[Senate Document 104-26]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

104th Congress, 2nd Session . . . . . . . . . . . Senate Document 104-26

VICE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES 1789-1993

President Gerald R. Ford congratulating Vice
President Nelson Rockefeller after his swearing
in on December 19, 1974

Vice Presidents

of the United States

1789-1993

Mark O. Hatfield
United States Senator

Donald A. Ritchie
Jo Anne McCormick Quatannens
Richard A. Baker
William T. Hull
U.S. Senate Historical Office

Edited by
Wendy Wolff
U.S. Senate Historical Office

U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington

104th Congress, 2d Session
S. Con. Res. 34

Senate Document 104-26
U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington: 1997

Supt. of Docs. No.: 052-071-01227-3

Much of the material in this volume is protected by copyright.
Photographs have been used with the consent of their respective owners.
No republication of copyrighted material may be made without permission
in writing from the copyright holder.

Cover illustration: Vice President Henry A. Wallace (center); Senator
Harry S. Truman (right), who had recently won the Democratic nomination
for vice president; and Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley (left)
in August 1944.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789-1993 / Mark O. Hatfield . . .
[et al.] ; edited by Wendy Wolff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Vice-Presidents--United States--Biography. I. Hatfield, Mark O.,
1922- . II. Wolff, Wendy.
E176.49.V53 1997
973' .09'9
[B]--DC21 96-51492
CIP

------------------------------------------------------------------
For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of
Documents, Mail Stop; SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328

To Gerald W. Frank

An exemplary citizen and leader in many civic causes.
A longtime friend, chief of staff, and confidant.

MOH
CONTENTS

Alphabetical List of Vice Presidents...................... ix
Introduction.............................................. xi
1 John Adams
(George Washington, 1789-1797)............................ 1
2 Thomas Jefferson
(John Adams, 1797-1801)................................... 15
3 Aaron Burr
(Thomas Jefferson, 1801-1805)............................. 29
4 George Clinton (died in office, April 12, 1812)
(Thomas Jefferson, 1805-1809; James Madison, 1809-1812)... 47
5 Elbridge Gerry (died in office November 23, 1814)
(James Madison, 1813-1814)................................ 61
6 Daniel D. Tompkins
(James Monroe, 1817-1825)................................. 71
7 John Caldwell Calhoun (resigned December 28, 1832)
(John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829; Andrew Jackson, 1829-1832). 81
8 Martin Van Buren
(Andrew Jackson, 1833-1837)............................... 103
9 Richard Mentor Johnson
(Martin Van Buren, 1837-1841)............................. 119
10 John Tyler (succeeded to presidency, April 6, 1841)
(William Henry Harrison, 1841)............................ 135
11 George Mifflin Dallas
(James K. Polk, 1845-1849)................................ 149
12 Millard Fillmore (succeeded to presidency, July 10, 1850)
(Zachary Taylor, 1849-1850)............................... 165
13 William Rufus King (died April 18, 1853)
(Franklin Pierce, 1853)................................... 179
14 John Cabell Breckinridge
(James Buchanan, 1857-1861)............................... 191
15 Hannibal Hamlin
(Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865).............................. 201
16 Andrew Johnson (succeeded to presidency, April 15, 1865)
(Abraham Lincoln, 1865)................................... 211
17 Schuyler Colfax
(Ulysses S. Grant, 1869-1873)............................. 221
18 Henry Wilson (died in office, November 22, 1875)
(Ulysses S. Grant, 1873-1875)............................. 231
19 William Almon Wheeler
(Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877-1881).......................... 241
20 Chester Alan Arthur (succeeded to presidency, September
20, 1881)
(James A. Garfield, 1881)................................. 249
21 Thomas Andrews Hendricks (died in office, November 25,
1885)
(Grover Cleveland, 1885).................................. 259
22 Levi Parsons Morton
(Benjamin Harrison, 1889-1893)............................ 267
23 Adlai Ewing Stevenson
(Grover Cleveland, 1893-1897)............................. 277
24 Garret Augustus Hobart (died in office, November 21, 1899)
(William McKinley, 1897-1899)............................. 287
25 Theodore Roosevelt (succeeded to presidency, September 14,
1901)
(William McKinley, 1901).................................. 295
26 Charles Warren Fairbanks
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1905-1909)........................... 311
27 James Schoolcraft Sherman (died in office, October 30,
1912)
(William H. Taft, 1909-1912).............................. 323
28 Thomas Riley Marshall
(Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921)............................... 335
29 Calvin Coolidge (succeeded to presidency, August 3, 1923)
(Warren G. Harding, 1921-1923)............................ 345
30 Charles Gates Dawes
(Calvin Coolidge, 1925-1929).............................. 357
31 Charles Curtis
(Herbert C. Hoover, 1929-1933)............................ 371
32 John Nance Garner
(Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1941)........................ 383
33 Henry Agard Wallace
(Frankin D. Roosevelt, 1941-1945)......................... 397
34 Harry S. Truman (succeeded to presidency, April 12, 1945)
(Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1945)............................. 409
35 Alben W. Barkley
(Harry S. Truman, 1949-1953).............................. 421
36 Richard Milhous Nixon
(Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953-1961)......................... 431
37 Lyndon Baines Johnson (succeeded to presidency, November
22, 1963)
(John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963).............................. 451
38 Hubert Horatio Humphrey
(Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965-1969)............................ 463
39 Spiro Theodore Agnew (resigned October 10, 1973)
(Richard M. Nixon, 1969-1973)............................. 479
40 Gerald Rudolph Ford (succeeded to presidency, August 9,
1974)
(Richard M. Nixon, 1973-1974)............................. 491
41 Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller
(Gerald R. Ford, 1974-1977)............................... 503
42 Walter Frederick Mondale
(James E. (Jimmy) Carter, 1977-1981)...................... 515
43 George H.W. Bush
(Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989)................................ 527
44 J. Danforth Quayle
(George H.W. Bush, 1989-1993)............................. 541
Appendix: Major Party Presidential and Vice-Presidential
Candidates, 1788-1992................................. 555
Bibliography.............................................. 559
Credits for illustrations................................. 571
Index..................................................... 573

VICE PRESIDENTS

(Alphabetical)

Vice President
Chapter Page
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adams, John 1.......................... 1
Agnew, Spiro Theodore 39.......................... 479
Arthur, Chester Alan 20.......................... 249
Barkley, Alben W. 35.......................... 421
Breckinridge, John Cabell 14.......................... 191
Burr, Aaron 3.......................... 29
Bush, George H. W. 43.......................... 527
Calhoun, John Caldwell 7.......................... 81
Clinton, George 4.......................... 47
Colfax, Schuyler 17.......................... 221
Coolidge, Calvin 29.......................... 345
Curtis, Charles 31.......................... 371
Dallas, George Mifflin 11.......................... 149
Dawes, Charles Gates 30.......................... 357
Fairbanks, Charles Warren 26.......................... 311
Fillmore, Millard 12.......................... 165
Ford, Gerald Rudolph 40.......................... 491
Garner, John Nance 32.......................... 383
Gerry, Elbridge 5.......................... 61
Hamlin, Hannibal 15.......................... 201
Hendricks, Thomas Andrews 21.......................... 259
Hobart, Garret Augustus 24.......................... 287
Humphrey, Hubert Horatio 38.......................... 463
Jefferson, Thomas 2.......................... 15
Johnson, Andrew 16.......................... 211
Johnson, Lyndon Baines 37.......................... 451
Johnson, Richard Mentor 9.......................... 119
King, William Rufus 13.......................... 179
Marshall, Thomas Riley 28.......................... 335
Mondale, Walter Frederick 42.......................... 515
Morton, Levi Parsons 22.......................... 267
Nixon, Richard Milhous 36.......................... 431
Quayle, J. Danforth 44.......................... 541
Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich 41.......................... 503
Roosevelt, Theodore 25.......................... 295
Sherman, James Schoolcraft 27.......................... 323
Stevenson, Adlai Ewing 23.......................... 277
Tompkins, Daniel D. 6.......................... 71
Truman, Harry S. 34.......................... 409
Tyler, John 10.......................... 135
Van Buren, Martin 8.......................... 103
Wallace, Henry Agard 33.......................... 397
Wheeler, William Almon 19.......................... 241
Wilson, Henry 18.......................... 231

INTRODUCTION

Holding the least understood, most ridiculed, and most often
ignored constitutional office in the federal government,
American vice presidents have included some remarkable
individuals. Fourteen of the forty-four former vice presidents
became president of the United States--more than half of them
after a president had died. One defeated the sitting president
with whom he served. One murdered a man and became a fugitive.
One joined the Confederate army and led an invasion of
Washington, D.C. One was the wealthiest banker of his era. One
received the Nobel Peace Prize and composed a popular melody.
One served as a corporal in the Coast Guard while vice
president. One had cities in Oregon and Texas named after him.
Two resigned the office. Two were never elected by the people.
One was the target of a failed assassination plot. One was
mobbed in his car while on a goodwill mission. Seven died in
office--one in his room in the U.S. Capitol and two fatally
stricken while on their way to preside over the Senate. And
one piano-playing vice president suffered political
repercussions from a photograph showing him playing that
instrument while famous movie actress Lauren Bacall posed
seductively on top of it.
I have encountered these and many other stories over the
past four years in the course of my inquiry into the history
of the American vice-presidency. As is apparent from such
examples, the men who served as vice president of the United
States varied greatly in their talents and aptitude for the
post. What they generally had in common was political ambition
and experience in public office. Most hoped the position would
prove a stepping stone to the presidency, but some--old and
tired near the close of their careers--simply hoped that it
would offer a quiet refuge from political pressures and
turmoil.
The stories of these diverse individuals attempt to sketch
the development of the vice presidency itself--that colorful,
important, and routinely disparaged American political
institution.

I. Constitutional Origins and Structural Changes

Electoral system
Our Constitution's framers created the vice-presidency
almost as an afterthought. In setting up a system for electing
presidents, they devised an electoral college and provided
that each of its members was to vote for two persons, ``of
whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State
with themselves.'' In those days when loyalty to one's state
was stronger than to the new nation, the framers recognized
that individual electors might be inclined to choose a leader
from their own immediate political circle, creating the danger
of a crippling deadlock, as no one candidate would win a
plurality of all votes cast. By being required to select one
candidate from outside their own states, electors would be
compelled to look for individuals of national stature. Under
the system the framers created, the candidate receiving the
most electoral votes would be president. The one coming in
second would be vice president.
In the election of 1800, however, the constitutional system
for electing presidents broke down, as both Jefferson and
Aaron Burr received the same number of electoral votes. This
impasse threw the contest into the House of Representatives,
where for thirty-five separate ballots, neither candidate was
able to gain a majority. When the stalemate was finally
broken, the House elected Jefferson president, thus making
Aaron Burr our third vice president. Within four years of this
deadlocked election, Congress had passed, and the necessary
number of states had ratified, the Twelfth Amendment to the
Constitution, instituting the present system wherein electors
cast separate ballots for president and for vice president.
Presidential succession
Although the office of vice president did not exist under
the Continental congresses or the Articles of Confederation,
the concept of a concurrently elected successor to the
executive was not without precedent for the framers of the
Constitution in 1787. Prior to the Revolution, lieutenant
governors presided over the governors' councils of the royal
colonies--which, in their legislative capacities, functioned
as upper houses. John Adams was certainly familiar with this
arrangement, since the lieutenant governor presided over the
upper house in his own state of Massachusetts. After the
states declared their independence, they adopted new
constitutions, retaining, in some instances, earlier forms
recast to meet current needs. As Alexander Hamilton noted in
The Federalist No. 68, New York's 1777 constitution provided
for ``a Lieutenant Governor chosen by the people at large, who
presides in the senate, and is the constitutional substitute
for the Governor in casualties similar to those, which would
authorise the vice-president to exercise the authorities and
discharge the duties of the president.'' The Constitution
established the office of vice president primarily to provide
a successor in the event of the president's death, disability,
or resignation.
The document, however, was vague about the way the
presidential succession would work, stating only that, in
cases of presidential death or disability, the ``Powers and
Duties of the said Office . . . shall devolve on the Vice
President'' (Article II, section 1). What did ``devolve''
mean? Would the vice president become acting president until
another was chosen, or would he become president in his own
right? A half-century would pass before the nation would have
to address that murky constitutional language. Although the
Constitution's framers kept their intentions about
presidential succession shrouded in ambiguity, they left no
doubt about vice-presidential succession. There was to be
none. ``[I]n the absence of the Vice President, or when he
shall exercise the Office of the President of the United
States'' the Senate would simply choose a president pro
tempore.
The framers' failure to provide a method for filling a vice-
presidential vacancy continued to plague the nation. In 1792
Congress made a first stab at addressing the problem by
adopting the Presidential Succession Act, providing that, if a
president should die when there was no vice president, the
Senate president pro tempore and the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, in that order, would succeed to the office.
In 1886, responding to a concern that few presidents pro
tempore had executive branch experience, Congress altered the
line of succession to substitute for the congressional
officials cabinet officers in order of rank, starting with the
secretary of state. In 1947, after the vice-presidency had
been vacant for most of a presidential term, Congress again
changed the line of succession. Concerned that cabinet
officers had not been elected, it named the House Speaker as
the first official to succeed if a president died during a
vacancy in the vice-presidency, followed by the president pro
tempore.
Finally, after the death of President John F. Kennedy in
1963 and the resulting vice-presidential vacancy, Congress
debated what became the second constitutional amendment
related to the structure of the vice-presidency. In 1967, the
Twenty-fifth Amendment, addressing presidential vacancy and
disability, became part of our Constitution. The absence of
any provision for filling a vice-presidential vacancy had
become intolerable in the nuclear age. Added impetus for the
change came from a growing public concern at the time about
the advanced ages of President pro tempore Carl Hayden, who
was eighty, and House Speaker John W. McCormack, who was
seventy-six. The amendment states that the president may
appoint a vice president to fill a vacancy in that office,
subject to approval by both houses of Congress. Before a
decade had passed, the provision was used twice, first in 1973
when President Nixon appointed Gerald R. Ford to replace Spiro
Agnew, who had resigned, and again in 1974, with the
appointment of Nelson Rockefeller after Nixon himself resigned
and Ford became president. The amendment also sets forth very
specifically the steps that would permit the vice president to
serve as acting president if a president becomes ``unable to
discharge the powers and duties of his office.'' Each of these
changes further reflected the increased importance of the
office.
Vice-presidential duties
The framers also devoted scant attention to the vice
president's duties, providing only that he ``shall be
President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they
be evenly divided'' (Article I, section 3). In practice, the
number of times vice presidents have exercised this right has
varied greatly. More than half the total number of 233 tie-
breaking votes occurred before 1850, with John Adams holding
the record at 29 votes, followed closely by John C. Calhoun
with 28. Since the 1870s, no vice president has cast as many
as 10 tie-breaking votes. While vice presidents have used
their votes chiefly on legislative issues, they have also
broken ties on the election of Senate officers, as well as on
the appointment of committees in 1881 when the parties were
evenly represented in the Senate.
The vice president's other constitutionally mandated duty
was to receive from the states the tally of electoral ballots
cast for president and vice president and to open the
certificates ``in the Presence of the Senate and House of
Representatives,'' so that the total votes could be counted
(Article II, section 1). Only a few happy vice presidents--
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and George
Bush--had the pleasure of announcing their own election as
president. Many more were chagrined to announce the choice of
some rival for the office.
Several framers ultimately refused to sign the Constitution,
in part because they viewed the vice president's legislative
role as a violation of the separation of powers doctrine.
Elbridge Gerry, who would later serve as vice president,
declared that the framers ``might as well put the President
himself as head of the legislature.'' Others thought the
office unnecessary but agreed with Connecticut delegate Roger
Sherman that ``if the vice-President were not to be President
of the Senate, he would be without employment, and some member
[of the Senate, acting as presiding officer] must be deprived
of his vote.''
Under the original code of Senate rules, the presiding
officer exercised great power over the conduct of the body's
proceedings. Rule XVI provided that ``every question of order
shall be decided by the President [of the Senate], without
debate; but if there be a doubt in his mind, he may call for a
sense of the Senate.'' Thus, contrary to later practice, the
presiding officer was the sole judge of proper procedure and
his rulings could not be turned aside by the full Senate
without his assent.
The first two vice presidents, Adams and Jefferson, did much
to shape the nature of the office, setting precedents that
were followed by others. During most of the nineteenth
century, the degree of influence and the role played within
the Senate depended chiefly on the personality and
inclinations of the individual involved. Some had great
parliamentary skill and presided well, while others found the
task boring, were incapable of maintaining order, or chose to
spend most of their time away from Washington, leaving the
duty to a president pro tempore. Some made an effort to
preside fairly, while others used their position to promote
the political agenda of the administration.
During the twentieth century, the role of the vice president
has evolved into more of an executive branch position. Now,
the vice president is usually seen as an integral part of a
president's administration and presides over the Senate only
on ceremonial occasions or when a tie-breaking vote may be
needed. Yet, even though the nature of the job has changed, it
is still greatly affected by the personality and skills of the
individual incumbent.

II. The Individuals

Political Experience
Most of our former vice presidents have brought to that
office significant public service experience. Thirty-one of
the forty-four served in Congress, and fifteen had been state
or territorial governors. Five--Schuyler Colfax, Charles
Curtis, John Garner, Alben Barkley, and Lyndon Johnson--gave
up powerful congressional leadership posts to run for that
much-derided office. Another, House Minority Leader Gerald
Ford, observed that he had been trying for twenty-five years
to become Speaker of the House. ``Suddenly, I am a candidate
for the President of the Senate, where I can hardly ever vote,
and where I will never get a chance to speak.''
Nineteen former vice presidents came to their role as
president of the Senate already familiar with the body, having
served as U.S. senators. Several vice presidents later
returned to serve again in the Senate, among them former
President Andrew Johnson. Nine vice presidents won
renomination and election to a second term. Two of these,
George Clinton and John C. Calhoun, held the office under two
different presidents.
Of the fourteen vice presidents who fulfilled their ambition
by achieving the presidency, eight succeeded to the office on
the death of a president. Three of these and six other former
vice presidents were later elected president. Four former vice
presidents ran unsuccessfully for president. Two unlucky vice
presidents, Hannibal Hamlin and Henry Wallace, were dropped
from the ticket after their first term, only to see their
successors become president months after taking office, when
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln made Andrew Johnson
president and the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt raised Harry
Truman to the presidency. Similarly, when Spiro Agnew
resigned, he was replaced under the Twenty-fifth Amendment by
Gerald R. Ford, who became president when Richard M. Nixon
resigned less than a year later.
The vice-presidency was generally held by men of mature
years--thirty-two of them were in their fifties or sixties
when they took office--but ten were in their forties, and the
youngest, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, was thirty-six at
the beginning of his term. At seventy-two, Alben Barkley,
another Kentuckian, was the oldest when his term began.
The earliest vice presidents: Adams and Jefferson
The nation's first vice presidents were men of extraordinary
ability. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson gained the
office as runners-up in presidential contests, with the
support of those who believed they were amply qualified to
hold the top office. Each recognized, in assuming this new and
as yet loosely defined position, that his actions would set
precedents for future vice presidents. But one precedent
established by Adams and Jefferson would not be repeated for
over three decades; although both men won election as
president immediately following their terms as vice president,
no sitting vice president would repeat this pattern until
1836, when Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson. (The gap
thereafter was even longer. More than 150 years elapsed before
George Bush won the presidency in 1988 at the conclusion of
his eight years as Ronald Reagan's vice president.)
During his two vice-presidential terms, Adams maintained a
cordial, but distant, relationship with the president, who
sought his advice only occasionally. In the Senate, Adams
played a more active role, particularly during his first term.
On at least one occasion, he persuaded senators to vote
against legislation he opposed, and he frequently lectured the
body on procedural and policy matters. He supported
Washington's policies by casting the twenty-nine tie-breaking
votes that no successor has equalled.
Thomas Jefferson, learning in 1797 that he had been elected
vice president, and always happy to return to his beloved
Monticello, expressed his pleasure. ``A more tranquil and
unoffending station could not have been found for me. It will
give me philosophical evenings in the winter [while at the
Senate] and rural days in the summer [at Monticello].'' Unlike
Adams, who shared the political beliefs of the president with
whom he served, Jefferson and his president belonged to
different political parties. Although two later vice
presidents, George Clinton and John C. Calhoun, joined with
anti-administration forces in their efforts to prevent the
reelection of the presidents with whom they served,
Jefferson's situation would prove to be unique in all the
nation's history. No one expected Jefferson to be President
Adams' principal assistant. Instead he devoted his four-year
term to preparing himself for the next presidential election
and to drafting a guidebook on legislative procedure.
Jefferson hoped that his Manual of Parliamentary Practice
would allow him and his successors to preside over the Senate
with fairness, intelligence, and consistency. That classic
guide has retained its usefulness to both the Senate and the
House of Representatives through the intervening two
centuries.
Nineteenth-century vice presidents
Adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, together with the
strategy employed by the Republicans in their successful
effort to capture the presidency in 1800--and to retain it for
the next quarter century--proved to have a serious impact on
the overall quality of individuals drawn to the vice-
presidency.
Aaron Burr, whose refusal to defer to Jefferson had
precipitated the electoral crisis of 1800, became one of the
most maligned and mistrusted figures of his era and, without
question, the most controversial vice president of the early
republic. He was also a man of extraordinary ability, and a
key player in New York politics--a consideration of overriding
importance for Republicans, given the fact that New York's
electoral votes accounted for over 15 percent of the total
needed to achieve an electoral majority. Burr was the first of
a series of vice presidents who hailed from the northern
states, chosen more for their ability to bring geographical
balance to presidential tickets headed by Virginia Republicans
than for their capacity to serve as president. During the
quarter century that the ``Virginia dynasty'' presidents
(Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe) held sway, the
vice-presidency was the province of men widely regarded as
party hacks or men in the twilight of illustrious careers.
Much of the scholarship on the vice-presidency makes but
passing mention of these individuals, or focuses on their
obvious shortcomings. But these vice presidents (Burr, George
Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, and Daniel D. Tompkins)--all of them
New Yorkers, with the single exception of Elbridge Gerry, a
Massachusetts man--helped cement the ``Virginia-New York''
alliance that enabled the Republicans to control the
presidency for six consecutive terms. Their ties to local and
state party organizations, which they maintained during their
vice-presidential terms, helped ensure the continued
allegiance of northern Republicans. For the most part, these
vice presidents presided over the Senate with an easy or
indifferent hand, while a series of presidents pro tempore
attended to administrative matters at the beginning and end of
each legislative session.
John C. Calhoun's vice-presidency stands in vivid contrast
to the experience of his immediate predecessors. He accepted
the second office, under John Quincy Adams, after his 1824
presidential bid failed, offering himself as Andrew Jackson's
running mate four years later in hopes of eventually
succeeding Jackson. A man of formidable intellect and energy,
Calhoun approached his legislative duties with a gravity,
dedication, and concern for maintaining order not seen since
the time of Adams and Jefferson. A scrupulous guardian of the
Senate's written rules, he disdained its unwritten customs and
practices. After a quarter century of ineffective or
incapacitated vice presidents, the Senate chafed under
Calhoun's tutelage and began a lengthy examination of the role
of its presiding officer. Calhoun's endorsement of
nullification effectively killed his chances of becoming
president. In 1836, his successor and rival, Martin Van Buren,
became the first vice president since Jefferson to win the
presidency.
Richard Mentor Johnson, Martin Van Buren's vice president,
came to the office along a unique path not yet followed by any
subsequent vice president. The Twelfth Amendment provides that
if no vice-presidential candidate receives a majority, the
Senate shall decide between the two highest vote getters. A
controversial figure who had openly acknowledged his slave
mistress and mulatto daughters and devoted himself more to the
customers of his tavern than to his Senate duties, Johnson
received one electoral vote less than the majority needed to
elect. The Senate therefore met on February 8, 1837, and
elected Johnson by a vote of 33 to 16 over the runner-up.
Johnson's successor, John Tyler, wrote an important chapter
in American presidential and vice-presidential history in 1841
when William Henry Harrison became the first president to die
in office. Interpreting the Constitution in a way that might
have surprised its framers, Vice President Tyler refused to
consider himself as acting president. What ``devolved'' on him
at Harrison's death were not the ``powers and duties'' of the
presidential office, he contended, but the office itself.
Tyler boldly claimed the presidency, its full $25,000 salary
(vice presidents were paid 20 percent of that amount--$5,000),
and all its prerogatives. Congressional leaders and members of
Harrison's cabinet who were inclined to challenge Tyler
eventually set aside their concerns in the face of the
accomplished fact. Nine years later, when Vice President
Millard Fillmore succeeded to the presidency after Zachary
Taylor's death, no serious question was raised about the
propriety of such a move.
During the nineteenth century, the vice-presidency remained
essentially a legislative position. Those who held it rarely
attended cabinet meetings or otherwise involved themselves in
executive branch business. Their usefulness to the president
generally ended with the election. While those who had served
in Congress might offer helpful political information and
connections to a presidential candidate, or might attract
electoral votes in marginal states, their status and value
evaporated after inauguration day. In fact, as political
circumstances altered during their first term, some presidents
began considering a new running mate for the reelection
campaign. Abraham Lincoln, for example, had no need of Vice
President Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for a second term, since
his state was certain to vote to reelect Lincoln in 1864.
Success being less assured in the border state of Tennessee,
party leaders chose Senator Andrew Johnson to replace Hamlin
in the second position.
Relegated to presiding over the Senate, a few nineteenth-
century vice presidents took that task seriously. Men such as
George Dallas, Levi Morton, and Garret Hobart studied the
Senate's rules and precedents and presided most effectively.
Others, such as Henry Wilson--Grant's second vice president--
spent their time as they pleased. As vice president, Wilson
wrote a three-volume history of slavery before dying in his
Capitol office.
The vice-presidency in the nineteenth century seldom led to
the White House, because vice presidents of the era were
rarely men of presidential stature. Of the twenty-one
individuals who held that office from 1805 to 1899, only
Martin Van Buren managed to be elected president. Four others
achieved the presidency only because the incumbent died, and
none of those four accidental presidents subsequently won
election in his own right.
Twentieth-century vice presidents
The twentieth century opened without a vice president. Vice
President Garret Augustus Hobart had died in November 1899,
leaving the office vacant, as it had been on ten previous
occasions for periods ranging from a few months to nearly four
years. The nation had gotten along just fine. No one much
noticed.
People noticed the next vice president. Cowboy, scholar,
naturalist, impetuous enthusiast for numerous ideas and
causes, Theodore Roosevelt owed his nomination to the desire
of New York state political bosses to get him out of the
state's politics. The former Rough Rider held presidential
ambitions and worried that the job could be ``a steppingstone
to . . . oblivion.'' He also felt that he lacked the financial
resources needed to entertain on the grand scale expected of
his immediate predecessors. Roosevelt argued in vain that the
party should find someone else, but Republican leaders wanted
him, believing he would bring a new kind of glamour and
excitement to President McKinley's candidacy. When his
magnetic presence at the national convention fired the
enthusiasm of his partisans, the nomination was his. Roosevelt
then defied conventional practice by waging an active national
campaign for the ticket, publicizing the Republican cause in a
way that President McKinley could not. Had not an assassin's
bullet in September 1901 propelled Roosevelt to the White
House, his impact on the vice-presidency during a four-year
term would most likely have been profound. In 1904, Theodore
Roosevelt became the first vice president who succeeded to the
presidency to be elected president in his own right.
For the next forty years, the role of the office grew slowly
but perceptibly. Party leaders rather than presidential
candidates continued to make vice-presidential selections to
balance the ticket, often choosing someone from a different
party faction who was not personally close to the presidential
nominee. In fact, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William
Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover protested the individuals
selected to be their running mates. The feeling was often
mutual. When Charles Curtis gave the customary vice-
presidential inaugural address in the Senate chamber, he
omitted any reference to his running mate, President Hoover. A
few minutes later, Hoover returned the favor by neglecting to
mention Curtis in his official remarks on the Capitol's east
portico.
The principal twentieth-century growth in the vice
president's role occurred when the national government assumed
a greater presence in American life, beginning with the New
Deal era and extending through the cold war years. That era
brought to the vice-presidency such major political leaders as
House Speaker John ``Cactus Jack'' Garner and Senate Majority
Leaders Alben Barkley and Lyndon Johnson. This distinguished
cast of elected vice presidents also included Senators Harry
Truman, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Al
Gore (who is serving as vice president at this writing and is
therefore not included in this book). The group also includes
George Bush, whose previous experience ranged from the House
of Representatives to the Central Intelligence Agency. With
the exception of Garner and possibly Truman, these men were
selected not by party wheelhorses but by the presidential
candidates themselves. Competence and compatibility became the
most sought-after qualities in a running mate. These
characteristics were especially evident in the Truman-Barkley
and Clinton-Gore tickets, both of which set aside the
traditional selection considerations of geographical and
ideological balance.
During the twentieth century, the focus of the vice-
presidency has shifted dramatically from being mainly a
legislative position to a predominately executive post. As
modern-era presidents began playing an increasing role as
legislative agenda setters, their vice presidents regularly
attended cabinet meetings and received executive assignments.
Vice presidents represented their presidents' administrations
on Capitol Hill, served on the National Security Council,
chaired special commissions, acted as high level
representatives of the government to foreign heads of state,
and assumed countless other chores--great and trivial--at the
president's direction. Beginning with Richard Nixon, they have
occupied spacious quarters in the Executive Office Building
and assembled staffs of specialists to extend their reach and
influence. From fewer than 20 staff members at the end of
Nixon's vice-presidency, the number increased to 60 during the
1970s, with the addition of not only political and support
staff but advisers on domestic policy and national security.
Walter Mondale expanded the vice president's role as
presidential adviser, establishing the tradition of weekly
lunches with the president, and subsequent vice presidents
have continued to be active participants in their
administrations.
Expansion of the office did not come without a cost,
however. In assuming substantive policy responsibilities, vice
presidents often ran afoul of cabinet secretaries whose
territories they invaded. As administration lobbyists, they
also irritated members of Congress. My favorite example of
this problem occurred in 1969. President Nixon had pledged to
give his vice president a significant policy-making role and--
for the first time--an office in the White House itself. Spiro
Agnew was determined to make the most of that role and to
expand his legislative functions as well. Since he lacked
previous legislative experience, he had the Senate
parliamentarian tutor him on the intricacies of Senate floor
procedure. Soon he began to inject himself into the course of
Senate proceedings, contrary to the well-worn practice that
constrained his predecessors. During the debate over the Anti-
Ballistic-Missile Treaty, Agnew approached Idaho Republican
Senator Len Jordan and asked how he was going to vote. ``You
can't tell me how to vote!'' said the shocked senator. ``You
can't twist my arm!'' At the next regular luncheon of
Republican senators, Jordan accused Agnew of breaking the
separation of powers by lobbying on the Senate floor, and
announced the ``Jordan Rule.'' Under his rule, if the vice
president tried to lobby him on anything, the senator would
automatically vote the other way. Agnew concluded from this
experience, ``after trying for a while to get along with the
Senate, I decided I would go down to the other end of
Pennsylvania Avenue and try playing the executive game.''
In 1886 the Senate initiated the practice of honoring former
vice presidents by acquiring marble busts of those who had
held the office, with the expenses paid from the contingent
fund of the Senate. The previous year, in 1885, the Senate had
placed in the Vice President's Room a bust of Henry Wilson,
who had died in that room a decade earlier. Under the 1886
resolution, busts of former vice presidents, beginning with
those of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were placed in the
niches around the gallery level of the Senate chamber. Once
those twenty spaces were filled, the Senate adopted an amended
resolution in 1898 to place future vice-presidential busts
elsewhere in the Senate wing of the Capitol. The practice
continues today.

III. Goals and Execution of the Project

During the commemoration of the bicentennials of the U.S.
Constitution and the U.S. Congress in the late 1980s, I
realized that the vice-presidency and those who have held the
office were largely neglected in the various two-hundred-year
celebrations. Clearly, there was a need to look more closely
at both the institution and the individuals. Although the
debate over the Twenty-fifth Amendment in the 1960s had
inspired a number of books on the history and operations of
the vice-presidency, most of those works were narrowly drawn,
serving only to make a case for or against the amendment. The
ones that took a biographical approach focused on just the
most ``significant'' vice presidents.
Yet, obscure as many of those who have held this office may
be today, most were active in public service at both the state
and federal levels, often reaching the vice-presidency after
long and valuable careers in both Congress and the executive
branch. Studying the lives of even the men of less than
presidential stature and the reasons they were selected for
the post--as well as the reasons they failed to reach the
White House--provides useful insights into the history of our
nation's political process. Examining the successive stories
of the former vice presidents in chronological order
illuminates the way in which their strengths and personalities
helped to shape the evolution of this office that was so
vaguely defined by the framers. The changes in the vice-
presidency, in turn, shed light on the nation's political
development; for example, the growing importance of the office
in the decades since World War II mirrors the expansion of the
role of the federal government during that period.
Having conceived the idea for this project, I met in the
summer of 1991 with the director of the Senate Historical
Office. We discussed a plan that would focus on the role of
all our former vice presidents within the institutional
context of the United States Senate. We agreed that the
resulting book should include for each vice president: brief
biographical background, the circumstances surrounding his
selection, a summary of the major issues confronting the
nation during his service, the nature of his relations with
the president, his broader national and international role,
and his contributions to the office and the nation. Such a
study had never before been undertaken. In the course of our
work, we conducted a major search for source materials and
consulted all significant book- and article-length biographies
of these forty-four men, as well as appropriate Senate
records.
Acknowledgements
When I proposed this book to Dr. Richard A. Baker, the
Senate historian, he expressed great interest, sharing my view
that this topic had received too little attention. The staff
of the Senate Historical Office prepared the forty-four
chapters discussing each of the former vice presidents, under
the direction of Secretary of the Senate Kelly D. Johnston and
his predecessors, Walter J. Stewart, Martha Pope, and Sheila
Burke. I carefully reviewed and critiqued each of these
chapters in draft and have reviewed them again in proofs. I
believe that, collectively, these essays make the case that
the institution of the vice-presidency and those who have held
the office have made a substantial contribution to our nation.
I would particularly like to thank Dr. Baker for his crucial
role in shaping the concept and content of this book. He and
his colleagues, Dr. Donald A. Ritchie and Dr. Jo Anne
McCormick Quatannens, wrote the bulk of the chapters, drawing
upon their deep understanding of the nation's political
history, as well as the extensive professional expertise that
each has in a particular period of the Senate's history.
Others who participated by writing one or more chapters were
Mark Clifford, Richard Hill, Jonathan Marcus, and the late
William T. Hull. Mr. Hull, a gifted historian whose promising
career was tragically cut short by cancer in the fall of 1995,
contributed the chapters on Theodore Roosevelt, Charles
Fairbanks, and Richard Nixon, as well as offering insights
into his particular interest, the Republican party in the
period between the New Deal and the Eisenhower administration.
Others in the Senate Historical Office who contributed to
this project were Wendy Wolff, who prepared the appendix and
index and edited the text for publication, and Matthew T.
Cook, who researched and assisted me in selecting the
illustrations.
As one who has greatly enjoyed and profited from the study
of American presidential history, I relish this project and
trust that it will add new color to the rich mosaic of our
nation's political development. Statesmen and murderers;
scholars and scoundrels; piano players and composers; military
heroes and invading generals--what a fascinating lot!

Mark O. Hatfield
?

Chapter 1

JOHN ADAMS

1789-1797

JOHN ADAMS
JOHN ADAMS

Chapter 1

JOHN ADAMS

1st Vice President: 1789-1797

It is not for me to interrupt your deliberations by any
general observations on the state of the nation, or by
recommending, or proposing any particular measures.
--John Adams
On April 21, 1789, John Adams, the first vice president of the
United States, began his duties as president of the Senate.
Adams' role in the administration of George Washington was sharply
constrained by the constitutional limits on the vice-presidency and his
own reluctance to encroach upon executive prerogative. He enjoyed a
cordial but distant relationship with President Washington, who sought
his advice on occasion but relied primarily on the cabinet. Adams played
a more active role in the Senate, however, particularly during his first
term.
As president of the Senate, Adams cast twenty-nine tie-breaking
votes--a record that no successor has ever threatened.¹ His
votes protected the president's sole authority over the removal of
appointees, influenced the location of the national capital, and
prevented war with Great Britain. On at least one occasion he persuaded
senators to vote against legislation that he opposed, and he frequently
lectured the Senate on procedural and policy matters. Adams' political
views and his active role in the Senate made him a natural target for
critics of the Washington administration. Toward the end of his first
term, he began to exercise more restraint in the hope of realizing the
goal shared by many of his successors: election in his own right as
president of the United States.

A Family Tradition of Public Service

John Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, on October 19,
1735, into a family with an established tradition of public service. As
a child, he attended town meetings with his father, who was at various
times a militia officer, a deacon and tithe collector of the local
congregation, and selectman for the town of Braintree. Determined that
his namesake attend Harvard College, the elder Adams sent young John to
a local ``dame'' school and later to Joseph Cleverly's Latin school.
Adams was an indifferent student until the age of fourteen, when he
withdrew from the Latin school to prepare for college with a private
tutor, ``Mr. Marsh.'' ² Adams entered Harvard College in
1751, and plunged into a rigorous course of study. After his graduation
in 1755, he accepted a position as Latin master of the Worcester,
Massachusetts, Grammar School. The following year, finding himself
``irresistibly impelled'' toward a legal career, Adams apprenticed
himself to James Putnam, a local attorney. He continued to teach school
while reading law at night until his admission to the Boston Superior
Court bar on November 6, 1758.³
His legal studies completed, Adams returned to Braintree to
establish his legal practice, which grew slowly. In the spring of 1761,
on the death of his father, Adams inherited the family farm--a bequest
that enabled him, as a ``freeholder''

with a tangible interest in the community, to take an active part in
town meetings. He served on several local committees and led a crusade
to require professional certification of practitioners before the local
courts. In February 1761, on one of his regular trips to Boston to
attend the Court of Common Pleas, Adams observed James Otis' arguments
against the writs of assistance before the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Adams recalled in later years that Otis' impassioned oratory against
these general search and seizure warrants convinced Adams that England
and the colonies had been ``brought to a Collision,'' and left him
``ready to take arms'' against the writs. However, Adams' political
career remained limited to local concerns for several more years until
1765, when he played a crucial role in formulating Massachusetts'
response to the Stamp Act.⁴

A Lawyer and a Legislator

As a member of the town meeting, Adams drafted instructions for the
Braintree delegate to the Massachusetts provincial assembly, known as
the General Court, which met in October 1765 to formulate the colony's
response to the Stamp Act. Adams' rationale, that the colonies could not
be taxed by a parliament in which they were not represented, and that
the stamp tax was ``inconsistent with the spirit of the common law and
of the essential fundamental principles of the British constitution,''
soon appeared in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News Letter. His
cousin, Samuel Adams, incorporated John's argument in the instructions
that he drafted for the Boston delegates, and other towns adopted the
same stance.⁵
With the repeal of the Stamp Act, Adams focused his energies on
building his law practice and attending to the demands of the growing
family that followed from his marriage to Abigail Smith in 1764. Finding
few opportunities for a struggling young attorney in Braintree, the
young family moved in 1768 to Boston, where John's practice flourished.
Adams soon found himself an active participant in the local resistance
to British authority as a consequence of his defense of John Hancock
before the vice admiralty court for customs duty violations. He argued
in Hancock's defense that the Parliament could not tax the colonies
without their express consent and added the charge, soon to become a
part of the revolutionary rhetoric, that the vice-admiralty courts
violated the colonists' rights as Englishmen to trial by jury. Although
the crown eventually withdrew the charges against Hancock, Adams
continued his assault on the vice-admiralty courts in the instructions
he wrote for the Boston general court representatives in 1768 and
1769.⁶
Adams subsequently agreed to defend the British soldiers who fired
upon the Boston mob during the spring of 1770. His able and
dispassionate argument on behalf of the defendants in the Boston
massacre case won his clients' acquittal, as well as his election to a
brief term in the Massachusetts assembly, where he was one of Governor
Thomas Hutchinson's most vocal opponents. The enmity was mutual; when
the general court elected Adams to the Massachusetts council, or upper
house, in 1773, the governor denied Adams his seat. The general court
reelected Adams the following year, but Hutchinson's successor, Thomas
Gage, again prevented him from serving on the council. The general court
subsequently elected Adams to the first and second Continental
congresses. Although initially reluctant to press for immediate armed
resistance, Adams consistently denied Parliament's right to regulate the
internal affairs of the colonies, a position he elaborated in a series
of thirteen newspaper essays published under the name ``Novanglus''
during the winter and spring of 1775. Like Adams' other political
writings, the Novanglus essays set forth his tenets in rambling and
disjointed fashion, but their primary focus--the fundamental rights of
the colonists--was clear.⁷

An Architect of Independence

An avowed supporter of independence in the second Continental
Congress, Adams was a member of the committee that prepared the
Declaration of Independence. Although Thomas Jefferson of Virginia
composed the committee draft, Adams' contribution was no less important.
As Jefferson later acknowledged, Adams was the Declaration's ``pillar of
support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender.''
New Jersey delegate Richard Stockton and others styled Adams ``the
`Atlas' of independence.'' ⁸ Adams further served the cause
of independence as chairman of the Board of War and Ordnance. Congress
assigned to the board the onerous tasks of recruiting, provisioning, and
dispatching a continental army; as chairman, Adams coordinated this
Herculean effort until the winter of 1777, when Congress appointed him
to replace Silas Deane as commissioner to the Court of
Paris.⁹
Adams served as commissioner until the spring of 1779. On his return
to Massachusetts, he represented Braintree in the state constitutional
convention. The convention asked him to draft a model constitution,
which it adopted with amendments in 1780. Adams' model provided for the
three branches of government--executive, legislative, and judicial--that
were ultimately incorporated into the United States Constitution, and it
vested strong powers in the executive. ``His Excellency,'' as the
governor was to be addressed, was given an absolute veto over the
legislature and sole power to appoint officers of the
militia.¹⁰ Throughout his life, Adams was an advocate of a
strong executive. He believed that only a stable government could
preserve social order and protect the liberties of the people. His
studies of classical antiquity convinced him that republican government
was inherently vulnerable to corruption and inevitably harbored ``a
never-failing passion for tyranny'' unless balanced by a stabilizing
force.¹¹ In 1780, Adams considered a strong executive
sufficient to achieve this end. In later years, he grew so fearful of
the ``corruption'' he discerned in popular elections that he suggested
more drastic alternatives--a hereditary senate and a hereditary
executive--which his opponents saw as evidence of his antidemocratic,
``monarchist'' intent.
Before the Massachusetts convention began its deliberations over
Adams' draft, Congress appointed him minister plenipotentiary to
negotiate peace and commerce treaties with Great Britain and
subsequently authorized him to negotiate an alliance with the
Netherlands, as well. Although Adams' attempts to negotiate treaties
with the British proved unavailing, in 1782 he finally persuaded the
Netherlands to recognize American independence--``the happiest event and
the greatest action of my life, past or future.'' ¹² Adams
remained abroad as a member of the peace commission and ambassador to
the Court of St. James until 1788. On his return to the United States,
he found to his surprise that he was widely mentioned as a possible
candidate for the office of vice president of the United
States.¹³

1788 Election

Although George Washington was the inevitable and unanimous choice
for president, there were several contenders for the second office. At
the time of the first federal elections, political sentiment was divided
between the ``Federalists,'' who supported a strong central government
and toward that end had worked to secure the ratification of the
Constitution, and the ``Antifederalist'' advocates of a more limited
national government. Adams was the leading Federalist candidate for vice
president. The New England Federalists strongly supported him, and he
also commanded the allegiance of a few key Antifederalists, including
Arthur Lee and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. Benjamin Rush and William
Maclay of Pennsylvania also backed Adams, hinting that he could assure
his election by supporting their efforts to locate the national capital
in Philadelphia. Other contenders were John Hancock of Massachusetts,
whose support for the new Constitution was predicated on his assumption
that he would assume the second office, and George Clinton, a New York
Antifederalist who later served as vice president under Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison.¹⁴
As much as he coveted the vice-presidency, Adams did not actively
campaign for the office, refusing the deal proffered by Rush and Maclay.
Maclay later explained that the Pennsylvanians played to Adams'
``Vanity, and hoped by laying hold of it to render him Useful.'' They
failed to take into account the strong Puritan sense of moral rectitude
that prevented Adams from striking such a bargain, even to achieve an
office to which he clearly felt entitled. Maclay, who served in the
Senate for the first two years of Adams' initial vice-presidential term,
never forgave Adams and petulantly noted in his diary that the vice
president's ``Pride Obstinacy And Folly'' were ``equal to his Vanity.''
¹⁵
The principal threat to Adams came from Federalist leader Alexander
Hamilton, who perceived in the New Englander's popularity and
uncompromising nature a threat to his own career aspirations. Acting
secretly at Hamilton's behest, General Henry Knox tried but failed to
persuade Adams that he was too prominent a figure in his own right to
serve as Washington's subordinate. When Hamilton realized that Adams
commanded the overwhelming support of the New England Federalists and
could not be dissuaded, he grudgingly backed his rival but resolved that
Adams would not enjoy an overwhelming electoral victory.¹⁶
Hamilton exploited to his advantage the constitutional provision
governing the election of the president and vice president. Article II,
section 1 of the Constitution authorized each presidential elector to
cast votes ``for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an
Inhabitant of the same State with themselves.'' The candidate with the
greatest number of electoral votes would become president and the
candidate with the next-highest number would become vice president. The
Constitution's framers created the vice-presidency, in part, to keep
presidential electors from voting only for state or regional favorites,
thus ensuring deadlocks with no candidate receiving a majority vote. By
giving each presidential elector two ballots, the framers made it
possible to vote for a favorite-son candidate as well as for a more
nationally acceptable individual. In the event that no candidate
received a majority, as some expected would be the case after George
Washington passed from the national stage, the House of Representatives
would decide the election from among the five largest vote getters, with
each state casting one vote.
The framers, however, had not foreseen the potential complications
inherent in this ``double-balloting'' scheme. Hamilton realized that if
each Federalist elector cast one vote for Washington and one for Adams,
the resulting tied vote would throw the election into the House of
Representatives. Hamilton persuaded several electors to withhold their
votes from Adams, ostensibly to ensure Washington a unanimous electoral
victory. Adams was bitterly disappointed when he learned that he had
received only thirty-four electoral votes to Washington's sixty-nine,
and called his election, ``in the scurvy manner in which it was done, a
curse rather than a blessing.'' ¹⁷
Hamilton's duplicity had a more lasting effect on the new vice
president's political fortunes: the election confirmed his fear that
popular elections in ``a populous, oppulent, and commercial nation''
would eventually lead to ``corruption Sedition and civil war.'' The
remedies he suggested--a hereditary senate and an executive appointed
for life ¹⁸--prompted charges by his opponents that the vice
president was the ``monarchist'' enemy of republican government and
popular liberties.

The First Vice President

Adams took office as vice president on April 21, 1789.¹⁹
Apart from his legislative and ceremonial responsibilities, he did not
assume an active role in the Washington administration. Although
relations between the two men were cordial, if somewhat restrained, a
combination of personality, circumstance, and principle limited Adams'
influence. Adams attended few cabinet meetings, and the president sought
his counsel only infrequently.²⁰ Hesitant to take any action
that might be construed as usurping the president's prerogative, he
generally forwarded applications for offices in the new government to
Washington. As president of the Senate, Adams had no reservations about
recommending his friend Samuel Allyne Otis for the position of secretary
of the Senate, but declined to assist Otis' brother-in-law, General
Joseph Warren, and Abigail's brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, in
obtaining much-needed sinecures. Adams was similarly hesitant when
Washington solicited his advice regarding Supreme Court
nominations.²¹
Although Washington rarely consulted Adams on domestic or foreign
policy matters, the two men, according to Adams' most recent biographer,
John Ferling, ``jointly executed many more of the executive branch's
ceremonial undertakings than would be likely for a contemporary
president and vice-president.'' ²² Washington invited the
vice president to accompany him on his fall 1789 tour of New England--an
invitation that Adams declined, although he met the president in
Boston--and to several official dinners. The Washingtons routinely
extended their hospitality to John, and to Abigail when she was in the
capital, and Adams frequently accompanied the president to the
theater.²³
For his own part, Adams professed a narrow interpretation of the
vice president's role in the new government. Shortly after taking
office, he wrote to his friend and supporter Benjamin Lincoln, ``The
Constitution has instituted two great offices . . . and the nation at
large has created two officers: one who is the first of the two . . . is
placed at the Head of the Executive, the other at the Head of the
Legislative.'' The following year, he informed another correspondent
that the office of vice president ``is totally detached from the
executive authority and confined to the legislative.''²⁴
But Adams never really considered himself ``totally detached'' from
the executive branch, as the Senate discovered when he began signing
legislative documents as ``John Adams, Vice President of the United
States.'' Speaking for a majority of the senators, William Maclay of
Pennsylvania quickly called Adams to account. ``[A]s President of the
Senate only can [y]ou sign or authenticate any Act of that body,'' he
lectured the vice president. Uneasy as some senators were at the
prospect of having a member of the executive branch preside over their
deliberations, they would permit Adams to certify legislation as
president of the Senate, but not as vice president. Never one to
acquiesce cheerfully when he believed that important principles were at
stake, Adams struck an awkward compromise, signing Senate documents as
``John Adams, Vice President of the United States and President of the
Senate.'' ²⁵
To the extent that Adams remained aloof from the administration, his
stance was as much the result of personality and prudence as of
principle. He held the president in high personal esteem and generally
deferred to the more forceful Washington as a matter of
course.²⁶ Also, as his biographer Page Smith has explained,
the vice president always feared that he would become a ``scapegoat for
all of Washington's unpopular decisions.'' During the furor over
Washington's 1793 proclamation of American neutrality, a weary Adams
confided to his wife that he had ``held the office of Libellee General
long enough.'' ²⁷
In the Senate, Adams brought energy and dedication to the presiding
officer's chair, but found the task ``not quite adapted to my
character.'' ²⁸ Addressing the Senate for the first time on
April 21, 1789, he offered the caveat that although ``not wholly without
experience in public assemblies,'' he was ``more accustomed to take a
share in their debates, than to preside in their deliberations.''
Notwithstanding his lack of experience as a presiding officer, Adams had
definite notions regarding the limitations of his office. ``It is not
for me,'' he assured the Senate, ``to interrupt your deliberations by
any general observations on the state of the nation, or by recommending,
or proposing any particular measures.'' ²⁹

President of the Senate

Adams' resolve was short-lived. His first incursion into the
legislative realm occurred shortly after he assumed office, during the
Senate debates over titles for the president and executive officers of
the new government. Although the House of Representatives agreed in
short order that the president should be addressed simply as ``George
Washington, President of the United States,'' the Senate debated the
issue at some length. Adams repeatedly lectured the Senate that titles
were necessary to ensure proper respect for the new government and its
officers. Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay complained that when the
Senate considered the matter on May 8, 1789, the vice president
``repeatedly helped the speakers for Titles.'' The following day, Adams
``harangued'' the Senate for forty minutes. ``What will the common
people of foreign countries, what will the sailors and soldiers say,''
he argued, ``George Washington president of the United States, they will
despise him to all eternity.'' The Senate ultimately deferred to the
House on the question of titles, but not before Adams incurred the
lasting enmity of the Antifederalists, who saw in his support for titles
and ceremony distressing evidence of his ``monarchist''
leanings.³⁰
Adams was more successful in preventing the Senate from asserting a
role in the removal of presidential appointees. In the July 14, 1789,
debates over the organization of executive departments, several senators
agreed with William Maclay that removals of cabinet officers by the
president, as well as appointments, should be subject to the advice and
consent of the Senate. Adams and his Federalist allies viewed the
proposal as an attempt by Antifederalists to enhance the Senate's powers
at the expense of the executive. After a series of meetings with
individual senators, Adams finally convinced Tristram Dalton of
Massachusetts to withdraw his support for Maclay's proposal. Richard
Bassett of Delaware followed suit. When the Senate decided the question
on July 18 in a 9-to-9 vote, Adams performed his sole legislative
function by casting a tie-breaking vote against Maclay's
proposal.³¹ His action was purely symbolic in this instance,
however, as a tie vote automatically defeats a measure.
During the protracted debates over the Residence bill to determine
the location of the capital, Adams thwarted another initiative dear to
Maclay's heart: a provision to establish the permanent capital ``along
the banks of the Susquehannah'' in convenient proximity to the
Pennsylvania senator's extensive landholdings. The disgruntled
speculator attributed his defeat to the vice president's tie-breaking
votes and the ``barefaced partiality'' of Adams' rulings from the chair.
Maclay was enraged that Adams allowed frequent delays in the September
24, 1789, debates, which permitted Pennsylvania Senator Robert Morris,
whose sympathies lay with Philadelphia, to lobby other senators against
the Susquehannah site. After Morris' motion to strike the provision
failed, Adams granted his motion to reconsider over Maclay's strenuous
objection that ``no business ever could have a decision, if minority
members, were permitted to move reconsiderations under every pretense of
new argument.'' Adams ultimately cast the deciding vote in favor of
Morris' motion.³²
The vice president's frequent and pedantic lectures from the chair
earned him the resentment of other senators, as well. Shortly after the
second session of the First Congress convened in January 1790, John
Trumbull warned his friend that he faced growing opposition in the
Senate, particularly among the southern senators. Adams' enemies
resented his propensity for joining in Senate debates and suspected him
of ``monarchist'' sentiments. Trumbull cautioned that ``he who mingles
in debate subjects himself to frequent retorts from his opposers, places
himself on the same ground with his inferiors in rank, appears too much
like the leader of a party, and renders it more difficult for him to
support the dignity of the chair and preserve order and regularity in
the debate.'' Although Adams denied that he had ever exceeded the limits
of his authority in the Senate, he must have seen the truth in
Trumbull's observations, for he assured his confidant that he had ``no
desire ever to open my mouth again upon any question.'' Acutely aware of
the controversy over his views and behavior, Adams became less an active
participant and more an impartial moderator of Senate
debates.³³
Although stung by Trumbull's comments and the censure of less
tactful critics, Adams continued to devote a considerable portion of his
time and energy to presiding over the Senate; Abigail Adams observed
that her husband's schedule ``five hours constant sitting in a day for
six months together (for he cannot leave his Chair) is pretty tight
service.'' ³⁴
In the absence of a manual governing Senate debates, Adams looked to
British parliamentary procedures for guidance in deciding questions of
order.³⁵ Despite complaints by some senators that Adams
demonstrated inconsistency in his rulings, Delaware Senator George Read
in 1792 praised his ``attentive, upright, fair, and unexceptionable''
performance as presiding officer, and his ``uncommonly exact''
attendance in the Senate.³⁶
Still, as a national figure and Washington's probable successor,
Adams remained controversial, particularly as legislative political
parties emerged in the 1790s. Although sectional differences had in
large part shaped the debates of the First Congress, two distinct
parties began to develop during the Second Congress in 1791 to 1793. The
Federalists, adopting the name earlier used by supporters of the
Constitution, were the conservative, prosperous advocates of a strong
central government. They supported Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton's proposals to assume and fund the states' revolutionary debts,
encourage manufactures, and establish a Bank of the United States.
Hamilton's fiscal program appealed to the mercantile, financial, and
artisan segments of the population but sparked the growth of an
agrarian-based opposition party--initially known as Antifederalists and
later as ``Republicans''--led by Secretary of State Thomas
Jefferson.³⁷ Adams supported Hamilton's fiscal proposals and,
with the Federalists still firmly in command of the Senate and the
controversy over public finance largely confined to the House of
Representatives, ³⁸ he emerged unscathed from the partisan
battles over fiscal policy.
The outbreak of the French Revolution prompted a more divisive
debate. Republicans greeted the overthrow of the French monarchy with
enthusiasm while the Federalists heard in the revolutionaries'
egalitarian rhetoric a threat to the order and stability of Europe and
America. France's 1793 declaration of war on Great Britain further
polarized the argument, with the Republicans celebrating each British
defeat, the Federalists dreading the consequences of a French victory,
and both belligerents preying on American shipping at will. While
Washington attempted to hold the United States to a neutral course, his
vice president--who considered political parties ``the greatest
political evil under our Constitution,'' and whose greatest fear was ``a
division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its
leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other''--became,
as he had anticipated, the target of concerted Republican
opposition.³⁹
Adams articulated his thoughts on the French Revolution and its
implications for the United States in a series of newspaper essays, the
Discourses on Davila. He predicted that the revolution, having abolished
the aristocratic institutions necessary to preserve stability and order,
was doomed to failure. He warned that the United States would share a
similar fate if it failed to honor and encourage with titles and
appropriate ceremony its own ``natural aristocracy'' of talented and
propertied public men. Adams even went so far as to predict that a
hereditary American aristocracy would be necessary in the event that the
``natural'' variety failed to emerge. The Davila essays were consistent
with Adams' longstanding belief that a strong stabilizing force--a
strong executive, a hereditary senate, or a natural aristocracy--was an
essential bulwark of popular liberties. They also reflected his recent
humiliation at the hands of Alexander Hamilton. Still smarting from his
low electoral count in the 1788 presidential election, Adams observed in
the thirty-second essay that ``hereditary succession was attended with
fewer evils than frequent elections.'' As Peter Shaw has noted in his
study of Adams' character, ``it would be difficult to imagine . . . a
more impolitic act.'' The Discourses on Davila, together with Adams'
earlier support for titles and ceremony, convinced his Republican
opponents that he was an enemy of republican government. Rumors that
Washington would resign his office once the government was established
on a secure footing, and his near death from influenza in the spring of
1790, added to the Republicans' anxiety. In response, they mounted an
intense but unsuccessful campaign to unseat Adams in the 1792
presidential election.⁴⁰

Second Term

Persuaded by Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison to run for a second
term, George Washington was again the obvious and unanimous choice for
president. Adams was still the preferred vice-presidential candidate of
the New England Federalists, but he faced a serious challenge from
Republican candidate George Clinton of New York. Although many of his
earlier supporters, including Benjamin Rush, joined the opposition in
support of Clinton, Adams won reelection with 77 electoral votes to 50
for Clinton.⁴¹ On March 4, 1793, in the Senate chamber,
Washington took the oath of office for a second time. Adams, as always,
followed Washington's example but waited until the Third Congress
convened on December 2, 1793, to take his second oath of office. No one,
apparently, gave much thought to the question of whether or not the
nation had a vice president--and a successor to Washington, should he
die in office or become incapacitated--during the nine-month interval
between these two inaugurations.⁴²
Early in Adams' second vice-presidential term, France declared war
on Great Britain. Washington's cabinet supported the president's policy
of neutrality, but its members disagreed over the implementation of that
policy. Hamilton urged the president to issue an immediate proclamation
of American neutrality; Jefferson warned that only Congress could issue
such a declaration and counseled that delaying the proclamation would
force concessions from France and England. Recognizing the United
States' commercial dependence on Great Britain, Hamilton proposed that
the nation conditionally suspend the treaties that granted France access
to U. S. ports and guaranteed French possession of the West Indies.
Secretary of State Jefferson insisted that the United States honor its
treaty obligations. The secretaries similarly disagreed over extending
recognition to the emissary of the French republic, ``Citizen'' Edmond
Genet.
Adams considered absolute neutrality the only prudent course. As a
Federalist, he was no supporter of France, but his reluctance to offend
a former ally led him to take a more cautious stance than Hamilton.
Although Washington sought his advice, Adams scrupulously avoided public
comment; he had ``no constitutional vote'' in the matter and no
intention of ``taking any side in it or having my name or opinion quoted
about it.'' ⁴³ After the president decided to recognize
Genet, Adams reluctantly received the controversial Frenchman but
predicted that ``a little more of this indelicacy and indecency may
involve us in a war with all the world.'' ⁴⁴
Although Adams, as vice president, had ``no constitutional vote'' in
the administration's foreign policy, he cast two important tie-breaking
foreign policy votes in the Senate, where Republican gains in the 1792
elections had eroded the Federalist majority. In both cases, Adams voted
to prevent war with Great Britain and its allies. On March 12, 1794, he
voted in favor of an embargo on the domestic sale of vessels and goods
seized from friendly nations. The following month, he voted against a
bill to suspend American trade with Great Britain.⁴⁵ Despite
these votes, Adams made every effort to stay aloof from the bitter
controversy over foreign policy, remaining silent during the Senate's
1795 debates over the controversial Jay Treaty. Privately, Adams
considered the Jay Treaty essential to avert war with Great Britain, but
the Federalists still commanded sufficient votes to ratify the treaty
without the vice president's assistance.⁴⁶

1796 Election

The popular outcry against the Jay Treaty strengthened Washington's
resolve to retire at the end of his second term, and he announced his
intentions in September 1796. Although the majority of the Federalists
considered Adams the logical choice to succeed Washington, Hamilton
preferred their more pliant vice-presidential candidate, former minister
to Great Britain Thomas Pinckney. The Republican candidates were Thomas
Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Once again Hamilton proved a greater threat to
Adams than the opposition candidates. The Federalists lost the vice-
presidency because of Hamilton's scheming and came dangerously close to
losing the presidency as well. Repeating the tactics he had used to
diminish Adams' electoral count in the 1788 election, Hamilton tried to
persuade South Carolina's Federalist electors to withhold enough votes
from Adams to ensure Thomas Pinckney's election to the presidency. This
time, however, the New England Federalist electors learned of Hamilton's
plot and withheld sufficient votes from Pinckney to compensate for the
lost South Carolina votes. These intrigues resulted in the election of a
president and vice president from opposing parties, with president-elect
Adams receiving 71 electoral votes to 68 for Thomas
Jefferson.⁴⁷
Vice president Adams addressed the Senate for the last time on
February 15, 1797. He thanked current and former members for the
``candor and favor'' they had extended to him during his eight years as
presiding officer. Despite the frustrations and difficulties he had
experienced as vice president, Adams left the presiding officer's chair
with a genuine regard for the Senate that was in large part mutual. He
expressed gratitude to the body for the ``uniform politeness'' accorded
him ``from every quarter,'' and declared that he had ``never had the
smallest misunderstanding with any member of the Senate.''
Notwithstanding his earlier pronouncements in favor of a hereditary
Senate, Adams assured the members that the ``eloquence, patriotism, and
independence'' that he had witnessed had convinced him that ``no council
more permanent than this . . . will be necessary, to defend the rights,
liberties, and properties of the people, and to protect the Constitution
of the United States.'' The Senate's February 22 message expressing
``gratitude and affection'' and praising his ``abilities and undeviating
impartiality'' evoked a frank and emotional response from Adams the
following day. The Senate's ``generous approbation'' of his
``undeviating impartiality'' had served to ``soften asperities, and
conciliate animosities, wherever such may unhappily exist,'' for which
the departing vice president offered his ``sincere thanks.''
⁴⁸

President

Adams served as president from 1797 to 1801. He failed to win a
second term due to the popular outcry against the repressive Alien and
Sedition Acts, which he had reluctantly approved as necessary wartime
measures, as well as the rupture in the Federalist party over the end of
hostilities with France. Hamilton was determined to defeat Adams after
the president responded favorably to French overtures for peace in 1799,
and he was further outraged when Adams purged two of his sympathizers
from the cabinet in May 1800. In a letter to Federalist leaders,
Hamilton detailed his charges that Adams' ``ungovernable indiscretion''
and ``distempered jealousy'' made him unfit for office. With the
Federalist party split between the Hamilton and Adams factions, Adams
lost the election. After thirty-five ballots, the House of
Representatives broke the tied vote between Republican presidential
candidate Thomas Jefferson and vice-presidential candidate Aaron Burr in
Jefferson's favor.⁴⁹
Adams spent the remainder of his life in retirement at his farm in
Quincy, Massachusetts. In an attempt to vindicate himself from past
charges that he was an enemy of American liberties, Adams in 1804 began
his Autobiography, which he never finished. He also wrote voluminous
letters to friends and former colleagues toward the same end. In 1811,
Adams resumed his friendship with Jefferson, and the two old patriots
began a lively correspondence that continued for fifteen years. Although
largely content to observe political events from the seclusion of Quincy
and to follow the promising career of his eldest son, John Quincy, Adams
briefly resumed his own public career in 1820, when he represented the
town of Quincy in the Massachusetts constitutional convention. Adams
died at Quincy on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of American
independence.⁵⁰
JOHN ADAMS

NOTES

¹ Linda Dudik Guerrero, in her study of Adams' vice
presidency, found that Adams cast ``at least'' thirty-one votes, a
figure accepted by Adams' most recent biographer. The Senate Historical
Office has been able to verify only twenty-nine tie-breaking votes by
Adams--still a record, although George Dallas claimed that he cast
thirty tie-breaking votes during his vice-presidency (See Chapter 11,
page 158 and note 35). Linda Dudik Guerrero, John Adams' Vice
Presidency, 1789-1797: The Neglected Man in the Forgotten Office (New
York, 1982), p. 128; U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate 1789-1989, by
Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 4,
Historical Statistics, 1789-1992, 1993, p. 640; John Ferling, John
Adams: A Life (Knoxville, 1992), p. 311.
² Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill,
1976), pp.1-6; Page Smith, John Adams (Westport, CT, 1969, reprint of
1962-1963 ed.), 1:1-14.
³ Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L.H.
Butterfield, The Adams Papers, Series I (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 263-64;
Smith, 1:27-43.
⁴ Shaw, pp. 43-46; Smith, 1:54-80; Theodore Draper, A
Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (New York, 1996), pp. 184-
89.
⁵ Smith, 1:80-81.
⁶ Shaw, p. 57; Smith, 1:94-104.
⁷ Shaw, pp. 58-85; Smith, 1:121-26.
⁸ Shaw, pp. 94-98; Ferling, pp. 149-50.
⁹ Shaw, pp. 106-7; Smith, 1:266-67, 285-350.
¹⁰ Shaw, pp. 128-30; Smith, 1:438-44.
¹¹ Shaw, pp. 218-22.
¹² Ibid., pp. 131-63; Smith, 1:444-535.
¹³ Shaw, pp. 157-225.
¹⁴ Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, eds., The Diary
of William Maclay and Other Notes On Senate Debates, Documentary History
of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, vol. 9
(Baltimore, 1988), pp. 85-86; Smith, 2:734-37.
¹⁵ Diary of William Maclay, pp. 85-86; Shaw, p. 225,
Smith, 2:737-39.
¹⁶ Smith, 2:739-41.
¹⁷ Ibid., 2:739-42.
¹⁸ Shaw, pp. 231-32.
¹⁹ Linda Grant De Pauw, Charlene Bangs Bickford, and
LaVonne Marlene Siegel, eds., Senate Legislative Journal, Documentary
History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America,
vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1972), pp. 21-23.
²⁰ Shaw, p. 226; Guerrero, pp. 169-83.
²¹ John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of
John Adams (Princeton, 1966), pp. 212-13; Shaw, p. 288; Smith, 2:761-63;
``Biographical Sketches of the Twenty-Two Secretaries of the United
States Senate,'' undated report prepared by the U.S. Senate Historical
Office. In 1789, Adams asked Washington to appoint his improvident son-
in-law, Colonel William Smith, federal marshal for New York--a request
that the president obliged. In 1791, Adams sought Smith's appointment as
minister to Great Britain. Although the president did not send Smith to
the Court of St. James, he subsequently named Smith supervisor of
revenue for New York. Adams' concern for his daughter ``Nabby'' and her
children prompted these rare departures from his customary practice.
Ferling, pp. 323-24; Guerrero, p. 82, fn. 41.
²² Ferling, p. 310.
²³ Ibid.; Guerrero, pp. 166-69.
²⁴ John Adams to Lincoln, May 26, 1789, and John Adams to
Hurd, April 5, 1790, quoted in Guerrero, p. 185.
²⁵ David P. Currie, ``The Constitution in Congress: The
First Congress and the Structure of Government, 1789-1791,'' University
of Chicago Law School Roundtable 2 (1995): 161.
²⁶ Howe, p. 212; Ferling, p. 310.
²⁷ Smith, 2:763, 842-43.
²⁸ Ibid., 2:769.
²⁹ Senate Legislative Journal, pp. 21-23.
³⁰ Senate Legislative Journal, pp. 44-45; Howe, 176-79;
Diary of William Maclay, pp. 27-32; Shaw, pp. 227-30.
³¹ Senate Legislative Journal, pp. 83-87; Smith, 2:774-
76; Diary of William Maclay, pp. 109-19.
³² Diary of William Maclay, pp. 132-35, 152-64.
³³ Smith, 2:788-91.
³⁴ Quoted in U.S., Congress, Senate, The United States
Senate, 1787-1801: A Dissertation on the First Fourteen Years of the
Upper Legislative Body, by Roy Swanstrom, S. Doc. 100-31, 100th Cong.,
1st sess., 1988, p. 254.
³⁵ Richard Allan Baker, ``The Senate of the United
States: `Supreme Executive Council of the Nation,' 1787-1800,'' in The
Congress of the United States, 1789-1989, vol. 1, ed. Joel Silbey
(Brooklyn, NY, 1991), p. 148, originally published in Prologue 21
(Winter 1989): 299-313; Diary of William Maclay, p. 36.
³⁶ George Read to Gunning Bedford, quoted in Swanstrom,
p. 254.
³⁷ John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 (New
York, 1963; reprint of 1960 ed.), pp. 99-125.
³⁸ Howe, p. 197; Swanstrom, pp. 274-76.
³⁹ Howe, 193-97; Miller, pp. 126-54.
⁴⁰ Howe, pp. 133-49; Shaw, pp. 229-37; Smith, 2:794, 826-
33.
⁴¹ Miller, p. 96; Smith, 2:826-33.
⁴² Stephen W. Stathis and Ronald C. Moe, ``America's
Other Inauguration,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 10 (Fall 1980):
552.
⁴³ Miller, pp. 128-30; Smith, 2:838-44.
⁴⁴ Smith, 2:845.
⁴⁵ Miller, p. 154; Smith, 2:853; U.S., Congress, Senate,
Annals of Congress, 3d Cong., 1st sess., pp. 66, 90.
⁴⁶ Smith, 2:873-75; Swanstrom, pp. 120-23.
⁴⁷ Miller, pp. 198-202; Smith, 2:898-910.
⁴⁸ U.S., Congress, Senate, Annals of Congress, 4th Cong.,
2d sess., pp. 1549-58.
⁴⁹ Miller, pp. 251-77; Smith, 2:1056-62.
⁵⁰ Smith, 2:1067-1138.
?

Chapter 2

THOMAS JEFFERSON

1797-1801

THOMAS JEFFERSON
THOMAS JEFFERSON

Chapter 2

THOMAS JEFFERSON

2nd Vice President: 1797-1801

. . . a more tranquil & unoffending station could not
have been found for me. . . . It will give me philosophical
evenings in the winter, & rural days in the summer.
--Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, January 22, 1797
¹
Thomas Jefferson entered an ill-defined vice-presidency on March 4,
1797. For guidance on how to conduct himself, he had to rely on a brief
reference in the U.S. Constitution, the eight-year experience of John
Adams, and his own common sense. Of a profoundly different political and
personal temperament from his predecessor, Jefferson knew his
performance in that relatively new office would influence its operations
well into the future. Unlike Adams, who shared the political beliefs of
the president with whom he served, Jefferson and his president belonged
to different political parties--a situation that would prove to be
unique in all the nation's history. No one who knew the two men expected
that Vice President Jefferson would be inclined to serve as President
Adams' principal assistant. More likely, he would confine his duties to
presiding over the Senate and offering leadership to his anti-
administration Republican party in quiet preparation for the election of
1800.²

Scholar and Legislator

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, in what is now
Albemarle County, Virginia. He was the third child of Peter Jefferson, a
surveyor, and Jane Randolph, daughter of a distinguished Virginia
family. Classical languages formed the base of his early formal
education. A thorough and diligent student, inspired by the
Enlightenment's belief in the power of reason to govern human behavior,
Jefferson graduated from the College of William and Mary after only two
years, at the age of nineteen. Dr. William Small, the chair of
mathematics at the college, helped cultivate Jefferson's intellectual
interests, especially in science. In addition to his academic pursuits,
young Thomas excelled as a horseman and violinist. He studied law under
George Wythe, Virginia's most eminent legal scholar of that era.
Admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767, Jefferson maintained a successful
practice until abandoning the legal profession at the start of the
American Revolution.³
Jefferson's political career began in May 1769 when he became a
member of the Virginia house of burgesses. He served there until the
body was dissolved in 1775. While not considered an effective public
speaker, Jefferson gained a reputation as a gifted writer. Unable to
attend the Virginia convention of 1774, he sent instructions for the
Virginia delegates to the first Continental Congress. These proposals,
eventually published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America,
asserted that the American colonies' only legitimate political
connection to Great Britain was through the king, to whom they had
submitted voluntarily, and not to Parliament.
In 1775, the thirty-two-year-old Jefferson gained a seat in the
Continental Congress, where he was appointed to a committee to draft a
declaration of independence from the mother country. He became the
declaration's principal author and later counted it, along with
establishment of the University of Virginia and creation of the Virginia
statute for Religious Freedom, among his three proudest lifetime
accomplishments. The Declaration of Independence and the Summary View
ensured Jefferson's standing in the mid-1770s as the American
Revolution's most significant literary theorist.
After spending less than a year in the Continental Congress,
Jefferson resigned that post and entered the Virginia house of
delegates. While he produced an admirable legislative record during his
service from October 1776 to June 1779, his tenure as Virginia's
governor from 1779 to mid-1781 was less successful. Although the
Virginia assembly had made sizeable contributions to the Continental
effort, it failed to make adequate provision for local defenses, and the
state offered only token resistance to the British invasion in early
1781. Jefferson narrowly escaped capture, fleeing on horseback as Lt.
Col. Banastre Tarleton's forces ascended Carter's Mountain toward
Monticello, two days after his gubernatorial term expired but before the
Virginia legislature could designate a successor. Jefferson had already
decided not to seek reelection to a third term, but his perceived
abdication at this critical juncture earned him considerable scorn. The
Virginia house of delegates immediately ordered an investigation of his
conduct, only to join with the state Senate in exonerating the former
governor after he appeared before both houses six months later to
explain his actions. Deeply mortified by the public scrutiny and
increasingly alarmed by his wife's serious illness, Jefferson retreated
to Monticello.⁴
In what proved to be a temporary retirement from public life,
Jefferson turned his attention to farming and scientific endeavors--
pursuits that he found more enjoyable. During this time, he organized
and published his Notes on the State of Virginia, which his preeminent
biographer, Dumas Malone, believed ``laid the foundations of Jefferson's
high contemporary reputation as a universal scholar and of his enduring
fame as a pioneer American scientist.'' ⁵
On the death of his wife Martha in September 1782, Jefferson
returned to public life. In June of the following year he became a
delegate to the Congress under the Articles of Confederation and served
on several major committees. During his service, he prepared various
influential committee papers, including a report of March 22, 1784,
calling for prohibition of slavery in the western territory after the
year 1800. The report also declared illegal any western regional
secession. Although Congress did not adopt the report as presented,
Jefferson's language subsequently influenced the drafting of the 1787
Northwest Ordinance with its highly significant slavery restrictions.

Diplomacy and the Cabinet

Jefferson prepared a report in December 1783 on the procedure for
negotiating commercial treaties. His recommendations became general
practice, and in May 1784 Congress appointed him to assist Benjamin
Franklin in arranging commercial agreements with France. Within a year
he succeeded Franklin as minister to that country. While Jefferson would
later make light of his accomplishments during his ministerial tenure,
he proved to be a talented diplomat. Following his own pro-French
leanings, and his belief that France could serve to counter Britain's
threat to American interests, Jefferson worked hard for improved
relations.
On returning home in December 1789, Jefferson accepted President
George Washington's appointment to be the nation's first secretary of
state. Progressively harsher disputes with Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton troubled his tenure in that office. Their differences extended
from financial policy to foreign affairs and grew out of fundamentally
conflicting interpretations of the Constitution and the scope of federal
power.
The rise of two rudimentary political groupings during the early
1790s reflected Hamilton's and Jefferson's differing philosophical
views. Formed generally along sectional lines, these early parties were
known as Federalists (with strong support in the North and East) and
Republicans (with a southern base). In later years the Republicans would
come to be called ``Democrats,'' but in the 1790s, that term carried a
negative connotation associated with mob rule.⁶
In May 1790, Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay, with his
customarily acerbic pen, recorded the following physical description of
the secretary of state:
When I came to the Hall Jefferson and the rest of the Committee
were there. Jefferson is a slender Man [and] has rather the Air of
Stiffness in his Manner. His cloaths seem too small for him. He sits
in a lounging Manner on One hip, commonly, and with one of his
shoulders elevated much above the other. His face has a scrany
aspect. His Whole figure has a loose shackling Air. He had a
rambling Vacant look & nothing of that firm collected deportment
which I expected would dignify the presence of a Secretary or
Minister. I looked for gravity, but a laxity of Manner, seemed shed
about him. He spoke almost without ceasing, but even his discourse
partook of his personal demeanor. It was lax & rambling and Yet he
scattered information wherever he went, and some even brilliant
sentiments sparkled from him.⁷
Worn out from his battles with Hamilton, Jefferson resigned as
secretary of state at the end of 1793 and handed leadership of the
emerging Republican party to his fellow Virginian James Madison. For the
next three years, Madison worked to strengthen the party in Congress,
transforming it from a reactive faction to a positive political force
with its own distinctive programs and, by April 1796, a congressional
party caucus to establish legislative priorities.⁸

The 1796 Election

When President Washington announced in September 1796 that he would
not run for a third term, a caucus of Federalists in Congress selected
Vice President Adams as their presidential candidate. Congressional
Republicans turned to Jefferson as the only person capable of defeating
Adams, who enjoyed a strong following in New England and was closely
associated with the success of the American Revolution.⁹
Jefferson had told friends in 1793 that his ``retirement from office had
meant from all office, high or low, without exception.'' ¹⁰
While he continued to hold those views in 1796, he reluctantly allowed
Republican leader Madison to advance his candidacy--in part to block the
ambitions of his archrival, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson confided to
Madison that he hoped he would receive either the second- or third-
largest number of electoral votes. A third-place finish would allow him
to remain home the entire year, while a second-place result--making him
the vice president--would permit him to stay home two-thirds of the
year.¹¹ Jefferson made no effort to influence the outcome. He
believed that Madison, as an active party leader, would have been a more
suitable candidate. But even though Jefferson had left the political
stage more than two years earlier, he remained the symbol of Republican
values--in no small part due to Hamilton's unremitting attacks.
In devising the constitutional system that obligated each
presidential elector to cast two ballots, the framers intended to
produce a winning candidate for president who enjoyed a broad national
consensus and, in second place, a vice president with at least strong
regional support. They assumed that electors would give one vote to a
home state favorite, reserving the second for a person of national
reputation, but this view failed to anticipate the development of
political parties. Thus the framers apparently gave little consideration
to the potential for competing slates of candidates--seen for the first
time in the 1796 presidential contest.
As part of a strategy to erode Jefferson's southern support, the
Federalists selected as Adams' running mate Thomas Pinckney of South
Carolina, author of the popular 1795 treaty with Spain.¹²
Hamilton, Adams' bitter rival within the Federalist party, encouraged
Federalist electors in the North to give both their votes to Adams and
Pinckney. On the safe assumption that Pinckney would draw more votes
than Adams from the other regions, and recognizing that Jefferson lacked
support north and east of the Delaware River, Hamilton mistakenly
concluded this tactic would assure Pinckney's election.¹³
Adams' supporters countered Hamilton's plan by convincing a number of
their party's electors to vote for someone other than Pinckney. As a
result, Adams won the presidency with 71 of a possible 138 electoral
votes. But Jefferson with 68 votes, rather than Pinckney with 59 votes,
became vice president. Aaron Burr, the Republican vice-presidential
contender, received only 30 votes, while 48 other votes were scattered
among nine minor candidates.¹⁴ This election produced the
first and only mixed-party presidential team in the nation's history.
Not looking forward to reentering the political fray and feeling
unprepared to assume presidential responsibilities for foreign policy at
a time when relations with European nations were strained, Jefferson may
have been the only person in the history of American politics to
celebrate the fact that he lost a presidential election. He preferred
the quietness of the vice-presidency. He wrote Benjamin Rush, ``a more
tranquil & unoffending station could not have been found for me.'' And
he told James Madison, ``I think they [foreign affairs] never wore so
gloomy an aspect since the year 83. Let those come to the helm who think
they can steer clear of the difficulties. I have no confidence in myself
for the undertaking.'' ¹⁵ In a classic assessment of the
presidency's thankless nature, Jefferson wrote Edward Rutledge, ``I know
well that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which
carries him into it. The honey moon would be as short in that case as in
any other, & its moments of extasy would be ransomed by years of torment
& hatred.'' ¹⁶

Vice President

On February 8, 1797, Vice President Adams, as one of his final
official duties, presided over a joint session of Congress in the Senate
chamber to tally electoral votes for the nation's two highest offices.
To his obvious satisfaction, he announced his own victory for the first
office and that of Thomas Jefferson for the second.¹⁷ When
the confirming news of his election reached Jefferson in Virginia, he
initially hoped to avoid the trip to Philadelphia by seeking a senator
who would administer the oath of office at his home.¹⁸ But
rumors were beginning to spread that Jefferson considered the vice-
presidency beneath his dignity. To quash that mistaken notion, the
Virginian decided to attend the inauguration; but he requested that
local officials downplay his arrival at the capital. Despite these
wishes, an artillery company and a sixteen-gun salute greeted Jefferson
on March 2 at the completion of his arduous ten-day journey by horseback
and stage coach. He stayed the first night with James Madison and then
moved to a nearby hotel for the remainder of his week-and-a-half visit.
The Senate convened at 10 a.m. on Saturday, March 4, in its ornate
chamber on the second floor of Congress Hall at the corner of Sixth and
Chestnut Streets. As the first order of business, Senate President Pro
Tempore William Bingham administered the brief oath to the new vice
president. Over six feet tall, with reddish hair and hazel eyes, and
attired in a single-breasted long blue frock coat, Jefferson established
a commanding presence as he in turn swore in the eight newly elected
members among the twenty-seven senators who were present that day. He
then read a brief inaugural address.
In that address Jefferson apologized in advance for any shortcomings
members might perceive in the conduct of his duties. Anticipating the
role that would most define his vice-presidential legacy, Jefferson
promised that he would approach his duties as presiding officer with
``more confidence because it will depend on my will and not my
capacity.'' He continued:
The rules which are to govern the proceedings of this House, so
far as they shall depend on me for their application, shall be
applied with the most rigorous and inflexible impartiality,
regarding neither persons, their views, nor principles, and seeing
only the abstract proposition subject to my decision. If in forming
that decision, I concur with some and differ from others, as must of
necessity happen, I shall rely on the liberality and candor of those
from whom I differ, to believe that I do it on pure motives.
Having devoted half of his less than three-minute speech to his role
as presiding officer, Jefferson briefly referred to the Constitution and
its defense. But he quickly returned to his own more limited station,
supposing that ``these declarations [are] not pertinent to the occasion
of entering into an office whose primary business is merely to preside
over the forms of this House.'' ¹⁹ Concluding his remarks,
Jefferson led the Senate downstairs to the House of Representatives'
chamber to attend President-elect Adams' inaugural address and
subsequent oath-taking.
Three potential roles awaited the new vice president in his as yet
only marginally defined office. He could serve as an assistant to the
president; he could concentrate on his constitutional duties as the
Senate's presiding officer; or he could become an active leader of the
Republican party. Jefferson had no interest in being an assistant to the
chief executive. He told Elbridge Gerry that he considered his office
``constitutionally confined to legislative functions,'' ²⁰
and he hoped those functions would not keep him away from his cherished
Monticello. In any event, the job provided a comfortable and needed
regular salary--$5,000 paid in quarterly installments.²¹
Adams and Jefferson started off cordially. The Virginian, having
enjoyed Adams' friendship in the second Continental Congress and while
in retirement at Monticello, set out to forge a good public relationship
with him as his vice president. Although he realized that they would
probably disagree on many issues, Jefferson deeply respected Adams'
prior service to the nation.²²
On the eve of their inaugurations, Adams and Jefferson met briefly
to discuss the possibility of sending Jefferson to France as part of a
three-member delegation to calm the increasingly turbulent relations
between the two countries. When the two men concluded that this would be
an improper role for the vice president, they agreed on substituting
Jefferson's political ally, James Madison. The bond between president
and vice president seemed--for the moment--particularly close.
Several days after the inauguration, Jefferson encountered the
president at a dinner party. He took the opportunity to report that
Madison was not interested in the diplomatic mission to France. Adams
replied that, in any event, he would not have been able to select
Madison because of pressure from within his cabinet to appoint a
Federalist. This confirmed Jefferson's view that the new president
lacked his own political compass and was too easily swayed by partisan
advisers. Thereafter, Adams never consulted Jefferson on an issue of
national significance.²³ For his part, the vice president
turned exclusively to his political role as leader of the Republicans
and to his governmental duty as the Senate's presiding officer.
While in Philadelphia to commence his vice-presidential duties,
Jefferson acceded to a second leadership position--the presidency of the
American Philosophical Society. Conveniently located near Congress Hall,
this august scientific and philosophical body counted among its previous
leaders Benjamin Franklin and mathematician David Rittenhouse. Jefferson
attained the post on the strength of his Notes on the State of Virginia
(first English edition, 1787), which secured his reputation as a
preeminent scholar and scientist and is today considered ``the most
important scientific work published in America in the eighteenth
century.'' ²⁴ Within days of his inaugural address to the
Senate, Jefferson delivered his presidential address to the society--a
task that he found considerably more gratifying. His subject: the
recently discovered fossil remains of a large animal, found in western
Virginia, that he called the ``Megalonyx'' or ``Great Claw.''
²⁵ Jefferson would preside over the society until 1815. He
considered his contributions to its proceedings among his proudest
endeavors.

