern in sympathy and never gave Lincoln a plurality of votes in either 1860 or 1864, when he ran for president. Joseph Irwin, however, was known as so strong an opponent of slavery and so determined a proponent of the Union that the local cell of Copperheads marked him for assassination. The attempt was made, but it failed. Much later, Irwin’s mother, Nettie, once asked her grandfather on his deathbed if he was afraid to die. His response was this: Why? No one could have come into this world more helpless than I, nor had a happier life. I’m sure I’ll make out as well in whatever comes next.⁸ Joseph Ireland Irwin even named his first son, Charles Sumner Irwin, after the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, on the Sweeney side, his maternal great-grandfather Guyrn Sweeney, an innkeeper from Kentucky, decided he didn’t want to raise his already large family in a slave state, and so moved them all to Illinois, with no assurance that he could make a living there.

The lead story in Columbus’s newspaper, the Evening Republican, April 19, 1909—five weeks before Miller’s birth—reveals much about Guyrn’s son, Zachary Taylor Sweeney, a retired minister of Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The paper had published a story about a Jewish immigrant from Romania who had come to the United States to start a new life. After earning some money, the immigrant sent for his wife and children—but his youngest son was refused entry into the country because of head lice. When the Ellis Island hospital began to charge the man for his son’s expenses, he simply couldn’t keep up, and the boy was sent back to Romania.

The next day, the Evening Republican reported the following:

This story so enraged Mr. Sweeney that he sent the following letter to President [Taft]:

I am exceedingly anxious to know if anyone in the service of the United States government could be a party to such a transaction. If that little child has been deported because there was no means to pay the hospital expenses, I should like to have you cable for the child’s return and have it placed in the hospital, and I will be personally responsible for its expenses until some humane disposition has been made of it. Senator Hemingway or Senator Beveridge⁹ can advise you whether I am responsible for my promises… Z. T. Sweeney.¹⁰

Five days later, when Sweeney is told the government has not funds for such expense,¹¹ he responds. If there is no means available for the care of a child under such circumstances, there ought to be, he writes. I shall make it my business to bombard Congress until money is placed at the discretion of the Secretary to care for children in such circumstances.¹²

Three blocks east and two blocks north of the courthouse at 608 Fifth Street was the Irwin household. It was one of the town’s nicest homes, built by Joseph himself in 1864.

The home was in fact a veritable family castle, as, at one point, in addition to Joseph Ireland and W. G. Irwin,