Charles Halleck, County Prosecutor in the Shadows of the Depression

Abstract

In U.S. political history, Charles Halleck is known for serving as Indiana’s Second District representa tive to the U.S. House from 1935 to 1968, including service as both minority and majority leaders during that time. But before that, Halleck was a county prosecutor in northwestern Indiana, serving from 1924 to 1926 and again from 1928 to 1934. In that capacity, he prosecuted a wide variety of cases, many of which lend interesting historical perspective to how Prohibition and the Great Depression affected people at the local and county levels. Details of Halleck’s time as a county prosecutor are now available to researchers because of the cataloguing of his papers, in the possession of the Jasper County Historical Society in Rensselaer, Indiana.