A Republican Leader

After his inauguration, Jefferson had written to Aaron Burr (the
former New York senator and intended vice-presidential candidate on the
Republican ticket) to complain about the partisan direction of the new
Federalist administration and seek his aid in building Republican
support in the northeast. This move signalled Jefferson's intention to
play an active political role during his vice-presidency. With James
Madison retired from the House of Representatives and the new House
leader, Albert Gallatin, preoccupied with the nation's financial
problems, Jefferson stood as the country's preeminent Republican leader.
Considering himself separate from the executive branch, he felt free to
criticize the Adams administration. Yet, to avoid public controversy, he
limited his criticism to private communications with political allies,
particularly after the distortion of a letter he had written in April
1796 to the Italian intellectual Philip Mazzei.
In that letter, composed as Federalists and Republicans battled over
the pro-British Jay Treaty, Jefferson had complained about the
Federalists as ``an Anglican monarchical, and aristocratical party''
whose intention was to impose the substance of British government, as
well as its forms, on the United States. Federalists in high government
posts were ``timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the
boisterous sea of liberty.'' ²⁶ A translated version of his
strongly worded communication appeared in several European newspapers
and in a May 1797 edition of the New York Minerva. Liberties taken in
translation served only to increase the letter's tone of partisan
intemperance. Federalists offered the letter as evidence of the vice
president's demagoguery, and the affair increased animosity between the
political parties. Unhappy with the consequences of the Mazzei letter,
Jefferson cautioned all future correspondents to ``[t]ake care that
nothing from my letters gets into the newspapers.'' ²⁷
Although Jefferson greatly respected the institution of the Senate,
he had little affection for the Federalist senators over whom he
presided. The Federalists enjoyed a 22-to-10 majority in 1797 and
Jefferson expected the worst. Fearing that the majority might routinely
employ the Senate's power to try impeachments to quiet senators who
harbored contrary views, Jefferson took more than a passing interest in
the impeachment proceedings against his fellow Republican, former
Tennessee senator William Blount, whose trial he presided over in
December 1798. Almost a year earlier, as the Senate worked to establish
rules and procedures for the first impeachment trial, the vice president
had secretly reinforced Virginia Senator Henry Tazewell's argument that
Blount had a Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, providing precedents
he extracted from the parliamentary writings of William Blackstone and
Richard Woddeson. ``The object in supporting this engraftment into
impeachments,'' he wrote Tazewell on January 27, 1798, ``is to lessen
the dangers of the court of impeachment under its present form & to
induce dispositions in all parties in favor of a better constituted
court of impeachment, which I own I consider as an useful thing, if so
composed as to be clear of the spirit of faction.'' Anxious to conceal
his role in the Republican effort to circumscribe the impeachment power,
he cautioned Tazewell, ``Do not let the enclosed paper be seen in my
handwriting.'' ²⁸ A month later, after Tazewell's effort
failed, Jefferson confided to Madison that the Federalists ``consider
themselves as the bulwarks of the government, and will be rendering that
the more secure, in proportion as they can assume greater powers.''
²⁹

Alien and Sedition Acts

Deteriorating relations with France preoccupied the government
during Jefferson's vice-presidency and fostered anti-French sentiment at
home. No one event caused the conflict, but a decree of the ruling
Directory and a series of French proposals fueled the spreading fire.
The decree declared that neutral ships with English merchandise or
commodities could be seized. Congress, in turn, sought to protect
American commerce by authorizing the arming of private vessels.
In what proved to be a futile attempt to improve relations,
President Adams sent three envoys to France. When they reached Paris in
October 1797, however, the French government refused to receive them
until they satisfied requirements that the Americans considered
insulting. Minor French officials--publicly labeled ``X, Y, and Z''--met
with the envoys and presented proposals that included a request for a
$12 million loan and a $250,000 bribe in exchange for recognition of the
United States and the establishment of formal ties. Despite his
sympathies for France, Jefferson viewed the proposals as a supreme
insult, yet he understood that a war could undermine the nation's newly
set constitutional foundations and strengthen the pro-British Federalist
leadership.
The publication in April 1798 of what became known as the ``XYZ
papers'' produced widespread anger and created a frenzied atmosphere in
which overzealous patriotism flourished. In an effort to restore their
party's popularity, Federalist legislators--recently the targets of
public scorn for their support of the unpopular Jay treaty with
England--seized on the anti-French hostility that the XYZ affair had
generated. Federalists in Congress, their numbers expanded in response
to public anger against France, quickly passed a series of tough
measures to set the nation on a war footing. Most notorious of these
statutes were the Sedition Act, the Naturalization Act, and the Alien
Act, all viewed by their Republican opponents as distinctly partisan
measures to curtail individual rights.³⁰
The Senate approved the Sedition Act on July 4, 1798, in the final
days of the Fifth Congress after Jefferson had left for Virginia. The
statute curtailed the rights of Americans to criticize their government
and provided punishment for any person writing, uttering, or publishing
``any false, scandalous and malicious writing'' against the president or
Congress with the intent of inflaming public passions against
them.³¹ The Federalists immediately invoked the law's
provisions to suppress Republican criticism.
The Naturalization Act was also a decidedly partisan measure in that
it targeted immigrants, who tended to support the Republican party, by
lengthening the residency requirements for U.S. citizenship from five to
fourteen years.³² Finally, President Adams, on June 25, 1798,
signed a third repressive law passed by the Federalist Congress. The
Alien Act, which Jefferson called ``a most detestable thing,''
authorized the president, acting unilaterally, to deport any noncitizen
whom he viewed as ``dangerous to the peace and safety of the United
States.'' ³³ Adams never exercised this power, but the Act
inflamed the dispute over the scope of presidential power in the young
nation.
Jefferson recognized that these measures raised fundamental
questions regarding the division of sovereignty between the national and
state governments and the means for settling disputes between the two
levels of government. As vice president and head of the party that this
legislation was designed to restrain, Jefferson found himself powerless
at the national level to combat these measures that he believed were
``so palpably in the teeth of the Constitution as to shew they mean to
pay no respect to it.'' ³⁴
Looking to the states to provide an arena for constructive action,
Jefferson drafted a set of resolutions assailing these acts as
unconstitutional violations of human rights.³⁵ He sent them
to Wilson Nicholas, a member of the Virginia assembly, with a request
that he arrange for their introduction in the North Carolina
legislature. By chance, Nicholas encountered John Breckinridge, a member
of the Kentucky house of representatives, many of whose members strongly
opposed these repressive laws. Breckinridge agreed to introduce
Jefferson's resolutions in his legislature while keeping their author's
identity secret.
The first sentence of Jefferson's ``Kentucky Resolutions'' asserted:
That the several states composing the United States of America
are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their
general government, but that, by a compact under the style and title
of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto,
they constituted a general government for special purposes,--
delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving,
each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-
government; and that whensoever the general government assumes
undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no
force.³⁶
Although the vice president had no desire to subvert the Union, his
suggestion that any state had the power to nullify a federal law if it
determined the legislation to be unconstitutional harbored grave
consequences for the nation's stability. He also argued that the federal
judiciary should not decide issues of constitutionality because it was a
partisan arm of the federal government. Jefferson did not specifically
call for the nullification of the Alien and Sedition acts, but he did
use the word ``nullify,'' which was subsequently dropped from the
version of the resolution that the Kentucky legislature adopted in
November 1798.
The Virginia legislature passed similar measures prepared in a less
strident form by James Madison who, like Jefferson, found the Sedition
and Alien laws to be constitutionally flawed and dangerous to individual
freedom. To Jefferson's chagrin, no other states joined in this action,
as most legislatures thought Jefferson's ideas too extreme. The
resolutions as passed in Kentucky and Virginia simply called on states
to seek repeal of the odious statutes through their representatives at
the next session of Congress.³⁷ The Kentucky legislature
passed additional resolutions in 1799--specifically calling for
nullification of objectionable laws. Although Jefferson sympathized with
their aim, he had no part in their drafting. Congress did not renew the
Alien and Sedition acts in 1801 when they expired.
Thomas Jefferson's involvement with the Kentucky Resolutions
reflected his passion for protecting civil liberties from repressive
measures by omnipotent government. He favored a governmental system that
would resist tyranny and corruption. He found republicanism to be
closest to his ideal of a balanced and strong yet nonintrusive form of
government. ``The legitimate powers of government,'' he wrote, ``extend
to such acts only as are injurious to others.'' ³⁸ Yet his
philosophy did allow for a distinction between the relative powers of
the state and federal governments.
Conditioned by his overriding fear of centralized power, Jefferson
argued that the federal government could not infringe on the freedom of
the press. He vehemently opposed the Sedition Act, but he believed the
states had the right to restrict the press to some degree. The
possibility that states might abuse this power did not concern
Jefferson. On the contrary, he saw the states as the bulwarks of
freedom, as his involvement with the Kentucky Resolutions demonstrated.
Years later, he would write, ``the true barriers of our liberty in this
country are our State governments; and the wisest conservative power
ever contrived by man, is that of which our Revolution and present
government found us possessed.'' ³⁹
Jefferson sought to enhance the authority of the states only to
further the cause of individual rights. But when a foreign nation posed
a threat to the country, Jefferson was quick to underscore the
importance of the Union, which he described as ``the last anchor of our
hope.'' Though he would eschew war at all costs, Jefferson believed the
states had an obligation to support the Union, even if it blundered into
war.

Jefferson's Manual

Thomas Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice is, without
question, the distinguishing feature of his vice-presidency. The single
greatest contribution to the Senate by any person to serve as vice
president, it is as relevant to the Senate of the late twentieth century
as it was to the Senate of the late eighteenth century. Reflecting the
Manual's continuing value, the Senate in 1993 provided for its
publication in a special edition to commemorate the 250th anniversary of
Jefferson's birth.
Jefferson had conceived the idea of a parliamentary manual as he
prepared to assume the duties of the vice-presidency early in 1797. John
Adams offered an inadequate model for the role of presiding officer, for
he had earned a reputation for officious behavior in the Senate
president's chair. To avoid the criticism that attended Adams'
performance, Jefferson believed the Senate's presiding officer needed to
follow ``some known system of rules, that he may neither leave himself
free to indulge caprice or passion, nor open to the imputation of
them.'' ⁴⁰ The lack of carefully delineated rules, he feared,
would make the Senate prone to the extremes of chaos and tyranny. He was
particularly concerned about the operation of Senate Rule 16, which
provided that the presiding officer was to be solely responsible for
deciding all questions of order, ``without debate and without appeal.''
⁴¹
Before leaving Virginia to take up his new duties, Jefferson had
contacted his old mentor, George Wythe. Acknowledging that he had not
concerned himself about legislative matters for many years, Jefferson
asked Wythe to help refresh his memory by loaning him notes on
parliamentary procedure that Wythe had made years earlier. To
Jefferson's disappointment, the eminent jurist reported that he had lost
track of his notes and that his memory no longer served him well.
Jefferson then consulted his ``Parliamentary Pocketbook,'' which
included notes on parliamentary procedure he had taken when he studied
under Wythe and during his service as a member of the Virginia house of
burgesses. Although he considered these notes his ``pillar,'' he
realized they would be of little direct assistance in resolving Senate
procedural disputes.
The new vice president admired the British House of Commons' rules
of procedure because, in the words of a former Speaker, they provided
``a shelter and protection to the minority, against the attempts of
power.'' ⁴² ``Its rules are probably as wisely constructed
for governing the debates of a deliberative body, and obtaining its true
sense, as any which can become known to us.'' ⁴³ A Senate in
which the Federalists had a two-to-one majority over the Republicans
accentuated Jefferson's fears and made him particularly sensitive to the
preservation of minority rights. Distrusting the process in which small
committees under majority party control made key decisions, the vice
president wished to protect minority interests by emphasizing those
procedures that permitted each senator to have a say in important
matters.
Jefferson compiled his Manual of Parliamentary Practice during the
course of his four-year vice-presidency. He designed it to contain
guidance for the Senate drawn from ``the precepts of the Constitution,
the regulations of the Senate, and where these are silent, the rules of
Parliament.'' To broaden his understanding of legislative procedure,
Jefferson studied noteworthy works on the British Parliament such as
John Hatsell's three-volume Precedents of Proceedings in the House of
Commons (1785), Anchitell Grey's ten-volume edition of Debates in the
House of Commons (1769), and Richard Wooddeson's three-volume A
Systematical View of the Laws of England (1792, 1794). The resulting
Manual, loaded with references to these British parliamentary
authorities, contained fifty-three sections devoted to such topics as
privileges, petitions, motions, resolutions, bills, treaties,
conferences, and impeachments.
Jefferson's Manual was first published in 1801, shortly after he
became president. A second edition followed in 1812, and in 1837 the
House of Representatives established that the rules listed in the Manual
would ``govern the House in all cases to which they are applicable and
in which they are not inconsistent with the standing rules and orders of
the House and the joint rules of the Senate.'' ⁴⁴ Although
the Manual has not been treated as ``a direct authority on parliamentary
procedure in the Senate,'' ⁴⁵ it is the Senate that today
more closely captures Jefferson's ideal of a genuinely deliberative
body. His emphasis on order and decorum changed the way the Senate of
his day operated. In the assessment of Dumas Malone, Jefferson
``exercised his limited functions [as presiding officer] with greater
care than his predecessor and left every successor his debtor.''
⁴⁶

President

On February 17, 1801, after thirty-six ballots, the House of
Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson president of the United
States.⁴⁷ Following the precedent that Vice President Adams
set in February 1797, Jefferson delivered a brief farewell address to
the Senate on February 28, 1801. He thanked members for their indulgence
of his weaknesses.
In the discharge of my functions here, it has been my
conscientious endeavor to observe impartial justice without regard
to persons or subjects; and if I have failed of impressing this on
the mind of the Senate, it will be to me a circumstance of the
deepest regret. . . . I owe to truth and justice, at the same time,
to declare, that the habits of order and decorum, which so strongly
characterize the proceedings of the Senate, have rendered the
umpirage of their President an office of little difficulty; that, in
times and on questions which have severely tried the sensibilities
of the House, calm and temperate discussion has rarely been
disturbed by departures from order.⁴⁸
After completing these remarks, Jefferson followed another Adams
precedent by stepping aside a few days prior to the end of the session.
This action allowed the Senate to appoint a president pro tempore, a
post filled only when the vice president was absent from the capital.
Next to the vice president in the line of presidential succession at
that time, the president pro tempore would serve until the swearing in
of a new vice president at the start of the next session.
On March 4, 1801, Jefferson took the oath of office as president of
the United States, thereby successfully accomplishing the nation's first
transfer of presidential power between the two major political parties.
He served two terms as president, retiring at last from public life in
1809. He renewed his friendship with John Adams, and the two men
corresponded regularly until their deaths--both dying on July 4, 1826,
the fiftieth anniversary of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson's Contributions

Thomas Jefferson infused the vice-presidency with his genius through
the contribution of his Manual of Parliamentary Practice--a magisterial
guide to legislative procedure that has retained its broad utility
through two centuries. He also contributed to the office his example of
skillful behind-the-scenes legislative leadership, and he offered a
philosophical compass on the issues of constitutionalism and individual
rights. Biographer Dumas Malone provides a final analysis of Jefferson's
style as party leader during his vice-presidential tenure:
His popular success was due in considerable part to his
identification of himself with causes for which time was fighting--
notably the broadening of the political base--and to his remarkable
sensitivity to fluctuations in public opinion. As a practical
politician, he worked through other men, whom he energized and who
gave him to an extraordinary degree their devoted cooperation. His
leadership was due not to self-assertiveness and imperiousness of
will but to the fact that circumstances had made him a symbolic
figure and that to an acute intelligence and unceasing industry he
joined a dauntless and contagious faith. ⁴⁸
THOMAS JEFFERSON

NOTES

¹ Paul Leicester Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
(New York, 1892-1899), vol. 7, p. 114.
² Biographical accounts of Jefferson's life are plentiful
and rich. The definitive modern study is Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His
Time, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948-1981). The volume in that series that covers
the years of his vice-presidency is Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty
(Boston, 1962). A first-rate single-volume biography is Noble E.
Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson
(Baton Rouge, 1987). For the period of Jefferson's vice-presidency, see
Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of
Party Organization, 1789-1801 (Chapel Hill, 1957). For a series of
twenty-five excellent essays that focus on each of Jefferson's
``extraordinary collection of talents,'' see Merrill D. Peterson, ed.,
Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (New York, 1986). This work also
contains a comprehensive bibliography. There are several major
collections of Jefferson's writings, including Paul Leicester Ford, The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols. (New York, 1892-1899) and the
more comprehensive, but as yet incomplete, Julian P. Boyd, et al., eds.,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1950-). The latter work has appeared to
date only to the mid-1790s and thus is of no assistance for the vice-
presidential period. One volume associated with this massive project,
however, is of direct value; appearing as part of the project's ``Second
Series'' is Wilbur Samuel Howell, ed., Jefferson's Parliamentary
Writings: `Parliamentary Pocket-Book' and A Manual of Parliamentary
Practice (Princeton, 1988).
³ For a thorough study of Jefferson's early years see
Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Road to Glory, 1743 to 1776 (New York,
1943) and Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948).
⁴ Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason, pp. 64-75.
⁵ Dumas Malone, ``The Life of Thomas Jefferson,'' in
Peterson, ed., p. 7.
⁶ Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ``The Jeffersonian Republican
Party,'' in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr. (New York, 1973), 1:240.
⁷ Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, eds., The Diary
of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, Documentary History
of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, vol. 9
(Baltimore, 1988), p. 275.
⁸ Cunningham, ``The Jeffersonian Republican Party,'' pp.
246-47.
⁹ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 274-
75.
¹⁰ Quoted in Cunningham, ``The Jeffersonian Republican
Party,'' p. 249.
¹¹ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 291.
¹² Ibid., p. 274.
¹³ Ibid., p. 278.
¹⁴ Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, 3d
ed. (Washington, 1994), p. 361.
¹⁵ Jefferson to Rush, January 22, 1797, in Ford, 7:114;
Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 292.
¹⁶ Ford, 7:93-94.
¹⁷ Only two other vice presidents subsequently shared
Adams' pleasant task: Martin Van Buren in 1837 and George Bush in 1989.
¹⁸ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 295.
¹⁹ U.S., Congress, Annals of Congress, March 4, 1797, pp.
1580-82.
²⁰ Jefferson to Gerry, May 13, 1797, in Ford, 7:120.
²¹ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 300.
²² Ibid., p. 293; Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason, pp.
206-7; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Knoxville, 1992), pp. 332-34.
²³ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 299.
²⁴ Silvio A. Bedini, ``Man of Science,'' in Peterson,
ed., p. 257.
²⁵ Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason, 206-7; Malone,
Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, chapter XXII; Bedini, in Peterson,
ed., pp. 253-76.
²⁶ Ford, 7: 76; Cunningham, The Jeffersonian Republicans,
p. 119.
²⁷ Jefferson to Colonel Bell, May 18, 1797, in Andrew A.
Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
(Washington, 1903), 9:387; Cunningham, The Jeffersonian Republicans, pp.
118-19.
²⁸ Thomas Jefferson to Henry Tazewell, January 27, 1798,
in Ford, 7:194-95.
²⁹ Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, February 22, 1798,
in Ford, 7:206-8.
³⁰ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, chapter
XXIV.
³¹ 1 Stat. 596-597.
³² 1 Stat. 566-569.
³³ 1 Stat. 570-572.
³⁴ Jefferson to James Madison, June 7, 1798, in Ford,
7:267.
³⁵ This issue is treated in full detail in Malone,
Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, chapter XXV.
³⁶ Ford, 8:458-61.
³⁷ Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason, pp. 217-18.
³⁸ Quoted in Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty,
p. 393.
³⁹ Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, January 16, 1888, in
Ford, 9:308-10; Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 394.
⁴⁰ Thomas Jefferson, A Manual of Parliamentary Practice
for the Use of the Senate of the United States, in The Papers of Thomas
Jefferson, Second Series, Jefferson's Parliamentary Writings, Wilbur
Samuel Howell, ed., p. 355. Howell has produced the definitive scholarly
edition of Jefferson's Manual (pp. 339-444).
⁴¹ U.S., Congress, Senate, History of the Committee on
Rules and Administration, United States Senate, S. Doc. 96-27, 96th
Cong., 1st sess., p. 6.
⁴² Speaker Arthur Onslow quoted in Section I of
Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice, Howell ed., p. 357.
⁴³ Howell, ed., p. 355.
⁴⁴ The Senate has regularly published that work as a
companion to the body's formal rules. The Manual was included as a
section within the Senate Manual from 1886 to 1975 and was republished
in 1993, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth,
in the original 1801 edition. Some practices discussed in Jefferson's
Manual set core precedents that the Senate has followed ever since,
although the work is not considered a direct authority on procedure. The
Manual's influence quickly extended beyond domestic legislatures, as
editors translated the work into other languages. At least 143 editions
have been printed. The work has abetted self-government in countries as
far away as the Philippines, where over one-hundred years later it was
adopted as a supplementary guide in that nation's senate and house of
representatives.
⁴⁵ U.S., Congress, Senate, Riddick's Senate Procedure:
Precedents and Practices, by Floyd M. Riddick and Alan S. Frumin, S.
Doc. 101-28, 101st Cong., 1st sess., p. 754.
⁴⁶ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 452-
53.
⁴⁷ A description of this election and the resulting
Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution appears in Chapter 3 of this
volume, ``Aaron Burr.''
⁴⁸ Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 753-54.
⁴⁸ Malone, ``The Life of Thomas Jefferson,'' in Peterson,
ed., p. 15.
?

Chapter 3

AARON BURR

1801-1805

AARON BURR
AARON BURR

Chapter 3

AARON BURR

3rd Vice President: 1801-1805

Was there in Greece or Rome a man of virtue and
independence, and supposed to possess great talents, who was
not the subject of vindictive and unrelenting persecution?
--Aaron Burr to Theodosia Burr Alston ¹
I never, indeed thought him an honest, frank-dealing
man, but considered him as a crooked gun, or other perverted
machine, whose aim or stroke you could never be sure of.
--Thomas Jefferson ²
Col. Burr . . . [is] Not by any means a model man . . .
but not so bad as it is the fashion to paint him.
--George W. Johnson ³
Congressional Republicans were in a festive mood on January 24,
1804, as they gathered at Stelle's Hotel on Capitol Hill for a banquet
celebrating the transfer of the Louisiana Territory to the United
States. The festivities began at noon with the discharge of ``three
pieces of cannon.'' President Thomas Jefferson and Vice President Aaron
Burr were among the honored guests; they departed after the banquet, but
the revelry continued until nightfall. ``A number of the guests drank so
many toasts that in the night they returned to their houses without
their hats,'' one contemporary reported. But when one celebrant offered
a toast to Vice President Burr, the effect was pronounced and chilling:
``few cheered him,'' the chronicler observed, ``& many declined drinking
it.'' ⁴
None of Aaron Burr's contemporaries knew quite what to make of this
complex and fascinating individual. As Senator Robert C. Byrd observed
in his November 13, 1987, address on the life and career of this
controversial vice president, ``there is much that we will never know
about the man.'' Much of Burr's early correspondence, entrusted to his
daughter for safekeeping, was lost in 1812, when the ship carrying
Theodosia Burr Alston from South Carolina to New York for a long-awaited
reunion with her father disappeared off the North Carolina
Coast.⁵
Burr was one of the most maligned and mistrusted public figures of
his era--and, without question, the most controversial vice president of
the early republic--but he never attempted to justify or explain his
actions to his friends or to his enemies. One editor of Burr's papers
has lamented, ``Almost alone among the men who held high office in the
early decades of this nation, Burr left behind no lengthy recriminations
against his enemies . . . no explanations and justifications for his
actions.'' He seems to have cared very little what his contemporaries
thought of him, or how historians would judge him.⁶ Few
figures in American history have been as vilified, or as romanticized,
by modern writers.⁷ Urbane and charming, generous beyond
prudence, proud, shrewd, and ambitious, he stood apart from other public
figures of his day. An anomaly in an era when public office was a duty
to be gravely and solemnly accepted but never pursued with unseemly
enthusiasm, Burr enjoyed the ``game'' of politics. His zest for politics
enabled him to endure the setbacks and defeats he experienced throughout
his checkered career, but, as Mary-Jo Kline, the editor of Burr's papers
suggests, it also gave him the ``spectacular ability to inspire
suspicion--even fear--among the more conventional Founding Fathers.''
⁸

Early Years

Aaron Burr was born at Newark, New Jersey, on February 6, 1756. His
father, Aaron Burr, Sr., was a highly respected clerical scholar who
served as pastor of the Newark First Presbyterian Church and as
president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). His
mother, Esther Edwards Burr, was the daughter of the noted Puritan
theologian and scholar, Jonathan Edwards, who is most often remembered
for his passionate and fiery sermons. The family moved to Princeton when
the college relocated there soon after the future vice president's
birth, but Burr did not remain there long. His father contracted a fever
and died when young Aaron was only a year-and-a-half old. His mother and
her parents died soon thereafter. An orphan by the age of two, Burr and
his older sister, Sally, moved to Philadelphia, where they lived with
family friends until 1759, when their uncle, Timothy Edwards of
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, became their legal guardian.
Edwards and his young wards moved to Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, the
following year. Uncle Timothy soon discovered that Esther's ``Little
dirty Noisy Boy'' had inherited much of the Edwards family's renowned
intellect but little of their piety. High-spirited, independent,
precocious and self-confident, young Aaron at first studied with a
private tutor. In 1769 he began his studies at the College of New
Jersey, graduating in 1772. In 1773, he enrolled in the Reverend Joseph
Bellamy's school at Bethlehem, Connecticut, to prepare for the ministry
but soon realized that he could neither wholly accept the Calvinist
discipline of his forebears nor forgo the distractions of the
town.⁹ He had, his authorized biographer relates, ``come to
the conclusion that the road to Heaven was open to all alike.''
¹⁰ In May 1774, he moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, to study
law under his brother-in-law, Tapping Reeve, but the outbreak of the
American Revolution interrupted his studies.
Burr joined the march on Quebec as an uncompensated ``gentleman
volunteer'' in the summer of 1775. His bravery under fire during the
ill-fated assault on that heavily fortified city on December 31, 1775,
won him a coveted appointment as an aide to the American commander in
chief, General George Washington, but he was almost immediately
reassigned to General Israel Putnam. Burr served as Putnam's aide until
1777, when he finally received a commission as a lieutenant colonel and
command of his own regiment. Washington seems to have taken an immediate
dislike to his ambitious young aide, and Burr appears to have
reciprocated this sentiment. When Washington ordered the court-martial
of General Charles Lee for dilatory conduct at the battle of Monmouth
Courthouse, New Jersey, in June 1778, Burr sided with Lee. His own
regiment had suffered heavy losses during the engagement after
Washington ordered Burr to hold an exposed position in the blazing
ninety-six-degree heat. But notwithstanding his dislike for Colonel
Burr, Washington respected his abilities, assigning him the difficult
but crucial task of determining the future movements of the British
forces in New York. Burr later commanded the troops stationed at
Westchester, New York, imposing a rigid but effective discipline that
brought order to the frontier outpost where unruly soldiers and
footloose marauders had formerly terrorized the nearby settlers. Burr
resigned his commission in early 1779, his health broken by the
accumulated stresses of several exhausting campaigns. He always took
pride in his military record, and for the remainder of his long life,
admirers referred to him as ``Colonel Burr.'' ¹¹ Of his many
accomplishments, only two are memorialized on the stone that marks his
grave: Colonel in the Army of the Revolution, and Vice President of the
United States.¹²
Aaron Burr lived an unsettled existence after leaving the army,
travelling about the countryside, visiting friends and family, and
studying law as his health permitted. In 1782, he began his legal
practice and married Theodosia Bartow Prevost, the widow of a British
army officer. In November 1783, the Burr family--which included his
wife's two sons by her first husband and an infant daughter, named
Theodosia for her mother--moved to New York after British forces
evacuated the city. Burr lavished special attention on his only child,
carefully supervising her education and cultivating her intellect. Young
``Theo,'' in turn, idolized her father, and she became his closest
confidante after her mother died in 1794.¹³

Early Political Career

Burr was an able lawyer. A New York law barring non-Whigs from the
legal profession worked to his advantage as he rose to prominence in
that calling. At this stage in his career, he was not, apparently, an
adherent of any particular political persuasion. Despite his alacrity in
responding to the call for volunteers at the outbreak of the Revolution,
he seems to have been curiously detached from the political ferment that
brought it about. Once Burr began his political career, he served a
single term in the New York assembly during the 1784-1785 session,
¹⁴ not returning to public life until 1788. Then, as the
editors of his papers suggest, he ``appears to have played a minor and
equivocal role'' in the New York debate over ratification of the
proposed federal constitution. The radical Sons of Liberty touted Burr
as a possible delegate to the ratification convention, but, for reasons
he never elaborated, he declined to serve.¹⁵ Before long,
however, he abandoned whatever reservations he may have had with respect
to the new Constitution. ``After adoption by ten states,'' he advised
one correspondent, ``I think it became both politic and necessary to
adopt it.'' ¹⁶
Burr was soon actively involved in New York politics. Joining forces
with his future rival, Alexander Hamilton, he supported Richard Yates--a
moderate Antifederalist and a longstanding friend who had helped him win
admission to the bar--in the 1789 gubernatorial election. Yates lost to
George Clinton, a more ardent Antifederalist who had served as governor
of New York since 1777. Governor Clinton, either willing to forgive Burr
or shrewd enough to realize that the brilliant young newcomer would soon
emerge as a key player in New York politics, appointed him attorney
general in 1789. In 1791, Clinton helped orchestrate Burr's election to
the U. S. Senate, unseating Senator Philip Schuyler and making a
lifelong enemy of Schuyler's son-in-law, Alexander
Hamilton.¹⁷
Senator Burr had acquired a taste for politics--a profession that,
he would later advise an aspiring candidate, he found ``a great deal of
fun.'' ¹⁸ In 1792, he entered the New York gubernatorial race
but soon withdrew in Clinton's favor. Northern Republicans mentioned him
as a prospective vice-presidential candidate in 1792, but Burr deferred
to Clinton again after southern Republicans refused to support the
ambitious young senator. Better to select ``a person of more advanced
life and longer standing in publick trust,'' James Monroe of Virginia
cautioned, ``particularly one who in consequence of such service had
given unequivocal proofs of what his principles really were.''
¹⁹
Burr was a vehement partisan in the Senate, siding with the anti-
administration forces who opposed Hamilton's financial system and
Washington's foreign policy. He mounted a spirited, though unsuccessful,
defense of Pennsylvania Senator Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born
Republican who was unseated in 1794 after the Federalist majority
determined that he did not meet the Constitution's nine-year citizenship
requirement for senators. He voted against Washington's nomination of
John Jay as an envoy to Great Britain in 1794, on the grounds that it
would be ``mischievous and impolitic'' to appoint Jay, the chief justice
of the United States, to ``any other office or employment emanating
from, and holden at the pleasure of, the executive.'' Burr was also one
of the most outspoken opponents of the unpopular ``Jay Treaty,'' which
the Federalist-dominated Senate approved in 1795.²⁰
In 1796, the determined senator again set his sights on the vice-
presidency, and--in a striking departure from eighteenth-century
electoral etiquette--began an energetic campaign to secure the support
of his fellow Republicans. On June 26, 1796, the Republican caucus
endorsed him as their vice-presidential candidate, although, as Burr's
biographers have noted, ``For their party's vice-presidential
nomination, the Republicans were less unified than in their
determination that [Thomas Jefferson] was the man to head their party's
drive to oust the `aristocrats.''' Republicans concentrated on capturing
the presidency but succeeded only in electing Thomas Jefferson vice
president. Over half of the electors who voted for Jefferson failed to
cast their second votes for Burr, who finished a disappointing fourth
with only thirty electoral votes.²¹
Burr retired from the Senate in 1797. The following year, he
returned to the New York assembly, making several enemies during his
brief and troubled term. He advocated defensive measures to protect New
York harbor as relations with France worsened in the wake of the ``X,Y,Z
affair''--a prudent stance, given New York's strategic importance and
vulnerable location, but one that prompted accusations from more
doctrinaire Republicans that Burr had joined the Federalist camp. He
became vulnerable to charges that he had abused the public trust for his
personal benefit when he participated in a private land speculation
venture in western New York and then sought to enact legislation
removing restrictions on land ownership by noncitizens--a measure that
would increase the value of his western lands. Working in concert with
Hamilton, Burr helped secure a charter and raise subscriptions for a
private company to improve the water supply of pestilence-ridden
Manhattan, but New Yorkers were shocked to learn that the surplus
capital from the venture had been used to establish the Bank of
Manhattan. Although Federalists were heavily involved in the enterprise,
the bank was controlled by Republicans. New York voters, suspicious as
they were of banks, deserted the party in droves in the 1799 state
election, and Burr was turned out of office.²² One observer
commented in disgust that the Republicans ``had such a damn'd ticket
that no decent man could hold up his head to support it.'' ²³
But although some Republicans were increasingly uncomfortable with
Burr's questionable financial dealings and his willingness to cooperate
with Federalists to achieve his ends, he remained a valuable asset. He
had, one Federalist admitted, ``by his arts & intrigues . . . done a
great deal towards revolutionizing the State,'' ²⁴ building a
political base that would help launch his national career. Burr's
vehement opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the New York
assembly had won Republicans the support of New York's large and rapidly
growing immigrant community. In a feat one admirer attributed to ``the
intervention of a Supreme Power and our friend Burr the agent,'' he
ensured that New York City elected a Republican delegation to the state
legislature in 1800, laying the groundwork for a Republican victory in
the presidential contest later that year. New York was one of the states
in which the legislature selected presidential electors, and its 12
electors comprised over 15 percent of the 70 votes necessary to achieve
an electoral majority. Republican control of the New York legislature
was crucial, and New York City's thirteen-member delegation gave the
party a majority.²⁵

The Election of 1800

In 1800, Republican strategists hoped to cement their fledgling
coalition by seeking, for geographical balance, a New Yorker as their
vice-presidential candidate. One obvious choice was New York's elder
statesman, George Clinton, but his reluctance to enter the race
²⁶ cleared the way for Burr's unanimous nomination by the
Republican caucus on May 11, 1800. Although Jefferson would later
claim--after Burr discredited himself by his behavior during the
election and in office--that he had harbored reservations about his New
York lieutenant from the time of their first meeting in 1791 or 1792,
contemporary correspondence suggests that their relationship was cordial
during the 1790s. If Jefferson had reservations about Burr in 1800, he
laid them aside to secure a Republican victory, using his influence to
ensure that all of Virginia's twenty-one electors would cast their
second votes for his running mate.²⁷
Jefferson waged a behind-the-scenes campaign, writing letters to his
political lieutenants and encouraging the preparation and dissemination
of pamphlets and press accounts critical of John Adams' administration,
which had supported the Alien and Sedition Acts and increased the
military establishment. Burr was an active campaigner, visiting Rhode
Island and Connecticut in late August to shore up Republican support.
``The Matter of V.P--is of very little comparative Consequence,'' he
informed one correspondent as he speculated that the election might
result in the election of Jefferson as president and Adams as vice
president, ``and any Sacrifice on that head ought to be made to obtain a
single vote for J--------.'' ²⁸ Surprising as it might appear
to modern observers, Burr's clearly successful political prowess in the
1800 election only raised suspicions among his rivals and allies that he
was not to be trusted. He did not fit the mold of the dispassionate
statesmen who remained aloof from the fray of politics while their
supporters worked to secure their election. But ``the creation of
nationwide, popularly based political parties,'' one Burr scholar
explains, ``demanded men who were willing to . . . bargain regional
alliances, men able to climb the ladder of popular support and to convey
their own enjoyment of the `fun' of politics.'' In this respect, she
suggests, Burr was ``The Ghost of Politics Yet to Come.'' ²⁹
Jefferson soon had ample reason to distrust Burr. In 1800, as in the
three previous presidential elections, each elector cast two votes
without distinguishing between presidential and vice-presidential
candidates. Republican strategists expected that all of their electors
would cast one vote for Jefferson and that most--enough to guarantee
that Burr would receive the second highest number of votes but not
enough to jeopardize Jefferson's margin--would cast their second votes
for Burr. Jefferson and his lieutenants left the implementation of this
scheme to chance, never asking even a single elector to withhold a vote
from Burr, although Jefferson's friend and adviser, James Madison, would
later allege that Republicans had been lulled by ``false assurances
dispatched at the critical moment to the electors of one state, that the
votes of another would be different from what they proved to be.''
Increasingly confident of victory as the news of the election
filtered in from the states, Republicans were stunned to learn by mid-
December that, although they had clearly defeated Adams and his running
mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, they had failed to
elect a president. Jefferson and Burr, whether by neglect or
miscalculation, would each receive 73 electoral votes. The election
would be decided by the House of Representatives, as provided in Article
II, section 1, of the Constitution, which directed that ``if there be
more that one [candidate] who have such a majority, and have an equal
Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately
chuse by Ballot one of them for President,'' with ``each State having
one Vote.'' ³⁰ The representatives from each state would poll
their delegation to determine how their state would cast its single
vote, with deadlocked states abstaining.
As soon as the outcome of the election became apparent, but before
Congress met to count the electoral votes on February 11, 1801, the
Federalists began a last-ditch effort to defeat Jefferson. Some, while
resigned to a Republican victory, believed that the less partisan and
more flexible Burr was by far the lesser of two evils. Others supported
Burr in the hope that, if a deadlock could be prolonged indefinitely,
the Federalist-dominated Congress could resolve the impasse with
legislation authorizing the Senate to elect a Federalist president--a
hope that had no constitutional basis but demonstrated the uncertain
temper of the times. Alexander Hamilton, a prominent New York
Federalist, actively opposed Burr, repeatedly attempting to convince his
colleagues that Burr was a man whose ``public principles have no other
spring or aim than his own aggrandisement.'' ³¹
Burr never explained his role in the drama that subsequently
unfolded in the House of Representatives, which cast thirty-six ballots
before finally declaring Jefferson the winner on February 17, 1801. The
few comments he ventured at the time were guarded, evasive, and
contradictory. Professing indignation at rumors that he was soliciting
Federalist support in an attempt to wrest the presidency from Jefferson,
Burr initially denied ``that I could submit to be instrumental in
counteracting the wishes & expectations of the U. S.,'' instructing his
friend Samuel Smith ``to declare these sentiments if the occasion shall
require.'' One prominent Federalist, Robert Goodloe Harper of South
Carolina, advised Burr against withdrawing from the presidential
contest, urging that he ``take no step whatsoever, by which the choice
of the House of Representatives can be impeded or embarassed,'' and
instead ``keep the game perfectly in your own hand.'' Burr appears to
have followed Harper's advice to the letter during the tense and
confused days that followed. He never actively solicited Federalist
votes but seemed willing enough to accept them. In late December, he
informed Samuel Smith that, if the House elected him president, he would
not step aside for Jefferson.³²
Rumors of Burr's change of heart soon appeared in the press. Tempers
flared and reports of impending armed conflict spread, but Burr remained
silent. When the House cast the first ballot on February 11, eight of
the sixteen states--one less than the simple majority required to elect
the president--voted for Jefferson. Six states voted for Burr, with two
states divided and not voting. This ratio remained constant through
thirty-four subsequent ballots taken over the course of a week. The
deadlock was not resolved until February 17, when Jefferson received the
votes of ten states on the thirty-sixth ballot. Representative James A.
Bayard (F-DE) and Burr himself finally resolved the impasse. As
Delaware's only representative, Bayard controlled his state's vote. He
voted for Burr on the first several ballots, but was under considerable
pressure from Hamilton to change his vote and resolve the contest in
Jefferson's favor. (In thus throwing his support to Jefferson, Hamilton
rose above partisan interests and helped to save the nation.) Concluding
that Burr could not muster enough Republican support to win the election
(and having received assurances with respect to Jefferson's fiscal and
appointments policies), Bayard finally informed his fellow Federalists
that he could not ``exclude Jefferson at the expense of the
Constitution.'' ³³ Correspondence from Burr, who was awaiting
the outcome of the election in New York, had arrived on February 15;
these letters, now lost, revealed that he had abandoned any hope of
winning the presidency.³⁴ His supporters finally agreed that,
when the state delegations were polled before the House cast its thirty-
sixth ballot on February 17, Vermont and Maryland Federalists would
withhold their votes, a move that freed their previously deadlocked
delegations to vote for Jefferson. Bayard and the South Carolina
representatives would cast blank ballots, further eroding Burr's margin.
Jefferson, with ten votes, would become president, while Burr, with
four, would become vice president.³⁵
The election, and the confusion that followed, exposed a critical
flaw in the constitutional provision governing the election of the
president and the vice president. The Twelfth Amendment, which passed
both houses during the fall of 1803 and was ratified by the requisite
number of states in time for the 1804 election, changed the method of
election by requiring electors to designate one vote for a presidential
candidate and the other for a vice-presidential candidate. Intended to
prevent an unscrupulous vice-presidential candidate (or his supporters)
from subverting the electoral process, the amendment was a Republican
initiative, sponsored in the House of Representatives by John Dawson (R-
VA) and in the Senate by Burr's rival De Witt Clinton (R-
NY).³⁶

Vice President Aaron Burr

If Burr was at all chagrined by the outcome of the election, or by
the taint he had acquired from not emphatically renouncing his widely
rumored presidential aspirations, he gave no sign of it. ``I join my
hearty Congratulations on the Auspicious events of the 17th:,'' he wrote
to Albert Gallatin while en route to Washington for the March 4
inauguration; ``as to the infamous slanders which have been so
industriously circulated--they are now of little Consequence & those who
believed them will doubtless blush at their own Weakness.''
³⁷ Burr arrived in Washington three days before the
inauguration and found accommodations in nearby Georgetown.
On March 4, 1801, Senate President pro tempore James Hillhouse (F-
CT) administered the oath of office to Burr in the Senate chamber on the
ground floor of the new Capitol in Washington. The new vice president
offered a brief extemporaneous address of ``about three sentences,''
which the press ignored in favor of Jefferson's elegant and conciliatory
inaugural address. Burr assumed the president's chair and administered
the oath of office to the newly elected senators who presented their
credentials. When Jefferson and the presidential party arrived in the
Senate chamber, Burr left the Senate president's seat and joined Chief
Justice John Marshall to listen to Jefferson's inaugural address. He
later described the day as ``serene & temperate--The Concourse of people
immense--all passed off handsomely--great joy but no riot.''
³⁸
The new vice president soon received a flood of letters from
friends, political allies and relatives, seeking appointments in the new
administration or demanding the removal of Adams' Federalist appointees.
Burr, who could never refuse a friend and considered patronage a means
of cementing alliances and paying political debts, passed a number of
these requests along to Jefferson. The president, however, became
increasingly uncomfortable with each new recommendation. Most damning,
as historian Mary-Jo Kline has explained, were the ``repeated requests
for consideration of the claims of the `faithful' from other states and
territories.'' Jefferson was perfectly willing to replace Adams'
``midnight appointments'' with marshals and court officers who were
loyal Republicans, as well as to remove Federalists who displayed
``malversation or inherent disqualification'' for office, appointing
Republicans to the vacant posts. Still, mindful of the charges of
nepotism and cronyism he had levelled against the Adams administration,
he hesitated to dismiss civil servants solely for political reasons. Nor
did he think it appropriate for the ambitious New Yorker to concern
himself with appointments to federal offices in other states. The final
insult appears to have occurred in the fall of 1801 with Burr's campaign
to secure an appointment for his ally, Matthew L. Davis, to a naval post
in New York. The president, already suspicious of the enterprising vice
president who had jeopardized his election, soon began to distance
himself from Burr.³⁹ Thereafter, in making federal
appointments in New York, he relied on George Clinton or Clinton's
nephew De Witt.
After the Clintons replaced Burr as the administration's liaison to
the New York Republican party, De Witt spared no effort to discredit the
vice president in his home state. Assisted by [New York] American
Citizen editor James Cheetham, he waged a savage war against the vice
president in the local press.⁴⁰ ``The handbills were
numerous, of various descriptions, uniform however in Virulent and
indecent abuse,'' Burr reported. ``[T]o Vilify A.B. was deemed of so
much consequence, that packages of them were sent to Various parts of
the country.'' It was becoming painfully apparent, one of his allies
observed, that the vice president's ``influence and weight with the
Administration is in my opinion not such as I could wish.''
⁴¹ Bereft of the political base that had made him a
formidable force in New York politics and an attractive vice-
presidential prospect, he was now a liability to the administration.
During Burr's single term in office, whatever influence or status he
enjoyed would derive solely from his position as president of the
Senate.⁴²

President of the Senate

Burr was one of the most skilled parliamentarians to serve as
president of the Senate, a striking contrast to Adams and a worthy
successor to Jefferson. ``Mr. Burr, the Vice President, presides in the
Senate with great ease, dignity & propriety,'' Senator William Plumer
(F-NH) observed. ``He preserves good order, silence--& decorum in
debate--he confines the speaker to the point. He has excluded all
spectators from the area of the Senate chamber, except the members from
the other House. A measure which contributes much to good order.''
⁴³
But, although Burr was universally respected for his parliamentary
skills and his impartial rulings, Senate Republicans noted with mounting
concern his easy familiarity with his many Federalist friends. Alienated
from his own party, pragmatic at the expense of principle, and beset by
the chronic financial difficulties that dogged him throughout his
career, Burr was increasingly regarded by his fellow Republicans as an
unprincipled opportunist who would stop at nothing to rebuild his
shattered political and personal fortunes.⁴⁴ They found ample
evidence of the vice president's apostasy on January 27, 1802, when Burr
cast a tie-breaking vote that undercut the Republican effort to repeal
the Judiciary Act of 1801.
That act, signed into law less than a week before Jefferson's
election, enacted badly needed reforms, providing circuit court judges
to relieve the Supreme Court justices from the burdensome and exhausting
chore of riding circuit, and reducing the number of justices from six to
five, effective with the next vacancy. The act became effective in time
to allow John Adams to appoint Federalist judges to the new circuit
courts, a development that heightened Republican fears of a Federalist-
controlled judiciary. And, with one less Supreme Court justice, it
appeared unlikely that Jefferson would ever have an opportunity to
appoint a Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. On January 6, 1802,
Senator John Breckinridge (R-KY) introduced a bill to repeal the
Judiciary Act. Burr's vote would prove crucial in the Senate, where the
absence of one Republican and the resignation of another had eroded the
administration's already slim majority. Republicans were greatly
relieved when the Senate deadlocked on a vote to proceed to a third
reading of the repeal bill on January 26, and Burr resolved the tie in
favor of the repealers. But he had secretly informed Federalists that he
would support their attempts to block repeal by adding amendments that
would make the Judiciary Act acceptable to moderate Republicans. Thus,
the next day, when his friend Jonathan Dayton (F-NJ) moved to refer the
bill to ``a select committee, with instructions to consider and report
the alterations which may be proper in the Judiciary system of the
United States,'' Burr resolved the tie in favor of the
Federalists.⁴⁵ Burr explained that he had voted for referral
in hopes of reaching a compromise:
I am for the affirmative, because I never can resist the
reference of a measure where the senate is so nicely balanced, when
the object is to effect amendment, that may accommodate it to the
opinions of a larger majority; and particularly when I can believe
that gentlemen are sincere in wishing a reference for this purpose.
Should it, however, at any time appear that delay only is intended,
my conduct will be different.⁴⁶
Republicans who resented Burr's treachery were outraged when he
announced the members of the select committee. During the early 1800s,
senators voted to choose members of these temporary committees, which
normally consisted of three members, but on this occasion two senators
tied for first place and three for second place. The committee would
therefore, Burr announced, be comprised of five members: two Republicans
who favored repeal; two Federalists who had voted against repeal and
subsequently voted to refer the bill to committee in hopes of effecting
a compromise; and one Republican moderate, John Ewing Colhoun (R-SC),
who had sided with the Federalists.⁴⁷ An account of the
proceedings in the New York Evening Post reveals that Burr answered
Republican challenges to this unexpected development with his customary
ease and composure:
. . . The Democratic [Republican] members appeared extremely
discontented at the apparent result; and before the vote was finally
declared by the Vice President, General [James] Jackson [R-GA] rose
and proposed, that the Senate should ballot again for the committee.
This dashing proposition did not materially interrupt the regularity
of the scrutiny.
The Vice President was very deliberate. He took the ballots of
the respective Senators, examined them attentively, stated the
number of them, and holding them up in his hand, mentioned that
gentlemen, if they chose, might come and examine them. Mr.
G[ouverneur] Morris [F-NY] hoped never to see, in the Senate a
proceeding implying so much distrust.
After a pause, the Vice President declared his opinion, that the
ballots were truly counted. Of course, the committee was composed as
stated above, to the no small chagrin of some of the Democratic
members of Congress, in both Houses.⁴⁸
Although Burr had substantive objections to the repeal bill,
⁴⁹ and told one correspondent that he was troubled at the
prospect ``of depriving the twenty-six judges of office and pay,''
⁵⁰ his growing estrangement from the administration was also
a factor. He may, as one scholar of the early judiciary suggests, have
hoped to ``enhance his stature not only with moderates of his own party
but also with Federalists, and perhaps even pave the way for the
eventual formation of a third party under his leadership,''
⁵¹ but the immediate result of Burr's abortive attempt to
reach a compromise was his further isolation from his party. He had, as
Jefferson's biographer has noted, ``offended one side without satisfying
the other.'' ⁵² Among the advisers who comprised Jefferson's
inner circle, only Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin continued to
support the increasingly troublesome vice president.⁵³
Burr soon abandoned any hope of winning renomination to a second
term. In early 1804, he called on Jefferson to inform him that he
recognized ``it would be for the interest of the republican cause for
him to retire; that a disadvantageous schism would otherwise take
place,'' but he was concerned that ``were he to retire, it would be said
that he shrunk from the public sentence.'' He would need, Burr
suggested, ``some mark of favor . . . which would declare to the world
that he retired with [Jefferson's] confidence.'' Jefferson replied that
he had not attempted to influence the 1800 election on his own or Burr's
behalf, nor would he do so in the next election--a cool rejoinder that
masked his now considerable resentment of the man whom, he claimed, he
had ``habitually cautioned Mr. Madison against trusting too much.''
⁵⁴
The Republicans ultimately settled on George Clinton as their new
vice-presidential candidate. Burr retired from national politics,
without Jefferson's ``mark of favor,'' entering the 1804 New York
gubernatorial race in a desperate attempt to restore his rapidly failing
career.

The Burr-Hamilton Duel

Burr no longer commanded the respect and support from New York
Republicans that he had once enjoyed. He entered the gubernatorial race
as an independent and actively sought Federalist support when it became
apparent that the Federalists would not offer a candidate of their own.
But Alexander Hamilton was soon ``intriguing for any candidate who can
have a chance of success against A.B.'' Burr plunged enthusiastically
into the campaign, delivering speeches and distributing campaign
literature, but he could not overcome the liabilities he had acquired
since 1800. He lost the election by an overwhelming 8,000-vote
margin.⁵⁵
Burr's defeat left him bitter and disillusioned. He blamed Hamilton
for his predicament, and when he learned that his rival and former ally
had referred to him, at a private dinner party, as a ``dangerous man,
and who ought not to be trusted,'' he demanded an explanation. The
conflict escalated, as Burr and Hamilton exchanged a series of letters,
and finally came to a head on June 27, 1804, when Burr challenged
Hamilton to a duel. The grim engagement took place on July 11 at
Weehawken, New Jersey, and resulted in Hamilton's death the following
day.⁵⁶
Burr's opponents called for his arrest, but the outcry against him
was by no means universal. Duelling was expressly prohibited by law in
most states, and murder was a crime in every state. But encounters on
the ``field of honor'' still took place during the early nineteenth
century, particularly in the southern states. Burr had previously
challenged Hamilton's brother-in-law, John Church, to a duel--a
bloodless encounter that enabled them to confront and then forget their
differences--and Hamilton's son, Philip, had incurred a mortal wound on
the duelling ground the previous year. Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and
others of similar stature subscribed to the Code Duello, but few
suffered the stigma that Burr carried after that fatal morning at
Weehawken. He left New York a month after Hamilton's death to allow
``public opinion'' to ``take its proper course,'' travelling south in
hopes of a reunion with his daughter Theodosia, now the wife of Joseph
Alston, a South Carolina planter with impeccable Republican credentials,
and his young grandson, Aaron Burr Alston. He was eventually indicted in
New York and New Jersey, but never stood trial in either
jurisdiction.⁵⁷
Burr returned to the Senate in early November, in time for the
second session of the Eighth Congress. It was, as Senator Plumer noted,
an awkward occasion:
Nov. 7, 1804
This day the Senate made a quorum for the first time this
session [which began two days earlier]. Mr. Burr, the Vice
President, appeared and took his seat in the Senate the very first
day of the session. It has been unusual for the Vice President to
take his seat the first day of the session. But this man, though
indicted in New York & New Jersey for the murder of the illustrious
Hamilton, is determined to brave public opinion. What a humiliating
circumstance that a man Who for months has fled from Justice--& who
by the legal authorities is now accused of murder, should preside
over the first branch of the National Legislature!
I have avoided him--his presence to me is odious--I have merely
bowed & spoken to him--Federalists appear to despise neglect & abhor
him. The democrats [Republicans], at least many of them, appear
attentive to him--& he is very familiar with them--What line of
conduct they will generally observe to him is yet
uncertain.⁵⁸
Republicans had indeed become ``more attentive'' to Burr; even
Jefferson seemed anxious to mend fences with his errant vice president.
``Mr. Jefferson has shewn more attention & invited Mr. Burr oftener to
his house within this three weeks than ever he did in the course of the
same time before,'' Plumer marvelled. ``Mr. Gallatin, the Secy of the
Treasury, has waited upon him often at his (Burr's) lodging--& on one
day was closeted with him more than two hours. The Secretary of State,
Mr. Madison, formerly the intimate friend of Genl. Hamilton, had taken
his murderer into his carriage rode with him--accompanied him on a visit
to M. Terreau the French Minister.'' ⁵⁹ United States
Attorney Alexander Dallas wrote to New Jersey Governor Joseph
Bloomfield, urging him to grant clemency to the vice
president.⁶⁰
Republicans in Congress, particularly in the Senate, were equally
solicitous of Burr. ``The proceedings in New York in consequence of the
duel are deemed by a number of the Senators to be harsh and
unprecedented,'' Senator Samuel L. Mitchill (R-NY) explained to his
wife. ``They believe it very unfair and partial to make him the victim
of justice, while several other persons who have killed their opponents
in duels at Hoboken are suffered to go at large without molestation.
Under these impressions an address has been drawn up to Governor
Bloomfield for the purpose of inducing him to quash or suspend the
proceedings against the Vice President.'' ⁶¹ Federalists were
stunned by the Republicans' newfound respect for Burr, which Plumer
attributed to ``their joy for the death of Hamilton.'' ⁶² But
the real reason for Republicans' apparent change of heart, as Burr's
biographers Herbert Parmet and Marie Hecht have suggested, was the
impending impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Chase.⁶³

The Impeachment Trials of John Pickering and Samuel Chase

Burr had earlier presided over the impeachment trial of New
Hampshire Judge John Pickering, a revered patriot and the author of his
state's 1784 constitution, who by 1803 had become insane and an
alcoholic. The House of Representatives impeached Pickering on March 2,
1803, for conduct ``contrary to his trust and duty as judge,'' and the
trial in the Senate was held a year later. Even the judge's Federalist
supporters were embarrassed by his ravings from the bench, but they saw
in the charges against him the opening salvo in the Republicans' assault
on the federal judiciary. They would defend him at all costs,
maintaining throughout his trial that insanity did not constitute
grounds for removal. Republicans were forced to counter that the judge
was perfectly sane, but guilty of misconduct that justified his removal
from office, although Jefferson and some moderate Republicans were
uneasy at the thought of subjecting a man so obviously tormented to the
ordeal of an impeachment trial.⁶⁴
The trial was a highly partisan proceeding, and on March 12, 1804,
the final vote that removed Pickering from office split along party
lines. The vice president made ``very formal arrangements'' for the
trial, Representative Manasseh Cutler, a Federalist from Massachusetts,
informed a correspondent, ``and the court was opened with a dignified
solemnity.'' ⁶⁵ Burr presided over the preliminary
proceedings and most of the trial with his customary tact and skill,
deferring to the Senate to resolve the difficult procedural issues that
arose after Pickering failed to appear and his son's attorney, Robert
Goodloe Harper, informed the court that the judge, ``being in a state of
absolute and long continued insanity,'' could ``neither appear nor
authorize another to appear for him.'' But on March 10, Burr, concerned
about his gubernatorial campaign in New York, ``abruptly left the
Senate,'' departing in the midst of a heated debate over Connecticut
Federalist Uriah Tracy's motion to postpone the trial until the
following session. President pro tempore Jesse Franklin, a North
Carolina Republican, presided for the remainder of the trial, and Burr's
unexpected departure made no apparent difference in the outcome of the
proceedings.⁶⁶ Pickering's trial, as Jefferson's biographer
has stressed, was a ``confused and tragic episode.'' ⁶⁷ The
participants in this sorry spectacle all realized that Pickering was a
deeply disturbed man and were greatly relieved when the trial ended with
his removal from office.
But the impending trial of Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Chase, impeached for judicial misconduct by the House of Representatives
on March 12, 1804--the day Pickering's trial ended--was another matter.
Appointed to the court by President Washington and confirmed by a narrow
margin, Chase was an inveterate Federalist, known for his intemperate
and partisan harangues from the bench and for his flagrant prejudice
against defendants accused of violating the Sedition Act. For many
Republicans, Chase personified all the evils inherent in the Federalist-
controlled judiciary. As his impeachment trial approached, these
Republicans were painfully aware that they could ill afford to offend
the man whose rulings would govern the proceedings, and they thus
treated Burr with studied deference.⁶⁸
But it was an uneasy truce, at best. Burr was noticeably
uncomfortable in the Senate chamber. ``After the minutes of the
preceding day have been read--the little business before us
dispatched,'' Plumer observed, the vice president would ``leave the
chair--come to some one Senator, & intimate in strong terms that it was
best to adjourn--& sometimes request a senator to move an adjournment--&
in a few minutes he was gone.'' He seemed to have ``lost those easy
graceful manners that beguiled the hours away the last session--He is
now uneasy, discontented, & hurried.'' ⁶⁹ Plumer also sensed
``an unusual concern & anxiety in the leading democratic members of the
senate,'' who feared ``the talents of Burr.'' The vice president
appeared ``friendly to them,'' he reflected, but ``[s]ome office must be
given him--what office can that be, that he will accept, & not injure
them?'' ⁷⁰
Burr imposed a rigid discipline on the conduct of the Chase
impeachment trial, conducting the proceedings, as one reporter observed,
``with the dignity and impartiality of an angel, but with the rigor of a
devil.'' ⁷¹ Manasseh Cutler reported that the trial was
``conducted with a propriety and solemnity throughout which reflects
honor upon the Senate. It must be acknowledged that Burr has displayed
much ability, and since the first day I have seen nothing of
partiality.'' ⁷² Although the managers appointed by the House
of Representatives and led by Republican Representative John Randolph of
Virginia were responsible for trying the case, Burr would occasionally
intervene, posing questions of his own to a witness when the irrational
and ineffective Randolph (or another interrogator) failed to pursue a
particular line of questioning, or seeking clarification of an
incomplete or ambiguous response. When either side objected to a
question posed by the other, Burr took careful note of the objection,
ordering that the offending question be ``reduced to writing'' and put
to the Senate for a determination.⁷³
But at times Burr's rigid insistence on absolute decorum only
increased the tensions that simmered in the Senate chamber, elaborately
redecorated for the occasion under his careful supervision. Although
Senator Plumer would conclude by the end of the trial that Burr had
``certainly, on the whole, done himself, the Senate & the nation honor
by the dignified manner in which he has presided over this high &
numerous Court,'' he was outraged at Burr's treatment of Chase on
January 2, 1805, when the judge appeared before the Senate to enter his
plea. Before the court opened, Plumer had overheard the vice president's
caustic comment as he ordered Sergeant at Arms James Mathers to remove
the chair set aside for the aged justice: ``Let the Judge take care to
find a seat for himself.'' Mathers replaced the chair, after Chase
``moved that a seat be assigned him,'' and the vice president ``in a
very cold formal insolent manner replied he presumed the Court would not
object to taking a seat,'' but Burr would not permit Mathers to provide
a table for the judge's convenience. Burr repeatedly interrupted the
aged and frail judge as Chase, at times breaking into tears, requested
additional time to prepare his answer to the impeachment.⁷⁴
Burr's ``peevishness'' continued as the proceedings unfolded; on one
occasion, he notified one of Chase's attorneys, Philip Barton Key,
``that he must not appear as counsel in his loose coat'' [``greatcoat,''
or overcoat], a proviso that senators criticized and Key ignored. By the
first week of February, the Senate's now ``remarkably testy'' president
was ``in a rage because we do not sit longer.'' ⁷⁵ Unruly
senators on both sides of the aisle bristled, Plumer observed, when Burr
lectured them on judicial etiquette after the high court of impeachment
had adjourned for the day on February 12:
Just as the time for adjourning to tomorrow was to be put in the
Secretary's office--Mr. Burr said he wished to inform the Senate of
some irregularities that he had observed in the Court. Some of the
senators as he said during the trial & while a witness was under
examination walked between him & the Managers--Others eat apples--&
some eat cake in their seats.
Mr. [Timothy] Pickering [F-MA] said he [did] eat an apple--but
it was at a time when the President had retired from the chair. Burr
replied he did not mean him--he did not see him.
Mr. [Robert] Wright [R-MD] said he did eat cake--he had a just
right so to do--he was faint--but he disturbed nobody--He never
would submit to be schooled & catechised in this manner.
At this instance a motion was made by Mr. [Stephen Row] Bradley
[R-VT], who also had eaten cake, for an adjournment--Burr told
Wright he was not in order--sit down--The Senate adjourned--& I left
Wright & Burr scolding.⁷⁶
Although rightfully concerned about maintaining an atmosphere of
judicial decorum, Burr had obviously lost much of the ``easy grace'' and
consummate tact that had made him such an effective presiding officer.
The ordeal ended on March 1, when Burr announced, after a separate vote
on each article of impeachment, ``that there is not a Constitutional
majority of votes finding Samuel Chase, Esq., guilty, on any one
article.'' ⁷⁷

Burr's Final Days in the Senate

Burr's final days in the Senate would have been unpleasant even
without the strain of presiding over a taxing and bitterly contested
impeachment trial. He presided over the February 13, 1805 joint session
of Congress, counting the electoral returns. In that capacity, he
announced that Jefferson had been reelected and that his old rival,
George Clinton, would succeed him as vice president. Senator Samuel
Mitchill reported that Burr performed this ``painful duty'' with ``so
much regularity and composure that you would not have seen the least
deviation from his common manner, or heard the smallest departure from
his usual tone.'' But, Mitchill observed, the always impeccably attired
vice president ``appeared rather more carefully dressed than usual'' for
the occasion.⁷⁸
A week later, Republican Senator John Smith of New York introduced a
bill ``freeing from postage all letters and packets to and from Aaron
Burr,'' and Burr found himself in the unenviable position of listening
as senators questioned the propriety of granting him the franking
privilege. Although surviving accounts of the debate do not indicate
that the issue of Burr's character was ever raised in his presence, it
was certainly an unspoken consideration. The debate was particularly
intense on February 27. Senator John Quincy Adams, a Massachusetts
Federalist, proposed an amendment to extend the frank to all former vice
presidents (omitting the explicit reference to Burr), and Republican
James Jackson of Georgia cautioned in response that ``We might hereafter
have a Vice President to whom it would be improper to grant the
privilege.'' After Federalist Senators Timothy Pickering of
Massachusetts and James Hillhouse of Connecticut finally ``advocated the
indelicacy of the situation of having Mr. Burr in the chair,'' the vice
president volunteered that ``he was apprehensive that tomorrow he should
be afflicted with pain in the head & should be unable to attend.'' With
Burr absent from the chamber, his opponents were free to speak their
minds. The debate was bitter and intense; Senator Hillhouse was
resolutely opposed to giving Burr such a dangerous privilege. ``The Vice
President is an ambitious man,'' he warned his colleagues. ``[H]e
aspired to the Presidency--disappointed ambition will be restless. You
put arms into his hands to attack your government--He may disseminate
seditious pamphlets, news papers & letters at the expence of the very
government he is destroying.'' Senator Pickering feared that Burr would
``sell the right of franking to commercial houses--And in the city of
New York alone it might give him a fortune.'' But Burr's supporters
countered, ``The reason why gentlemen oppose this bill is because Mr.
Burr has fought a duel and killed a man.'' Although the bill passed by a
vote of 18 to 13, with all but three of the New England senators voting
against it, the House subsequently postponed the measure.⁷⁹

Burr's Farewell Address

Burr left the Senate the day after the Chase trial concluded and
just two days before George Clinton took office as the nation's fourth
vice president. Federalists and Republicans alike were deeply moved by
his March 2, 1805, farewell address, still one of the most celebrated
speeches in the history of the early Republic. His remarks were intended
for the senators alone, unexpectedly delivered at the conclusion of a
closed-door executive session.
Burr began his twenty-minute address with an acknowledgement that
``he must at times have wounded the feelings of individual members.''
But he had ``avoided entering into explanations at the time,'' he
explained, ``because a moment of irritation was not a moment for
explanation; because his position (being in the chair) rendered it
impossible to enter into explanations without obvious danger of
consequences which must injure the dignity of the Senate, or prove
disagreeable and injurious in more than one point of view.'' Only ``the
ignorant and unthinking,'' he continued, ``affected to treat as
unnecessary and fastidious a rigid attention to rules and decorum.'' But
Burr ``thought nothing trivial which touched, however remotely, the
dignity'' of the Senate, and he cautioned senators ``to avoid the
smallest relaxation of the habits which he had endeavored to inculcate
and establish.'' Likening the Senate to ``a sanctuary, a citadel of law,
of order, and of liberty,'' Burr predicted that ``if the Constitution be
destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or
the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on
this floor.''
Concluding his remarks with the customary expressions of respect and
good will, Burr left the Senate chamber, closing the door behind him,
Senator Mitchill noted, ``with some force.'' ``[A] solemn and silent
weeping'' filled the Senate chamber ``for perhaps five minutes.''
Mitchill, for one, had ``never experienced any thing of the kind so
affecting,'' and New York Republican John Smith, ``stout and manly as he
is . . . laid his head upon his table and did not recover from his
emotion for a quarter of an hour or more.'' ⁸⁰ But De Witt
Clinton's ally, [New York] American Citizen editor James Cheetham, and
others who suspected that Burr's ``melodio, harmonico pathos'' was
merely an effort to restore his political fortunes, doubted that ``the
flowing tear'' could ``wash away the dingy stains'' of Burr's
``political degeneracy.'' ⁸¹

The ``Burr Conspiracy''

The forty-nine-year-old former vice president was heavily in debt at
the time of his forced retirement from politics. He had been involved in
a number of speculative ventures throughout his career, many of which
had resulted in substantial losses. Generous beyond prudence, Burr could
never refuse a relative or a friend in need, even if it meant going
further into debt. He had assumed responsibility for a number of young
wards throughout the years--some of them the children of clients, others
rumored to have been his own offspring--and his generosity to his
charges further strained his always precarious finances. Burr had always
lived, dressed and entertained well, even when he could ill afford to do
so.⁸² Surveying his limited prospects, the optimistic and
always enterprising former vice president now looked to the West.
The full extent of Burr's business and other ventures in the West
will probably never be known, but his first undertaking appears to have
been the Indiana Canal Company. Burr and his fellow investors intended
to construct a canal to circumvent the Ohio River rapids at Louisville,
but, as his biographers have explained, the resourceful vice president
had ``more than one plan for the future but several alternate ones
depending on change and history.'' His most ambitious scheme was
contingent upon the outbreak of war with Spain, which was still in
possession of West Florida and Mexico and increasingly hostile toward
the burgeoning new nation that pressed along its eastern border. Burr
planned an assault on Mexico and anticipated that the western states
would leave the Union to join in a southeastern confederacy under his
leadership. One of Burr's accomplices, Louisiana Governor James
Wilkinson, betrayed the conspiracy before Burr could begin his
expedition, and the former vice president was arrested on charges of
treason. Chief Justice John Marshall presided over Burr's trial, which
opened on August 3, 1807, in Richmond, Virginia. The jury, guided by
Marshall's written opinion that two witnesses must testify to a
specific, overt act to establish treason--a standard that the
prosecution failed to meet--ultimately found ``that Aaron Burr is not
proved to be guilty under this indictment.'' Pressed by debts and
fearful of further prosecution, Burr departed for Europe under an
assumed name in June 1808.⁸³

Burr's Later Years

Burr spent the next four years in self-imposed exile. He travelled
throughout England and the continent, sightseeing, reading, entertaining
the ladies, who found him an attractive companion, and seeking support
for another southwestern expedition. His overtures to the British and
French courts failed miserably. In the spring of 1812, convinced that a
war between the United States and Great Britain was imminent, Burr
returned home under the alias, ``M. Arnot.'' He took a room near the
Boston waterfront--a far cry from the handsome and well-furnished New
York mansion, Richmond Hill, that he maintained in better times--while
testing the waters to determine whether he could safely return to New
York.⁸⁴
Burr reappeared in New York in June 1812, ready to resume his legal
career. He eagerly looked forward to a reunion with his beloved ``Theo''
and his grandson Aaron Burr Alston but soon learned that young
``Gampy,'' as Burr called his namesake, had died. In late December 1812,
the grief-stricken Theo set out from her home in Georgetown, South
Carolina, to visit her father in New York and was never seen again. The
schooner that carried Theodosia Burr Alston and her escort probably sank
in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, but the mysterious
circumstances of her disappearance, and the controversy and mystery that
always dogged Burr's career, spawned legends that the unfortunate Mrs.
Alston had been forced to walk the plank by pirates or mutineers, or was
still alive as a prisoner in the West Indies.\85\
Although devastated by his daughter's death, Burr continued to
practice law and to supervise the education of his young wards. Snubbed
by many of his former acquaintances and wholly removed from the ``game
of politics'' that had once been his joy and delight, Burr followed the
independence movements that were changing the face of Latin America with
a lively but cautious interest. In 1829, he petitioned the government
for a pension based on his military service during the Revolution, a
crusade that continued until his plea was finally granted in 1834. He
became progressively more eccentric and impoverished as the years
passed. In 1831, William Seward found him living in a dirty garret,
shabbily dressed but optimistic as ever.
In 1833, Aaron Burr married a second time. His new bride, a wealthy
widow with a past almost as controversial as his own, soon became
disenchanted with her husband when she discovered that he had mismanaged
her assets, and she divorced him the following year. Incapacitated by a
series of strokes in 1834, Burr lived on the charity of friends and
relatives until his death at Port Richmond, Staten Island, on September
14, 1836. During his final hours, a clergyman inquired about his
prospects for salvation. Evasive and cryptic to the end, Burr only
replied, ``On that subject I am coy.'' Aaron Burr was buried with
military honors at Princeton, New Jersey, on September 16,
1836.⁸⁶
AARON BURR

NOTES

¹ Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht, Aaron Burr:
Portrait of an Ambitious Man (New York, 1967), p. 285.
² Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
(New York, 1905) 10:387, quoted in Parmet and Hecht, p. 287.
³ Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr, vol. 2 (New York, 1982), pp.
372-73.
⁴ Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer's
Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803-1807 (New
York, 1923), p. 123.
⁵ Remarks of Senator Robert C. Byrd, ``Profile of 'That
Great Enigma': Aaron Burr,'' U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional
Record, 100th Cong., 1st sess., p. 31910.
⁶ Mary-Jo Kline, ``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of Corruption
in the New Republic,'' in Before Watergate: Problems of Corruption in
American Society, ed. Abraham S. Eisenstadt, Ari Hoogenboom and Hans L.
Trefousse (Brooklyn, NY, 1978), p. 74. Mary-Jo Kline and Joanne Wood
Ryan's two-volume letterpress edition of Burr's public papers, published
by Princeton University Press in 1983, is an invaluable resource for
scholars.
⁷ See, for example, Samuel H. Wandell, Aaron Burr in
Literature: Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Miscellany Relating to
Aaron Burr and His Leading Political Contemporaries (Port Washington,
NY, 1972; reprint of 1936 edition).
⁸ Kline, ``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of Corruption in the
New Republic,'' p. 70.
⁹ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 1-16.
¹⁰ Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr (Freeport, NY,
1970; reprint of 1836 edition), 1:45.
¹¹ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 17-51.
¹² Byrd, p. 31910.
¹³ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 52-58, 64-65. A second daughter,
Sally Reeve Burr, was born in 1785 and died in February 1789.
¹⁴ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 58-62.
¹⁵ Kline, Mary-Jo, and Joanne Wood Ryan, eds., Political
Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr, vol. 1 (Princeton,
1983), p. 46.
¹⁶ Aaron Burr to Richard Oliver, July 29, 1788, in Kline
and Ryan, 1:33.
¹⁷ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 65-66.
¹⁸ Kline, ``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of Corruption in the
New Republic,'' p. 74.
¹⁹ Parmet and Hecht, p. 84.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 68-110.
²¹ Ibid., pp. 108-10.
²² Ibid., pp. 112-43.
²³ [New York] Commercial Advertiser, May 4, 1799, quoted
in Kline and Ryan, 1:402.
²⁴ Robert Troup to Rufus King, May 6, 1799, quoted in
Kline and Ryan, 1:420.
²⁵ Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ``Election of 1800,'' in
History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, vol. 1, ed.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Fred L. Israel (New York, 1985), pp.
108-10; Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston,
1962), pp. 473-74; Parmet and Hecht, pp. 131-48.
²⁶ See Chapter 4 of this volume, ``George Clinton,'' p.
53.
²⁷ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, p. 474;
Kline and Ryan, 1:389-90, 430-34; Kline, ``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of
Corruption in the New Republic, p. 70; Cunningham, ''Election of 1800,''
p. 110.
²⁸ Cunningham, ``Election of 1800,'' pp. 104, 113-15;
Kline and Ryan, 1:443-49; Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty,
pp. 473-83.
²⁹ Kline, ``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of Corruption in the
New Republic,'' p. 75.
³⁰ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 489-
94; Thomas Jefferson to Aaron Burr, December 15, 1800, in Kline and
Ryan, 1:469-70.
³¹ Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 489-
96; Parmet and Hecht, pp. 158-60; Cunningham, ``Election of 1800,'' pp.
131-32.
³² Kline and Ryan, 1:469-87, see especially Aaron Burr to
Samuel Smith, December 16, 1800, p. 471, and Aaron Burr to Samuel Smith,
December 29, 1800, pp. 478-79; Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of
Liberty, pp. 499-505; Parmet and Hecht, pp. 144-67.
³³ Kline and Ryan, 1:486-87; Malone, Jefferson and the
Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 502-5; Cunningham, ``Election of 1800,'' pp. 131-
34; Parmet and Hecht, pp. 162-67; Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian
Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York, 1974;
reprint of 1971 edition), p. 28; Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A
Biography (New York, 1979), pp. 352-53.
³⁴ Kline and Ryan, 1:486.
³⁵ Ibid., 1:486-87; Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of
Liberty, pp. 502-5; Cunningham, ``Election of 1800,'' pp. 131-34; Parmet
and Hecht, pp. 162-67; Ellis, p. 28.
³⁶ U.S., Congress, House, Annals of Congress, 8th Cong.,
1st sess., pp. 372-77; U.S., Congress, Senate, Annals of Congress, 8th
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 21-25, 81-210; Dennis J. Mahoney, ``Twelfth
Amendment,'' Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, vol. 4 (New
York, 1986), p. 1927; Tadahisa Kuroda, The Origins of the Twelfth
Amendment: The Electoral College in the Early Republic, 1787-1804
(Westport, CT, 1994).
³⁷ Aaron Burr to Albert Gallatin, February 25, 1801, in
Kline and Ryan, 1:509.
³⁸ Aaron Burr to Caesar A. Rodney, March 3, 1801 (with
March 4 postscript), in Kline and Ryan, 1:517-19; Annals of Congress,
6th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 762-63.
³⁹ Kline and Ryan, 1:519-45; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the
President: First Term, 1801-1805 (Boston, 1970), pp. 69-89; Kline,
``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of Corruption in the New Republic,'' pp. 70-71;
Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1963), pp. 38-44.
⁴⁰ Kline and Ryan, 2:641-46, 724-28.
⁴¹ Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, pp. 38-
44; Parmet and Hecht, pp. 172-77.
⁴² Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Process of Government
Under Jefferson (Princeton, 1978), p. 16.
⁴³ Brown, pp. 74-75.
⁴⁴ Kline, ``Aaron Burr as a Symbol of Corruption in the
New Republic,'' pp. 69-76; Parmet and Hecht, pp. 168-93.
⁴⁵ Parmet and Hecht, p. 184; Ellis, pp. 15-16, 36-52;
Kline and Ryan, 2:653-73; Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term,
121-30.
⁴⁶ Aaron Burr, ``Comment on a Motion to Repeal the
Judiciary Act,'' [New York] American Citizen, February 3, 1802, in Kline
and Ryan, 2:656. According to Kline and Ryan, this version of Burr's
remarks, which differs slightly from the version printed in the Annals
(Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 1st sess., p. 150), is ``the version
closest to a direct quotation that survives among contemporary
accounts.'' Ibid., p. 655.
⁴⁷ Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 1st sess., p. 150.
⁴⁸ New York Evening Post, February 2, 1801; Kline and
Ryan, 2:655.
⁴⁹ Parmet and Hecht, p. 179.
⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 179.
⁵¹ Ellis, p. 48.
⁵² Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term, pp. 123-
24.
⁵³ Ibid., pp. 395-98.
⁵⁴ Thomas Jefferson, Memorandum of a Conversation with
Burr, January 26, 1804, Kline and Ryan, 2:819-22.
⁵⁵ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 194-201; Kline, ``Aaron Burr as
a Symbol of Corruption in the New Republic,'' pp. 72-73.
⁵⁶ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 194-215.
⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 210-23; Samuel L. Mitchill to Mrs.
Mitchill, November 20, 1804, ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters from Washington:
1801-1813,'' Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (April 1879): 748; W.J.
Rorabaugh, ``The Political Duel in the Early Republic: Burr v.
Hamilton,'' Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995): 14.
⁵⁸ Brown, p. 185.
⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 203-4.
⁶⁰ Parmet and Hecht, p. 224.
⁶¹ Samuel L. Mitchill to Mrs. Mitchill, November 30,
1804, ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters from Washington,'' p. 748.
⁶² Brown, p. 203.
⁶³ Parmet and Hecht, p. 224.
⁶⁴ Ellis, pp. 69-75; Malone, Jefferson the President,
First Term, pp. 460-64, 469; Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess.,
pp. 315-68.
⁶⁵ Manasseh Cutler to the Rev. Dr. Dana, March 3, 1804,
in Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL.D., by
William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, vol. 2 (Cincinnati,
1888), pp. 164-66.
⁶⁶ Brown, pp. 97-177; Ellis, pp., 69-75; Manasseh Cutler
to Dr. Torrey, March 13, 1804, Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev.
Manasseh Cutler 2:166-68; Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess., pp.
315-68; Peter Charles Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Impeachment in America,
1635-1805 (New Haven, 1984), pp. 206-20.
⁶⁷ Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term, p. 464.
⁶⁸ Parmet and Hecht, p. 224; Malone, Jefferson the
President, First Term, pp. 464-69; Ellis, pp. 76-79.
⁶⁹ Brown, p. 213.
⁷⁰ Ibid., pp. 218-19.
⁷¹ Quoted in Byrd, p. 31914.
⁷² Manasseh Cutler to Dr. Torrey, March 1, 1805, Life,
Journals and Correspondence of Manasseh Cutler 2:192-94.
⁷³ Report of the Trial of Samuel Chase, Annals of
Congress, 8th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 81-676.
⁷⁴ Ibid., pp. 92-98; Brown, pp. 235-39; Ellis, p. 96;
Hoffer and Hull, p. 238.
⁷⁵ Brown, pp. 239-311.
⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 285.
⁷⁷ Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 2d sess., p. 669.
⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 55-57; Samuel L. Mitchill to Mrs. Mitchill,
February 14, 1805, ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters from Washington,'' p. 749.
⁷⁹ Brown, pp. 302-7; Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 2d
sess., pp. 63-66; Kline and Ryan, 2:910.
⁸⁰ Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 71-72;
Dr. Mitchill to Mrs. Mitchill, March 2, 1805, ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters
from Washington,'' p. 750; Kline and Ryan, 2:909-17.
⁸¹ Kline and Ryan, 2:911-12.
⁸² Parmet and Hecht, passim; Lomask, vols. 1 and 2,
passim; Kline and Ryan, vols. 1 and 2, passim.
⁸³ Parmet and Hecht, pp. 233-310.
⁸⁴ Ibid., pp. 305-26.
⁸⁵ Ibid., pp. 326-31.
⁸⁶ Ibid., pp. 332-41; Kline and Ryan, 2:1169-1229.
?

