Between 1938 and 1946, Shake was also involved at the national level in mediating labor disputes, including service on six presidential emergency boards charged with settling railroad strikes.

News reporters harshly criticized the relatively light sentences imposed on those found guilty of war crimes.

In 1903, because there were no public high schools in the area, Shake began studies at Vincennes University, where he attended classes for two years to earn a teacher's license.

Shake, an avid storyteller, later recalled that while he was living in Vincennes, Jacob Gimbel, owner of a Vincennes department store that later became Gimbels in New York, offered to pay for his law studies at IU as long as he agreed to help another student in a similar manner in the future.

Shake also met his first wife, Anna Selesky, a Czech immigrant and a fellow law student, while attending IU.

Shake was an active state senator who coauthored the Lindley-Shake-Johnson law that reduced tax assessments on Indiana farmland.

A week before the election, John Rabb Emison, a Vincennes lawyer, announced at a Republican Party gathering in Indianapolis that Shake was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Emison asserted that Shake had joined Knox County Klan Number 75 on September 30, 1924, and produced a membership book to support the claim.

Shake never fully denied Klan membership in his speeches,[5] but he did label the claims "insinuations and false charges.

[4][5] After his defeat in the race for Indiana attorney general, Shake continued to practice law in Vincennes for the next ten years.

[8] Shake decided not to run for re-election because he believed that the state's voters would choose Republican candidates in the upcoming election and he wanted to avoid a defeat.

Ten of the defendants were acquitted on all counts; the remaining thirteen received prison sentences that ranged from two to eight years, considered mild punishments compared to the gravity of the indictments.

[9] News reporters harshly criticized Shake for the relatively light sentences in the Farben case and made allegations that he had been partial to the German defendants, which he denied.

Shake countered the criticisms by arguing that the tribunal "had worked hard to apply international law" in the trial.

"[11] After Shake returned to the United States from Germany in 1948, he continued to practiced law in Vincennes, Indiana, until his retirement at age eighty-eight.