Chapter 4

GEORGE CLINTON

1805-1812

GEORGE CLINTON
GEORGE CLINTON

Chapter 4

GEORGE CLINTON

4th Vice President: 1805-1812

George Clinton the Vice President . . . is an feeble old
man . . . What a vast difference between him & Aaron Burr!
One would think that the office was made for Clinton, & not
he for the office.
--Senator William Plumer (F-NH), December 16,
1805.¹
George Clinton took office as the nation's fourth vice president on
March 4, 1805. He was the second vice president to serve under Thomas
Jefferson, having replaced fellow New Yorker Aaron Burr whose
intransigence in 1800 had nearly cost Jefferson the presidency. A
Revolutionary War hero who had served as governor of New York for two
decades, Clinton seemed an ideal choice to supplant Burr while
preserving the New York-Virginia alliance that formed the backbone of
the Republican coalition.
Even though Republican senators may have been relieved to be rid of
Burr, the contrast between their new presiding officer and his urbane,
elegant predecessor must have been painfully apparent when Chief Justice
John Marshall administered the oath of office to Jefferson and Clinton
in the Senate chamber. Jefferson offered a lengthy inaugural speech
celebrating the accomplishments of his first term, but Clinton declined
to address the members of Congress and the ``large concourse of
citizens'' present.² Two days earlier, on March 2, 1805, Burr
had regaled the Senate with a ``correct and elegant'' farewell oration
so laden with emotion that even Clinton's friend, Senator Samuel L.
Mitchill (R-NY), pronounced the scene ``one of the most affecting . . .
of my life.'' ³ But when Clinton assumed the presiding
officer's chair on December 16, 1805, two weeks into the first session
of the Ninth Congress, he was so ``weak & feeble'' of voice that,
according to Senator William Plumer (F-NH), the senators could not
``hear the one half of what he says.'' ⁴
Clinton's age and infirmity had, if anything, enhanced his value to
the president, because Jefferson intended to pass his party's mantle to
Secretary of State James Madison when he retired after his second term,
yet he needed an honest, ``plain'' Republican vice president in the
meantime. Clinton would be sixty-nine in 1808, too old, Jefferson
anticipated, to challenge Madison for the Republican presidential
nomination. Clinton had already retired once from public life, in 1795,
pleading ill health.⁵ But, for all Clinton's apparent
frailty, he was still a force to be reckoned with. His earlier decision
to retire owed as much to the political climate in New York, and to his
own political misfortunes, as to his chronic rheumatism. He had been an
actual or prospective vice-presidential candidate in every election
since the first one in 1788, and later capped his elective career with a
successful run for the office in 1808.
Clinton was, in the words of a recent biographer, ``an enigma.'' The
British forces that torched Kingston, New York, during the Revolution,
as well as the 1911 conflagration that destroyed most of Clinton's
papers at the New York Public Library, have deprived modern researchers
of sources that might have illuminated his personality and explained his
motives.⁶ Much of the surviving evidence, however, coupled
with the observations of Clinton's contemporaries, support historian
Alan Taylor's assessment that ``Clinton crafted a masterful, compelling
public persona . . . [T]hat . . . masked and permitted an array of
contradictions that would have ruined a lesser, more transparent
politician.'' ⁷ He was, in Taylor's view, ``The astutest
politician in Revolutionary New York,'' a man who ``understood the power
of symbolism and the new popularity of a plain styleDespecially when
practiced by a man with the means and accomplishments to set himself
above the common people.'' ⁸

War and Politics

George Clinton's parents were Presbyterian immigrants who left
Longford County, Ireland, in 1729 to escape an intolerant Anglican
regime that imposed severe disabilities on religious dissenters. Charles
and Elizabeth Denniston Clinton settled in Ulster County, New York,
where the future vice president was born on July 26, 1739. Charles
Clinton was a farmer, surveyor, and land speculator, whose survey of the
New York frontier so impressed the governor that he was offered a
position as sheriff of New York City and the surrounding county in 1748.
After the elder Clinton declined the honor, the governor designated
young George as successor to the clerk of the Ulster County Court of
Common Pleas, a position he would assume in 1759 and hold for the rest
of his life.
George Clinton studied under a Scottish clergyman to prepare for his
future responsibilities, interrupting his education at the age of
eighteen in 1757 to serve in the French and Indian War. After the war,
he read law in New York City under the renowned attorney William Smith.
He began his legal practice in 1764 and became district attorney the
following year. Clinton's aptitude for surveying and his penchant for
land speculation eventually made him one of the wealthier residents of
Ulster County, ⁹ but, despite his considerable fortune, he
was a man of frugal habits and congenial, unassuming manners. Even in
later life, when chronic ill health made it difficult for him to perform
his public duties, observers remarked on his ``pleasing cheerfulness''
and ``flow of good humor.'' ¹⁰ Large-boned and coarse-
featured, ¹¹ he was, one scholar relates, ``a man of powerful
physique, whose mere presence commanded respect.'' ¹²
In 1768, the twenty-nine-year-old Clinton was elected to the New
York assembly, where he supported the ``Livingston'' faction, an
alliance that he cemented two years later with his marriage to Cornelia
Tappan, a Livingston relative. The Livingstons and their allies, who
represented the wealthy, predominantly Presbyterian landowners of the
Hudson Valley, assumed a vehemently anti-British posture as relations
between England and her North American colonies deteriorated during the
early 1770s. Clinton emerged as their leader in 1770, when he defended a
member of the Sons of Liberty imprisoned for ``seditious libel'' by the
royalist majority that still controlled the New York assembly. He was a
delegate to the second Continental Congress in 1775, where a fellow
delegate observed that ``Clinton has Abilities but is silent in general,
and wants (when he does speak) that Influence to which he is intitled.''
Clinton disliked legislative service, because, as he explained, ``the
duty of looking out for danger makes men cowards,'' and he soon resigned
his seat to accept an appointment as a brigadier general in the New York
militia. He was assigned to protect the New York frontier, where his
efforts to prevent the British from gaining control of the Hudson River
and splitting New England from the rest of the struggling confederacy
earned him a brigadier general's commission in the Continental army and
made him a hero among the farmers of the western counties.¹³
The social and political changes that the Revolution precipitated
worked to Clinton's advantage, and he made the most of his
opportunities. As Edward Countryman so forcefully demonstrated in his
study of revolutionary New York, ``the independence crisis . . .
shattered old New York, both politically and socially.'' ¹⁴
The state's new constitution greatly expanded the suffrage and increased
the size of the state legislature. The ``yeoman'' farmers of small and
middling means, who had previously deferred to the Livingstons and their
royalist rivals, the DeLanceys, emerged as a powerful political entity
in their own right, and George Clinton became their champion and
spokesman. Their support proved crucial in the 1777 gubernatorial
election, when Clinton defeated Edward Livingston in a stunning upset
that ``signalled the dismemberment of the old Livingston party.''
¹⁵ The election also signalled Clinton's emergence as a
dominant figure in New York politics; he served as governor from 1777
until 1795 and again from 1801 until 1804, exercising considerable
influence over the state legislature.¹⁶
Before leaving the battlefield to assume his new responsibilities,
Clinton promised his commander in chief, General George Washington, that
he would resume his military duties ``sh'd the Business of my new
appointm't admit of it.'' True to his word, he soon returned to the
field to help defend the New York frontier. There, American troops under
his command prevented Sir Henry Clinton (said to have been a ``distant
cousin'') from relieving the main British force under General John
Burgoyne, precipitating Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga on October 17,
1777.¹⁷ The Saratoga victory, which helped convince the
French that the struggling colonies were worthy of the aid that proved
so crucial to the revolutionary effort, marked a turning point in the
war.
Governor Clinton's civilian labors were equally impressive. Like
other wartime governors, he was responsible for coordinating his state's
war effort. New York's strategic importance and large Loyalist
population, coupled with Vermont's secession in 1777, posed special
problems for the beleaguered governor, but he proved an able
administrator. He was increasingly frustrated, however, as war expenses
mounted, and as the Continental Congress, which lacked the power to
raise revenues and relied on state contributions, looked to New York to
make up the shortfall that resulted when other states failed to meet
their quotas. He supported Alexander Hamilton's call for a stronger
Congress with independent revenue-raising powers, warning Continental
Congress President John Hanson in 1781 that ``we shall not be able
without a Change in our Circumstances, long to maintain our civil
Government.'' ¹⁸
Clinton's perspective changed in 1783, after Congress asked the
states to approve a national tariff that would deprive New York of its
most lucrative source of income. He had long believed that Congress
should facilitate and protect the foreign commerce that was so important
to New York. Toward that end, he had supported Hamilton's efforts to
strengthen the Articles of Confederation during the war. But the specter
of a national tariff helped convince him that a national government with
vastly enlarged powers might overwhelm the states and subvert individual
liberties. ``[W]hen stronger powers for Congress would benefit New
York,'' his biographer explains, ``Clinton would endorse such measures.
In purely domestic matters, the governor would put New York concerns
above all others.'' ¹⁹ The governor's primary concern,
according to another scholar, ``was to avoid any measure which might
burden his agrarian constituents with taxes.'' The tariff had supplied
nearly a third of New York's revenue during the 1780s, and Clinton
feared that if this critical source of income was diverted to national
coffers, the state legislature would be forced to raise real estate and
personal property taxes.²⁰

A Perennial Candidate for Vice President

Clinton emerged as one of the most prominent opponents of the new
Constitution. He was a delegate to the New York ratification convention,
where an Antifederalist majority elected him presiding officer. But with
the establishment of the federal union almost a foregone conclusion by
the time the convention assembled at Poughkeepsie on June 17, 1788
(eight states had already ratified, with the enabling ninth expected to
follow) Clinton's options were sharply limited. He had initially hoped
to secure a conditional ratification, contingent upon the adoption of
``amendments calculated to abridge and limit'' federal power, but after
the Antifederalists failed to agree on a common strategy and popular
sentiment shifted in favor of unconditional ratification, there was
little he could do to accomplish even this limited objective. Bowing to
the inevitable, he finally signalled his allies that, if their
constituents had come to favor unconditional ratification, they should
vote accordingly. He did so, as biographer John Kaminski suggests,
because he ``sensed that he might make the perfect vice presidential
candidate. . . . Once elected, Vice President Clinton could advise
Washington, support constitutional amendments as he presided over the
first United States Senate, and perhaps be heir apparent when Washington
decided to retire.'' ²¹
Friends of the new Constitution were much alarmed when New York and
Virginia Antifederalists proposed Clinton as a vice-presidential
candidate in 1788.²² James Madison was horrified that ``the
enemies to the Government . . . are laying a train for the election of
Governor Clinton,'' ²³ and Alexander Hamilton worked to unite
Federalists behind John Adams.²⁴ Well-placed rumors tainted
Clinton's candidacy by indicating that Antifederalist electors intended
to cast one of their two electoral votes for Richard Henry Lee or
Patrick Henry for president and the other vote for the New York
governor. Prior to the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804,
electors cast two votes in presidential elections without distinguishing
between presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and the runner-up
in the presidential race simply became vice president. Each elector,
however, voted with the clear intent of electing one individual as
president and the other as vice president. In the charged and expectant
atmosphere surrounding the first election under the new Constitution,
Federalists who learned of the rumored conspiracy to elect Lee or Henry
president feared that a vote for Clinton would be tantamount to a vote
against George Washington. Popular enthusiasm for the new government and
Clinton's well-known opposition to the Constitution also worked against
him. John Adams won the vice-presidency with 34 electoral votes; Clinton
received 3 of the 35 remaining electoral votes that were distributed
among a field of ten ``favorite son'' candidates.²⁵
Clinton fared better in the 1792 election. By the end of
Washington's first term, the cabinet was seriously divided over Treasury
Secretary Alexander Hamilton's financial system, and all parties agreed
that Washington's reelection was essential to the survival of the infant
republic. In spite of their earlier reservations about Clinton,
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and his Virginia allies, Madison and
James Monroe, were determined to replace the ``monarchist'' and abrasive
Vice President Adams. They considered the ``yeoman politician'' from New
York the candidate most likely to unseat him.²⁶
Clinton's candidacy faced several obstacles. He was still widely
suspect as an opponent of the Constitution, and the circumstances of his
reelection as governor earlier in the year had aroused the consternation
of even his most steadfast supporters. John Jay, the Federalist
candidate, had received a majority of the votes in the gubernatorial
race, but the destruction of ballots from Federalist-dominated Otsego
County on highly suspicious technical grounds by Antifederalist
canvassers had tipped the balance in Clinton's favor. Jefferson worried
that the New York election would jeopardize ``the cause of
republicanism,'' and Madison went so far as to suggest that Clinton
should resign the governorship if he believed that he had been
fraudulently elected.²⁷ Even though Adams was reelected vice
president with 77 electoral votes, Clinton managed to garner a
respectable 50 votes, carrying Virginia, Georgia, New York, and North
Carolina.²⁸ The election provided a limited measure of
comfort to Jefferson and Madison, who saw in the returns a portent of
future success for the emerging Republican coalition.²⁹
Despite his strong showing in the national election, Governor
Clinton found it increasingly difficult to maintain his power base in
New York. Pleading exhaustion and poor health, he announced his
retirement in 1795. Although his rheumatism was by that time so severe
that he could no longer travel to Albany to convene the state
legislature, other factors influenced his decision. The circumstances of
his 1792 reelection remained a serious liability, and his effectiveness
had been greatly diminished when the Federalists gained control of the
state legislature in 1793. Clinton was further compromised when his
daughter Cornelia married the flamboyant and highly suspect French
emissary, ``Citizen'' Edmond Genet, in 1794.³⁰
Clinton remained an attractive vice-presidential prospect for
Republican leaders hoping to preserve the Virginia-New York nexus so
crucial to their strategy, although he was never entirely comfortable
with the southern wing of the party. Party strategists tried to enlist
Clinton as their vice-presidential candidate to balance the ticket
headed by Thomas Jefferson in 1796, but he refused to run. He soon found
himself at odds with Jefferson, who became vice president in 1797 after
receiving the second highest number of electoral votes. In his March 4,
1797, inaugural address to the Senate, Jefferson praised his
predecessor, President John Adams, as a man of ``talents and
integrity.'' Clinton was quick to voice his outrage at this apparent
``public contradiction of the Objections offered by his Friends against
Mr. Adams's Election.'' In 1800, however, when approached by an emissary
from Representative Albert Gallatin (R-PA), Clinton did agree to become
Jefferson's running mate, although he seemed noticeably relieved when
Republicans finally chose his fellow New Yorker, Aaron Burr, to balance
the ticket.³¹

Governor Once More

Clinton ended his retirement in 1800, when he was elected to a seat
in the New York legislature. He had entered the contest at Burr's
urging, to ensure the selection of Republican presidential electors, and
probably intended to retire when his term expired. But when New York
Republicans, anticipating Jefferson's victory in the national election
and hoping to consolidate their gains on the local level, asked him to
enter the 1801 gubernatorial election, he agreed. He was at first
reluctant to seek the nomination--his acceptance was subject to the
caveat that he would resign the governorship if the office proved too
much for him--but Burr soon provided him with a compelling reason to
remain in the contest.³²
Eleven years earlier, Governor Clinton had appointed Aaron Burr
attorney general of New York. In 1789, with Federalists in control of
the state legislature, he had been anxious to add Burr and his allies to
the Clinton coalition. But he never completely trusted Burr, and his
suspicions were confirmed when Burr refused to defer to Thomas Jefferson
after the two candidates received an equal number of electoral votes in
the 1800 presidential contest. After the furor subsided, and after the
House of Representatives finally declared Jefferson the winner on the
thirty-sixth ballot, Clinton's nephew and political heir, De Witt
Clinton, predicted that Burr would resign the vice-presidency and try to
recoup his shattered fortunes by running for governor of New York. De
Witt apparently persuaded his uncle that he was the only prospective
candidate who could prevent Burr from taking control of the state
Republican party. George Clinton was elected governor by an overwhelming
margin, carrying traditionally Federalist New York City and all but six
counties.³³
During his last term as governor, Clinton was overshadowed by his
increasingly powerful and ambitious nephew. Still, although De Witt was
now ``the real power in New York politics,'' George Clinton was much
revered by New York voters. Anxious to preserve the Virginia-New York
coalition, but determined to limit Burr's role in his administration,
Jefferson turned to Clinton for advice in making federal appointments in
New York. ``[T]here is no one,'' he assured Clinton, ``whose opinion
would command me with greater respect than yours, if you would be so
good as to advise me.'' ³⁴ Jefferson was, in practical
effect, repudiating Burr, although he never publicly disavowed or openly
criticized his errant vice president.³⁵ One Federalist
observer soon noted that ``Burr is completely an insulated man in
Washington.'' ³⁶ As the 1804 election approached, De Witt
wrote to members of the Republican caucus suggesting his uncle George as
a replacement for Burr.³⁷

Vice President at Last

Widely respected for his heroism during the war and for his devotion
to Republican principles, George Clinton was a candidate who could
replace Burr without alienating New York voters. His age and precarious
health were important considerations for Jefferson, who calculated that
in 1808 the sixty-five-year-old hero would be too old to challenge his
intended successor, Secretary of State James Madison, for the Republican
presidential nomination.³⁸ But Clinton had no intention of
deferring to Madison in 1808. As Madison's biographer, Ralph Ketcham,
has explained, New York Republicans were deeply jealous of the
Virginians who had dominated their party's councils since 1792. ``George
Clinton's replacement of Burr as Vice President in 1804 was not so much
a reconciliation with the Virginians,'' he suggests, ``as a play for
better leverage to oust [the Virginians] in 1808.'' ³⁹
After the election, Clinton was all but shunted aside by a president
who had no wish to enhance his vice president's stature in the
administration or encourage his presidential ambitions. Jefferson no
longer asked Clinton's advice in making political appointments in New
York or elsewhere, or on any other matter of substance, ⁴⁰
relying instead on the counsel of Madison and Treasury Secretary Albert
Gallatin. When he felt it necessary to consult Republican legislators,
he did so in person ⁴¹ or through Gallatin, whose Capitol
Hill residence served as the meeting place for the Republican
caucus.⁴² (Now known as the Sewell-Belmont House, this
building still stands, adjacent to the Hart Senate Office Building.)
Clinton also took little part in the social life of the
administration.⁴³ Washington society had a distinctly
southern flavor, and, as the vice president confided to Senator Plumer,
he found the ``habits, manners, costoms, laws & country'' of New England
``much preferable to the southern States.'' ⁴⁴ A widower for
four years at the time of his election, Clinton and his daughter Maria
lived frugally with House of Representatives Clerk John Beckley and
seldom entertained.⁴⁵ Even in an administration that
consciously avoided ceremony and ostentatious display in favor of the
simple, republican style that shocked foreign visitors and scandalized
Federalists, Clinton's parsimony was legend. ``Mr. Clinton, always comes
to the city in his own carriage,'' Plumer noted. ``He is immensely
rich--but lives out at board like a common member--keeps no table--or
invites anybody to dine. A style of living unworthy of the 2d officer in
our government.'' ⁴⁶ Another senator observed that ``Mr.
Clinton . . . lives snug at his lodgings, and keeps aloof from . . .
exhibitions.'' ⁴⁷ Clinton's sole function was to preside over
the Senate.

An Ineffectual Presiding Officer

Nor was he an effective presiding officer. Senator Plumer observed,
when Clinton assumed the presiding officer's chair on December 16, 1805,
that he seemed ``altogether unacquainted'' with the Senate's rules, had
a ``clumsey awkward way of putting a question,'' and ``Preserves little
or no order.'' ⁴⁸ Senator John Quincy Adams (F-MA) shared
Plumer's concern. The Senate's new president was ``totally ignorant of
all the most common forms of proceeding in the Senate,'' he wrote in his
diary. ``His judgement is neither quick nor strong: so there is no more
dependence upon the correctness of his determination from his
understanding than from his experience . . . a worse choice than Mr.
Clinton could scarcely have been made.'' ⁴⁹ Clinton's
parliamentary skills failed to improve with experience, as Plumer
observed a year later:
The Vice President preserves very little order in the Senate. If
he ever had, he certainly has not now, the requisite qualifications
of a presiding officer. Age has impaired his mental powers. The
conversation & noise to day in our lobby was greater than I ever
suffered when moderator of a town meeting. It prevented us from
hearing the arguments of the Speaker. He frequently, at least he has
more than once, declared bills at the third reading when they had
been read but once--Puts questions without any motion being made--
Sometimes declares it a vote before any vote has been taken. And
sometimes before one bill is decided proceeds to another. From want
of authority, & attention to order he has prostrated the dignity of
the Senate. His disposition appears good,--but he wants mind &
nerve.⁵⁰
Although Plumer and others attributed the vice president's
ineptitude to his advanced age and feeble health, Clinton's longstanding
``aversion to councils'' ⁵¹ probably compounded his
difficulties. He had little patience with long-winded senators, as a
chagrined John Quincy Adams discovered after an extended discourse that
was, by his own admission, ``a very tedious one to all my hearers.''
``The Vice-President,'' he concluded, ``does not love long speeches.''
Clinton could do little to alleviate his discomfort, given the fact that
the Senate's rules permitted extended debate, but on at least one
occasion he asked a special favor: ``that when we were about to make
such we should give him notice; that he might take the opportunity to
warm himself at the fire.'' ⁵²
Clinton was frequently absent from the Senate, but he apparently
summoned the strength to attend when he found a compelling reason to do
so. A case in point was his tie-breaking vote to approve the nomination
of John Armstrong, Jr., a childhood friend and political ally, as a
commissioner to Spain. Federalist senators, and many of their Republican
colleagues, vehemently opposed Armstrong's nomination, alleging that he
had mishandled claims relating to the ship New Jersey while serving as
minister to France. At issue was Armstrong's finding that the 1800
convention with France indemnified only the original owners of captured
vessels, a position he abandoned after Jefferson insisted that insurers
should also receive compensation. Senator Samuel Smith (R-MD), a member
of Jefferson's own party and the brother of Navy Secretary Robert Smith,
so effectively mustered the opposition forces that, by Adams' account,
no senator spoke on Armstrong's behalf when the Senate debated his
nomination on March 17, 1806. After Senator John Adair (R-KY) ``left his
seat to avoid voting,'' the vice president, who had earlier informed
Plumer ``that he had intended not to take his seat in the Senate this
session,'' resolved the resulting 15-to-15 tied vote in Armstrong's
favor. ``I apprehended,'' Plumer surmised, that ``they found it
necessary & prevailed on him to attend.'' Clinton was absent for the
remainder of the session.⁵³
Clinton's only known attempt to influence legislation as vice
president occurred in early 1807, when he asked John Quincy Adams to
sponsor a bill to compensate settlers who had purchased western Georgia
lands from the Yazoo land companies. In 1795, the Georgia legislature
had sold thirty-five million acres of land to four land speculation
companies, which resold the properties to other land jobbers and to
individual investors before the legislature canceled the sale and ceded
the lands to the United States. A commission appointed to effect the
transfer to the United States proposed that five million acres be
earmarked to indemnify innocent parties, but Representative John
Randolph (R-VA) charged that congressional approval of the arrangement
would ``countenance the fraud a little further'' and blocked a final
settlement. In March 1806, the Senate passed a bill to compensate the
Yazoo settlers, but the House rejected the measure.⁵⁴ With
sentiment against compensation steadily mounting, the Senate on February
11, 1807, enacted a bill ``to prevent settlements on lands ceded to the
United States unless authorized by law.'' The following day, Adams
recorded in his diary that ``The Vice-President this morning took
[Adams] apart and advised [him] to ask leave to bring in a bill on
behalf of the Yazoo claimants, like that which passed the Senate at the
last session, to remove the effect of the bill passed yesterday.''
Clinton apparently abandoned the effort after Adams responded that he
did ``not think it would answer any such purpose.'' ⁵⁵
Clinton's always tenuous relationship with Jefferson became
increasingly strained as the president responded to English and French
assaults on American shipping with a strategy of diplomatic maneuvering
and economic coercion. Clinton viewed the escalating conflict between
England and France with alarm. He believed that war with one or both
nations was inevitable and became increasingly frustrated with
Jefferson's seeming reluctance to arm the nation for battle. The vice
president's own state was particularly vulnerable, because New York
shippers and merchants suffered heavily from British raids, yet
Jefferson's proposed solution of an embargo on foreign trade would have
a devastating impact on the state's economy. New York's limited coastal
defenses, Clinton feared, would prove painfully inadequate in the event
that the president's strategy failed to prevent war.⁵⁶

The Election of 1808

Congress approved the Embargo Act, closing United States ports to
foreign trade, in December 1807. When the Republican congressional
caucus met the following month to select the party's 1808 presidential
candidate, the vice president's supporters were conspicuously absent.
Clinton knew that the caucus would choose Madison, the architect of
Jefferson's foreign policy, as their presidential candidate but
apparently believed that he could win the presidency without the support
of the caucus. ``[O]ur venerable friend the Vice-President,'' Senator
Mitchill observed, ``considers himself as fully entitled to the first
place in the nation.'' Clinton was so ``self-complacent,'' Mitchill
marvelled, that he failed to ``discern what was as plain as daylight to
any body else,'' that there was not ``the remotest probability of his
success as President.'' But Clinton still commanded a substantial
following among disaffected Republicans from the Middle Atlantic states.
Because New Yorkers, in particular, resented Virginia's near-monopoly of
the presidency since 1789, Madison's campaign managers considered
Clinton enough of a threat to suggest him as a possible running
mate.⁵⁷
Much to Clinton's chagrin, the caucus renominated him to a second
term as vice president. His only public response was a letter to De
Witt--subsequently edited for maximum effect and released to the press
by the calculating nephew--denying that he had ``been directly or
indirectly consulted on the subject'' or ``apprised of the meeting held
for the purpose, otherwise, than by having accidentally seen a notice.''
⁵⁸ George Clinton neither accepted nor expressly refused the
vice-presidential nomination, a posture that caused considerable
consternation among Republican strategists. When caucus representatives
called on him to discuss the matter, his ``tart, severe, and puzzling
reply'' left them ``as much in a quandary as ever what to do with their
nomination of him.'' He was, Senator Mitchill theorized, ``as much a
candidate for the Presidency . . . as for the Vice Presidency.''
⁵⁹
As far as Clinton was concerned, he remained a presidential
candidate. While he affected the disinterested posture that early
nineteenth-century electoral etiquette demanded of candidates for
elective office, his supporters mounted a vigorous attack on Jefferson's
foreign policy, warning that Madison, the president's ``mere organ or
mouth piece,'' would continue along the same perilous course. But
Clinton, one pamphleteer promised voters, would ``protect you from
foreign and domestic foes.'' ⁶⁰ Writing under the pseudonym,
``A Citizen of New-York,'' the vice president's son-in-law, Edmond
Genet, promised that Clinton would substitute ``a dignified plan of
neutrality'' for the hated embargo.⁶¹ Turning their
candidate's most obvious liability to their advantage, Clintonians
portrayed the vice president as a seasoned elder statesman, ``a
repository of experimental knowledge.'' ⁶²
The tension between Jefferson and his refractory vice president
flared into open hostility after Clinton read confidential diplomatic
dispatches from London and Paris before an open session of the Senate on
February 26, 1808. The president had transmitted the reports to the
Senate with a letter expressly warning that ``the publication of papers
of this description would restrain injuriously the freedom of our
foreign correspondence.'' But, as John Quincy Adams recorded, ``The
Vice-President, not remarking that the first message was marked on the
cover, confidential, suffered all the papers to be read without closing
the doors.'' Clinton claimed that the disclosure was inadvertent, but
the dispatches had seemed to affirm his own conviction that ``war with
Great Britain appears inevitable.'' ⁶³ Much to his
embarrassment, the blunder was widely reported in the press. Entering
the Senate chamber ``rather late than usual'' one morning, Adams
witnessed an unusual display of temper:
The Vice President had been formally complaining of the
President for a mistake which was really his own. The message of the
twenty-sixth of February was read in public because the Vice-
President on receiving it had not noticed the word ``confidential''
written on the outside cover. This had been told in the newspapers,
and commented on as evidence of Mr. Clinton's declining years. He
thinks it was designedly done by the President to ensnare him and
expose him to derision. This morning he asked [Secretary of the
Senate Samuel] Otis for a certificate that the message was received
in Senate without the word ``confidential;'' which Otis declining to
do, he was much incensed with him, and spoke to the Senate in anger,
concluding by saying that he thought the Executive would have had
more magnanimity than to have treated him thus.⁶⁴
Support for Clinton's presidential bid steadily eroded as the
election approached and even the most ardent Clintonians realized that
their candidate had no chance of winning. Some bowed to the will of the
caucus as a matter of course, ⁶⁵ while the prospect of a
Federalist victory eventually drove others into the Madison
camp.⁶⁶ New England Federalists, energized by their
opposition to the embargo, briefly considered endorsing Clinton as their
presidential candidate but ultimately nominated Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney of South Carolina after intelligence reports from New York
indicated that Republicans there ``were disposed to unite in the
abandonment of Clinton.'' ⁶⁷ Madison won an easy victory with
122 electoral votes; Clinton finished a distant third with only six
electoral votes--a face-saving gesture by sympathetic New York
Republicans, who cast the state's thirteen remaining votes for
Madison.⁶⁸
The vice-presidential contest posed a unique problem for Republican
electors.⁶⁹ Clinton was still the Republican vice-
presidential candidate, notwithstanding the fact that, as Senator Wilson
Cary Nicholas (R-VA) observed, his conduct had ``alienated [him] from
the republicans.'' Although painfully aware that ``among the warm
friends of Mr. Clinton are to be found the bitterest enemies of the
administration,'' they ultimately elected him vice president because
they feared that repudiating the caucus nomination would set a dangerous
precedent. ``[I]f he is not elected,'' Nicholas argued, ``there will not
in future be any reliance upon such nominations, all confidence will be
lost and there can not be the necessary concert.'' ⁷⁰ As
Virginia Republican General Committee Chairman Philip Norborne Nicholas
stressed, it would be impossible to reject Clinton ``without injury to
the Republican cause.'' ⁷¹

The Final Term

Clinton left for New York before Congress assembled in the House of
Representatives chamber to count the electoral votes on February 8,
1809, thus avoiding the unpleasant task of proclaiming Madison's
election as president and his own reelection as vice president. He did
not return in time to witness Madison's inauguration on March 4 (and
surviving records do not indicate where or when he took his own
oath).⁷² In the meantime, his supporters had already joined
forces with disaffected Republican Senators Samuel Smith of Maryland,
William B. Giles of Virginia, and Michael Leib of Pennsylvania in a
successful attempt to prevent Madison from nominating Albert Gallatin as
secretary of state.⁷³
Clinton opposed Madison's foreign and domestic policies throughout
his second vice-presidential term, but he lacked the support and the
vitality to muster an effective opposition. Still, he dealt the
administration a severe blow when he cast the deciding vote in favor of
a measure to prevent the recharter of the Bank of the United States.
Madison had once opposed Hamilton's proposal to establish a national
bank, but by 1811, ``twenty years of usefulness and public approval''
had mooted his objections. Treasury Secretary Gallatin considered the
bank an essential component of the nation's financial and credit system,
but Clinton and other ``Old Republicans'' still considered the
institution an unconstitutional aggrandizement of federal power. The
Senate debated Republican Senator William H. Crawford of Georgia's
recharter bill at great length before voting on a motion to kill it on
February 20, 1811. Clinton voted in favor of the motion after the Senate
deadlocked by a vote of 17 to 17. His vote did not in itself defeat the
bank, since the recharter bill had already failed in the House of
Representatives, ⁷⁴ but this last act of defiance dealt a
humiliating blow to the administration and particularly to Gallatin, who
observed many years later that ``nothing can be more injurious to an
Administration than to have in that office a man in hostility with that
Administration, as he will always become the most formidable rallying
point for the opposition.'' ⁷⁵
In a brief and dignified address to the Senate, Clinton explained
his vote, declaring his longstanding conviction that ``Government is not
to be strengthened by an assumption of doubtful powers.'' Could
Congress, he asked, ``create a body politic and corporate, not
constituting a part of the Government, nor otherwise responsible to it
by forfeiture of charter, and bestow on its members privileges,
immunities, and exemptions not recognised by the laws of the States, nor
enjoyed by the citizens generally? . . . The power to create
corporations is not expressly granted [by the Constitution],'' he
reasoned, but ``[i]f . . . the powers vested in the Government shall be
found incompetent to the attainment of the objects for which it was
instituted, the Constitution happily furnishes the means for remedying
the evil by amendment.'' ⁷⁶ Then-Senator Henry Clay, a
Kentucky Republican, later claimed that he was the author of the vice
president's remarks. Long after Clinton's death, but before Clay
reversed his own position to become one of the bank's leading advocates
during the 1830s, the ever-boastful Clay asserted that the speech ``was
perhaps the thing that had gained the old man more credit than anything
else that he ever did.'' Clay, however, admitted that ``he had written
it . . . under Mr. Clinton's dictation, and he never should think of
claiming it as his composition.'' ⁷⁷
Clinton's February 20, 1811, speech was his first and last formal
address to the Senate. Two days later, he notified the senators that he
would be absent for the remainder of the session.⁷⁸ He
returned for the opening session of the Twelfth Congress on November 4,
1811, and faithfully presided over the Senate throughout the winter, but
by the end of March 1812 he was too ill to continue. President pro
tempore William Crawford presided for the remainder of the session,
while Clinton's would-be successors engaged in ``[e]lectioneering . . .
beyond description'' for the 1812 vice-presidential nomination. On April
20, 1812, Crawford informed the Senate of ``the death of our venerable
fellow-citizen, GEORGE CLINTON, Vice President of the United States.''
⁷⁹
The following afternoon, a joint delegation from the Senate and the
House of Representatives accompanied Clinton's body to the Senate
chamber. He was the first person to lie in state in the Capitol, for a
brief two-hour period, before the funeral procession escorted his
remains to nearby Congressional Cemetery. President Madison was among
the official mourners, although he and the first lady held their
customary reception at the Executive Mansion the following day. In the
Senate chamber, black crepe adorned the presiding officer's chair for
the remainder of the session, and each senator wore a black arm band for
thirty days ``from an unfeigned respect'' for their departed
president.⁸⁰ Clinton's former rival, Gouverneur Morris, later
offered a moving--if brutally frank--tribute to the fallen ``soldier of
the Revolution.'' Clinton had rendered a lifetime of service to New York
and the nation, Morris reminded his audience, but ``to share in the
measures of the administration was not his part. To influence them was
not in his power.'' ⁸¹
GEORGE CLINTON

NOTES

¹ Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer's
Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803-1807 (New
York, 1923), pp. 352-53.
² U.S., Congress, Senate, Annals of Congress, 8th Cong.,
2d sess., pp. 77-80; Stephen W. Stathis and Ronald C. Moe, ``America's
Other Inauguration,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 10 (Fall 1980):
561.
³ Brown, pp. 312-13; Samuel L. Mitchill to Mrs. Mitchill,
March 2, 1805, ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters from Washington: 1801-1818,''
Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (April 1879): 749.
⁴ Brown, pp. 353-53.
⁵ John Kaminski, George Clinton: Yeoman Politician of the
New Republic (Madison, WI, 1993), pp. 247, 255-56, 274.
⁶ Kaminski, p. 1.
⁷ Alan Taylor, review of Kaminski, George Clinton, in
Journal of the Early Republic 13 (Fall 1993): 414-15.
⁸ Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and
Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York,
1995), p. 156.
⁹ Kaminski, pp. 11-14; U.S., Congress, Senate,
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-1989, S. Doc.
100-34, 100th Cong., 2d sess., 1989, p. 795.
¹⁰ Brown, pp. 450, 635.
¹¹ Several portraits of Clinton, at various stages of his
career, are reproduced in Kaminski, pp. 22, 58, 112, 190, 228.
¹² Manning Dauer, ``Election of 1804,'' in History of
American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., and Fred L. Israel, vol. 1 (New York, 1971), p. 161.
¹³ Kaminski, pp. 14-25, 251, 293.
¹⁴ Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The
American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (New
York, 1989; reprint of 1981 edition), p. 162.
¹⁵ Kaminski, pp. 19-25; Countryman, pp. 161-202.
¹⁶ As Countryman has noted, during the Confederation
period alone, ``some 170 laws were passed and 40 other actions taken . .
. in response to the governor's suggestions.'' Countryman, p. 210.
¹⁷ Kaminski, pp. 26-36; Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious
Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York, 1982), pp. 382-84;
Countryman, p. 211.
¹⁸ Kaminski, pp. 23-57.
¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 60-63, 85-96, 115-21.
²⁰ Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New
York: The Origins, 1763-1791 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1967), pp. 56-57.
²¹ Kaminski, pp. 113-69.
²² Marcus Cunliffe, ``The Elections of 1789 and 1792,''
in Schlesinger and Israel, ed., 1:15.
²³ Kaminski, p. 171.
²⁴ As noted in Chapter 1 of this volume, ``John Adams,''
p. 6, Hamilton perceived Adams as a threat to his own ambitions and
schemed--successfully--to erode his electoral count in 1788. Yet, even
though, as Kaminski acknowledges, ``Hamilton did not particularly care
for Adams,'' Adams' support for the Constitution made him infinitely
preferable, in Hamilton's estimation, to Clinton. Kaminski, pp. 173-74.
²⁵ Cunliffe, p. 18; Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 1st
sess., p. 17.
²⁶ Kaminski, p. 231.
²⁷ Ibid., pp. 211-27; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), p. 288.
²⁸ Clinton also received one of Pennsylvania's 15
electoral votes.
²⁹ Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography
(Charlottesville, VA, 1992; reprint of 1971 edition), p. 336.
³⁰ Young, p. 430; Kaminski, p. 237-49.
³¹ Kaminski, pp. 249-55; Annals of Congress, 5th Cong.,
special sess., March 4, 1797, pp. 1581-82.
³² Kaminski, pp. 249-56; Annals of Congress, 5th Cong.,
special sess., March 4, 1797, pp. 1581-82.
³³ Kaminski, pp. 192, 256-60.
³⁴ Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans
in Power: Party Operations, 1801-1809 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1963), p. 39;
Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (Boston,
1970), p. 88; Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Process of Government under
Jefferson (Princeton, NJ, 1978), p. 16; Kaminski, p. 261.
³⁵ Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, pp. 42-
43, 205-13; Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of
Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987), p. 271; Malone, Jefferson the
President: First Term, pp. 123-24, 141, 432; Kaminski, pp. 261-64.
³⁶ Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, p. 205.
³⁷ Kaminski, pp. 262-73.

³⁸ Dauer, pp. 159-69; Kaminski, p. 274.

³⁹ Ketcham, p. 466.

⁴⁰ Kaminski, p. 279; Cunningham, The Process of
Government Under Jefferson, p. 16; Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans
in Power, passim; and Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second
Term, 1805-1809 (Boston, 1974), passim.

⁴¹ Cunningham, The Process of Government Under Jefferson,
pp. 188-93; Alexander B. Lacy, Jr., ``Jefferson and Congress:
Congressional Method and Politics, 1801-1809,'' Ph.D. dissertation
(University of Virginia, 1964), pp. 97-101.

⁴² Lacy, p. 102; Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A
Study in Administrative History, 1801-1809 (New York, 1951), p. 50.
⁴³ Kaminski, pp. 274-75.
⁴⁴ Brown, pp. 348-49.
⁴⁵ Kaminski, p. 275.
⁴⁶ Brown, pp. 634-35.
⁴⁷ Samuel L. Mitchill to Mrs. Mitchill, November 23,
1807, ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters from Washington,'' p. 748.
⁴⁸ Brown, pp. 352-53.
⁴⁹ Adams' criticism followed his account of a debate in
which Clinton ruled his motion to amend a resolution out of order.
Charles F. Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (12 vols.,
Philadelphia, 1874-1877), 1:382-85.
⁵⁰ Brown, p. 593.
⁵¹ Kaminski, p. 292.
⁵² Adams, 1:400.
⁵³ Ibid., 1:421; Brown, pp. 452, 455-57; Malone,
Jefferson the President: Second Term, pp. 88-89.
⁵⁴ Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason, pp. 281-82; Annals
of Congress, 9th Cong., 1st sess., p. 208; U.S., Congress, House, Annals
of Congress, 9th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 906-21.
⁵⁵ Adams, 1:452-53. The controversy was eventually
settled by the Supreme Court's 1810 ruling in Fletcher v. Peck.
⁵⁶ Kaminski, pp. 278-79; Malone, Jefferson the President:
Second Term, pp. 469-506.
⁵⁷ Samuel L. Mitchill to Mrs. Mitchill, January 25, 1808,
``Dr. Mitchill's Letters to Washington,'' p. 752; Irving Brant,
``Election of 1808,'' in Schlesinger and Israel, 1:185-221; Ketcham, pp.
466-67.
⁵⁸ ``Letter from Vice-President George Clinton to De Witt
Clinton, March 5, 1808,'' in Schlesinger and Israel, 1:228; Brant,
1:202; Kaminski, pp. 280-81, 332n.
⁵⁹ Samuel L. Mitchell to Mrs. Mitchell, April 1, 1808,
``Dr. Mitchell's Letters from Washington,'' p. 753.
⁶⁰ Kaminski, pp. 285-86.
⁶¹ ``A Citizen of New-York,'' quoted in Kaminski, pp.
286-87.
⁶² Kaminski, p. 284.
⁶³ Adams, 1:516; Annals of Congress, 10th Cong., 1st
sess., p. 150.
⁶⁴ Adams, 1:529.
⁶⁵ Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, pp.
118-21.
⁶⁶ Brant, 1:218.
⁶⁷ Kaminski, p. 283.
⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 288; Brant, 1:202; Ketcham, pp. 466-69.
Pinckney carried the New England states with 76 electoral votes.
⁶⁹ The Twelfth Amendment, which provides that electors
``shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in
distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President,'' was ratified
on June 15, 1804. This procedure--designed to prevent a recurrence of
the situation that occurred in 1800, when the Republican presidential
and vice-presidential candidates received an equal number of electoral
votes--was first employed during the 1804 election.
⁷⁰ Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, pp.
122-23.
⁷¹ Ibid., p. 123.
⁷² Annals of Congress, 10th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 337,
344-45; U.S., Congress, Senate, Journal, 10th Cong., special session,
March 4-March 7, 1809, pp. 365-68; and Journal, 11th Cong., 1st sess.,
pp. 373-74; Stathis and Moe, pp. 561, 566n. Neither the Annals nor the
Senate Journal indicates where, or on what date, Clinton took his oath
of office. He was not present for the special session of March 4-March
7, 1809. The Senate Journal notes that ``[t]he Honorable George Clinton,
Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate,'' was
present when the Eleventh Congress convened on May 22, 1809, but does
not indicate that he took the oath of office at that time.
⁷³ Ketcham, pp. 481-82. Gallatin continued to serve as
secretary of the treasury until 1814.
⁷⁴ Ketcham, pp. 506; Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d
sess., pp. 121-347; Kaminski, pp. 289-90; Chase C. Mooney, William H.
Crawford, 1772-1834 (Lexington, KY, 1974), pp. 17-26; Robert V. Remini,
Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York, 1991), pp. 68-71.
⁷⁵ Kaminski, p. 289.
⁷⁶ Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d sess., pp. 346-47.
⁷⁷ Adams, 7:64; Remini, pp. 68-71, 379, and passim.
⁷⁸ Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d sess., pp. 350-70.
⁷⁹ Ibid., pp. 9, 177, 205-6. The ``electioneering'' for
Clinton's office was mentioned in correspondence from First Lady Dolley
Madison to Anna Cutts, quoted in Ketcham, p. 521.
⁸⁰ Kaminski, p. 291; Annals of Congress, 12th Cong., 1st
sess., p. 206; Ketcham, p. 520.
⁸¹ Kaminski, pp. 292-93.
?

Chapter 5

ELBRIDGE GERRY

1813-1814

ELBRIDGE GERRY
ELBRIDGE GERRY

Chapter 5

ELBRIDGE GERRY

5th Vice President: 1813-1814

It is the duty of every man, though he may have but one
day to live, to devote that day to the good of his country.
--Elbridge Gerry ¹
The vice-presidency had been vacant for nearly a year by the time
Elbridge Gerry took office as the nation's fifth vice president on March
4, 1813. His predecessor, George Clinton, an uncompromising ``Old
Republican'' with frustrated presidential ambitions, had died in office
on April 20, 1812. Clinton's constant carping about President James
Madison's foreign policy had put him at odds with the administration.
Gerry, who replaced Clinton as the Republican vice-presidential nominee
in the 1812 election, was a vice president more to Madison's liking. An
enthusiastic supporter of Jefferson's embargo and Madison's foreign
policy, he offered a welcome contrast to the independent-minded and
cantankerous New Yorker who had proved so troublesome during the
president's first term. But, like Clinton, Gerry would die in office
before the end of his term, leaving Madison--and the nation--once again
without a vice president.

Early Career

Elbridge Gerry was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on July 17,
1744, one of Thomas and Elizabeth Greenleaf Gerry's eleven children. A
former ship's captain who emigrated from England in 1730, Thomas Gerry
was a pillar of the Marblehead community, serving as a justice of the
peace and selectman and as moderator of the town meeting. The family was
prosperous, thanks to a thriving mercantile and shipping business and an
inheritance from Elizabeth Gerry's side of the family. The Gerrys were
also pious, faithfully attending the First Congregational Church and
avoiding ostentatious display. Young Elbridge was probably educated by a
private tutor before his admission to Harvard College in 1758. Like many
of his fellow scholars, he paid careful attention to the imperial crisis
that would eventually precipitate the American Revolution, arguing in
his master's thesis that the colonists were justified in their
resistance to ``the new Prohibitory Duties, which make it useless for
the People to engage in Commerce.'' ²
Gerry returned home after graduation to join the family business. A
thriving port and commercial center, Marblehead was a hotbed of anti-
British activity during the 1760s and 1770s. The future vice president
played a limited role in the resistance movement until the spring of
1770, when he served on a local committee to enforce the ban on the sale
and consumption of tea. He was elected to the Massachusetts legislature
in 1772, and later to its successor body, the Provincial Congress,
serving as chairman of the committee on supplies during the fall and
winter of 1774-1775.³ The historian Mercy Otis Warren--a
contemporary--later recalled that Gerry coordinated the procurement and
distribution of arms and provisions with ``punctuality and indefatigable
industry,'' ⁴ an effort he would continue while serving in
the Continental Congress. Following a practice that was neither unusual
nor illegal at the time, Gerry awarded several supply contracts to his
family's business. But, unlike many of his fellow merchants, he refused
to take excessive profits from wartime commerce, explaining that he
would ``prefer any Loss to the least Misunderstanding with the public
relative of Interest.'' ⁵
Gerry was elected to the second Continental Congress in December
1775, serving until 1780 and again from 1783 to 1785. If he was, as his
biographer George Athan Billias admits, a ``second rank figure'' in a
body that included such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and John and
Samuel Adams, he was also a diligent legislator. His efforts to persuade
wavering middle colony delegates to support independence during the
summer of 1776 evoked paeans of praise from John Adams. ``If every Man
here was a Gerry,'' Adams claimed, ``the Liberties of America would be
safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.'' ⁶
But, like Adams, Gerry could also be trying and impractical--even
Adams despaired of his friend's ``obstinacy that will risk great things
to secure small ones.'' ⁷ He was ``of so peculiar a cast of
mind,'' Continental Congress Secretary Charles Thomson marvelled, ``that
his pleasure seems proportioned to the absurdity of his schemes.''
⁸ Modern scholars agree that ``his work in Congress was
remembered most for its capriciousness and contrariness,'' citing the
``phobias against sword, purse, and centralized power'' that ``drove him
to oppose any kind of peacetime army and any taxing scheme to raise
revenue for the central government.'' ⁹ But Gerry's
biographer discerns a fundamental logic in his seemingly erratic career.
The Revolution was Gerry's defining moment, Billias emphasizes, and the
future vice president considered ``the signing of the Declaration of
Independence . . . the greatest single act of his entire life.''
¹⁰ All of his subsequent actions, inconsistent and
idiosyncratic as they may have appeared to others, were driven by his
single-minded goal of preserving the hard-won gains of the Revolution.
For all his commitment to Revolutionary principles, however, Gerry
was no egalitarian. He believed that a ``natural elite'' of able and
talented individuals should govern the new nation. As a member of that
favored class, he considered public service a responsibility, not an
opportunity for personal or financial gain. Like many of his
contemporaries, he believed that the ideal form of government was a
``mixed'' constitution, incorporating in a delicately balanced
equilibrium the best features of a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a
democracy. A constitution that inclined too much toward any of the three
would, Gerry feared, threaten the stability of the government or
jeopardize the liberties of the people. This stance accounts for his
seemingly inconsistent behavior during the Constitutional Convention and
the ensuing ratification debate.¹¹

Constitutional Convention

One of four delegates chosen by the Massachusetts legislature to
attend the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Gerry was, in his
biographer's words, ``one of the most active participants in the entire
Convention.'' ¹² A member of the moderate bloc--he was
neither an extreme nationalist nor a committed states' rights advocate--
he acted as a conciliator during the first phases of the convention. As
chair of the committee that resolved the impasse between the large and
small states over representation in the national legislature, Gerry made
several impassioned speeches in support of the ``Great Compromise,''
which provided for equal representation of the states in the Senate and
proportional representation in the House of
Representatives.¹³
Soon after the convention adopted the compromise, Gerry began to
worry that the constitution that was slowly emerging during those hot
and tense days in Philadelphia would create a powerful national
legislature capable of jeopardizing the people's liberties and
overshadowing the states. Although the convention adopted several of his
proposals to limit congressional power, including the prohibition
against bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, these provisions
failed to satisfy his apprehensions. Struggling to save a document that
he now considered seriously flawed, Gerry offered a motion to include a
bill of rights and several specific proposals to safeguard popular
liberties. The convention's majority disagreed with this approach and
defeated each of these initiatives. On September 15, 1787, a dispirited
Gerry stated ``the objections which determined him to withhold his name
from the Constitution,'' concluding that ``the best that could be done .
. . was to provide for a second general Convention.'' Two days later, as
his more optimistic colleagues prepared to sign the new Constitution,
Gerry explained his change of heart. James Madison, whose notes of the
convention provide the only authoritative account of its proceedings,
recorded the awkward scene:
Mr. Gerry described the painful feelings of his situation, and
the embarrassment under which he rose to offer any further
observations on the subject which had finally been decided. Whilst
the plan was depending, he had treated it with all the freedom he
thought it deserved. He now felt himself bound as he was disposed to
treat it with the respect due to the Act of the Convention. He hoped
he should not violate that respect in declaring on this occasion his
fears that a Civil war may result from the present crisis of the
U.S.¹⁴
Gerry objected to several provisions in the new Constitution,
including the language in Article I, section 3, specifying that ``The
Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate.''
During the September 7 debate over the ``mode of constituting the
Executive,'' he had voiced his reservations about assigning legislative
responsibilities to the vice president. ``We might as well put the
President himself at the head of the Legislature,'' he had argued. ``The
close intimacy that must subsist between the President & vice-president
makes it absolutely improper.'' But, he now admitted, he could have
accepted this provision and others that he found troubling had the
Constitution not granted Congress such sweeping powers.¹⁵
Fearful as he was about the new Constitution, Gerry was equally
worried that ``anarchy may ensue'' if the states failed to ratify it. He
did not, therefore, reject it outright during the ratification struggle.
Abandoning his earlier call for a second convention, he worked to build
support for amendments ``adapted to the `exigencies of Government' & the
preservation of Liberty.'' Reviled as a traitor to his class by elites
who strongly favored ratification, Gerry suffered an overwhelming defeat
in the 1788 Massachusetts gubernatorial election. Still, he noted with
some satisfaction that his state and four others ratified the
Constitution with recommendations for amendments.¹⁶

The New Nation

Gerry served in the United States House of Representatives during
the First and Second congresses (1789-1793). A conciliatory and moderate
legislator, he supported Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's
proposals to fund the Revolutionary War debt and to establish a national
bank. Disillusioned by the increasingly partisan nature of the debate
that Hamilton's proposals generated, Gerry retired at the end of his
second term, returning to Elmwood, his Cambridge, Massachusetts, estate,
to attend to his business affairs and to care for his large and growing
family. He had remained a bachelor until the age of forty-one, marrying
Ann Thompson, the European-educated daughter of a wealthy New York
merchant, in 1786. Ann Gerry's frequent pregnancies--ten children
arrived between 1787 and 1801--placed a severe strain on her health, and
Elbridge was needed at home.¹⁷
Gerry's brief retirement ended in 1796, when he served as a
presidential elector, supporting his friend and former colleague, John
Adams. In 1797, with relations between the United States and France
steadily worsening after the adoption of the Jay Treaty, President Adams
appointed Gerry an envoy to France. The mission failed after
representatives of the French government demanded a bribe before they
would begin negotiations. Gerry's fellow commissioners left Paris, but
Gerry, who had been meeting privately with the French in an effort to
facilitate negotiations, remained behind, believing that accommodation
was possible. Eventually, he left France empty-handed but convinced that
his efforts had averted war. Attacks on American shipping continued,
however, and Gerry was widely criticized for the failure of the
mission.¹⁸
Maligned by Federalists who believed him partial to France, and
courted by Republicans for the same reason, Gerry tried to remain aloof
from the partisan warfare of the late 1790s. Then, in 1800, energized by
President John Adams' warning that Hamilton would use the army to gain
control of the government, he aligned himself with the moderate wing of
the Jeffersonian coalition, eventually emerging as the leader of the
Massachusetts Republicans. After a brief second retirement from politics
between 1804 and 1809, Gerry was elected governor of Massachusetts in
1810. The success of his efforts to reconcile Federalists and
Republicans, who were bitterly divided over foreign policy issues, led
to his reelection the following year. During his second term, however,
Governor Gerry adopted a more ``hard-line'' approach, as Massachusetts
Federalists became increasingly outspoken in their opposition to
Madison's foreign policy. He prosecuted Federalist editors for libel,
appointed family members to state office, and approved a controversial
redistricting plan crafted to give Republicans an advantage in the state
senatorial elections. The Federalist press responded to this plan with
cartoon figures of a salamander-shaped election district--the
``Gerrymander''--adding to the American political lexicon a term that is
still used to connote an irregularly shaped district created by
legislative fiat to benefit a particular party, politician, or other
group. Governor Gerry's highly partisan agenda led to his defeat in the
April 1812 gubernatorial election. Heavily in debt after cosigning a
note for a brother who defaulted on his obligation, and saddled with the
expenses of a large family, Gerry asked President James Madison to
appoint him collector of customs at Boston.¹⁹

Vice-Presidential Career

Madison had other plans for Gerry. With the 1812 presidential
election fast approaching and the vice-presidency vacant since George
Clinton's death in April, Madison was more anxious to find a suitable
running mate than to fill a customs post. He preferred a candidate who
would attract votes in the New England states yet would not threaten the
succession of the ``Virginia dynasty'' in the 1816 election. Former
Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire, the party's first choice, was too
old and too ill to accept the nomination. After he declined, the
Republican caucus turned to the sixty-seven-year-old Gerry, a choice
that Madison approved despite Albert Gallatin's prediction that the
Massachusetts patriot ``would give us as much trouble as our late Vice-
President.'' ²⁰ Gerry had supported Jefferson's embargo and
Madison's foreign policy, remaining steadfast after the United States
declared war against Great Britain in June 1812. Like Madison, he
believed that the war was necessary to protect the liberties that both
men had labored so hard to secure during the Revolution.²¹
Although Gerry was certainly no liability, he turned out not to be
as valuable an asset as the Republicans had hoped. Of Massachusetts' 22
electors, only 2 voted for Gerry and none voted for Madison. In an
election that was, as one scholar has observed, ``a virtual referendum''
on the War of 1812, editors and electioneers paid relatively little
attention to the vice-presidential candidates. By a margin of 39
electoral votes, Madison defeated opposition candidate De Witt Clinton,
and Gerry triumphed over Jared Ingersoll of Pennsylvania.²²
Gerry remained at home in Massachusetts on inauguration day, March
4, 1813, taking his oath of office there from U.S. District Judge John
Davis.²³ When the Senate convened at the beginning of the
Thirteenth Congress on May 24, 1813, he appeared in the chamber with a
certificate attesting to the fact that he had taken the oath of office.
Gerry's inaugural address, an extended oration condemning the British
and praising Madison, was unusual in content and length. He explained
that ``to have concealed'' his ``political principles and opinions''
during ``a crisis like this might have savored too much of a deficiency
of candor.'' ²⁴ He was now on record as a supporter of the
war effort and a loyal ally of the president.
Gerry's early hopes that ``unanimity should prevail'' in the Senate
²⁵ soon faded, as the war deepened the divisions between the
parties and threatened to split the Republican coalition. Republicans
far outnumbered Federalists in the Senate, but mounting opposition to
the war effort among disaffected Republicans steadily eroded the
administration's 28-to-8 majority. The president was such an inept
commander in chief that even his loyal ally, House Speaker Henry Clay of
Kentucky, considered him ``wholly unfit for the storms of War.''
²⁶ As anti-administration sentiment reached a fever pitch
after American forces suffered humiliating defeats in Canada and at sea,
²⁷ several members of the president's party balked at the
nomination of Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin as envoy to Great
Britain and Russia. Instead, they supported a resolution ordering
Madison to inform the Senate whether Gallatin would retain his cabinet
post (and, if so, who would serve in his absence). Ultimately, these
Republicans joined with Federalists to defeat the nomination by a vote
of 18 to 17.²⁸
Elbridge Gerry found it increasingly difficult to remain impartial
in such a highly charged atmosphere, especially after Madison became
seriously ill in mid-June 1813. Gerry, himself, was in poor health. He
had recently suffered a ``stroke,'' and old age had so withered his
slight physique that one observer likened his appearance to that of a
``scant-patterned old skeleton of a French Barber.'' The March 1, 1792,
act which at that time governed the presidential succession provided
that if the president and the vice president died in office--a
development that many considered possible, if not imminent, during the
summer of 1813--the president pro tempore of the Senate would serve as
president. And if Gerry left the Senate before Congress adjourned, as
all of his predecessors had done to allow election of a president pro
tempore, anti-administration forces might combine to elect an individual
hostile to Madison's agenda. One Federalist editor had already suggested
New York Federalist Senator Rufus King as a possible successor, while
Secretary of State James Monroe warned that disaffected Senate
Republicans had ``begun to make calculations, and plans, founded on the
presumed death of the President and Vice-President, and it has been
suggested to me that [Virginia Senator William Branch] Giles is thought
of to take the place of the President of the Senate.'' ²⁹
But if Gerry remained in the chair, and if he survived until the end
of the session, the person next in the line of succession would be
Speaker of the House Henry Clay, an outspoken ``warhawk.'' Breaking with
the precedent established by John Adams, Gerry therefore refused to
vacate the chair, presiding over the Senate until the first session of
the Thirteenth Congress adjourned on August 2, 1813. ``[S]everal
gentlemen of the Senate had intimated a wish that he would retire from
the Chair two or three weeks before the time of adjournment, and would
thus give to the Senate an opportunity for choosing a President pro
tempore,'' he later explained, but ``other gentlemen expressed a
contrary desire, and thought that the President should remain in the
Chair, and adjourn the Senate.'' Gerry ultimately decided that, as ``a
war existed and had produced a special session of Congress,'' he was
``differently circumstanced from any of his predecessors, and was under
an obligation to remain in the Chair until the important business of the
session was finished.'' ³⁰ (Decades later, in March 1890, the
Senate established the current practice of having presidents pro tempore
hold office continuously until the election of another president pro
tempore, rather than serving only during the absence of a vice
president.)
With the presidential succession safe and Madison's physical
condition much improved by the time the Senate adjourned, Gerry was free
to return home. He was absent when the second session of the Thirteenth
Congress convened in December and did not return to Washington until
early February 1814.³¹ Partisan sentiments remained strong in
the Senate, he soon discovered. By one observer's count, the
administration's opponents outnumbered its supporters by a margin of 20
to 16. The vice president suspected that a Senate stenographer was the
source of recent anti-administration articles in the local press, but
with opposition forces now in the majority he was reluctant to ``meddle
with serpents,'' and he let the matter drop.³²
Unpleasant as his Senate duties had become, Gerry still enjoyed the
endless round of dinners, receptions, and entertainments that crowded
his calendar. With his elegant manners and personal charm, the vice
president was a favorite guest of Washington's Republican hostesses,
including first lady Dolley Madison. He maintained an active social
schedule that belied his advanced years and failing health, visiting
friends from his earlier days, who were now serving as members of
Congress or administration appointees, and paying special attention to
Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the American-born sister-in-law of Napoleon,
whose revealing attire caused a stir wherever she went.³³
Gerry remained in Washington until the second session of the
Thirteenth Congress adjourned on April 18, 1814, leaving the Senate
chamber only a few moments before adjournment to permit the election of
South Carolina Republican John Gaillard as president pro tempore.
Mindful that the war had ``increased his responsibility,'' and
apprehensive of ``the tendency of contrary conduct to prostrate the laws
and Government,'' however, he had refused to relinquish the chair
``whilst any important bill or measure was pending, and was to be
finished at that session.'' ³⁴
Gerry spent the summer of 1814 in Massachusetts, awaiting news of
the war effort from Madison.³⁵ He found the capital much
changed when he returned in the fall; British troops had burned most of
the city's public buildings, including the Capitol, and the Senate would
meet in temporary quarters for the remainder of his term. He was
outraged to learn that Massachusetts Federalists had called for a
convention of the New England states to consider defensive measures and
to propose constitutional amendments. In the fall of 1814, the Hartford
Convention, which would not issue its recommendations until after
Gerry's death, was widely rumored to be a secessionist initiative. The
vice president therefore urged Madison to counter with a ``spirited
manifesto'' against the proceedings.³⁶
Gerry was still an energetic defender of the administration and of
the war, but, by that autumn, his public responsibilities, coupled with
his relentless socializing, had sapped his strength. He became seriously
ill in late November 1814, retiring early on the evening of November 22
and complaining of chest pains the next morning. Determined to perform
his public responsibilities, he arrived at the temporary capitol in the
Patent Office Building later that morning. Then, realizing that he was
in no condition to preside over the Senate, he returned to his
boardinghouse. Members of the Senate, assembling in the chamber at their
customary hour and hearing reports of Gerry's death, sent Massachusetts
Senators Joseph Varnum and Christopher Gore to the vice president's
lodgings ``to ascertain the fact.'' When they returned with confirmation
that the reports were true, the Senate appointed five senators to a
joint committee ``to consider and report measures most proper to
manifest the public respect for the memory of the deceased.'' The body
then adjourned as a mark of respect to its departed president. On the
following day, the Senate ordered that the president's chair ``be
shrouded with black during the present session; and as a further
testimony of respect for the deceased, the members of the Senate will go
into mourning, and wear black crape round the left arm for thirty
days.'' ³⁷ Although the Senate passed legislation providing
for payment of Gerry's vice-presidential salary to his financially
strapped widow for the remainder of his term, the House rejected the
plan.
Not long after Gerry's interment at Congressional Cemetery, the
United States claimed victory over Great Britain. The young nation
received few tangible concessions from the British under the Treaty of
Ghent, ³⁸ but a new generation of leaders viewed America's
``victory'' in the War of 1812 as a reaffirmation of the ideals that had
animated and sustained Elbridge Gerry since the summer of 1776.
ELBRIDGE GERRY2

NOTES

¹ Inscription on the Elbridge Gerry monument,
Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C., reproduced in James T. Austin,
The Life of Elbridge Gerry, vol. 2 (New York, 1970; reprint of 1829
edition), p. 403.
² George Athan Billias, Elbridge Gerry, Founding Father
and Republican Statesman (New York, 1976), pp. 1-7.
³ Ibid., pp. 7-54.
⁴ Quoted in ibid., p. 53.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 73-75.
⁶ Quoted in ibid., p. 70.
⁷ Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, ``Elbridge Gerry,
Gentleman-Democrat,'' New England Quarterly 2 (1929), reprinted in By
Land and By Sea: Essays and Addresses (New York, 1953), p. 190.
⁸ Quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of
Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York, 1993), p.
557.
⁹ Elkins and McKitrick, p. 557.
¹⁰ Billias, p. 70.
¹¹ Ibid., pp. xiii-xvii and passim; Jackson Turner Main,
The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1961). p. 171.
¹² Billias, p. 158; Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A
Biography (Charlottesville, VA, 1992; reprint of 1971 edition), p. 194.
¹³ Billias, pp. 153-84.
¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 185-205; Notes of Debates in the Federal
Convention of 1787 Reported By James Madison (New York, 1987; reprint of
1966 edition), pp. 652-58.
¹⁵ Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, pp. 594-
97, 652.
¹⁶ Billias, pp. 206-17.
¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 147, 218-35.
¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 245-86.
¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 287-325.
²⁰ Ketcham, p. 523; Norman K. Risjord, ``Election of
1812,'' in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, edited
by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Fred L. Israel, vol. 1 (New York,
1971). p. 252.
²¹ According to Madison scholar Robert Allen Rutland, the
president believed that ``war with Britain would reaffirm the commitment
of 1776.'' Robert Allen Rutland, The Presidency of James Madison
(Lawrence, KS, 1990), p. 97. Gerry elaborated his sentiments in his May
24, 1813, inaugural address. U.S., Congress, Senate, Annals of Congress,
13th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 10-13.
²² Risjord, ``Election of 1812,'' pp. 249-72; Norman K.
Risjord, ``1812,'' in Running for President: The Candidates and Their
Images, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., vol. 1, 1789-1896 (New York,
1994), pp. 67-72.
²³ Stephen W. Stathis and Ronald C. Moe, ``America's
Other Inauguration,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 10 (Fall 1980), p.
561. Gerry's legislative duties would not commence until the Thirteenth
Congress convened two months later, which may account for his decision
to remain in Cambridge until that time. Samuel Eliot Morison speculates
that Ann Gerry's illness may have prevented her from accompanying her
husband to Washington in 1813; her condition might also have delayed her
husband's departure. Morison, ``Elbridge Gerry,'' pp. 197-98.
²⁴ Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 9-13.
²⁵ Ibid., p. 10.
²⁶ Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
(New York, 1991), p. 97.
²⁷ Ibid., pp. 94-97.
²⁸ Ketcham, p. 560; Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American
Federalist (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), pp. 324-25; Annals of Congress, 13th
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 84-90.
²⁹ The vice president's social life is chronicled in the
diary of his son, Elbridge Gerry, Jr., who visited his father in
Washington during the summer of 1813. Elbridge, Jr.'s diary makes no
mention of his father's health, but the vice president's most recent
biographer notes that the elder Gerry suffered a ``stroke'' while
Madison was ill. Claude Bowers, ed., The Diary of Elbridge Gerry, Jr.
(New York, 1927), passim; Ketcham, pp. 560-62; Billias, pp. 326-29.
³⁰ Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 776-78.
³¹ Ketcham, p. 562; Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 2d
sess., pp. 537-622.
³² Billias, p. 327.
³³ Ibid., pp. 327-28.
³⁴ Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 622-778.
³⁵ Rutland, p. 151.
³⁶ Billias, p. 326; Marshall Smelser, The Democratic
Republic, 1801-1815 (New York, 1968), pp. 296-99.
³⁷ Billias, pp. 328-29; Annals of Congress, 13th Cong.,
3d sess., pp. 109-110.
³⁸ Smelser, pp. 308-11.
?

Chapter 6

DANIEL D. TOMPKINS

1817-1825

DANIEL D. TOMPKINS
DANIEL D. TOMPKINS

Chapter 6

DANIEL D. TOMPKINS

6th Vice President: 1817-1825

The name of Daniel Tompkins deserves to be more kindly
remembered than it has been.
--New York Herald-Tribune editorial, June 21, 1932
¹
Daniel D. Tompkins was by all accounts an exceptionally handsome
individual. He had a ``face of singular masculine beauty,'' one essayist
noted, and a ``gentle, polished and unpretentious'' demeanor. Tompkins'
biographer discovered that ``almost every noted American artist'' of the
time painted the handsome New York Republican, ² and the
images reproduced in Raymond Irwin's study of Tompkins' career depict an
attractive and obviously self-confident young politician. John
Trumbull's 1809 portrait, for example, shows Tompkins as he appeared
during his first term as governor of New York: a carefully dressed,
poised, and seemingly contented public man, his dark hair framing an
even-featured and not-yet-careworn face.³
But had Trumbull painted Tompkins in 1825, the year he retired from
public life after two terms as vice president during James Monroe's
administration, he would have captured a vastly different likeness. A
decade of financial privation and heavy drinking, coupled with
accusations that he had mishandled state and federal funds while serving
as governor of New York during the War of 1812, had prematurely aged
Tompkins. He was, at the age of fifty, an embittered and tortured old
man, his once-promising career brought to an untimely end. ``There was a
time when no man in the state dared compete with him for any office in
the gift of the people,'' a contemporary reflected after Tompkins' death
on June 11, 1825, ``and his habits of intemperance alone prevented him
from becoming President of the United States.'' ⁴

Tompkins' Early Years

Daniel D. Tompkins was born in Westchester County, New York, on June
21, 1774, one of eleven children of Jonathan Griffin Tompkins and Sarah
Ann Hyatt Tompkins. His parents were tenant farmers, who acquired
middle-class status only shortly before his birth when they purchased a
farm near Scarsdale. Jonathan Griffin Tompkins joined several local
resistance committees during the Revolution, serving as an adjutant in
the county militia. After the war, he served several years as a town
supervisor and as a delegate to the state legislature. A self-educated
man, the elder Tompkins was determined to provide young Daniel with a
classical education.
The future vice president began his education at a New York City
grammar school, later transferring to the Academy of North Salem and
entering Columbia University in 1792. An exceptional scholar and a
gifted essayist, Tompkins graduated first in his class in 1795, intent
on pursuing a political career. In 1797, he was admitted to the New York
bar and married Hannah Minthorne, the daughter of a well-connected
Republican merchant. Tompkins' father-in-law was a prominent member of
the Tammany Society, a militant, unabashedly democratic political
organization that would one day challenge the Clinton dynasty for
control of the New York Republican party. Also known as ``Bucktails,''
after the distinctive plumes worn at official and ceremonial gatherings,
the Tammanyites were a diverse lot. As Tompkins' biographer has noted,
the society was comprised of ``laborers . . . Revolutionary War veterans
. . . who admired republican France and hated monarchical England; more
than a sprinkling of immigrants . . . befriended by the Society . . .
and, of course, hopeful politicians.'' ⁵
Tompkins began his political career in 1800, canvassing his father-
in-law's precinct on behalf of candidates for the state legislature who
would, if elected, choose Republican electors in the forthcoming
presidential contest. He was a skilled and personable campaigner, never
forgetting a name or a face; by the time the election was over, he knew
nearly every voter in the Seventh Ward. Resourceful and energetic, he
managed to circumvent New York's highly restrictive voter-qualification
laws by pooling resources with other young men of modest means to
purchase enough property to qualify for the franchise. The engaging and
tactful Tompkins never allowed politics to interfere with personal
friendships--an enormous asset for a New York politician, given the
proliferation of factions in the Empire State during the early 1800s.
Tompkins served as a New York City delegate to the 1801 state
constitutional convention and was elected to the New York assembly in
1803. In 1804 he won a seat in the United States House of
Representatives, but he resigned before Congress convened to accept an
appointment as an associate justice of the New York Supreme
Court.⁶

War Governor

Tompkins was a popular and fair-minded jurist, well respected by
members of the several factions that were struggling for control of the
state Republican party during the early 1800s. He was also a close
associate of De Witt Clinton, who supported him in the 1807
gubernatorial race in an effort to unseat Morgan Lewis. Lewis was a
``Livingston'' Republican, supported by the landed aristocracy who sided
with the Livingston clan, wealthy landlords whose extensive holdings had
assured them of a prominent role in New York politics. In contrast, the
Clintonians stressed their candidate's humble origins--Tompkins was the
``the Farmer's Boy,'' with not a drop of ``aristocratical or
oligarchical blood'' in his veins--and won a solid victory. During his
first months in office, the new governor apparently took his marching
orders from Clinton, sending him advance copies of his official
addresses for review and comment. But he soon asserted his independence
by supporting President Thomas Jefferson's foreign policy and backing
Clinton's rival, James Madison, in the 1808 presidential
election.⁷
Reelected governor in 1810, Tompkins was a loyal supporter of the
Madison administration. He advised Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin
about patronage appointments in New York and, after the United States
declared war on Great Britain in the summer of 1812, did his best to
comply with War Department directives and requisitions. With Federalists
in control of the state legislature and the Clintonians resolutely
opposed to the war, Tompkins was hard pressed to comply with the
constant stream of requests for men and materiel. He used his own funds
to pay and arm the militia and personally endorsed a series of loans
from local banks in a desperate effort to buttress the state's defenses.
It was a risk Tompkins could ill afford to take; he had already made
substantial contributions to the war effort and had borrowed heavily to
finance several large purchases of land on Staten Island. When President
Madison offered him a cabinet appointment in the fall of 1814, Tompkins
protested that he would be more useful to the administration as governor
of New York. But, he later confessed, ``One of the reasons was the
inadequacy of my circumstances to remove to Washington & support so
large and expensive family as mine is, on the salary of that office.''
⁸

The Election of 1816

Tompkins' able and energetic leadership during the war made him one
of the best-loved men in his state. One of his aides, novelist
Washington Irving, pronounced him ``absolutely one of the worthiest men
I ever knew . . . honest, candid, prompt, indefatigable,'' ⁹
a sentiment that many shared. The editor of the Albany Argus suggested
in January 1816 that ``if private worth--if public service--if fervent
patriotism and practical talents are to be regarded in selecting a
President then Governor Tompkins stands forth to the nation with
unrivalled pretensions.'' ¹⁰ Republicans in the state
legislature endorsed him as their presidential candidate on February 14,
1816, and a week later he was renominated as the party's gubernatorial
candidate. Tompkins defeated Federalist Rufus King by a comfortable
margin in the gubernatorial race after an intensely partisan campaign
focusing on the candidates' wartime records. But the victory was marred
by Federalist accusations that Governor Tompkins had misused public
monies during the war, charges that would haunt him for the remainder of
his life.¹¹
Encouraged by Tompkins' victory, his supporters redoubled their
efforts to secure his presidential nomination. Outside of New York,
however, few Americans had ever heard of Tompkins, and few Republicans
believed him capable of winning the presidency. Not even all New York
Republicans backed Tompkins; some, like Albany Postmaster Samuel
Southwick, a Madison appointee and the editor of the Albany Register,
declared for Republican ``heir apparent'' James Monroe, who received the
Republican presidential nomination on March 16, 1816. In a concession to
New York Republicans, who were crucial to the party's national strategy,
Daniel Tompkins did receive the vice-presidential nomination. Tompkins,
like many New Yorkers, believed that Virginians had monopolized the
presidency long enough, but, he assured one supporter, he had ``no
objection to being vice President under Mr. Munro.'' He declared,
however, that he could not accept a cabinet post in the Monroe
administration because ``the emoluments . . . would not save his private
fortune from encroachment . . . the vice Presidency in that respect
would be more eligible to him--as he could discharge the Duties of that
office and suffer his family to remain at home & probably save something
for the support of his family.''
The end of the war, by then popularly acclaimed as an American
triumph, brought a resurgence in popularity for the Republicans and
marked the beginning of the end for the Federalists, who had become
suspect because of their opposition to the war. In this euphoric
atmosphere, Monroe and Tompkins won an easy victory over Federalist
presidential candidate Rufus King and an array of vice-presidential
candidates.¹²

Absentee Vice President

Tompkins' first term began auspiciously. He returned to his Staten
Island home soon after taking the oath of office on March 4, 1817. There
he welcomed President Monroe, who began the term with a tour of the
northern states in the summer of 1817. A gesture reminiscent of
President Washington's 1789 New England tour, the trip was intended to
quell the partisan resentments that had so bitterly divided the country
during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. After the president's
brief visit to Staten Island, Tompkins accompanied him to Manhattan,
where they attended a military review and a reception at City Hall and
toured New York's military installations. When Monroe was made an
honorary member of the Society for Encouragement of American
Manufactures on June 13, 1817, Tompkins, the society's president,
chaired the proceedings.¹³
But Tompkins paid only sporadic attention to his vice-presidential
duties after Monroe left New York to continue his tour. The vice
president was in poor health, the result of a fall from his horse during
an inspection tour of Fort Greene in 1814. By the fall of 1817, Tompkins
was complaining that his injuries had ``increased upon me for several
years until finally, for the last six weeks, they have confined me to my
house and . . . sometimes to my bed. . . . My present prospect is that
kind of affliction and confinement for the residue of my life.'' The
problem was so severe that he expected to ``resign the office of Vice
President at the next session, if not sooner, as there is very little
hope of my ever being able to perform its duties hereafter.''
¹⁴
Tompkins' health eventually improved enough to permit his return to
public life, but his financial affairs were in such a chaotic state by
1817 that he found little time to attend the Senate. In his haste to
raise and spend the huge sums required for New York's wartime defense,
he had failed to document his transactions, commingling his own monies
with state and federal funds. An 1816 audit by the New York comptroller
had revealed a $120,000 shortfall in the state treasury, the rough
equivalent of $1.2 million 1991 dollars.¹⁵ A state commission
appointed to investigate the matter indicated that Tompkins had
apparently used the funds to make interest payments on an 1814 loan
incurred ``on the pledge of the United States stock and Treasury notes,
and on his personal responsibility, for defraying the expenses of
carrying on the war.'' In 1819 the New York legislature awarded him a
premium of $120,000, but currency values had plummeted since 1814.
Tompkins maintained that the state now owed him $130,000, setting the
stage for a long and bitter battle that continued through his first term
as vice president.¹⁶
Tompkins' efforts to settle accounts with the federal treasury
proved equally frustrating. Perplexed by the intricacies of the
government's rudimentary accounting system and lacking adequate
documentation of his claims, he received no acknowledgement of the
government's indebtedness to him until late 1822 and no actual
compensation until 1824. In the meantime, Tompkins could neither make
mortgage payments on his properties nor satisfy the judgments that
several creditors, including his father-in-law and a former law tutor,
obtained against him. Tompkins slid deeper into debt and began to drink
heavily.¹⁷
The vice president's financial troubles, and his continuing
involvement in New York politics, kept him away from Washington for
extended periods. He spent much of his first term in New York, trying to
develop his Staten Island properties and negotiating with Comptroller
Archibald McIntyre to settle his wartime accounts--a nearly impossible
task, given the political climate in the state. De Witt Clinton had
succeeded Tompkins as governor, and Comptroller McIntyre was Clinton's
staunch ally. Governor Clinton's resentment of the ``Virginia dynasty''
knew no bounds, and with Tompkins now on record as a supporter of the
Monroe administration, the long-simmering rivalry between the vice
president and his former mentor finally came to a head. ``[B]oth parties
thought they could make political capital'' out of Tompkins' financial
embarrassments, one contemporary observed, ``and each party thought it
could make more than the other.'' ¹⁸ In the spring of 1820,
the New York Senate voted to award Tompkins $11,870.50 to settle his
accounts, but Clinton's allies in the state assembly blocked a final
settlement and affirmed the comptroller's contention that Tompkins was
still in arrears.¹⁹
Tompkins grew increasingly bitter with each new assault on his
integrity, but many New Yorkers, having themselves suffered severe
financial reverses during the panic of 1819, sympathized with his
plight, and continued to hold him in high regard. In 1820, the Bucktails
nominated Tompkins as their candidate to oppose Clinton in the
gubernatorial race--a move that heightened public scrutiny of the
charges against him while foreclosing any possibility of reaching a
settlement before the election. Some questioned the wisdom of nominating
Tompkins. Republican strategist Martin Van Buren tried, without success,
to replace him with a less controversial candidate. But Tompkins,
fearful that his withdrawal would only lend credence to the charges
against him, refused to step aside. Although Clinton ultimately won
reelection by a narrow margin, Tompkins achieved a personal victory when
the state legislature finally approved a compromise settlement of his
accounts in November 1820.²⁰
When Tompkins did find time to attend the Senate, he was an inept
presiding officer. His shortcomings were painfully apparent during the
debates over the admission of Missouri into the Union, a critically
important contest that became, in the words of historian Glover Moore,
``a struggle for political power between the North and South.''
²¹ New York Representative James Tallmadge, Jr. had sparked
the debate when he offered an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill
prohibiting ``the further introduction of slavery or involuntary
servitude'' in the prospective state and requiring the emancipation, at
the age of twenty-five, of all slave children born after Missouri's
admission into the Union. The Senate took up the Missouri question in
February 1819, with Senator Rufus King of New York leading the
restrictionist charge and southern Republicans opposing the effort to
restrict the spread of slavery. The debates continued through the spring
of 1820, when Congress finally approved the Missouri
Compromise.²²
In this contentious atmosphere, Tompkins found it difficult to
maintain order. Mrs. William A. Seaton, who followed the debate with
avid interest from the Senate gallery, recounted one particularly
chaotic session that took place in January 1820:
. . . There have been not less than a hundred ladies on the
floor of the Senate every day on which it was anticipated that Mr.
Pinckney ²³ would speak . . . Governor Tompkins, a very
gallant man, had invited a party of ladies who he met at Senator
Brown's, ²⁴ to take seats on the floor of the Senate,
having, as President of the Senate, unlimited power, and thinking
proper to use it, contrary to all former precedent. I was one of the
select, and gladly availed myself of the invitation, with my good
friend Mrs. Lowndes, of South Carolina, and half a dozen others. The
company in the gallery seeing a few ladies very comfortably seated
on the sofas, with warm foot-stools and other luxuries, did as they
had a right to do,--deserted the gallery; and every one, old and
young, flocked into the Senate. 'Twas then that our Vice-President
began to look alarmed, and did not attend strictly to the member
addressing the chair. The Senators (some of them) frowned
indignantly, and were heard to mutter audibly, 'Too many women here
for business to be transacted properly!' Governor Tompkins found it
necessary the next morning to affix a note to the door, excluding
all ladies not introduced by one of the Senators.²⁵
Tompkins left for New York shortly after this embarrassing incident,
turning his attention to the gubernatorial race while the Missouri
debate dragged on. His abrupt departure angered antislavery senators,
who were thus deprived of the vice president's tie-breaking vote in the
event of a deadlock between the free states and the slave states. There
is little evidence to suggest that Tompkins' absence had any effect on
the ultimate outcome of the Missouri debate, since his vote was never
needed to resolve an impasse, but restrictionists reviled him as a
``miserable Sycophant who betrayed us to the lords of the South . . .
that smallest of small men Daniel D. Tompkins.'' In one his last
official acts as governor, Tompkins had petitioned the New York
legislature to set a date certain for emancipation, and northern
senators apparently expected some type of support from his quarter
during the Missouri debate. They were bitterly disappointed. Rufus King,
for one, lamented that Tompkins had ``fled the field on the day of
battle.'' ²⁶
The vice president was, admittedly, distracted by the New York
election and obsessed with clearing his name, but in ``fleeing the
field,'' he had also avoided taking a public stand that would certainly
have alienated the president, an important consideration since Tompkins
had every intention of remaining on the ticket as Monroe's running mate
in 1820. Monroe never commented publicly on the Missouri controversy,
although he privately informed some advisers that he would veto any
statehood bill incorporating a restrictionist proviso. Because his
overriding concern had been to resolve the crisis before the 1820
election, he had worked quietly behind the scenes to help fashion a
compromise acceptable to northern and southern Republicans. Monroe's
biographer has suggested that, given the controversy over his unsettled
accounts, Tompkins knew that he had little chance of winning the New
York gubernatorial election and ``intended to protect his career by
remaining on the national ticket as Vice-President.'' ²⁷
Whatever his motives, the vice president was by 1820 a bitter and
desperate man, his judgment and once-considerable abilities severely
impaired both by the strain of his ordeal and by his heavy drinking.
Still, even though some Republicans attempted to block his renomination,
most remained faithful to ``the Farmer's Boy.'' The 1820 presidential
contest generated surprisingly little interest, given the problems then
facing the nation. The country was suffering from a severe depression,
and the American occupation of Spanish Florida had unleashed a torrent
of anti-administration criticism from House Speaker Henry Clay of
Kentucky. Although the Missouri controversy had been resolved for the
moment, the truce between North and South was still perilously fragile.
Historian Lynn W. Turner has suggested that the reelection of Monroe and
Tompkins in 1820 can perhaps be attributed to ``the nineteenth-century
time-lapse between the perception of political pain and the physical
reaction to it.'' Monroe ran virtually unopposed, winning all but one of
the electoral votes cast--a ``unanimity of indifference, not of
approbation,'' according to John Randolph of Roanoke.²⁸
Some of the electors who were willing to grant Monroe another term
balked at casting their second votes for Tompkins. Among these was
Federalist elector Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who predicted that
``[t]here will be a number of us . . . in this state, who will not vote
for Mr. Tompkins, and we must therefore look up somebody to vote for.''
Federalist elector and former Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire
felt ``compelled to withhold my vote from . . . Tompkins . . . because
he grossly neglected his duty.'' ²⁹ The vice president's only
official function, Plumer maintained, was to preside over the Senate,
``for which he receives annually a salary of five thousand dollars.''
But ``during the last three years he was absent from the Senate nearly
three fourths of the time, & thereby occasioned an extra expense to the
nation of nearly twenty five hundred dollars. He has not that weight of
character which his office requires--the fact is he is grossly
intemperate.'' ³⁰ But Tompkins, like Monroe, ran virtually
unopposed. He was easily reelected with 218 electoral votes.

Vindication

Tompkins' second term was, in his biographer's words, a time of
``intensifying personal trial, and even of crushing misfortune.''
³¹ In 1821, he attended the New York constitutional
convention and was deeply honored when his fellow delegates chose him to
chair the proceedings. But his detractors complained that ``Mr.
Tompkins''--now ``a degraded sot''--owed his election only to ``the
madness of party.'' ³²
Tompkins missed the opening session of the Seventeenth Congress on
December 3, 1821, but he was back in the Senate by December 28. He
attended regularly until January 25, 1822, when the Senate was forced to
adjourn until the following day, ``the Vice President being absent, from
indisposition.'' Less than a week later, Senator King arrived with a
letter from Tompkins informing the Senate that, his health having
``suffered so much on my journey'' and since his arrival in town, he
intended, ``as soon as the weather and the state of the roads permit, to
return to my family.'' ³³
Tompkins was clearly losing control. During his brief stay in
Washington, he had managed to alienate Monroe, having severely
criticized the president during a meeting with Postmaster General Return
J. Meigs and others.³⁴ Not long after his departure, one
observer ventured that Tompkins had never been ``perfectly sober during
his stay here. He was several times so drunk in the chair,'' Dr. James
Bronaugh informed Andrew Jackson, ``that he could with difficulty put
the question.'' ³⁵ Tompkins would spend the next several
months trying to settle his accounts with the federal treasury. Before
leaving Washington, he assigned what property he still owned, including
his Staten Island home, to a group of trustees, and on his return to New
York he moved into a run-down boardinghouse in Manhattan.³⁶
Tompkins' absence spared him the humiliation of presiding over the
Senate as it considered a provision in the 1822 General Appropriation
bill to withhold the salaries of government officials who owned money
to, or had failed to settle their accounts with, the Treasury. The
provision, part of a continuing effort to reform the government's
auditing process and to insure greater accountability in public
administration, prompted extensive debate.³⁷ The April 19
session would have been particularly difficult for Tompkins, with New
York Senator Martin Van Buren asking whether ``gallant and heroic men,
who had sustained the honor of their country in the hour of danger,
should be kept out of their just dues''--an oblique reference, perhaps,
to the vice president's plight--and South Carolina Senator William Smith
exhibiting ``voluminous lists of those who had been reported public
debtors of more than three years' standing,'' lists that included the
name of Daniel Tompkins.³⁸
The General Appropriation Act became law on April 30, 1822,
depriving Tompkins of his last remaining source of funds.³⁹
In a desperate attempt to settle his accounts, Tompkins petitioned the
United States District Court for the District of New York to bring suit
against him for the ``supposed balance for which I have been reported
among the defaulters.'' His trial began on June 3, 1822, with the U.S.
district attorney seeking a judgment of over $11,000 and the defendant
coordinating his own defense. For three days, the jurors heard accounts
of Tompkins' wartime sacrifices: bankers who had lent him funds to pay
and arm the militia testified in his behalf, and Senator Rufus King
recounted that he had urged his friend to take out personal loans for
the common defense. Another witness gave a detailed accounting of
Tompkins' transactions. But the high point of the trial was Tompkins'
highly emotional summation to the jury, a detailed chronicle of ``long
ten years' . . . accumulated and protracted wrongs.'' After deliberating
for several hours, the jury finally decided in favor of Tompkins.
Although the court could by law deliver only a general verdict, the
jurors proclaimed that ``there is moreover due from the United States of
America to the Defendant Daniel D. Tompkins the sum of One hundred and
thirty six thousand seven hundred and ninety nine dollars and ninety
seven cents.'' ⁴⁰
Tompkins returned to Washington by December 3, 1822, to resume his
duties in the Senate. Finally exonerated after a decade-long struggle,
Tompkins seemed a changed man. ``[T]he verdict . . . had an evident
effect on his spirits,'' Niles' Weekly Register reported. ``His mind
appeared to resume all its former strength, and, during the last
session, in his attention to the duties of his office as president of
the senate, it is the opinion of many of the older members, that no one
ever conducted himself more satisfactorily, or with greater dignity
filled the chair.'' He remained until February 18, 1823; two days later,
the Senate approved a bill to ``adjust and settle the accounts and
claims of Daniel D. Tompkins'' and to restore his salary.⁴¹
Tompkins received no actual remuneration until much later, however.
Government accountants ultimately recommended a settlement of just over
$35,000, a finding that Monroe, convinced that ``a larger sum ought to
be allowed him,'' delayed transmitting to Congress. But Tompkins and his
family were in dire straits, although rumors of his confinement to a New
York debtors' prison ultimately proved false. On December 7, 1823,
Monroe asked Congress for a $35,000 interim appropriation to provide the
vice president with ``an essential accommodation.'' Congress approved
the request in late December.⁴²
On January 21, 1824, Tompkins returned to the Senate. He was
``determined to take no part in the approaching election,'' he informed
John Quincy Adams, ``and wished for nothing thereafter but quiet and
retirement.'' He still suffered from bouts of insomnia but was finally
``relieved of all his embarrassments.'' He remained in Washington until
the end of the session, taking his final leave from the Senate on May 20
with ``a few brief remarks'' expressing ``his sense of the kind and
courteous treatment he had experienced from the members, collectively
and individually.'' On May 26, the Senate approved Monroe's request for
an additional appropriation of just over $60,000 ``for the payment of
the claims of Daniel D. Tompkins.'' ⁴³
The 1823 and 1824 appropriations came too late to be of much use to
the impoverished vice president. He continued to drink heavily, and
after years of indebtedness his business affairs were convoluted beyond
resolution. Daniel Tompkins died intestate on June 11, 1825, and was
interred in St. Mark's Church in New York City. After his death, his
creditors squabbled over his once-magnificent Staten Island estate,
until it was finally disposed of in a series of sheriff's sales. In
1847, Congress approved a payment of close to $50,000 to Tompkins's
heirs.⁴⁴ But even this amount, one scholar noted long after
the fact, ``was only part of what was due him as generally admitted.''
⁴⁵
DANIEL D. TOMPKINS2

NOTES

¹ Quoted in Ray W. Irwin, Daniel D. Tompkins: Governor of
New York and Vice President of the United States (New York, 1968), p.
309, n. 55.
² Irwin, pp. 59, 227.
³ Reproduced in ibid., facing p. 66.
⁴ Philip Hone, quoted in ibid., p. 309.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 1-36.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 25-50.
⁷ Ibid., pp. 51-75.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 83-84, 145-213; Harry Ammon, James Monroe:
The Quest for National Identity (Charlottesville, Va., 1990; reprint of
1971 edition), pp. 314-37.
⁹ Washington Irving to William Irving, October 14, 1814,
quoted in Pierre M. Irving, ed., The Life and Letters of Washington
Irving, vol. 1 (Detroit, 1967; reprint of 1863 edition), pp. 320-21.
¹⁰ Quoted in Irwin, pp. 197-98.
¹¹ Ibid., pp. 197-205.
¹² Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American
Political System (Princeton, NJ, 1984), pp. 46-47; Irwin, pp. 206-11;
Lynn W. Turner, ``Elections of 1816 and 1820,'' in History of American
Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, ed., Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and
Fred L. Israel, vol. 1 (New York, 1985), pp. 299-321.
¹³ Irwin, pp. 221-23; Ammon, pp. 371-79.
¹⁴ Irwin, pp. 185, 223.
¹⁵ Based on 1860 Composite Consumer Price Index, in John
J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index
for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United
States (Worcester, MA, 1992; reprint of 1991 edition), pp. 326-32.
¹⁶ Irwin, pp. 231-32, and passim.
¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 279-305, and passim.
¹⁸ Jabez Hammond, quoted in ibid., p. 234.
¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 220-63.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 243-63; Cole, Martin Van Buren and the
American Political System, pp. 61-62.
²¹ Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821
(Gloucester, MA, 1967; reprint of 1953 edition), p. 126.
²² Moore, passim; Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American
Federalist (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), pp. 369-74; Ammon, pp. 449-57.
²³ Maryland Senator William Pinkney.
²⁴ Louisiana Senator James Brown.
²⁵ Josephine Seaton, William Winston Seaton of The
``National Intelligencer'' (New York, 1970; reprint of 1871 edition),
pp. 146-47.
²⁶ Irwin, pp. 211-12, 249-50; Moore, p. 182 and passim.
²⁷ Ammon, pp. 450-58.
²⁸ Turner, pp. 312-21.
²⁹ Ibid., pp. 312-18.
³⁰ Irwin, p. 262.
³¹ Ibid., p. 279.
³² Ibid., pp. 264-80.
³³ U.S., Congress, Senate, Annals of Congress, 17th
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 9-43, 157, 174.
³⁴ Irwin, p. 282.
³⁵ Dr. James Bronaugh to Andrew Jackson, February 8,
1822, quoted in Irwin, p. 283, n. 9.
³⁶ Irwin, pp. 280-84.
³⁷ Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in
Administrative History, 1801-1829 (New York, 1961), pp. 162-79.
³⁸ Annals of Congress, 17th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 391-
408.
³⁹ Irwin, p. 284; White, p. 179.
⁴⁰ Irwin, pp. 286-94.
⁴¹ Niles' Weekly Register, quoted in Irwin, p. 295;
Annals of Congress, 17th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 10-260.
⁴² Annals of Congress, 18th Cong., 1st sess., p. 26;
Irwin, pp. 297-99.
⁴³ Annals of Congress, 18th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 127,
766, 788; Irwin, pp. 273, 300.
⁴⁴ Irwin, pp. 300-311.
⁴⁵ Henry A. Holmes, quoted in ibid., p. 301, n.43.
?

Chapter 7

JOHN C. CALHOUN

1825-1832

JOHN C. CALHOUN
JOHN C. CALHOUN

Chapter 7

JOHN C. CALHOUN

7th Vice President: 1825-1832

. . . There are no two events in my life, in which I
take greater pride, than those to which you have so kindly
alluded. My first public act was to contribute . . . to the
maintenance of our national rights against foreign
aggressions, and my last had been to preserve in their
integrity, as far as it depended on men, those principles of
presiding in the Senate, which are essentially the most
vital of political rights, the freedom of debate . . . it
will ever to me be a proud reflection, that I have been
thought worthy of suffering in a great cause, . . . the
freedom of debate, a cause more sacred than even the liberty
of the press.
--John C. Calhoun, September 7, 1826 ¹
John C. Calhoun assumed office as the nation's seventh vice
president on March 4, 1825, during a period of extraordinary political
ferment. The demise of the Federalist party after the War of 1812 had
not, as former President James Monroe had hoped, ushered in an ``Era of
Good Feelings,'' free from party divisions. Contrary to Monroe's
expectations, the partisan strife of earlier years had not abated during
his two terms as president but had, instead, infected the Republican
party, which had declined into a broad-based but rapidly disintegrating
coalition of disparate elements. Five individuals, all of them
Republicans, had entered the 1824 presidential contest, one of the most
controversial and bitterly contested races in the nation's history. The
``National Republicans,'' a group that included Calhoun, House Speaker
Henry Clay, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, supported an
expansive, nationalist agenda; the ``Radicals,'' allies of Treasury
Secretary William Crawford, were strict constructionists and advocates
of limited government. Other Republicans had rallied to the standard of
Andrew Jackson, a former Tennessee senator and the military hero whose
stunning victory at the Battle of New Orleans had salvaged the nation's
pride during the War of 1812.
In this momentous contest, John Quincy Adams had emerged the winner,
but his victory came at great cost to his administration and to the
nation. The election was decided in the House of Representatives, where
Clay had used his influence as leader of the western bloc and as Speaker
to secure Adams' election. Adams, in turn, had appointed Clay secretary
of state, a nomination that stunned Jackson supporters, strict
constructionists, and particularly Vice President Calhoun. The ``corrupt
bargain'' deeply offended Calhoun's strict sense of honor and propriety,
pushing him toward the opposition camp, a fragmented assortment of
Radicals, southern agriculturalists, and men of conscience who shared
the vice president's conviction that Adams and Clay had subverted the
popular will. These diverse elements, which were frequently at odds with
one another, would eventually coalesce to form the Democratic party. But
the nation would first pass through a chaotic and turbulent period of
political realignment, which Calhoun described for his friend and
mentor, Monroe, in the summer of 1826:
. . . Never in any country . . . was there in so short a period,
so complete an anarchy of political relations. Every prominent
publick man feels, that he has been thrown into a new attitude, and
has to reexamine his position, and reapply principles to the
situation, into which he was so unexpectedly and suddenly thrown, as
if by some might[y] political revolution . . . Was he of the old
Republican party? He finds his prominent political companions, who
claim and take the lead, to be the very men, against who, he had
been violently arrayed till the close of the late war; and sees in
the opposite rank, as enemies, those with whom he was proud to rank
. . .
Taking it altogether, a new and dangerous state of things has
suddenly occurred, of which no one can see the result. It is, in my
opinion, more critical and perilous, than any I have ever
seen.²
Congress was changing, as well. The Senate, as Senator Robert C.
Byrd has noted in his authoritative history, was ``beginning to
challenge the House as the principal legislative forum of the nation.''
Before the 1820s, the press and public had paid relatively little
attention to the Senate's deliberations, being drawn instead to the
livelier and more entertaining theater in the House of Representatives.
By 1825, the House had become too large to permit the lengthy speeches
and extended debates that had drawn observers to its galleries, while in
the Senate, growth had brought increased influence. ``At the formation
of the Government,'' Calhoun observed in his inaugural remarks, ``the
members of the Senate were, probably, too small to attract the full
confidence of the people, and thereby give to it that weight in the
system which the Constitution intended. This defect has, however, been
happily removed by an extraordinary growth''--eleven new states, and
twenty-two senators, in a thirty-six-year period. The 1819-1820 debate
over the extension of slavery into the Missouri territory signalled that
an era of increasingly virulent sectional discord had arrived. The
Senate, with its equality of representation among states and rules
permitting extended debate, would become the forum where sectional
concerns were aired, debated, and reconciled during the next quarter
century, a momentous era known to scholars as ``The Golden Age of the
Senate.'' ³
Calhoun, who presided over the Senate at the dawning of its Golden
Age, had reached the height of his career. Given his meteoritic rise to
national prominence as a talented young congressman during the War of
1812 and his solid record of accomplishment as secretary of war during
Monroe's administration, he had every reason to assume that he would one
day become president.

Calhoun's Early Life and Career

John Caldwell Calhoun was born on March 18, 1782, near Long Canes
Creek, an area later known as the Abbeville District, located in
present-day McCormick County, South Carolina. His parents, Patrick and
Martha Caldwell Calhoun, were of Scotch-Irish ancestry. The Calhouns had
immigrated to Pennsylvania during the 1730s and moved steadily southward
until 1756, when Patrick reached the South Carolina
backcountry.⁴ One of the most prosperous planters (and one of
the largest slaveowners) in his district, Patrick Calhoun was a leader
in local politics; he served in the South Carolina legislature from 1768
to 1774. During the late 1760s, he was a Regulator, one of the self-
appointed vigilantes whose well-intentioned but rough efforts to impose
justice on a crime-racked frontier wholly lacking in judicial
institutions finally prompted the South Carolina legislature to
establish circuit courts in the backcountry. During the Revolution, he
sided with the patriot cause.⁵
Young John received only a sporadic education during his early
years, attending a ``field school'' for a few months each year. In 1795,
he entered a private academy in Appling, Georgia, but the school closed
after a few months. The boy plunged into an exhausting course of self-
study, but his father's death soon forced him to return to Abbeville to
manage the family farm. The disappointed young scholar remained at home
until 1800, when his mother and brothers, having recognized his
formidable intellectual abilities, returned him to the academy, which
had since reopened. He was a diligent student, qualifying for admission
to Yale College in 1802.
Calhoun completed his studies at Yale in 1804. After graduation, he
spent a month at the Newport, Rhode Island, summer retreat of Floride
Bonneau Colhoun.⁶ Mrs. Colhoun was the widow of the future
vice president's cousin, Senator John Ewing Colhoun; her daughter, also
named Floride, was attractive, well-connected in South Carolina
lowcountry circles, and socially accomplished. John C. Calhoun married
his young cousin in 1811. The union conferred wealth and social prestige
on the earnest young upcountry lawyer, but Calhoun was also attracted to
Floride's ``beauty of mind . . . soft and sweet disposition,'' and
``amiable and lovable character.'' ⁷ Not until later would he
experience her stubborn will and unwavering sense of moral rectitude, so
like his own.
Calhoun began his legal education in 1804 soon after leaving
Newport, studying first in Charleston and later at the Litchfield,
Connecticut, school of Tapping Reeve, a distinguished scholar who
counted among his former students such notables as James Madison and
Aaron Burr. He returned to South Carolina in 1806 and served brief
apprenticeships at Charleston and Abbeville. Admitted to the bar in
Abbeville in 1807, Calhoun soon found another calling. In the summer of
1807, he helped organize a town meeting to protest the British attack on
the American vessel Chesapeake off the Virginia coast. His speech
recommending an embargo and an enhanced defense posture electrified the
militantly nationalistic crowd assembled at the Abbeville courthouse,
winning him immediate acclaim. He was elected to the South Carolina
legislature, where he served two terms, and in 1810 he won a seat in the
United States House of Representatives.⁸

Congressman Calhoun

Calhoun arrived in Washington shortly after the Twelfth Congress
convened on November 4, 1811, taking quarters in a boardinghouse soon to
be known as the ``War Mess.'' The nation's capital boasted few amenities
during the early nineteenth century, and members of Congress rarely
brought their families to town. They lodged instead with colleagues from
their own states or regions and, as one student of early Washington
discovered, ``the members who lived together, took their meals together,
and spent most of their leisure hours together also voted together with
a very high degree of regularity.'' ⁹ Calhoun's mess mates
included two members of the South Carolina delegation, Langdon Cheves
and William Lowndes; Felix Grundy of Tennessee; and the newly elected
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay of
Kentucky.¹⁰ They, and other like-minded young congressmen
known as the ``warhawks,'' believed that nothing short of war would stop
British raids on American shipping and restore the young nation's honor.
Calhoun, who had been appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee
¹¹ at the beginning of his first term and became its chairman
in the spring of 1812, played a leading role in the effort, supporting
legislation to strengthen the nation's defenses. Working in concert with
Secretary of State James Monroe, he introduced the war bill that
Congress approved in June 1812.¹² Although Calhoun soon
realized that Madison was ``wholly unfit for the storms of war,'' he
labored so diligently to defend the administration and to assist in the
war effort that he became known as ``the young Hercules who carried the
war on his shoulders.'' He was, as a historian of the period has noted,
``an administration leader second only to Clay.'' ¹³
Calhoun served in the House until 1817. Sobered by the nation's
near-defeat during the War of 1812, he continued his interest in
military affairs, opposing troop reductions and advocating the
establishment of two additional service academies. As his modern
biographer has observed, Calhoun ``equated defense with national self-
sufficiency.'' Toward that end, he accepted protective tariffs and
helped draft legislation to establish the Second Bank of the United
States in 1816. Concerned that the nation's interior settlements lacked
the roads and other improvements that he believed essential to economic
development and national security, he proposed legislation to earmark
for internal improvements the $1.5 million charter fee the bank paid to
the federal government, as well as the yields of government-owned bank
stocks.¹⁴

Secretary of War

Calhoun resigned from the House in November 1817 to accept an
appointment as secretary of war in President James Monroe's cabinet, a
post he would hold for more than seven years. Calhoun was not the
president's first choice; Monroe had approached several others, but all
had declined. With the nation's military establishment in complete
disarray after the war, reforming a badly managed department with over
$45 million in outstanding accounts (at a time when the government's
annual budget amounted to less than $26 million) seemed to most a near-
impossible task. But Calhoun believed that a strong defense
establishment was essential to maintaining the nation's honor and
security, and he welcomed the chance to reform the troubled department.
The thirty-two-year-old cabinet officer was also ambitious and well
aware that, as another biographer has noted, ``no man had yet held the
presidency . . . who had not proved his worth in some executive
capacity.'' ¹⁵
President Monroe relied heavily on his cabinet and submitted all
matters of consequence to his department heads before deciding upon a
course of action, a practice that assured the gifted young war secretary
a prominent role in the new administration.¹⁶ Monroe seems to
have felt a special fondness for Calhoun--and for Floride, who moved to
Washington and soon became one of the capital's most popular hostesses.
Official protocol during the early nineteenth century dictated that the
president refrain from ``going abroad into any private companies,'' but
when the Calhouns' infant daughter contracted a fatal illness in the
spring of 1820, Monroe visited their residence every day to check on her
condition.¹⁷
Calhoun began his first term as secretary of war with an exhaustive
review and audit of the department's operations and
accounts.¹⁸ Acting on his recommendations, Congress
reorganized the army's command and general staff structure, revamped the
accounting and procurement systems, and voted annual appropriations to
construct fortifications and pay down the war debt. By the end of
Calhoun's second term as secretary, outstanding accounts had been
reduced from $45 to $3 million.¹⁹ Congress, however, refused
to approve Calhoun's proposals for a network of coastal and frontier
fortifications and military roads, imposing steep cuts in the defense
budget after Treasury Secretary William Crawford's 1819 annual report
projected a budget deficit for 1820 of $7 million (later adjusted to $5
million). Postwar economic expansion had given way to a depression of
unprecedented severity, and the panic of 1819 had left hundreds of
speculators impoverished and in debt. These conditions, and Crawford's
dire forecast, prompted calls for sharp reductions in government
expenditures. The war department came under immediate attack, which
intensified when the press reported that one of Calhoun's pet projects,
an expedition to plant a military outpost on the Yellowstone River, had
run significantly over budget.²⁰
Some scholars have suggested that Crawford timed the release of his
report both to embarrass Monroe and Calhoun and to enhance his own
presidential prospects. Shortly afterwards, the president received an
anonymous letter alleging that Calhoun's chief secretary had realized
substantial profits from an interest in a materials contract. The
transaction was not illegal, for war department officials enjoyed
considerable latitude in awarding government contracts, and the primary
contractor had submitted the lowest bid, but the appearance of
impropriety gave Crawford additional ammunition. Congress began an
exhaustive review of the war department, with the ``Radicals'' taking
the lead. Although the investigation found no evidence of malfeasance on
Calhoun's part, Republicans were inherently suspicious of standing
armies, and even the National Republicans were reluctant to fund a
peacetime army on the scale envisioned by Calhoun. Congress ultimately
reduced the war department budget by close to 50 percent.²¹

The 1824 Presidential Election

Calhoun declared himself a candidate for the presidency in December
1821, much to the surprise of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams,
widely considered to be Monroe's heir apparent by virtue of his office.
Calhoun and Adams were friends; both avid nationalists, they had also
been political allies until the Missouri crisis in 1820 exposed their
profound disagreement over slavery. Calhoun, however, became convinced
that Adams was too weak a candidate to defeat Crawford, who enjoyed a
significant following within the congressional nominating caucus. The
South Carolinian, determined to prevent Crawford's election at any cost,
therefore decided to become a candidate himself.
In addition to Calhoun, Adams, and Crawford, the crowded field of
prospective candidates for 1824 soon included House Speaker Henry Clay
and the revered hero of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson--all Republicans.
Calhoun believed that he was the only candidate who could command a
national following; he had been warmly received during a visit to the
northern and middle states in 1820, and his efforts to strengthen the
nation's defenses had won him a following in the West, as well. His
quest, however, lost momentum after the South Carolina legislature voted
to endorse another favorite son, William Lowndes. Not only did Calhoun
face formidable opposition from Crawford's supporters, now ably led by
New York Senator Martin Van Buren, but, to the amazement of many,
Jackson soon emerged as a leading contender. Calhoun's Pennsylvania
supporters eventually declared for Jackson, endorsing Calhoun as their
vice-presidential candidate. As other states followed suit, the
ambitious young secretary of war was, in one scholar's words,
``everybody's 'second choice.''' Thus, in the general election, Calhoun
was overwhelmingly elected vice president, with support from both the
Jackson and Adams camps.
None of the presidential candidates, however, achieved an electoral
majority--although Jackson received a plurality. The election was
therefore thrown into the House of Representatives, where each state
delegation had a single vote. Having come in fourth in the general
election, Clay was not a contender in the House balloting, but he played
a pivotal part in determining the outcome by persuading the delegations
of the three states he had carried (Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri) to vote
for Adams. These three western states, as well as New York, after heavy
lobbying by Clay and Massachusetts Representative Daniel Webster, gave
Adams the margin he needed to defeat Jackson.
Clay's maneuvering and his subsequent appointment as Adams'
secretary of state deeply offended Calhoun, nudging him toward the
Jackson camp.²² He ``would probably have coalesced with the
Jacksonians in any event,'' one scholar of the period has surmised,
since South Carolina and Pennsylvania, the two states crucial to
Calhoun's abortive presidential strategy, had gone for
Jackson.²³ But politics alone could not fully account for
Calhoun's shift. He knew that the Kentucky legislature had expressly
instructed its delegation to vote for Jackson, who had run second to
Clay in the general election. Yet, at Clay's urging, the Kentuckians had
cast their state's vote for Adams, who had received few, if any, popular
votes in the state. ``Mr. Clay has made the Prest [President] against
the voice of his constituents,'' Calhoun confided to a friend, ``and has
been rewarded by the man elevated by him by the first office in his
gift, the most dangerous stab, which the liberty of this country has
ever received.'' ²⁴

The Senate Examines the Role of the Presiding Officer

Wholly lacking in experience as a presiding officer, Calhoun
prepared himself for his new responsibilities by studying Jefferson's
Manual of Parliamentary Practice and other parliamentary
authorities.²⁵ But even this rigorous course of study could
not adequately prepare him for the challenges he would face. The Senate,
experiencing ``growing pains'' as it completed its transformation from
the ``chamber of revision'' envisioned by the Constitution's framers to
a full-fledged legislative body in its own right, was beginning to
reconsider rules and procedures that seemed outdated or impractical. As
the Senate's debates became increasingly contentious, the body began
rethinking the role of its presiding officer, as well.
Calhoun's difficulties began shortly after the Nineteenth Congress
convened in December 1825, when he announced appointments to the
Senate's standing committees. Prior to 1823, the Senate had elected
committee members by ballot, an awkward and time-consuming process. The
rule was revised during the Eighteenth Congress to provide that ``all
committees shall be appointed by the presiding officer of this House,
unless specially ordered otherwise by the Senate.'' Before Calhoun
became vice president, the new procedure had been used only once, on
December 9, 1823, the day the Senate adopted the revised rule. On that
occasion, Vice President Daniel Tompkins was absent, a frequent
occurrence during his troubled tenure, and President pro tempore John
Gaillard of South Carolina had appointed the chairmen and members of the
Senate's standing committees.
As one scholar of the period has noted, Calhoun made ``an honest
effort to divide control of the committees between friends and enemies
of the administration.'' ²⁶ An analysis of his appointments
suggests that he took into account a senator's experience. He
reappointed nine of the fifteen standing committee chairmen whom
Gaillard had chosen two years earlier. The two chairmen who had left the
Senate he replaced with individuals who had previously served on their
respective committees. Of the four remaining committees, three were
chaired by senators friendly to the administration. After Military
Affairs Committee Chairman Andrew Jackson resigned his seat in October
1825, Calhoun chose as his replacement the only member of the Senate
whose military record could match Jackson's--Senator William Henry
Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe.²⁷
As a result of Calhoun's appointments, senators hostile to the
administration retained or gained control of several important
committees: Maryland Senator Samuel Smith, a Crawford Republican who
would eventually join the Jackson camp, remained in charge of the
influential Finance Committee, while New York Senator Martin Van Buren,
who would soon unite the opposition forces behind Andrew Jackson,
continued to chair the Judiciary Committee. Administration supporters
were outraged to learn that the Foreign Relations Committee included
only one Adams-Clay man and that its new chairman was Nathaniel Macon of
North Carolina, who had voted against confirming Clay as secretary of
state.²⁸ Bitter divisions between administration supporters
and the opposition forces were beginning to infect the Senate, and
Calhoun, in his attempt to please everyone, had satisfied no one. The
pro-administration Philadelphia Democratic Press and several other
papers vehemently criticized Calhoun, publishing unfounded allegations
that he had made the offending appointments after Adams ignored
Calhoun's demand to dissociate himself from Henry Clay.²⁹
In the meantime, Senator Van Buren had enlisted Calhoun's support
for a concerted challenge to the expansive agenda that President Adams
outlined in his December 6, 1825, annual message to Congress. Adams had
proposed a national university, a national observatory, and a network of
internal improvements unprecedented in the nation's history, as well as
foreign policy initiatives. In particular, Calhoun, not yet the strict
constructionist he would later become, was concerned that Adams' plan to
send observers to a conference of South and Central American ministers
scheduled to meet in Panama the following year would reinvigorate the
sectional tensions that had emerged during the Missouri crisis. Calhoun
saw United States participation in the Panama Congress as a perilous
first step toward extending diplomatic recognition to Haiti, a nation of
former slaves. He had cautioned Adams, through an intermediary, that the
initiative would ``in the present tone of feelings in the south lead to
great mischief.'' But Clay, an early and enthusiastic supporter of the
Latin American independence movements, had prevailed.³⁰
The president sent the names of prospective delegates to Panama to
the Senate for approval in late December 1825, touching off a protracted
and contentious debate that continued through March 14, 1826, when the
Senate approved the mission by a narrow margin. Missouri Senator Thomas
Hart Benton later reflected that ``no question, in its day, excited more
heat and intemperate discussion, or more feeling between a President and
Senate, than this proposed mission.'' Although the vice president had
``no vote, the constitutional contingency to authorize it not having
occurred,'' Benton recalled, Calhoun had been ``full and free in the
expression of his opinion against the mission.'' ³¹ It was a
costly victory for the administration. The United States delegation
arrived too late to have any impact on the deliberations, and all but
one of the Latin American republics failed to ratify the accords
approved at the convention. The president had wasted a great deal of
political capital in a confrontation that hardened the party divisions
in the Senate, and Calhoun and Van Buren had taken the first tentative
steps toward an alliance that would drive Adams from office in the next
election.
Calhoun also endorsed the opposition's efforts to curtail the powers
of the executive, through constitutional amendments to abolish the
electoral college and to limit the president to two terms. Although the
Senate had considered similar amendments in previous sessions, the move
acquired a new urgency after the 1824 election. Thomas Hart Benton
renewed the initiative on December 15, 1825, with a resolution to
appoint a select committee ``to inquire into the expediency'' of
choosing the president and vice president ``by a direct vote of the
People, in districts.'' Other senators suggested amendments to provide
for the election of the president and vice president ``without the
intervention of the Senate or House of Representatives'' and to
``prohibit the appointment of any Member of Congress to any office of
honor or trust under the United States during the term for which such
Senator or Representative should have been elected.'' The latter
proposal represented an obvious slap at Secretary of State Henry Clay,
who had resigned from the House to take the executive post.
Calhoun appointed Benton chairman of the select committee, which the
Senate directed to determine ``the best, most preferable, and safest
mode in regard to such elections.'' Benton was pleased that the other
members of the nine-man select committee ``were . . . carefully
selected, both geographically as coming from different sections of the
Union, and personally and politically as being friendly to the object.''
Only one, Senator John Holmes of Maine, was an Adams man. Calhoun had
appointed the administration's most vocal critics to the committee,
which reported to the Senate on January 19, 1826, a constitutional
amendment calling for the direct election of the president and vice
president. Calhoun confided to a correspondent that he expected the
administration to resist ``all attempts that can limit or counteract the
effects of patronage. They will in particular resist any amendment of
the Constitution,'' he predicted, ``which will place the Presl
[Presidential] election in the hands of the voters, where patronage can
have little, or no effect.'' As for Calhoun, he promised that ``no one
who knows me, can doubt where I will be found.'' ³²
The constitutional debate over the select committee's report took an
unexpected turn on March 30, 1826, when Virginia Senator John Randolph
rose to address the Senate after North Carolina Senator John Branch
offered a resolution protesting the president's appointment of ministers
to the Panama Congress ``without the advice and consent of the Senate.''
Randolph was a diehard ``Old Republican,'' a strict constructionist and
a resolute opponent of change in any form. Stubbornly clinging to the
customs, attire, and rhetoric of a bygone era, he regarded any departure
from the dicta of the Founding Fathers as tantamount to heresy. Calhoun
thought him ``highly talented, eloquent, severe and eccentric,'' while
others, alternately amused and offended by his rambling and caustic
speeches, his eighteenth-century dress and manners, and his bizarre
behavior, dismissed him as thoroughly insane. His March 30 address was
vintage Randolph: a disjointed litany of personal grievances
interspersed with his objections to the administration, the Panama
Congress, and the ``practice . . . that the Secretary of State shall
succeed the President.'' Calhoun remained silent as the agitated
Virginian took Adams to task for elevating patronage above patriotism--
``buying us up with our own money''--and suggested that Clay had
``manufactured'' the invitation to the Panama Congress. Even Randolph's
likening of Adams and Clay to ``Bliful and Black George,'' two unsavory
characters from the popular novel, Tom Jones, brought no rebuke from the
chair.³³
After Randolph ended his harangue, the Senate turned to the select
committee report. Randolph, trumpeting his opposition ``to all
amendments to the Constitution,'' moved to table the report. New Jersey
Senator Mahlon Dickerson, who had spoken at great length the previous
day in support of his own proposal to limit the president to two terms
in office, prepared to speak in opposition to Randolph's motion. He had
just started to explain his position when Calhoun cut him short, ruling
him out of order on the grounds that ``the motion now pending . . . did
not admit of debate.'' Randolph added that ``it is unreasonable, after
having spoken an hour and thirty-five minutes [the previous day], to
speak again to-day'' and explained that he would oppose any effort to
amend the Constitution. When Dickerson attempted to respond to
Randolph's remarks, Calhoun ruled him out of order a second time.
Randolph finally agreed to Dickerson's request to postpone the
discussion until the next day, bringing the awkward exchange to an end.
On April 3, 1826, the Senate approved the select committee's amendment
providing for the direct election of the president and vice
president.³⁴
Fallout from the explosive session of March 30, 1826, would haunt
Calhoun for the remainder of his term. Deeply offended at Randolph's
charges, Clay demanded a duel with the Virginian. The resulting nerve-
wracking but bloodless encounter ended with a handshake after two
exchanges of fire. Those who had expressed amusement at Randolph's March
30 performance, or agreed with him in principle, were suddenly sobered
at the thought that the vice president's failure to restrain an
intemperate senator had resulted in a near-tragedy.³⁵
Calhoun's enemies criticized him for twice calling the sedate and
congenial Dickerson to order while permitting Randolph to vent his
spleen at will. In the following weeks the Senate, for the first time in
its history, attempted to define the vice president's legislative duties
and responsibilities.
In the decade prior to 1826, the Senate had paid increasing
attention to organizational matters, a clear indication of its increased
workload, enlarged membership, and heightened importance as a national
forum. It had established standing committees in 1816, revised its rules
in 1820, and required the publication of regular financial reports by
the secretary of the Senate after 1823. The body also enhanced the
powers of the chair. Not only had it authorized the presiding officer in
1823 to appoint members of standing and select committees, but in 1824
it also directed the presiding officer to ``examine and correct the
Journals, before they are read,'' and to ``have the regulation of such
parts of the Capitol . . . as are . . . set apart for the use of the
Senate and its officers.'' ³⁶ These changes reflect an
institution in transition, conscious of its changing role in a rapidly
altering political environment. After the March 30, 1826, spectacle,
however, any discussion of Senate rules inevitably invited comment on
the vice president's legislative duties and on Calhoun's conduct as
president of the Senate.
On April 13, 1826, John Randolph offered a motion to rescind ``so
much of the new rules of this House, which give to the presiding officer
of this body the appointment of its committees, and the control over the
Journal of its proceedings.'' The debate continued on April 15, as
several Calhoun supporters, including Van Buren, reviewed ``the
considerations that had led the Senate'' to change its rules in 1823 and
1824. The fragmentary published accounts in the Register of Debates
suggest that, when the Senate vested in the presiding officer the power
to appoint committees, it had done so assuming that the president pro
tempore would actually make the selections--a reasonable assumption when
the debilitated Daniel D. Tompkins served as vice president. Randolph's
cryptic remarks on April 12, when he notified the Senate that he would
propose the rules changes on the following day, also hint that the
Senate had given the presiding officer the responsibility of supervising
the Journal because the secretary of the Senate had been negligent in
performing this important task.
The reporter who followed the April 15 debate was careful to note
that ``the gentlemen who favored the present motion, as well as the one
who offered it, disclaimed the remotest intention to impute to the Vice
President an improper exercise of the duties devolved on him by the
rules.'' But the debate took a personal turn after Randolph, sensitive
to mounting and widespread criticism of Calhoun for failing to stifle
his recent outburst, asserted that ``it is not the duty, nor the right,
of the President of the Senate to call a member to order.'' That right,
Randolph argued, was reserved to members of the Senate. At the
conclusion of the debate, the Senate voted, by overwhelming margins, to
resume its former practice of selecting committee members by ballot, and
``to take from the President of the Senate, the control over the Journal
of the Proceedings.'' ³⁷
Some contemporary observers, as well as modern day scholars, have
interpreted the April 15 vote as a pointed rebuke of a vice president
who had exceeded his authority and offended the Senate. On the other
hand, the caveats of Van Buren and opposition senators suggest that,
although some senators may well have intended to curtail Calhoun's
authority, others were animated by concern for maintaining the Senate's
institutional prerogatives. Calhoun, edging toward the strict
constructionist stance he would champion in later years, seems to have
approved of the changes, or at least to have accepted them with his
customary grace. ``[N]o power ought to be delegated which can be fairly
exercised by the constituent body,'' he agreed shortly after the vote,
``and . . . none ought ever to be delegated, but to responsible agents .
. . and I should be inconsistent with myself, if I did not give my
entire assent to the principles on which the rules in question have been
rescinded.'' Calhoun did bristle, however, at the suggestion that he had
been negligent in not calling Randolph to order. He had diligently
studied the Senate's rules, he informed the senators, and had concluded
that, although the chair could issue rulings on procedural matters,
``the right to call to order, on questions touching the latitude or
freedom of debate, belongs exclusively to the members of this body, and
not to the Chair. The power of the presiding officer . . . is an
appellate power only; and . . . the duties of the Chair commence when a
Senator is called to order by a Senator.'' He had been elected vice
president by ``the People,'' he reminded the Senate, and ``he had laid
it down as an invariable rule, to assume no power in the least degree
doubtful.'' ³⁸
The debate over the vice president's role in the Senate continued a
month later on May 18. A select committee chaired by Randolph that had
been appointed ``to take into consideration the present arrangement of
the Senate chamber,'' reported a resolution that would make access to
the Senate floor by anyone other than past and current members of
Congress and certain members of the executive and judicial branches
contingent upon written authorization by the vice president. The
resolution also specified that the officers of the Senate would be
responsible to the vice president and that all, except for the secretary
of the Senate, would be subject to immediate removal ``for any neglect
of duty.'' The Senate chamber would ``be arranged under the direction of
the Vice President, . . . so as to keep order more effectually in the
lobby and the gallery,'' a change intended to regulate the crowds who
were flocking to the Senate galleries in increasing numbers.
As this first session of the Nineteenth Congress neared its end,
Senator John Holmes submitted a resolution, for consideration in the
next session, to appoint a committee that would consider rules to
clarify and enhance the powers of the chair. Randolph moved to take up
the Holmes resolution immediately, but Calhoun ruled him out of order on
the grounds that ``when a member offered a resolution, if he did not
desire its consideration, it would lie one day on the table.''
Undaunted, Randolph moved to instruct the committee that it would be
``inconsistent with the rights and privileges of the States'' to
authorize the chair to call a member. He then proceeded to castigate a
Massachusetts editor for his alleged misconduct in the chamber. The
debate degenerated into a shouting match after Massachusetts Senator
James Lloyd rose to defend his constituent, but Calhoun remained
impassive until Alabama Senator William R. King intervened with a call
to order. Rigidly adhering to the Senate's rule governing the conduct of
debate, Calhoun instructed King ``to reduce the exceptionable words to
writing.'' King responded that ``it was not necessary to reduce the
words to writing,'' since he had merely intended to ``check the
gentlemen when they were giving way to effervescence of feeling.''
Calhoun explained that he had ``no power beyond the rules of the
Senate;'' if King would not comply, Randolph was free to continue. After
Randolph finished his diatribe, Calhoun again reminded the Senate that
``The Chair . . . would never assume any power not vested in it.''
³⁹
A weary Calhoun left the chair on May 20, 1826, two days before the
Nineteenth Congress adjourned, in order to allow for the election of a
president pro tempore, but the controversy over his conduct in the
Senate continued throughout the spring and summer and into fall. On
April 24, the National Intelligencer had published a letter from Senator
Dickerson, who maintained that Calhoun had treated him with appropriate
courtesy and respect during the March 30 debate, ⁴⁰ as well
as a submission from an anonymous ``Western Senator'' defending the vice
president. On May 1, the pro-administration National Journal published
the first in a series of five articles by ``Patrick Henry,'' an
anonymous writer friendly to the administration, charging that Calhoun
had abused his office. These essays, which continued through August 8,
cited an impressive array of parliamentary scholarship to support the
author's contention that Calhoun had been negligent in permitting the
``irrelative rhapsodies of a once powerful mind'' to disturb the Senate
``without one effort of authority, or one hint of disapprobation from
its president.'' The vice president had also allowed ``selfish
considerations'' to influence his committee appointments, ``Henry''
charged. ``From the commencement of the Government until the last
session of Congress,'' the essayist scolded Calhoun in his August 4
installment:
order had been preserved in the Senate under every Vice-President,
and decorum, almost rising to solemnity, had been a
distinctive feature of its proceedings. But no sooner were
you sent to preside over it, than its hall became, as if
by some magic agency, transformed into an arena where
political disappointment rioted in its madness.
Modern scholars have never conclusively established the identity of
``Patrick Henry,'' although Calhoun and many others believed him to be
President Adams. The vice president responded in his own series of
essays, published in the National Intelligencer between May 20 and
October 12, 1826, under the pseudonym ``Onslow,'' in honor of a
distinguished eighteenth-century Speaker of the British House of
Commons. Echoing Calhoun's pronouncements in the Senate, the writer's
opening salvo offered a forceful defense of the vice president's refusal
to restrain ``the latitude or freedom of debate.'' The decision to rule
Dickerson out of order had involved a procedural matter, well within the
scope of the vice president's authority; silencing Randolph's outburst
would have required ``a despotic Power, worse than the sedition law.''
As for the vice president's committee appointments, ``Onslow''
maintained in his October 12 epistle, ``The only correct rule is, to
appoint the able, experienced, and independent, without regard to their
feelings towards the Executive.'' To appoint only pro-administration
partisans, he argued, would have drastically expanded the power of an
executive who already had ``the whole patronage of the Government'' at
his disposal.⁴¹ These arguments, the modern-era editors of
Calhoun's papers have stressed, reveal ``the ground principles of all
Calhoun's later thinking,'' and mark ``the `turning point' in Calhoun's
career from nationalist and latitudinarian to sectionalist and strict
constructionist.'' ⁴²
Not until 1828 did the Senate finally revise the rule governing
debate to authorize the presiding officer, or any senator, to call a
member to order. After this revision was adopted, Calhoun stubbornly
remarked that ``it was not for him'' to comment on the change, assuring
the Senate ``that he should always endeavor to exercise it with strict
impartiality.'' He did heartily approve of another change adopted in
1828, a revision that made rulings of the chair subject to appeal. ``It
was not only according to strict principle,'' he informed the Senate,
``but would relieve the Chair from a most delicate duty.'' ⁴³

The Calhoun-Jackson Alliance

On June 4, 1826, Calhoun notified Andrew Jackson that he would
support his 1828 presidential bid. Calhoun, with his disciplined
intellect and rigid sense of propriety, presented a striking contrast to
the popular and dashing military hero. The two were never close, and
Calhoun never completely trusted Jackson. In fact, several years
earlier, while serving in Monroe's cabinet, the South Carolinian had
urged the president to discipline Jackson for his unauthorized invasion
of Spanish Florida during the Seminole War.⁴⁴ But Calhoun
needed time to recoup his political fortunes, and Jackson had vowed to
serve but a single term if elected president. The old hero welcomed
Calhoun's support, assuring him that they would ``march hand in hand in
their [the people's] cause,'' cementing one of the most ill-starred
partnerships in the history of the vice-presidency.⁴⁵
When Calhoun returned to the Senate for the second session of the
Nineteenth Congress in early December, he was relieved to find that he
was not ``the object of the malignant attack of those in power.'' He did
observe, however, that in the Senate ``the line of separation is better
drawn, and the feelings on both sides higher than in the last session.''
⁴⁶ Calhoun's respite came to an abrupt halt on December 28,
when the Alexandria, Virginia, Phoenix Gazette, an administration
mouthpiece, resurrected the old charges that Calhoun's chief secretary
at the War Department had improperly profited from his interest in a
materials contract.⁴⁷ On the following day, Calhoun notified
Secretary of the Senate Walter Lowrie that he had asked the House of
Representatives to investigate the charges and would not preside over
the Senate until the matter was resolved. ``[A] sense of propriety
forbids me from resuming my station till the House has disposed of this
subject,'' he explained.⁴⁸
On January 2, 1827, the Senate chose Nathaniel Macon of North
Carolina to preside over its deliberations while a House select
committee pursued the allegations. Henry Clay, who still commanded
enormous influence in the House of Representatives, played a silent role
in the appointment of the House select committee, which was heavily
weighted against Calhoun. Even though the committee cleared Calhoun
after six weeks of hearings, press accounts of the investigation,
combined with the muddled language that Clay had persuaded his allies to
insert in the select committee's February 13, 1827, report, contributed
to the widespread perception that the vice president had done something
wrong while serving as secretary of war.⁴⁹ Some Jacksonians
would have gladly withdrawn their support for Calhoun's vice-
presidential bid at that point. But Jackson's chief strategist, Martin
Van Buren, insisted that Calhoun was essential to his strategy of
forging a coalition of ``planters of the South and the plain Republicans
of the North'' to drive Adams from the White House.⁵⁰
The vice president, for his part, was increasingly disturbed at the
concessions that Van Buren seemed willing to make to secure Jackson's
election, particularly with respect to the tariff. Van Buren and New
York Senator Silas Wright had finessed a protective tariff through the
Senate in the spring of 1828. This so-called ``Tariff of Abominations''
included no concessions to southern agricultural interests, as had
previous tariffs, and imposed severe hardships on the region. Still,
Calhoun convinced the South Carolina delegation to hold its fire,
fearing that the backlash might cost Jackson the election and hoping
that Jackson would, if elected, reform the tariff
schedules.⁵¹ ``[T]he Tariff of the last session excites much
feelings in this and the other Southern atlantick states,'' he wrote to
Jackson from South Carolina in July, continuing,
The belief that those now in power will be displaced shortly, and
that under an administration formed under your auspices, a
better order will commence, in which an equal distribution
of the burden and benefit of government . . . and finally
the removal of oppressive duties will be the primary
objects of policy is what mainly consoles this quarter of
the Union under existing embarrassment.⁵²
Jackson and Calhoun won 56 percent of the popular vote in 1828--a
sweeping victory widely acclaimed as a triumph for ``the common man.''
The ``Jacksonians'' boasted an organization vastly more efficient than
that of Adams' National Republicans, a factor that had helped them gain
control of both houses in the 1827 congressional elections. The
presidential campaign was one of the most bitterly contested in the
nation's history. Adams' supporters charged Jackson and his wife with
immoral conduct (the two had married before Rachel's divorce from her
first husband) and Jacksonians countered by reminding the electorate of
the ``corrupt bargain.'' Calhoun and the National Republican vice-
presidential candidate Richard Rush were barely noticed in the
fray.⁵³
Candidate Calhoun had spent most of the election year at ``Fort
Hill,'' his Pendleton, South Carolina estate, supervising farm
operations and, at the request of the South Carolina legislature,
preparing a critique of the tariff. His point of departure for the
resulting South Carolina ``Exposition'' was an argument that Jefferson
had marshalled three decades earlier in his crusade against the Alien
and Sedition Acts: that the Union was a compact between states, which
retained certain rights under the Constitution. But Calhoun carried the
argument several steps farther, asserting that a state could veto, or
``nullify,'' any act by the federal government that encroached on its
sovereignty or otherwise violated the Constitution. The ``Exposition''
and an accompanying set of ``Protest'' resolutions were widely
circulated by the South Carolina legislature. Calhoun, wary of
jeopardizing his national standing, was careful not to claim authorship,
but Jackson and Van Buren soon suspected that the vice president had
written the controversial tract.⁵⁴

The Senate Debates Nullification

Calhoun's second vice-presidential term was even more of an ordeal
than his first. His suspicions that Jackson might pose as great a threat
to popular liberties as his predecessor were soon confirmed. The
president failed to repudiate the tariff--clear evidence that he had
fallen under Van Buren's spell--and his appointment of the ``Little
Magician'' as secretary of state boded ill for Calhoun. The vice
president was soon isolated within an administration where Van Buren and
his protectionist allies appeared to be gaining the upper
hand.⁵⁵
Calhoun's novel theory came under attack in the Senate early in his
second term, during a debate over the disposition of western lands, a
lengthy exchange that one historian has termed ``the greatest debate in
the history of the Senate.'' ⁵⁶ The debate began on December
29, when Connecticut Senator Samuel Foot offered a resolution to curtail
the sale of public lands in the West. South Carolina Senator Robert Y.
Hayne changed the tone of the debate on January 19, 1830, when he argued
that the federal government should leave land policy to the states and
that individual states could nullify federal legislation. The remainder
of the debate, which lasted through January 27, consisted of a spirited
exchange between Hayne and Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who
summoned all of his formidable oratorical talents in a passionate
defense of the Union.
But the Webster-Hayne debate was, in fact, a confrontation between
Webster and Calhoun. Hayne received a steady stream of handwritten notes
from the chair as he articulated Calhoun's doctrines for several hours
on January 21, and Webster clearly directed at the vice president his
second reply to Hayne of January 26-27. His charge that ``leading and
distinguished gentlemen from South Carolina'' had reversed their stand
on internal improvements brought an immediate and pointed inquiry from
the vice president: ``Does the chair understand the gentleman from
Massachusetts to say that the person now occupying the chair of the
Senate had changed his opinions on the subject of internal
improvements?'' Webster responded: ``If such change has taken place, I
regret it. I speak generally of the State of South Carolina.''
⁵⁷
The president, although not directly involved in the debate, was
clearly interested in the outcome. Jackson sympathized with advocates of
states' rights, but, as a passionate defender of the Union, he regarded
nullification as tantamount to treason. When his friend and adviser,
William B. Lewis, having witnessed the sparring between Hayne and
Webster from the Senate gallery, reported that Webster was ``demolishing
our friend Hayne,'' the president responded with a succinct ``I expected
it.'' ⁵⁸ An open confrontation between Jackson and Calhoun
soon followed, at the April 13, 1830, banquet commemorating Jefferson's
birthday. The event was a longstanding tradition among congressional
Republicans, but the recent use of Jefferson's writings to justify
nullification imbued the 1830 celebration with particular significance.
Warned in advance by Van Buren that several ``nullifiers'' were expected
to attend, the president and his advisers carefully scripted his
remarks. After the meal, and an interminable series of toasts, Jackson
rose to offer his own: ``Our Union. It must be preserved.'' Calhoun was
well prepared with an explosive rejoinder: ``The Union. Next to our
liberty, the most dear.'' Jackson had the last word a few days later,
when he asked a South Carolina congressman about to depart for home to
``give my compliments to my friends in your State, and say to them, that
if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws
of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on
engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.''
⁵⁹

Jackson Repudiates Calhoun

Even without Calhoun's intransigence on the tariff and
nullification, Jackson had ample reason to dislike his vice president.
In May 1830, the president finally received incontrovertible proof that
Calhoun, as he had long suspected, had urged Monroe's cabinet to censure
him for his invasion of Spanish Florida during the Seminole War.
Demanding an explanation from Calhoun, Jackson was stunned when the vice
president responded that he could not ``recognize the right on your part
to call in question my conduct.'' Calhoun went on to explain that
neither he, as secretary of war, nor President Monroe had authorized the
occupation of the Spanish posts in Florida, and that ``when orders were
transcended, investigation, as a matter of course, ought to follow.''
His opponents had resurrected a long-forgotten incident to discredit him
in Jackson's eyes, the vice president warned. ``I should be blind not to
see, that this whole affair is a political manoeuvre.'' Thus began a
lengthy and strident correspondence, which concluded only after Jackson
wrote from his Tennessee home in mid-July that ``I feel no interest in
this altercation . . . and now close this correspondence forever,'' and
Calhoun concurred that the correspondence ``is far from being agreeable
at this critical juncture of our affairs.'' Anxious to contradict
inaccurate press accounts of his quarrel with the president, Calhoun
published the correspondence in the United States' Telegraph of February
17 and 25, 1831, prefaced with a lengthy explanation addressed ``To the
People of the United States.'' His break with Jackson, so long in the
making, was now complete.⁶⁰
Calhoun soon found himself completely eclipsed by Van Buren. After a
longstanding dispute over official protocol had culminated in the
resignation of the entire cabinet in April 1831, all of Jackson's new
secretaries were Van Buren men. Calhoun had his wife Floride to thank
for this unfortunate development. Mrs. Calhoun, the unofficial arbiter
of Washington society, had thrown the capital into turmoil with her
deliberate snub of Secretary of War John Eaton and his wife, Peggy.
Peggy Eaton was a lively and attractive woman of dubious reputation and
a special favorite of the president. The daughter of an innkeeper, she
was clearly not the social equal of the haughty and highly critical
Floride. She had married Eaton, a boarder at her father's hotel, soon
after her first husband had died at sea--Washington scandalmongers
hinted that he had taken his life in despair after learning of Peggy's
affair with Eaton. Floride's reputation as an accomplished hostess, her
husband's position, and the fact that both the president and Van Buren
were widowers gave her enormous influence in Washington society. When
she refused to return Peggy Eaton's calls, several of the cabinet wives
followed suit.
Floride's actions put her husband in an awkward position, but he
acquiesced in her decision because he regarded social protocol as her
rightful sphere of authority and because he knew that nothing he did or
said would shake her resolve. The president, who considered Eaton ``more
like a son to me than anything else''--and later pronounced Peggy
``chaste as a virgin''--was sorely offended. His outrage was compounded
by memories of his late wife, Rachel, who had suffered a fatal heart
attack after hearing the vicious attacks on her character that the Adams
camp had circulated during the presidential campaign.
The ``Petticoat War'' split the cabinet for well over a year, with
Van Buren emerging the winner. The shrewd and gallant widower had
conspicuously entertained the Eatons and orchestrated the cabinet's
resignation to resolve the impasse. Jackson was profoundly grateful to
Van Buren for the opportunity to purge his cabinet of Calhoun's
supporters, and rewarded him with an appointment as ambassador to Great
Britain.⁶¹

Nullification Leader

Calhoun initially believed that his break with Jackson would only
enhance his chances of winning the presidency in 1832. He still enjoyed
considerable support in the South and believed he might be able to
reconcile southern agriculturalists and northern manufacturers with
selective modifications in the tariff schedules. But events in South
Carolina soon forced him to make public his position on the tariff and
nullification, a move that effectively killed his chances of ever
becoming president. In the summer of 1831, Calhoun protege George
McDuffie electrified a Charleston, South Carolina, audience with a fiery
declamation advocating nullification and secession. Calhoun was
horrified at this development, as well as by accounts that South
Carolina merchants were refusing to pay duties that they considered
unconstitutional. Calhoun had advanced the doctrine of nullification to
provide southern states with a peaceful mechanism for obtaining redress
of their grievances, never contemplating the possibility of disunion. He
had not endorsed secession in his 1828 ``Exposition,'' arguing that a
state could veto and refuse to enforce any law it considered
unconstitutional, but, if three fourths of the states subsequently
affirmed the law, the nullifying state must defer to the collective
will.
Until this point, Calhoun had never publicly claimed authorship of
his controversial doctrine, but now he felt compelled to assume control
of the nullification movement to minimize its destructive potential. He
published in the July 26, 1831, issue of the Pendleton, South Carolina,
Messenger his first public statement on nullification, the ``Rock Hill
Address,'' a forceful restatement of the principles first articulated in
the South Carolina ``Exposition.'' Calhoun was well aware of the risk he
had assumed. ``I can scarcely dare hope,'' he conceded shortly after the
``Rock Hill Address'' appeared in print, ``that my friends to the North
will sustain me in the positions I have taken, tho' I have the most
thorough conviction that the doctrines I advanced, must ultimately
become those of the Union; or that it will be impossible to preserve the
Union.'' Once the most ardent of nationalists, Calhoun would henceforth
be known as the South's advocate and, by Jackson supporters, as a
traitor.⁶²

Calhoun ``Elects'' a Vice President

Calhoun returned to Washington after a lengthy absence in time for
the opening of the Twenty-second Congress in December 1831. He had
devoted the time since the Twenty-first Congress had adjourned on March
3 to nullification and to his anticipated presidential campaign. One of
the first items on the Senate's agenda was the confirmation of Jackson's
reconstituted cabinet. The Senate approved these nominations without
incident, but Jackson's appointment of former Secretary of State Martin
Van Buren as ambassador to Great Britain aroused a firestorm of
controversy. Henry Clay, leading the anti-Jackson forces in the Senate,
blamed Van Buren for the ``pernicious system of party politics adopted
by the present administration,'' ⁶³ a sentiment shared by
many disaffected Jacksonians and Calhoun supporters, as well.
Tempers flared as the Senate debated the controversial nomination on
January 24 and 25, 1832, with several senators venting their anger at
the administration. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster took Van Buren
to task for his trade policies, while his southern colleagues, Senators
Stephen Miller of South Carolina and George Poindexter of Mississippi,
took aim at Van Buren's personal life. When Missouri's Alexander Buckner
rose to Van Buren's defense, asserting that only a ``liar'' would accuse
Van Buren of malfeasance or misconduct, Vice President Calhoun ruled him
out of order. Georgia Senator John Forsyth, a staunch Jackson man,
pointedly reminded the vice president, ``[I]f you remember your own
decisions you must know that you are grossly out of order for this
interference.'' Forsyth clearly intended to taunt Calhoun, not to raise
a substantive objection, since the Senate had, four years earlier,
revised its rules to authorize the presiding officer to call a member to
order.
The debate over Van Buren's appointment ended in a tied vote--
orchestrated, one scholar suggests, to give the vice president the
``distinction and honor of defeating Van Buren's nomination.'' Calhoun,
as expected, cast his vote against the nomination, a decision that,
Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton predicted, ``elected a Vice
President.'' ⁶⁴ But Benton was only partially correct. Rigid
in defense of his principles, but wholly lacking the abundant political
skills of the ``Little Magician,'' Calhoun had played into Van Buren's
hands throughout his second term as vice president. His decision to
assume control of the South Carolina nullification movement had already
killed his presidential prospects. Van Buren would become the Democratic
vice-presidential candidate in 1832 and would succeed Jackson as
president four years later.
Calhoun spent the remainder of the year in the Senate disheartened
by the enactment of the 1832 tariff. That measure was intended to
reconcile northern manufacturers and all but the most diehard free
traders, but, in one scholar's assessment, it ``satisfied neither
protectionists nor free traders.'' ⁶⁵ ``It is, in truth,''
Calhoun wrote to a kinsman as the Senate labored over the tariff in
early March 1832, ``hard to find a midle [sic] position, where the
principle of protection is asserted to be essential on one side, and
fatal on the other. It involves not the question of concession, but
surrender.'' ⁶⁶ In early July, a despairing Calhoun offered a
gloomy precis of the Senate's action on the tariff:
We have spent a long & fruitless season. The Tariff Bill was
late last evening ordered to the 3d. reading in the senate with many
amendments all going to increase the burden on us. Every southern
member voted against it including the South West, with the exception
of the Senators from Louisiana. The question is no longer one of
free trade, but liberty and despotism. The hope of the country now
rests on our gallant little State. Let every Carolinian do his duty.
Those who do not join us now intend unqualified
submission.⁶⁷

Senator Calhoun

In South Carolina, where antitariff sentiments had reached a fever
pitch, Calhoun found it increasingly difficult to contain the deadly
forces that he had unwittingly unleashed. Nullifiers gained control of
the state legislature in the fall 1832 election. The new legislature
promptly called for a nullification convention, which passed an
ordinance declaring the 1828 and 1832 tariffs void as of February 1,
1833. The Ordinance of Nullification also warned that, if the
administration resorted to coercion to collect the offensive duties,
South Carolina would ``proceed to organize a separate government.'' An
irate Jackson ordered reinforcements to the federal installations
surrounding Charleston Harbor but soon announced his support for a
revised tariff. On December 10, he proclaimed nullification
``incompatible with the existence of the Union.''
Calhoun would help defuse this explosive situation, but not as vice
president. Elected to the Senate to replace Robert Hayne, he resigned
the vice-presidency on December 28, 1832, more than two months before
his term was up. Except for a brief stint as secretary of state during
John Tyler's administration, he spent the rest of his life in the
Senate, valiantly defending his state and attempting to reconcile its
interests with those of the nation at large. Undaunted by rumors that
Jackson intended to try him for treason if the impasse over
nullification resulted in an armed confrontation, Calhoun joined forces
with Henry Clay to help guide through the Senate a revised tariff,
acceptable to the southern states. The nullifiers, encouraged by the
prospect of a more equitable tariff, and counseled by cool-headed
emissaries from Virginia to show restraint, postponed the effective date
of the ordinance until March 4. Jackson's supporters had, in the
meantime, introduced a measure to force South Carolina's compliance with
the old tariff, which passed the Senate by overwhelming margins. Calhoun
and eight of his fellow senators stalked out of the chamber in protest
when the Senate adopted the ``Force bill,'' but Jackson never had
occasion to employ its provisions against the nullifiers. The crisis
passed after Congress approved both the revised tariff and the Force
bill shortly before adjourning on March 3, 1833. Calhoun returned to
South Carolina firmly convinced that nullification had ``dealt the fatal
blow'' to the tariff.⁶⁸
For the next several years, Calhoun remained aloof from the
Jacksonian coalition, which had become known as the Democratic party.
But during Van Buren's administration, from 1837 to 1841, he set aside
his longstanding aversion to ``the Little Magician'' and risked the
wrath of his fellow South Carolinians to support the independent
treasury plan, Van Buren's solution to the credit and currency problems
that he and Calhoun believed responsible for the 1837 depression.
Alarmed at the prospect that Whig presidential candidate William Henry
Harrison would back tariff concessions for special interests, Calhoun
rejoined the Democrats in 1840 and began making plans to enter the 1844
presidential race.⁶⁹
Hoping to present himself as an independent candidate with no
institutional affiliation, Calhoun resigned from the Senate on March 3,
1843. His campaign faltered, however, when several prominent Virginia
Democrats backed Van Buren and the New York City convention followed
suit. Calhoun consoled himself by focusing his attention on his farm,
badly in debt after several years of depressed cotton prices, and his
family, torn by a protracted financial disputes between Calhoun's son,
Andrew Pickens Calhoun, and his son-in-law, Thomas Green Clemson. In
mid-March 1844, he accepted President John Tyler's offer of an
appointment to succeed Secretary of State Abel Upshur, who had been
killed by an exploding cannon during an outing on the ship Princeton.
Calhoun remained at the State Department until Tyler's term ended on
March 3, 1845, participating in the final stages of the negotiations for
the Texas Annexation Treaty.⁷⁰
Calhoun returned to the Senate in November 1845 and remained there
for the rest of his life. Increasingly defensive about the institution
of slavery as the abolition movement gained momentum, and agitated at
the growing discord between the slaveholding and free states, he spoke,
as he informed the Senate in 1847, as ``a Southern man and a
slaveholder.'' As secretary of state Calhoun had strongly supported the
annexation of Texas. After Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot
offered his famous proviso as an amendment to an administration war
bill, however, the South Carolina senator realized that the acquisition
of additional territory would inevitably heighten the sectional conflict
over slavery. The Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred slavery from
all lands acquired from Mexico, pushed Calhoun into the anti-
administration camp. He vehemently opposed the war policy of President
James K. Polk, warning that the acquisition of Mexican territory, with
its population of ``pure Indians and by far the larger portion of the
residue mixed blood,'' would corrupt the nation's culture and
institutions.⁷¹
By 1850, the precarious balance between the slaveholding and free
states was again at risk. California's petition to enter the Union as a
free state threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium. Other
unresolved issues, too, including slavery in the District of Columbia
and the enforcement of fugitive slave laws, loomed large on the horizon
during the final weeks of Calhoun's life. To resolve the impasse,
Calhoun's old friend and rival, Henry Clay, on January 29, 1850, offered
a series of proposals, collectively known as the Compromise of 1850.
Clay proposed that California enter the Union as a free state and that
Congress agree to impose no restrictions on slavery in the New Mexico
and Utah territories. The compromise also provided that Congress would
not prohibit or regulate slavery in the District of Columbia, would
abolish the slave trade in the District, and would require northern
states to comply with fugitive slave laws. Massachusetts Senator Daniel
Webster sought Calhoun's support for the compromise, but the South
Carolinian, vehemently opposed to abolishing the slave trade in the
nation's capital and admitting California as a free state, refused to
endorse the plan.
On March 4, a dispirited and emaciated Calhoun, his body so ravaged
by tuberculosis that he could no longer walk unassisted and his once
penetrating voice so weak that he could no longer speak, presented his
final address to the Senate. Virginia Senator James Mason spoke for
Calhoun, who sat nearby, his pitiful frame huddled in his chair. Only an
immediate halt to antislavery agitation and a constitutional amendment
to preserve the balance between North and South would save the Union,
Calhoun warned. Even senators who had long considered Calhoun a
disunionist were shocked when Mason pronounced his ultimatum: if the
northern states were unwilling to reconcile their differences with the
South ``on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the
States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace.'' Three
days later, Senator Webster delivered his famous ``Seventh of March''
speech, a ringing plea for compromise and Union that Calhoun interrupted
with a resolute, ``No sir! the Union can be broken''--one of his last
utterances in the Senate.⁷²
The Senate ultimately approved Clay's compromise, not as a package,
but as separate items. Calhoun died on March 31, 1850, convinced that
his beloved South would one day withdraw from the Union he had labored
so long and hard to strengthen and preserve. Even in death, he was a
controversial figure. Senator Thomas Hart Benton refused to speak at the
April 5 memorial service in the Senate chamber; Calhoun was ``not
dead,'' he maintained. ``There may be no vitality in his body, but there
is in his doctrines.'' Senator Daniel Webster, one of the official
mourners chosen by the Senate to accompany Calhoun's body to South
Carolina, could not bring himself to perform this awkward and painful
task. He took his leave from Calhoun at the Virginia landing as the
funeral party departed for the South. Calhoun was buried in Charleston,
in a crypt in St. Philip's churchyard.⁷³
JOHN C. CALHOUN

NOTES

¹ Clyde N. Wilson and W. Edwin Hemphill, eds., The Papers
of John C. Calhoun, vol. 10 (Columbia, SC, 1977), pp. 199-203.
² John C. Calhoun to James Monroe, June 23, 1826, Calhoun
Papers, 10:132-35.
³ U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989:
Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd,
S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 1, 1988, p. 88; U.S.,
Congress, Senate, Journal, 18th Cong., special session of March 4, 1825,
pp. 271-74.
⁴ John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union
(Baton Rouge, LA, 1988), p. 10.
⁵ Niven, pp. 1-12; for an account of the Regulator
movement, see Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators
(Cambridge, 1963).
⁶ By the eighteenth century, the family had changed the
spelling of their name, originally ``Colquhoun'' (after the Scottish
clan of that name), with one branch of the family adopting the most
commonly known spelling, ``Calhoun,'' and the other spelling the name
``Colhoun.'' Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, vol. 1, Nationalist,
1782-1828 (New York, 1968; reprint of 1944 ed.), p. 12; Niven, p. 20.
⁷ Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nationalist, p. 50.
⁸ Niven, pp. 21-34; Merrill D. Peterson, The Great
Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), pp. 23-27.
⁹ James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800-
1828 (New York, 1966), pp. 97-102.
¹⁰ Niven, pp. 34-35; Peterson, p. 23.
¹¹ The Committee on Foreign Affairs did not become a
standing committee of the House of Representatives until 1822. U.S.,
Congress, House of Representatives, Guide to the Records of the United
States House of Representatives at the National Archives, 1789-1989,
100th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, 1989), p. 135.
¹² Peterson, p. 18; Niven, pp. 41-52; Harry Ammon, James
Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (Charlottesville, VA, 1990;
reprint of 1971 edition), p. 309; James F. Hopkins, ``Election of
1824,'' in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, ed.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Fred L. Israel, vol. 1 (New York, 1971),
p. 354.
¹³ Peterson, pp. 18, 39.
¹⁴ Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian
America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), pp. 76-79; Peterson, p. 49; Niven,
pp. 51-57. President James Madison vetoed the ``Bonus Bill'' on
Constitutional grounds.
¹⁵ Niven, pp. 58-60; Ammon, pp. 357-60, 470; Richard W.
Barsness, ``John C. Calhoun and the Military Establishment, 1817-1825,''
Wisconsin Magazine of History 50 (Autumn 1966), pp. 43-53; Wiltse, John
C. Calhoun: Nationalist, p. 140.
¹⁶ Young, pp. 230-31.
¹⁷ Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of John Quincy Adams,
1794-1845 (New York, 1951), p. 354; Wiltse, John C. Calhoun:
Nationalist, pp. 208-209.
¹⁸ Peterson, pp. 87-88.
¹⁹ Barsness, pp. 43-53; Ammon, p. 470.
²⁰ Ammon, pp. 470-72; Peterson, pp. 88-89, 93; Niven, pp.
78-79. See also Chapter 9 of this volume, ``Richard Mentor Johnson,''
pp. 123-24.
²¹ Barsness, pp. 43-53; Niven, pp. 86-93.
²² Peterson, pp. 116-31; Hopkins, pp. 349-81; Niven, pp.
93-109.
²³ Peterson, p. 130.
²⁴ John C. Calhoun to J.G. Swift, in Calhoun Papers,
10:9-10.
²⁵ Niven, p. 116; for Calhoun's caveat that he was
``without experience, which only can give the requisite skill in
presiding,'' see his March 4, 1825, inaugural address, U.S., Congress,
Senate, Journal, 18th Cong., special sess. of March 4, 1825, pp. 272-73.
²⁶ Peterson, p. 136.
²⁷ For a list of committee chairmen during the 18th
Congress, see U.S., Congress, Senate, Annals of Congress, 18th Cong.,
1st sess., p. 27; a comprehensive list of committee chairs from 1789
through 1992 appears in Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989, vol. 4, Historical
Statistics, 1789-1992 (Washington, 1993), pp. 522-81.
²⁸ Peterson, p. 136; Niven, p. 114. Macon had served as a
member of the Foreign Relations Committee in the 18th Congress; Virginia
Senator James Barbour, a Crawford Republican who served as the
committee's chairman during that Congress, had resigned in March 1825,
to accept an appointment as secretary of war. Annals of Congress, 18th
Cong., 1st sess., p. 27; U.S., Congress, Senate, Biographical Directory
of the United States Congress, 1771-1989, S. Doc. 100-34, 100th Cong.,
2d sess., 1989, pp. 574-75.
²⁹ Peterson, p. 136.
³⁰ Niven, pp. 113-15; Peterson, pp. 136-40; Robert V.
Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New
York, 1959), pp. 105-13.
³¹ Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years View; or, A History
of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to
1850 (New York, 1871; reprint of 1854 edition), vol. 1, pp. 65-69;
Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party, pp.
105-13. The Senate confirmed the appointments of John Sergeant and
Richard Clark Adams as delegates to the Panama Congress by a vote of 24
to 20.
³² U.S., Congress, Register of Debates in Congress, 19th
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 384-406; Benton, 1:78; John C. Calhoun to Micah
Sterling, February 4, 1826, in Calhoun Papers, 10:72-73.
³³ Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
(New York, 1991), pp. 292-93; Niven, pp. 114-16; Peterson, pp. 140-41;
Register of Debates in Congress, 19th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 384-406.
³⁴ Register of Debates in Congress, 19th Cong., 1st
sess., pp. 384-407. The amendment was sent to the House of
Representatives, where it died in committee.
³⁵ Remini, Henry Clay, pp. 293-95; Peterson, pp. 140-42.
³⁶ Annals of Congress, 18th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 114-17;
U.S., Congress, Senate, Journal, 18th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 106, 114,
125.
³⁷ Register of Debates in Congress, 19th Cong., 1st
sess., pp. 525-26, 571-73.
³⁸ Senator John Holmes of Maine noted, in his April 15,
1826 remarks, that proposed rules changes ``had proceeded from an
intimate personal friend of the Vice President, which will itself
contradict the presumption that any conduct'' of Calhoun's ``had induced
the proposition.'' His remarks brought an immediate disclaimer from the
ever-erratic Randolph that he had ``offered the resolution in no such
character . . . of the personal friend or enemy of any gentleman on this
floor with one exception.'' Register of Debates in Congress, 19th Cong.,
1st sess., pp. 571-74.
³⁹ Register of Debates in Congress, pp. 754-59.
⁴⁰ Editorial note and summary, Calhoun Papers, 10:91.
⁴¹ The essays of ``Patrick Henry'' appear in Calhoun
Papers, 10:91-96; 113-27; 165-75; 175-87; 188-97; for the ``Onslow''
essays, see pp. 99-104; 135-47; 147-155; 208-215; 215-21; 223-33. See
also the editors' introduction, xix-xxx.
⁴² Calhoun Papers, 10:xxi.
⁴³ Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong., 1st
sess., pp. 278-341 (``Powers of the Vice President'').
⁴⁴ John C. Calhoun to Andrew Jackson, June 4, 1826,
Calhoun Papers, 10:110-11; Peterson, pp. 151-52; Niven, pp. 68-71, 119-
21.
⁴⁵ Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of
Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), pp. 73-74.
⁴⁶ John C. Calhoun to Lt. James Edward Colhoun, December
24, 1826, Calhoun Papers, 10:238-40.
⁴⁷ Alexandria Phoenix Gazette, December 28, 1826, Calhoun
Papers, 10:241-42.
⁴⁸ John C. Calhoun to the secretary of the Senate,
December 29, 1826, Calhoun Papers, 10:243.
⁴⁹ Niven, pp. 124-26; editorial note, Calhoun Papers,
10:246.
⁵⁰ John C. Calhoun to the Rev. Moses Waddel, February 24,
1827, Calhoun Papers, 10: 266-67; Niven, pp. 125-26.
⁵¹ Niven, pp. 131-37; Peterson, pp. 159-61.
⁵² John C. Calhoun to Andrew Jackson, July 10, 1828,
Calhoun Papers, 10:395-97.
⁵³ Robert V. Remini, ``Election of 1828,'' in Schlesinger
and Israel, eds., pp. 413-33.
⁵⁴ Niven, pp. 154-78; Peterson, pp. 169-70.
⁵⁵ Niven, pp. 165-69.
⁵⁶ Peterson, p. 170.
⁵⁷ Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989, vol. 3, Classic Speeches,
1830-1993 (Washington, 1994), pp. 1-77; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson
and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York, 1981), pp. 232-
33; Peterson, pp. 170-83; Niven, pp. 169-72.
⁵⁸ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, p.
233.
⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 185-86; Peterson, pp. 233-37.
⁶⁰ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom,
pp. 240-47; Peterson, pp. 187-89; Niven, pp. 174-75. For the Calhoun-
Jackson correspondence regarding the Seminole War investigation, and an
account of Calhoun's subsequent publication of the exchange, see Clyde
N. Wilson, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 11 (Columbia, SC,
1978), pp. 94-96, 159-225, 285, 334-38.
⁶¹ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom,
pp. 161-63, 320-21; Peterson, pp. 183-85; Niven, pp. 167-69, 174. For
further discussion of this incident, see Chapter 8 of this volume,
``Martin Van Buren,'' p. 108.
⁶² Niven, pp. 180-84; Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun,
vol. 2, Nullifier, 1829-1839 (New York, 1968; reprint of 1949 ed.), pp.
110-20; John C. Calhoun to Samuel D. Ingham, July 31, 1831, Calhoun
Papers, 11:441-45.
⁶³ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
p. 347.
⁶⁴ Ibid., pp. 347-49; Niven, pp. 185-87; Peterson, p.
203; Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 278-
341.
⁶⁵ Peterson, pp. 203-9.
⁶⁶ John C. Calhoun to Francis W. Pickens, March 2, 1832,
Calhoun Papers, 11:558-59.
⁶⁷ John C. Calhoun to Samuel D. Ingham, July 8, 1832,
Calhoun Papers, 11:602-3.
⁶⁸ Niven, pp. 189-99; Richard E. Ellis, The Union at
Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights, and the Nullification Crisis
(New York, 1987), pp. 74-91, and passim.
⁶⁹ Niven, pp. 200-58.
⁷⁰ Ibid., pp. 259-82.
⁷¹ Ibid., pp. 295-313.
⁷² Ibid., pp. 339-45; Peterson, pp. 449-66.
⁷³ Peterson, pp. 467-68; Niven, pp. 343-45.
?

Chapter 8

MARTIN VAN BUREN

1833-1837

MARTIN VAN BUREN
MARTIN VAN BUREN

Chapter 8

MARTIN VAN BUREN

8th Vice President: 1833-1837

a true man with no guile
--Andrew Jackson on Martin Van Buren ¹
you were a great intriguer--the author of sundry plots
--William L. Marcy to Martin Van Buren ²
Few people ever really knew Martin Van Buren. The impeccable attire,
ready wit, and unfailing tact that set him apart from his contemporaries
masked a nagging sense of insecurity that dogged him throughout his
political career. His father, a tavern keeper of modest means, had been
able to provide him with only a rudimentary education. One of Van
Buren's better-educated associates observed that his ``knowledge of
books outside of his profession was more limited than that of any other
public man'' he had ever known and that Van Buren never prepared a state
paper without asking a friend to ``revise and correct that document.''
Van Buren received his real education in the turbulent and factious
world of New York politics, and he was an apt pupil. He learned to hold
his counsel as others debated the hotly contested issues of the day,
carefully observing the course of a debate and weighing all of the
issues before staking out a position of his own. ``Even after deciding
on a course of action,'' one scholar has observed, ``Van Buren might
move with an air of evasiveness.'' Circumspect to a fault, he ``enjoyed
a name for noncommittalism that survived when most other things about
him were forgotten.'' ³
Reviled as a ``schemer'' and a master ``manipulator'' by
contemporaries who lacked (and probably envied) his uncanny political
acumen, he was known throughout his career by an unparalleled assortment
of nicknames, none of them entirely favorable. But ``the Little
Magician'' (also known as ``the American Talleyrand,'' ``the Red Fox of
Kinderhook,'' the ``Mistletoe Politician,'' and by a variety of other
sobriquets) ⁴ left a solid record of accomplishment that few
of his better-known fellows could rival. More than any other individual
of his time, Van Buren realized the importance of party organization,
discipline, and political patronage. He engineered Andrew Jackson's
victory in the 1828 presidential election and later became a trusted
confidant and adviser to ``Old Hickory,'' a relationship that continued
after Van Buren became vice president in 1833. No previous vice
president enjoyed a greater measure of influence than Van Buren, and no
vice president, in over three decades, had assumed that office as the
``heir apparent.''

Van Buren's Early Years

Martin Van Buren was born on December 5, 1782, in the predominantly
Dutch community of Kinderhook, New York. His father, Abraham, was a
tavern keeper and farmer of modest means; his mother, Maria Goes
⁵ Van Alen, was a widow with two sons from her first
marriage. Both were of undiluted Dutch ancestry, a fact that Van Buren
took care to note in his Autobiography. One of the six children born to
Abraham and Maria, Martin grew up in a crowded household, lodged above
his father's tavern. From his father, a resolute opponent of Federalism,
he inherited his genial manners and political creed but very little
else. Dilatory about collecting his debts and generous beyond his means,
Abraham barely supported his large family. Young Martin inherited his
ambition from his mother, who insisted that her sons receive the best
education possible, given their limited resources. He attended a local
school until the age of fifteen, then served as an apprentice to Francis
Sylvester, a local lawyer. During his apprenticeship, Van Buren became
involved in local politics, attending his district's 1800 Republican
convention and helping to elect John Peter Van Ness to the United States
House of Representatives in 1801. These activities strained his
relationship with Sylvester, a prominent Federalist, and Van Buren
terminated their arrangement after the election. Van Ness, grateful for
Van Buren's efforts on his behalf, paid his young supporter's travel and
expenses while he finished his legal studies in New York City, clerking
for the congressman's brother, William.
New York City politics fascinated Van Buren, but he returned to
Kinderhook shortly after his admission to the bar in 1803 to establish a
legal practice with his half brother, James Van Alen. In leaving the
city he also sought to distance himself from the intraparty warfare that
infected the New York Republican coalition after the 1800 presidential
election. In Kinderhook, much of Van Buren's time was spent defending
tenants and small landholders in suits against the powerful Livingston
clan. The Livingstons, landed gentry whose control of the New York
legislature had helped them expand their extensive holdings by
questionable means, had retained the best legal minds in the state.
Rigorous and careful preparation on Van Buren's part helped him prevail
against these notable attorneys and won him the respect of De Witt
Clinton, Governor George Clinton's nephew and political heir. Van Buren
backed Clinton's candidate, future Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, in
the 1807 gubernatorial race and received for his efforts an appointment
as Columbia County surrogate on March 20, 1808.⁶
In 1808, Van Buren married Hannah Hoes, a distant relative, and
settled in Hudson, the Columbia County seat. The marriage was a happy
one, notwithstanding the frequent absences imposed by the demands of
Martin's career, but by the time their fifth son was born in 1817,
Hannah had contracted a fatal case of tuberculosis. Van Buren was
profoundly affected by her death in 1819; although much in demand as an
escort and dinner companion, particularly during the years that he lived
in Washington, he never remarried.⁷
Van Buren served as Columbia County surrogate from 1808 until 1812,
when he was elected to the New York senate. During the War of 1812, he
was an avid supporter of the administration's war effort, offering
legislation to facilitate mobilization of the state's defenses. He
opposed the Federalists' antiwar stance and broke with his mentor, De
Witt Clinton, after learning that Clinton had solicited Federalist
support for his 1812 presidential bid. In 1815, Van Buren became state
attorney general and moved his family to Albany. He held that office
until 1819 and continued to serve in the state senate until 1820,
delegating his growing legal practice to his junior partner, Benjamin F.
Butler.⁸
Van Buren soon emerged as the guiding force of the ``Bucktail''
faction, one of several groups jockeying for control of the New York
Republican party. The Bucktails, opponents of De Witt Clinton who took
their name from the distinctive plumes they affixed to their hats,
rapidly gained in influence under Van Buren's tutelage. A Bucktail-
controlled convention made major revisions in New York's constitution in
1821-1822, expanding the suffrage and curbing aristocratic influence,
reforms that helped break De Witt Clinton's hold on the state Republican
party. In 1821, Van Buren won election to the United States Senate,
leaving behind a formidable political organization, popularly known as
the ``Albany Regency,'' that would manage the New York Republican
party--and through it, the state--while he was away. The Regency
maintained rigid discipline, rewarding loyalty with patronage
appointments and disciplining errant members. Although centered in
Albany, the organization's control also extended to local political
organizations and clubs. Powerful as Van Buren's apparatus became, ``It
was not,'' one scholar of the period emphasizes, ``so much the rewarding
of partisans and the mass lopping off of rebellious heads that explained
the Regency success as it was the skilful, highly judicious manner in
which the power was exercised.'' Regency leaders took ``the prejudices
and feelings of local communities'' into account in making their
appointments and exercised equal care in making removals.⁹

Senator Van Buren: The ``Little Magician''

Once in Washington, Van Buren set about organizing the New York
congressional delegation, a difficult undertaking in light of the fact
that John Taylor, the unofficial dean of the delegation and Speaker of
the House of Representatives, was firmly in the Clinton camp. In an
effort to curb Taylor's influence, Van Buren helped orchestrate the
election of Virginia Representative Philip Barbour as House Speaker
during the Seventeenth Congress, a narrow victory that increased his own
influence while cementing his ties to Virginia Republicans. He tried but
failed to block the appointment of a Federalist as postmaster of Albany,
but his effort to derail the nomination, chronicled at length by the
press, enhanced his reputation.¹⁰
In the 1824 presidential election, Van Buren backed the Republican
caucus nominee, Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. The two had a
great deal in common: Crawford was a states' rights advocate, a strict
constructionist, and--a consideration of overriding importance to Van
Buren--a dedicated party man. But the Republican coalition was rapidly
splintering, and many Republicans, calling for reform of the nominating
process, refused to heed the will of the caucus. Four other candidates
ultimately entered the race, all claiming membership in the party of
Jefferson: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of War John
C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Tennessee Senator Andrew Jackson. Consumed
by his single-minded effort to secure Crawford's election, even after
his candidate became so seriously ill that he could neither see, hear,
nor walk, Van Buren was bitterly disappointed when the House of
Representatives elected Adams president.¹¹
After the election, Van Buren, as the new acknowledged leader of the
``Crawford'' Republicans, also known as ``Radicals,'' kept his peace
while others denounced the ``corrupt bargain'' with Henry Clay that many
suspected had elevated Adams to the White House. He voted to confirm
Clay as secretary of state, but he broke his silence after Adams
outlined an ambitious domestic and foreign policy agenda in his first
annual address. Van Buren particularly objected to the president's plan
to send representatives to a conference of South and Central American
delegates in Panama and enlisted the aid of Vice President John C.
Calhoun and his allies in an effort to prevent the confirmation of
delegates to the conference. The Senate ultimately confirmed the
nominees, but the debate over the Panama mission had helped forge a
tentative coalition of ``Radicals'' and Calhoun supporters under Van
Buren's leadership.¹²
In December 1826, the Little Magician formalized his alliance with
Calhoun, who had already pledged his support for Andrew Jackson in the
forthcoming presidential race. Each man had his own agenda: Calhoun
intended to succeed Jackson, after serving a second term as vice
president; Van Buren, alarmed by Adams' grandiose agenda and convinced
that Republicans had strayed from the Jeffersonian creed, intended to
restore the party to its ``first principles.'' Jackson, he was
convinced, should carry the reinvigorated party's standard in 1828. ``If
Gen Jackson . . . will put his election on old party grounds, preserve
the old systems, avoid if not condemn the practices of the last
campaign,'' he predicted, ``we can by adding his personal popularity to
the yet remaining force of old party feeling, not only succeed in
electing him but our success when achieved will be worth something.''
¹³
By December 1827, Van Buren had assumed control of the Jackson
campaign. The candidate remained in the background while the Little
Magician orchestrated a battle plan of unprecedented energy and vigor.
His campaigning was, in the words of one scholar, ``little short of
brilliant.'' Van Buren plunged wholeheartedly into the contest, serving
as fund raiser, strategist, publicist, and counselor. Several states
had, prior to the election, revised their election laws to expand the
franchise. With parades, rallies, speeches, and calls for ``reform,''
Van Buren and his lieutenants mesmerized these first-time voters, as
well as others who had become disenchanted with the administration.
``[T]he American people,'' a Jackson scholar concluded, ``loved the
performance put on for them.'' ¹⁴
Keeping his fragile coalition together represented Van Buren's most
difficult challenge, apart from persuading the candidate to suffer in
dignified silence as the Adams camp levelled increasingly virulent
attacks on his character. The growing protectionist sentiment in the
West and in the Northeast posed particular problems for Van Buren, who
could not afford to alienate southern free-trade advocates. Courting
both camps, he studiously avoided making a definitive pronouncement on
the tariff, even as he deftly guided a protectionist bill through the
Senate. The 1828 tariff, known in the South as the ``Tariff of
Abominations,'' reassured westerners, who might otherwise have remained
in the ``Adams-Clay'' fold, that a Jackson administration would take
their interests into account. Van Buren realized that protectionism was
anathema to southern agriculturalists, but he also realized that most
southerners regarded Jackson as the lesser of two evils. As one scholar
has conceded, during the tariff debate Van Buren ``said some very
equivocal things to Southerners,'' helping them convince themselves
that, once elected, Old Hickory would support tariff
reform.¹⁵

Secretary of State Van Buren

Jackson won an impressive victory in 1828, widely heralded as a
triumph of the ``common man.'' Writing his Autobiography many years
after the fact, Van Buren attributed the outcome of this historic
election to the ``zealous union between that portion of the republican
party who . . . had shown themselves willing to sacrifice personal
preferences to its harmony, the numerous supporters of Gen. Jackson . .
. and the friends of Mr. Calhoun . . . strengthened by the mismanagement
of the administration.'' Van Buren achieved a personal victory as well,
winning election as governor of New York. But he served less than two
months in this position, resigning to accept an appointment as secretary
of state in the new administration.¹⁶
Van Buren was easily the most capable individual in Jackson's
cabinet, an assortment of second-rank appointees chosen to achieve
sectional and ideological balance.¹⁷ During his two years as
secretary of state from 1829 to 1831, he became one of the president's
most trusted advisers. He arrived in the capital shortly after Jackson's
inauguration to find the cabinet--and Washington society--at odds over
Mrs. John C. Calhoun's adamant refusal to socialize with the wife of
Secretary of War John Eaton, a woman with a spirited disposition and a
notorious reputation. Several cabinet wives had followed suit, avoiding
official functions for fear of encountering the tainted couple. The
``Petticoat War'' was, as Van Buren realized, much more than a dispute
over protocol or public morals; it was a symptom of the deep divisions
in an administration that included both free-trade advocates and
protectionists. The tension became even more pronounced after Jackson
delivered his first annual message. His speech, prepared with Van
Buren's assistance, convinced Vice President Calhoun and his allies that
they would obtain no relief from the Tariff of Abominations. As for Van
Buren, he suspected--correctly, as it turned out--that Calhoun was
somehow behind the talk of ``nullification'' emanating from South
Carolina.
Van Buren at first tried to cure what he called ``the Eaton
malaria,'' the malaise that threatened to paralyze the administration,
by entertaining the Eatons. As a widower with no wife to object if he
showed courtesy to a woman of questionable repute, he had nothing to
lose by entertaining Mrs. Eaton and everything to gain, given the high
regard that Jackson felt for Peggy and her husband. He was no match for
the formidable Floride Calhoun, however, and he soon became persona non
grata among the Calhoun set, but his gallantry endeared him to the
president.¹⁸ Accompanying Jackson on horseback for their
customary rides throughout the countryside surrounding Washington, Van
Buren became the president's sounding board and friend, offering well-
timed and perceptive counsel to the care-burdened and lonely old hero.
He helped craft the president's memorable toast: ``The Union: It must be
preserved'' that electrified the April 13, 1830, banquet commemorating
Jefferson's birthday, and he helped persuade Jackson to run for a second
term.
Calhoun simmered with resentment as the man he considered a
``weasel'' gained the upper hand in a rivalry that was becoming
increasingly bitter. Van Buren, although every bit as ambitious as
Calhoun, became increasingly discomfited at the widespread speculation
that he, and not Calhoun, would succeed Jackson as president. Recoiling
at the thought that his opponents might interpret his labors on
Jackson's behalf as a crude form of electioneering, he informed the
president in late March of 1831 that ``there is but one thing'' that
would bring peace to Jackson's troubled administration: ``my
resignation.'' Old Hickory was at first reluctant to accept Van Buren's
resignation, but eventually realized that the gesture offered him the
opportunity to purge his cabinet of Calhoun partisans. Van Buren's
departure precipitated the mass resignation of the entire cabinet,
except for Postmaster General William Barry. The new cabinet was
distinctly more sympathetic to Jackson--and to Van Buren. As a reward
for his ``highly patriotic'' sacrifice, the Little Magician received an
appointment as minister to England.¹⁹
Van Buren sailed for England before the Senate confirmed his
nomination. His easy, elegant manners made him an instant hit in London.
Almost immediately, he received the British foreign minister's pledge to
respect the rulings of the panel arbitrating the longstanding boundary
dispute between Maine and New Brunswick. Jackson had predicted that Van
Buren's enemies would not dare oppose this appointment, for fear that
``the people in mass would take you up and elect you vice Pres.,'' but,
in late February 1832, Van Buren learned that the Senate had in fact
rejected his nomination, with Vice President Calhoun casting the
deciding vote. Jackson was furious when he heard the news but, after
sober reflection, realized that he now had ample justification for
removing Calhoun from the ticket in the coming election. He had already
settled on Van Buren as his next vice president, but Calhoun's
effrontery strengthened his resolve. ``The people will properly resent
the insult offered to the Executive, and the injury intended to our
foreign relations, in your rejection,'' he consoled Van Buren in mid-
February, ``by placing you in the chair of the very man whose casting
vote rejected you.'' ²⁰ Calhoun, his presidential prospects
rapidly dimming as a consequence of his role in the nullification
controversy, resigned before the end of his term--the first vice
president to do so--to take a seat in the Senate. Once Van Buren's most
formidable rival for the soul of the organization soon to be known as
the Democratic party, he had become a sectional leader and would remain
a sectional leader for the rest of his life.

The Election of 1832

Van Buren found every reason imaginable to remain abroad after
learning of his rejection by the Senate. He could not break his lease or
abruptly discharge his servants, he protested, nor could he pack up his
household on such short notice. But his biographer suggests that he
delayed his departure because he believed that the ``opposition would
splinter . . . if left alone; it stood a good chance of coalescing if he
returned with undue haste for vindication.'' ²¹ Touring the
Continent with his son John, Van Buren was still abroad when Democratic
delegates assembled at Baltimore on May 21, 1832, to choose a vice-
presidential candidate. Although antitariff southern Democrats had
serious reservations about Van Buren, Jackson's sentiments prevailed. By
an overwhelming margin, the convention chose Van Buren on the first
ballot.²²
Finally returning home in July 1832, the Little Magician was
immediately summoned to Washington. Jackson needed his help in drafting
a message to Congress explaining his impending veto of a bill to
recharter the Second Bank of the United States. Van Buren approved of
the veto message, a ringing denunciation of the bank as an instrument of
privilege. At Jackson's request, he attended the Senate and the House of
Representatives on July 10, in order to lobby against the inevitable
attempt to override the veto. Also at Jackson's request, he lobbied for
a compromise tariff designed to keep would-be nullifiers in the
Jacksonian camp. Successful in both efforts, he departed for New York
after Congress adjourned. He remained in New York until shortly before
the inauguration, attempting to reconcile die-hard New York
protectionists to the compromise tariff.²³
The 1832 election was, as one scholar of the period has observed, a
referendum on the Second Bank of the United States, the first
presidential election in which the candidates submitted a single,
specific question to the electorate. Jackson was a ``hard-money'' man,
deeply suspicious of banks, credit, and paper money after suffering near
ruin in an early land speculation venture. Regarding the Second Bank of
the United States, a government-chartered but privately owned
institution, as an instrument of aristocratic, monied interests, he
would have announced his intention to destroy the bank in his first
annual message had his advisers not counseled restraint. Fully confident
that the voters would signal their assent by electing him to a second
term, Jackson had vetoed the bank recharter bill before the election.
National Republican candidate Henry Clay, who considered the bank
essential to the nation's fiscal stability, was quick to make an issue
of the veto. Clay's partisans took aim at the Little Magician, as well,
charging that his feats of legerdemain had secured the throne for a
president who had abused his office. Political cartoons showed Jackson,
Van Buren, and their cronies assaulting the bank with a battering ram,
Van Buren crowning Jackson, and ``King Andrew the First'' brandishing
the ``veto.'' These and similar images helped make the contest one of
the liveliest, if not the best illustrated, in the nation's history.
But the National Republicans were no match for the well-organized
party that Van Buren had helped create. One scholar has suggested that
the majority of American voters still regarded Jackson as their
champion, even though they may well have approved of the bank, which
provided the nation with the stable currency so essential to its
prosperity. The Democrats, now a full-fledged political party, won a
solid victory, although by a somewhat smaller margin than in 1828.
Jackson was easily reelected, and Van Buren won a substantial victory
over Clay's running mate, John Sergeant.²⁴

Vice President Van Buren

Jackson had every reason to rejoice at the outcome of the election.
The voters had, he believed, given him a mandate to destroy the bank,
and he was rid of Calhoun. In Van Buren, Jackson had a vice president
more to his liking. Old Hickory respected his second vice president and
seems to have felt sincere affection for him, as well. Some longtime
Jackson cronies were deeply jealous of the New Yorker, who, as one
critic put it, stuck ``close to the President as a blistering plaster.''
²⁵ But Van Buren was not, as critics of both men so
frequently alleged, the ``power- behind-the-throne.'' Jackson was a
formidable tactician in his own right and a man of resolute convictions,
fully capable of determining his own course of action. Van Buren was not
his only confidant; throughout his two terms as president, Jackson also
relied on his ``Kitchen Cabinet,'' an informal group of trusted friends,
supporters, kinsmen, and hangers-on, for advice and moral support.
In orchestrating the transfer of government deposits from the Bank
of the United States to state depositories, for example, Jackson
rejected the cautious course that Van Buren proposed in favor of the
more precipitate approach advocated by Amos Kendall, the fourth auditor
of the treasury. After Jackson informed his advisers early in his first
term that he intended to remove the deposits, Kendall urged immediate
action. Van Buren, sensitive to the political and financial
repercussions of a hasty withdrawal but reluctant to challenge the
president, advised Jackson to wait at least until the Twenty-third
Congress convened in December 1833. Apprehensive--with good reason, as
it turned out--that he would be regarded both as the author of this
controversial move and as the pawn of Wall Street bankers who expected
to benefit from the Philadelphia-based bank's demise, Van Buren was
conspicuously absent from Washington that fall. The opposition would
inevitably ``relieve the question . . . from the influence of your well
deserved popularity with the people,'' he wrote Jackson from New York in
September, ``by attributing the removal of the deposits to the
solicitat[i]ons of myself and the monied junto in N. York, and as it is
not your habit to play into the enemies hands you will not I know
request me to come down unless there is some adequate inducement for my
so doing.'' ²⁶
Van Buren did, however, enjoy a greater measure of influence in the
administration than any previous vice president. He helped Treasury
Secretary Roger B. Taney coax the president into a less belligerent
posture when Jackson, outraged at France's failure to comply with the
1832 treaty for the payment of U.S. claims against France, threatened to
seek congressional authorization to issue letters of marque, a move that
Taney feared might lead to war. Upset that Jackson failed to follow his
advice about France, Secretary of State Louis McLane resigned in
protest. Van Buren then helped Jackson draft a reply to McLane's letter
of resignation and suggested his longtime ally Senator John Forsyth of
Georgia to fill the position. Van Buren shouldered a workload that, in
the words of a biographer, ``would have crushed lesser men.'' In
addition to his labors in the Senate, he spent a considerable amount of
time ``advising members of the cabinet, ghosting significant parts of
Jackson's messages, acting as the president's chief advisor on patronage
and foreign affairs, feeling his way around the Kitchen Cabinet, while
always keeping his eye on New York.'' ²⁷

Senate Committee Elections

Presiding over the Senate was easily Van Buren's most challenging
and frustrating task, one that demanded all of his legendary tact and
good humor. Jackson faced sustained opposition during his second term
from an opposition coalition of National Republicans, nullifiers,
states' rights advocates, and eventually from disaffected Democrats who
came to regard him as an overreaching despot. By 1834, these disparate
elements would unite to form a new party, calling themselves ``Whigs''
to signal their opposition to a chief executive they called King Andrew.
The rhetoric was particularly heated in the Senate, where the opposition
commanded a slim majority after the 1832 election. The coalition's ranks
included such luminaries as Henry Clay, the bank's most avid defender;
Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, like Jackson a staunch unionist
but also a defender of the bank; and Calhoun, the author of
nullification.²⁸
Van Buren began his duties in the Senate on December 16, 1833, two
weeks after the Twenty-third Congress convened. Having served there from
1821 to 1828, he was familiar with the body's customs and procedures. He
knew that the vice president was not expected to attend the Senate for
several days at the beginning of each Congress, a practice that allowed
the Senate to attend to organizational matters and appoint committees
without interference from the executive branch. But in 1833 a unique
combination of events prevented the Senate from attending to this
important task before Van Buren arrived.
Under normal circumstances, President pro tempore Hugh Lawson White
would have appointed the committee members and chairmen at the start of
the Twenty-third Congress. The rule adopted in December 1828 governing
the appointment of committees directed that ``[t]he President pro
tempore . . . shall appoint the committees of the Senate; but if there
be no President pro tempore, the Senate . . . will proceed, by ballot,''
with a majority required to elect a committee chairman and a plurality
required to elect the remaining members.²⁹ But White found
himself in a ``delicate'' position. Although he was a longstanding
friend and supporter of the president, he was becoming disillusioned
with the administration, and he particularly resented Jackson's
designation of Van Buren as his political heir. A firm defender of the
Senate's prerogatives, he had refused to let Jackson dictate the
composition of a select committee appointed to consider Clay's
compromise tariff during the previous Congress, a stand that had deeply
offended the president. White would eventually become a Whig, but at the
start of the Twenty-third Congress, Clay and the rest of the opposition
still regarded him as a Jackson man.³⁰
On December 9, White stated that ``he should have announced the
standing committees this morning . . . had it not been that a resolution
was offered by a Senator [Peleg Sprague] from Maine . . . which proposed
to take away from the presiding officer the power of appointing any
committees whatsoever.'' The Senate adopted the resolution the following
day, returning to its earlier practice of choosing committees by ballot,
with nearly all of the Jacksonians opposing the change.³¹
Van Buren finally arrived in Washington on the evening of December
14 and met with the president and Tennessee Senator Felix Grundy the
following morning. He learned that Grundy, painfully aware that his
party could no longer count on a majority in the Senate and reluctant to
proceed with the selection of committees until Van Buren could provide
advice, had offered a motion to postpone the elections until December
16. Webster had voted in favor of that motion, along with five other New
England senators--a gesture that Grundy, rightly or wrongly, interpreted
as an overture toward the administration. Webster's biographer discounts
this possibility but admits that the Massachusetts senator's support for
the administration during the nullification battle, and his differences
with Clay over the tariff issue, had led to widespread speculation that
he intended to form an alliance with the Jacksonians.
During his December 15 meeting with Van Buren, therefore, Grundy
raised the possibility of an alliance with Webster, at least for the
purposes of electing the Senate's committees. The vice president,
however, refused to consider collaboration with Webster, the one
individual he genuinely disliked and took pains to avoid. Such an
arrangement would blur the very real differences between the
administration and the New England opposition, he lectured, and would
leave Jackson open to charges that he had placed politics above
principle. Persuaded by the force of Van Buren's argument, Grundy
deferred to the vice president. The Senate began the balloting to elect
chairmen and members of its standing committees on December 16, Van
Buren's first day in the chair. With only a slight majority, the Anti-
Jackson forces did not win complete control of the committees. Jackson's
ally, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, was reelected chairman of the
Military Affairs Committee, and William Wilkins of Pennsylvania was
elected chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But other coveted
chairmanships went to opposition senators: the Finance Committee to
Webster, the Judiciary Committee to John Clayton of Delaware, and the
Committee on Public Lands to one of Jackson's most outspoken critics,
George Poindexter of Mississippi.³²

The Senate Censures Jackson: Van Buren Versus Clay

During the four years that Van Buren served as vice president, the
president's war on the Bank of the United States was one of the most
important and controversial subjects on the Senate's agenda.
Anticipating Jackson's order to withdraw the government deposits, bank
president Nicholas Biddle had persuaded the bank's directors to order
sharp reductions in credit. The directors subsequently decreed that the
bank would accept only hard currency from state banks with loans
outstanding, a move that forced state banks to adopt similar measures
and wreaked havoc in the credit-dependent West and in the nation's
financial markets.³³
When Van Buren assumed the chair on December 16, 1833, he found the
Senate in a state of turmoil. The Senate's December 11 request that
Jackson provide a copy of his withdrawal directive had been met with a
curt response that infuriated opposition senators. ``I have yet to
learn,'' Jackson had notified the Senate on December 12, ``under what
constitutional authority that branch of the Legislature has a right to
require of me an account of any communication.'' On December 27, Clay
retaliated with two resolutions to censure Jackson, which the Senate
adopted after three months of intense and heated debate. Van Buren's
legendary poise served him well as Clay and his lieutenants began their
attack, dropping not-so-thinly-veiled hints that the vice president was
also to blame for the wave of bank and business failures sweeping the
nation. Smiling and genial, he took care to maintain order in the
chamber, ordering the galleries cleared when necessary. To all outward
appearances, he seemed oddly unperturbed at the opprobrium that Clay and
his allies heaped on the administration.³⁴
Early in the debate, however, Van Buren had orchestrated a spirited
rejoinder to Clay's attacks. Unable to join in the debate himself, he
had persuaded Silas Wright, the New York senator widely regarded as his
spokesman in the Senate, to deliver the administration's response.
Unmoved by Wright's plea that ``[t]he administration had several friends
in the Senate more competent for the task than myself,'' Van Buren
offered to ``reduce all we want to have said to writing.'' On January
30, Wright presented an impassioned defense of Jackson's conduct and a
ringing condemnation of the bank. His lengthy address--the product of
Van Buren's pen--emphasized that the question before the public was
``Bank or no Bank, . . . not the disposition of the Government
deposits.'' The president, he argued, had been ``instrumental in
restoring the constitution of the country to what it was intended to be
by those who formed it . . . relieving that sacred instrument from those
constructive and implied additions under which Congress have claimed the
right to place beyond the reach of the people, and without
responsibility, a moneyed power.'' Wright concluded his remarks with an
argument that Jackson partisans would use to good advantage in the
months that followed. ``The country . . . has approved the course of the
Executive, in his attempts to relieve us from the corrupt and corrupting
power and influence of a national bank,'' the New York senator stressed,
``and it will sustain him in the experiment now making to substitute
State institutions for such a fiscal agent.''
Notwithstanding Wright's disclaimer that ``he had given his opinion
as an individual,'' everyone present realized the truth of Daniel
Webster's observation that, knowing the senator's ``political
connexions, his station, and his relations,'' it was obvious that he had
not ``spoken one word which has not been deliberately weighed and
considered by others.'' Van Buren's words, ably articulated by a senator
generally regarded as the ``clearest logician'' of his day, provided a
forceful rebuttal to Clay's charges. One senator pronounced the speech
``a hit,'' while Webster fretted about the ``effect which the recent
debate in the Senate . . . may produce at the north.'' ³⁵
But even this triumph of sorts could not alleviate Van Buren's
mounting discomfort as the lengthy debate dragged on. During one
particularly heated March session, Clay addressed him directly, pleading
with him to tell Jackson ``in the language of truth and sincerity, the
actual condition of his bleeding country.'' Van Buren listened politely
as Clay, obviously playing to the galleries, reminded him of his ``well-
known influence'' in the administration. At the conclusion of Clay's
remarks, Van Buren handed the gavel to Hugh Lawson White and stepped
down from the dais. Clay rose to his feet as the vice president
deliberately approached his desk, and the crowds in the galleries fell
silent. Then, with a deep bow, and a voice dripping with sarcasm, Van
Buren returned fire: ``Mr. Senator, allow me to be indebted to you for
another pinch of your aromatic Maccoboy.'' The galleries erupted in a
wave of laughter as Clay, speechless and humiliated, gestured helplessly
at the snuff on his desk. Van Buren helped himself and returned to the
chair, all the while maintaining his studied composure.³⁶
When the Senate finally voted to censure the president on March 28,
1834, Van Buren was not unduly alarmed, convinced that the American
people would not take kindly to this dramatic assault on their hero and
champion. But he was deeply disturbed by the response that Jackson sent
to the Senate in mid-April. The president's critics, and even some of
his allies, were shocked to learn that Jackson, as he explained in his
infamous ``Protest,'' considered himself the direct representative of
the American people--responsible, along with his appointees, for ``every
species of property belonging to the United States.'' Worried about the
constitutional ramifications of this novel interpretation of
presidential power and about the effect that the controversial
pronouncement might have on his own prospects in the coming election,
Van Buren persuaded Jackson to soften his rhetoric. He was greatly
relieved when the 1834 midterm elections affirmed that the American
people approved of the war that Jackson waged against the bank on their
behalf. Jackson ultimately killed the bank, as he had predicted he
would, but the struggle took its toll on Van Buren, who eventually came
to regard his duties as president of the opposition-controlled Senate as
``so distasteful and so wearing'' that, according to a modern
biographer, he suffered ``more than his share of colds and debilitating
upsets.'' ³⁷

The ``Weasel''

Other issues before the Senate were equally troublesome for Van
Buren, who was well aware that opposition senators, as well as some
Jacksonians resentful of his influence, would exploit any apparent
failing on his part in the coming election. The abolition movement,
which sent scores of antislavery petitions to Congress during the 1830s,
posed particular difficulties for a northern politician who had
supported emancipation in his own state but was anxious to remain on
good terms with southern voters and regarded slavery as a matter best
left to the states. Like many northern voters at the time, Van Buren had
little use for the abolitionists, dismissing their 1835-1836 crusade for
emancipation in the District of Columbia as an attempt to ``distract
Congress and the country . . . in the midst of a Presidential canvas.''
Van Buren's disclaimers failed to satisfy many southerners who
considered him an abolitionist at heart, but some were heartened by his
June 2, 1836, tie-breaking vote to proceed to the third and final
reading of Calhoun's bill authorizing local postal officials to
confiscate mailings prohibited by state law. The bill was similar to one
that Jackson had proposed after a mass mailing of abolitionist
literature to Charleston, South Carolina, caused a near-riot there the
previous summer. But the administration proposal would have authorized
the federal government to determine which materials should be embargoed,
while Calhoun's would have delegated this function to the states.
Calhoun engineered a tied vote on the motion to proceed to the third
reading of his bill. If he did so to embarrass Van Buren, as one scholar
of the period has suggested, he miscalculated. ``The Vice President
promptly voted yea, thus preventing Southerners from blaming him when
the bill was finally defeated.'' ³⁸ In fact, when the measure
came up for the final vote less that a week later, ³⁹ the
Senate rejected it, a development that Van Buren, a shrewd judge of men
and events, may well have anticipated. The ``weasel,'' as Calhoun now
disparagingly referred to Van Buren, ⁴⁰ had once again
outmaneuvered his rival.

A ``Third-Rate Man''

On May 20, 1835, the Democratic nominating convention chose Van
Buren as the party's 1836 presidential candidate. The unanimous vote of
the delegates present belied serious divisions in a party that was, in
the words of a contemporary journalist, comprised of ``the Jackson
party, proper; the Jackson-Van Buren party; the Jackson-anti-Van Buren
party.'' More than a few disaffected Democrats, alarmed at the growth of
presidential power during Jackson's two terms and reluctant to
countenance more of the same under Van Buren, had grave reservations
about the Little Magician. But Jackson had made his preference known.
The president was equally adamant that Richard Mentor Johnson, a
Kentucky Democrat and military hero who had served in both houses of
Congress, should be Van Buren's running mate, a legacy that cost the
ticket support among southern voters who regarded Johnson as an
``amalgamator'' because of his relationship with his slave mistress.
Van Buren was opposed by a field of regional opposition candidates
endorsed by state and local Whig organizations. The Whigs, still more a
coalition than a party, with no candidate capable of defeating Van Buren
outright, hoped that each regional candidate would so weaken the
Democratic ticket in his own section that the election would be thrown
into the House of Representatives. During the campaign, opposition
strategists reviled Van Buren as an abolitionist, a manipulator, and a
trimmer--a ``third-rate man,'' in the words of one detractor. David
Crockett, formerly a member of the anti-Jackson coalition in the House
and one of ``Aunt Matty's'' sharpest critics, ridiculed the vice
president's appearance as he presided over the Senate, ``laced up in
corsets, such as women in a town wear, and, if possible, tighter than
the best of them.'' Cartoonists portrayed Van Buren clutching the
president's coattails, or donning Jackson's too-large greatcoat. More
serious detractors warned that Van Buren would continue the
aggrandizement of executive power that Jackson had begun. Democrats
countered with pointed allusions to the Federalists, who had supported
the First Bank of the United States, they reminded voters, as well as
such equally repugnant measures as the Alien and Sedition Acts. They
coupled these attacks with paeans of praise for the president who had
slain the ``monster bank.''
Van Buren won the election, a triumph that owed more to the
fragmented and poorly coordinated campaigns mounted by the opposition
and to Jackson's continued popularity than to his own prestige. He
assumed office under a cloud, overshadowed at his presidential
inauguration by the crowds that flocked to catch a final glimpse of Old
Hickory. He would never be as beloved or as respected as his
predecessor. Richard Mentor Johnson had failed to receive an electoral
majority after Virginia's electors withheld their votes in protest,
forcing the vice-presidential election into the Senate for the first and
only time in the nation's history. With his controversial personal
history and complete disdain for prevailing norms of social discourse
and personal hygiene, Johnson would remain a source of continuing
embarrassment for Van Buren.⁴¹

``Martin Van Ruin''

The nation's worsening relations with Mexico posed a serious problem
for the new president. American settlers in Texas had declared their
independence in 1836, precipitating a war with Mexico, and a request for
annexation by the United States was pending at the time of Van Buren's
inauguration. Reluctant to involve the nation in a war that northern
antislavery interests would inevitably characterize as a war to extend
slavery, but equally reluctant to offend southern expansionists, he
pursued a dilatory and evasive course until Texas ultimately withdrew
its petition.⁴²
Van Buren could not, however, afford to remain equally indecisive
with respect to the economic maladies besetting the nation. On the day
that he assumed office, one of the nation's most prominent trading
houses suspended payments, the first in a wave of brokerage house
failures that swept the nation during the panic of 1837. Jackson's
``hard money'' fiscal policies were only partly to blame for the panic.
A trade imbalance and a sharp decline in the price of American cotton
had also contributed to the crisis, which was international in scope.
But Whigs were quick to blame the nation's economic woes on Jackson and,
by extension, on Van Buren, sometimes dubbed ``Martin Van Ruin'' during
this period. He had inherited a situation that one scholar has
characterized as a ``potentially devastating emergency, probably the
worst facing any new President on taking office until James Buchanan had
to cope with slavery and the Dred Scott decision in 1837.'' Van Buren's
solution was to ``divorce'' the government from the banking sector by
establishing a treasury independent of the state bank-based system that,
contrary to Jackson's expectations, had fuelled the speculative frenzy
of the mid 1830s. Whigs succeeded in blocking this initiative until
1840, when Congress finally passed an independent treasury bill. In the
meantime, the panic gave way to a depression of unprecedented severity.
Up to one third of the factory workers in some northeastern towns were
thrown out of work; in the South, vast expanses of once productive
farmland went untilled. Prices of food and other necessities
skyrocketed, with soup kitchens the only source of sustenance for many
destitute residents of Washington, D.C., and other cities.⁴³
Van Buren lost his 1840 bid for reelection to William Henry
Harrison, a military hero touted as a ``common man'' by the Whig
strategists who ran an extraordinarily effective campaign on his behalf.
After one Democrat made the mistake of dismissing ``Old Tippecanoe'' as
a cider-swilling rustic content to live in a log cabin, Whigs
appropriated these symbols to their advantage. The log cabin and the
cider barrel were powerful images during the depression, images that
contrasted sharply with the picture that Whigs painted of Van Buren as a
nattily attired, high-living schemer, a ``used-up man'' hopelessly out
of touch with the American electorate. Out-maneuvered and out-
campaigned, Van Buren's party lost not only the White House, but control
of both houses of Congress, as well.⁴⁴

A ``Used-Up Man''

Van Buren was staggered by his humiliating defeat. He had received a
mere 60 electoral votes, a dismal showing compared with Harrison's 234
electoral votes, and a defeat made even more galling by his failure to
carry New York. He gave little outward sign of his disappointment and
extended more than the customary courtesies to Harrison when ``Old Tip''
arrived in Washington shortly before the inauguration. Van Buren was
anxious to return to private life, he cheerfully informed friends, and
seemed to enjoy the rousing welcome that awaited him in New York City.
(He had, of course, conveniently informed friends that he would arrive
in the city on March 23, allowing them plenty of time to prepare a
``surprise'' in his honor.) But he was deeply shaken at the outcome of
the election, and would have announced his retirement from politics had
Silas Wright not intervened with a timely lecture about his
responsibilities to the Democratic party.⁴⁵
Van Buren retired to Lindenwald, his Kinderhook estate, cautiously
pondering his prospects for 1844 while maintaining that ``his ambition
had been fully satisfied.'' But he made an extensive tour of the
southern and western states in the spring and summer of 1842, drawing
large crowds wherever he went. The voters who had turned him out of
office were amazed to discover that the man demonized by Whigs as an
insensitive dandy and a shrewd, cunning schemer was merely a plain-
spoken, unassuming, and quite ordinary man. ``Instead of a dwarf
Dutchman, a little dandy who you might lift in a bandbox,'' Jackson
observed, ``the people found him a plain man of middle size, plain and
affable.'' Cautiously and discreetly, Van Buren began laying the
groundwork for another attempt at the presidency. The leading contender
after the first ballot at the 1844 Democratic convention, he ultimately
lost the nomination to James K. Polk, a darkhorse candidate who
supported the immediate annexation of Texas. Resolved never again to
seek elective office, he focused his energies on securing New York for
Polk.⁴⁶
After Polk's inauguration, Van Buren watched with mounting alarm as
disagreement over the extension of slavery into the territory acquired
from Mexico began to split his increasingly fragile party. He was deeply
troubled by southern Democrats' claims that Congress could not bar
slavery from the new territories; he had always believed that the
institution, where it already existed, was a matter best left to the
individual states. But when events in Texas offered southern
slaveholders the opportunity to extend their reach toward the Southwest,
Van Buren decided that he could not support the expansion of a practice
that he regarded as evil. In 1848, the Free Soil party--a coalition of
antislavery Democrats, antislavery Whigs and disaffected Whigs--
nominated Van Buren as their presidential candidate. In this last
attempt at elective office, he lost to Whig candidate Zachary Taylor,
having received a mere 10 percent of the popular vote and no electoral
votes.⁴⁷
Van Buren died at Lindenwald on July 24, 1862. He had lived long
enough to see the southern states secede from the Union, a bitter
disappointment for the man who had forged a once-formidable coalition
that had transcended sectional lines. His last public statement, made
the year before his death, was a declaration of his ``earnest and
vigorous support to the Lincoln Administration for . . . the maintenance
of the Union and the Constitution'' in response to President Lincoln's
call for troops to suppress the rebellion. Lincoln reciprocated with a
stilted posthumous tribute: ``The grief of his patriotic friends, will
measurably be assuaged by the consciousness that while . . . seeing his
end approaching, his prayers were for the restoration of the authority
of the government of which he had been head, and for peace and good will
among his fellow citizens.'' ⁴⁸
MARTIN VAN BUREN

NOTES

¹ Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American
Political System (Princeton, NJ, 1984), p. 188.
² John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of
American Politics (New York, 1983), p. 298.
³ James A. Hamilton, Reminiscences of James A. Hamilton;
or, Men and Events, at Home and Abroad, During Three Quarters of a
Century (New York, 1869), pp. 42, 97; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The
Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945), pp. 47-50; Robert V. Remini, Martin Van
Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New York, 1959; reprint of
1951 edition), pp. 2-3; Niven, pp. 7-8.
⁴ Schlesinger, p. 49; Carl Sifakis, The Dictionary of
Historic Nicknames (New York, 1984), p. 508.
⁵ Also spelled Hoes.
⁶ Niven, pp. 1-22; John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The
Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (New York, 1973; reprint of 1920
edition), 1:9-10.
⁷ Niven, pp. 23-25, 60, 72, 162-63. Four of the five sons
born to Martin and Hannah Van Buren survived infancy.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 26-52.
⁹ Remini, Martin Van Buren, pp. 5-11; Niven, p. 88.
¹⁰ Niven, pp. 102-17.
¹¹ Remini, Martin Van Buren, pp. 36-92. For more on the
1824 election, see also Chapter 7, ``John C. Calhoun,'' pp. 86-87.
¹² Remini, Martin Van Buren, pp. 91-113. For more about
the Panama mission, see Chapter 7 of this volume, ``John C. Calhoun,''
pp. 88-89.
¹³ Ibid., pp. 120-32; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson
and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York, 1981), pp. 113-
15.
¹⁴ Remini, Martin Van Buren, pp. 192-93; Remini, Jackson
and the Course of American Freedom, pp. 116-42.
¹⁵ Remini, Martin Van Buren, pp. 170-85. See also Chapter
7, ``John C. Calhoun,'' p. 93.
¹⁶ Fitzpatrick, ed., 1:220-24.
¹⁷ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom,
pp. 159-66.
¹⁸ This incident is also discussed in Chapter 7, ``John
C. Calhoun,'' p. 95.
¹⁹ Niven, pp. 232-71; Remini, Jackson and the Course of
American Freedom, pp. 291-320.
²⁰ Niven, pp. 272-95; Remini, Jackson and the Course of
American Freedom, pp. 345-55.
²¹ Niven, pp. 295-98.
²² Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom,
pp. 355-58; Niven, pp. 298-301.
²³ Niven, pp. 301-29. For a more detailed account of the
nullification crisis, see Chapter 7 of this volume, ``John C. Calhoun,''
pp. 94-96.
²⁴ Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of
American Democracy, 1833-1845 (New York, 1984), pp. 374-92; Robert V.
Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War: A Study in the Growth of
Presidential Power (New York, 1967), pp. 1-108.
²⁵ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
p. 46.
²⁶ Remini, Jackson and the Bank War, passim; Niven, pp.
304, 330-47.
²⁷ Niven, pp. 368-72, 402; Remini, Jackson and the Course
of American Democracy, pp. 201-18.
²⁸ At the beginning of the Twenty-second Congress, 20 of
the Senate's 48 members belonged to the Jackson coalition; of the
remainder, 26 belonged to the Anti-Jackson party and 2 were Nullifiers.
U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989, by Robert C. Byrd, S.
Doc., 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 4, Historical Statistics,
1789-1992, 1993, p. 416.
²⁹ U.S., Congress, Senate, Journal, 20th Cong., 2d sess.,
p. 51.
³⁰ Nancy N. Scott, ed., A Memoir of Hugh Lawson White,
Judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, Member of the Senate of the
United States . . . With Selections from His Speeches and Correspondence
(Philadelphia, 1856), pp. 265-300; Remini, Jackson and the Course of
American Democracy, p. 39; Niven, p. 356.
³¹ U.S., Congress, Senate, Register of Debates in
Congress, 23d Cong., 1st sess., pp. 19-29; Senate Journal, 23d Cong.,
1st sess., p. 39.
³² Niven, pp. 356-58; Remini, Jackson and the Course of
American Democracy, pp. 116-18; Register of Debates in Congress, 23d
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 39-44; Senate Journal, 23d Cong., 1st sess., pp.
39-43; Maurice G. Baxter, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the
Union (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 224-28.
³³ Niven, pp. 333-54; Remini, Jackson and the Bank War,
pp. 109-53.
³⁴ U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989:
Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd,
S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 1, 1989, pp. 127-32; Niven,
p. 354.
³⁵ John A. Garraty, Silas Wright (New York, 1970; reprint
of 1949 edition), pp. 114-18; Register of Debates in Congress, 23d
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 397-405.
³⁶ Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
(New York, 1991), pp. 452-53; Niven, pp. 354-55.
³⁷ Byrd, The Senate, 1:127-41, 145-47; Niven, pp. 365-66;
Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, pp. 150-60;
Remini, Jackson and the Bank War, pp. 152-53.
³⁸ Niven, pp. 384-85, 390; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The
Jacksonian Era (New York, 1959), p. 107-9; Cole, pp. 269-72; Senate
Journal, 24th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 396-400.
³⁹ Senate Journal, 24th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 414-16.
⁴⁰ Cole, p. 264.
⁴¹ Ibid., pp. 256-90; Niven, pp. 386-402. For a more
detailed account of the 1836 election, see Chapter 9 of this volume,
``Richard Mentor Johnson,'' pp. 126-27.
⁴² Cole, pp. 317-21.
⁴³ Ibid., pp. 285-360; Sifakis, p. 508; Niven, pp. 412-
61.
⁴⁴ Cole, pp. 368-73.
⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 372-75; Niven, pp. 471-83.
⁴⁶ Niven, pp. 484-548.
⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 542-90; Cole, pp. 407-18.
⁴⁸ Niven, pp. 611-12.
?

Chapter 9

RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON

1837-1841

RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON
RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON

Chapter 9

RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON

9th Vice President: 1837-1841

. . . I pray you to assure our friends that the
humblest of us do not believe that a lucky random shot, even
if it did hit Tecumseh, qualifies a man for the Vice
Presidency.
--Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice John Catron to Andrew
Jackson,
March 21, 1835.¹
The United States Senate elected Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky
the nation's ninth vice president on February 8, 1837. His selection
marked the first and only time the Senate has exercised its prerogative
under the U.S. Constitution's Twelfth Amendment, which provides, ``if no
person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list,
the Senate shall choose the Vice-President.'' Johnson became Martin Van
Buren's running mate after three decades in the House and Senate, a
congressional career spanning the administrations of five presidents
from Thomas Jefferson through Andrew Jackson. Detractors alleged,
however, that he owed his nomination solely to the dubious claim that he
killed the Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh in 1813 at the Battle of the
Thames.
Johnson wielded substantial power in the House of Representatives
during Jackson's two administrations, and his successful decade-long
campaign to end imprisonment for debt won him a national following. For
most of his career, the voters of his district held him in great esteem.
They forgave him when he sponsored the 1816 Compensation Act, one of the
most unpopular laws ever enacted by Congress, as well as on more than
one occasion when he lined his own pockets with government funds.
During the 1836 presidential campaign and Johnson's single term as
vice president, however, his popularity dissipated. The plain manners
and habits that had once endeared him to his constituents and
supporters, combined with his controversial personal life and
unfortunate penchant for lending his influence in support of
questionable undertakings, proved serious liabilities. A campaign to
remove him from the Democratic ticket in 1840 failed only because Van
Buren, while no Johnson enthusiast, was unwilling to alienate the
eastern labor vote and because party leaders were reluctant to force a
potentially divisive confrontation. The 1840 election, resulting in a
decisive victory for the Whig ticket headed by Johnson's former comrade-
in-arms, William Henry Harrison, signalled the end of the Kentuckian's
long and often controversial career.

A Frontier Youth

Little is known of Richard Mentor Johnson's early years. Nineteenth-
century campaign biographies and a modern study based on these earlier
accounts are heavily colored by the heroic rhetoric that Johnson and his
supporters employed throughout his career.² Although he was,
as he later claimed, ``born in a cane-brake and cradled in a sap
trough,'' ³ the Johnsons were a powerful family of
substantial means. The future vice president was born on October 17,
1780, at Beargrass, a Virginia frontier outpost near the site of
present-day Louisville, Kentucky.⁴ His father, Robert
Johnson, had migrated from Orange County, Virginia, with his wife,
Jemima Suggett Johnson, in 1779. By 1812 Robert Johnson was one of the
largest landholders in Kentucky. He served in the Virginia house of
burgesses, attended both the 1785 convention that petitioned the
Virginia legislature for Kentucky statehood and the 1792 Kentucky
constitutional convention, and represented his district in the state
legislature for several years after Kentucky's admission to the Union.
After three of Richard Mentor Johnson's brothers achieved national
office--James and John Telemachus served in the House of Representatives
and Benjamin was a federal district judge--critics charged that the
family sought ``power in every hole and corner of the state.'' The
Johnsons proved remarkably effective in obtaining government contracts
and other favors for family members and allies, and their financial
interests in local newspapers such as Amos Kendall's Georgetown Minerva
and the Georgetown Patriot added to their considerable
influence.⁵
Richard Mentor Johnson received enough of an early education to
qualify him for apprenticeships reading law under Kentucky jurists
George Nicholas and James Brown, ⁶ both former students of
Thomas Jefferson's legendary teacher George Wythe.⁷ The
allusions that flavor his letters and speeches suggest at least a
passing familiarity with the classics.⁸ After his admission
to the bar in 1802, he returned to the family's home near Great
Crossings, Kentucky, to practice law.⁹ He later operated a
retail store at Great Crossings and engaged in other business and
speculative ventures with brothers James, Benjamin, and Joel. These
efforts, together with a sizeable bequest of land and slaves from his
father, eventually made Johnson a wealthy man, although he never
identified with the privileged classes. He routinely waived legal fees
for the indigent land claimants he represented in suits against wealthy
speculators, ¹⁰ and his home was a mecca for disabled
veterans, widows, and orphans seeking his assistance. No one was refused
hospitality at Blue Spring Farm, his estate near Great Crossings. An
acquaintance ``heard men say they were treated so well by Col. Johnson
when they went out there, they loved to go.'' ¹¹
Early accounts describe the future vice president as a gentle and
personable man, with a pleasant, if nondescript, appearance. Washington
socialite Margaret Bayard Smith found him ``[t]he most tender hearted,
mild, affectionate and benevolent of men . . . whose countenance beams
with good will to all, whose soul seems to feed on the milk of human
kindness.'' He ``might have been a fashionable man,'' she speculated, if
not for his retiring nature and ``plain . . . dress and manners.''
¹² He possessed, in the words of John C. Calhoun's biographer
Charles M. Wiltse, ``the rare quality of being personally liked by
everyone.'' ¹³

Soldier and Legislator

From 1804 to 1806, Johnson served as a delegate from Scott County in
the Kentucky house of representatives, where he supported legislation to
protect settlers from land speculators.¹⁴ Elected to the
United States House of Representatives from the district encompassing
Shelby, Scott, and Franklin counties in 1806, he served six consecutive
terms, retiring from the House in 1819 to seek election to the
Senate.¹⁵ Throughout his career, Johnson professed allegiance
to the principles of ``Thomas Jefferson, the patriarch of
republicanism,'' and correspondence from his early years in Congress
suggests that he enjoyed a cordial acquaintance with
Jefferson.¹⁶ In a rambling letter of February 1808, Johnson
recommended a candidate for federal office and assured the president
that ``I feel in you a confidence, & attachment which is indescribable &
can never be excelled.'' ``Having procured the Books mentioned in the
memorandum from you,'' the young congressman suggested, ``a course of
Historical reading would be gratefully received.'' ¹⁷ The
acquaintance continued after Jefferson's retirement. In 1813, Johnson
wrote that he ``constantly recollected how much mankind are indebted to
you,'' adding somewhat self-consciously that ``I make no apologies for
indulging feelings which I really feel.'' ¹⁸ During the War
of 1812, he apprised the retired president of military developments and
solicited his counsel ``as to the manner of reading, & the Books to
read, particularly as it respects Military history.'' ¹⁹
As the representative of a frontier, predominantly agrarian
district, Johnson shared his constituents' concern for the security of
the interior settlements, as well as their inherent distrust of bankers,
speculators, and other monied interests. An ``administration man'' with
respect to defense and foreign policy matters, he voted against
Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin's proposal to recharter the
Bank of the United States during the Madison
administration.²⁰ ``Great monied monopolies,'' he explained
much later, ``controlled by persons, irresponsible to the people, are
liable to exercise a dangerous influence, and corporate bodies
generally, especially when they have the power to effect the circulating
medium of the country, do not well comport with genius of a republic.''
²¹ He was a hardworking representative, popular among the
voters of his district but otherwise undistinguished, until his heroism
in the War of 1812 brought him national acclaim.²²
Johnson was one of the vociferous young congressmen, led by his
fellow Kentuckian House Speaker Henry Clay, known collectively as the
``warhawks.'' During the Twelfth Congress, this group urged military
redress for British violations of American frontiers and shipping
rights, ²³ and in June 1812 they voted to declare war against
Great Britain.²⁴ Not wishing ``to be idle during the recess
of Congress,'' ²⁵ Johnson raised and led two mounted
regiments that joined the northwestern army under the command of his
future rival, General William Henry Harrison, in the fall of 1813.
Johnson's Kentucky volunteers crossed the Canadian border in pursuit of
a combined British and Shawnee force led by General Henry Proctor and
overran the enemy position at the Thames River on October 5, 1813. A
heroic cavalry charge led by Johnson and his brother James ensured a
decisive American victory, in which Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who had
preyed upon American settlements in the Northwest since 1806, was among
the presumed casualties. Although his remains were never identified,
some witnesses claimed after the fact that Johnson had killed
Tecumseh.²⁶
Johnson returned to Congress a hero on March 7, 1814, still
suffering from the extensive wounds that plagued him for the rest of his
life. He turned his attention to war-related matters: the relief of
veterans, widows and orphans; the compensation of veterans for service-
related property losses; and the improvement of the young nation's
military establishment.²⁷ Johnson's newfound popularity and
his characteristic willingness to accede to his constituents' demands
ensured his political survival through the furor over the 1816
Compensation Act, which for the first time granted members of Congress
an annual salary, rather than paying them only for the days Congress was
in session. The measure became controversial when a newspaper estimated
that the new system would cost the government an additional $400,000
annually, and Congress repealed the law the next year. Although Johnson
sponsored the bill, he quickly repudiated the measure after the public
outcry cost many of his colleagues their seats.²⁸
His nationalist perspective heightened by the war, Johnson joined
with Henry Clay in advocating protection for frontier products and
federal funding for internal improvements to give western producers
readier access to eastern markets.²⁹ In 1817, he voted to
override Madison's veto of the bonus bill, a proposal to fund internal
improvements from the bonus and dividends from the Bank of the United
States.³⁰ Widely regarded as an expert in military affairs as
a consequence of his valor under fire, Johnson was one of several
westerners whom President James Monroe considered to head the War
Department after Henry Clay declined the post in 1817.³¹ The
nomination ultimately went to John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, but
Johnson enjoyed considerable leverage over the department as chairman
from 1817 to 1819 of the House Committee on Expenditures in the
Department of War.³² In 1818, Calhoun authorized an
expedition to plant a military outpost at the mouth of the Yellowstone
River, near the current site of Bismarck, North Dakota, and awarded the
transportation and supply contract to the chairman's brother and
partner, James Johnson.
The Yellowstone expedition departed from St. Louis just as the panic
of 1819 brought postwar economic expansion to a halt and shortly before
Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford issued a December 1819 report
projecting a $5 million budget deficit. The venture grossly exceeded
anticipated costs (in large part because of James Johnson's malfeasance
and Richard Mentor Johnson's repeated pleas for further advances). As a
result, the expedition provided Calhoun's enemies in Congress with
potent ammunition for an attack that ultimately led to drastic
reductions in the War Department budget.³³ After Johnson
requested yet another contract for James in the summer of 1820, Calhoun
finally advised the president that, ``to avoid all censure, the
contracts ought to be made on public proposals.'' ³⁴
Johnson retired from the House long before the Yellowstone
expedition stalled at Council Bluffs, Iowa, but the eventual outcry over
the venture failed to diminish his stature in Kentucky.³⁵ As
Monroe had earlier acknowledged, ``the people of the whole western
country'' considered the expedition ``a measure . . . to preserve the
peace of the frontier.'' ³⁶ The local press celebrated ``the
Herculean undertakings of the Johnsons,'' while accusing their critics
of ``political animosity.'' ³⁷ On December 10, 1819, the
Kentucky legislature elected Johnson to fill the unexpired portion of
John J. Crittenden's Senate term.³⁸

Relief for Debtors

Johnson began his Senate career heavily in debt. He mortgaged
several properties to the Bank of the United States to settle accounts
outstanding from the Yellowstone expedition and other speculative
ventures. In 1822 Bank counsel Henry Clay won a substantial judgment
against the Johnson brothers.³⁹ Still, Johnson weathered the
depression better than many of his constituents and others who were left
destitute after the panic of 1819 severely depressed credit and
agricultural prices. Thousands of overextended farmers and laborers
found themselves pressed by increasingly frantic creditors during the
depression that followed the panic. Imprisonment for debt was a common
punishment in state and local courts during the early nineteenth
century, although few debtors were incarcerated for outstanding federal
obligations.⁴⁰
Both Johnson's own experience and the suffering in his district and
elsewhere convinced him that ``the principle is deemed too dangerous to
be tolerated in a free government, to permit a man for any pecuniary
consideration, to dispose of the liberty of his equal.'' ⁴¹
The movement to end debt imprisonment began long before Johnson, on
December 10, 1822, introduced a Senate bill to abolish use of the
punishment by federal courts. He did, however, become one of the
acknowledged leaders of the effort, first through his success in
persuading the Kentucky legislature to abolish the practice in 1821 and
then with his decade-long campaign in Congress that in 1832 achieved
enactment of a federal statute.⁴² Senator Thomas Hart Benton
of Missouri later explained that the impact of the 1832 law extended far
beyond the federal courts ``in the force of example and influence.'' The
statute ``led to the cessation of the practice of imprisoning debtors,
in all, or nearly all, of the States and Territories of the Union.''
⁴³
A second legislative accomplishment that brought Johnson national
distinction was a report that he prepared during his final Senate term,
as chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, in response
to a flood of petitions from religious congregations in the East
demanding the suspension of Sunday mail deliveries. The January 19,
1829, report, widely reprinted in the press, argued that, as ``a civil,
and not a religious institution,'' the government could take no action
sanctioning the religious convictions or practices of any denomination.
After leaving the Senate, Johnson continued his crusade as a member of
the House of Representatives. In 1830, as chairman of the House
Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, he submitted a second report.
This, like the earlier Senate report, brought him widespread acclaim in
the labor press as a champion of religious liberty. Some contemporaries
doubted Johnson's authorship of the second report, however; and his
biographer has conceded that Johnson's friends in the Post Office
Department, including his landlord O.B. Brown, may have influenced his
stance.⁴⁴
During his ten years in the Senate from 1819 to 1829, Johnson
gravitated toward the coalition, then emerging under the skilled
leadership of Martin Van Buren, that eventually became the Democratic
party, as well as toward the party's future standard bearer, Andrew
Jackson.⁴⁵ The acquaintance dated at least from 1814, when
Johnson wrote to Jackson at New Orleans to recommend a supply
contractor.⁴⁶ He was Jackson's impassioned, if ineffective,
defender in 1819 when Clay urged the House of Representatives to censure
the general for his execution of two British subjects during the
Seminole War.⁴⁷ Senator Johnson declared for Jackson after
the 1824 presidential election was thrown into the House of
Representatives ⁴⁸--and, by some accounts, after the
candidate hinted that, if elected, he intended to name Johnson secretary
of war.⁴⁹ When the House elected John Quincy Adams president,
Johnson broke the news to Jackson that the new president had named as
secretary of state Henry Clay, who had voted for Adams in spite of the
Kentucky voters' clear preference for Jackson.⁵⁰ Johnson was
absent when the Senate approved Clay's nomination on March 7,
1825.⁵¹ A Washington journalist later reported that, after
the election, Johnson ``determined to enter the ranks of the
opposition.'' ⁵² He had become, and would remain for the rest
of his life, a steadfast ``Jacksonian.''
Johnson was reelected to a full Senate term in 1822 but in 1828
lost his reelection bid because Kentucky Democrats feared that
controversy over his domestic life would jeopardize Jackson's chances in
the national election. Johnson never married. Family tradition recounts
that he ended an early romance, vowing revenge for his mother's
interference, after Jemima Johnson pronounced his intended bride
unworthy of the family.⁵³ He later lived openly with Julia
Chinn, a mulatto slave raised by his mother and inherited from his
father, until her death from cholera in 1833. Johnson freely
acknowledged the relationship, as well as the two daughters born to the
union, and entrusted Julia with full authority over his business affairs
during his absences from Blue Spring Farm.⁵⁴
The relationship provoked little comment in Johnson's congressional
district, but as a member of the Senate, with an expanded constituency,
he was vulnerable to criticism by large slaveholders and others who
disapproved of open miscegenation. Threatened press exposure of the
senator's personal life during the 1828 campaign unnerved Jackson
supporters in the Kentucky legislature. They therefore attempted to
dissociate the national candidate from the now-controversial Johnson,
joining forces with the Adams faction to oppose Johnson's reelection and
ultimately forcing state legislator John Telemachus Johnson to withdraw
his brother's name from the contest.⁵⁵ The defeat ended
Johnson's Senate career. In his three later attempts to return to the
Senate, he lost to Henry Clay in 1831 and 1848 and to John J. Crittenden
in 1842.⁵⁶

In the House Again

In 1829 the voters in Johnson's old district returned him to the
House of Representatives, ⁵⁷ where he remained during
Jackson's two administrations. After chairing the Committee on Post
Offices and Post Roads from 1829 to 1833, he served as chairman of the
Committee on Military Affairs from 1833 to 1837.⁵⁸ An
acknowledged power in the House, Johnson offered his services and advice
to the administration on several occasions, albeit with noticeably less
success than the more politically astute Martin Van Buren.⁵⁹
Johnson was, by nature, a conciliator, whose vehement rhetoric
belied a tendency to avoid politically risky confrontations. In 1830 he
urged Jackson to sign a bill to fund an extension of the national road
from Lexington to Maysville, Kentucky, warning in emphatic terms that
``you will crush your friends in Kentucky if you veto that Bill.'' When
the president proved intransigent, he conceded that a tax to fund the
Maysville Road ``would be worse than a veto.'' He failed to vote when
the House sustained the veto on May 18, 1830.⁶⁰
An early aspirant for the 1832 Democratic presidential nomination,
Johnson refocused his sights on the vice-presidency after Jackson
announced that he would seek a second term.⁶¹ New York labor
leader Ely Moore and members of the Workingmen's party supported Johnson
for vice president, ⁶² but Democratic strategists questioned
the wisdom of adding him to the ticket. A correspondent of Navy
Secretary John McLean noted that ``Gen. Jackson . . . is in feeble
health; and may not live to the end of his second term'' and questioned
whether ``Colo. Johnson's calibre will answer for so high a station.''
⁶³ Despite clear indications that Van Buren would replace
Calhoun as the vice-presidential candidate, however, Johnson abandoned
his campaign only after Jackson's adviser William B. Lewis convinced him
to do so.⁶⁴ When, on May 22, 1832, the Democratic convention
tapped Van Buren as Jackson's running mate on the first ballot, Johnson
received only 26 votes from the Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois
delegations--a poor showing compared to Van Buren's 208 votes and the 49
votes of former House Speaker and Calhoun ally Philip P. Barbour.
Jackson and Van Buren then went on to win an easy victory in the general
election.⁶⁵
As early as April 1833, shortly after Jackson's new term began, Duff
Green's Political Register reported that ``the western States are
flooded with handbills nominating Col. Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky,
as a candidate for the Presidency in 1836.'' Johnson's friend William
Emmons published The Authentic Biography of Colonel Richard M. Johnson
in 1833, and Richard Emmons' play, Tecumseh, of the Battle of the
Thames, soon followed. A poem by Richard Emmons supplied the slogan that
Johnson enthusiasts trumpeted in the 1836 and 1840 campaigns: ``Rumpsey,
Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!''
The candidate delighted in these overblown celebrations of his
military prowess, boasting after a well-attended and well-received
performance of Tecumseh that he had ``more friends than ever.''
⁶⁶ But Johnson's following was based upon more than his
military accomplishments, exaggerated though they were by his eager
promoters. His efforts to abolish imprisonment for debt and to continue
Sunday mail deliveries ensured him the support of the workingmen's
movement in the urban centers, and his ``hard-money,'' antibank fiscal
policy appealed to the party's ``radical'' faction. He also enjoyed a
strong following in the West, where Jackson's ``Kitchen Cabinet''
advisers Amos Kendall and Francis P. Blair considered him the only
candidate who could neutralize Clay's overwhelming appeal.⁶⁷
Party regulars understood, however, that in selecting Van Buren as his
running mate in 1832, Jackson had named the diminutive New Yorker his
successor. Johnson eventually acceded to the president's wishes with his
usual equanimity, refusing to run as an opposition candidate when
approached in 1834 by a coalition of disaffected Tennesseans led by
David Crockett and John Bell.⁶⁸ Blair and Kendall quietly
changed their tactics in hopes of securing the vice-presidential
nomination for ``Old Dick.'' ⁶⁹ Perhaps they hoped that
Johnson would thus become the ``heir apparent'' to succeed Van Buren, or
perhaps they merely recognized the futility of opposing Old Hickory's
will. Van Buren served as Jackson's ``right hand'' during his term as
vice president, but this arrangement resulted more from his longstanding
relationship with the president than from any commonly held assumptions
regarding the role of the vice president.

1836 Election

When the Democratic convention met at Baltimore on May 22, 1835, to
ratify Van Buren's nomination and select his running mate, Johnson's
only serious opponent for the vice-presidential nomination was former
senator William Cabell Rives of Virginia, who had served as minister to
France during Jackson's first administration. Southern Democrats, and
Van Buren himself, strongly preferred Rives. Although he counted ``the
gallant Colonel . . . among the bravest of the brave,'' Van Buren also
feared that Johnson could not ``be relied upon to check the cupidity of
his friends.'' Jackson, however, concerned about the threat that
opposition candidate Hugh Lawson White posed among western voters,
strongly preferred his Kentucky lieutenant. His anger over Rives'
diplomatic failures and his gratitude for Johnson's longstanding loyalty
and support also weighed heavily in his decision. In spite of the
president's considerable influence, however, Johnson received the
required two-thirds vote only after New York Senator Silas Wright
prevailed upon nondelegate Edward Rucker to cast the fifteen votes of
the absent Tennessee delegation in his favor.⁷⁰
The choice provoked bitter dissention in Democratic ranks. Virginia
delegate Dr. R.C. Mason questioned Johnson's fidelity to the party's
``great republican principles'' and announced that his delegation would
not support the nomination.⁷¹ Johnson's letter of acceptance,
explaining that ``I consider the views of president Jackson, on the
tariff and internal improvements, as founded in true wisdom,'' failed to
mollify the Virginians.⁷² Van Buren's ally Albert Balch had
previously warned Jackson that ``I do not think from what I hear daily
that the nomination of Johnson for the Vice Presidency will be popular
in any of the slave holding states except Ky. on account of his former
domestic relations,'' ⁷³ and a Van Buren correspondent later
predicted that ``Col. Johnson's . . . weight would absolutely sink the
whole party in Virginia.'' ⁷⁴ Tennessee Supreme Court Chief
Justice John Catron warned Jackson that Johnson was ``not only
positively unpopular in Tennessee . . . but affirmatively odious'' and
begged the president ``to assure our friends that the humblest of us do
not believe that a lucky random shot, even if it did hit Tecumseh,
qualifies a man for the Vice Presidency.'' He predicted that ``the very
moment Col. J. is announced, the newspapers will open upon him with
facts, that he had endeavored often to force his daughters into society,
that the mother in her life time, and they now, rode in carriages, and
claimed equality.'' ⁷⁵
The Whigs still formed a loose coalition bound by mutual opposition
to Jackson's antibank policies but lacked the party unity or
organizational strength to field a single ticket or define a coherent
platform. Instead of a single nominee, they offered a series of
sectional candidates nominated by local caucuses in hopes of defeating
Van Buren in each region and throwing the election into the House of
Representatives. The Whig presidential candidates were Daniel Webster,
Tennessee Senator and former Jacksonian Hugh Lawson White, and Johnson's
former commander, General William Henry Harrison. For vice president,
opposition caucuses nominated New York Anti-Mason Francis Granger and
former Democrat John Tyler of Virginia.⁷⁶
In the bitter campaign that followed, Whigs attempted to attract
disaffected Democrats by focusing on personalities rather than issues.
In the South, opposition strategists raised the specter of abolition
against Van Buren, ⁷⁷ while attacking Johnson as a ``great
amalgamator,'' who had ``habitually and practically illustrated''
abolitionist principles in his own home.⁷⁸ Johnson not only
cost his party southern votes, but he also failed to attract western
votes as anticipated. His own state went for Harrison and Granger. In
spite of these disappointments, however, Van Buren still managed a
narrow victory with just over fifty percent of the popular
vote.⁷⁹
On February 8, 1837, President pro tempore of the Senate William R.
King of Alabama proclaimed to the members of Congress assembled in the
House chamber to tally the electoral returns that Martin Van Buren, with
170 electoral votes, was the ``duly elected President of the United
States.'' Johnson, however, received only 147 electoral votes, 70 more
than his closest contender, Francis Granger, but one less than the
number required to elect. The Virginia electors had remained loyal to
Van Buren, who carried the state by a close margin, but cast their votes
in the vice-presidential contest for William Smith of Alabama. After
King announced that ``it devolved on the Senate of the United States . .
. to choose . . . a Vice President of the United States,'' the Senate
retired to its own chamber.⁸⁰
After reassembling to elect the vice president, the Senate approved
Tennessee Senator Felix Grundy's resolution to establish the voting
procedure:
[T]he Secretary of the Senate shall call the names of Senators in
alphabetical order; and each Senator will, when his name
is called, name the person for whom he votes; and if a
majority of the whole number of Senators shall vote for
either the said Richard M. Johnson or Francis Granger, he
shall be declared by the presiding officer of the Senate
constitutionally elected Vice President of the United
States.
Secretary of the Senate Asbury Dickins called the roll, with 49 of the
52 senators present voting along strict party lines: 33 for Johnson, 16
for Granger. President pro tempore King then announced that Johnson had
been ``constitutionally elected Vice President of the United States for
four years, commencing on the fourth day of March, 1837.'' ⁸¹

Vice President

Notified of his election, ⁸² Johnson responded that his
``gratification was heightened from the conviction that the Senate, in
the exercise of their constitutional prerogative, concurred with and
confirmed the wishes of both the States and the people.'' He explained
that he had never paid ``special regard to the minuteness of rules and
orders, so necessary to the progress of business, and so important to
the observance of the presiding officer'' during his three decades in
Congress. He was nonetheless confident--in words reminiscent of
Jefferson's forty years earlier--that ``the intelligence of the Senate
will guard the country from any injury that might result from the
imperfections of the presiding officer.'' While he hoped ``that there
may be always sufficient unanimity'' to prevent equal divisions in the
Senate, he would perform his duty ``without embarrassment'' in the event
that he was called upon to cast a tie-breaking vote.⁸³
President pro tempore King administered the oath of office to
Johnson in the Senate chamber at 10:00 a.m. on March 4, 1837. In a brief
address to the Senate, the new vice president observed that ``there is
not, perhaps, a deliberative assembly existing, where the presiding
officer has less difficulty in preserving order.'' He attributed this
characteristic to ``the intelligence and patriotism of the members who
compose the body, and that personal respect and courtesy which have
always been extended from one member to another in its deliberations.''
At the conclusion of his remarks, the ceremony of newly elected senators
presenting their credentials to the Senate and taking the oath of office
was temporarily interrupted by the arrival of President-elect Van Buren
and his party. The senators therefore joined the procession to the east
portico of the Capitol for the presidential inauguration.⁸⁴
Contemporary witnesses and scholarly accounts of the day's
festivities mention Richard Mentor Johnson only in passing, if at all.
The outgoing president, worn and emaciated from two terms in office and
a recent debilitating illness but still towering over his immaculately
attired successor, was clearly the focus of attention. Thomas Hart
Benton, a dedicated Jackson supporter, later recounted the
``acclamations and cheers bursting from the heart and filling the air''
that erupted from the crowd as Jackson took his leave of the ceremony.
From Benton's perspective, ``the rising was eclipsed by the setting
sun.'' ⁸⁵
Johnson's friendship with Jackson and his stature in the House had
assured him access to the president and some measure of influence during
Jackson's administrations. The controversy surrounding his nomination,
however, together with his disappointing showing in the 1836 election,
his longstanding rivalry with Van Buren, and the constitutional
limitations of his new office severely curtailed his role in the Van
Buren administration. Histories of Van Buren's presidency do not
indicate that he ever sought his vice president's counsel.⁸⁶
Johnson's duties were confined to the Senate chamber, where he watched
from the presiding officer's chair as Senate Finance Committee Chairman
Silas Wright of New York introduced Van Buren's economic
program.⁸⁷
Johnson was, however, willing to use on behalf of his friends and
cronies the limited influence he still commanded. When Lewis Tappan
asked the vice president to present an abolition petition to the Senate,
Johnson, who owned several slaves, averred that ``considerations of a
moral and political, as well as of a constitutional nature'' prevented
him from presenting ``petitions of a character evidently hostile to the
union, and destructive of the principles on which it is founded.''
⁸⁸ ``Constitutional considerations'' did not, however,
prevent him from lobbying Congress on behalf of Indian subagent Samuel
Milroy when Milroy, an Indiana Democrat who performed ``special favors''
for the vice president, sought the more lucrative position of Indian
agent.⁸⁹
Johnson was a competent presiding officer, ⁹⁰ although
not an accomplished parliamentarian. In keeping with Senate practice
during the 1830s, he appointed senators to standing and select
committees, a duty that President pro tempore William R. King performed
when he was absent.⁹¹
Although he had hoped for ``equanimity'' in the Senate, Johnson was
called upon to cast his tie-breaking vote fourteen times during his
single term in office, more frequently than any previous vice president
except John Adams and John C. Calhoun.⁹² Three of his
predecessors--Adams, George Clinton, and Daniel D. Tompkins--had
addressed the Senate on occasion to explain their tie-breaking votes,
but Johnson declined to do so.⁹³ In at least one instance,
however, he did explain a vote to readers of the Kentucky Gazette.
Justifying his support for a bill granting relief to the daughter of a
veteran, Johnson reminded his former constituents that he had always
``used my humble abilities in favor of those laws which have extended
compensation to the officers and soldiers who have bravely fought, and
freely bled, in their country's cause, and to widows and orphans of
those who perished.'' ⁹⁴ In other instances, however, Johnson
voted with Democratic senators in support of administration
policy.⁹⁵
Notwithstanding his steady, if lackluster, service in the Senate,
Johnson from the outset represented a liability to Van Buren. Still
heavily in debt when he assumed office, he hoped to recoup his fortunes
through the Choctaw Academy, a school he established at Blue Spring Farm
during the 1820s that became the focus of the Jackson administration's
efforts to ``socialize'' and ``civilize'' the Native American
population. He received federal funds for each student from tribal
annuities and the ``Civilization Fund'' established by Congress during
the Monroe administration, ⁹⁶ but revenues from the school
failed to satisfy his mounting obligations. By the spring of 1839, Amos
Kendall reported to Van Buren on the vice president's latest venture: a
hotel and tavern at White Sulphur Spring, Kentucky. He enclosed a letter
from a friend who had visited ``Col. Johnson's Watering establishment''
and found the vice president ``happy in the inglorious pursuit of tavern
keeping--even giving his personal superintendence to the chicken and egg
purchasing and water-melon selling department.'' ⁹⁷ Kendall
wrote with consternation that Johnson's companion, ``a young Delilah of
about the complexion of Shakespears swarthy Othello,'' was ``said to be
his third wife; his second, which he sold for her infidelity, having
been the sister of the present lady.'' ⁹⁸ Although one of the
most fashionable in Kentucky, ⁹⁹ Johnson's resort also formed
a source of considerable embarrassment for the administration.
As debts, disappointments, and the chronic pain he had suffered
since 1813 took their toll, Johnson's once-pleasing appearance became
dishevelled, and the plain republican manners that had in earlier days
so charmed Margaret Bayard Smith now struck observers as vulgar and
crude, ¹⁰⁰ especially compared to the impeccably clad and
consummately tactful Van Buren. Henry Stanton observed Johnson presiding
over the Senate in 1838 and pronounced him ``shabbily dressed, and to
the last degree clumsy,'' a striking contrast with his ``urbane, elegant
predecessor.'' ¹⁰¹ English author Harriett Martineau sat
opposite the vice president at a dinner party, and predicted that ``if
he should become President, he will be as strange-looking a potentate as
ever ruled. His countenance is wild, though with much cleverness in it;
his hair wanders all abroad, and he wears no cravat. But there is no
telling how he might look if he dressed like other people.''
¹⁰² The trademark scarlet vest that Johnson affected while
vice president (after he and stagecoach line operator James Reeside
agreed to don vests to match Reeside's red coaches) ¹⁰³ only
accentuated his unkempt appearance and eccentric habits.
Van Buren and Johnson took office just as weakened demand for
American products abroad and credit restrictions imposed by British
banks and trading houses combined to produce a massive contraction in
the economy. Critics focused their wrath on Jackson's fiscal policies,
which were in part responsible for the panic of 1837, but Van Buren
would not abandon his predecessor's ``hard money'' stance. He refused
mounting demands to rescind the 1836 Specie Circular, Jackson's
directive to end speculation and inflation by requiring purchasers of
public land to pay in specie. During the September 1837 special session
of Congress that Van Buren called to address the crisis, Senate Finance
Committee Chairman Silas Wright of New York introduced the new
administration's remedy, a proposal to end government reliance on the
banking system. Congress finally approved Van Buren's independent
treasury plan in the summer of 1840, but not before bitter debate and
the worsening economy galvanized the Whig opposition.¹⁰⁴
Adding to Van Buren's considerable difficulties, and contributing to
Democratic losses in the 1837 and 1838 local elections, were a border
dispute with Canada, armed resistance to removal by the Seminole tribe
in Florida, heightened sectional antagonism over slavery in Congress,
and flagrant misconduct on the part of several administration
appointees.¹⁰⁵

1840 Campaign

Although Van Buren's renomination was never in doubt, Democratic
strategists began to question the wisdom of keeping Johnson on the
ticket in 1840. They feared, as Harriett Martineau had predicted, that
``the slavery question . . . may again be to the disadvantage of the
Colonel.'' ¹⁰⁶ Even Jackson finally conceded that Johnson was
a liability and insisted on former House Speaker James K. Polk of
Tennessee as Van Buren's new running mate.¹⁰⁷ ``I like Col.
Johnson but I like my country more,'' he wrote Francis P. Blair shortly
before the Democratic convention, ``and I allway go for my Country
first, and then for my friend.'' ¹⁰⁸
In spite of the entreaties of several southern Democrats, anonymous
hints in the Democratic press that Johnson would not stand for
reelection, and his own half-hearted offer to withdraw from the contest
if asked to do so, he remained a candidate.¹⁰⁹ With William
Henry Harrison, Johnson's former commander and comrade-in-arms and the
``Hero of Tippecanoe,'' emerging as a likely Whig presidential
contender, Van Buren was reluctant to drop the Democrats' own hero from
the ticket. He was also well aware of ``Old Dick's'' following among
``hard-money'' Democrats in the Northeast.¹¹⁰ Party leaders,
unwilling to risk an open confrontation, approved Van Buren's compromise
proposal that the 1840 convention would leave the selection of the vice-
presidential candidate to the state party organizations, but they
ultimately backed Johnson after two crucial states--New York and
Pennsylvania--rallied behind him and other prospective candidates
declined to run.¹¹¹
Eastern Whigs' fear that Clay could not win the presidency, as well
as Harrison's surprising showing in the 1836 contest, assured Harrison
the 1840 Whig nomination. To balance his strength in the North and West,
Whigs chose former Virginia Senator John Tyler as their vice-
presidential candidate. Whigs portrayed Harrison as a champion of the
people and a welcome corrective to the New York dandy whose economic
policies had failed to relieve widespread suffering among ordinary
folk.¹¹²
Van Buren remained aloof from the popular hoopla that distinguished
the 1840 campaign from earlier contests, despite Johnson's warning that
the campaign ``would be hard run, and that he ought to go out among the
voters as I intended doing.'' ¹¹³ The vice president plunged
headlong into the fray, opening his shirt to display battle scars before
an Ohio audience, revisiting the Battle of the Thames in progressively
more lurid detail with each retelling, and delivering ``rambling''
diatribes on several occasions. He always also took care to remind
western audiences that Van Buren had ``raised himself from a poor Dutch
orphan boy to the highest station in the world.'' During an Ohio
campaign tour with Governor Wilson Shannon and Senator William Allen,
the trio's inflammatory charges against Harrison touched off a riot in
Cleveland.¹¹⁴ Still, as Robert Gray Gunderson concluded in
his study of the ``log-cabin campaign,'' ``Old Rumpsey Dumpsey conducted
a more effective campaign than any other Democrat in 1840.''
¹¹⁵
Unprecedented public interest aroused by the campaign, coupled with
broadened suffrage requirements in several states, ensured a record
voter turnout. Harrison defeated Van Buren with 52.9 percent of the
popular vote and 234 electoral votes to Van Buren's 60, and Whigs won
majorities for the first time in both the House and the
Senate.¹¹⁶ Johnson's showing was particularly embarrassing:
Kentucky voters again backed the opposing ticket, but this time the
Whigs carried the vice president's own district as well.¹¹⁷
One of the 23 Virginia electors, and all of South Carolina's 11
electors, voted for Van Buren but defected to James K. Polk and
Littleton W. Tazewell of Virginia, respectively, in the vice-
presidential contest.¹¹⁸
Johnson had the painful duty of presiding over the joint session of
Congress that met in the House chamber on February 10, 1841, to count
the electoral votes. After proclaiming Harrison's election, he announced
that John Tyler ``was duly elected Vice President of the United States
for four years, commencing with the 4th day of March, 1841.'' He then
appointed Whig Senator William C. Preston of South Carolina to a joint
committee to notify Tyler of his election, ¹¹⁹ and nine days
later, he reported Tyler's acknowledgement of the message.¹²⁰

Farewell

Johnson took his leave of the Senate on March 2, 1841, the day
before the Twenty-sixth Congress adjourned, to allow the Senate ``an
opportunity of selecting a presiding officer, for the convenience of
organization'' when the next Congress convened two days later. Recalling
his association with ``a very great majority of the members of the
Senate . . . for many years, in the councils of our common country,'' he
reflected that his ``personal relations'' with them had ``ever been kind
and tender,'' notwithstanding ``diversity of opinion . . . on minor
points, or . . . points of greater magnitude.'' The ``generous, the
magnanimous course'' of individual senators, and particularly ``their
indulgence'' of a presiding officer ``who never studied the rules of
order technically,'' had rendered his service in the Senate ``pleasant
and agreeable'' despite ``momentary agitation and excitement in
debate.'' As the Senate's presiding officer, he had tried to ``act with
perfect impartiality'' and to treat ``each Senator as the representative
of a sovereign and independent State, and as entitled to equal
consideration of me.''
Johnson claimed that he retired ``without the least
dissatisfaction,'' obedient to ``the great radical and fundamental
principle of submission to the voice of the people, when
constitutionally expressed.'' But his parting comments betrayed a sense
of regret:
[A]nd when I am far distant from you--as time must separate us all
even here, not to speak of hereafter--as long as I shall
have my recollection to remember the associations which I
have had with this body, I shall always be animated by the
sentiment of kindness and friendship with which I take my
final leave of the Senate.¹²¹

Later Years

Johnson's 1840 defeat effectively ended his political career. He was
a candidate for the Senate in 1842 but lost to John J. Crittenden. Early
efforts by Kentucky Democrats to secure the 1844 Democratic presidential
nomination for ``Colonel Dick,'' and his own tours of the northern
states and the Mississippi Valley toward that end, met with polite but
condescending resistance from Democrats who shared William L. Marcy's
view that ``he is not now even what he formally was. It may be there was
never so much of him as many of us were led to suppose.'' ¹²²
Jackson was characteristically blunt. Johnson, he warned Van Buren,
would be ``dead weight'' in the forthcoming election.¹²³ An
observer noted the old hero's mounting frustration: ``Colonel Dick
Johnson . . . seems to understand very well Mr. V Buren is stacking the
cards . . . Dick . . . will be bamboozled as sure as a gun. . . . You
never saw a more restless dissatisfied man in your life, than Dick is.''
¹²⁴ By 1843, Johnson partisans conceded that he had no chance
of winning the presidential nomination, and a Kentucky Democrat assured
Van Buren that ``the friends of Col. Johnson do not ask anything more
than a vote on the first ballot in his favor.'' ¹²⁵ Several
Democrats speculated that Johnson's real objective was the vice-
presidential nomination, although he never formally declared himself a
candidate.¹²⁶ But by early 1844 he realized that ``his party
doesn't even intend to place him upon the Vice Presidents ticket.''
¹²⁷
Johnson made a final attempt to return to the Senate in 1848, but
the Kentucky legislature sent his old colleague and adversary, Henry
Clay, to Washington. Scott County voters elected Johnson to the state
legislature two years later, but he was gravely ill when he took his
seat on November 8, 1850. Shortly after the Louisville Daily Journal
reported that ``it is painful to see him on the floor attempting to
discharge the duties of a member,'' Johnson suffered a stroke. He died
on November 19, 1850, and, by resolution of the Kentucky legislature,
was buried at the Frankfort cemetery. State Senator Beriah Magoffin
eulogized the frontier hero as Johnson would have wished to be
remembered: ``He was the poor man's friend. . . . Void of ostentation,
simple in his taste, his manners, and his dress--brave, magnanimous,
patriotic and generous to a fault, in his earliest years he was the beau
ideal of the soul and the chivalry of Kentucky.'' ¹²⁸
RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON

NOTES

¹ John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew
Jackson (Washington, DC, 1931), 5:331.
² The first full-length account of Richard Mentor
Johnson's career was William Emmons' highly laudatory campaign
biography, Authentic Biography of Colonel Richard M. Johnson (New York,
1833). Ignatius Loyola Robertson's Sketches of Public Characters--Drawn
from the Living and the Dead (New York, 1830), includes a brief and
highly complimentary sketch of Johnson's career. Leland Winfield Meyer,
Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson (New York, 1967, reprint of
1932 edition), pp. 176, 298, 342, 401, 405, 489. Meyer's biography, the
only modern account of Johnson's life and career, accepts at face value
many of the assumptions and assessments that color the earlier works.
³ Louisville Journal, October 14, 1840, quoted in Meyer,
p. 290.
⁴ U.S., Congress, Biographical Directory of the United
States Congress, 1774-1989, S. Doc. 100-34, 100th Cong., 2d sess., 1989,
p. 1270.
⁵ Meyer, pp. 13-48, 325-27.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 290-91.
⁷ Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
(New York, 1991), p. 18.
⁸ See, for example, Johnson's December 4, 1816, speech on
the Compensation Law, U.S., Congress, House, Annals of Congress, 14th
Cong., 2d sess., pp. 235-43.
⁹ Meyer, p. 292.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 290-342 and passim.
¹¹ Ibid., pp. 312-14 and Appendix, ``Mr. James Y. Kelly's
Reminiscences about 'Dick Johnson' Taken Down as He Spoke, April 2,
1929, to Leland W. Meyer,'' pp. 477-78.
¹² Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard Smith),
The First Forty Years of Washington Society (New York, 1906), quoted in
Meyer, pp. 293, 304-5.
¹³ Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, vol. 2, Nullifier,
1829-1839 (New York, 1968; reprint of 1948 ed.), p. 37.
¹⁴ Meyer, pp. 49-58.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 58; Biographical Directory of the United
States Congress, p. 1270.
¹⁶ R. M. Johnson to Andrew Stevenson et al., June 9,
1835, in James A. Padgett, ed., ``The Letters of Colonel Richard M.
Johnson of Kentucky,'' Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society
40 (January 1942): 83-86.
¹⁷ Richard M. Johnson to Thomas Jefferson, February 27,
1808, in James A. Padgett, ed., ``The Letters of Colonel Richard M.
Johnson of Kentucky,'' Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society
38 (July 1940): 190-91.
¹⁸ Richard M. Johnson to Thomas Jefferson, January 30,
1813, in ibid., p. 197.
¹⁹ Richard M. Johnson to Thomas Jefferson, February 9,
1813 [1814?], in ibid., p. 198.
²⁰ Meyer, pp. 49-84.
²¹ Richard Mentor Johnson to Dawson et al., February 6,
1836, printed in Kentucky Gazette, April 2, 1836, and reprinted in
Meyer, p. 142.
²² Meyer, pp. 49-84.
²³ Marshall Smelser, The Democratic Republic, 1801-1815
(New York, 1968), pp. 208-9; John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price
of Union (Baton Rouge, LA, 1988), p. 36; Harry W. Fritz, ``The War Hawks
of 1812,'' Capitol Studies 5 (Spring 1977): 28.
²⁴ Smelser, p. 216.
²⁵ Richard Mentor Johnson to John Armstrong, received
February 23, 1813, quoted in Meyer, pp. 100-101.
²⁶ Smelser, pp. 210, 255-56; Meyer, pp. 101-35.
²⁷ Meyer, pp. 136-88.
²⁸ U.S., Congress, House, Annals of Congress, 14th Cong.,
1st sess., pp. 1127-34, Appendix, p. 1801; 14th Cong., 2d sess., pp.
235-43, Appendix, p. 1278; Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, vol. 1,
Nationalist, 1782-1828 (New York, 1968; reprint of 1944 edition), pp.
125-31; U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989: Addresses on the
History of the United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc. 100-20,
vol. 2, 1991, pp. 350-51; Meyer, pp. 168, 172, 326-27.
²⁹ Meyer, pp. 162-67.
³⁰ Annals of Congress, 14th Cong., 2d sess., p. 1062.
³¹ Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National
Identity (Charlottesville, VA, 1990), pp. 358-59.
³² Biographical Directory of the United States Congress,
p. 1270.
³³ John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union
(Baton Rouge, LA, 1988), pp. 59-80; Ammon, pp. 468-71; Meyer, pp. 189-
206; Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and
Calhoun (New York, 1987), pp. 88-95; Chase C. Mooney, William H.
Crawford, 1772-1834 (Lexington, KY, 1974), pp. 151-57.
³⁴ John C. Calhoun to James Monroe, July 14, 1820, quoted
in Meyer, p. 195.
³⁵ Meyer, pp. 202-5.
³⁶ James Monroe to John C. Calhoun, July 5, 1819, quoted
in ibid., p. 202.
³⁷ Kentucky Gazette, October 8, 1819, quoted in ibid., p.
203.
³⁸ Meyer, pp. 183-88.
³⁹ Ibid., pp. 205-6; Remini, Henry Clay, pp. 207-8.
⁴⁰ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson
(Boston, 1945), pp. 134-36.
⁴¹ Speech of Col. Richard M. Johnson to the Senate,
January 14, 1823, quoted in Meyer, pp. 283-84.
⁴² Schlesinger, pp. 134-36; Meyer, pp. 235, 282-89;
Annals of Congress, 17th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 23-27.
⁴³ Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View; or, A History
of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, From 1820 to
1851 (New York, 1871; reprint of 1854 ed.), 1:291-92.
⁴⁴ Meyer, pp. 256-63, 293-94.
⁴⁵ Ibid., passim; Donald R. Cole, Martin Van Buren and
the American Political System (Princeton, NJ, 1984), p. 125.
⁴⁶ Richard M. Johnson to Major General Andrew Jackson,
November 21, 1814, in Padgett, ed., Register of the Kentucky State
Historical Society 38: 326-27.
⁴⁷ Remini, Henry Clay, pp. 161-66.
⁴⁸ Meyer, p. 220.
⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 221-22.
⁵⁰ Remini, Henry Clay, p. 268.
⁵¹ Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of
American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York, 1981), p. 103; U.S., Congress,
Senate, Journal, Appendix, 19th Cong., special session of March 4, 1825;
U.S., Congress, Senate, Executive Journal, 19th Cong., special session,
p. 441.
⁵² Niles' Weekly Register, April 28, 1827, quoted in
Meyer, pp. 220-21.
⁵³ Meyer, pp. 318-19.
⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 317-22.
⁵⁵ Ibid., pp. 251-55.
⁵⁶ Remini, Henry Clay, pp. 373, 716; Meyer, p. 457.
⁵⁷ Meyer, p. 256.
⁵⁸ Biographical Directory of the United States Congress,
p. 1270.
⁵⁹ Meyer, pp. 266-71; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson
and the Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845 (New York, 1984), pp.
203-16, 305-6, 423; Richard M. Johnson to Andrew Jackson, February 13,
1831, in Padgett, ed., Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society
40: 69.
⁶⁰ Meyer, pp. 273-76; U.S., Congress, House, Journal,
21st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 763-64; Remini, Jackson and the Course of
American Freedom, pp. 252-56.
⁶¹ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, p.
304; Meyer, pp. 393-400.
⁶² Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working
Class: A Study of the New York Workingmen's Movement (Stanford, CA,
1960), pp. 63-64, 97.
⁶³ John Norvell to John McLean, January 23, 1832, and
Worden Pope to John McLean, quoted in Meyer, p. 398.
⁶⁴ Schlesinger, p. 142.
⁶⁵ Robert V. Remini, ``Election of 1832,'' in History of
American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger
and Fred L. Israel, (New York, 1971), 1:507-8; John Niven, Martin Van
Buren and the Romantic Era of American Politics (New York, 1983), p.
300.
⁶⁶ Meyer, pp. 315-16, 398-402, 411.
⁶⁷ Major L. Wilson, The Presidency of Martin Van Buren
(Lawrence, KS, 1984), pp. 15-16; Niven, Martin Van Buren, pp. 374-76;
John Arthur Garraty, Silas Wright (New York, 1970; reprint of 1949
edition), p. 130; Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
p. 256; Meyer, pp. 393-429.
⁶⁸ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
pp. 252-53.
⁶⁹ Ibid., pp, 182-83, 252-55, Niven, Martin Van Buren, p.
351, 372-76; Cole, p. 262; Wilson, p. 16.
⁷⁰ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
pp. 256; Niven, Martin Van Buren, pp. 374-96; Wilson, p. 16; John C.
Fitzpatrick, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Washington, DC,
1920), 2:754, quoted in Meyer, pp. 337-38.
⁷¹ Niven, Martin Van Buren, p. 396; Meyer, p. 419.
⁷² Richard M. Johnson to Andrew Stevenson, et al., June
9, 1835, in Padgett, ed., Register of the Kentucky State Historical
Society 40: 83-86.
⁷³ Albert Balch to Andrew Jackson, April 4, 1835, quoted
in Meyer, p. 413.
⁷⁴ C.S. Morgan to Martin Van Buren, January 9, 1936,
quoted in Robert Bolt, ``Vice President Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky:
Hero of the Thames--Or the Great Amalgamator?'' Register of the Kentucky
Historical Society 75 (July 1977): 201.
⁷⁵ John Catron to Andrew Jackson, March 21, 1835, in
Bassett, Correspondence of Jackson, 5:330-32.
⁷⁶ Joel Silbey, ``Election of 1836,'' in Schlesinger and
Israel, eds., 1:584-86.
⁷⁷ Silbey, pp. 586-91; Harry L. Watson, Liberty and
Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), p. 204.
⁷⁸ United States Telegraph, June 3, 1835, quoted in Bolt,
pp. 198-99.
⁷⁹ Niven, Martin Van Buren, pp. 401-2; Silbey, pp. 591-
96; Senate Journal, 24th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 227-28.
⁸⁰ Senate Journal, 24th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 227-28;
Niven, Martin Van Buren, pp. 401-2.
⁸¹ Senate Journal, 24th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 229-31.
South Carolina Senators John C. Calhoun and William C. Preston and
Tennessee Senator Hugh Lawson White attended but did not vote. Wiltse,
2:303.
⁸² Senate Journal, 24th Cong., 2d sess., p. 231.
⁸³ Ibid., pp. 238-39.
⁸⁴ Ibid., Appendix, special session of March 4, 1837, pp.
355-65.
⁸⁵ Benton, 1:735; Cole, pp. 289-90; Remini, Jackson and
the Course of American Democracy, pp. 420-23; Stephen W. Stathis and
Ronald C. Moe, ``America's Other Inauguration,'' Presidential Studies
Quarterly 10 (Fall 1980): 561; Watson, p. 205.
⁸⁶ See, for example, James C. Curtis, The Fox at Bay:
Martin Van Buren and the Presidency, 1837-1841 (Lexington, KY, 1970);
Cole; Niven, Martin Van Buren; Wilson.
⁸⁷ Niven, Martin Van Buren, pp. 423-24; Cole, pp. 307-11,
318.
⁸⁸ Meyer, p. 431.
⁸⁹ Ronald M. Satz, American Indian Policy in the
Jacksonian Era (Lincoln, NE, 1975), p. 183.
⁹⁰ Meyer, p. 431.
⁹¹ Byrd, 2:219; Senate Journal, 25th Cong., 1st sess.,
pp. 27-28; 2d sess., pp. 25, 32-33; 3d sess., p. 5; 26th Cong., 1st
sess., pp. 5, 10-11, 46.
⁹² Henry Barrett Learned, ``Casting Votes of the Vice-
Presidents, 1789-1915,'' American Historical Review 20 (April 1915):
571; Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989, vol. 4, Historical Statistics, 1789-
1992, p. 642.
⁹³ Ibid., p. 574.
⁹⁴ Kentucky Gazette, March 14, 1839, quoted in Meyer, pp.
431-32.
⁹⁵ Senate Journal, 25th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 181-82; 26th
Cong., 2d sess., pp. 274-76; Francis Jennings, ed., The History and
Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the
Treaties of the Six Nations and Their Leagues (New York, 1985), p. 206.
⁹⁶ Satz, pp. 246-51; Meyer, pp. 337-39.
⁹⁷ Letter to Amos Kendall, August 12, 1839, enclosed in
Kendall's letter of August 22, 1839, to Van Buren, quoted in Meyer, p.
341.
⁹⁸ Kendall to Van Buren, August 22, 1839, quoted in
Meyer, p. 341.
⁹⁹ Meyer, pp. 339-40.
¹⁰⁰ Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign
(Lexington, KY, 1957), p. 80.
¹⁰¹ Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (New York,
1887), p. 61.
¹⁰² Harriett Martineau, ``Life at the Capital,'' in
America Through British Eyes, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1948; revised
from 1923 edition), p. 150.
¹⁰³ Joseph E. Morse and R. Duff Green, eds., Thomas B.
Searight's The Old Pike: An Illustrated Narrative of the National Road
(Orange, VA, 1971), pp. 105-6.
¹⁰⁴ Glyndon Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, 1828-1848
(New York, 1959), pp. 116-28; Watson, pp. 206-209; Cole, pp. 307-41,
347-60.
¹⁰⁵ Niven, Martin Van Buren, pp. 425-52; Watson, p. 410;
Van Deusen, pp. 132-40; Cole, pp. 318-42.
¹⁰⁶ Harriett Martineau, ``Life at the Capital,'' p. 150.
¹⁰⁷ Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
pp. 463-64.
¹⁰⁸ Andrew Jackson to Francis P. Blair, February 15,
1840, quoted in Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, p.
463.
¹⁰⁹ Gunderson, p. 82; Meyer, pp. 435-36; Niven, Martin
Van Buren, p. 463.
¹¹⁰ Niven, Martin Van Buren, p. 463; Gunderson, pp. 81-
82; Cole, p. 358.
¹¹¹ Niven, Martin Van Buren, p. 463; Gunderson, p. 83.
¹¹² Gunderson, pp. 41-75; Peterson, pp. 248, 281-96;
Remini, Henry Clay, pp. 545-67.
¹¹³ Washington National Intelligencer, September 24,
1840, quoting Wheeling Gazette, n.d., cited in Gunderson, p. 163;
Wilson, p. 206.
¹¹⁴ Meyer, p. 433; Gunderson, pp. 241-46.
¹¹⁵ Gunderson, p. 246.
¹¹⁶ Remini, Henry Clay, pp. 566-67; Gunderson, pp. 253-
54.
¹¹⁷ Gunderson, p. 255.
¹¹⁸ Senate Journal, 26th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 171-72.
¹¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 172-73.
¹²⁰ Ibid., pp. 191-92.
¹²¹ Ibid., pp. 231-32.
¹²² Meyer, pp. 452-59.
¹²³ Andrew Jackson to Martin Van Buren, September 22,
1843, quoted in Meyer, p. 460.
¹²⁴ R.P. Letcher to John J. Crittenden, June 2, 1842,
quoted in Meyer, p. 454.
¹²⁵ General McCalla to Martin Van Buren, January 11,
1843, quoted in Meyer, p. 457.
¹²⁶ Meyer, pp. 461-62.
¹²⁷ R.P. Letcher to John J. Crittenden, January 6, 1844,
quoted in ibid., p. 461.
¹²⁸ Meyer, pp. 473-74.
?

Chapter 10

JOHN TYLER

1841

JOHN TYLER
JOHN TYLER

Chapter 10

JOHN TYLER

10th Vice President: 1841

To this body [the Senate] is committed in an eminent
degree, the trust of guarding and protecting the
institutions handed down to us from our fathers, as well
against the waves of popular and rash impulses on the one
hand, as against attempts at executive encroachment on the
other.
--Vice President John Tyler
Go you now then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue,
where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the
country as you shall think proper. So help me God, I shall
do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper.
--President John Tyler
He held the office of vice president for only thirty-three days; he
presided over the Senate for less than two hours. Despite this brief
experience, John Tyler significantly strengthened the office by
enforcing an interpretation of the Constitution that many of his
contemporaries disputed. Tyler believed that, in the event of a vacancy
in the office of president, the vice president would become more than
just the acting president. He would assume the chief executive's full
powers, salary, and residence as if he himself had been elected to that
position. Taken for granted today, that interpretation is owed entirely
to this courtly and uncompromising Virginian who brought to the vice-
presidency a greater diversity of governmental experience than any of
his predecessors.

Early Years

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, at Greenway, his family's
twelve-hundred-acre James River estate in Charles City County, Virginia.
He was the second son among the eight children of John and Mary
Armistead Tyler. The elder John Tyler had been a prominent figure in the
American Revolution and a vigorous opponent of the Constitution at the
Virginia ratifying convention. Young John Tyler's mother died when he
was only seven, leaving the boy's upbringing to his father. During
John's late teens and early twenties, his father served as governor of
Virginia and then as a federal judge. A modern biographer concluded:
``The most important single fact that can be derived from John Tyler's
formative years is that he absorbed in toto the political, social, and
economic views of his distinguished father.'' ¹
Tyler received his early formal education at private schools; at the
age of twelve he enrolled in the college preparatory division of the
College of William and Mary. Three years later he began his college
studies, chiefly in English literature and classical languages, and
graduated in 1807, just seventeen years old. He studied law for two
years, first under his father's direction, then with a cousin, and
finally with Edmund Randolph, the nation's first attorney general.
Randolph's advocacy of a strong central government ran counter to
Tyler's interpretation of the limited extent to which the Constitution
granted powers to the national government and his belief in the
supremacy of states' rights. Tyler feared the Constitution would be used
to subordinate the interests of the southern white planter class to
those of northern merchants and propertyless working men, putting the
South at an economic and political disadvantage.²
The young Virginian established his own legal practice in 1811 and
soon developed a reputation as an eloquent and effective advocate in
handling difficult criminal defense cases. That year also brought his
election, at age twenty-one, to the Virginia house of delegates. He
earned early acclaim through his work in persuading the house to pass a
resolution censuring Virginia's two U.S. senators for their refusal to
follow the legislature's ``instructions'' to vote against the recharter
of the Bank of the United States.³
In March 1813, weeks after he inherited the Greenway plantation on
his father's death, Tyler married the beautiful and introverted Letitia
Christian. The death of both her parents soon after the marriage
conveyed to the bride holdings of land and slaves that greatly expanded
the wealth that John brought to their union. Reclusive and preferring
domestic pursuits, Letitia took no active interest in her husband's
public life. During the time of his service in Congress and as vice
president, she visited Washington only once, preferring the tranquility
of the family's plantation to the mud and grime of the nation's capital.
Together they had seven children in a tranquil and happy union disrupted
only when she suffered a paralytic stroke in 1839. She died in
1842.⁴
Tyler served five one-year terms in the Virginia house of delegates
and was chosen to sit on the state executive council. In 1817, at the
age of twenty-seven, he won election to the U.S. House of
Representatives, serving there until 1821 without apparent distinction.
He actively opposed legislation designed to implement Henry Clay's
``American System,'' linking a federally sponsored network of canals,
railroads, and turnpikes with a strong central bank and protective
tariffs in an alliance that seemed designed to unite the North and West
at the South's expense.
Tyler's views on slavery appeared ambivalent. In attacking the 1820
Missouri Compromise governing the future admission of ``slave'' and
``free'' states, Tyler sought without success to deny the federal
government the right to regulate slavery. From his earliest days in the
public arena, the Virginian appeared uncomfortable with the institution
of slavery, although he owned many slaves throughout his lifetime and
argued that slavery should be allowed to extend to regions where it
would prove to be economically viable. He expected, however, that the
``peculiar institution'' would eventually die out and, on various
occasions over the years, he advocated ending both the importation of
slaves and their sale in the District of Columbia.⁵
At the end of 1820, suffering from financial difficulties,
chronically poor health, and a string of legislative defeats, Tyler
decided to give up his career in the House of Representatives. He wrote
a friend, ``the truth is, that I can no longer do any good here. I stand
in a decided minority, and to waste words on an obstinate majority is
utterly useless and vain.'' ⁶ In 1823, however, his health
and political ambitions restored, Tyler returned to the Virginia house
of delegates. Two years later, he won election as Virginia's governor
and served two one-year terms until 1827, when he was elected to the
U.S. Senate. Reelected in 1833, Tyler served until his resignation on
February 29, 1836. While in the Senate he served briefly as president
pro tempore in March 1835 and as chairman of the Committee on the
District of Columbia and the Committee on Manufactures.

Philosophy

In the 1830s John Tyler identified himself with the Democratic party
but differed often with President Andrew Jackson. The two men diverged
both in temperament--a Tidewater aristocrat opposing a Tennessee
democrat--and in political philosophy. Tyler supported the president's
veto of legislation rechartering the Bank of the United States, but he
opposed Jackson's removal of government funds from that institution.
Although Tyler reluctantly advocated Jackson's election in both 1828 and
1832, he opposed many of the president's nominees to key administration
posts. The final break between the two came in 1833 when Tyler, alone
among Senate Democrats, chose to oppose the Force Act, which allowed
Jackson to override South Carolina's ordinance nullifying the tariff of
1832. He feared the Force Act would undermine the doctrine of states'
rights, to which he was deeply committed.
By 1834 Tyler joined Henry Clay in actively opposing Jackson's
policies, and he voted with a Senate majority to ``censure'' the
president for refusing to provide information concerning his removal of
government funds from the Bank of the United States. In 1836, when the
Virginia legislature ``instructed'' Tyler to reverse his censure vote,
Tyler refused. Unlike some senators who by that time had come to ignore
such legislative instruction, Tyler remembered his own vote years
earlier against noncomplying senators and concluded that he had no
honorable choice but to resign from the Senate.
In 1836 the emerging Whig party was united only in its opposition to
Jackson. To avoid demonstrating their lack of unity, the Whigs chose not
to hold a presidential nominating convention that year.⁷
Party strategy called for fielding several regional candidates,
nominated at the state and local level, in the hope that they would deny
Jackson's heir Martin Van Buren a majority in the electoral college.
Such an impasse would throw the contest into the House of
Representatives where the outcome might be more easily influenced to
produce a Whig president. Although there was little general interest
expressed in the vice-presidential position, Tyler's name appeared for
that post on the ballots in several states. He was listed as the running
mate of William Henry Harrison in Maryland; of Hugh Lawson White in
Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia; and of Willie Mangum in South
Carolina. In Virginia, Tyler's name appeared on the ballot with both
Harrison and White.
Van Buren won the presidency, but when the vice-presidential ballots
were tallied, Tyler came in third, after Richard Mentor Johnson and
Francis Granger, with 47 electoral votes from the states of Georgia,
Maryland, South Carolina and Tennessee.⁸ Under the provisions
of the Constitution's Twelfth Amendment, as no candidate for the vice-
presidency had secured a majority of the electoral votes, the Senate
would make the selection from the top two candidates. On February 8,
1837, the Senate exercised this constitutional prerogative for the only
time in its history and selected Johnson on the first ballot.

Senate Election Deadlock

In April 1838, Tyler won election to the Virginia house of
delegates for the third time--this time as a Whig. On taking his seat
early in 1839, he was unanimously chosen speaker. In that capacity, he
presided over a debate in which he held an intense personal interest:
the selection of a United States senator. William C. Rives, the
Jacksonian Democrat who had succeeded Tyler in 1836, hoped to retain his
Senate seat for another term. Tyler, however, decided that he would like
to return to the Senate. The Democrats held a slight majority in the
legislature, but among their members were a dozen so-called
Conservatives, renegade Democrats who had supported Jackson but
disagreed with the financial policies of his successor, Martin Van
Buren. The legislature's regular Democrats tried to win the support of
this maverick group to ensure that Virginia would marshal its sizeable
number of electoral votes in favor of Van Buren in the 1840 presidential
election. To this end, they offered to support Rives, one of Virginia's
most prominent Conservatives. But Rives proved unwilling to lead
Virginia's Conservatives back to the Democratic fold. Consequently, the
Democrats turned to John Mason as their Senate candidate. Whig leaders
might have been expected to support Tyler, who had resigned the seat in
1836 out of support for that party's doctrine. In fact, however, these
party leaders were more willing to ``sacrifice Tyler on the altar of
party expediency'' and promote Rives in return for cooperation from his
fellow Conservatives in voting for a Whig presidential candidate in
1840.⁹
On February 15, 1839, each house first met separately to hear
extended debate in support of Rives, Tyler, and Mason then convened in
joint session to vote. With heavy support from the Whig rank-and-file,
Tyler received a plurality on each of the first five ballots. On the
sixth ballot, Whigs began to shift in favor of Rives, who moved into the
lead but fell short of a majority in this and succeeding tallies. On
February 25, after twenty-eight ballots and eight legislative days
during which no other business was transacted, both houses agreed to
suspend the voting indefinitely. The seat remained vacant for nearly two
years until Tyler's election as vice president broke the deadlock and
opened the way for the legislature to select Rives, who had recently
changed his political allegiance to the Whig party.¹⁰
Contrary to his opponents' later charges, Tyler made no effort to
obtain the vice-presidential nomination as a consolation prize for the
Senate seat denied to him. ``I do declare, in the presence of my
Heavenly Judge, that the nomination given to me was neither solicited
nor expected.'' ¹¹

Whig Nominating Convention

Going into their December 1839 presidential nominating convention,
Whig leaders believed that Democratic President Martin Van Buren was
easily beatable as long as they selected a challenger of moderate views
who had not alienated large numbers of voters. Taking its name from the
English political party of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that
had formed in opposition to monarchial tyranny, the American Whig party
was held together primarily by its opposition to the perceived executive
tyranny of ``King Andrew'' and his successor, Van Buren.
Desiring a presidential candidate who would acknowledge the
preeminent role of Congress as maker of national policy, the party could
not ignore Henry Clay. As a leader of the Senate's Whigs and
orchestrator of the 1834 Senate censure of Jackson, Clay personified the
notion of congressional dominance. He was the best known of his party's
potential candidates; he was the most competent; and, as a slaveholder
and low-tariff advocate, he enjoyed considerable support in the South.
Party leaders from other regions, however, argued that Clay's public
record would work to his disadvantage and that, in any event, he could
not be expected to carry the electorally essential states of New York
and Pennsylvania.
Turning from a battle-scarred legislative veteran to military heroes
of uncertain political leanings, the Whig convention, meeting in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, considered War of 1812 generals Winfield Scott
and William Henry Harrison. Harrison's heroism at the Battle of
Tippecanoe was well known. He served as territorial governor of Indiana
after the war and later represented Ohio in the House of Representatives
and in the Senate, but he was hardly a national figure before the 1836
election.¹² That year he ran well in the presidential contest
and in 1840 won the endorsement of Senator Daniel Webster, who sought to
block his old rival, Clay. At the convention, Harrison gained the
crucial support of New York political boss Thurlow Weed, who also wanted
to prevent Clay from becoming the party's nominee. Weed manipulated the
convention's voting rules to require a unit-rule system that had each
state cast its entire vote for the candidate preferred by a simple
majority of its delegates. Weed then led his state's influential
delegation to secure a first-ballot victory for Harrison, a candidate
unencumbered by a political record or strong opinions. ¹³
The Whigs turned to the selection of a vice-presidential candidate
as somewhat of an afterthought. In finding a running mate for Harrison,
they sought an equally malleable candidate who would bring suitable
geographical and ideological balance to the ticket. If Clay of Kentucky
had been selected for the presidency, party leaders intended to find a
vice-presidential candidate from a state closed to slavery. With
Harrison the party's choice, they looked instead to the slave states for
a suitable contender; they found John Tyler.
The courtly Virginian had run well in southern states during the
1836 contest and enjoyed a solid identification with the South and
states' rights doctrine.¹⁴ With Harrison rumored to be an
abolitionist sympathizer, a slaveholder would nicely balance the ticket.
The Whigs particularly hoped to pick up Virginia's twenty-three
electoral votes, which had gone to the Democrats in 1836. (Both Tyler
and Harrison had been born in the same Virginia county and their fathers
had served terms as that state's governor.) The selection of Tyler, who
had energetically campaigned for Clay through the final convention
ballot--and was believed by some even to have shed tears at his defeat--
was also intended to mollify Clay's disappointed supporters in the
South. The convention's general committee quickly agreed on Tyler and
recommended him to the assembled delegates, who voted their unanimous
approval. In selecting Tyler, party leaders made no effort to determine
whether his views were compatible with their candidate's, for their
privately acknowledged campaign strategy was to ``fool the voters and
avoid the issues.'' ¹⁵

The 1840 Campaign

At Harrison's request, Tyler remained inactive during most of the
1840 election campaign. His major contribution was his surname, which
formed the rhyming conclusion of the party slogan ``Tippecanoe and Tyler
Too.'' Few Americans took much interest in his candidacy, for the sixty-
seven-year-old Harrison appeared to be in good health and had vowed to
serve only a single four-year term.
In the campaign's final weeks, word reached Tyler that President Van
Buren's running mate, Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson, had been
conducting a vigorous reelection campaign before enthusiastic crowds in
Ohio and adjacent states. Tyler responded with a speaking tour of his
own in portions of Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.¹⁶ One
Democratic editor concluded that he might as well have stayed home.
``Mr. Tyler is a graceful, easy speaker, with all that blandness of
manner which belongs to the Virginia character. But there is nothing
forcible or striking in his speech; no bright thoughts, no well-turned
expressions; nothing that left an impression on the mind from its
strength and beauty--nothing that marked the great man.'' ¹⁷
Saddled with responsibility for the economic crises that
characterized his administration, Martin Van Buren had but a slim chance
to win a second term. Harrison, for his part, avoided taking unpopular
stands by repeating at every opportunity that he would take his
direction from Congress--the best instrument for expressing the needs
and wishes of the American people. Although the popular-vote margin was
relatively slim, the Harrison-Tyler ticket won a resounding electoral
vote victory (234 to 60) in an election that stimulated the
participation of 80.2 percent of the eligible voters, the greatest
percentage ever.
Although Tyler failed to carry his own state of Virginia, he took
some satisfaction in believing that his Pennsylvania tour may have been
responsible for winning that state's important electoral votes. The
election also placed both houses of Congress under Whig control for the
first time. A Whig newspaper summarized the consequences of the
Harrison-Tyler victory: ``It has pleased the Almighty to give the
oppressed people of this misgoverned and suffering country a victory
over their weak and wicked rulers. . . . The reign of incompetency,
imposture and corruption, is at length arrested, and the country
redeemed.'' ¹⁸

A Brief Vice-Presidency

At 11 a.m. on March 4, 1841, the Senate convened in special session
to play its constitutional role in inaugurating the Harrison presidency.
After the secretary of the Senate called members to order, Henry Clay
administered the oath of office to President pro tempore William R.
King. Then, as a wave of excitement swept chamber galleries that had
been packed to capacity since early morning, Tyler entered the room
accompanied by former Vice President Richard M. Johnson, the Supreme
Court, and the diplomatic corps. The court, somber ``in their black
robes with their grave, intellectual, reflecting countenances,'' sat in
front-row seats to the presiding officer's right. To his left, in
colorful contrast, sat the ambassadors decorated, ``not only with the
insignia of their various orders, but half covered with the richest
embroidery in silver and in gold.'' ¹⁹
John Tyler arose and proceeded with Vice President Richard Johnson
to the presiding officer's chair to take his oath from President pro
tempore King. The new vice president then assumed the chair and launched
a three-minute inaugural address with a ringing tribute to his
predecessors, calling it an honor ``to occupy a seat which has been
filled and adorned . . . by an Adams, a Jefferson, a Gerry, a Clinton,
and a Tompkins.'' He then continued with a verbal bouquet to the Senate
and ``the high order of the moral and intellectual power which has
distinguished it in all past time, and which still distinguishes it.''
In the next sentence, Tyler moved into his main theme--the centrality of
the states' rights doctrine:
Here [in the Senate] are to be found the immediate representatives
of the States, by whose sovereign will the Government has
been spoken into existence. Here exists the perfect
equality among the members of this confederacy, which
gives to the smallest State in the Union a voice as
potential as that of the largest. To this body is
committed in an eminent degree, the trust of guarding and
protecting the institutions handed down to us from our
fathers, as well against the waves of popular and rash
impulses on the one hand, as against attempts at executive
encroachment on the other.
Concluding in the spirit of Vice President Jefferson, Tyler
confessed to his shortcomings as a presiding officer and asked of the
Senate ``your indulgence for my defects, and your charity for my errors.
I am but little skilled in parliamentary law, and have been unused to
preside over deliberative assemblies. All that I can urge in excuse of
my defects is, that I bring with me to this chair an earnest wish to
discharge properly its duties, and a fixed determination to preside over
your deliberations with entire impartiality.'' ²⁰
When Tyler finished, senators beginning new terms took their oaths.
At twenty minutes past noon, President-elect Harrison and the inaugural
arrangements committee entered the chamber and took seats in front of
the secretary's desk. After several minutes, the entire official party
rose and proceeded to the Capitol's east portico where a crowd of fifty
thousand awaited to witness the president's oath-taking. On that
blustery spring day, Harrison spoke without hat or overcoat for more
than ninety minutes. Following the ceremony, Tyler and the Senate
returned to the chamber to receive the president's cabinet nominations,
which were confirmed unanimously on the following day. Without caring to
attend the series of inaugural parties or to preside over the Senate for
the remainder of the special session that ended on March 15, Tyler
promptly returned to Williamsburg. He traveled there, as one biographer
noted, ``with the expectation of spending the next four years in peace
and quiet.'' ²¹
Early in April, Secretary of State Daniel Webster sent word to Tyler
that Harrison, worn out from the press of jobseekers, had fallen
seriously ill. The vice president saw no compelling need, however, to
return to Washington on account of the president's condition. As Senator
Thomas Hart Benton observed, ``Mr. Tyler would feel it indelicate to
repair to the seat of government, of his own will, on hearing the report
of the President's illness.'' ²² Then, at sunrise on April 5,
1841, two horsemen arrived at Tyler's plantation. They were State
Department chief clerk Fletcher Webster, son of Secretary of State
Daniel Webster, and Senate assistant doorkeeper Robert Beale, whose
mission was to deliver a letter from the cabinet addressed to ``John
Tyler, Vice President of the United States.'' The letter reported that
President Harrison had died of pneumonia the previous day.²³
After a quick breakfast, Tyler embarked on a hurried journey by
horseback and boat that placed him back in the nation's capital at 4
a.m. the following day.
As word of Harrison's demise spread across a startled nation, John
Quincy Adams despaired for the country's well-being:
Tyler is a political sectarian, of the slave-driving, Virginian,
Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement,
with all the interests and passions and vices of slavery
rooted in his moral and political constitution--with
talents not above mediocrity, and a spirit incapable of
expansion to the dimensions of the station upon which he
has been cast by the hand of Providence, unseen through
the apparent agency of chance. No one ever thought of his
being placed in the executive chair.²⁴
Although Tyler at age fifty-one was younger than any previous president,
he was also the most experienced in the ways of government. He had
served as a member of both houses of his state legislature, both houses
of the U.S. Congress, governor of his state, and vice president of the
United States.²⁵ By appearance, he was cast for a leadership
role. Standing slightly over six feet, he possessed all the ``features
of the best Grecian model'' including a sharply defined aquiline nose.
When a bust of Cicero was discovered during an excavation in Naples, two
visiting Americans reportedly exclaimed ``President Tyler!''
²⁶

The Accidental President

Harrison's demise after only a month in office presented the nation
with a potential constitutional crisis. The Constitution of that time
contained no Twenty-fifth Amendment to lay out procedures governing the
vice president's actions when the chief executive became disabled or
when there was a vacancy before the end of the incumbent's term. The
document provided only that the ``Powers and Duties of the said Office .
. . shall devolve on the Vice President . . . [who] shall act
accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be
elected.'' In another section, the Constitution referred to the vice
president ``when he shall exercise [emphasis added] the Office of
President of the United States.'' ²⁷
These provisions had occasioned a theoretical discussion between
those who believed a person does not have to become president to
exercise presidential powers and others who held that the vice president
becomes president for the balance of the term.²⁸ As the first
vice president to succeed to the presidency upon the death of his
predecessor, Tyler was determined to transform theory into practice on
behalf of the latter view, becoming president in his own right and not
``Vice President, acting as President'' as Harrison's cabinet was
inclined to label him. Secretary of State Webster raised his concern
about the constitutional implications of the succession with William
Carroll, clerk of the Supreme Court. Carroll conveyed Webster's
misgivings to Chief Justice Roger Taney, reporting that the ``Cabinet
would be pleased to see and confer with you at this most interesting
moment.'' Taney responded with extreme caution, saying that he wished to
avoid raising ``the suspicion of desiring to intrude into the affairs
which belong to another branch of government.'' ²⁹
Tyler argued that his vice-presidential oath covered the possibility
of having to take over as chief executive and consequently there was no
need for him to take the separate presidential oath. The cabinet, major
newspapers, and some Tyler advisers disagreed. To remove any doubt,
despite his own strong reservations, Tyler agreed to the oath, which was
administered on April 6 at Brown's Indian Queen Hotel by Chief Judge
William Cranch of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia.
Taking this step produced a significant reward, for it boosted Tyler's
annual salary five-fold from $5,000 to $25,000.³⁰
In his first official move, Tyler convened Harrison's cabinet and
listened patiently as Secretary of State Daniel Webster advised that it
had been Harrison's custom to bring all administrative issues ``before
the Cabinet, and their settlement was decided by the majority, each
member of the Cabinet and the President having but one vote.'' Choosing
his words with care, Tyler responded, ``I am the President, and I shall
be held responsible for my administration. I shall be pleased to avail
myself of your counsel and advice. But I can never consent to being
dictated to as to what I shall do or not do. When you think otherwise,
your resignations will be accepted.'' ³¹
Outside of his cabinet, Tyler's assumption of the presidency's full
powers evoked little general concern that he was overstepping proper
constitutional boundaries, or that a special election should be called.
Major newspapers argued that he was fully justified in his action,
although for several months after he took office some journals continued
to refer to him as ``acting president.'' One suggested a compromise
view; a special election would be required only if the presidency were
to fall, in the absence of a vice president, to the Senate president pro
tempore or the House Speaker, as designated by the presidential
succession statute of 1792.³²
As the epithet ``His Accidency'' grew in popularity, Congress
convened on May 31, 1841, for its previously called special session and
immediately took up the issue of Tyler's claim to be president in his
own right. The question was raised as the House prepared a resolution
authorizing a committee to follow the custom of informing the president
that ``Congress is now ready to receive any communication he may be
pleased to make.'' ³³ One member moved to amend the
resolution by striking out the word ``President'' and substituting
``Vice President now exercising the office of President.'' Members more
sympathetic to Tyler's reading of the Constitution--and the need to get
on with the business of the nation--offered a firm rebuttal, which the
House then agreed to.
In the Senate, on the following day, a member posed a hypothetical
question as to what would happen if the president were only temporarily
disabled and the vice president assumed the office. He envisioned a
major struggle at the time the disabled president sought to resume his
powers, particularly if he and the vice president were of different
parties. Senator John C. Calhoun reminded the Senate that this was not
the situation that faced them, rendering further discussion pointless.
And what about the Senate's president pro tempore? Should he assume the
vice-presidency as the vice president had assumed the presidency? Former
President pro tempore George Poindexter urged the incumbent president
pro tempore, Samuel Southard, to claim the title. Southard ignored the
advice, and the Senate then joined the House in adopting a resolution
recognizing Tyler's legitimate claim to the presidency.³⁴

Acting Vice President (President Pro Tempore)

In this early period of the Senate's history, when a vice president
planned to be away from the Capitol, the Senate customarily elected a
president pro tempore to serve for the limited time of that absence.
This official would preside, sign legislation, and perform routine
administrative tasks. Whenever the vice-presidency was vacant, as it was
with the deaths of George Clinton and Elbridge Gerry in James Madison's
administration, the post of president pro tempore, next in line of
presidential succession, assumed heightened importance. Two individuals
held this crucial post during Tyler's presidency: Samuel Southard, from
1841 to 1842, and Willie P. Mangum from 1842 to 1845.
Soon after Vice President Tyler left Washington on the day of
Harrison's inauguration, the Senate followed Clay's recommendation and
elected Senator Samuel Southard of New Jersey as president pro tempore.
Southard had first entered the Senate in 1821 but resigned in 1823 to
become secretary of the navy. In 1833, after moving through a series of
state and national offices, Southard returned to the Senate, where he
helped to establish the Whig party. At a time when Clay was attempting
to consolidate his control of the Senate, Southard proved to be a useful
ally. When the Senate convened in May 1841, a month after Harrison's
death, Southard's significance expanded. In this period of the Senate's
history, the vice president or, in his absence, the president pro
tempore made all committee assignments. Southard willingly accommodated
Clay in the distribution of important chairmanships.
The next year, however, on May 3, 1842, the New Jersey Whig resigned
from the Senate due to ill health and died soon thereafter. Several
weeks later, on May 31, the Senate selected a new president pro tempore,
Willie P. Mangum (W-NC), a leader of the Senate's Whig caucus. Mangum
had served a Senate term in the 1830s and, as a Clay delegate to the
1839 Whig convention, had been considered briefly as a vice-presidential
nominee. He returned to the Senate in 1840, where he remained as a Whig
leader until 1853. His 1842 selection as president pro tempore occurred
in recognition of his leadership in opposing Tyler. He held the post
through the remainder of Tyler's administration.

Tyler's Presidency

Deep divisions over the issue of establishing a new banking system
overshadowed Tyler's early presidency. In the Senate, Henry Clay led his
party in a direction quite different from Tyler's. The two men had been
good friends, despite their philosophical differences. Tyler had joined
the Whigs because of his strong opposition to the policies of Andrew
Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Ideologically, however, he had little
sympathy for the Whig program of a national bank, internal improvements,
and protective tariffs embodied in Clay's ``American System.'' As a
former states' rights Democrat, Tyler emphasized the importance of state
sovereignty over national economic integration. Both Tyler and Clay held
a typical nineteenth-century, anti-Jacksonian view of the presidency as
a limited, relatively passive office responsible for providing Congress
the necessary information to pass appropriate legislation. They saw the
president's policy role as essentially limited to vetoing legislation
that he believed to be either unconstitutional or not in the nation's
best interests. Tyler, however, would have given the president
sufficient power to keep Congress from actions that might erode states'
rights. Clay made a sharper distinction, advocating an assertive
Congress and a chief executive stripped of the powers acquired during
Jackson's years in office. Admirers and foes alike began referring to
Clay as ``the Andrew Jackson of the Senate.''
Although Clay had briefly opposed Tyler's move to take on full
presidential powers after Harrison's death, he changed his mind and
began to provide the new chief executive with valuable moral and
political support. Yet Clay also realized that Tyler now blocked his own
road to the presidency. Clay had appeared to be the obvious successor in
1845, based on Harrison's announcement that he intended to serve only
one term.
Clay intended to lead the nation from the Senate and he expected
Tyler to help him to that objective by supporting his policies. That
expectation quickly proved to be misplaced. Despite Tyler's mild-
mannered demeanor, he began to display a rock-like tenacity in pushing
for his own objectives. Clay sought to reestablish a strong, private,
central bank of the United States. Tyler, consistent in his concern for
preservation of states' rights--and state banks--advocated a weaker
bank, chartered in the District of Columbia, that would operate only in
those states that chose to have it. When Clay urged Tyler to push for a
new Bank of the United States during the May 1841 special session, Tyler
said he wanted more time and intended to put the matter off until the
regular session in December. Clay arrogantly responded that this would
not be acceptable. Tyler is said to have countered, ``Then, sir, I wish
you to understand this--that you and I were born in the same district;
that we have fed upon the same food, and have breathed the same natal
air. Go you now then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands
the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the country as you shall
think proper. So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I
shall think proper.'' ³⁵
In the interest of party harmony, Clay eventually agreed to a
compromise bank measure, which the increasingly resentful Tyler promptly
vetoed. Congress subsequently passed a modified ``Fiscal Corporation''
bill to meet the president's specific objections. Tyler also vetoed this
act as an unconstitutional infringement on states' rights. On Saturday,
September 11, 1841, in the final days of the special session, Tyler's
entire cabinet--with the exception of Secretary of State Webster--
resigned in a protest designed by Clay to force Tyler's own resignation.
With the vice-presidency vacant, this would place Clay's protege, Senate
President pro tempore Southard, in the White House.
Refusing to be intimidated, Tyler responded the following Monday by
sending the Senate a new slate of cabinet officers. Despite the
president's break with the Senate's leaders, the body on September 13
quickly confirmed each of the nominees and then adjourned until
December. Later that day, in a starkly dramatic move, sixty prominent
Whigs assembled in the plaza adjacent to the Capitol. In a festive mood,
they adopted a manifesto that asserted the supremacy of Congress in
policy-making, condemned the president's conduct, and proclaimed that
the Whig party could no longer be held responsible for the chief
executive's actions. Tyler had become a president without a
party.³⁶
The chaos that ensued gave Tyler the unwanted distinction of having
``the most disrupted Cabinet in presidential history.'' ³⁷
During his nearly four years in office, he appointed twenty-two
individuals to the administration's six cabinet seats. Many of these
nominees were manifestly unqualified for their assignments, and the
Senate refused to confirm four of them. Among those rejected was Caleb
Cushing, whom Tyler chose to be secretary of the treasury. On the day of
Cushing's initial rejection, Tyler immediately resubmitted his name. The
Senate, irritated at this disregard of its expressed will, again said
``no'' but by a larger margin. For a third time, Tyler nominated Cushing
and again the Senate decisively rejected him. The Senate's Whig
majority, stalling for time in the expectation that Henry Clay would be
elected president in 1844, also turned down, or failed to act on, four
of Tyler's Supreme Court nominees--a record not before or since
equalled.
Positioning himself to run in 1844 as the Whig candidate for the
presidency, Clay resigned from the Senate in March 1842. Tyler continued
the struggle with his party's congressional majority by vetoing two
tariff bills. As government revenues fell to a dangerously low level, he
finally agreed to a measure that became the Tariff Act of 1842. Although
this action probably aided the nation's economy, it destroyed any
remaining hope that Tyler might govern effectively. Northern Whigs
condemned him for failing to push for a sufficiently protective tariff,
and his former states' rights allies in the South abandoned him for
supporting a measure that they considered excessively protective.
John Tyler sought to be a strong president, but his accomplishments
proved to be modest. Stubborn, proud, and unpredictable, he decisively
established the right of the vice president to assume the full powers of
the presidency in the event of a vacancy to an unexpired term. He boldly
exercised the veto ten times, a record exceeded only by Andrew Jackson
among presidents who served in the nation's first seventy-five years.
His chief contributions lay in the field of foreign policy. The
annexation of Texas opened a new chapter in the nation's history. The
Webster-Ashburton treaty prevented a costly war with Great Britain, and
the Treaty of Wanghia obtained economically promising most-favored-
nation status for the United States in China. ³⁸
Despite his earlier ambitions, Tyler became the first president not
to seek a second term. (No party would have him as its candidate.) After
leaving the White House on March 3, 1845, Tyler practiced law and was
appointed to the board of visitors for the College of William and Mary.
A year earlier, at the first presidential wedding to be conducted in the
White House, he had married Julia Gardiner, a vivacious partner who,
like his first wife Letitia, produced seven children.³⁹ In
February 1861 the ex-president chaired a conference in Washington in a
last-ditch effort to avert civil war. When that war began, he was
elected to Virginia's secessionist convention and then to the
provisional Congress of the Confederacy. He had won a seat in the
Confederate Congress' house of representatives, but his death on January
18, 1862, came before he could begin his service.
Tyler biographer Robert Seager notes that he ``lived in a time in
which many brilliant and forceful men strode the American stage . . .
and he was overshadowed by all of them, as was the office of the
Presidency itself. . . . Had he surrendered his states' rights and anti-
Bank principles he might have salvaged it. He chose not to surrender and
the powerful Henry Clay crushed him.'' ⁴⁰
JOHN TYLER2

NOTES

¹ Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John &
Julia Gardiner Tyler (Norwalk, CT, 1963), p. 50.
² Ibid., pp. 52-53.
³ Ibid., pp. 55-56.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 56-58.
⁵ Ibid., p. 53-54.
⁶ Quoted in ibid., p. 72.
⁷ Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old
South (New York, 1939), pp. 148-49.
⁸ Ibid., p. 151-52.
⁹ Ibid., pp. 157-61.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 162-63.
¹¹ National Intelligencer, August 27, 1844; Seager, p.
135.
¹² Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign
(Lexington, KY, 1957), pp. 41-75; Merrill D. Peterson, The Great
Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), pp. 248, 281-
96; Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York,
1991), pp. 545-67.
¹³ Norma Lois Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry
Harrison & John Tyler (Lawrence, KS, 1989), p. 21; Chitwood, pp. 164-67.
¹⁴ Seager, pp. 134-35. There is some scholarly
controversy over the reasons for Tyler's selection. The view that he was
carelessly selected may not have been widely held until after Tyler
broke with Whig party leaders after becoming president. For a discussion
of this question, see Norma Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry
Harrison & John Tyler, p. 26; Chitwood, pp. 167-73.
¹⁵ William O. Stoddard, Lives of the Presidents, 10 vols.
(New York, 1888), 5:44; Chitwood, pp. 166-67; Norma Peterson, pp. 26-27.
¹⁶ Chitwood, pp. 184-85.
¹⁷ Daily Pittsburgher, October 8, 1840, quoted in ibid.,
p. 187.
¹⁸ Niles' National Register, 59:163.
¹⁹ Niles National Register, March 13, 1841, p. 19. This
excellent source provides colorful descriptions of the events of March
4, 1841.
²⁰ Chitwood, pp. 200-201; U.S., Congress, Senate,
Congressional Globe, 26th Cong., 2d sess., March 4, 1841, pp. 231-32.
²¹ Chitwood, p. 202.
²² Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View, 2 vols. (New
York, 1871), 2:211.
²³ Ruth C. Silva, Presidential Succession (Ann Arbor, MI,
1951), p. 16.
²⁴ Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy
Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia, 1876), 10:456-57.
²⁵ Seager, p. 147.
²⁶ Quoted in Remini, p. 582.
²⁷ U.S. Constitution, Article II, section 1, clause 6;
Article I, section 2, clause 10.
²⁸ Stephen W. Stathis, ``John Tyler's Presidential
Succession: A Reappraisal,'' Prologue 8 (Winter 1976): 223-24,
especially footnote 1; Silva, pp. 2-3. See also Stephen W. Stathis,
``The Making of a Precedent 1841 (The Presidential Succession of John
Tyler),'' (Master's Thesis, Utah State University, 1971).
²⁹ Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney (Baltimore,
1872), pp. 295-96; Silva, pp. 16-17.
³⁰ Sharon Stiver Gressle, ``Salaries, Executive,''
Encyclopedia of the American Presidency (New York, 1994), pp. 1344-46.
³¹ Quoted in Seager, p. 149.
³² Silva, pp. 18-20.
³³ Congressional Globe, 27th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 3-4.
³⁴ Stathis, p. 234; Chitwood, p. 206; Silva, pp. 21-22.
Even after he left the presidency, Tyler continued to confront the issue
of his proper title. On October 16, 1848, he wrote to Secretary of State
James Buchanan to complain that the State Department, the government's
official arbiter of protocol, had on three occasions addressed him in
formal correspondence as ``ex-vice president.'' ``I desire only to say,
that if I am addressed, and especially from the State department, by
title, it must be that which the Constitution confers . . .'' [quoted in
Silva, p. 21]
³⁵ Chitwood, pp. 210-11; Seager, p. 147; Remini, p. 583.
³⁶ Norma Peterson, pp. 89-91; Seager, p. 160.
³⁷ Paul Finkelman, ``John Tyler,'' Encyclopedia of the
American Presidency, 4:1521.
³⁸ For a balanced assessment of Tyler's presidency, see
Norma Peterson, chapter 15.
³⁹ Seager, pp. 1-16.
⁴⁰ Ibid., p. xvi.
?

Chapter 11

GEORGE MIFFLIN DALLAS

1845-1849

GEORGE M. DALLAS
GEORGE M. DALLAS

Chapter 11

GEORGE MIFFLIN DALLAS

11th Vice President: 1845-1849

[Except that he is President of the Senate, the vice
president] forms no part of the government:--he enters into
no administrative sphere:--he has practically no
legislative, executive, or judicial functions:--while the
Senate sits, he presides, that's all:--he doesn't debate or
vote, (except to end a tie) he merely preserves the order
and courtesy of business . . . [When Congress is in recess]
where is he to go? what has he to do?--no where, nothing! He
might, to be sure, meddle with affairs of state, rummage
through the departments, devote his leisure to the study of
public questions and interests, holding himself in readiness
to counsel and to help at every emergency in the great
onward movement of the vast machine:--But, then, recollect,
that this course would sometimes be esteemed intrusive,
sometimes factious, sometimes vain and arrogant, and, as it
is prescribed by no law, it could not fail to be treated
lightly because guaranteed by no responsibility.
--George M. Dallas, ca. 1845 ¹
George Mifflin Dallas admitted in his later years that his driving
force in life was for historical fame. From the 1840s on through the
latter part of the nineteenth century, Americans associated his name
with the acquisition of Texas and the settlement of the Oregon boundary
dispute. Texas memorialized his contributions to the state's history by
renaming the town of Peter's Corner in his honor. In the 1850s, when
officials in Oregon sought a name for the principal town in Polk County,
they settled on the logical choice: Polk's vice president. Thus, while
largely forgotten today as the nation's eleventh vice president, George
Mifflin Dallas has won his measure of immortality in a large Texas city
and a small Oregon town.²
For four years at the heart of the Senate's ``Golden Age,'' Vice
President George Dallas occupied a center stage seat in the nation's
premier political theater. This courtly Philadelphia aristocrat--whose
political ambition greatly exceeded his political energy--entered that
arena in 1845 filled with optimism for the nation, the Democratic party,
and his own presidential future. He departed in 1849 embittered and
depressed, his political chances obliterated. During his term, the
nation fought and won a war with Mexico, acquired vast new territories,
settled a chronic northwestern boundary dispute, discovered gold, and
launched a communications revolution with the invention of the
telegraph. In the Senate, where political party caucuses assumed new
powers to appoint committee members and distribute patronage, the
central debates occurred over the status of slavery in the territories
and the very nature of the constitutional union. With increasing
frequency, senators faced conflicting choices between the desires of
their parties and of their constituencies. When such an unavoidable
decision confronted Vice President Dallas in July 1846 on the then
searing issue of tariff policy, he chose party over constituency--
thereby forfeiting his political future.

Early Years

George Mifflin Dallas was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1792,
the second of Alexander and Arabella Smith Dallas' six children.
Alexander Dallas, a politically well-connected Philadelphia lawyer,
served as secretary for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and reporter
for the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts then meeting
in that city, which was at the time the nation's capital and leading
commercial center. In 1801, as a reward for the elder Dallas' assistance
in his presidential election campaign, Thomas Jefferson appointed him
U.S. district attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania. He
remained in that post until 1814, when President James Madison selected
him as his treasury secretary. In 1815, Alexander Dallas also served
concurrently for a brief period as acting secretary of war. He then
resigned the treasury position in 1816 to return to his law practice
with the intention of expanding the family's financial resources.
However, early the following year, a chronic illness led to his death at
the age of fifty-nine, leaving his family without the wealth necessary
to support its accustomed style of living.
George Dallas graduated with highest honors from the College of New
Jersey at Princeton in 1810. He then studied law and in 1813, at age
twenty, was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. With little taste for
legal practice, he sought military service in the War of 1812 but
abandoned those plans on the objection of his ever-influential father.
He then readily accepted an appointment to serve as private secretary to
former treasury secretary and Pennsylvania political figure Albert
Gallatin, who was about to embark on a wartime mission to secure the aid
of Russia in U.S. peace negotiations with Great Britain. Dallas enjoyed
the opportunities that travel to this distant land offered, but after
six months orders took him from St. Petersburg to London to probe for
diplomatic openings that might bring the war to an end.
In August 1814, as British troops were setting fire to the U.S.
Capitol, young Dallas carried a preliminary draft of Britain's peace
terms home to Washington and accepted President Madison's appointment as
remitter of the treasury, a convenient arrangement at a time when his
father was serving as that department's secretary. The light duties of
his new post left Dallas plenty of time to pursue his major vocational
interest--politics.³
In 1816, lonely and lovesick, Dallas left Washington for
Philadelphia, where he married Sophia Chew Nicklin, daughter of an old-
line Federalist family. (They would eventually have eight children.) His
marriage extended his social and political reach but, as his modern
biographer reports, ``Prestige came without money, a circumstance that
was doubly unfortunate because he had developed extravagant tastes as a
youth. For this reason he continually lived beyond his means and was
constantly in debt, a situation that caused him on more than one
occasion to reject otherwise acceptable political posts.'' ⁴
At the start of his married life, Dallas achieved a measure of financial
stability by accepting a position as counsel to the Second Bank of the
United States, an institution his father had helped create while
treasury secretary. The 1817 death of Alexander Dallas abruptly ended
George's plans for a family law practice. He left the Bank of the United
States to become deputy attorney general of Philadelphia, a post he held
until 1820.
George Mifflin Dallas cultivated a bearing appropriate to his
aristocratic origins. Tall, with soft hazel eyes, an aquiline nose, and
sandy hair, he dressed impeccably in the finest clothes his fashionable
city could offer, wrote poetry, and, when the occasion warranted, spoke
perfectly nuanced French. He developed an oratorical style that
capitalized on his sonorous voice and protected him from the barbs of
quicker-witted legal adversaries. His biographer explains that, whether
``by chance or design, his habit of talking slowly and emphasizing each
word created the feeling that he was reasoning his way to a conclusion
on the spot. Since he also prepared cases carefully in advance, his
apparent groping for the right word--and finding it--reinforced the
initial impression that a great mind was at work.'' ⁵
Dallas, however, lacked both the intense drive necessary to achieve
his high ambitions and a natural politican's gift for warm social
interaction with those outside his immediate circle. ``A silk-stocking
Jeffersonian in an age of egalitarianism,'' he preferred to remain aloof
from the rough-and-tumble world of political deal making. Only once in
his public life, when he ran for the vice-presidency, did he submit
himself to the decision of the voting public. The Pennsylvania state
legislature awarded him his Senate term, and the rest of his offices
were given by appointment. At crucial moments, Dallas pulled back from
the wrenching political compromises and exhausting coalition building
necessary to achieve his lifelong quest for the presidency.⁶

Buchanan Rivalry

Pennsylvania's chaotic political climate in the forty years that
followed the War of 1812 promoted, shaped, and ultimately sidetracked
Dallas' public career. Two factions within the state's Democratic party
contended for power during that time. Led by Dallas, the Philadelphia-
based ``Family party'' shared his belief in the supremacy of the
Constitution and in an active national government that would impose
protective tariffs, operate a strong central banking system, and promote
so-called internal improvements to facilitate national commerce. In
factional opposition to Dallas stood the equally patrician James
Buchanan of Harrisburg, head of the rival ``Amalgamators,'' whose
strength lay among the farmers of western Pennsylvania.⁷
When the Family party gained control of the Philadelphia city
councils, its members in 1828 elected Dallas as mayor. Boredom with that
post quickly led Dallas--in his father's path--to the position of
district attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania, where he
stayed from 1829 to 1831. In December 1831 he won a five-man, eleven-
ballot contest in the state legislature for election to the U.S. Senate
to complete an unexpired term. In the Senate for only fourteen months,
he chaired the Naval Affairs Committee and supported President Jackson's
views on protective tariffs and the use of force to implement federal
tariff laws in South Carolina.
A longtime supporter and financial beneficiary of the Second Bank of
the United States, whose original charter his father had drafted, Dallas
reluctantly parted company with the president on the volcanic issue of
the bank's rechartering. As one Dallas biographer has written: ``There
was no question about how the people of Pennsylvania viewed the Second
Bank of the United States. The Philadelphia-based institution was
Pennsylvanian by interest, location, and legislative initiative.''
⁸ Dallas complied with a directive from his state legislature
that he support a new charter, despite Jackson's unremitting opposition
and his own view that the divisive recharter issue should be put off
until after the 1832 presidential election. When Jackson vetoed the
recharter act in July 1831 and Congress failed to override the veto,
Dallas--always the pragmatist--dropped his support for the bank.
Observing that ``we ought to have it, but we can do without it,'' he
mollified the president and angered his state's influential commercial
interests.⁹ Dallas realized that his chances for reelection
to the Senate by the state legislature were uncertain. His wife Sophia,
who refused to leave Philadelphia's comforts for muddy and cholera-
ridden Washington, was growing increasingly bitter over the legislative
and social demands of his life in the capital. Consequently, Dallas
chose not to run for a full term and left the Senate in March
1833.¹⁰
Although off the national stage, Dallas remained active in state
Democratic politics. The tension with Buchanan intensified when the
latter returned from his diplomatic post in Russia and secured
Pennsylvania's other seat in the U.S. Senate. Dallas turned down
opportunities to return to the Senate and to become the nation's
attorney general. Instead, he accepted an appointment as state attorney
general, holding that post until 1835, when control of the state's party
machinery shifted from the declining Family party to Buchanan's
Amalgamators. In 1837, it was Dallas' turn for political exile, as newly
elected President Martin Van Buren named him U.S. minister to Russia.
Although Dallas enjoyed the social responsibilities of that post, he
soon grew frustrated at its lack of substantive duties and returned to
the United States in 1839. He found that during his absence in St.
Petersburg Buchanan had achieved a commanding position in the home state
political contest that had long engaged the two men.¹¹
In December 1839, Van Buren offered the U.S. attorney-generalship to
Dallas after Buchanan had rejected the post. Dallas again declined the
offer and spent the following years building his Philadelphia law
practice. His relations with Buchanan remained troubled throughout this
period.

The 1844 Campaign and Election

Favoring Van Buren for the 1844 Democratic presidential nomination,
Dallas worked successfully to blunt Buchanan's drive for that prize. Van
Buren sought unsuccessfully to have the Democratic convention held in
November 1843 rather than late May 1844. He had hoped to capture the
nomination before his opposition to the annexation of Texas became
public when Congress convened in early December. By April 1844, with
Democratic support for annexation intensifying, Van Buren watched
helplessly as his chances for regaining the White House slipped away.
Under the influence of Van Buren's opponents, the Democratic party's
Baltimore convention in May adopted the Jackson-era rule that required a
two-thirds vote to select its nominee. After eight deadlocked ballots at
the superheated and violence-prone convention, supporters of Van Buren
and his chief rival, Michigan's Lewis Cass, united on the unheralded
former House Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee--who thus became the
first successful ``darkhorse'' candidate in American presidential
history. To cement an alliance with the disgruntled Van Buren faction,
Polk offered to support a Van Buren loyalist for the vice-presidential
nomination, New York Senator Silas Wright. Although Wright was absent
from the convention, those delegates who had not already left town
willingly added him to the ticket.¹²
Four days earlier, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse had successfully
demonstrated that his newly invented ``Magnetic Electric Telegraph''
could transmit messages over the forty-mile distance between the U.S.
Capitol and Baltimore. Silas Wright was in the Capitol Rotunda reading
other telegraphic reports from the Baltimore convention when news of his
nomination arrived. Bitter at the convention's rejection of Van Buren,
Wright dictated a response to Morse, who typed out the following message
to the convention's waiting delegates: ``Washington. Important! Mr.
Wright is here, and says, say to the New York delegation, that he cannot
accept the nomination.'' His party's remaining delegates in Baltimore
did not fully trust this new invention and repeated their message. Morse
replied: ``Again: Mr. Wright is here, and will support Mr. Polk
cheerfully, but can not accept the nomination for vice-president.'' The
unbelieving convention continued its request until Wright dispatched two
members of Congress in a wagon--the evening train to Baltimore had
already departed--bearing handwritten letters of rejection.¹³
With Wright out of the picture, and with no New York ally of Van
Buren willing to accept the nomination, the convention turned to James
Buchanan, but he immediately instructed his allies to withdraw his name.
The searchlight then swept across several candidates from New England
and came to rest on Maine's Senator John Fairfield, who received an
impressive, but inconclusive, 106 votes on the first ballot. At the
suggestion of party leader and Mississippi Senator Robert J. Walker (who
was married to Dallas' niece), Pennsylvania delegates then sparked a
move for Dallas, who was at home in Philadelphia. Dallas' views were
generally compatible with Polk's, especially on the key issue of
annexing Texas. His stand in favor of protective tariffs would appeal to
northeastern commercial interests and offset Polk's ambiguous position
on this sensitive issue. Party strategists realized that Pennsylvania,
with its prize of nearly 10 percent of the total electoral votes, which
were by no means safely in the Democratic camp, could prove decisive in
the election. On the second ballot, the convention gave Dallas the
nomination with 220 votes to just 30 for Fairfield.
On May 30, sixty high-spirited delegates left Baltimore for
Philadelphia, arriving at the Dallas residence at 3 a.m. As a bewildered
Dallas stood by his open door, the nocturnal visitors marched by double
column silently into his parlor. Forming a semicircle, the men burst
into applause as Senator Fairfield conveyed the surprising news and
Dallas, uneasy at the prospect of returning to public life, accepted
with less than abundant enthusiasm.¹⁴
The selection also came as news to presidential nominee Polk, whose
advisers quickly assured him that Dallas would be an excellent
complement to the ticket. Within Pennsylvania, opinion was sharply
divided, as resentful Buchanan allies feared that the less-than-dynamic
Dallas would cost their party the presidency in a contest against the
aggressive and better-known Whig candidates, Kentucky's Henry Clay and
New Jersey's Theodore Frelinghuysen.¹⁵ One Pennsylvania Whig
dismissively described Dallas as ``a gentleman by birth and education,
amiable in private life, very bland and courteous in manner . . . a
reckless partizan totally devoid of principle and capable of upholding
or relinquishing . . . opinions whenever his own or his party's
interests require it.'' ¹⁶
As was customary prior to 1845, the various states scheduled the
presidential election on different days during November's first two
weeks.¹⁷ When the votes were finally tallied, the Polk-Dallas
ticket won fifteen out of the twenty-six states by a comfortable margin
of 170 to 105 electoral votes. They were far less convincing, however,
in the popular vote, with a margin of only 6,000 out of the 2.7 million
ballots cast. Polk narrowly lost his native Tennessee, while Dallas
barely carried Pennsylvania. While analysts agreed that victories in New
York and Pennsylvania made the difference for the Democratic ticket, no
such consensus existed about Dallas' impact on this result.¹⁸

Preparing for Office

Like many of his contemporaries on the national political stage in
1845, George Dallas wanted to be president. In accepting the Democratic
nomination, Polk committed himself to serving only one term, hoping this
promise would encourage his party's warring factions to suspend their
combat at least until the 1848 campaign.¹⁹ Instead, his
pledge instantly prompted maneuvering from many quarters for the 1848
nomination. Four of the nation's ten previous vice presidents had moved
up to the presidency and Dallas saw no reason why he should not become
the fifth. For his first two years in the second office, Dallas framed
his behavior with that goal in mind.
Dallas met Polk for the first time on February 13, 1845, joining the
president-elect for the final leg of his railroad journey to Washington.
Dallas used the opportunity to follow up on his earlier suggestions for
cabinet nominees he believed would strengthen the party--and his own
presidential chances.²⁰ He particularly sought to sabotage
archrival James Buchanan's hopes of becoming secretary of state, the
other traditional launching pad to the White House. Buchanan had
arrogantly instructed Pennsylvania's presidential electors to recommend
him for that post at the time they cast their ballots for the Democratic
ticket. This infuriated Dallas, who promised a friend that, while he had
become vice president ``willy-nilly'' and expected to endure ``heavy and
painful and protracted sacrifices, . . . I am resolved that no one shall
be taken from Pennsylvania in a cabinet office who is notoriously
hostile to the Vice President. If such a choice be made, my relations
with the administration are at once at an end.'' ²¹
Several weeks later, learning that Polk had indeed chosen Buchanan,
Dallas failed to follow up on his dark oath. Instead, he began quietly
to lobby for the appointment of Senator Robert J. Walker--his earlier
choice against Buchanan for the state department--for the influential
post of treasury secretary. Polk, realizing that he had offended Dallas
and Walker's southern Democratic allies, awarded the treasury post to
Walker. Dallas continued to be sensitive about the administration's
distribution of major appointments, as he sought to strengthen his
Pennsylvania political base in order to weaken the Buchanan faction and
enhance his own presidential prospects. In his subsequent appointments,
however, Polk continued to antagonize Dallas, as well as others in the
Democratic party. Again, the president tried to appease the vice
president. ``I would have been pleased to explain to you some of the
circumstances attending the appointments at Philadelphia which were made
some time ago, but no opportunity for that purpose has occurred.''
Dallas responded that it was pointless to discuss these matters ``in as
much as you have not been able to gratify the few requests I have
previously made.'' Despite his frustration and subsequent patronage
losses to Secretary of State Buchanan, who was a far tougher and more
persistent operator, the vice president endeavored to remain loyal to
his president and party.²²

President of the Senate

From 1789 to 1845, the Senate followed the practice of selecting its
committees by ballot, with the exception of several years in the 1820s
and 1830s when the power was specifically given to the presiding officer
(1823-1826) or, more pointedly, to the president pro tempore (1828-
1833), an officer selected by and responsible to the
Senate.²³ When the Senate convened in March 1845 for its
brief special session to receive the new president's executive
nominations, Democratic party leaders engineered a resolution that
revived the practice of having the vice president appoint the members of
standing committees. Acknowledging that the vice president was not
directly responsible to the Senate, administration allies asserted that
his was a greater responsibility, as guaranteed in the Constitution,
``to the Senate's masters, the people of these United States.''
²⁴ The goal was to pack the Committee on Foreign Relations
with members sympathetic to the administration's position on the Oregon
boundary question. Vice President Dallas made the desired appointments.
In December 1845, at the opening of the Senate's regular legislative
session, party leaders again sought to give the appointment power to
Dallas. On this occasion, however, four rebellious Democrats joined
minority party Whigs to defeat the resolution by a one-vote margin. This
action presented the Polk administration with the unappealing likelihood
that, in balloting by the full Senate, Democrats hostile to its specific
objectives would take control of key Senate committees. Dallas reported
that the return to the usual procedure required him to work ``unusually
hard . . . to superintend some sixteen or twenty ballotings for officers
and chairmen of Committees.'' He was ``much encouraged by the kind
manner in which I am complimented on my mode of presiding. But I assure
you,'' he continued, ``contrary to my expectations, it is not done
without a great deal of preparatory labor. Now that [the anti-
administration] hostility has shewn itself, I am bound to be ready at
all points and against surprizes.'' ²⁵
To end this time-consuming process, Senate party leaders took a step
of major importance for the future development of legislative political
parties. The Democrats and Whigs each organized a party caucus to
prepare lists of committee assignments, an arrangement that marked the
beginning of the Senate seniority system. As long as committee members
had been selected by secret ballot or appointed by presiding officers, a
member's experience did not guarantee his selection. After 1845,
seniority became a major determinant, particularly in the selection of
committee chairmen. Legislative parties, charged with preparing slates
of committee assignments, tended to become more cohesive. In this period
the tradition also began of seating in the chamber by party--with the
Democrats to the presiding officer's right and the Whigs (later the
Republicans) to the left.
From his canopied dais, the vice president had the best seat in the
nation's best theater. On one memorable occasion, he reported to his
wife that ``the speech of [Senator Daniel] Webster to-day would have
overwhelmed and perhaps disgusted you. He attacked [Pennsylvania's
Representative] Mr. C. J. Ingersoll with the savage and mangling
ferocity of a tiger. For at least a half an hour, he grit his teeth,
scowled, stamped, and roared forth the very worst & most abusive
language I have ever heard uttered in the Senate.'' Dallas later
observed that ``[v]ast intellect, like Webster's, almost naturally
glides into arrogance.'' ²⁶
In his brief inaugural address to the Senate, Dallas had
acknowledged that he entered into his ``tranquil and unimposing'' new
duties ``[w]ithout any of the cares of real power [and] none of the
responsibilities of legislation'' except in rare instances when he might
be called on to break tied votes. If anything, he would stand as ``an
organ of Freedom's fundamental principle of order.'' ²⁷
Despite this noble disclaimer of partisanship, Dallas involved himself
deeply in the struggle to help the president achieve his legislative
agenda. He worked against strong contrary pressures from the party's
western faction, led by Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and its southern
bloc under the inspiration of Senator John C. Calhoun. In assessing
these senators' motives, Dallas reported that Benton intended to oppose
Calhoun wherever possible. ``If Mr. Calhoun should support the [Polk]
administration, Col. Benton will not be able to resist the impulse to
oppose it:--on the contrary, if Mr. Calhoun opposes, Col. Benton will be
our champion. Such are, in the highest spheres of action, the
uncertainties and extravagancies of human passions!'' ²⁸
At the start of his term as Senate president, Dallas was called on
to make an administrative decision that had larger constitutional
consequences. Since 1815, senators had received a compensation of eight
dollars for each day they were present in Washington. Public opposition
routinely frustrated persistent congressional efforts to move instead to
an annual salary. In March 1845 several senators hit upon a novel way to
supplement their compensation--to collect travel expenses to and from
Washington for the special session that the Senate held at the start of
each new administration to confirm presidential appointments. The
problem was that senators had already been paid for their travel to the
final regular session of the Congress that had adjourned the day before
the special session began. When veteran Secretary of the Senate Asbury
Dickins informed Dallas that ``no distinct and controlling decision''
had ever been made on this issue, Dallas ruled in a lengthy written
opinion that each senator should be paid for travel at the beginning and
end of each session ``without any enquiry or regard as to where he
actually was or how he was actually engaged . . . and without any
enquiry or regard as to, where he intends to travel or remain when the
Senate adjourns.'' This decision unleashed a flood of applications from
current and former senators for compensation for travel to earlier
special sessions, until Dallas advised that the ruling would not be
applied retroactively. Several years later, in response to a Treasury
Department challenge of the Dallas ruling, the attorney general
concluded that the ``president of the Senate is the sole judge of the
amounts of compensation due and his certificate is conclusive'' and that
``mileage is part of a Senator's compensation, and not mere defrayment
of travelling expenses, and hence actual travel is not necessary.''
²⁹
Dallas followed the custom of members of Congress who rented rooms,
for the duration of a congressional session, either on Capitol Hill or
closer to the White House. During the regular session of the Twenty-
ninth Congress, from December 1845 through August 1846, he resided at
Henry Riell's boardinghouse within a short walk of the Capitol at Third
Street and Maryland Avenue, NE. For the first session of the Thirtieth
Congress, from December 1847 to August 1848, he lived at Mrs. Gadsby's
on President's Square across from the White House. For his final
session, from December 1848 to March 1849, he moved several blocks to
Mr. Levi Williams' boardinghouse on the north side of Pennsylvania
Avenue, between 17th and 18th Streets, Northwest.³⁰
At the beginning of his first regular session in December 1845,
Dallas set a daily routine in which he arrived at the vice president's
office in the Capitol at 9 a.m., remained busily engaged there receiving
visitors and presiding until 4 p.m., adjourned to his lodgings for
lunch, and then returned to the Capitol until 9 or 10 p.m. For a
diversion, he would stroll around the Capitol grounds or walk down
Pennsylvania Avenue.³¹ The newly refurbished Senate chamber
he pronounced ``redeemed from a thousand barbarisms.'' But he confided
to his son that he expected the coming session to ``be one of the most
important, disturbed, and protracted'' in the nation's history and
feared that the weakness of administration supporters in the Senate
``may exact more exertion from me than would otherwise fall my share.''
³²
Dallas regularly complained about the inconveniences and demands of
his daily life as vice president. His wife disliked Washington and
remained in Philadelphia except for rare visits. He dined frequently
with Treasury Secretary Robert Walker and his nephew U.S. Coast Survey
Superintendent Alexander Dallas Bache (a great-grandson of Benjamin
Franklin). His biographer reports that during these years, the vice
president allowed himself one luxury--a stylish African American
coachman who wore a distinctive black hat with broad band and steel
buckle. Dallas was ill a great deal and complained of digestive
disorders and sore feet, which he routinely bathed in hot water
augmented with mustard or cayenne pepper.
Always concerned about earning enough money to support his desired
social position and his wife's easy spending habits, Dallas supplemented
his $5,000 government salary by maintaining an active law practice
during his vice-presidency. He handled several high-profile cases
against the federal government, including a claim against the Treasury
Department for $15 million. The decision would be made by his close
friend and relative by marriage, Treasury Secretary Robert Walker.
Dallas, whose cocounsel in the case was Senator Daniel Webster,
considered that ``unless Walker has lost his intelligence and fairness,
[the case] will be a lucrative one.'' To Dallas' dismay and veiled
anger, Walker decided against his client.³³
At the mid-point in his vice-presidency, Dallas accepted a $1,000
fee for a secondary role in representing wealthy Philadelphian Pierce
Butler in his celebrated divorce from the Shakespearean actress Fanny
Kemble. Fearing that the nation's top legal talent would be attracted to
Kemble's side, Butler preemptively purchased much of that talent,
including Dallas and Daniel Webster. Despite intense criticism by
political opponents for cashing in on his national prominence, the vice
president tossed off these attacks as the ``hissing and gobbling'' of
``snakes and geese'' and spent his final months in office arranging an
expanded legal partnership with his son Philip.³⁴

Tariffs and Westward Expansion

Dallas determined that he would use his vice-presidential position
to advance two of the administration's major objectives: tariff
reduction and territorial expansion. As a Pennsylvanian, Dallas had
traditionally supported the protectionist tariff policy that his state's
coal and iron interests demanded. But as vice president, elected on a
platform dedicated to tariff reduction, he agreed to do anything
necessary to realize that goal. Dallas equated the vice president's
constitutional power to break tied votes in the Senate with the
president's constitutional power to veto acts of Congress. At the end of
his vice-presidential term, Dallas claimed that he cast thirty tie-
breaking votes during his four years in office (although only nineteen
of these have been identified in Senate records). Taking obvious
personal satisfaction in this record, Dallas singled out this
achievement and the fairness with which he believed he accomplished it
in his farewell address to the Senate.³⁵ Not interested in
political suicide, however, Dallas sought to avoid having to exercise
his singular constitutional prerogative on the tariff issue, actively
lobbying senators during the debate over Treasury Secretary Walker's
tariff bill in the summer of 1846. He complained to his wife (whom he
sometimes addressed as ``Mrs. Vice'') that the Senate speeches on the
subject were ``as vapid as inexhaustible. . . . All sorts of ridiculous
efforts are making, by letters, newspaper-paragraphs, and personal
visits, to affect the Vice's casting vote, by persuasion or threat.''
³⁶
Despite Dallas' efforts to avoid taking a stand, the Senate
completed its voting on the Walker Tariff with a 27-to-27 tie. (A
twenty-eighth vote in favor was held in reserve by a senator who opposed
the measure but agreed to follow the instructions of his state
legislature to support it.) When he cast the tie-breaking vote in favor
of the tariff on July 28, 1846, Dallas rationalized that he had studied
the distribution of Senate support and concluded that backing for the
measure came from all regions of the country. Additionally, the measure
had overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives, a body closer to
public sentiment. He apprehensively explained to the citizens of
Pennsylvania that ``an officer, elected by the suffrages of all twenty-
eight states, and bound by his oath and every constitutional obligation,
faithfully and fairly to represent, in the execution of his high trust,
all the citizens of the Union'' could not ``narrow his great sphere and
act with reference only to [Pennsylvania's] interests.'' While his
action, based on a mixture of party loyalty and political opportunism,
earned Dallas the respect of the president and certain party leaders--
and possible votes in 1848 from the southern and western states that
supported low tariffs--it effectively demolished his home state
political base, ending any serious prospects for future elective office.
(He even advised his wife in a message hand-delivered by the Senate
sergeant at arms, ``If there be the slightest indication of a
disposition to riot in the city of Philadelphia, owing to the passage of
the Tariff Bill, pack up and bring the whole brood to Washington.'')
³⁷
While Dallas' tariff vote destroyed him in Pennsylvania, his
aggressive views on Oregon and the Mexican War crippled his campaign
efforts elsewhere in the nation.³⁸ In his last hope of
building the necessary national support to gain the White House, the
vice president shifted his attention to the aggressive, expansionist
foreign policy program embodied in the concept of ``Manifest Destiny.''
He actively supported efforts to gain control of Texas, the Southwest,
Cuba, and disputed portions of the Oregon territory.
The joint United States-British occupation of the vast western
territory in the region north of the forty-second parallel and south of
the boundary at fifty-four degrees, forty minutes, was scheduled for
renewal in 1847. Dallas seized the opportunity in 1846 to call for a
``settlement'' at the 54 deg. 40' line, even at the risk of war with
Great Britain. For several months early in 1846, the vice president
pursued this position--seeking to broaden his national political base--
until President Polk and British leaders agreed to compromise on a
northern boundary at the forty-ninth parallel. This outcome satisfied
Dallas, as it removed his earlier fear that the United States would be
caught in a two-front war, with Great Britain over the Oregon boundary
and with Mexico over control of Texas. Now the nation would be free to
concentrate on war with Mexico, a conflict that Dallas hoped would serve
to unify the Democratic party and propel him to the White House. As the
Mexican War continued into 1847, Dallas expanded his own objective to
the taking of all Mexico. Again, a moderate course advanced by more
realistic leaders prevailed and forced Dallas to applaud publicly the
result that gained for the United States the Mexican states of
California and New Mexico.
The events of 1846 extinguished Dallas' presidential fire. Although
he remained strong in Philadelphia and its immediate precincts, Buchanan
sapped his strength throughout the rest of their state. The vice
president, incapable of the intense and sustained personal drive
necessary to secure the nomination, nonetheless sought to bolster his
political standing by advocating popular sovereignty as a solution to
the crippling issue of allowing slavery in the territories. This stance
only hardened the opposition against him and he soon abandoned his
presidential quest.³⁹ Democratic party leaders originally
looked to Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor as their 1848 standard-bearer.
When the general cast his lot with the Whigs, Democrats turned to
Michigan's Lewis Cass, who took the nomination at the Baltimore
convention on the fourth ballot. They chose General William O. Butler as
the vice-presidential candidate. With Martin Van Buren's third-party
candidacy eroding the Democratic vote, Taylor and his running mate
Millard Fillmore easily won the election.
By the end of the Mexican War in 1848, relations between Polk and
Dallas had deteriorated to the point that the two men rarely spoke to
one another. From the first days of his vice-presidency, Dallas
complained to his wife Sophia and others that the president cared little
for his advice on either small matters or major affairs of state. At the
outbreak of the war with Mexico, Dallas confided, ``In making the
officers of the new Regiment of mounted riflemen, the tenant of the
White House has maintained his consistency of action by excluding every
one for whom I felt an interest.'' When Polk summoned the vice president
to the White House for ``a most important communication,'' Dallas told
Sophia that Polk had a habit of ``making mountains out of molehills.''
and that the meeting was ``another illustration of the mountain and the
mouse. I am heartily sick of factitious importance.'' Dallas considered
Polk to be ``cold, devious, and two-faced.'' When he received Thomas
Macauley's newly published History of England, he noted that the
author's description of Charles I's ``defects of character''--
faithlessness and cunning--``are so directly applicable to President
Polk as almost to be curious.'' ⁴⁰

Last Session

Dallas entered the sunset of his vice-presidency at the three-month
final session of the Thirtieth Congress, beginning on December 4, 1848.
On the following day at noon, the Senate convened for the reading by its
clerk of President Polk's State of the Union message. Dallas listened
for a while, until boredom compelled him to turn the chair over to
Senator William King. ``It was insufferably long, and some of its
topics, a dissertation on the American system and one on the Veto Power
especially, were almost ludicrous from their being misplaced and
prolix.'' ⁴¹ This ``lame duck'' session, with its
contentiousness and inaction, proved particularly frustrating as the
Democrats sought to defer action on the volatile issues. ``The great
party project of the Session is to try hard to do nothing:--leaving all
unsettled questions, and especially the free soil one, to harass Genl.
Taylor next winter.'' ⁴²
Dallas was constantly aware of his responsibilities for maintaining
order on the Senate floor. During the contentious final session,
Mississippi's Henry Foote constantly baited Missouri's Thomas Hart
Benton. While Benton never hesitated to bully other adversaries, he
inexplicably refrained from challenging the diminutive Mississippian. As
the Senate adjourned for the day on February 10, 1849, Benton approached
Dallas and, in a whisper, asked whether he intended to act on his
earlier request that alcoholic beverages be banned in the Senate. Dallas
responded by asking whether any drinking had been taking place in the
chamber. ``Yes, in quantities, in every part, and at all times,''
responded the agitated Missourian. Dallas, believing that Benton's
concern stemmed from an effort to curb Foote's behavior and ``to excuse
his own silent disregard of it in that way,'' instructed the sergeant at
arms to ban liquor on the Senate side of the Capitol, except for members
claiming to require it for medicinal purposes.⁴³
Dallas told his wife that he was tempted to return home, leaving his
Senate duties to a president pro tempore, but he felt obligated to
remain at the Capitol for the important business of receiving the
presidential electoral ballots, addressed to his attention, that were
then arriving from the individual states. He explained that his duty was
to ``mark on each [envelope containing a state's ballots] the day and
manner of receiving it, and file them with the Secretary [of the
Senate], of course without breaking the seals. If a messenger hand me
the list, I give him a certificate to that effect, on which he is
entitled to be paid his expenses, at the Treasury Department.''
⁴⁴
The president expressed to the vice president his ambivalence about
his plans for the forthcoming inauguration of Zachary Taylor. If the
planners reserved a place for him, he would attend, otherwise he would
follow Van Buren's 1841 precedent and simply go home. Dallas said he
would try to ``follow the proper courtesies of public life,'' unless he
too was intentionally slighted. He examined the practice of his
predecessors and found Richard M. Johnson to be the only vice president
to have attended the swearing in of his successor.
On March 2, 1849, Dallas followed the vice-presidential custom of
delivering a farewell address to the Senate and then stepping aside so
that the Senate could elect a president pro tempore to bridge the
transition between administrations. In remarks more exalted in phrasing
than the observations of his personal diary and correspondence, Dallas
praised the Senate for the ``elevated principle and dignified tone which
mark [its] proceedings; the frank and yet forbearing temper of its
discussions; the mutual manifestations of conciliatory deference, so
just and appropriate among the delegates of independent States; and the
consequent calmness and precision of its legislative action,'' which he
believed had ``attracted to it a very large share of veneration and
confidence.'' He noted that, on occasion, tempers flared into ``sudden
impulses of feeling,'' but these ``transient disturbances'' were rare
and passed ``over the scene like flashes which do but startle, and then
cease, [serving] only to exhibit in stronger relief the grave decorum of
its general conduct.'' ⁴⁵
To a standing ovation, Dallas left the chamber in what he believed
would be ``the last scene of my public life.'' He recorded in his diary
that ``Mr. Filmore [sic] called at my chamber in the Capitol today,
shortly I had left the Senate, and remained for an hour, making
enquiries as to the forms of proceeding and the general duties annexed
to the office he was about assuming. He was good enough to say that
every body had told him I eclipsed as a presiding officer, all of my
predecessors, and that he felt extreme diffidence in undertaking to
follow me. Of course, after this, I took pleasure in answering all his
questions.'' ⁴⁶
Dallas left Washington largely embittered about the price of success
in public life, which he believed led ``almost invariably to poverty and
ignorance. Truth, Courage, Candour, Wisdom, Firmness, Honor and Religion
may by accident now and then be serviceable:-- but a steady perseverance
in them leads inevitably to private life.'' ⁴⁷ His only
regret about leaving the Senate was that he would miss the ``strange
political tableau [that] would present itself on the floor of the Senate
Chamber . . . on the 6. of March next [if] Mr. Clay, Genl. Cass, Mr. Van
Buren, Mr, Calhoun, Mr. Webster, and Col. Benton were grouped together!
Such a convocation of self-imagined gods could not fail to be followed
by much thunder and lightening.'' But, he consoled himself, ``All this
galaxy, in the order of nature, may disappear in the course or two or
three years. When then? Why, the Sun will still shine, the earth still
roll upon its axis, and the worms of the Capitol be as numerous and
phosphorescent as ever.'' ⁴⁸

Later Years

Dallas returned to private life until 1856, when James Buchanan
resigned as minister to Great Britain to launch his presidential
campaign challenging President Franklin Pierce for the Democratic
nomination. Pierce, seeking to remove another potential rival for
reelection, named Dallas to that prize diplomatic post. Philadelphia
journalist John Forney, a longtime Buchanan ally who had once described
Dallas as ``below mediocre as a public man,'' thought the sixty-four-
year-old Dallas fit the part. ``I do not know anything more charming,
always excepting a lovely woman, than a handsome old man--one who, like
a winter apple, is ruddy and ripe with time, and yet sound to the heart.
Such a man was George M. Dallas.'' ⁴⁹ After Buchanan won the
presidency, he retained Dallas at the Court of St. James but conducted
sensitive diplomatic relations with Great Britain from the White House.
Tired and longing for the comforts of home and family, Dallas resigned
his post in May 1861. As a states' rights Unionist, he was deeply
saddened by the eclipse of his Democratic party and its failure to
prevent civil war. He died at the age of seventy-two on December 31,
1864.
GEORGE M. DALLAS

NOTES

¹ George M. Dallas to unknown addressee, 1845 [?], in Roy
M. Nichols, ``The Library: The Mystery of the Dallas Papers (Part I),''
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 73 (July 1949): 373
[hereafter cited as Nichols-I].
² Lewis A. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 5th ed.
(Portland, OR, 1982), p. 205.
³ John M. Belohlavek, George Mifflin Dallas: Jacksonian
Patrician (University Park, PA, 1977), pp. 13-14.
⁴ Ibid. pp. 4-5.
⁵ Ibid., p. 15.
⁶ Ibid., p. 5.
⁷ Ibid., p. 27.
⁸ Ibid., p. 37.
⁹ Quoted in ibid., p. 43.
¹⁰ Bruce Ambacher, ``George M. Dallas and the Bank War,''
Pennsylvania History 42 (April 1975): 135.
¹¹ Belohlavek, p. 77.
¹² Charles Sellers, ``Election of 1844,'' in History of
American Presidential Elections, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
and Fred L. Israel (New York, 1971), 1:759-72.
¹³ John Arthur Garraty, Silas Wright (New York, 1949),
pp. 280-82.
¹⁴ Belohlavek, pp. 86-88; Sellers, pp. 772-73.
¹⁵ Belohlavek, p. 88.
¹⁶ Sidney George Fisher quoted in ibid., p. 89.
¹⁷ By the time of the presidential elections of 1840 and
1844, states were increasingly selecting presidential electors by
popular vote, rather than by vote of their legislatures. With
presidential elections scheduled on a variety of days throughout the
states, conditions were ripe for election fraud. Both political parties
organized gangs of voters who moved from state to state in an attempt to
boost tallies in close elections. Finally, in 1845 Congress established
a uniform date for presidential elections--the first Tuesday after the
first Monday in November. Congressional elections were not similarly
standardized until 1872. Peter H. Argersinger, ``Electoral Processes,''
Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York, 1984), 2:496.
¹⁸ Sellers, p. 795; Belohlavek, p. 97.
¹⁹ Paul H. Beregeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk
(Lawrence, KS, 1987), pp. 16-17.
²⁰ Dallas to Polk, December 15, 1845; Dallas to Sophia,
February 14, 1845 in Nichols-I, pp. 355-60.
²¹ Dallas to Robert J. Walker, November 6, 1844, quoted
in Belohlavek, p. 100.
²² Belohlavek, pp. 105-10.
²³ See Chapter 7 of this book, ``John C. Calhoun,'' pp.
10-12.
²⁴ U.S., Congress, Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 1st
sess., p. 20.
²⁵ Ibid., pp. 19-22; Belohlavek, pp. 107-9; Dallas to
Sophia, December 9, 1845, Nichols-I, p. 370.
²⁶ Ingersoll had accused Webster of corruption and
embezzlement while serving as secretary of state. Dallas to Sophia,
April 7, 1846, Nichols-I, pp. 375-76; Roy F. Nichols, ``The Library: The
Mystery of the Dallas Papers (Part II),'' The Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography 73 (October 1949): 480 [hereafter cited as
Nichols-II].
²⁷ U.S., Congress, Senate, Journal, 29th Cong., Extra
Session, Appendix, p. 274.
²⁸ Dallas to Sophia, November 27, 1845, Nichols-I, p.
366.
²⁹ Ruth Ketring Nuermberger, ``Asbury Dickins (1780-
1861): A Career in Government Service,'' The North Carolina Historical
Review 24 (July 1947): 311-12; Dallas to Sophia, March 17, 1845,
Nichols-I, p. 365. On March 3, 1851, the president approved a statute
(Chapter 42) ending the practice of paying members of the previous
Congress for mileage to attend the Senate special session beginning on
March 4, 1853, and every four years thereafter.
³⁰ Nichols-I, p. 391; Nichols-II, p. 475.
³¹ Dallas to Sophia, December 2, 1845, Nichols-I, p. 369.
³² Dallas to Sophia, November 27, 1845, ibid., p. 367.
³³ Belohlavek, pp. 134-35.
³⁴ Ibid., pp. 135-36; Dallas to Sophia, December 10,
1848, Nichols-II, p. 483.
³⁵ Senate Journal, 30th Cong., 2d sess., March 2, 1849,
p. 294. Nineteen of the thirty votes that Dallas claimed to have cast
have been identified in records of Senate floor proceedings. If Dallas'
figure is accepted, he would hold the record among vice presidents for
exercising this constitutional prerogative (although some scholars have
credited John Adams with casting as many as thirty tie-breaking votes--
see Chapter 1, note 1). If the lower figure is accurate, it still places
him just behind John Adams--and just ahead of John C. Calhoun--for the
number of ties broken in a four-year period. For a list of vice-
presidential tie-breaking votes, see U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate,
1789-1989, by Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc., 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess.,
vol. 4, Historical Statistics, 1789-1992, 1993, pp. 640-46.
³⁶ Dallas to Sophia, July 17, 1846, Nichols-I, pp. 384-
85.
³⁷ Dallas' public letter quoted in Charles John Biddle,
Eulogy upon the Hon. George Mifflin Dallas Delivered before the Bar of
Philadelphia, February 11, 1865 (Philadelphia, 1865), p. 36; Belohlavek,
pp. 113-14; Dallas to Sophia, July 30, 1846, Nichols-I, p. 386.
³⁸ Belohlavek, p. 118.
³⁹ Charles McCool Snyder, The Jacksonian Heritage:
Pennsylvania Politics, 1833-1848 (Harrisburg, PA, 1958), pp. 205-7;
Frederick Moore Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire
(Cranbury, NJ, 1994), p. 91.
⁴⁰ Dallas to Sophia, June 7, 1846, Nichols-I, pp. 381-82;
Dallas diary, January 14, 1849, Nichols-II, pp. 492-93; Belohlavek, pp.
132-33.
⁴¹ Dallas diary, December 5, 1848, Nichols-II, p. 475.
⁴² Dallas to Sophia, December 7, 1848, ibid., p. 477.
⁴³ Dallas diary, February 10, 1849, ibid., pp. 512-13.
⁴⁴ Dallas to Sophia, December 7, 1848; Dallas diary,
December 8, 1848, ibid., pp. 477-78.
⁴⁵ Senate Journal, 30th Cong., 2d sess., March 2, 1849,
pp. 293-94.
⁴⁶ Dallas diary, March 2, 1849, Nichols-II, pp. 515-16.
⁴⁷ Dallas diary, January 28, 1849, ibid., p. 501; Dallas
diary, March 2, 1849, ibid., pp. 516-17.
⁴⁸ Dallas diary, January 28, 1849, ibid., p. 502.
⁴⁹ Belohlavek, p. 107; John W. Forney, Anecdotes of
Public Men (New York, 1881), 2:102.
?

Chapter 12

MILLARD FILLMORE

1849-1850

MILLARD FILLMORE
MILLARD FILLMORE

Chapter 12

MILLARD FILLMORE

12th Vice President: 1849-1850

I know how difficult it is to determine what is and what
is not in order, to restrain improper language, and yet not
abridge the freedom of debate. But all must see how
important it is that the first departure from the strict
rule of parliamentary decorum be checked, as a slight
attack, or even insinuation of a personal character, often
provokes a more severe retort, which brings out a more
disorderly reply, each Senator feeling a justification in
the previous aggression. There is, therefore, no point so
proper to interpose for the preservation of order as to
check the first violation of it.
--Millard Fillmore, April 3, 1850
The new vice president needed a clerk. Millard Fillmore suffered
from an eye disorder that limited his ability to read by candlelight,
yet his official duties kept him so busy during the daytime that he had
to put off reading and preparing his correspondence until evening. A
clerk would be most useful. When Fillmore's immediate predecessor,
George Dallas, took office in 1845, no funding was provided for a vice-
presidential clerk because there had been no vice president since 1841,
when John Tyler had succeeded to the presidency after the death of
William Henry Harrison. Senator Willie Mangum (W-NC), who had fulfilled
the office's major constitutional function as Senate president pro
tempore from 1842 to 1845, had considered his duties too light to
justify continuing the perquisite that Vice President Richard M. Johnson
had enjoyed during his 1837-1841 term. Aware of these precedents,
Fillmore asked Mangum, one of the Whig party's senior senators, to
introduce the necessary authorizing resolution. When Mangum did so, a
Democratic senator immediately objected, noting that former Vice
President Dallas had gotten along just fine without a clerk. Mangum
responded by citing the example of Vice President Johnson, also a
Democrat. The Democratic senator withdrew his objection and Fillmore got
his clerk. From this experience, Fillmore may have learned both how much
the Senate valued precedent and how little some of its members regarded
the office of vice president.¹
Millard Fillmore rose to the vice-presidency, in part, because he
was from New York. In presidential elections from 1812 to 1968, that
state had the nation's largest congressional delegation and therefore
was entitled to cast more votes in the electoral college than any other
state. New York's electoral riches account for the fact that, during the
century from 1801 to 1901, eight of the twenty-two vice presidents
called that state home. In designing a presidential ticket that would
attract large blocks of electoral votes, the national parties always
paid very careful attention to New York political leaders.
Millard Fillmore would occupy the nation's second highest office for
fewer than seventeen months. During his brief tenure, he suffered the
fate of other vice presidents: his president ignored him, his state's
party leaders undercut him, and the Senate over which he presided barely
tolerated him. Yet the office benefitted him, just as he improved it.
The experience ratified and extended his stature as a significant
national figure. When Zachary Taylor's death thrust Fillmore into the
presidency, few seriously doubted that he was up to the job. His close
relations with senators at a time when the Senate served as the final
arbiter of crucial national policy issues eased passage of the vital
compromise legislation that staved off national political disintegration
for another decade. To his role as the Senate's president, Fillmore
brought a deep knowledge and understanding of the institution's rules,
precedents, and culture. Aware that the incendiary climate in the Senate
chamber during 1850 could foster an explosion of devastating national
consequence, he insisted on order, decorum, and fair play. For his
successors, he provided a valuable example, couched in the spirit of
Thomas Jefferson a half century earlier.

Early Years

Millard Fillmore was born on January 7, 1800, into an impoverished
farm family in the central New York frontier town of Locke. The second
of Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore's nine children, Millard found little
time for formal schooling and had barely learned to read by the age of
seventeen. As a youth he worked on his father's farm--developing a
muscular chest and broad shoulders that would remain a distinguishing
physical characteristic for years to come--and he served apprenticeships
to a cloth dresser and a textile mill operator. Aware of his educational
deficiencies, young Millard struggled to improve his reading skills,
carrying a dictionary on his daily rounds.² At age nineteen,
he enrolled in a small academy in the town of New Hope, where he engaged
in his first formal education, as well as a budding relationship with
Abigail Powers, a local minister's daughter. When Millard returned to
the central New York tenant farm, the judge who owned the property
recognized his potential and provided him with essential financial and
educational support to pursue a legal career. Young Fillmore taught in a
local school and saved enough money to buy out the time remaining in his
textile mill apprenticeship. When, before long, personal differences
caused Millard and the judge to part ways, the young man once more
returned to work on his father's farm. In 1820, the elder Fillmore moved
his family west to the town of Aurora, eighteen miles from Buffalo.
There Millard resumed his work as a teacher and as a law clerk, until he
was admitted to the New York bar in 1824. He then opened a small law
practice in East Aurora and in 1826 married Abigail Powers.³
In 1830 Millard and Abigail settled in Buffalo, the thriving western
terminus of the Erie Canal. His practice flourished, as the local
business community came to recognize him as an energetic, careful, and
talented lawyer. An impressive figure, Fillmore stood six feet tall and
handsome, with sparkling blue eyes, a pinkish complexion, a jovial and
kindly demeanor, and polished manners. He enjoyed dressing in the latest
fashions, displaying impeccable good taste that masked his humble
origins. The Fillmore family, which now included a son and daughter,
rose rapidly in Buffalo society. Millard and Abigail regularly
entertained the city's elite and others with whom he associated in
founding and promoting local educational, cultural, and civic
institutions.
Buffalo's proximity to major water transportation routes predisposed
Fillmore to be a strong supporter of John Quincy Adams' National
Republicans and Henry Clay's ``American System'' of internal
improvements, tariffs, and national bank. In 1828, Fillmore met Albany
editor and political boss Thurlow Weed. Weed saw in Fillmore a natural
politician and assisted his campaign, as a National Republican, for a
seat in the state assembly. Despite the strong contrary tide that swept
Democrat Andrew Jackson into the White House, Fillmore won his race.
Over the next few years, he rose to leadership in western New York's
newly emerging Whig party, sponsoring legislation beneficial to
transportation, as well as financial and educational enterprises.
Fillmore and Weed would remain close allies for many years.⁴

In the House of Representatives

In 1832, Anti-Mason and National Republican party voters in the
congressional district that encompassed Buffalo elected Fillmore to the
U.S. House of Representatives. There he served a single term and
dedicated himself to merging those two parties into a strong Whig party
in opposition to President Jackson's policies. Maneuvering to repair ill
feelings between his supporting party factions, Fillmore removed himself
from a reelection bid in 1834, but reentered the contest in 1836. He
resumed his seat in the House the following year and served there until
1843.⁵ When the Whigs took control of the White House and
both houses of Congress for the first time in 1841, Fillmore's allies in
the House nominated him for the post of Speaker. Although he came in
second to a candidate supported by Henry Clay, he was subsequently
elected chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, a powerful position
at this time of national financial crisis. His major accomplishment as
chairman was to steer through his chamber's rough waters, and against
the force of President John Tyler's opposition, the protective Tariff of
1842, a key revenue-raising component of his party's plan for economic
recovery. The heads of executive branch agencies came to fear the
chairman's quietly efficient scrutiny of their budget requests, as he
routinely returned their spending estimates heavily marked in red pencil
with notes asking for thorough justification of matters great and
small.⁶ At the end of the Twenty-seventh Congress, in March
1843, Fillmore again abandoned the political and social life of
Washington, which he heartily disliked, for the quiet pleasures of
Buffalo.

Neither Vice President nor Governor

Whig party elder statesman John Quincy Adams visited Buffalo in the
summer of 1843 to praise publicly his former house colleague's
achievements and to urge him to return to government service. Still
enjoying the high regard of his party allies as a result of his
successful management of the 1842 tariff, Fillmore had decided to launch
a behind-the-scenes campaign for the Whig party's 1844 vice-presidential
nomination. He learned, however, that state party strategist Thurlow
Weed coveted that spot for his close ally, former New York governor
William Seward, against whom Fillmore ``harbored a jealousy that had in
it something of the petulance of a child.'' ⁷ To derail this
scheme, Fillmore made a bargain with John Collier of Binghamton, a New
York City-supported antagonist of the party's Weed-Seward Albany
faction. Fillmore would support Collier for governor and Collier would
put his influence behind Fillmore's vice-presidential quest. The plan
fell apart when Seward declared he had no interest in the number two
position. To protect against the election of his enemy Collier, Weed
urged Fillmore to shift his focus and seek the governorship. Fillmore
initially refused. Weed then quietly went to work to sabotage any
chances that his faction-ridden party would award Fillmore its vice-
presidential nomination. He hinted to delegates at the Whigs' Baltimore
convention that Seward would accept a draft, while loudly proclaiming
that no Whig but Fillmore could win the governorship. Seeing through
Weed's machinations, Fillmore wrote an ally: ``I need not tell you that
I have no desire to run for governor. . . . I am not willing to be
treacherously killed by this pretended kindness. . . . Do not suppose
for a moment that I think they desire my nomination for governor.''
⁸ Weed's tactics succeeded in denying Fillmore the vice-
presidential nomination, as Theodore Frelinghuysen won a third-ballot
nomination to join Henry Clay on the party's ticket.
Henry Clay made northern antislavery Whigs nervous. Soon after
receiving the party's presidential nomination with a vow of opposition
to the annexation of Texas, which seemed certain to become a slave
state, he shifted to a more ambivalent stance. As abolitionists among
New York's Whigs began to explore alliances with other parties, Weed
redoubled his efforts to solidify the state party by putting Fillmore at
the top of its ticket in the race for governor. Under Weed's pressure,
John Collier withdrew in favor of Fillmore, who then received the
unanimous nomination of the New York state Whig convention. Aware that
the governorship could be a way station on the road to greater national
ambitions, Fillmore set aside his earlier reluctance. He ran a strong
campaign based on his opposition to Texas annexation, which he believed
would benefit slaveholders at the expense of the rest of the country.
Fillmore's views, however, proved unpopular with many voters,
particularly recent immigrants who resented his party's nativist, anti-
Catholic stance. In vain did Fillmore try to appeal to foreign-born
voters by working to create a German-language newspaper in Buffalo. He
lost by ten thousand votes to Democrat Silas Wright, who earlier in the
year had turned down his party's nomination as vice president in favor
of this race.
The disaffection of New York's antislavery Whigs accounted for
Fillmore's defeat, and the loss of that pivotal state also cost Henry
Clay the presidency. Despite his setback, Fillmore emerged as his
party's state leader, much to the irritation of Seward and Weed, who
feared the New York Whig party's center of influence would thereby shift
westward from their Albany power base to Fillmore's in Buffalo. Thus
began a politically destructive geographical and ideological
polarization between Fillmore in the state's western districts and the
Seward-Weed forces in the east.⁹

Ambition for National Office

In his earlier life, Fillmore had shown no compelling ambition for
public office, despite the evidence of his 1844 vice-presidential and
gubernatorial campaigns. Twice he had given up his seat in the U.S.
House of Representatives for other goals, and the center of his personal
and political universe seemed to be the city of Buffalo, where his law
practice was flourishing. By 1847, however, as in 1844, Fillmore had
grown restless away from the larger state and national arenas. He had
become deeply hostile toward President James K. Polk, whose
administration was reversing Whig economic gains. In addition, the
president was leading the nation in a war with Mexico aimed at acquiring
western territories, presumably to feed slavery's insatiable appetite.
In this frame of mind, Fillmore readily accepted his party's nomination
for the influential post of state comptroller. (He would have preferred
a U.S. Senate seat, but none was available.) By a wide margin over his
Democratic opponent, Fillmore won the election, and his political star
again began to rise. In Albany, he built a record of accomplishment that
enlarged his already considerable popularity. While comptroller,
Fillmore retained a national presence, regularly denouncing President
Polk's war with Mexico, so that by 1848, northern Whigs had come to view
the New York comptroller as a logical vice-presidential choice to
balance the likely presidential candidacy of war hero General Zachary
Taylor.¹⁰

The June 1848 Whig Convention

When the Whigs gathered at Philadelphia in June 1848, party leaders
expected that General Taylor would win their presidential nomination. A
Louisiana slaveholder, Taylor lacked partisan political experience and
commitment. He had never voted in a presidential election, but he was an
obviously electable military hero and had the important support of the
southern or ``Cotton Whig'' branch of the party. Despite unhappiness
among the party's antislavery elements in the North and West, and a
sputtering effort to revive Henry Clay's candidacy (Clay lamented, ``I
wish I could slay a Mexican.'' ¹¹), Taylor gained the Whig
nomination on the fourth ballot.
Following the selection of Taylor, convention chairman John Collier,
a New Yorker and skillful parliamentary tactician, took the rostrum and
gained control of Henry Clay's disappointed and angry forces, who
threatened to disrupt the convention. Assuring the agitated delegates
that New York would actively support Taylor, Collier presented a peace
offering--a ``surprise'' candidate for vice president. On hearing the
name of Millard Fillmore, many opponents of Taylor set aside their
reservations and joined to support the new ticket. By the second ballot,
the prize was Fillmore's.¹² Although Collier had skillfully
associated Fillmore with Clay, playing on his well-established advocacy
of Whig legislative programs, the nominee was by no means broadly
sympathetic to the Kentucky statesman. However, the nervous delegates
were in no mood for an extended examination of Fillmore's beliefs.
Collier saw that Fillmore would balance the ticket and block fellow New
Yorkers Seward and Weed, whose wishes for a return to a larger role in
Whig affairs threatened to further polarize that party's factions. Weed
reluctantly acquiesced to the nomination, while Seward remained deeply
concerned. ¹³
The same contentiousness reflected in the 1848 convention's
proceedings made it inadvisable for party leaders to develop a specific
platform. Instead, the Whig candidates devised their positions to fit
the prejudices of specific regions. Candidate Fillmore told southern
audiences that he ``regarded slavery as an evil, but one with which the
National Government had nothing to do.'' Under the Constitution, he
contended, ``the whole power over that question was vested in the
several states where the institution was tolerated. If they regarded it
as a blessing, they had a constitutional right to enjoy it; and if they
regarded it as an evil, they had the power and knew best how to apply
the remedy.'' As for Congress, Fillmore concluded that it had no power
to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. He dodged
entirely the more ominous issue of slavery in the
territories.¹⁴
In the weeks after the national convention, Thurlow Weed and other
northern Whig leaders who suspected Taylor of Democratic sympathies
considered moves to undercut his candidacy by influencing state party
conventions to select panels of unpledged presidential electors.
Fillmore defused this subversive strategy by persuading Taylor to write
and publish a letter in which he distanced himself from his vocal
Democratic supporters. In the so-called Allison Letter, Taylor asserted
that Congress, not the president, should control the nation's policy
agenda. ``The personal opinions of the individual who may happen to
occupy the executive chair ought not to control the action of Congress
upon questions of domestic policy; nor ought his objections to be
interposed where questions of constitutional power have been settled by
the various departments of government, and acquiesced in by the
people.'' ¹⁵
Thanks in great measure to the influence of the Allison Letter and
Fillmore's hard work, as well as to the Free Soil party candidacy of
Martin Van Buren that divided traditional northern Democratic ranks, the
Taylor-Fillmore ticket won New York state by a narrow margin, providing
barely enough electoral votes to swing the election to the
Whigs.¹⁶ Expressing a common belief that the Whigs had sold
out their principles with the selection of Taylor, journalist Horace
Greeley, a Seward-Weed ally, concluded that the party was ``at once
triumphant and undone.'' ¹⁷

A New Administration

Millard Fillmore shared Zachary Taylor's belief in a strong
legislature and a compliant executive. In a letter written immediately
after his election, he explained that in all areas not directly covered
by the Constitution, ``as to all other questions of mere policy, where
Congress has the constitutional right to legislate, the will of the
people, as expressed through their representatives in Congress, is to
control, and that will is not to be defeated by the arbitrary
interposition of the [executive] veto power.'' By adhering to this
classic Whig doctrine, Taylor and Fillmore hoped to avoid the roiling
sectional controversies that could easily wreck their administration,
leaving them to the people's representatives in Congress. With guarded
optimism, Fillmore saw the 1848 election ``as putting an end to all
ideas of disunion. It raises up a national party, occupying a middle
ground, and leaves the fanatics and disunionists, north and south,
without the hope of destroying the fair fabric of our constitution.''
¹⁸ Yet, even as he wrote this, secessionist conventions were
gathering in the South and antislavery societies in the North were
stating their legislative demands. As word of the revolutions sweeping
Europe reached the United States, it became clear that the political
climate in the months ahead would hardly be free of grave challenges to
the nation's constitutional order.
In the months before taking his oath of office, Fillmore had reason
to believe his would be an active vice-presidency. Thurlow Weed heard
that President-elect Taylor, fearing the unaccustomed administrative
burdens that awaited him, had said ``I wish Mr. Fillmore would take all
of the business into his own hands.'' The ill-informed Taylor believed
that the vice president would be an official member of his cabinet. Weed
worried that Fillmore would use his new position to take control of New
York state's lucrative federal patronage appointments, which would
surely accelerate the political decline of that state's once-potent
Weed-Seward political faction.¹⁹
In a typically crafty move to rescue their fortunes, Weed lobbied
Fillmore to support Seward's candidacy for the Senate over that of John
Collier, who had engineered Fillmore's vice-presidential nomination. In
return, Weed promised full consultation in all state patronage matters.
Anxious to secure his own political base in New York before moving onto
the national stage, Fillmore abandoned Collier and yielded to Weed's
entreaties, despite his misgivings based on twenty years of experience
with the duplicitous political boss. As a result of Fillmore's shift,
Seward obtained the necessary votes in the state legislature to win the
Senate seat. He headed to Washington with the vice president-elect after
both men, at a dinner with Weed in Albany, had agreed to consult with
one another from time to time on the state's rich federal patronage.
Outwardly cordial to Fillmore, Seward harbored a dark plot, conceived by
Weed, to sabotage Fillmore's control over New York's federal
appointments. Fillmore would pay dearly for his abandonment of
Collier.²⁰
In 1849, March 4 fell on a Sunday. In observance of the Christian
sabbath, President-elect Taylor chose to defer his public oath-taking to
the following day.²¹ Thus, on a cloudy and brisk Monday
morning, Fillmore met Vice President George Dallas at Willard's Hotel on
Pennsylvania Avenue, the preferred lodging place of both men. At 11
a.m., the two men set out for Capitol Hill in an open carriage.
Onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue had difficulty telling the present and
future vice presidents apart. Both were large, clean-shaven men, dressed
in somber black with full heads of white hair. Only Fillmore's muscular
torso, pink face, and sparkling blue eyes distinguished him. At this
point in the transition process, as the president-elect was making key
appointments to his cabinet and thereby setting the tone of his
administration, Taylor and Fillmore had met only for social occasions.
Yet, Fillmore seemed unconcerned that Taylor had not bothered to take
advantage of his broad knowledge of party leaders and
issues.²²
An honor guard of senators escorted Fillmore into the mobbed Senate
chamber where Vice President Dallas led him to the presiding officer's
chair. Chief Justice Roger Taney administered the oath of office, and
the new vice president delivered a brief inaugural address. Fillmore
confessed his inexperience in the customs and procedures of legislative
bodies and asked senators for their ``indulgent forbearance.'' In
cheerful words that he would soon have cause to reconsider, Fillmore
observed that ``the senate is composed of eminent statesmen, equally
distinguished for their high intellectual endowments and their amenity
of manners, whose persuasive eloquence is so happily tempered with
habitual courtesy, as to relieve your presiding officer from all that
would be painful in the discharge of his duty, and render his position
as agreeable as it must be instructive.'' ²³ When he
concluded his remarks, President Polk and General Taylor, after an
awkward delay, entered the chamber and took their assigned seats.
Pausing only briefly, the presidential party then formed ranks and
proceeded with the senators to the inaugural platform on the Capitol's
eastern portico.
In the weeks following the inauguration, Fillmore began to realize
that on patronage matters Weed and Seward had already succeeded in
weakening his limited influence with the new president. When the
important post of marshal for New York's northern district opened,
Seward and Weed, without consulting the vice president, sent word to
Secretary of State John Clayton that they and Fillmore had agreed on
P.V. Kellogg. Clayton forwarded Kellogg's name to the president, who
made the selection. Learning of their duplicity, Fillmore asked Taylor
to rescind the appointment, but the president refused to do so without
consulting Clayton. Weed rushed to Washington and advised the president
that Fillmore's anger reflected a parochial dispute between state
factions that could best be avoided by placing New York's patronage
recommendations in other hands. He suggested Governor Hamilton Fish, a
``neutral'' figure who was actually firmly within the Weed-Seward camp.
Taylor naively agreed.²⁴ The extent of Weed's victory became
clear when Fillmore recommended John Collier for the post of New York
naval officer. Taylor ignored the request and appointed a Weed ally to
that coveted position. The ultimate Fillmore defeat occurred in the vice
president's own political back yard with the appointment of a Weed-
Seward crony as collector for the port of Buffalo. A Buffalo newspaper
under Weed's control gloated, ``We could put up a cow against a Fillmore
nominee and defeat him.'' Reflecting on his lowly status, Fillmore wrote
Harvard President Edward Everett that since he had ``no favors to
bestow, either legislative or official,'' he expected a restful
tenure.²⁵
By November 1849, as Congress was about to convene for the first
regular session of the Taylor administration, Fillmore complained to the
president that the administration's appointments, influenced by Weed and
Seward, were destroying his influence in New York. He asked the
president whether in the future he would be ``treated as a friend or
foe?'' Taylor promised to do better--and soon forgot his promise.

The ``Memorable Senate of that fearful epoch''

Departing Vice President George M. Dallas had regretted that he
would not be present in the presiding officer's chair in December 1849
to witness the constellation of illustrious figures among the sixty-
member Senate of the Thirty-first Congress. Together again for what
would prove to be their last legislative session were the members of the
already legendary ``Great Triumvirate.'' Returning from a seven-year
absence, Henry Clay, whose initial Senate service dated back forty-three
years to 1806, had been the Whig party's preeminent legislative leader.
Daniel Webster, an eighteen-year Senate veteran, had taken a sabbatical
to be secretary of state in the first Whig administration under Harrison
and Tyler. And John C. Calhoun, gaunt, ill, and unlikely to survive the
session, had been vice president in the John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson administrations, as well as Webster's successor as secretary of
state in the Tyler presidency. Each of these men was by then identified
as the congressional personification of his region. Also present among
this eminent assembly were Stephen A. Douglas, the ``Little Giant'' of
Illinois; Michigan's Lewis Cass, the recently defeated Democratic
presidential candidate; Henry Foote and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi;
Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, approaching a thirty-year record of
Senate service; Seward of New York; Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, an eventual
U.S. chief justice; the fiery Sam Houston of Texas; and--at a lesser
level of eminence--the Dodges, Henry of Wisconsin and Augustus Caesar of
Iowa, the Senate's only father-son team.²⁶
The 1848 treaty concluding the war with Mexico added to the nation's
land mass 500,000 square miles of new western territories, including
present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and much of New Mexico, Arizona,
Wyoming, and Colorado. Confronting Congress and the new Taylor
administration in 1849 was the explosive issue of how these territories
would be organized with respect to slavery. Northern ``free soil''
advocates insisted that slavery be contained in the states where it
already existed. Southern planters and their allies believed that their
region's economic system should be allowed to operate without such
crippling restrictions. In the 1848 presidential campaign, Democratic
candidate Lewis Cass had supported the doctrine of ``popular
sovereignty,'' under which the residents of the territories would decide
the issue for themselves. Former President Martin Van Buren, running as
the Free Soil party candidate, demanded support for the 1846 Wilmot
Proviso. This amendment to an appropriations bill had failed to pass the
Senate, but it provided a rallying cry for antislavery forces by
proposing the prohibition of slavery in the territory acquired from
Mexico. The Whigs, standing on no platform, had simply ducked the issue
during the election campaign. Southerners who at first had believed a
Louisiana slaveholder would be a sympathetic president, soon had cause
for concern when Taylor began to take advice from Senator Seward and
other antislavery Whigs.
In his December 24, 1849, annual message to the newly convened
Congress, Taylor sought to defuse this portentous issue by proposing
that California and New Mexico apply immediately for statehood,
bypassing the territorial stage and the Wilmot Proviso controversy. As
Mexico had prohibited slavery in these regions, there would be few
slaveholders to vote in favor of that institution. In fact, California
had already approved a constitution that prohibited slavery. Southern
members of Congress realized that the admission of an additional free
state would destroy the balance between slave and free states that had
made the Senate the principal forum for debate on the slavery issue
since the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Taylor's message only further
inflamed the festering controversy among southerners, who argued that if
the territories had been taken with the blood of all Americans, they
should not be closed to those citizens choosing to move with their
property to those regions. Southern members introduced legislation
designed to preserve the balance of new states and to toughen fugitive
slave laws.
Conflicting northern proposals prompted Henry Clay in January 1850,
with the assistance of Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, to fashion an
``Omnibus Bill,'' a series of eight measures to address the slavery and
territorial issues that collectively became known as the ``Compromise of
1850.'' In the weeks that followed, the compelling oratory of Clay,
Webster, Calhoun, and others drew capacity crowds to the Senate chamber.
On March 7, Daniel Webster opened his classic address with these
memorable lines of national reconciliation--and political suicide--
addressed to Senate President Fillmore: ``Mr. President, I wish to speak
to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an
American.'' Four days later, Seward rose to denounce the proposed
compromise. Acknowledging that the Constitution protected slavery, he
asserted, ``But, there is a higher law than the Constitution, which
regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same
noble purposes.'' These speeches drew new battle lines, with Seward and
the mortally ill Calhoun representing their sections' hard-liners, while
Webster and Clay sought a middle way. Suddenly secession seemed a real
possibility.²⁷

Obligation to Preserve Order

The death of John C. Calhoun on March 31 removed a tenacious
opponent of the compromise. Fillmore presided at the statesman's funeral
in the Senate chamber on April 2. On the following day, responding to
the deeply unsettled atmosphere, the vice president took an
extraordinary step for a presiding officer--he addressed the Senate. His
topic: the vice president's ``powers and duties to preserve order.''
²⁸ Speaking in a solemn manner, Fillmore stated that when he
had first entered the office, he had assumed he would not be called on
to maintain order in a body with such a strong reputation for courtesy
and deference. He soon realized that he had been naive. To arm himself
against the challenge of recurring disorderly behavior, he had consulted
old Senate records and manuals of parliamentary practice for guidance.
He discovered, to no one's surprise, that the Constitution conferred on
the vice president the general, if not express, power to maintain order.
Rules 16 and 17, adopted during the First Congress in 1789, had defined
the vice president's constitutional prerogatives. He alone possessed the
authority to call a member to order, and his decision was to be
considered final, not subject to appeal to the full Senate. In 1828 the
Senate had adopted a rule that broadened the chamber's responsibility
for taking notice of unruly senators, while weakening the vice
president's role. Rule 6 provided that either the vice president or a
senator could take action to silence a disorderly senator. When a
senator called another senator to order, the offending words were to be
written down so that the vice president could review them. Then the vice
president would rule on the merits of the question, subject to an appeal
to the Senate to confirm or override that ruling. The Senate adopted
this rule after Vice President John C. Calhoun, in 1826, declared that
he lacked authority to call a senator to order. He also objected to the
arbitrary practice of not permitting an appeal to the full
Senate.²⁹
Fillmore acknowledged that senators were generally unwilling ``to
appear as volunteers in the discharge of such an invidious duty'' as
calling other senators to order. This reluctance placed a greater
obligation on the vice president to exercise that power. The House of
Representatives had recognized the unequal nature of the responsibility
in the wording of its comparable rule, which provided that ``the Speaker
shall, or a member may, call to order.'' Fillmore concluded that,
although some might charge him with impeding freedom of debate, he would
do his duty to contain the first spark of disorder before it ignited a
conflagration that would be more difficult to bring under control. ``[A]
slight attack, or even insinuation, of a personal character, often
provokes a more severe retort, which brings out a more disorderly reply,
each Senator feeling a justification in the previous aggression.''
³⁰ Exactly two weeks after Fillmore spoke these words, an
altercation of historic proportions on the Senate floor dramatically
validated his concern.
On Saturday, April 17, 1850, the Senate resumed its consideration of
the volatile legislation related to the slavery issue and California
statehood. Mississippi's senior senator, Henry S. Foote, made a motion
to refer the various proposals to a special thirteen-member committee,
which would reshape them into a new legislative plan. Since Missouri's
Thomas Hart Benton favored compromise but disliked Henry Clay's specific
plan, he offered an amendment to undercut Foote's motion. Seated in his
accustomed place at the dais, Vice President Fillmore ruled that
Benton's motion was in order, citing as his authority Thomas Jefferson's
Manual of Parliamentary Practice (Section 35.2). Henry Clay rose in
anger, charging that Fillmore's ruling was an attack on the Senate's
``power,'' ``consistency,'' and ``dignity.'' He demanded that the Senate
vote to reverse the decision.
Clay's complaint triggered an extended debate and a fiery exchange
in which Benton charged Foote and his southern allies with alarming the
country ``without reason, and against reason.'' ³¹ Foote, who
had been goading Benton for weeks, responded by asserting that Benton
had unfairly maligned the ``action of a band of patriots, worthy of the
highest laudation, and who will be held in veneration when their
calumniators, no matter who they may be, will be objects of general
loathing and contempt.'' ³² As Foote sharpened his reference
to Benton, ``a gentleman long denominated the oldest member of the
Senate--the father of the Senate,'' the burly sixty-eight-year-old
Missourian rose from his seat separated from Foote by four desks on the
rear row of the Democratic side, shoved back his chair, and advanced on
the diminutive forty-six-year-old senator. Foote stepped away from
Benton and into the chamber's nearby center aisle. He removed a ``five-
barrelled'' pistol from his pocket, cocked the weapon, and pointed it at
the floor. The Senate exploded in pandemonium. As alarmed senators
called for order and blocked Benton's advance, the ``father of the
Senate'' shrieked ``I have no pistols! Let him fire! Stand out of the
way, and let the assassin fire!'' Foote handed over his pistol to a
fellow senator, while Benton demanded to be searched to prove that he
had no weapon. Fillmore called for order, but the chamber would not be
quieted. As several senators shouted ``Be cool!'' Benton and Foote
angrily hurled justifications of their actions. Accepting that no
further business would be transacted that day, Fillmore recognized a
senator who moved to adjourn. Despite his earnest preparations, the vice
president now understood the near impossibility of maintaining order in
such a deeply fractured Senate.³³
On the following day, agreeing to Foote's interrupted proposal, the
Senate appointed the Select Committee of Thirteen to prepare a suitable
compromise measure. The committee reported on May 8, but for the
remainder of the spring and into the summer the Senate heatedly debated
the slavery-related issues that underlay the Benton-Foote controversy.
Vice President Fillmore's estrangement from the Taylor administration
deepened during this period and he turned his creative energies to
service on the newly established Smithsonian Institution's board of
regents.
On the Fourth of July, President Taylor celebrated the holiday by
laying a ceremonial stone at the partially constructed Washington
Monument and listening to a lengthy speech of reconciliation by Senator
Henry Foote. Suffering from extended exposure to the sun, the president
returned to the White House, ate some raw fruit and vegetables, which he
washed down with large amounts of iced milk. He soon fell ill with the
symptoms of acute gastroenteritis, which his doctors diagnosed as
``cholera morbus.'' Under their treatment, his condition worsened. On
July 7, 1850, Fillmore was called from the dais in the Senate chamber to
the White House to keep vigil outside the president's bedroom. Late in
the evening of July 9, a cabinet messenger went to Fillmore's quarters
in the Willard Hotel to inform the sleepless vice president that Taylor
was dead.³⁴

President Fillmore

On the morning of July 10 a presidential messenger carried into the
Senate chamber a letter in which Millard Fillmore announced the ``most
afflicting bereavement'' of President Taylor's death and his own
intention to take the presidential oath at noon in the House chamber.
This time, unlike the first unplanned presidential transition less than
a decade earlier, no one seriously questioned Fillmore's right to take
on the full powers of the presidency. At the appointed hour, before a
joint session of Congress, Fillmore took his presidential oath. Later in
the day, the entire Taylor cabinet resigned to give the new chief
executive the opportunity to set his own course.
As president, Fillmore moved to end the stalemate over the western
lands issue. By the end of July, Clay's omnibus compromise bill was
dead, replaced by a series of individual bills that Senator Stephen
Douglas had proposed as a means to achieve Clay's objectives. Working
closely and tactfully with legislative leaders, Fillmore succeeded in
shaping these measures to be acceptable to all regions and sentiments.
Within a few weeks, the individual bills became law. Passage of this
Compromise of 1850 resulted in a major political realignment, which
placed fatal pressures on the Whig party. Northern Whigs were furious
about the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the laws enacted as part of the
compromise, which Fillmore had only reluctantly signed. Thus, while
Whigs in the South urged moderation, their northern counterparts
embraced antislavery politics. A modern observer of the Whig party in
1850 characterized its many divisions, including the Seward-Fillmore
animosity, as manifesting ``the inescapable tension within Whiggery
between progress and stability, between moral urgency and social
order.'' ³⁵
Against this dark political landscape, Fillmore decided once again
that he preferred the charms of life in Buffalo to the contentiousness
of the nation's capital. Throughout 1851, the president let it be known
that he would not seek a full term in 1852, hoping to advance Daniel
Webster's candidacy. Webster, however, was too frail to attract the
serious support of Whig national convention delegates. At the last
minute, Fillmore half-heartedly decided to run, in order to prevent the
nomination of Mexican War hero General Winfield Scott, the candidate of
Fillmore's archenemy, William Seward. At the convention, delegates
deadlocked between Seward, Scott, and Webster. After forty-six ballots,
Fillmore tried to strike a bargain with Webster. The aging statesman,
the weakest of the three, refused to transfer his delegates. They and
others ultimately shifted to Scott, giving him the nomination on the
fifty-third ballot. In the general election, southern Whigs abandoned
their party to give the election to the Democratic candidate, New
Hampshire's Franklin Pierce. The Whig party would never again be a
significant national political force.
Anticipating his return to a happy life in Buffalo, Fillmore left a
chilled White House on a bitterly cold March 4, 1853, to attend Pierce's
inauguration. His wife, Abigail, who had suffered poor health for many
months, stood through the extended proceedings with other dignitaries in
the slush and lightly falling snow. The next day, she complained of cold
symptoms, which developed into pneumonia. Her condition worsened and she
died on March 30. Fillmore returned to Buffalo, where in July 1854 his
favorite daughter, Mary Abigail, died at the age of twenty-two. Grief-
stricken and seeking a diversion, he reentered the national political
arena by accepting the 1856 presidential nomination of the anti-
Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party, composed of former Whig
moderates and conservative southern unionists. In that ill-starred
venture, the former president carried only Maryland.
In 1858 Fillmore married Caroline McIntosh, a wealthy Albany widow,
and resumed his role as Buffalo's leading educator and
philanthropist.³⁶ He served as the first chancellor of the
University of Buffalo and the first president of the Buffalo Historical
Society. Millard Fillmore died at the age of seventy-four on March 8,
1874.
MILLARD FILLMORE2

NOTES

¹ U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe, 33d Cong.,
1st sess., pp. 4-5.
² Robert J. Rayback, Millard Fillmore: Biography of a
President (Norwalk, CT, 1959), pp. 4-7.
³ Ibid., pp. 8-15.
⁴ Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and
Millard Fillmore (Lawrence, KS, 1988), pp. 44-45.
⁵ Rayback, pp. 81-85.
⁶ U.S., Congress, House, The Committee on Ways and Means:
A Bicentennial History, 1789-1989, by Donald R. Kennon and Rebecca M.
Rogers, H. Doc. 100-244, 100th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 105, 125-29.
⁷ Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the
Lobby (Boston, 1947), p. 127.
⁸ Rayback, pp. 148-51.
⁹ Ibid., pp. 155-59; Glyndon Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward (New York, 1967), pp. 100-103.
¹⁰ Rayback, pp. 177-78.
¹¹ Quoted in Gil Troy, ``Election of 1848,'' in Running
for President: The Candidates and Their Images, ed. Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., vol. 1, (New York, 1994), p. 188.
¹² Rayback, pp. 183-86; Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p. 161.
¹³ Thurlow Weed, Autobiography (1883), p. 585; Van
Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 107-9.
¹⁴ Rayback, pp. 186-87.
¹⁵ W.L. Barre, The Life and Public Services of Millard
Fillmore (New York, 1971; reprint of 1856 edition), p. 308.
¹⁶ Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard
Fillmore, p. 46.
¹⁷ Troy, 1:193.
¹⁸ Barre, p. 311.
¹⁹ Rayback, p. 192; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp.
114-15.
²⁰ Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard
Fillmore, p. 165; Rayback, pp. 192-96; Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, pp.
165-67; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 111-12.
²¹ Twenty-eight years had passed since an inauguration
day had fallen on a Sunday. On that occasion, in 1821, President Monroe
had taken Chief Justice John Marshall's advice to postpone ``the oath
until Monday unless some official duty should require its being taken on
Sunday.'' (Stephen W. Stathis and Ronald C. Moe, ``America's Other
Inauguration,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly, 10 (Fall 1980): 553.)
The story that Senate President Pro Tempore David Atchison served as
``president for a day'' on March 4, 1849, is without foundation. Since
Atchison's Senate term expired on March 3, the Senate was without a
president pro tempore, who under the presidential succession plan then
in effect might have taken over. When the Senate convened on March 5 for
the new Congress, it passed a resolution renewing Atchison's appointment
as the temporary presiding officer. Based on the 1821 Monroe precedent,
it was assumed that the new president began his term on March 4, but
could not exercise the duties of the office until he had taken the
formal oath. (George H. Haynes, ``President of the United States for a
Single Day,'' American Historical Review 30 (January 1925): 308-10.
²² Rayback, pp. 196-97.
²³ Barre, pp. 212-13.
²⁴ Rayback, pp. 200-202; Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward, pp. 114-15.
²⁵ Smith, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, p. 163,
Rayback, pp. 203-4.
²⁶ Barre, p. 316.
²⁷ This familiar story is recounted in two modern-era
studies: William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at
Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), Chapter 28, and Merrill D. Peterson,
The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), pp.
449-76.
²⁸ Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 631-
32. Out of his concern for proper decorum, Fillmore reportedly ordered
the removal of the large urn of snuff that had traditionally been placed
on the vice president's desk. He acted because its availability caused
members to congregate there, talking loudly and obscuring his view of
the chamber. (This story is drawn from the recollections of Senate
Assistant Doorkeeper Isaac Bassett as reported in the New York Times,
June 7, 1894.)
²⁹ See Chapter 7, ``John C. Calhoun,'' pp. 89-92.
³⁰ Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 632.
³¹ Ibid., p. 762.
³² Ibid.
³³ Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of
Thomas Hart Benton (New York, 1958), pp. 271-72; Smith, The Presidencies
of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, pp. 138-39; Congressional Globe,
31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 762-64.
³⁴ Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard
Fillmore, pp. 156-57; Rayback, pp. 238-39.
³⁵ Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the
American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), p. 207; Mark J. Stegmaier, Texas, New
Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute and Sectional
Crisis (Kent, OH, 1996), p. 319.
³⁶ Rayback, p. 416.
?

Chapter 13

WILLIAM RUFUS DEVANE KING

1853

WILLIAM R. KING
WILLIAM R. KING

Chapter 13

WILLIAM RUFUS DEVANE KING

13th Vice President: 1853

The ceremony, although simple, was very sad and
impressive, and will never be forgotten by any who were
present. To see an old man, on the very verge of the grave,
clothed with honors which he cared not for, and invested
with authority which he could never exercise, was truly
touching. It was only by persuasion that Mr. King would go
through with the ceremony, as he looked on it as an idle
form, for he said he was conscious he would not live many
weeks.
--National Intelligencer, April 8, 1853
Since the adjournment of Congress, the Vice President of
the United States has passed from the scenes of earth,
without having entered upon the duties of the station to
which he had been called by the voice of his countrymen.
Having occupied, almost continuously, for more than thirty
years, a seat in one or the other of the two Houses of
Congress, and having by his singular purity and wisdom,
secured unbounded confidence and universal respect, his
failing health was watched by the nation with painful
solicitude. His loss to the country, under all
circumstances, has been justly regarded as irreparable.
--Franklin Pierce, December 5, 1853 ¹
On April 18, 1853, death cheated William King of his life's calling.
Experience and temperament had uniquely prepared him to be the Senate's
constitutional presiding officer, but tuberculosis denied him that role
as vice president.² Between 1836 and 1850, King had won a
record-breaking eleven elections to the post of Senate president pro
tempore. At the time of his 1852 election to the vice-presidency, only
one other member in the body's entire history had exceeded King's
twenty-eight years and ten months of Senate service.³ Warm-
hearted and even-tempered, King personified balance and fairness in
deeply disputatious times. Elected to the vice-presidential term that
ran from March 4, 1853, to March 3, 1857, King was positioned to occupy
center stage during such tumultuous future performances as the party
rending 1854 struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and--the single most
dramatic act in the Senate's history--the 1856 caning of Massachusetts
Senator Charles Sumner by a South Carolina representative. One can now
only speculate about the calming role that this natural mediator might
have played in such events, although, ultimately, personalities and
minds much stronger than his would direct the fateful course to national
disunion and civil war.
William King was far from a genius and he had little talent as an
orator. These qualities were so well noted during his lifetime that a
fellow southerner, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, felt free to
remark on them even in the speak-no-evil context of a funeral oration.
Hunter was quick to acknowledge, however, that this guileless and self-
effacing man was an individual of integrity, sound judgment, and rich
experience, who could be stern ``when the public interests or his
personal honor required it.'' Hunter and others lamented the demise of
such a moderate and conciliatory statesman at ``a period like this
[April 1853], pregnant with change, and teeming, perhaps, with great and
strange events.'' ⁴ Symbolic of the sectional balance that
King tried to achieve, the Virginia senator's eulogy was followed by one
from a longtime friend from Massachusetts, the renowned orator Edward
Everett. Everett reminded all that when the Senate over the past several
decades had needed a presiding officer in the absence of the vice
president, its members ``turned spontaneously'' to Senator King. ``He
possessed, in an eminent degree, that quickness of perception, that
promptness of decision, that familiarity with the now complicated rules
of congressional proceedings, and that urbanity of manner, which are
required in a presiding officer.'' ⁵

Early Career

William Rufus Devane King was born in Sampson County, North
Carolina, on April 7, 1786, the second son of William King and Margaret
Devane. His father, a wealthy planter and justice of the peace, had
fought in the Revolutionary War, served as a delegate in the state
convention called to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and was an occasional
member of the North Carolina state assembly. At the time of his son's
birth, he owned more than two dozen slaves. Young William studied at
local academies and at the University of North Carolina Preparatory
School, a facility established in 1795 to cater to the educational needs
of ``raw, mostly untaught youths of diverse ages and acquirements.''
⁶ He entered the University of North Carolina in the summer
of 1801 and proved to be a capable student, but he left that institution
at the end of his junior year.⁷ Following a period of legal
training with Fayetteville's William Duffy--one of the state's leading
lawyers--he gained admission to the North Carolina bar in 1805. A
Jeffersonian Republican, King served in the North Carolina legislature's
house of commons from 1808 to 1809, and then as solicitor of the fifth
circuit of the state superior court at Wilmington. In 1810, several
months short of the constitutionally prescribed age of twenty-five, he
won the Wilmington district's seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives.⁸ There he joined with House Speaker Henry
Clay, also a freshman member, John C. Calhoun, and other young,
expansionist ``warhawks'' of the Twelfth Congress in a determined and
successful campaign to initiate hostilities with Great Britain. In
November 1816, King traded lawmaking for diplomacy by resigning from the
House to serve as legation secretary under William Pinkney, recently
appointed U.S. minister to Russia. Pinkney and King traveled first to
the Kingdom of Naples in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain compensation
for seized American ships. In January 1817, they reached St. Petersburg,
where they served for a year. In February 1818, without waiting to be
formally recalled, Pinkney and King returned to the United
States.⁹
King then moved from North Carolina to the rich economic and
political opportunities of the newly organized Alabama Territory. In
October 1818, he purchased 750 acres of land and created an Alabama
River estate, ``King's Bend,'' six miles from the town of Cahaba, the
new state capital. In March 1819, King and several others organized a
land company and founded the nearby town of Selma, which he named for a
site in classical legend that occupied high bluffs above a
river.¹⁰ The town prospered because of its proximity to
Cahaba, which remained the state's capital until 1826. The former
congressman and diplomat rose quickly to local prominence and was
selected as a delegate to the territory's July 1819 constitutional
convention and then, in December 1819, as one of Alabama's first United
States senators.

Senator from Alabama

Despite his lengthy Senate service and his important role as
conciliator in a fractious era, William King is not today counted among
the great statesmen of the Senate's ``Golden Age.'' ¹¹ One
scholar of the period, mindful of King's practice of wearing a wig long
after such coverings had gone out of fashion, dismissed him as a ``tall,
prim, wigtopped mediocrity.'' Novelist John Updike, after his own
extended research, took a more positive view of the slender and courtly
statesman. Describing King's face as ``darkly handsome and smolderingly
receptive,'' he characterized the senator as ``one of those eminences
whose strong impression on their own times has suffered a gradual
erasure upon the tablets of history.'' ¹² A fellow senator
offered the following assessment:
He was distinguished by the scrupulous correctness of his conduct.
He was remarkable for his quiet and unobtrusive, but
active, practical usefulness as a legislator. He was
emphatically a business member of the Senate, and, without
ostentation, originated and perfected more useful measures
than many who filled the public eye by greater display and
daily commanded the applause of a listening Senate. . . .
[T]o his honor be it spoken, he never vexed the ear of the
Senate with ill-timed, tedious, or unnecessary
debate.¹³
A moderate Democrat, King became an active supporter of Andrew
Jackson soon after the 1825 decision of the House of Representatives to
select John Quincy Adams over Jackson for president. In the 1828
presidential election, Alabama cast its electoral votes for Jackson, due
in large measure to King's efforts. King generally supported the Jackson
administration during its stormy eight-year life, although as a
southerner he was also associated with the ``little Senate'' group
considered loyal to Jackson's nemesis, South Carolina's John C.
Calhoun.¹⁴ The Alabama senator shared Jackson's hostility to
Kentuckian Henry Clay's ``accursed American System'' of centralized
governmental action against foreign competition through protective
tariffs, a central banking system, and a public works program of canal
and road-building.
In 1831 and 1832, King used his chairmanship of the Senate Committee
on Public Lands to advance Jackson administration land policies.
Consistent with his long-held views on the subject, he attacked the
notion that public lands should be priced primarily to produce large
amounts of federal revenue (that would go ``to the East to pay the
pensioners and support the fortifications''); he believed public lands
should be sold only to those who actually planned to settle them. A
reduction in land prices would simultaneously stimulate territorial
settlement and national economic growth.¹⁵ King also
subscribed to his region's hostility to high protective tariffs, arguing
that high rates tax ``the many for the benefit of the few,'' but he
opposed John C. Calhoun's theory that the South had the right to
``nullify'' odious laws, such as the 1828 ``Tariff of Abominations.''
``I view [nullification] as neither peaceful nor constitutional, but
clearly revolutionary in its character, and if persevered in, must, in
the nature of things, result in the severance of the Union. From such a
calamity may God in His mercy deliver us.'' When Clay early in 1833
presented a compromise tariff bill that defused the building
confrontation between federal force and state resistance, King, ever the
moderate, quickly rose to support the measure. His moderation irritated
both President Jackson and southern hard-liners, who charged that he had
not worked hard enough to defend his region's interests.¹⁶
King contested Henry Clay's 1832 move to recharter the Bank of the
United States, not because he opposed the bank, but because he objected
to Clay's political opportunism, tied to that year's presidential
election. When, as part of that controversy, Jackson ordered the removal
of federal funds from the bank and then refused to respond to a Clay-
inspired Senate demand for a copy of a related document, the Senate took
the unprecedented action on March 28, 1834, of censuring the president.
Administration partisans, led by Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and
King, launched a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to expunge
the censure from the Senate's journal. King, who had become widely
respected for his knowledge of the Senate's rules and precedents, argued
that Jackson's refusal to produce the document was in no way an assault
on senatorial prerogatives. ``The Senate was in no danger,'' he
asserted, ``it had never been so strong or so saucy as it was at the
present moment; why, then, was it like the Italian beggar, continually
wounding itself, for the purpose of exciting the commiseration and
benevolence of the public.'' ¹⁷
King's conflict with Clay and the dangerous tenor of the times are
symbolized in the clash between the two men that took place in March
1841, as the Senate, under Clay's leadership, for the first time passed
to the control of a new Whig majority. A great battle developed over
Senate printing patronage as Clay sought to dismiss Democrat Francis P.
Blair, editor of the Washington Globe, as official Senate printer. Clay
``believed the Globe to be an infamous paper, and its chief editor an
infamous man.'' King responded that Blair's character would ``compare
gloriously'' to that of Clay. The Kentucky senator jumped to his feet
and shouted, ``That is false, it is a slanderous base and cowardly
declaration and the senator knows it to be so.'' King answered
ominously, ``Mr. President, I have no reply to make--none whatever. But
Mr. Clay deserves a response.'' King then wrote out a challenge to a
duel and had another senator deliver it to Clay, who belatedly realized
what trouble his hasty words had unleashed. As Clay and King selected
seconds and prepared for the imminent encounter, the Senate sergeant at
arms arrested both men and turned them over to a civil authority. Clay
posted a five-thousand-dollar bond as assurance that he would keep the
peace, ``and particularly towards William R. King.'' Each wanted the
matter behind him, but King insisted on ``an unequivocal apology.'' On
March 14, 1841, Clay apologized and noted that he would have been wiser
to have kept quiet despite the intensity of his feelings against Blair.
King then gave his own apology, after which Clay walked to King's desk
and said sweetly, ``King, give us a pinch of your snuff.'' King rose and
both men shook hands as applause engulfed the chamber.¹⁸

Vice-Presidential Ambitions

In the late 1830s, as a leading southern moderate among long-
serving, middle-aged senators, William King attracted attention within
the Democratic party as a prospective vice-presidential candidate for
the 1840 election. As early as 1838, dissatisfaction with Vice President
Richard M. Johnson for his negative impact on the 1836 race and his
scandalous personal life ¹⁹ caused party leaders to begin the
search for a strong second-term running mate for President Martin Van
Buren. King was a natural contender, having been on the national
political stage for a quarter century and having routinely substituted
for Johnson during the vice president's frequent absences from the
Senate chamber. He enjoyed significant support in the electorally
important state of Pennsylvania, thanks to his roommate and close ally
Senator James Buchanan. Buchanan wished to thwart the 1844 presidential
ambitions of both Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Secretary of State John
Forsyth by blocking their paths to the vice-presidency in 1840. (In the
closeness of their relationship in the years after 1834, King and
Buchanan--both lifelong bachelors--became known as the ``Siamese
twins.'' ²⁰) King assured Buchanan that in return for the
Pennsylvanian's help in obtaining the vice-presidency in 1840, he would
refuse to run for the presidency in 1844, thus clearing the way for
Buchanan. The Pennsylvania senator agreed to King's plan and circulated
his name among leading Democratic newspaper editors. The anticipated
renomination of President Van Buren, a New Yorker, required balancing by
a southerner such as King. By the start of 1840, however, King's vice-
presidential chances had evaporated because he was unable to generate
support from Democratic leaders in the influential states of North
Carolina and Pennsylvania. At the party's national convention in
Baltimore, a motion to give the second spot to King failed to draw
serious interest and party leaders decided to leave the vice-
presidential selection to the individual state party
organizations.²¹
In 1842, King's name again surfaced as a vice-presidential contender
for the 1844 Democratic ticket. Supporters of a presidential bid by
South Carolina's John C. Calhoun tried without success to dissuade King,
as there would be room for no more than one southerner on a national
slate. But by late 1843, the stronger candidacy of former President Van
Buren smothered Calhoun's aspirations. For Van Buren's running mate, the
names most frequently mentioned were James K. Polk and William King.
King's supporters argued that, as a Jacksonian and resident of a
southern state loyal to the Democratic party (a slap at Polk's Whig-
inclined Tennessee), he deserved the vice-presidency.²²
However, in a repeat of his troubles four years earlier, King was unable
to attract serious support in the electorally rich eastern states, so
that his candidacy had lost its vitality by the eve of the 1844
Baltimore convention. Meanwhile, Van Buren had destroyed his own chances
of becoming the presidential nominee with his announcement of opposition
to the annexation of Texas. King hoped that party leaders would fill
that void by selecting Buchanan, in which case he would again offer
himself for the second spot on the grounds that his presence would help
secure essential electoral votes from the wavering state of North
Carolina.
On April 9, 1844, President Tyler ended King's preconvention
maneuvering by appointing him minister to France. Throughout 1843 and
into early 1844, angry with Tyler's policies, the Senate had rejected
many of his nominations to major judicial, cabinet, and diplomatic
posts. Among these was the appointment as minister to France of Virginia
Representative Henry A. Wise, described by a modern historian as a
``high-strung, tobacco-chewing extrovert.'' ²³ As a result,
this sensitive post had remained vacant for eighteen months until Tyler
selected King, one of the Senate's most popular members. Easily
confirmed, King left for Paris and soon succeeded in his central
mission: to keep France from interfering with U.S. plans to annex
Texas.²⁴
From Paris, King kept actively in touch with national and Alabama
political developments. In April 1846 he wrote his friend James
Buchanan, now his boss as secretary of state, ``Most sincerely do I wish
that we had both remained in the Senate.'' ²⁵ King therefore
decided to run for his old Senate seat, then occupied by political rival
and fellow Democrat Dixon H. Lewis. Desiring to return in time to
influence the Alabama legislature's election, he left for the United
States in November 1846. In a three-way race that included Whig leader
Arthur Hopkins, the legislature took seventeen ballots during December
1847 but failed to make a selection. Throughout this hotly contested
battle between unionist and states' rights forces--a battle that one
modern historian of Alabama labeled ``probably the most significant
senatorial election in the antebellum period''--states rights' candidate
Lewis led, followed by Hopkins and then unionist King. On the eighteenth
ballot, in the only election defeat of his public career, King withdrew
and the seat went to Lewis.²⁶ King, however, did not have to
wait long to fulfill his senatorial ambitions. Within seven months,
Alabama's other Senate seat became vacant when President Polk named
Arthur Bagby minister to Russia. On July 1, 1848, the governor appointed
King to fill the eight months remaining in Bagby's term. Later that
year, in a close race with his nemesis Arthur Hopkins, King won a full
term.²⁷

Compromiser in 1850

The national mood had darkened during King's four-year absence from
the Senate. He told James Buchanan that he had doubts about the wisdom
of returning in those troubled days. ``A seat in the Senate is, I assure
you, far from being desirable to me; bringing with it as it does at this
particular time especially, great responsibility, great labor, and no
little anxiety.'' ²⁸ Characteristically, King tried to calm
the brewing storm. He urged northern senators to resist intensifying
pressures to introduce antislavery petitions. ``I speak as a senator who
has been here many years, and as one always anxious to see the members
of this body preserve that decorum and kindness toward each other which
secures to the body the respect in which it is held throughout the
country and the world.'' ²⁹ He supported the spirit, if not
always the specifics, of Henry Clay's compromise measures. He opposed
admitting California without the seasoning period of territorial status
and he believed that Congress had ``about as much constitutional power
to prohibit slavery from going into the Territories of the United States
as we have power to pass an act carrying slavery there.'' He believed
that abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia would be unfair to
the slaveholders in adjacent states, but he supported abolition of the
slave trade there.
As the regional positions hardened in the tumultuous early months of
1850, King lamented the ``banefull spirit of party'' that in dividing
the South encouraged northern extremists. In April, King's seniority and
moderate views earned him a place as one of two southern Democratic
representatives on the Senate's Select Committee of Thirteen, appointed
to review Henry Clay's compromise resolutions regarding territories and
slavery. With a majority of the committee's members, he agreed that
slavery was a ``rightful'' subject for legislative attention, but only
in the legislatures of states and not of territories. Thus, King took
the view of southern conservatives that the Constitution protected
owners in their control of slave property until a territory became a
state.³⁰ At home, he met bitter opposition from a faction of
``Southern Rights'' secessionists who argued that his voting record
better reflected the interests of Massachusetts, but an equally large
group of supporters praised his support for compromise, union, and
peace. He counseled patience, optimistically expecting the North to
respect southern rights, but warning that if that section's actions
jeopardized those rights--both constitutional and material--all southern
men should ``hurl defiance at the fanatical crew, and unitedly determine
to defend their rights at every hazard and every sacrifice.''
³¹

Arbiter of Decorum

The Senate chamber in 1850 was frequently jammed to capacity as the
major debates on slavery in the territories drew large crowds of House
members, reporters, and the general public eager to get a glimpse of the
likes of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois, Sam Houston of Texas, and others of the nation's
most notable public figures. As a frequent presiding officer, King
regularly acted to restore decorum. In this electrically charged
environment, he took every opportunity to remind other senators of his
need for their support ``to put down the least movement toward disorder,
or the slightest indulgence in personal remarks.'' ³²
In May, while Vice President Millard Fillmore was presiding, a
senator won adoption of a routine resolution to admit a local newspaper
reporter to the Senate floor. Dissatisfied with such flagrant
circumvention of the Senate's floor access rules, another member
suggested referring the matter to a committee. Several senators proposed
that the presiding officer be allowed to issue each member one admission
permit to award as he saw fit. According to the proposal, with a guest
waiting at the chamber's entrance, the host senator would go to the dais
and request his ticket from the vice president. New Jersey Senator
William Dayton predicted there would be few takers. ``All the
multitudinous persons who hang around the Capitol will not have the face
to ask Senators to go to the Vice President and formally get the permit
to allow them to come on the floor every day.'' Others laughed at the
dilemma of a senator having to decide between male and female guests and
the idea of such a system that would have sixty senatorial guests
contending with sixty senators and several hundred House members for
floor space in such cramped quarters. Senator Jefferson Davis of
Mississippi sounded the most realistic note: ``It is utterly impossible
to attempt to admit all who desire to come on the floor. . . . The evil
can only be remedied by an enlarged chamber.'' As the member most
identified with Senate decorum and tradition, King brought the debate to
a close by moving to refer the matter to a special committee, knowing
that another committee would soon propose the construction of new Senate
and House chambers, each with ample public galleries.³³

Finally Vice President

On July 10, 1850, Zachary Taylor's death placed Millard Fillmore in
the White House and left the vice-presidency vacant. On July 11, the
solemn Senate set aside the practice of having each party offer a
nomination for the president pro tempore's post and unanimously selected
King for the vacancy. This otherwise routine act took on special
significance, for King would be in effect the acting vice president of
the United States. King addressed the Senate in the tone of a vice
president offering an inaugural oration. Noting the unusual bipartisan
support for his election, King vowed to enforce the Senate's rules
``mildly, but firmly, and I trust impartially. . . . Should I err, I
look to my brother Senators, in a spirit of kindness, to correct my
errors.'' ³⁴ Continuing in the fashion of former Vice
President Fillmore, King worked hard to calm the angry seas that swelled
with increasing violence on the Senate floor.
King's long quest for the vice-presidency had resumed immediately
after he returned from France in 1846. However, his failure that year to
regain his Senate seat, coupled with deep ideological divisions within
the Alabama Democratic party, denied him the support necessary to launch
a vigorous national campaign. At the 1848 national convention in
Baltimore, following the nomination of Michigan's Lewis Cass for the
presidency, King's was among a half-dozen names placed before the
delegates. On the first ballot, he came in third. On the second ballot,
the convention selected Kentucky's General William O. Butler, a veteran
of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.³⁵
In January 1852, the Alabama state Democratic convention endorsed
the Compromise of 1850 and directed the state's national convention
delegates to support King for either the presidency or vice-presidency.
At the jam-packed, tumultuous Baltimore convention, delegates selected
Franklin Pierce on the forty-ninth ballot. In a peace gesture to the
Buchanan wing of the party, Pierce's supporters allowed Buchanan's
allies to fill the second position, knowing that they would select King.
On the second ballot, with only minor opposition, King finally captured
his prize.³⁶ During the ensuing campaign, King's
tuberculosis, which he believed he had contracted while in Paris, denied
him the active behind-the-scenes role that he might otherwise have
played, although he worked hard to assure his region's voters that New
Hampshire's Pierce was a ``northern man with southern principles.''
King's deteriorating physical condition clouded the victory that came in
November; Pierce's unwillingness to consult the vice-president-elect on
cabinet appointments deepened his malaise.
In November, King began to suffer from a worsening cough. A month
later, he described himself as looking like a skeleton and told friends
he doubted that he would ever recover. On December 20, two weeks into
the short December-March congressional session, King resigned his Senate
seat and made plans to regain his health away from wintertime
Washington.³⁷ On January 17, 1853, King left for the more
salutary climate of Cuba, by way of Key West, Florida; he reached Havana
in early February. Soon realizing that he would be unable to return to
Washington in time for the March 4, 1853, inauguration, King requested
that Congress permit him to take his oath in Cuba.³⁸
Consequently, for the only time in this nation's history, Congress
passed legislation allowing the vice-president-elect to be sworn in
outside the country. On March 24, 1853, near Matanzas, a seaport town
sixty miles east of Havana, the gravely ill statesman, too feeble to
stand unaided, became the nation's thirteenth vice president. Deciding
that he would make every effort to return to the United States, King set
sail for Mobile on April 6. He reached his Alabama plantation on April
17, but his struggle was at an end. The sixty-seven-year-old King died
there the following day. An opposition newspaper praised his ``purity
and patriotism'' and concluded, ``[t]hough not, perhaps, brilliant, he
was better--sensible, honest, never running into ultraism, but in the
contests between the State and the federal government, maintaining the
true conservative medium, so necessary to the preservation of the
constitution, the rights of the States and the Republic.'' ³⁹
WILLIAM R. KING

NOTES

¹ U.S., Congress, Senate, Journal, 33d Cong., 1st sess.,
p. 25.
² On taking office as president pro tempore in January
1837, King offered the following observations about the Senate and the
role of its presiding officer. They are similar in tone and formulation
to those that Vice President Aaron Burr uttered on March 2, 1805.
The Senate of the United States, gentlemen, is, from
its very organization, the great conservative body in
this republic. Here is the strong citadel of liberty. To
this body the intelligent and the virtuous, throughout
our wide-spread country, look with confidence for an
unwavering and unflinching resistance to the
encroachments of power on the one hand, and the
effervescence of popular excitement on the other. Unawed
and unseduced, it should firmly maintain the
constitution in its purity, and present an impregnable
barrier against every attack on that sacred instrument,
come it from what quarter it may. The demon of faction
should find no abiding place in this chamber, but every
heart and every head should be wholly occupied in
advancing the general welfare, and preserving,
unimpaired, the national honor. To insure success,
gentlemen, in the discharge of our high duties, we must
command the confidence and receive the support of the
people. Calm deliberation, courtesy toward each other,
order and decorum in debate, will go far, very far, to
inspire that confidence and command that support. It
becomes my duty, gentlemen, to banish (if practicable)
from this hall all personal altercation; to check, at
once, every remark of a character personally offensive;
to preserve order, and promote harmony. . . . I
earnestly solicit your co-operation, gentlemen, in
aiding my efforts promptly to put down every species of
disorder. (U.S., Congress, Senate, Register of Debates
in Congress, 24th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 618-19.)
³ As early as 1824, King regularly served as the chairman
of the Committee of the Whole, a long-since-abandoned parliamentary form
by which the full Senate could expedite its proceedings. (John Milton
Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' Ph.D. dissertation,
University of North Carolina, 1955, p. 81.) Prior to 1890, the Senate
elected its president pro tempore only when the vice president was away
from the chamber. Election to that post during the Senate's first
century was generally considered an acknowledgment of the Senate's
respect for the individual's judicious temperament. In later years, the
Senate designated a permanent president pro tempore for each Congress,
usually the senior member of the majority party. (U.S., Congress,
Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989: Addresses on the History of the United
States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st
sess., vol. 2, 1991, Chapter 6; vol. 4, Historical Statistics, 1993, pp.
647-53.)
⁴ U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe, 33d Cong.,
1st sess, pp. 19-21. See also U.S., Congress, Obituary Addresses on the
Occasion of the Death of the Hon. William R. King, of Alabama, Vice
President of the United States, Delivered in the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States, Eighth of December, 1853
(Washington, 1854), pp. 8-13, 37. Representative Sampson Harris (D-AL)
also commented that King lacked ``many of those great attributes of
mind, which dazzle and lead captive the admiring throng . . .'' (p. 37)
and the National Intelligencer began its obituary, ``Not endowed with
shining talents, though of excellent sense . . .'' (April 20, 1853).
⁵ Congressional Globe, 33d Cong., 1st sess, p. 20.
⁶ Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' pp.
3-5, 11-12.
⁷ No book-length biography of King exists. John Milton
Martin, the only modern-era scholar to have given King's career serious
consideration, prepared a 1955 doctoral dissertation (``William Rufus
King: Southern Moderate,'' University of North Carolina) and articles in
the early 1960s on King's role as a ``Jacksonian Senator'' and his
multiple quests for the vice-presidency. Biographies of King's leading
contemporaries and histories of nineteenth-century Alabama political
life give him only passing reference. A small unorganized collection of
his personal papers survives at the Alabama Department of Archives and
History in Montgomery. Incomplete records at the University of North
Carolina have led to conflicting accounts of his stay there. An error-
ridden biographical article by E.S.W. Dameron in that institution's
University Magazine (March 1905, p. 317-22) credits him with graduating
in 1803, but notes that the ``ravages of a century have despoiled his
Alma Mater of all account of his college life.'' Others have accepted
that information, including Thomas M. Owen in History of Alabama and
Dictionary of Alabama Biography, vol. 3 (Chicago, 1921), p. 983, and Roy
F. Nichols in ``William Rufus Devane King,'' Dictionary of American
Biography (vol. 10, p. 406). John M. Martin, King's only reliable modern
biographer, disagrees, indicating that he withdrew in 1804, ``William R.
King and the Compromise of 1850,'' The North Carolina Historical Review
39 (October 1962): 500. In his University of North Carolina doctoral
dissertation (pp. 20-22), Martin explores the matter in greater detail
and concludes that King felt he was sufficiently prepared to begin his
legal studies.
⁸ By the time the Twelfth Congress convened on November
4, 1811, King had reached the required age of twenty-five. In those
early years both houses of Congress occasionally ignored the minimum age
requirement, which was generally applied at the time the oath of office
was administered rather than on the date of election.
⁹ Martin, ``William R. King and the Compromise of 1850,''
p. 500; Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' Chapter 2.
¹⁰ Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' pp.
61-65. King took the name ``Selma'' from the poem by James Macpherson,
``the Song of Selma.'' Virginia O. Foscue, Place Names in Alabama
(Tuscaloosa, AL, 1989), pp. 26-27, 125; Writers' Program, Alabama,
Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South (WPA American Guide Series) (New
York, 1941), pp. 47-50, 237-38.
¹¹ The major documentary record of his Senate service is
found in the quasi-official proceedings of Congress, the Annals of
Congress (1811-1816; 1819-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress
(1824-1838), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1853). Yet even this
record is spare, as King made few substantive speeches, preferring to
preside rather than to debate. He never married or had children, thus
there were no direct heirs with a vested interest in preserving a useful
record of his service.
¹² Roy Nichols and Jeannette Nichols, ``Election of
1852,'' in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, ed.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., vol. 2 (New York, 1971), p. 942; John
Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York, 1992), pp. 227,
233.
¹³ Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 21.
¹⁴ John M. Martin, ``William R. King: Jacksonian
Senator,'' The Alabama Review 18 (October 1965): 243-45.
¹⁵ Martin, ``William R. King: Jacksonian Senator,'' pp.
247-51; Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' p. 77.
¹⁶ Martin, ``William R. King: Jacksonian Senator,'' pp.
253, 256.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 262.
¹⁸ This story is derived from the account presented in
Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York, 1991),
p. 574. Remini consulted many sources beyond the quasi-official
Congressional Globe (26th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 245, 247-249, 256-257),
which was reported in the third person and without the detail that
Remini located in contemporary newspapers, letters, and diary accounts.
See also Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' pp. 183-86.
¹⁹ See Chapter 9 of this volume, ``Richard Mentor
Johnson,'' p. 129.
²⁰ Philip Shriver Klein, President James Buchanan
(University Park, PA, 1962), p. 111; Novelist John Updike, in Memories
of the Ford Administration (pp. 227-41), speculates at length on the
nature of the intimacy between King and Buchanan.
²¹ John M. Martin, ``William R. King and the Vice
Presidency,'' The Alabama Review 16 (January 1963): 35-40; Klein, pp.
131-32.
²² Martin, ``William R. King and the Vice Presidency,''
pp. 43-44.
²³ John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union
(Baton Rouge, LA, 1988), p. 260.
²⁴ St. George Leakin Sioussat, ``John Caldwell Calhoun,''
in American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, ed. Samuel Flagg
Bemis, vol. 5 (New York, 1928), pp. 164-65, 169, 208, 300; Martin,
``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' Chapter 7.
²⁵ Letter of April 30, 1846, quoted in Martin, ``William
Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' p. 268.
²⁶ William Warren Rogers, et al., Alabama: The History of
a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1994), p. 155.
²⁷ Martin, ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate,'' pp.
274-81, 290-91, 300-303.
²⁸ Martin, ``William R. King and the Compromise of
1850,'' p. 501.
²⁹ Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 342.
³⁰ Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union, pp. 746-
47.
³¹ Ibid.
³² Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 915.
³³ Ibid., pp. 1054-55.
³⁴ Ibid., p. 1370.
³⁵ Martin, ``William R. King and the Vice Presidency,''
pp. 46-49.
³⁶ Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, 3d
ed. (Washington, DC, 1994), p. 43.
³⁷ Congressional Globe, 32d Cong., 2d sess., p. 89.
³⁸ In King's absence, Senator Lewis Cass, as the Senate's
oldest member, administered the oath of office to newly elected
senators. President Franklin Pierce made no reference to his absent
running mate during his inaugural address. Congress approved the
necessary legislation on March 2, 1853. (Congressional Globe, 32d Cong.,
2d sess., Appendix, p. 341.)
³⁹ Daily [Montgomery] Alabama Journal, April 20, 1853.
?

Chapter 14

JOHN CABELL BRECKINRIDGE

1857-1861

JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE
JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE

Chapter 14

JOHN CABELL BRECKINRIDGE

14th Vice President: 1857-1861

I trust that I have the courage to lead a forlorn hope.
--John C. Breckinridge, 1860
The only vice president ever to take up arms against the government
of the United States, John Cabell Breckinridge completed four years as
vice president under James Buchanan, ran for president as the Southern
Democratic candidate in 1860, and then returned to the Senate to lead
the remnants of the Democratic party for the first congressional session
during the Civil War. Although his cousin Mary Todd Lincoln resided in
the White House and his home state of Kentucky remained in the Union,
Breckinridge chose to volunteer his services to the Confederate army.
The United States Senate formally expelled him as a traitor. When the
Confederates were defeated, Breckinridge's personal secession forced him
into exile abroad, bringing his promising political career to a bitter
end.

An Illustrious Political Family

Born at ``Cabell's Dale,'' the Breckinridge family estate near
Lexington, Kentucky, on January 16, 1821, John Cabell Breckinridge was
named for his father and grandfather. The father, Joseph Cabell
Breckinridge, a rising young politician, died at the state capital at
the age of thirty-five. Left without resources, his wife took her
children back to Cabell's Dale to live with their grandmother, known
affectionately as ``Grandma Black Cap.'' She often regaled the children
with stories of their grandfather, the first John Breckinridge, who, in
addition to introducing the Kentucky Resolutions that denounced the
Alien and Sedition Acts, had helped secure the Louisiana Purchase and
had served during the administration of Thomas Jefferson first as a
Senate leader and then as attorney general. The grandfather might well
have become president one day but, like his son, he died prematurely.
The sense of family mission that his grandmother imparted shaped young
John C. Breckinridge's self-image and directed him towards a life in
public office. The family also believed strongly in education, since
Breckinridge's maternal grandfather, Samuel Stanhope Smith, had served
as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, and his uncle
Robert J. Breckinridge started Kentucky's public school system. The boy
attended the Presbyterian Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, where he
received his bachelor's degree at seventeen. He then attended Princeton
before returning to Lexington to study law at Transylvania
University.¹
A tall, strikingly handsome young man with a genial air and a
powerful voice, considered by many ``a perfect gentleman,'' Breckinridge
set out to make his fortune on the frontier. In 1841 he and his law
partner Thomas W. Bullock settled in the Mississippi River town of
Burlingame, in the Iowa Territory. There he might have entered politics
and pursued a career relatively free from the divisive issue of slavery,
but Iowa's fierce winter gave him influenza and made him homesick for
Kentucky. When he returned home on a visit in 1843, he met and soon
married Mary Cyrene Burch of Georgetown. The newlyweds settled in
Georgetown, and Breckinridge opened a law office in
Lexington.²

A Rapid Political Rise

When the Mexican War began, Breckinridge volunteered to serve as an
officer in a Kentucky infantry regiment. In Mexico, Major Breckinridge
won the support of his troops for his acts of kindness, being known to
give up his horse to sick and footsore soldiers. After six months in
Mexico City, he returned to Kentucky and to an almost inevitable
political career. In 1849, while still only twenty-eight years old, he
won a seat in the state house of representatives. In that election, as
in all his campaigns, he demonstrated both an exceptional ability as a
stump speaker and a politician's memory for names and faces. Shortly
after the election, he met for the first time the Illinois legislator
who had married his cousin Mary Todd. Abraham Lincoln, while visiting
his wife's family in Lexington, paid courtesy calls on the city's
lawyers. Lincoln and Breckinridge became friends, despite their
differences in party and ideology. Breckinridge was a Jacksonian
Democrat in a state that Senator Henry Clay had made a Whig bastion. In
1851, Breckinridge shocked the Whig party by winning the congressional
race in Clay's home district, a victory that also brought him to the
attention of national Democratic leaders. He arrived in Congress shortly
after the passage of Clay's Compromise of 1850, which had sought to
settle the issue of slavery in the territories. Breckinridge became a
spokesman for the proslavery Democrats, arguing that the federal
government had no right to interfere with slavery anywhere, either in
the District of Columbia or in any of the territories.³
Since Breckinridge defended both the Union and slavery, people
viewed him as a moderate. The Pennsylvania newspaper publisher and
political adventurer John W. Forney insisted that when Breckinridge came
to Congress ``he was in no sense an extremist.'' Forney recalled how the
young Breckinridge spoke with great respect about Texas Senator Sam
Houston, who denounced the dangers and evils of slavery. But Forney
thought that Breckinridge ``was too interesting a character to be
neglected by the able ultras of the South. They saw in his winning
manners, attractive appearance, and rare talent for public affairs,
exactly the elements they needed in their concealed designs against the
country.'' People noted that his uncle, Robert Breckinridge, was a
prominent antislavery man, and that as a state legislator Breckinridge
had aided the Kentucky Colonization Society (a branch of the American
Colonization Society), dedicated to gradual emancipation and the
resettlement of free blacks outside the United States. They suspected
that he held private concerns about the morality of slavery and that he
supported gradual emancipation. Yet, while Breckinridge was no planter
or large slaveholder, he owned a few household slaves and idealized the
southern way of life. He willingly defended slavery and white supremacy
against all critics.⁴

The Kansas-Nebraska Controversy

In Congress, Breckinridge became an ally of Illinois Senator Stephen
A. Douglas. When Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854,
which repealed the Missouri Compromise and left the issue of slavery in
the territories to the settlers themselves--a policy known as ``popular
sovereignty''--Breckinridge worked hard to enact the legislation. Going
to the White House, he served as a broker between Douglas and President
Franklin Pierce, persuading the president to support the bill. He also
spoke out in the House in favor of leaving the settlers ``free to form
their own institutions, and enter the Union with or without slavery, as
their constitutions should prescribe.'' ⁵
During those debates in March 1854, the normally even-tempered
Breckinridge exchanged angry words on the House floor with Democratic
Representative Francis B. Cutting of New York, almost provoking a duel.
``They were a high-strung pair,'' commented Breckinridge's friend
Forney. Cutting accused Breckinridge of ingratitude toward the North,
where he had raised campaign funds for his tough reelection campaign in
1853. Breckinridge, ``his eyes flashing fire,'' interrupted Cutting's
speech, denied his charges, denounced his language, and demanded an
apology. When Cutting refused, Breckinridge interpreted this as a
challenge to a duel. He proposed that they meet near Silver Spring, the
nearby Maryland home of his friend Francis P. Blair, and that they duel
with western rifles. The New Yorker objected that he had never handled a
western rifle and that as the challenged party he should pick the
weapons. Once it became clear that neither party considered himself the
challenger, they gained a face-saving means of withdrawing from the
``code of honor'' without fighting the duel. When the two next
encountered each other in the House, Breckinridge looked his adversary
in the eye and said: ``Cutting, give me a chew of tobacco!'' The New
Yorker drew a plug of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wad for
Breckinridge and another for himself, and both returned to their desks
chewing and looking happier. Those who observed the exchange compared it
to the American Indians' practice of smoking a peace pipe.⁶
Breckinridge supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the hope that it
would take slavery in the territories out of national politics, but the
act had entirely the opposite effect. Public outrage throughout the
North caused the Whig party to collapse and new antislavery parties, the
Republican and the American (Know-Nothing) parties, to rise in its wake.
When the spread of Know-Nothing lodges in his district jeopardized his
chances of reelection in 1855, Breckinridge declined to run for a third
term. He also rejected President Pierce's nomination to serve as
minister to Spain and negotiate American annexation of Cuba, despite the
Senate's confirmation of his appointment. Citing his wife's poor health
and his own precarious finances, Breckinridge returned to Kentucky. Land
speculation in the West helped him accumulate a considerable amount of
money during his absence from politics.⁷

The Youngest Vice President

As the Democratic convention approached in 1856, the three leading
contenders--President Pierce, Senator Douglas, and former Minister to
Great Britain James Buchanan--all courted Breckinridge. He attended the
convention as a delegate, voting first for Pierce and then switching to
Douglas. When Douglas withdrew as a gesture toward party unity, the
nomination went to Buchanan. The Kentucky delegation nominated former
House Speaker Linn Boyd for vice president. Then a Louisiana delegate
nominated Breckinridge. Gaining the floor, Breckinridge declined to run
against his delegation's nominee, but his speech deeply impressed the
convention. One Arkansas delegate admired ``his manner, his severely
simple style of delivery with scarcely an ornament [or] gesture and
deriving its force and eloquence solely from the remarkably choice ready
flow of words, the rich voice and intonation.'' The delegate noted that
``every member seemed riveted to his seat and each face seemed by
magnetic influence to be directed to him.'' When Boyd ran poorly on the
first ballot, the convention switched to Breckinridge and nominated him
on the second ballot. Although Tennessee's Governor Andrew Johnson
grumbled that Breckinridge's lack of national reputation would hurt the
ticket, Buchanan's managers were pleased with the choice. They thought
Breckinridge would appease Douglas, since the two men had been closely
identified through their work on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Being present
at the convention, Breckinridge was prevailed upon to make a short
acceptance speech, thanking the delegates for the nomination, endorsing
Buchanan and the platform, and reaffirming his position as a ``state's
rights man.'' The nominee was thirty-six years old--just a year over the
constitutional minimum age for holding the office--and his election
would make him the youngest vice president in American
history.⁸
Breckinridge spent most of the campaign in Kentucky, but he gave
speeches in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, defending the Kansas-Nebraska
Act. The election was a three-way race among the Democrats under
Buchanan, the Republicans under John Charles Fremont, and the Know-
Nothings under former President Millard Fillmore. Denouncing the
antislavery policies of the Republicans and Know-Nothings, Breckinridge
described himself not as proslavery but as a defender of the people's
constitutional right to make their own territorial laws, a position that
caused some Deep South extremists to accuse him of harboring
abolitionist views. In November, Democrats carried all the slaveholding
states except Maryland (which went Know-Nothing) and enough northern
states to win the election. Breckinridge was proud that Kentucky voted
for a Democratic presidential ticket for the first time since
1828.⁹

Strained Relations with Buchanan

Buchanan won the nomination and election primarily because nobody
knew where he stood on the issues, since he had been out of the country
for the past three years as minister to England. Although his supporters
promoted him as ``the man for the crisis,'' Buchanan was in fact the
worst man for the crisis. Narrow, secretive, petty, vindictive, and
blind to corruption within his administration, he proved unable to bind
together either the factions of his party or the regions of his nation.
A poor winner, Buchanan distrusted his rivals for the nomination and
refused to invite Stephen Douglas to join his cabinet or to take
seriously Douglas' patronage requests. Similarly snubbed, Breckinridge
quickly discovered that he held less influence with Buchanan as vice
president than he had as a member of the House with Pierce.¹⁰
Viewing Breckinridge as part of the Pierce-Douglas faction, Buchanan
almost never consulted him, and rarely invited him to the White House
for either political or social gatherings. Early in the new
administration, when the vice president asked for a private interview
with the president, he was told instead to call at the White House some
evening and ask to see Buchanan's niece and hostess, Harriet Lane.
Taking this as a rebuff, the proud Kentuckian left town without calling
on either Miss Lane or the president. His friends reported his
resentment to Buchanan, and in short order three of the president's
confidants wrote to tell Breckinridge that it had been a mistake. A
request to see Miss Lane was really a password to admit a caller to see
her uncle. How Breckinridge could have known this, they did not explain.
In fact, the vice president had no private meetings with the president
for over three years.¹¹
The new vice president bought property in the District of Columbia
and planned to construct, along with his good friends Senator Douglas
and Senator Henry Rice of Minnesota, three large, expensive, connected
houses at New Jersey Avenue and I Street that would become known as
``Minnesota Row.'' Before the construction was completed, however, the
friendship had become deeply strained when Douglas fell out with
President Buchanan over slavery in Kansas. A proslavery minority there
had sent to Washington a new territorial constitution--known as the
Lecompton Constitution. Buchanan threw his weight behind the Lecompton
Constitution as a device for admitting Kansas as a state and defusing
the explosive issue of slavery in the territory. But Douglas objected
that the Lecompton Constitution made a mockery out of popular
sovereignty and warned that he would fight it as a fraud. Recalling the
way Andrew Jackson had dealt with his opponents, Buchanan said, ``Mr.
Douglas, I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed
from an Administration of his choice without being crushed.'' To which
Douglas replied, ``Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General
Jackson is dead.'' Between these two poles, the vice president vainly
sought to steer a neutral course. He sided with Buchanan on the
Lecompton Constitution but endorsed Douglas for reelection to the
Senate.¹²

An Impartial Presiding Officer

As vice president in such a turbulent era, Breckinridge won respect
for presiding gracefully and impartially over the Senate. On January 4,
1859, when the Senate met for the last time in its old chamber, he used
the occasion to deliver an eloquent appeal for national unity. During
its half century in the chamber, the Senate had grown from thirty-two to
sixty-four members. The expansion of the nation forced them to move to a
new, more spacious chamber. During those years, he observed, the
Constitution had ``survived peace and war, prosperity and adversity'' to
protect ``the larger personal freedom compatible with public order.'' He
recalled the legislative labors of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John
C. Calhoun, whose performance in that chamber challenged their
successors ``to give the Union a destiny not unworthy of the past.'' He
trusted that in the future ``another Senate, in another age, shall bear
to a new and larger Chamber, this Constitution vigorous and inviolate,
and that the last generation of posterity shall witness the
deliberations of the Representatives of American States, still united,
prosperous, and free.'' The vice president then led a procession to the
new chamber. Walking two-by-two behind him were the political and
military leaders of what would soon become the Union and the
Confederacy.¹³
Breckinridge counseled against secession. A famous incident,
recounted in many memoirs of the era, took place at a dinner party that
the vice president attended. South Carolina Representative Lawrence
Keitt repeatedly denigrated Kentucky's compromising tendencies.
Breckinridge responded by recalling a trip he had made through South
Carolina, where he met a militia officer in full military regalia. ``I
tell you, sah, we can not stand it any longer; we intend to fight,''
said the officer. ``And from what are you suffering?'' asked
Breckinridge. ``Why, sah, we are suffering from the oppression of the
Federal Government. We have suffered under it for thirty years, and will
stand it no more.'' Turning to Keitt, Breckinridge advised him ``to
invite some of his constituents, before undertaking the war, upon a tour
through the North, if only for the purpose of teaching them what an
almighty big country they will have to whip before they get through!''
¹⁴

A Four-Way Race for President

Early in 1859 a New York Times correspondent in Washington wrote
that ``Vice President Breckinridge stands deservedly high in public
estimation, and has the character of a man slow to form resolves, but
unceasing and inexorable in their fulfillment.'' At a time when the
Buchanan administration was falling ``in prestige and political
consequence, the star of the Vice President rises higher above the
clouds.'' Later that year, Linn Boyd died while campaigning for the
Senate, and Kentucky Democrats nominated Breckinridge for the seat,
which would become vacant at the time Breckinridge's term as vice
president ended. Breckinridge may also have been harboring even greater
ambitions. Although he remained silent about the upcoming presidential
campaign, many Democrats considered him a strong contender. In 1860, the
Democratic convention met in Charleston, South Carolina. Stephen Douglas
was the frontrunner, but when his supporters defeated efforts to write
into the platform a plank protecting the right of slavery anywhere in
the territories, the southern delegates walked out. They held their own
convention in Baltimore and nominated Breckinridge as their presidential
candidate.¹⁵
For national balance, the breakaway Democrats selected Senator
Joseph Lane, a Democrat from Oregon, for vice president. Lane had spent
his youth in Kentucky and Indiana and served in the Mexican War.
President James K. Polk had appointed him territorial governor of
Oregon, an office he held from 1849 to 1850 before becoming Oregon's
territorial delegate to Congress in 1851. When Oregon entered the Union
in 1859, he was chosen one of its first senators. Lane's embrace of the
secessionist spirit attracted him to the Southern Democrats. Had the
four-way election of 1860 not been decided by the electoral college but
been thrown into Congress, the Democratic majority in the outgoing
Senate might well have elected him vice president. Instead, the race
ended Lane's political career entirely, and Oregon became a Republican
state.¹⁶
Breckinridge faced a campaign against three old friends: Stephen
Douglas, the Democratic candidate; Abraham Lincoln, the Republican; and
John Bell of Tennessee, the Constitutional Union party candidate. He was
not optimistic about his chances. Privately, he told Mrs. Jefferson
Davis, ``I trust that I have the courage to lead a forlorn hope.'' At a
dinner just before the nomination, Breckinridge talked of not accepting
it, but Jefferson Davis persuaded him to run. Worried that a split in
the anti-Republican vote would ensure Lincoln's victory, Davis proposed
a scheme by which Breckinridge, Douglas, and Bell would agree to
withdraw their candidacies in favor of a compromise candidate.
Breckinridge and Bell agreed, but Douglas refused, arguing that northern
Democrats would take Lincoln before they voted for any candidate that
the southern firebrands had endorsed. The Illinois senator pointed out
that, while not all of Breckinridge's followers were secessionists,
every secessionist was supporting him. But Breckinridge also counted on
the support of the last three Democratic presidential candidates, Lewis
Cass, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, as well as most of the
northern Democratic senators and representatives. Despite these
endorsements and the financial levies that the Buchanan administration
made on all Democratic officeholders for him, Breckinridge failed to
carry any northern states. In the four-way race, he placed third in the
popular vote and second in electoral votes. Most disappointingly, he
lost Kentucky to Bell.¹⁷

A Personal Secession

Following the election, Breckinridge returned to Washington to
preside over the Senate, hoping to persuade southerners to abandon
secession. But in December, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Florida left the Union. In January, Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis
and other southerners bid a formal farewell to the Senate. In February,
Vice President Breckinridge led a procession of senators to the House
chamber to count the electoral votes, and to announce the election of
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. On March 4, Breckinridge administered the
oath of office to his successor, Hannibal Hamlin, who in turn swore him
into the Senate. When President Lincoln called Congress into special
session on July 4, 1861, to raise the arms and men necessary to fight
the Civil War, Breckinridge returned to Washington as the leader of what
was left of the Senate Democrats. Many in Washington doubted that he
planned to offer much support to the Union or the war effort.
Breckinridge seemed out of place in the wartime capital, after so many
of his southern friends had left. On several occasions, however, he
visited his cousin Mary Todd Lincoln at the White House.¹⁸
During the special session, which lasted until August 6, 1861,
Breckinridge remained firm in his belief that the Constitution strictly
limited the powers of the federal government, regardless of secession
and war. Although he wanted the Union restored, he preferred a peaceful
separation rather than ``endless, aimless, devastating war, at the end
of which I see the grave of public liberty and of personal freedom.''
The most dramatic moment of the session occurred on August 1, when
Senator Breckinridge took the floor to oppose the Lincoln
administration's expansion of martial law. As he spoke, Oregon
Republican Senator Edward D. Baker entered the chamber, dressed in the
blue coat of a Union army colonel. Baker had raised and was training a
militia unit known as the California Regiment. When Breckinridge
finished, Baker challenged him: ``These speeches of his, sown broadcast
over the land, what meaning have they? Are they not intended for
disorganization in our very midst?'' Baker demanded. ``Sir, are they not
words of brilliant, polished treason, even in the very Capitol?'' Within
months of this exchange, Senator Baker was killed while leading his
militia at the Battle of Ball's Bluff along the Potomac River, and
Senator Breckinridge was wearing the gray uniform of a Confederate
officer.¹⁹
After the special session, Breckinridge returned to Kentucky to try
to keep his state neutral. He spoke at a number of peace rallies,
proclaiming that, if Kentucky took up arms against the Confederacy, then
someone else must represent the state in the Senate. Despite his
efforts, pro-Union forces won the state legislative elections. When
another large peace rally was scheduled for September 21, the
legislature sent a regiment to break up the meeting and arrest
Breckinridge. Forewarned, he packed his bag and fled to Virginia. He
could no longer find any neutral ground to stand upon, no way to endorse
both the Union and the southern way of life. Forced to choose sides,
Breckinridge joined his friends in the Confederacy. In Richmond he
volunteered for military service, exchanging, as he said, his ``term of
six years in the Senate of the United States for the musket of a
soldier.'' On December 4, 1861, the Senate by a 36 to 0 vote expelled
the Kentucky senator, declaring that Breckinridge, ``the traitor,'' had
``joined the enemies of his country.'' ²⁰

General Breckinridge

Commissioned a brigadier general, and later a major general,
Breckinridge went west to fight at Shiloh, Stone's River, Chickamauga,
and Chattanooga. He returned east to the battle of Cold Harbor, and in
July 1864 he and General Jubal T. Early led a dramatic raid on
Washington, D.C. Breckinridge's troops advanced as far as Silver Spring,
Maryland, where they sacked Francis Blair's home but did not destroy it,
supposedly at the urging of Breckinridge, who had often been a guest
there. Breckinridge got so close to Washington that he could see the
newly completed Capitol dome, and General Early joked that he would
allow him to lead the advance into the city so that he could sit in the
vice-presidential chair again. But federal troops halted the
Confederates, who retreated back to the Shenandoah Valley. There, at
Winchester, Virginia, they confronted Union troops commanded by Philip
H. Sheridan. The Confederate general John B. Gordon later recalled that
Breckinridge was ``desperately reckless'' during that campaign, and
``literally seemed to court death.'' When Gordon urged him to be
careful, Breckinridge replied, ``Well, general, there is little left for
me if our cause is to fail.'' As they rode from their defeat on the
battlefield, Jubal T. Early turned to ask, ``General Breckinridge, what
do you think of the `rights of the South in the territories' now?'' He
received no answer.²¹
During the closing months of the war in 1865, Jefferson Davis made
Breckinridge his secretary of war. He performed well in this final
government position, firing the Confederacy's bumbling commissary
general and trying to bring order out of the chaos, but these efforts
came too late. When General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army,
President Davis was determined to keep on fighting, but Breckinridge
opposed continuing the war as a guerrilla campaign. ``This has been a
magnificent epic,'' he said; ``in God's name let it not terminate in
farce.'' Fleeing Richmond, Breckinridge commanded the troops that
accompanied Davis and his cabinet. Davis was captured, but Breckinridge
evaded arrest and imprisonment by fleeing through Florida to Cuba. From
there he sailed for England. Subsequently, the Breckinridge family
settled in Toronto, Canada. His daughter Mary later remarked that, while
exile was a quiet relief for her mother, it was hard on her father,
``separated from the activities of life, and unable to do anything
towards making a support for his family.'' In Canada he met other
Confederate exiles, including the freed Jefferson Davis. Once,
Breckinridge and Davis rode to Niagara. Across the river they could see
the red stripes of the American flag, which Breckinridge viewed
nostalgically but the more embittered Davis described as ``the gridiron
we have been fried on.'' ²²
On Christmas Day, 1868, departing President Andrew Johnson issued a
blanket pardon for all Confederates. John C. Breckinridge returned to
the United States in February 1869. Stopping in many cities to visit old
friends, he reached Lexington, Kentucky, a month later. He had not been
back in Kentucky since he fled eight years before. In welcome, a band
played ``Home Sweet Home,'' ``Dixie,'' and ``Hail to the Chief.''
Breckinridge declared himself through with politics: ``I no more feel
the political excitements that marked the scenes of my former years than
if I were an extinct volcano.'' Other than publicly denouncing the
lawless violence of the Ku Klux Klan, he devoted himself entirely to
private matters. The former vice president practiced law and became
active in building railroads. Although he was only fifty-four, his
health declined severely and he died on May 17, 1875. Despite his
weakened condition at the end, Breckinridge surprised his doctor with
his clear and strong voice. ``Why, Doctor,'' the famous stump speaker
smiled from his deathbed, ``I can throw my voice a mile.'' ²³
JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE2

NOTES

¹ Frank H. Heck, Proud Kentuckian: John C. Breckinridge,
1821-1875 (Lexington, KY, 1976), pp. 1-11; James C. Klotter, The
Breckinridges of Kentucky, 1760-1981 (Lexington, KY, 1986), pp. 95-98.
² Heck, pp. 11-18; Klotter, p. 101.
³ Heck, pp. 22, 30-31; William C. Davis, Breckinridge:
Statesman, Soldier, Symbol (Baton Rouge, LA, 1974), p. 45.
⁴ John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men (New York,
1873), 2:41-42; Heck, pp. 30-31, 163-64; Klotter, p. 113.
⁵ Heck, pp. 41-43.
⁶ Forney, 2:301; Heck, pp. 44-46; Benjamin Perley Poore,
Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis
(Philadelphia, 1886), 1:439-42; L.A. Gobright, Recollections of Men and
Things at Washington During The Third of a Century (Philadelphia, 1869),
p. 138.
⁷ Heck, pp. 47, 53-54; Mark W. Summers, The Plundering
Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (New York,
1987), p. 203.
⁸ Davis, Breckinridge, p. 145; Heck, pp. 59-60; Klotter,
p. 111.
⁹ Klotter, pp. 111, 113; Heck, pp. 55-66.
¹⁰ Frederick Moore Binder, James Buchanan and the
American Empire (Cranbury, NJ, 1994), pp. 219-22.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 223; Heck, pp. 67-68; Davis, Breckinridge,
p. 172.
¹² Heck, pp. 69-74; Davis, Breckinridge, pp. 171-72;
Elbert B. Smith, The Presidency of James Buchanan (Lawrence, KS, 1975),
p. 41; Forney, 1:41-42; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New
York, 1973), p. 652.
¹³ U.S., Congress, Senate, The Old Senate Chamber:
Proceedings in the Senate of the United States upon Vacating their old
Chamber on January 4, 1859, S. Doc. 67, 74th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 4-15;
Heck, pp. 75-76; Davis, Breckinridge, p. 194.
¹⁴ Forney, 1:283-84; Poore, 2:47; Davis, Breckinridge, p.
175.
¹⁵ Davis, Breckinridge, p. 197; Smith, p. 113.
¹⁶ David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New
York, 1976), p. 438; see also Margaret Jean Kelly, The Career of Joseph
Lane (Washington, 1942).
¹⁷ William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His
Hour (New York, 1991), pp. 282-83; Heck, p. 85; Smith, pp. 124-26;
Summers, p. 274; Lowell H. Harrison, ``John C. Breckinridge:
Nationalist, Confederate, Kentuckian,'' The Filson Club History
Quarterly 47 (April 1973): 128.
¹⁸ Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865 (New
York, 1941), pp. 32, 87. As a sign of the public confusion over
Breckinridge's loyalties, Mathew Brady's studio produced a photograph of
Breckinridge retouched to make him appear to be wearing a Union army
uniform. See Susan Kismaric, American Politicians: Photographs from 1843
to 1993 (New York, 1994), p. 66.
¹⁹ Heck, pp. 101-2; U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate,
1789-1989: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, by
Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 1, 1989, p.
250.
²⁰ Heck, pp. 101-2, 106; U.S., Congress, Senate, United
States Senate Election, Expulsion, and Censure Cases, 1793-1990, S. Doc.
103-33, 103d Cong., 1st sess., 1995, p. 103.
²¹ Klotter, p. 127; Leech, p. 345; Heck, pp. 111, 127-28;
Harrison, p. 136.
²² Heck, pp. 133-34; Davis, Jefferson Davis, pp. 600-601,
616-33, 658; Lucille Stilwell Williams, ``John Cabell Breckinridge,''
Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 33 (January 1935): 29.
²³ Heck, pp. 149, 157; Davis, Breckinridge, pp. 593, 623.
?

Chapter 15

HANNIBAL HAMLIN

1861-1865

HANNIBAL HAMLIN
HANNIBAL HAMLIN

Chapter 15

HANNIBAL HAMLIN

15th Vice President: 1861-1865

What can I do? The slow and unsatisfactory movements of
the Government do not meet with my approbation, and that is
known, and of course I am not consulted at all, nor do I
think there is much disposition in any quarter to regard any
counsel I may give much if at all.
--Hannibal Hamlin, 1862
The emotional issue of slavery demolished the American political
system during the 1850s: the Whig party disintegrated; the Democrats
divided; and the Free Soil and American (or Know-Nothing) parties
flourished briefly and died. Emerging from the wreckage of the old
system, the Republican party, which ran its first presidential campaign
in 1856, drew converts from all of these parties. Within the new party
stood men who had spent years fighting each other under different
political banners. In constructing a presidential ticket in 1860,
therefore, Republicans needed candidates who would reflect their complex
construction and reinforce their new unity. They picked a presidential
candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who was not only a westerner but a Whig who
claimed Henry Clay as his political role model. To balance Lincoln,
Republicans chose as their vice-presidential candidate Hannibal Hamlin,
an easterner who had spent the bulk of his political career as a
Democrat and who had battled Henry Clay when they served together in the
United States Senate. Despite their differences, Lincoln and Hamlin
shared an opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western
territories, without being abolitionists.¹

Youth

Hannibal Hamlin owed his classical name to his grandfather Eleazer
Hamlin, a man well read in history, who named his first son after the
Roman general Scipio Africanus (everyone called the boy Africa) and
called his twin sons Cyrus, after the great Persian conqueror, and
Hannibal, after the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps on
elephants in his campaigns against Rome. Cyrus became a Harvard-trained
medical doctor and moved to the village of Paris Hill, Maine, where on
August 27, 1809, was born his son, whom he named after his brother
Hannibal. The boy grew up in a prosperous family, living in an imposing,
three-story white house. A natural leader among his peers, physically
fit and athletic, Hannibal was also an avid reader. He was sent to local
public schools and then to Hebron Academy.
Hannibal's ambition to become a lawyer was nearly sidetracked, first
when his elder brother took ill, forcing him to leave school to run the
family farm, and then when his father died, requiring him, under the
terms of his father's will, to stay home and take care of his mother
until he turned twenty-one. When he came of age, however, Hannibal left
home to read law at the offices of Fessenden and Deblois, under Samuel
C. Fessenden, an outspoken abolitionist and father of Hamlin's future
political rival, William Pitt Fessenden. The association made Hamlin an
antislavery man and launched him into his new profession. He set up his
own law practice and became the town attorney in Hampden,
Maine.²

Democratic Politics in Maine and Washington

Politically, from the 1830s to the 1850s, Maine was an entrenched
Democratic state, and the politically ambitious Hamlin joined the
Democratic party. In 1835 he was elected to the state house of
representatives. Described as ``tall, and gracious in figure, with
black, piercing eyes, a skin almost olive-colored, hair smooth, thick
and jetty, a manner always courteous and affable,'' he fit easily into
legislative politics, became a popular member of the house, and was soon
elected its speaker. His most notable legislative achievement was to
lead the movement to abolish capital punishment in Maine. In 1840 he
lost a race for the U.S. House of Representatives, but in 1843 (after
the next election was delayed until the districts could be
reapportioned) he won a seat in Congress. There he denounced Henry
Clay's economic programs and voted very much as a Jacksonian Democrat.
He became chairman of the Committee on Elections and won a coveted seat
on the House Rules Committee. Hamlin enjoyed considerable luck in his
career, particularly in February 1844, when he missed sailing on the
U.S. Navy frigate Princeton, which was going to demonstrate its new
guns. One of the guns exploded, killing Secretary of State Abel Upshur
and several others.³
The extension of slavery into the territories was the most
perplexing issue to face Congress during Hamlin's long career in the
House and Senate. His state of Maine had entered the Union as a result
of the Missouri Compromise, which admitted one free state for every
slave state. But in 1846, when the United States entered a war with
Mexico, the prospects of vast new conquered territories south of the
Missouri Compromise line raised the question of the parameters of
slavery. Hamlin joined with other radical antislavery men in the House
to devise an amendment that would prohibit the introduction of slavery
into any territory taken from Mexico as a result of the war.
Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot was selected to introduce the
measure, which became known as the Wilmot Proviso. Hamlin introduced his
own version of the proviso on an army appropriations bill, much to the
anger of Democratic President James K. Polk. ``Mr. Hamlin professes to
be a democrat,'' the president wrote in his diary, ``but has given
indications during the present session that he is dissatisfied, and is
pursuing a mischievous course . . . on the slavery question.'' The
president attributed Hamlin's stand to a patronage quarrel with the
administration, but Hamlin stood squarely on principle. ``I have no
doubt that the whole North will come to the position I have taken,'' he
said. ``Some damned rascals who may be desirous of disposing of myself,
will mutter & growl about abolitionism but I do not care the snap of my
fingers for them all.'' ⁴

The Free Soil Challenge

In the House, Hamlin encountered many of the men with whom he would
serve and against whom he would contend for the rest of his long career.
Among others, he met Representatives Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, Andrew
Johnson of Tennessee, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. He and Davis
sparred frequently in the House and Senate over slavery. Tempers between
the two men rose to such a level that for the only time in his life
Hamlin thought it prudent to carry a pistol for self-protection. The
unexpected death of Senator John Fairfield from malpractice by an
incompetent physician opened a Senate seat from Maine, which Hamlin was
elected to fill in 1848. That same year, antislavery Whigs and Democrats
united to form a Free Soil party that nominated Martin Van Buren for
president. Although Hamlin approved of their antislavery platform and
had supported Van Buren in the past, he could not bring himself to
abandon his party--to which he owed his Senate seat. As a Democratic
senator, Hamlin strongly opposed Henry Clay's proposed Compromise of
1850. If the bill spread slavery into the West, he declared, ``it will
not be with my vote.'' ⁵
As a temperance man, Senator Hamlin was distressed by the drinking
habits of his colleagues. He observed that New York Senator Silas Wright
was never sober and even sipped whiskey while he addressed the Senate.
Hamlin estimated that as many as a third of the senators were drunk by
the end of a daily session and that after a long executive session (held
behind closed doors) two-thirds of the members left inebriated. Nor did
he approve of the ruffianly tendencies and tempers of some senators.
After a dispute between Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Henry S. Foote,
in which Foote pulled a pistol on the Senate floor, Hamlin wrote in
disgust to a friend, ``Don't you think the American Senate is a
dignified body!!!!!!!!'' ⁶

Woolheads Versus Wildcats

The slavery issue split the Maine Democratic party into two
factions. Hamlin's antislavery faction won the name ``Woolheads'' from
its opponents. The Woolheads in turn labeled their adversaries, who
opposed the Wilmot Proviso, ``Wildcats.'' In addition to the slavery
issue, temperance also divided the two factions, with Hamlin's
``Woolheads'' supporting prohibition laws and the ``Wildcats'' opposing
them. In 1854, Hamlin denounced Senator Stephen Douglas' efforts to
enact the Kansas-Nebraska bill and repeal the Missouri Compromise.
``Shall we repeal freedom and make slavery?'' he asked. ``It comes to
that.'' When the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 37 to 14, Hamlin
was among only four Democrats to vote against it.⁷
As political turmoil reigned, Hamlin's attention was distracted by
the illness of his wife, Sarah Jane Hamlin. Both Hannibal and Sarah
Hamlin loved Washington's social life of dances, receptions, card
playing, and theater-going. The senator, she wrote home to their son,
``has had about ten invitations a week to dine, and he enjoys them very
much, you know how much he enjoys a good dinner.'' But Sarah's health
declined so severely in 1855 that for a while he considered resigning
his Senate seat. Sarah Jane Hamlin died from tuberculosis in April 1856.
That September, Hamlin married his wife's younger half-sister, Ellen,
who was the same age as one of his sons. Characterized as plain but
witty and warm-hearted, she bore two more of his children and offered
him companionship through the rest of his long life.⁸

Becoming a Republican

To some degree, Sarah's illness provided political cover for
Hannibal Hamlin at a time when he was under intense pressure to abandon
the Democrats in favor of the newly formed Republican party. Republican
leaders were anxious for the popular Hamlin to join their party to
balance the radicals who threatened to gain control. ``We have a great
many men in our party who go off half cocked,'' wrote the young editor
and politico, James G. Blaine. ``They must be made to ride in the rear
of the car instead of in the engine or else we are in constant danger of
being thrown from the track.'' In 1856, Republicans wanted Hamlin to
head their ticket as the Republican candidate for governor of Maine.
Hamlin clung to his old party as long as he could, and also had no
desire to leave the Senate. However, Republicans warned him that refusal
to run for governor would end any chance of his being returned to the
Senate. Hamlin agreed to run for governor, but only if the legislature
would send him back to the Senate as soon as possible. An effective
campaigner, Hamlin canvassed the state. Republicans won a smashing
victory over both Whigs and Democrats, sweeping all six congressional
districts and carrying the legislature. Since Maine's elections were
held in September (because of the state's harsh winter weather), the
early victory gave a psychological boost to the national Republican
campaign that year. Hamlin won widespread credit for helping Republicans
broaden their electoral base.⁹
Inaugurated governor on January 8, 1857, Hamlin resigned on February
25 to begin his third term as senator. In Washington he provided the
Republicans with a strong voice against the ``doughface'' policies of
James Buchanan's administration. (It was a decidedly Maine ``Down East''
voice, with Hamlin pronouncing ``now'' as ``ne-a-ow,'' for instance.)
While boarding at the St. Charles Hotel in Washington, Hamlin became
reacquainted and favorably impressed with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee,
with whom he had served in the House and who had just been elected to
the Senate. As the 1860 elections approached, some Maine Republicans
viewed Hamlin as a possible favorite-son candidate, in case the
frontrunner, New York Senator William Seward, should falter. But James
G. Blaine worked the Maine delegation to the Republican National
Convention in favor of Abraham Lincoln's nomination. On the train ride
to Chicago, Blaine convinced Governor Lot Morrill and other delegates to
throw their support to Lincoln. When Lincoln upset Seward, the vice-
presidential nomination was offered first to the Seward camp. The
disappointed Seward men put no one forward for the second spot. There
was strong support among the delegates for Cassius M. Clay, the Kentucky
abolitionist, but Republican party leaders thought him too radical. By
contrast, Hamlin seemed a more ``natural'' choice, more moderate, but
with a spotless record against slavery, and a friend of Seward's in the
Senate. Hamlin won the nomination on the second ballot.¹⁰
The nomination came as a shock to Hannibal Hamlin. While playing
cards in his Washington hotel room, Hamlin heard a racket in the
corridor. The door burst open and the room filled with excited men, led
by Indiana Congressman Schuyler Colfax, who read a telegram from the
convention and addressed him as ``Mr. Vice-President.'' Stunned, Hamlin
said he did not want the office, but Ohio Senator Ben Wade warned him
that to decline would only give ammunition to the Democrats, suggesting
that he was afraid to run on a losing ticket. Hamlin agreed, whispering
to Wade and Colfax: ``You people have spoiled a good lone hand I held.''
Afterwards, writing to his wife, Hamlin explained: ``I neither expected
or desired it. But it has been made and as a faithful man to the cause,
it leaves me no alternative but to accept it.'' At least, he conceded,
the duties of the office would ``not be hard or unpleasant.'' Whether in
cards or in politics, Hamlin had a lucky streak. As Blaine observed:
``He always turns up on the winning side.'' ¹¹

Abra/Hamlin/coln

During the campaign, both Lincoln and Hamlin considered it prudent
to make no speeches. However, Hamlin assured Lincoln, ``While I have
been silent, I have never been so busy thro' the Press and by personal
effort endeavoring to strengthen the weak points all along the line.''
After Maine Republicans swept the September elections, Hamlin traveled
to Boston in October to march in a torchlight parade, accompanied by
Maine lumberjacks, Penobscot Indians, and party stalwarts. One of the
favorite signs combined the ticket into a single name: ``Abra/Hamlin/
coln.'' On a less friendly note, southerners denounced Lincoln and
Hamlin as a radical abolitionists. Going even further, Robert Barnwell
Rhett, editor of the Charleston [S.C.] Mercury, wrote that ``Hamlin is
what we call a mulatto. He has black blood in him.'' An amused New
Yorker, George Templeton Strong, observed that Hamlin seemed ``a
vigorous specimen of the pure Yankee type. His complexion is so swarthy
that I cannot wonder at the demented South for believing him a
mulatto.'' ¹²
Once the election had been won, Lincoln summoned Hamlin to meet him
in Chicago on November 22. After some casual initial conversation--
Hamlin noted that Lincoln had started to grow a beard, and both men
reminisced about hearing each other's speeches during their term
together in the House of Representatives--they got down to work. Lincoln
wanted to discuss the composition of his cabinet and knew that Hamlin,
as a senator, had worked with and taken the measure of many of the men
he was considering for appointment. Lincoln was especially concerned
about attracting his former rival, William Seward, into the cabinet as
secretary of state. When the Senate convened in December, Senator Hamlin
carried notes from Lincoln to Seward and pressed his colleague to accept
the offer, which he did. Hamlin also successfully promoted Gideon Welles
of Connecticut as a New England candidate for the cabinet as secretary
of the navy. These early dealings hinted that Hamlin might play a more
active role in the administration than had previous vice presidents. It
soon turned out, however, that Hamlin's usefulness to Lincoln was tied
mostly to his role as a senior senator and subsided almost as soon as he
vacated his Senate seat for the vice-presidency.¹³
The Lincoln-Hamlin victory triggered the secession of the southern
states. When asked by a friend from Maine what the future would hold,
the new vice president replied, ``there's going to be a war, and a
terrible one, just as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow.'' Congress
was out of session and Hamlin was in Maine when word came that
Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter. The vice president devoted
himself to raising a Maine regiment to fight for the Union. On his way
back to Washington, Hamlin stopped in New York City, where he complied
with President Lincoln's request to keep him advised daily on what
troops were leaving New York to protect the capital.¹⁴

``A Contingent Somebody''

When the Senate convened on the Fourth of July in 1861 to take the
legislative actions necessary for raising and funding an army for the
Union, Vice President Hamlin discovered that he had far less power and
patronage as vice president than he had as a senator. The loss of
patronage particularly galled Hamlin, who was ``noted for his fidelity
to political friends.'' He also felt unhappy over being relegated to
serving as an inactive observer of events. Hamlin considered himself the
most unimportant man in Washington, ignored equally by the
administration and the senators. He called his job ``a fifth wheel on a
coach'' and identified the vice president as ``a contingent somebody.''
When Jessie Benton Fremont asked Hamlin to intervene in favor of a new
military command for her husband, the vice president replied: ``What can
I do? The slow and unsatisfactory movements of the Government do not
meet with my approbation, and that is known, and of course I am not
consulted at all, nor do I think there is much disposition in any
quarter to regard any counsel I may give much if at all.'' ¹⁵
Reflecting later on his office, Hamlin told an interviewer:
There is a popular impression that the Vice President is in
reality the second officer of the government not only in rank but in
power and influence. This is a mistake. In the early days of the
republic he was in some sort an heir apparent to the Presidency. But
that is changed. He presides over the Senate--he has a casting vote
in case of a tie--and he appoints his own private secretary. But
this gives him no power to wield and no influence to exert. Every
member who has a constituency, and every Senator who represents a
state, counts for more in his own locality, and with the Executive
who must needs, in wielding the functions of his office, gather
around him, and retain by his favors, those who can vote in Congress
and operate directly upon public sentiment in their houses.
Hamlin explained that he soon saw that his office was a ``nullity'' in
Washington. He tried not to intrude upon the president, but always gave
Lincoln his views, and when asked, his advice.¹⁶
Moreover, Hamlin found presiding over the Senate so boring that he
was frequently absent. In contrast to his service as a senator, when he
rarely missed a day of a session, as vice president he would leave for
Maine well before the end of a session, turning his duties over to the
president pro tempore. Hamlin's inattentiveness to Senate proceedings
became an embarrassment when the Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury
launched into a savage attack on President Lincoln as ``a weak and
imbecile man.'' Republican senators objected that the remarks were not
in order, but Vice President Hamlin had to admit that ``[t]he Chair was
not listening to what the Senator from Delaware was saying, and did not
hear the words.'' To this Saulsbury replied, ``That is the fault of the
Chair, and not of the Senator who was addressing the Chair.'' Hamlin
finally ordered Saulsbury to be seated for questioning the motives of
the senators who had raised the objection, and when Saulsbury refused to
comply, the vice president ordered the sergeant at arms to place the
senator in custody. After a brief conversation, Saulsbury accompanied
the assistant sergeant at arms out of the chamber.¹⁶
Hamlin attributed Saulsbury's belligerence to his drinking. ``He was
very drunk--beastly so on the night of the transaction,'' the vice
president wrote. ``It was a most disgraceful scene.'' As a temperance
man, Hamlin determined to banish liquor from the Senate chamber and
committee rooms. The combination of his rule outlawing the sale of
liquor in the Senate restaurant and the departure of the hard-drinking
southern senators after secession sobered the institution. One visitor
to the Capitol noted, ``A few Senators were seen walking with unsteady
gait from the cloak room to their desks, but thanks to the firmness of
Hannibal Hamlin, the Senate became a pleasant place to the sober people
who had to live there.'' ¹⁷
Throughout the war, Hamlin identified more with the frustrated
congressional radicals than with the more cautious President Lincoln.
Those around Lincoln concluded that the vice president was not in close
sympathy with the president but ``was known as one who passively rather
than actively strengthened a powerful cabal of Republican leaders in
their aggressive hostility to Lincoln and his general policy.'' Lincoln
did not appear to hold this against Hamlin. As one newspaper
correspondent of the era observed: ``Lincoln measured the men about him
at their value. He knew their worth, their fidelity, and in no sense
distrusted them.'' He did not require absolute loyalty in order to use a
person. Hamlin, for instance, was among those who pressed Lincoln hard
to issue an emancipation proclamation. Fearing at first that such a
measure would divide the North, Lincoln resisted until he believed he
could use the issue as a military advantage, to give a nobler purpose to
the war. When Lincoln first drafted a proclamation, he invited Hamlin to
dinner and let him be the first to see the document, asking for his
suggestions. Hamlin later described Lincoln as ``much moved at the step
he was taking.'' ¹⁸

Dumped from the Ticket

Despite Hamlin's grumbling about the powerlessness of the vice-
presidency, he was willing to stand for reelection in 1864. Hamlin
assumed that Lincoln supported his nomination, but the president--an
entirely pragmatic politician--doubted that Hamlin would add much
strength to the ticket in what was sure to be a difficult reelection
campaign, with the survival of the nation at stake. Maine would vote
Republican whether or not Hamlin was on the ticket, and he carried
little weight in any other state. Lincoln sent emissaries to sound out
several prominent War Democrats, among them Tennessee's war governor,
Andrew Johnson. As the thinking went, to nominate a southerner like
Johnson would be a way to ``nationalize the Republican party.'' At the
convention, to the surprise of Hamlin's supporters, the Tennessee
governor outpolled the vice president on the first ballot and went on to
win the nomination on the second. ``To be Vice President is clearly not
to be anything more than a reflected greatness,'' Secretary of the
Senate John W. Forney wrote to console Hamlin. ``You know how it is with
the Prince of Wales or the Heir Apparent. He is waiting for somebody to
die, and that is all of it.'' Hamlin maintained a dignified silence but
was vexed by his defeat. Years later he wrote: ``I was dragged out of
the Senate, against my wishes--tried to do my whole duty, and was then
unceremoniously `whistled down the wind.' While I have never complained
to any one, I did not fail to feel and know how I was treated.''
¹⁹
During the summer of 1864, the lame-duck vice president briefly
served in the Union army. When the war began in 1861, Hamlin had
enlisted as a private in the Maine Coast Guard. His unit was called to
active duty in 1864 and ordered to report to Fort McClary, at Kittery,
Maine. Although Hamlin could have accepted a purely honorary place on
the roll, he insisted upon active service. ``I am the Vice-President of
the United States, but I am also a private citizen, and as an enlisted
member of your company, I am bound to do my duty.'' He added, ``I aspire
only to be a high private in the rear ranks, and keep step with the boys
in blue.'' Promoted to corporal, Hamlin reported on July 7, drilled, and
did guard duty and kitchen patrol along with the rest of the enlisted
men. As vice president, however, he was assigned to officers' quarters.
When his tour of duty ended in September, he left the company to
campaign for the Republican ticket, first in Maine, and then down
through New England to New York and Pennsylvania, doing what he could to
aid Lincoln's reelection.²⁰
In the Vice President's Room in the Capitol on inauguration day,
Hamlin's successor, Andrew Johnson, approached him with a request. ``Mr.
Hamlin, I am not well, and need a stimulant,'' he said. ``Have you any
whiskey?'' Hamlin explained that he had prohibited the sale of liquor in
the Capitol, but when Johnson pressed his request, a messenger was sent
to procure a bottle. Johnson poured a tumbler and downed it straight,
then had two more drinks before going onto the Senate floor to give an
embarrassingly drunken inaugural address. Recounting the scene later,
Hamlin privately commented that if Johnson ordinarily drank that way,
``he must be able to stand a great deal.''
A few weeks after Hamlin returned to Maine, on the morning of April
15, 1865, he encountered a group of sorrowful men on the street in
Bangor, who informed him that Lincoln had been assassinated. Hamlin
boarded a steamer for Washington to attend the president's funeral. At
the White House, he stood side by side with Andrew Johnson at Lincoln's
casket, causing those who saw them to note the irony that Hamlin had
within a matter of weeks missed the presidency. None could have realized
how differently the nation's history might have developed if Lincoln had
been succeeded by Hamlin, who favored a Radical Reconstruction of the
South, rather than by Johnson, who opposed it.²¹

A Post-Vice-Presidential Political Career

After Hamlin's defeat for renomination as vice president, Lincoln
had considered appointing him secretary of the treasury but concluded
that ``Hamlin has the Senate on the brain and nothing more or less will
cure him.'' However, Hamlin was outmaneuvered for the Senate seat by his
Maine Republican rival, William Pitt Fessenden. Massachusetts Senator
Charles Sumner instead recommended that Hamlin be appointed collector of
the port of Boston, and President Johnson made the nomination. In time,
Hamlin became dismayed over Johnson's policies on Reconstruction and his
abandonment of the rights of the freedmen. As other Republican
officeholders resigned in protest, many looked to Hamlin to join them,
but he held onto his collectorship. Finally, the governor of Maine wrote
to Hamlin that his resignation would ``strike a lofty note'' and set a
``high example'' of sacrifice for principles. Realizing that his
political future depended upon distancing himself from Johnson, Hamlin
abandoned the office with a blast at the president.²²
In 1868, against his wishes, Hamlin's name was put forward as a
vice-presidential candidate on the ticket headed by U.S. Grant, but the
nomination went to House Speaker Schuyler Colfax. At last in 1869 Hamlin
was elected to another term in the Senate. He returned as a respected
elder statesman and served two terms. One journalist who met Senator
Hamlin in 1871 described him as attired in an antique blue swallow-
tailed coat with big brass buttons, the type worn by antebellum
statesmen. Hamlin mistook the journalist for a resident of Maine ``and
with the amiable humbug habit of many years wrung my hand warmly and
affectionately inquired for the folks at the farm.'' The journalist took
no offense, recognizing that ``this trick of pretending remembrance is a
venial sin with politicians and head waiters, great and small.'' Still,
the incident gave an indication of how Hamlin had survived in politics
for so long.²³
In 1877, Hamlin fainted in the Senate Republican cloakroom, the
first signs of his heart disease. He chose not to stand for reelection
in 1880. The election that year of James Garfield as president made
Maine's James G. Blaine secretary of state. Garfield and Blaine
appointed Hamlin minister to Spain, a post that carried few duties and
allowed him to make an extended tour of the European continent. The most
amusing part of his brief diplomatic tenure was that the various foreign
ministers he met ``seemed to regard as of great importance'' the fact
that he had served as vice president. Hamlin retired from public service
in 1882. He made his last public appearance at a Republican Club dinner
at Delmonico's in honor of Lincoln's birthday in February 1891. There he
was toasted as ``The Surviving Standard-Bearer of 1860,'' to thunderous
applause. A few months later, on the Fourth of July in 1891, thirty
years to the day after he convened the Senate at the start of the Civil
War, Hannibal Hamlin walked from his home to the Tarratine Club of
Bangor, Maine. He had founded the social club, served as its president,
and went there every afternoon (except Sunday) to play cards. While
seated at the card table, Hamlin collapsed and fell unconscious, dying
that night at the age of eighty-one.²⁴
HANNIBAL HAMLIN2

NOTES

¹ See William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican
Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987).
² Charles Eugene Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal
Hamlin (Cambridge, MA, 1899), pp. 7-8; H. Draper Hunt, Hannibal Hamlin
of Maine: Lincoln's First Vice-President (Syracuse, NY, 1969), pp. 1-11;
Mark Scroggins, Hannibal: The Life of Abraham Lincoln's First Vice
President (Lanham, MD, 1994), pp. 4-19.
³ Hunt, pp. 23-26.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 40-41; Scroggins, pp. 34-58.
⁵ Hunt, pp. 44-47, 63; Hamlin, pp. 72-181; Frederick J.
Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-54 (Urbana, IL,
1973), pp. 97-100.
⁶ Hunt, pp. 48, 62. See description of the incident in
Chapter 12 of this volume, ``Millard Fillmore,'' p. 175.
⁷ Hunt, pp. 68, 81; Gienapp, pp. 47, 77.
⁸ Hunt, pp. 84-85; Scroggins, pp. 102-5, 117-18.
⁹ Gienapp, pp. 208, 390-94.
¹⁰ Hunt, pp. 114-18, 152; John Russell Young, Men and
Memories, Personal Reminiscences (New York, 1901), pp. 48-50; Hans L.
Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York, 1989), p. 115.
¹¹ Hunt, pp. 118-19; Hamlin, p. 580.
¹² Hunt, pp. 121, 125-26, 152; Hamlin, pp. 354-55, 359.
¹³ Hunt, pp. 127, 133; Hamlin, pp. 366-75.
¹⁴ Hunt, pp. 148, 153.
¹⁵ Ibid, p. 155; Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley's
Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia,
1886), 2:97-98.
¹⁶ ``Conversation with Hon. H. Hamlin,'' April 8, 1879,
in Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G.
Nicolay's Interviews and Essays (Carbondale, IL, 1996), pp. 67-68.
¹⁶ Hunt, pp. 157-58.
¹⁷ Ibid, pp. 158, 188; Hamlin, p. 497.
¹⁸ Hunt, pp. 160, 189; Young, p. 54.
¹⁹ David Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), pp. 503-6;
Hunt, pp. 177-89; Hamlin, pp. 461-89; James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of
Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield (Norwich, CT, 1884), p. 522; David
Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York, 1970), pp. 169-
73.
²⁰ Scroggins, pp. 210-12.
²¹ Hamlin, p. 497; Hunt, p. 200; Poore, pp. 159-60.
²² Scroggins, pp. 213-15; Hunt, pp. 194, 200; Beverly
Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston,
1990), 2:326-27.
²³ Edward P. Mitchell, Memoirs of an Editor (New York,
1924), p. 314.
²⁴ Hunt, pp. 221, 250; Eric Foner, Reconstruction:
America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), p. 266.
?

Chapter 16

ANDREW JOHNSON

1865

ANDREW JOHNSON
ANDREW JOHNSON

Chapter 16

ANDREW JOHNSON

16th Vice President: 1865

The inauguration went off very well except that the Vice
President Elect was too drunk to perform his duties &
disgraced himself & the Senate by making a drunken foolish
speech.
--Senator Zachariah Chandler
Vice President-elect Andrew Johnson arrived in Washington ill from
typhoid fever. The night before his March 4, 1865, inauguration, he
fortified himself with whiskey at a party hosted by his old friend,
Secretary of the Senate John W. Forney. The next morning, hung over and
confronting cold, wet, and windy weather, Johnson proceeded to the
Capitol office of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, where he complained of
feeling weak and asked for a tumbler of whiskey. Drinking it straight,
he quickly consumed two more. Then, growing red in the face, Johnson
entered the overcrowded and overheated Senate chamber. After Hamlin
delivered a brief and stately valedictory, Johnson rose unsteadily to
harangue the distinguished crowd about his humble origins and his
triumph over the rebel aristocracy. In the shocked and silent audience,
President Abraham Lincoln showed an expression of ``unutterable
sorrow,'' while Senator Charles Sumner covered his face with his hands.
Former Vice President Hamlin tugged vainly at Johnson's coattails,
trying to cut short his remarks. After Johnson finally quieted, took the
oath of office, and kissed the Bible, he tried to swear in the new
senators, but became so confused that he had to turn the job over to a
Senate clerk.¹
Without a doubt it had been the most inauspicious beginning to any
vice-presidency. ``The inauguration went off very well except that the
Vice President Elect was too drunk to perform his duties & disgraced
himself & the Senate by making a drunken foolish speech,'' Michigan
Republican Senator Zachariah Chandler wrote home to his wife. ``I was
never so mortified in my life, had I been able to find a hole I would
have dropped through it out of sight.'' Johnson presided over the Senate
on March 6 but, still feeling unwell, he then went into seclusion at the
home of an old friend in Silver Spring, Maryland. He returned to the
Senate only on the last day of the special session, March 11. Rumors
that had him on a drunken spree led some Radical Republicans to draft a
resolution calling for Johnson's resignation. Others talked of
impeachment. President Lincoln, however, assured callers that he still
had confidence in Johnson, whom he had known for years, observing, ``It
has been a severe lesson for Andy, but I do not think he will do it
again.'' ²

Plebian Roots

Lost in his muddled inaugural was Johnson's celebration of his
dramatic rise from ``plebeian'' roots. He had been born in a log cabin
in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808, to Jacob Johnson, an
illiterate bank porter and city constable, and his wife, Mary, known as
``Polly the Weaver'' for her work as a seamstress and laundress. When
Andrew was three his father died. His mother remarried and later
apprenticed her sons William and Andrew at James Selby's tailor shop.
Young Andy Johnson was something of a hell-raiser and at fifteen he and
his brother got into trouble by pelting a neighbor's house with pieces
of wood. When the woman threatened to sue, the boys fled from Raleigh,
causing their employer Selby to post a ten-dollar reward for their
return.³
Johnson went to Laurens, South Carolina, where he worked in a tailor
shop. He fell in love with a local girl, but her mother objected to her
marriage with a penniless tailor. Disappointed, he abandoned South
Carolina and walked to Tennessee. There he worked in a tailor shop and
in 1827 married Eliza McCardle, daughter of a Greenville shoemaker.
Eliza did not teach her husband to read, as some stories later had it,
but she aided his further efforts at self-education. Short, stocky, and
swarthy, but always impeccably dressed, as befitted his trade, Johnson
built a solid business as a tailor, invested in real estate, raised a
growing family, joined a debating society, and won the title ``Colonel
Johnson'' for his rank in the state militia. With his steadily
increasing wealth and status, he also bought a few slaves. A staunch
supporter of the Democrat Andrew Jackson, Johnson became active in local
politics. In 1829, he won his first race as alderman. He was chosen
mayor of Greenville in 1834 and elected to the Tennessee state
legislature the following year. In the legislature he introduced a
homesteading bill that would give poor men 160 acres of public land if
they would live on it--a measure he persisted in pushing when he moved
to the U.S. Congress, until it became federal law in 1862.⁴

A Rising Political Star

Tennessee Democrats, spotting Andrew Johnson as a rising star and a
pugnacious debater, sent him around the state to campaign for their
ticket in the 1840 election. Governor James K. Polk received reports
that Johnson was ``a strongminded man who cuts when he does cut not with
a razor but with a case knife.'' In 1843, Johnson won election to the
U.S. House of Representatives, where he attracted attention as an
outspoken and unbending defender of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian principles.
He opposed Whig programs for protective tariffs and internal
improvements as unnecessary public expenditures. He proposed cutting the
number of government clerks, voted against raising soldiers' pay,
assailed military academies as aristocratic, opposed purchasing
paintings of past presidents for the White House, and opposed accepting
the funds bequeathed to the United States by James Smithson to create a
Smithsonian Institution, on the grounds that if the funds were unwisely
invested the taxpayers would have to support the enterprise. Among those
with whom he served in Congress who had the opportunity to take his full
measure were the Whig representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, and
the Democratic representative from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis. Johnson
particularly sparred with Davis, whom he portrayed as part of the
South's ``illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy.''
⁵
In 1852, Tennessee elected Johnson governor. During his term he
succeeded in enacting tax-supported public education for his state. He
won reelection over intense opposition and served until 1856, when the
legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate. Once more, Johnson pressed
for passage of a Homestead bill, which he succeeded in moving through
Congress in 1860, only to have it vetoed by President James Buchanan.
While Johnson was preoccupied with his Homestead bill, his party was
breaking up over the issue of slavery in the territories. In 1860,
Johnson supported the Southern Democratic candidate, John C.
Breckinridge, but he strenuously opposed the secessionists within his
party. After Lincoln's election, Johnson fought to keep Tennessee in the
Union. To Andrew Johnson, secession appeared simply a continuation of
John C. Calhoun's discredited policy of nullification, against which his
hero Andrew Jackson had stood his ground. Johnson threw his support
behind Lincoln as the new embodiment of Jackson.⁶

War Democrat

In the spring of 1861, Johnson took the train from Washington back
to Tennessee and was mobbed at several stops in Virginia. The senator
had to pull a pistol to defend himself. Although Union sympathies were
strong in the eastern mountains of Tennessee, where Johnson's hometown
of Greenville was located, he found Confederate flags flying around the
town. There were enough Union sympathizers in Tennessee to defeat an
effort to call a state convention to secede, but after the firing on
Fort Sumter, sentiment in the state swung more heavily to the
Confederates. To avoid arrest, Johnson left Tennessee and returned to
the Senate. As the only southern senator to remain loyal to the Union
after his state seceded, Johnson became a hero in the North. As a leader
of the ``War Democrats,'' he denounced ``Peace Democrats'' and defended
President Lincoln's use of wartime executive power. ``I say, Let the
battle go on--it is Freedom's cause. . . . Do not talk about Republicans
now; do not talk about Democrats now; do not talk about Whigs or
Americans now; talk about your Country and the Constitution and the
Union.'' ⁷
When federal troops conquered Nashville and its immediate vicinity,
President Lincoln sent Andrew Johnson back to Tennessee in 1862 as war
governor. Johnson still identified himself as a Democrat, but as one who
put the Union before party. He denounced the state's aristocratic
planting class who had supported the war, and said that if freeing their
slaves would help to end the war, then he was in favor of emancipation.
``Treason,'' he said, in a much-publicized quote, ``must be made odious
and traitors punished.'' In 1863, Tennessee held elections for a
civilian government. Much to Johnson's chagrin, a conservative,
proslavery candidate won the race for governor. President Lincoln wired
Johnson to ignore the results and not recognize the new governor. ``Let
the reconstruction be the work of such men only as can be trusted for
the Union,'' Lincoln instructed. ``Exclude all others. . . . Get
emancipation into your new state constitution.'' Following Lincoln's
advice, Johnson made anyone who wished to vote take an oath of loyalty,
which was then followed by a six-month waiting period. Since this meant
that only those who had opposed the Confederacy could vote, Johnson's
Radical forces swept the next state elections.⁸
Lincoln faced a difficult campaign for reelection in 1864, and he
doubted that his vice president, Maine Republican Hannibal Hamlin, would
add much to his ticket. Officially, the president maintained a hands-off
attitude toward the choice of a vice president, but privately he sent
emissaries to several War Democrats as potential candidates on a fusion
ticket. General Benjamin F. Butler let the president know he had no
interest in the second spot, but Johnson of Tennessee and Daniel S.
Dickinson of New York both expressed eagerness to be considered.
Secretary of State William Seward, who counted New York as his own
political base, wanted no part of Dickinson in the cabinet and threw his
weight behind Johnson. The fearless, tough-minded war governor of
Tennessee captured the imagination of the delegates. As John W. Forney
judged Johnson's wartime record: ``His speeches were sound, his measures
bold, his administration a fair success.'' Johnson won the nomination on
the first ballot.⁹

Becoming a Household Word

During the campaign, the great Republican orator Robert G. Ingersoll
wrote to Johnson saying:
The people want to see and hear you. The name of Andrew Johnson
has become a household word all over the great West, and
you are regarded by the people of Illinois as the grandest
example of loyalty in the whole South.
Traveling to Logansport, Indiana, in October, Johnson told the crowd
that a Democratic newspaper had accused the Republicans of nominating
``a rail-splitter'' at the head of their ticket and ``a boorish tailor''
at its tail. Rather than see this as a rebuke, Johnson took pride in
having risen up ``from the mass of the people.'' The aristocrats were
offended that he was a tailor, he said, but he had learned ``that if a
man does not disgrace his profession, it never disgraces him.'' Johnson
acquitted himself well during the campaign but at times had trouble
restraining himself in the excitement of facing a crowd, whether hostile
or supportive. Late in October 1864 he addressed a large rally of
African Americans in Nashville. Johnson noted that, since Lincoln's
emancipation proclamation had not covered territories like Tennessee
that were already under Union control, he had issued his own
proclamation freeing the slaves in Tennessee. He also asserted that
society would be improved if the great plantations were divided into
many small farms and sold to honest farmers. Looking out over the crowd
and commenting on the storm of persecution through which his listeners
had passed, he wished that a Moses might arise to ``lead them safely to
their promised land of freedom and happiness.'' ``You are our Moses,''
shouted people in the crowd. ``We want no Moses but you!'' ``Well,
then,'' replied Johnson, ``humble and unworthy as I am, if no other
better shall be found, I will indeed by your Moses, and lead you through
the Red Sea of war and bondage, to a fairer future of liberty and
peace.'' ¹⁰

Vice President

Success on the battlefield brought Lincoln and Johnson victory in
the election of 1864. As the Civil War approached its end, the equally
monumental challenge of reconstructing the Union lay ahead. In Congress,
the Radical Republicans wanted a victor's peace, enforced by federal
troops, that would allow the former Confederate states to return to the
Union only on terms that protected the rights of the freedmen. They
offered their plan as the Wade-Davis bill of 1864, which Lincoln killed
by a pocket veto. Lincoln wanted to be free to pursue a more lenient,
flexible approach to Reconstruction. Having gotten the United States
into the Civil War during a congressional recess in 1861, Lincoln
anticipated ending the war and reconstructing the South during the long
recess between March and December 1865. He presumed that his new vice
president would be in sympathy with these plans, since in July 1864
Johnson had congratulated Lincoln on his veto of the Wade-Davis bill,
saying that ``the real union men'' were satisfied with the president's
approach.¹¹
The vice president-elect hesitated in leaving Tennessee. In January
1865, Johnson wrote to Lincoln pointing out that the final abolition of
slavery in Tennessee could not be taken up until the new civilian
legislature met that April. He wanted to remain as war governor until
that time, before handing power over to the elected representatives of
the people. Johnson suggested that his inaugural as vice president be
delayed until April. His friend, John W. Forney, secretary of the
Senate, had checked the records and found that several vice presidents
(John Adams, George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, Daniel Tompkins, Martin Van
Buren, and William R. King) were sworn in on dates after March 4. With
the war still underway, however, Lincoln replied that he and his cabinet
unanimously believed that Johnson must be in Washington by March 4. Had
Johnson not complied, he might not have taken the oath of office before
Lincoln's death on April 14, adding more constitutional confusion to the
aftermath of the assassination.¹²

An Assassination Plot

During Johnson's six weeks as vice president, he faced greater
danger than he knew. The assassination plot that would make Johnson
president included him as a target. The circle of conspirators that John
Wilkes Booth had gathered at Mrs. Mary Surratt's boardinghouse had at
first planned to capture President Lincoln and whisk him off to the
Confederacy. But the war was ending sooner than they anticipated, and
when the attempted capture went awry, Booth decided to kill Lincoln,
Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward,
thereby throwing the North into confusion and anarchy. Booth intended to
kill Lincoln himself, and assigned Lewis Payne to assassinate Seward.
For the vice president, whom he considered the least important victim,
Booth assigned his weakest partner, George Atzerodt. A German carriage
maker from Port Tobacco, Maryland, Atzerodt had spent the war years
ferrying Confederates across the Potomac River to circumvent the Union
blockades.
On the morning of April 14, 1865, Atzerodt registered at Kirkwood
House, a hotel at the corner of Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue,
between the White House and the Capitol. He took a room almost directly
above the ground-floor suite occupied by the vice president. So
incompetent at conspiracy was Atzerodt that he signed his right name to
the hotel register. His notion of surveillance was to spend the
afternoon in the hotel bar asking suspicious questions about the vice
president and his guard. Sufficiently fortified with liquor, Atzerodt
armed himself and asked the desk clerk to point out the vice president's
suite. When informed that Johnson had just come back to his rooms,
Atzerodt reacted in shocked surprise, and left the hotel. Shortly
afterwards, Johnson also left for an appointment with Lincoln.
When Booth arrived at the Kirkwood House and learned that Atzerodt
was gone, he lost hope that this weak man would have the nerve to carry
out his assignment. If he could not have Johnson killed, Booth
improvised a way of discrediting him. He asked for a blank card, which
he filled out: ``Don't wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes
Booth.'' Booth assumed that Johnson would have a hard time explaining
the card, since it suggested that the vice president was himself part of
the conspiracy. Fortunately for Johnson, his secretary, William A.
Browning, picked up the mail at the desk and assumed that the card was
for him, since he had once met Booth after a performance.
A pounding at the door later that evening awakened Andrew Johnson.
Rather than George Atzerodt with a pistol, the excited man at the door
was former Wisconsin Governor Leonard Farwell, who had just come from
Ford's Theater and who exclaimed, ``Someone has shot and murdered the
President.'' Johnson ordered Farwell to go back to the theater to find
out what he could about the president's condition. Farwell returned with
the District of Columbia's provost marshal, who assured Johnson and the
crowd that had gathered in his room that President Lincoln was dying and
that Secretary of State William Seward was dead, as part of a gigantic
plot (in fact, Seward had been badly wounded but not killed). Johnson
wished to leave immediately to be with the president, but the provost
marshal urged him to wait until order had been restored in the streets.
At dawn, Johnson, receiving word from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
that Lincoln was dying, insisted on going to the president's side.
Flanked by Governor Farwell and the provost marshal, the vice president
walked the few blocks to the Petersen house, just across from Ford's
Theater, where Lincoln had been carried. Admitted to the bedroom where
the cabinet and military leaders were gathered around the president's
deathbed, Johnson stood with his hat in his hand looking down saying
nothing. He then took Robert Lincoln's hand, whispered a few words to
him, conversed with Stanton, and went to another parlor to pay his
respects to Mary Todd Lincoln. Somberly, he walked back to Kirkwood
House. There, in his parlor, at ten o'clock that morning after Lincoln's
death, Johnson took the oath of office from Chief Justice Salmon P.
Chase.¹³

A Stormy Presidency

Lincoln's death stunned the nation and elevated the often harshly
criticized wartime president to a sanctified martyr. In Washington, some
Radical Republicans viewed Lincoln's death as a godsend. They held, as
Johnson's friend Forney wrote in the Philadelphia Press, that ``a
sterner and less gentle hand may at this juncture have been required to
take hold of the reins of Government.'' Johnson's fiery rhetoric in the
Senate and as war governor, his early embrace of the ``state suicide''
theory that secession had reduced the southern states to the status of
territories, to be readmitted under terms set by Congress, his call for
expropriation of plantation lands, his authorship of the Homestead Act,
all suggested that the new president would act more sympathetically
toward Radical Reconstruction than would Lincoln. ``Johnson, we have
faith in you,'' the Radical Republican Senator Ben Wade told the new
president. ``By the Gods, there will be no trouble now in running this
government.'' ¹⁴
Johnson also won admiration for his gallant treatment of Mrs.
Lincoln, who was too distraught to leave the White House for more than a
month after her husband's death. Rather than move into the White House,
which served as the president's office as well as his residence,
President Johnson worked out of a suite of rooms in the Treasury
Department (marked today by a plaque on the door). However, the spirit
of good will evaporated almost a soon as Johnson began making decisions
regarding Reconstruction.
Showing a strange amalgam of political courage and ``pigheaded''
stubbornness, Andrew Johnson confounded both his supporters and his
adversaries. By the end of May 1865, it became clear that, like Lincoln,
he intended to pursue a more lenient course toward Reconstruction than
the Radicals in Congress wanted. Members of Congress grumbled when
Johnson handed pardons to former Confederate leaders, suspected that the
plebeian president took pride in having former aristocrats petition him.
Congress was further shocked when the new governments formed under
Johnson's plan enacted ``Black Codes'' that sought to regulate and
restrict the activities of the freedmen. There was fear also that the
former Confederate states would send Confederate officers and
officeholders to reclaim their seats in Congress and undo the
legislative accomplishments of the wartime Republican majorities. When
the president opposed granting political rights to the freedmen, white
southerners looked to him as a defender of white supremacy and as their
protector against Radical retribution. The Democratic party considered
Johnson as one of their own, who might be induced to return to their
fold.¹⁵
The predominantly Republican Washington press corps had at first
embraced President Johnson, assuring their readers that he supported
black suffrage and other Radical measures. Forney celebrated his old
friend as a ``practical statesman'' whose policies offered a common
ground for ``all earnest loyalists.'' Whatever honeymoon the new
president enjoyed with Congress and the press ended in February 1866
when Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau bill. The veto shocked
Republican conservatives and drove them into alliance with the Radicals
against the president. The press and even Forney deserted Johnson. That
fall, Johnson conducted a disastrous ``swing around the circle,''
campaigning by train in favor of congressional candidates who supported
his policies. Egged on by hecklers, he made intemperate remarks that
further alienated the voters and resulted in the election of an even
more hostile Congress. The new Congress seized the initiative on
Reconstruction from the president--most notably with a constitutional
amendment giving the freedmen the right to vote--and passed legislation
to limit his responses. Among these laws, the Tenure of Office Act
prohibited the president from firing cabinet officers and other
appointees without Senate approval. Johnson considered the act
unconstitutional--as indeed the Supreme Court would later declare it--
and in February 1868 he fired his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, for
insubordination.¹⁶

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Although Johnson's term was coming to a close and he had little
chance of nomination by any party, the House of Representatives voted to
impeach the president. The New York Tribune's editor Horace Greeley
thought this a foolhardy tactic. ``Why hang a man who is bent on hanging
himself?'' Greeley asked. But the Republican members of Congress and
their allies in the press wanted to take no chance of the president's
sabotaging congressional Reconstruction during his last months in
office. Said Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the House impeachers: ``I don't
want to hurt the man's feelings by telling him he is a rascal. I'd
rather put it mildly, and say he hasn't got off that inaugural drunk
yet, and just let him retire to get sobered.'' The House voted for
impeachment, and on March 5, 1868, the United States Senate convened as
a court to consider removing Johnson from the presidency. As the trial
opened, the majority of the northern press favored conviction, but as
the proceedings wound on, a profound sense of disillusionment set in
among the correspondents, who communicated their dismay to their
readers.¹⁷
Correspondent George Alfred Townsend described Johnson's Senate
trial as ``a more terrible scene than the trial of Judas Iscariot might
be before the College of Cardinals.'' Not a single Democrat countenanced
the impeachment, he pointed out, ``It was purely within the political
organization which had nominated the offender.'' Although Townsend was a
Republican who considered Johnson a barrier against any settlement of
``the Southern question,'' when he arrived at the Capitol he found none
except Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens who seemed excited over
Johnson's policies. ``It was his abuse of the party patronage which was
an unforgiven sin.'' Johnson took patronage away from his critics and
purged over 1,600 postmasters. In addition, Townsend noted: ``He had
disobeyed an act of Congress, of doubtful validity, taking away from him
the power to make ad-interim appointments, or those made between
sessions of Congress. This was a challenge to every member of Congress
in the regular caucus ranks that off straight come the heads of HIS
post-master, HIS revenue officials, HIS clerks, and HIS brothers-in-
law.'' ¹⁸
Rather than appear in the Senate chamber personally, President
Johnson wisely left his defense to his attorneys. Although Republicans
enjoyed a more than two-thirds majority in the Senate at the time, seven
Republicans--fearing impeachment's negative impact on the office of the
presidency--broke with their party. As a result, the impeachers failed
by a single vote to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to convict
the president. In the 1868 elections, Johnson endorsed the Democratic
candidate, Horatio Seymour, and was deeply disappointed over the victory
of the Republican, U.S. Grant. Refusing to attend Grant's inauguration,
Johnson left the White House in March 1869, discredited but not
disgraced. Out of office for the first time in thirty years, he could
not stay retired. That fall he campaigned for a Senate seat from
Tennessee and lost. Never giving up, Johnson tried again in January 1875
and won back a seat in the Senate that had once tormented
him.¹⁹
The only former U.S. president ever to return to serve in the
Senate, Johnson saw his election as a vindication and came back to
Washington in triumph. He took his oath of office on March 5, along with
Lincoln's other vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, reelected a senator
from Maine. (Both men had begun their congressional service in the House
of Representatives on the same day, thirty-two years earlier.) Hamlin in
1866 had resigned as collector of the port of Boston as a public protest
against Johnson's policies on Reconstruction. The oath was administered
by Vice President Henry Wilson, who as a senator had voted for Johnson's
conviction and for his disqualification from holding future office. When
Johnson stepped forward to shake hands first with Hamlin and then
Wilson, the chamber erupted into cheers. A reporter asked if he would
use his new position to settle some old scores, to which Johnson
replied, ``I have no enemies to punish nor friends to reward.'' The
special session ended on March 24, and Johnson returned to Tennessee. At
the home of a granddaughter, he suffered a stroke and died on July 31,
1875. A marble bust of Johnson, sculpted with a typically pugnacious and
defiant expression, looks down from the gallery at the Senate chamber,
where he served on three occasions as a senator, briefly presided as
vice president, and was tried and acquitted in a court of
impeachment.²⁰
ANDREW JOHNSON

NOTES

¹ H. Draper Hunt, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine: Lincoln's
First Vice-President (Syracuse, NY, 1969), pp. 196-98; Lloyd Paul
Stryker, Andrew Johnson: A Study in Courage (New York, 1929), p. 167.
² Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New
York, 1989), pp. 188-91; John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men (New
York, 1873), 1:177.
³ Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, pp. 20-23.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 35-50.
⁵ Ibid, pp. 43, 51-83; Donald W. Riddle, Congressman
Abraham Lincoln (Urbana, IL, 1957), pp. 144, 147, 159.
⁶ Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, pp. 84-127; Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York,
1988), p. 176; LeRoy P. Graf, ed., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 7,
1864-1865 (Knoxville, TN, 1986), p. 9.
⁷ Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats: The
Grand Erosion of Conservative Tradition (Rutherford, NJ, 1975), pp. 36-
37, 80.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 202, 238-39, 289; Foner, pp. 43-44.
⁹ Hunt, pp. 178-89; Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, pp. 176-
79; Stryker, pp. 121-23; Forney, 1:166-67, 2:48.
¹⁰ Graf, ed., 7:110, 222, 251-53.
¹¹ Ibid., 7:30.
¹² Ibid., 7:420-21, 427.
¹³ See Jim Bishop, The Day Lincoln Was Shot (New York,
1955).
¹⁴ Dell, p. 323; Foner, p. 177.
¹⁵ Graf, ed., 7:639; Foner, pp. 176-216; Joel H. Silbey,
A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-
1868 (New York, 1877), pp. 178-79.
¹⁶ Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the
Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 79-90; Foner, pp.
261-71.
¹⁷ Ritchie, pp. 83-84; Hans L. Trefousse, Impeachment of
a President: Andrew Johnson, the Blacks, and Reconstruction (Knoxville,
TN, 1975), pp. 146-64; Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley's Reminiscences of
Sixty Years in the Nation's Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1886), 2:229.
¹⁸ George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside
(Hartford, CT, 1873), pp. 506-7; Foner, p. 266.
¹⁹ Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of
Andrew Johnson (New York, 1973), pp. 126-80.
²⁰ Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, pp. 353-79; Stryker, pp.
805-11, Hunt, pp. 202-5.
?

Chapter 17

SCHUYLER COLFAX

1869-1873

SCHUYLER COLFAX
SCHUYLER COLFAX

Chapter 17

SCHUYLER COLFAX

17th Vice President: 1869-1873

The Vice Presidency is an elegant office whose occupant
must find it his principal business to try to discover what
is the use of there being such an office at all.
--Indianapolis Journal, March 7, 1871
As amiable a man who ever served in Congress, good-natured, kindly,
cordial, and always diplomatic, Indiana's Schuyler Colfax won the
nickname ``Smiler'' Colfax. Through two of the most tumultuous decades
in American public life, Colfax glided smoothly from the Whig to Know-
Nothing to Republican parties, mingling easily with both conservatives
and radicals. He rose to become Speaker of the House and vice president
and seemed poised to achieve his goal of the presidency. Along the way,
there were those who doubted the sincerity behind the smile and
suspected that for all his political dexterity, Colfax stood for nothing
save his own advancement. Those close to President Abraham Lincoln later
revealed that he considered Speaker Colfax an untrustworthy intriguer,
and President Ulysses S. Grant seemed relieved when the Republican
convention dumped Vice President Colfax from the ticket in 1872. Even
the press, which counted the Indiana editor as a colleague and pumped
him up to national prominence, eventually turned on Colfax and shredded
his once admirable reputation until he disappeared into the forgotten
recesses of American history.¹

Early Years

Schuyler Colfax was born into a family of distinguished heritage but
depleted circumstances. His grandfather, who had fought in the American
Revolution and served closely with George Washington, married Hester
Schuyler, a cousin of General Philip Schuyler, and named one of his sons
for Washington and another for Schuyler. Schuyler Colfax, Sr., became a
teller in a bank on New York City's Wall Street. In 1820 he married
Hannah Stryker, the daughter of a widowed boardinghouse keeper. He died
of tuberculosis two years later, as his wife was expecting her first
child. Four months after his father's death, Schuyler, Jr. was born in
New York City on March 23, 1823.
As a boy, Colfax attended public schools until he was ten, when he
was obliged to work as a clerk in a retail store to help support
himself, his mother, and his grandmother. Three years later, his mother
married George W. Matthews, and the family moved to New Carlisle,
Indiana. Young Colfax worked in his stepfather's store, which served
also as the village post office. Townspeople later recalled that Colfax
would sit on barrels reading newspapers as they arrived by post. He
borrowed whatever books he could get to provide himself with an
education. In 1841, the family moved to South Bend, where Matthews was
elected as the Whig candidate for county auditor and hired Schuyler as
his deputy. Enjoying politics, the boy became active in a ``moot
legislature,'' where he gained his first experience in debate and
parliamentary procedure.²

Politics and the Press

At sixteen, Colfax wrote to Horace Greeley, editor of the
influential Whig newspaper, the New-York Tribune, offering to send
occasional articles. Always open to new talent, Greeley agreed and
published the boy's writings on Indiana politics, beginning a
correspondence and friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives.
Colfax also reported on the Indiana legislature for the Indiana State
Journal, and when he was nineteen local Whigs engaged him to edit the
South Bend Free Press. The young editor described himself as an
``uncompromising Whig.'' He idolized Henry Clay and embraced all of the
Whig reforms, taking a pledge of abstinence from alcoholic spirits (but
not from the cigars he loved). In 1844 he married a childhood
sweetheart, Evelyn Clark, and by the next year was able to purchase the
Free Press, renaming it the St. Joseph Valley Register. The writer
Harriet Beecher Stowe later proclaimed it ``a morally pure paper.''
³
Advancing from the editorial page into politics, Colfax served as a
delegate to the Whig convention of 1848 and to the convention that
drafted a new constitution for Indiana in 1849. He led the opposition to
a provision in the constitution that barred African Americans from
settling in Indiana or those already in the state from purchasing land.
Despite his efforts, this racial barrier stood until ruled
unconstitutional as a consequence of the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Constitution in 1865. In 1851, the Whigs chose Colfax to run for
Congress. At that time, Indiana was a Democratic state and Colfax
narrowly lost to the incumbent Democrat. He declined to run again in
1852. Dismayed over the disintegration of the Whig party and offended by
Senator Stephen A. Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the
Missouri Compromise, Colfax again ran for Congress in 1854 as an Anti-
Nebraska candidate. His friend and fellow editor Horace Greeley, who had
served a brief term in 1849, encouraged him: ``I thought it would be a
nuisance and a sacrifice for me to go to Congress,'' he advised Colfax,
``but I was mistaken; it did me lasting good. I never was brought so
palpably and tryingly into collision with the embodied scoundrelism of
the nation as while in Congress.'' ⁴

Building a New Party

Antislavery Whigs like Colfax sought to build a new party that
combined the antislavery elements among the Whigs, Democrats, and Free
Soilers, a coalition that eventually emerged as the Republican party.
For a brief time, however, it seemed likely that a nativist
organization, the Know-Nothings, might become the new majority party.
The first Know-Nothing lodge in Indiana opened in early 1854 and by
election time the party had grown, in the words of one Methodist
minister, ``as thick as the Locusts in Egypt.'' The Know-Nothings
opposed slavery and alcohol but turned their greatest passions against
Catholics and immigrants. Although Colfax shared these nativist
prejudices (arguing that ``Protestant foreigners, who are thoroughly
Americanized'' should be admitted into the party), he made it clear that
he would remain only if the Know-Nothings kept a firm antislavery plank
in their platform. When the new congressman arrived in the House of
Representatives in 1855, it was unclear which members belonged to what
party. The New-York Tribune Almanac estimated that there were 118 Anti-
Nebraska representatives, a number that included Republicans, anti-
Nebraska Democrats, and antislavery Know-Nothings, comprising a slight
majority of the House. By the following year, the Know-Nothings had
already peaked and declined, and Colfax announced that he would run for
reelection as a Republican.⁵
The House of Representatives proved an ideal arena for Colfax's
talents. Short and stocky, fair-haired, with a ready smile, he got along
well with his colleagues in private but never hesitated to do battle
with the opposition on the House floor. When Republicans held the
majority, he served energetically as chairman of the Committee on Post
Offices and Post Roads, handling the kind of patronage that built
political organizations. Never having been a lawyer, he could put
complex issues of the day into layman's terms. In 1856, his speech
attacking laws passed by the proslavery legislature in Kansas became the
most widely requested Republican campaign document. His speech raised
warnings that it was a short step between enslaving blacks and
suppressing the civil liberties of whites. Watching Colfax battle
southern representatives over the slavery issue, James Dabney McCabe
recorded that ``Mr. Colfax took an active part in the debate, giving and
receiving hard blows with all the skill of an old gladiator.''
⁶
Colfax traveled widely, spoke frequently, and helped fuse the
various Republican and antislavery groups into a unified party for the
1860 election. When the southern Democrats seceded and put House
Republicans in the majority, he considered running for Speaker, but
after testing the waters declined to be a candidate. He resumed his
chairmanship of the Post Office Committee. Colfax took a moderate
position on emancipation and other issues of the day, maintaining close
ties with both wings of his party. He enjoyed direct access to President
Lincoln and often served as a conduit of information and opinion from
Horace Greeley and other Republican editors. He worked tirelessly on
behalf of the Union, recruiting regiments and raising public spirits.
Yet antiwar sentiments ran strong in Indiana and many other northern
states, and in 1862 Colfax faced a tough campaign for reelection against
David A. Turpie. Winning a narrow victory further elevated Colfax within
the party at a time when many other Republicans, including House Speaker
Galusha Grow, were defeated. When the Thirty-eighth Congress convened in
December 1863, House Republicans--with their numbers considerably
thinned--elected Schuyler Colfax Speaker, despite President Lincoln's
preference for a Speaker less tied to the Radical faction of his
party.⁷

Speaker of the House

As Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax presided, in the words of
the journalist Ben: Perley Poore, ``in rather a slap-dash-knock-'em-
down-auctioneer style, greatly in variance with the decorous dignity of
his predecessors.'' He had studied and mastered the rules of the House,
and both sides considered his rulings fair. Credited as being the most
popular Speaker since Henry Clay, Colfax aspired to be as powerful as
Clay. Certainly, he shared Clay's sense of the dramatic, once stepping
down from the presiding officer's chair to urge the House to expel an
Ohio Democrat who had advocated recognizing the independence of the
Confederacy. Another time the Speaker broke precedent by requesting that
his vote be recorded in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet with the
exception of the power to appoint members to committees, the Speaker of
the House was still mostly a figurehead. Observers declared the real
power in the House to be the tough-minded Pennsylvanian Thaddeus
Stevens, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and de facto
Republican floor leader.⁸
Washington newspaper correspondents celebrated the election of one
of their own as Speaker and threw a dinner in his honor. ``We
journalists and men of the newspaper press do love you, and claim you as
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,'' said correspondent Sam
Wilkeson. ``Fill your glasses, all, in an invocation to the gods for
long life, greater success, and ever-increasing happiness to our
editorial brother in the Speaker's Chair.'' In reply Colfax thanked the
press for sustaining him through all his elections. Trained in
journalism, Speaker Colfax applied the lessons of his craft to his
political career, making himself available for interviews, planting
stories, sending flattering notes to editors, suggesting editorials, and
spreading patronage. A widower (his wife died in 1863) with no children,
Colfax was free to socialize nightly with his friends on Washington's
``Newspaper Row.'' He hoped to parlay his popularity with the press into
a national following that would make him the first journalist to occupy
the White House.⁹
The press lavished more attention on Speaker Colfax than they had on
Galusha Grow or any of his immediate predecessors. They praised the
regular Friday night receptions that the Speaker and his mother held and
commended him for the ``courtesy, dignity, and equitability which he
exhibited in the discharge of the important duties of the chair.'' It
was harder for the press to detect whether Speaker Colfax actually had
any influence on specific legislation. He gave the radical firebrands
wide latitude, while speaking with moderation himself. At one point,
when Radical Republicans were prepared to introduce a resolution in the
party conference that defended the Republican record and called for the
use of black soldiers in the Union army, Colfax outflanked them with a
motion that substituted patriotic flag waving for partisanship, calling
instead for all loyal men to stand by the Union. His action was taken as
an effort to give the Republican party a less vindictive image that
would build a broader base for congressional elections.¹⁰
On April 14, 1865, Colfax called at the White House to talk over
Reconstruction and other matters with President Lincoln before Colfax
left on a long tour of the western states and territories. With the war
won, Lincoln was in an ebullient mood and held a long and pleasant
conversation with the Speaker (whom Lincoln privately regarded as ``a
little intriguer--plausible, aspiring beyond his capacity, and not
trustworthy''). The president invited the Speaker to join his party at
Ford's Theater that night, but Colfax declined. Later that evening, he
was awakened with news that the president had been shot and rushed to
spend the night in the room where Lincoln died.¹¹

Reconstructing the South

During the summer of 1865, Colfax toured the mining regions between
the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Newspaper correspondent Albert
Richardson, who accompanied him, recorded that the trip proved to be
``one continuous ovation'' for Colfax, with brass bands, banquets, and
public receptions, during which the Speaker made seventy speeches. He
returned to a capital still uncertain over how the new President Andrew
Johnson would handle the reconstruction of the southern states. Radicals
in Congress trusted that Johnson would use federal troops to support
tough policies toward the former Confederacy, but there were signs that
Johnson favored a speedier, more lenient readmission of the states. That
November, at a serenade to mark his return to Washington, Speaker Colfax
made some remarks that seemed impromptu but that may have been
prearranged. He endorsed Johnson's attempts to begin Reconstruction
prior to congressional legislation and set as a minimum for the return
of the southern states a guarantee that freedmen would be treated
equally under the law. He made no mention of the radical demand that the
freedmen also have the right to vote. The speech won widespread praise
in the North, where it was perceived as the firm foundation of
Republican policy on which both the president and Congress could
stand.¹²
Colfax's efforts at party harmony and a moderate course of
Reconstruction were short lived. Johnson resented Colfax's preempting
his own statement of policy on the subject. The president's plans to
reconstruct the South showed little regard for the rights of the
freedmen, and he vetoed such relatively moderate congressional efforts
as the Freedmen's Bureau bill. His action drove moderate and radical
Republicans into an alliance that brought about congressional
Reconstruction of the South. Finally, Johnson's dismissal of Secretary
of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act convinced
even moderates like Colfax that the president must be impeached. Through
all of these dramatic events, Colfax's most astonishing success was his
ability to retain the support of all sides in his party and to hold
House Republicans together. The party defections that saved Johnson took
place in the Senate rather than the House.¹³

From Speaker to Vice President

As the 1868 presidential election approached, Speaker Colfax
believed the nomination of Ulysses S. Grant to be ``resistless.'' As for
himself, he declined to run either for the Senate or for governor of
Indiana, leaving the door open for the vice-presidential nomination.
Colfax insisted that presiding over the House as Speaker was ``the more
important office'' than presiding over the Senate as vice president. But
the vice-presidency was the more direct avenue to the presidency. At the
convention, his chief rivals for the second spot were Senate President
pro tempore Ben Wade and Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson. Colfax
polled fourth on the first ballot and gained steadily with each
subsequent ballot. The temperance forces were delighted that Colfax's
headquarters distributed no liquor, in contrast to Senator Wade, who
handed out spirits freely among the delegates. Among Republicans there
was a collective sense that the abstinent Colfax would balance a ticket
with Grant, who had been known to drink heavily.¹⁴
Colfax stayed in Washington while the Republican convention met in
Chicago. His good friend, William Orton, head of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, arranged for Colfax to receive dispatches from the
convention every ten minutes. On May 21 Colfax was in the Speaker's
Lobby when he received Orton's telegram announcing his nomination.
Cheers broke out, and the room quickly filled with congressmen wishing
to offer congratulations. As he left the lobby, Colfax was greeted by
House staff members, who ``gathered around him in the most affectionate
manner and tendered him their regards.'' Citizens hailed him as he
walked across the Capitol grounds. On the Senate side, Bluff Ben Wade
received the news that he had been beaten and said, ``Well, I guess it
will be all right; he deserves it, and he will be a good presiding
officer.'' The news was received with seemingly universal applause.
``His friends love him devotedly,'' wrote one admirer, ``and his
political adversaries . . . respect him thoroughly.'' ¹⁵
For years, Colfax had addressed Sunday schools and temperance
revival meetings, quoting from the Bible and urging his listeners to a
life of virtue. He won support from the religious magazines as a
``Christian Statesman.'' One campaign biography praised his ``spotless
integrity'' and declared, ``So pure is his personal character, that the
venom of political enmity has never attempted to fix a stain upon it.''
Democrats, however, lambasted Colfax as a bigot for the anti-Catholicism
of his Know-Nothing past. Republicans dismissed these charges as
mudslinging and organized Irish and German Grant and Colfax Clubs to
court the Catholic and foreign-born vote. (Although it was not known at
the time, U.S. Grant had also once joined the Know-Nothings and
apparently shared their anti-Catholic prejudices.) ¹⁶
In November 1868, Grant and Colfax were narrowly elected over the
Democratic ticket headed by New York Governor Horatio Seymour. Days
after the election, the vice president-elect married Ellen Wade, niece
of the Ohio senator he had defeated for the vice-presidential
nomination. The groom was forty-five and the bride ``about thirty,'' an
attractive and charming woman. By April 1870 their son Schuyler III was
born. This domestic bliss would in fact contribute to Colfax's political
undoing. As a married man, he found less time to socialize with his old
friends in the press, and invitations to the lavish receptions at his
new home became harder for reporters to receive, causing considerable
resentment among his old friends on Newspaper Row, who thought he was
putting on airs. Not a wealthy man, the new vice president could never
say no to a gift. He grew indiscreet in his acceptance of everything
from sterling silver to free railroad passes. In 1868 Colfax also
accepted some railroad stocks from his friend Representative Oakes Ames,
who promised handsome dividends. Neither suspected the political price
that the stock would ultimately exact.¹⁷

Plans to Retire

The first Speaker of the House ever elected vice president (a
previous former Speaker, James K. Polk, had won the presidency in 1844),
Colfax moved easily to the Senate chamber as a man long familiar with
the ways of Capitol Hill. The Senate proved an easier body to preside
over, leaving him with time on his hands to travel, lecture, and write
for the press. The Indianapolis Journal observed that ``the Vice
Presidency is an elegant office whose occupant must find it his
principal business to try to discover what is the use of there being
such an office at all.'' Colfax consulted periodically with President
Grant, but, as one Democratic paper sneered, the vice president carried
``more wind than weight.'' His distance from the president proved not to
be a disadvantage when various scandals began to tarnish Grant and his
administration. Speculation soon arose that Colfax would replace Grant
in the next election. There was much surprise, therefore, when in
September 1870, at age forty-seven, Colfax announced that he intended to
retire at the end of his term. ``I will then have had eighteen years of
continuous service at Washington, mostly on a stormy sea--long enough
for any one; and my ambition is all gratified and satisfied.'' This was
an old tactic for Colfax, who periodically before had announced his
retirement and then changed his mind. Some believed he intended the
announcement to further separate himself from the Grant administration
and open the way for the presidential nomination in 1872. But the
national press and Senator Henry Wilson took the announcement at face
value, and before long the movement to replace him went further than
Colfax had anticipated.¹⁸
Colfax predictably changed his mind early in 1872 and acceded to the
wishes of his friends that he stand for reelection on ``the old
ticket.'' President Grant may have questioned Colfax's intentions. In
1871 the president had sent his vice president an extraordinary letter,
informing him that Secretary of State Hamilton Fish wished to retire and
asking him ``in plain English'' to give up the vice-presidency for the
State Department. Grant appeared to be removing Colfax as a potential
rival. ``In all my heart I hope you will say yes,'' he wrote, ``though I
confess the sacrifice you will be making.'' Colfax declined, and a year
later when Senator Wilson challenged Colfax for renomination, the
president chose to remain neutral in the contest.¹⁹
For a man who had assiduously courted the press for so long, Colfax
found himself abandoned by the Washington correspondents, who
overwhelmingly supported Henry Wilson. Colfax's slide in the opinion of
the Washington press corps had its roots in a dinner at the beginning of
his term as vice president, when he had lectured them on the need to
exercise their responsibilities prudently, since in their hands lay the
making and unmaking of great men. The reporters had noted archly that
Colfax, like other politicians, had never complained about the
``making'' of their reputations, just the ``unmaking.'' Mary Clemmer
Ames, a popular newspaper writer in Washington, attributed Colfax's
downfall to envy within the press corps. He did not invite them to his
dinners and receptions, so they decided to ``write him down.'' The
naturally cynical and skeptical reporters, apparently considering the
vice president's sanctimoniousness contradictory to his newfound riches
and opulent lifestyle, sought to take him down a few pegs. One
correspondent likened Colfax to ``a penny dip burning high on the altar
among the legitimate tapers of State.'' By contrast, the reporters liked
Senator Wilson, who leaked so freely that they dubbed him ``the official
reporter of the [secret] executive sessions of the Senate.'' Colfax
bitterly charged that Wilson had invited newspapermen in ``nearly every
evening, asking them to telegraph that he was gaining steadily, that I
did not care for it.'' When he lost the nomination, the vice president
magnanimously shook Senator Wilson's hand, but one observer noticed that
his famous smile had become ``a whitened skeleton of its former self.''
At least Colfax's defeat spared him having to run against his old
mentor, Horace Greeley, presidential candidate that year on a fusion
ticket of Democrats and Liberal Republicans.²⁰

The Credit Mobilier Scandal

As a man still in his forties, Colfax might well have continued his
political career after the vice-presidency, except for his connection to
the worst scandal in nineteenth-century U.S. political history. In
September 1872, as the presidential campaign was getting underway, the
New York Sun broke the four-year-old story about the Credit Mobilier, a
finance company created to underwrite construction of the
transcontinental Union Pacific Railroad. Since the railroad depended on
federal subsidies, the company had recruited Massachusetts
Representative Oakes Ames to distribute stock among the key members of
Congress who could help them the most. Some members had paid for the
stock at a low value, others had put no money down at all but simply let
the generous dividends pay for the stock. On Oakes Ames' list were the
names of both Schuyler Colfax and Henry Wilson, along with such other
Washington luminaries as Representatives James Garfield and James G.
Blaine. In South Bend, Indiana, Vice President Colfax made a public
statement that completely dissociated himself from Credit Mobilier,
assuring his listeners that he never owned a dollar of stock that he had
not paid for.²¹
On January 7, 1873, the House committee investigating the Credit
Mobilier scandal called the vice president to testify. Ames claimed
that, since Colfax had lacked the money to buy the stock, the stock had
been paid for by its own inflated dividends. Ames' notes indicated that
Colfax had received an additional $1,200 in dividends. On the stand,
Colfax swore flatly that he had never received a dividend check from
Ames, but his testimony was contradicted by evidence from the files of
the House sergeant at arms. Without missing a beat, Colfax insisted that
Ames himself must have signed and cashed the check. Then the committee
produced evidence from Colfax's Washington bank that two days after the
payment had been made, he had deposited $1,200 in cash--and the deposit
slip was in Colfax's own handwriting. Taking two weeks to explain,
Colfax claimed that he had received $200 from his stepfather (who worked
as a clerk in the House of Representatives) and another $1,000 from
George Nesbitt, a campaign contributor by then deceased. This story
seemed so patently self-serving and far-fetched that even his strongest
supporters dismissed it. Making matters worse, the committee disclosed
evidence suggesting that Nesbitt, who manufactured stationery, had
bribed Colfax as chairman of the House Post Office Committee in order to
receive government contracts for envelopes. A resolution to impeach
Colfax failed to pass by a mostly party-line vote, in part because just
a few weeks remained in his term. The pious statesman had been exposed,
and the public was unforgiving. Colfax left the vice-presidency in
disgrace, becoming a symbol of the sordidness of Gilded Age politics.
Later in 1873, when the failure of the transcontinental railroads to
make their bond payments triggered a disastrous financial collapse on
Wall Street, plunging the nation into a depression that lasted for the
rest of the decade, one ruined investor muttered that it was ``all
Schuyler Colfax's fault, damn him.'' ²²

Later Years

Others implicated in Credit Mobilier survived politically. Henry
Wilson was elected vice president. James Garfield became president in
1880, and James G. Blaine won the Republican presidential nomination,
but not the election, in 1884. Colfax, however, returned to private life
in South Bend, Indiana. Briefly, there was talk that his friend William
Orton would put up the funds to enable him to purchase the prestigious
New-York Tribune after Horace Greeley's death in 1872, but the deal fell
through. Then a new opportunity developed. Called upon to deliver a
short speech at the unveiling of a statue of Abraham Lincoln in
Springfield, Illinois, Colfax discovered that the public had an
insatiable appetite for information about their martyred president. He
commenced a lucrative career as a public lecturer (up to $2,500 per
speech) on his wartime relationship with Lincoln. From time to time,
Colfax's name surfaced as a candidate for the House or the Senate, or
for the presidential nomination, but he declined to become a candidate.
``You can't imagine the repugnance with which I now view the service of
the many headed public,'' he wrote, ``with all its toils, its
innumerable exactions of all kinds, the never ending work and worry, the
explanations about everything which the public think they have a right
to, the lack of independence as to your goings and comings, the
misunderstandings, the envyings, backbitings, etc., etc., etc.'' On
January 13, 1885, on his way to a speaking engagement in Iowa, Colfax
was stricken by a heart attack and died while waiting at a railroad
station in Mankato, Minnesota, where the temperature dipped to thirty
below zero. Unrecognized by those around him, the former Speaker and
vice president was identified only by papers in his pocket.²³
Doggerel from a critical newspaper perhaps served as the epitaph for
Schuyler Colfax's rise to national prominence and precipitous fall from
grace:
A beautiful smiler came in our midst,
Too lively and fair to remain;
They stretched him on racks till the soul of Colfax
Flapped up into Heaven again,
May the fate of poor Schuyler warn men of a smiler,
Who dividends gets on the brain! ²⁴
SCHUYLER COLFAX

NOTES

¹ James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln
to Garfield (Norwich, CT, 1884), 1:497-98; Neil MacNeil, Forge of
Democracy: The House of Representatives (New York, 1963), p. 69; Allan
G. Bogue, The Congressman's Civil War (New York, 1989), p. 117.
² Willard H. Smith, Schuyler Colfax: The Changing
Fortunes of a Political Idol (Indianapolis, 1952), pp. 1-7; Albert D.
Richardson, A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant with a Portrait and
Sketch of Schuyler Colfax (Hartford, CT, 1868), p. 553.
³ Smith, pp. 13-16; Edward Winslow Martin [James Dabney
McCabe], The Life and Public Service of Schuyler Colfax (New York,
1868), p. 15.
⁴ Richardson, pp. 554-55; Donald A. Ritchie, Press
Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA,
1991), p. 43.
⁵ William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican
Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987), pp. 109, 180-81, 240-41, 245.
⁶ Ibid, p. 359; Martin [James Dabney McCabe], p. 109.
⁷ Charles Edward Russell, Blaine of Maine: His Life and
Times (New York, 1931), p. 237; Bogue, p. 116; David Herbert Donald,
Lincoln (New York, 1995), pp. 468-69.
⁸ Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty
Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1887) 2:211; McNeil, pp.
69, 171; James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to
Garfield (Norwich, CT, 1884), 1:325-26, 497-98; Albert G. Riddle,
Recollections of War Times: Reminiscences of Men and Events in
Washington, 1860-1865 (New York, 1895), p. 222.
⁹ Ritchie, pp. 63-64, 67.
¹⁰ Bogue, pp. 116, 125.
¹¹ Smith, pp. 202-9.
¹² Richardson, p. 559; Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise
of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction 1863-1869
(New York, 1974), p. 130; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's
Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), pp. 181, 226.
¹³ Benedict, pp. 168, 255; Smith, pp. 222-26.
¹⁴ Foner, p. 338; Smith, p. 284, Russell, p. 237.
¹⁵ Martin [James Dabney McCabe], pp. 246-47, 253.
¹⁶ Russell, p. 237; Richardson, p. 560; Tyler Anbinder,
Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the
1850s (New York, 1992), pp. 271-74.
¹⁷ Smith, pp. 308-9, 312; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era
of Good Stealings (New York, 1993), p. 66; McNeil, p. 198.
¹⁸ Smith, pp. 316-17, 324, 326, 333; Ernest A. McKay,
Henry Wilson: Practical Radical: A Portrait of a Politician (Port
Washington, NY, 1971), p. 225.
¹⁹ George S. Sirgiovanni, ``Dumping the Vice President:
An Historical Overview and Analysis,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 24
(Fall 1994): 769-71.
²⁰ Poore, 2:243; Ritchie, pp. 96, 106; Richard H. Abbott,
Cobbler in Congress: The Life of Henry Wilson, 1812-1875 (Lexington, KY,
1972), p. 243; Smith, pp. 358-59; Summers, Era of Good Stealings, p. 66;
Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-
1878 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), pp. 152-53.
²¹ Smith, pp. 369-74; Ritchie, pp. 102-3.
²² Smith, pp. 374-416; Russell, pp. 243-45; Sean Dennis
Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the
Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1984), p. 197; Summers, The Era of
Good Stealings, pp. 52-53, 66, 242; see also W. Allan Wilbur, ``The
Credit Mobilier Scandal, 1873,'' in Congress Investigates: A Documented
History, 1792-1974, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Roger Bruns (New
York, 1975), pp. 1849-63.
²³ Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New
York, 1994), p. 138; Smith, pp. 422, 430, 438-39; O.J. Hollister, Life
of Schuyler Colfax (New York, 1886), pp. 385-91.
²⁴ Summers, The Press Gang, p. 154.
?

Chapter 18

HENRY WILSON

1873-1875

HENRY WILSON
HENRY WILSON

Chapter 18

HENRY WILSON

18th Vice President: 1873-1875

He was not learned, he was not eloquent, he was not
logical in a high sense, he was not always consistent in his
political actions, and yet he gained the confidence of the
people, and he retained it to the end of his life.
--Senator George Boutwell
Long before public opinion polling, Vice President Henry Wilson
earned recognition as a master at reading the public's mind. During his
eighteen years in the United States Senate, Wilson traveled relentlessly
through his home state of Massachusetts. A typical day would find him
visiting shops and factories around Boston. Then he would board the
night train to Springfield, where he would rouse some political friend
at 2 a.m. and spend the rest of the night talking over current issues,
departing at dawn to catch the early train to Northampton or Greenfield.
``After a week or two spent in that way,'' his friend George F. Hoar
observed,
never giving his own opinion, talking as if he were all things to
all men, seeming to hesitate and falter and be frightened,
so if you had met him and talked with him you would have
said . . . that there was no more thought, nor more
steadiness of purpose, or backbone in him than in an
easterly cloud; but at length when the time came, and he
had got ready, the easterly cloud seemed suddenly to have
been charged with an electric fire and a swift and
resistless bolt flashed out, and the righteous judgment of
Massachusetts came from his lips.¹
Such systematic sampling of public opinion enabled Wilson to
represent the prevailing sentiments of his constituents and to make
remarkably accurate political prognoses. This skill helped him build
political alliances and parties and win elections. It also added an
element of opportunism to Wilson's political maneuvering that brought
him distrust, even from his political allies. Yet he did not simply
follow the winds of public opinion whichever way they blew. Throughout
his long political career, Wilson remained remarkably consistent in his
support for human freedom and equality of rights for all men and women
regardless of their color or class.

The Rise of Jeremiah Jones Colbath

Henry Wilson's life resembled a Dickens novel. Like Pip, David
Copperfield, and Nicholas Nickleby, he overcame a childhood of hardship
and privation through the strength of his character, his ambition, and
occasional assistance from others. He was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath on
February 16, 1812, in Farmington, New Hampshire. His shiftless and
intemperate father named the child after a wealthy bachelor neighbor in
vain hope of inheritance. The boy grew to hate the name, and when he
came of age had it legally changed to Henry Wilson, inspired either by a
biography of the Philadelphia school teacher Henry Wilson or by a
portrait of the Rev. Henry Wilson in a volume on English clergymen. The
Colbaths lived from hand to mouth; ``Want sat by my cradle,'' he later
recalled. ``I know what it is to ask a mother for bread when she has
none to give.'' ²
When the boy was ten years old, his father apprenticed him to a
nearby farmer, binding him to work until his twenty-first birthday. The
apprenticeship supposedly allowed one month of school every year, so
long as there was no work to be done, but he rarely had more than a few
days of school at any time. Lacking formal education, he compensated by
reading every book in the farmhouse and borrowing other books from
neighbors. He read copiously from history, biography and philosophy.
Also as part of his self-improvement efforts, at age nineteen he took a
pledge of total abstinence from alcohol, which he maintained thereafter.
In 1833 he reached twenty-one and was freed from his apprenticeship.
Long estranged from his parents, the newly renamed Henry Wilson set out
for new horizons. He hunted for employment in the mills of New Hampshire
and then walked one hundred miles from Farmington to Boston. Just
outside of Boston he settled in the town of Natick, where he learned
shoemaking from a friend.³
The ambitious young cobbler worked so hard that by 1836 his health
required he get some rest. Gathering his savings, Wilson traveled to
Washington, D.C., to see the federal government. His attention was
caught instead by the sight of slaves laboring in the fields of Maryland
and Virginia and of slave pens and auctions within view of the Capitol
Building. He left Washington determined ``to give all that I had . . .
to the cause of emancipation in America,'' he said. Wilson committed
himself to the antislavery movement and years later took pride in
introducing the legislation in Congress that ended slavery in the
District of Columbia. Home from his journey, he enrolled briefly in
three academies and then taught school for a year, falling in love with
one of his students, Harriet Malvina Howe. They were married three years
later, in 1840, when she turned sixteen.⁴

From Shoemaker to Politician

Although he harbored political aspirations, Wilson returned to the
shoemaking business. Even during the economic recession that swept the
country in the late 1830s, he prospered. Abandoning the cobbler's bench
himself, he hired contract laborers and supervised their work, vastly
increasing his production. As a factory owner, Wilson was able to build
a handsome house for his family and to devote his attention more fully
to civic affairs.⁵
An active member of the Natick Debating Society, Wilson became swept
up in the leading reform issues of his day, temperance, educational
reform, and antislavery, and these in turn shaped his politics. Although
the Democratic party in Massachusetts appealed to workers and small
businessmen like Wilson, he was drawn instead to the more upper-crust
Whig party because it embraced the social reforms that he supported. At
a time when the Whigs were seeking to expand their political base,
Wilson's working-class background and image as the ``Natick Cobbler''
appealed to the party. During the 1830s and 1840s, the Whigs ran him
repeatedly for the state legislature, and he won seats in its upper and
lower houses. Unlike many other Whigs, Wilson mingled easily in the
state's factories and saloons. He gathered political lieutenants around
the state and invested some of his shoemaking earnings in the Boston
Republican, which he edited from 1848 to 1851. He also joined the Natick
militia, rising to brigadier general and proudly claiming the title
``General Wilson'' through the rest of his long political
career.⁶
As a self-made man, Henry Wilson felt contempt for aristocrats,
whether Boston Brahmins or southern planters. ``I for one don't want the
endorsement of the `best society' in Boston until I am dead,'' he once
declared, ``--for it endorses everything that is dead.'' He reserved
even greater contempt for aristocratic southerners who lived off the
labor of their slaves, swearing that slavery must be ended. ``Freedom
and slavery are now arrayed against each other,'' he declared; ``we must
destroy slavery, or it will destroy liberty.'' Although the Whigs
promoted numerous reforms, as a national party they included many
southerners who supported slavery. In Massachusetts, the party split
between ``Cotton Whigs,'' with political and economic ties between the
New England cotton mills and the southern cotton plantations, and the
``Conscience Whigs,'' who placed freedom ahead of patronage and profits.
Sensing the changing tides of public opinion, Wilson predicted that, if
antislavery supporters in all the old parties could bind together to
form a new party, they could sweep the northern elections and displace
southerners from power in Washington. In 1848 he abandoned the Whigs for
the new Free Soil party, which nominated Martin Van Buren for president
on an antislavery platform.⁷

A Residue of Distrust

The Free Soil party proved to be premature. Wary voters defeated
Wilson in his campaigns as the Free Soil candidate for the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1852 and governor in 1853. Sadly disappointed in 1853
at the defeat of a new state constitution for which he had labored long
and hard, Wilson responded by secretly joining the Order of the Star
Spangled Banner, also known as the American or Know-Nothing party--an
anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, nativist movement. Given the collapse
of the established parties, the Know-Nothings flourished briefly,
offering Wilson an unsavory opportunity to promote his personal
ambitions--despite the party's conflict with his political ideals of
racial and religious equality. At the same time, Wilson called for the
creation of ``one great Republican party'' in opposition to the Kansas-
Nebraska Act, which threatened to open the western territories to
slavery. In 1854, he ran as the Republican candidate for governor, but
his strange maneuvering during and after the campaign convinced many
Republicans that Wilson had sold them out by throwing the gubernatorial
election to the Know-Nothings in return for being elected a U.S. senator
by the Know-Nothings in the Massachusetts legislature, with the aid of
Free Soilers and Democrats. Although Wilson identified himself as a
Republican, his first Senate election left a residue of distrust that he
would spend the rest of his life trying to live down.⁸
In the Senate, Henry Wilson was inevitably compared with his
handsome, dignified, scholarly senior colleague from Massachusetts,
Charles Sumner. An idealist and fierce foe of slavery, Sumner laced his
speeches with classical allusions and gave every indication that he
would appear quite natural in the toga of a Roman senator. Henry Wilson
would have seemed ludicrous in Roman garb or in attempting to match
Sumner's grandiloquent addresses. Listeners described Wilson instead as
``an earnest man'' who presented ``the cold facts of a case'' without
relying on flamboyant oratory. George Boutwell, who served with him in
Massachusetts and national politics, judged Wilson an especially
effective speaker during elections and estimated that during the course
of Wilson's career he spoke to more people than anyone else alive.
Boutwell concluded of Wilson:
He was not learned, he was not eloquent, he was not logical in a
high sense, he was not always consistent in his political
actions, and yet he gained the confidence of the people,
and he retained it to the end of his life. His success may
have been due in part to the circumstance that he was not
far removed from the mass of the people in the particulars
named, and that he acted in a period when fidelity to the
cause of freedom and activity in its promotion satisfied
the public demand.⁹
Despite their different backgrounds and personalities, Wilson and
Sumner agreed strongly on their opposition to slavery and pooled their
efforts to destroy the ``peculiar institution.'' Even when people
distrusted Wilson's wily political maneuvering or disdained his plebeian
roots, they gave him credit for showing backbone in his fight against
slavery. Massachusetts returned him to the Senate for three more terms,
until his election as vice president.

Chairman of the Military Affairs Committee

During the 1850s, Wilson fought from the minority. When the southern
states seceded in 1860 and 1861 and the Republicans moved into the
majority, Henry Wilson assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Committee
on Military Affairs, a key legislative post during the Civil War. In the
months that Congress stood in recess, impatient Radical Republicans
demanded quick military action against the South. In July 1861, at the
war's first battle, along Bull Run creek in Manassas, Virginia, Wilson
rode out with other senators, representatives, newspaper reporters, and
members of Washington society to witness what they anticipated would be
a Union victory. In his carriage, Senator Wilson carried a large hamper
of sandwiches to distribute among the troops. Unexpectedly, however, the
Confederates routed the Union army. Wilson's carriage was crushed and he
was forced to beat an inglorious retreat back to
Washington.¹⁰
Defeat at the ``picnic battle,'' sobered many in the North who had
talked of a short, easy war. In seeking to assign blame for the debacle,
rumors spread that Wilson himself might have tipped off the enemy
through his friendly relationship with a Washington woman, Mrs. Rose
O'Neal Greenhow. When she was arrested as a Confederate spy, ``the Wild
Rose'' held a packet of love letters signed ``H.'' But the letters were
not in Wilson's handwriting, and Mrs. Greenhow knew many other senators,
members of Lincoln's cabinet, and other highly placed sources of
information.¹¹
Wilson went back to Massachusetts to raise a volunteer infantry, in
which he wore the uniform of colonel. However, once the regiment reached
Washington, he resigned his commission and returned to his Senate seat.
Wilson also served as a volunteer aide-de-camp to General George
McClellan, who commanded the Union armies. When he reported to the
general's camp, he was ordered to accompany other officers on a
horseback inspection of the capital's fortifications. As the Boston
newspaper correspondent Benjamin Perley Poore observed, ``Unaccustomed
to horsemanship, the ride of thirty miles was too much for the Senator,
who kept his bed for a week, and then resigned his staff position.''
Still, this brief association made Wilson more sympathetic to McClellan
than were other Radical Republicans in Congress. The Radicals
established a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, in part to
bypass Wilson's Military Affairs Committee in scrutinizing and attacking
the various officers of the Union army. Wilson at first defended the
army, arguing that Democratic generals were opposed to the Republican
administration but not to the war. Over time, he grew disheartened by
the protracted war and impatient with McClellan's overly cautious
military tactics. However, he made it a point, as committee chair, to
avoid public criticism of the military operations of any
general.¹²

Wilson and the Radicals

Henry Wilson soon stood among the inner circle of Radical
Republicans in Congress beside Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Thaddeus
Stevens, and Henry Winter Davis. He introduced bills that freed slaves
in the District of Columbia, permitted African Americans to join the
Union army, and provided equal pay to black and white soldiers. Wilson
pressed President Lincoln to issue an emancipation proclamation and
worried that the final product left many people still enslaved in the
border states. Known as one of the most persistent newshunters in
Washington, Wilson brought knowledgeable newspaper reporters straight
from the battlefield to the White House to brief the president. Despite
his intimacy with Lincoln, Wilson considered him too moderate and
underestimated his abilities. The senator was once overheard denouncing
Lincoln while sitting in the White House waiting room. He hoped that
Lincoln would withdraw from the Republican ticket in 1864 in favor of a
more radical presidential candidate.¹³
Following Lincoln's assassination, Wilson initially hoped that the
new president, his former Senate colleague Andrew Johnson, would pursue
the Radical Republican agenda for reconstruction of the South. He was
deeply disappointed in Johnson's endorsement of a speedy return of the
Confederate states to the Union without any protection for the newly
freed slaves. When the Thirty-ninth Congress convened in December 1865,
Wilson introduced the first civil rights initiative of the postwar
Congress. His bill aimed at outlawing the Black Codes and other forms of
racial discrimination in the former Confederacy but, deemed too extreme
by the non-Radical Republicans, it was defeated. Wilson also proposed
that the Constitution be amended to prohibit any effort to limit the
right to vote by race.¹⁴
Johnson's more lenient policies for Reconstruction and his veto of
the Freedmen's Bureau bill and other congressional efforts to protect
black southerners eventually drove moderate Republicans into an alliance
with the Radicals. Over time, Wilson saw his objectives added to the
Constitution as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. He
supported the use of federal troops to enforce congressional
Reconstruction, to permit freedmen to vote, and to establish Republican
governments in the southern states. When Johnson stubbornly resisted the
Radical programs, Wilson endorsed efforts to impeach the president. He
accused the president of ``unworthy, if not criminal'' motives in
resisting the will of the people on Reconstruction and cast his vote to
remove Johnson from office. However, seven moderate Republican senators
broke ranks with their party, and the Radicals failed by a single vote
to achieve the two-thirds necessary to remove the
president.¹⁵

National Ambitions

Prior to the presidential election of 1868, Henry Wilson made an
extended speaking tour throughout the southern states. Many journalists
interpreted this effort as a means of promoting himself as a
presidential candidate. In fact, Wilson supported U.S. Grant, the hero
of Appomattox, for president and sought the vice-presidential nomination
for himself. Always a political mechanic bent on building coalitions,
Wilson felt certain that the southern Republican party could survive
only if it became biracial. ``I do not want to see a white man's party
nor a black man's party,'' he told a black audience in New Orleans. ``I
warn you to-night, as I do the black men of this country everywhere, to
remember this: that while a black man is as good as a white man, a white
man is as good as a black man. See to it while you are striving to lift
yourselves up, that you do not strive to pull anybody else down.'' By
urging southern blacks to take a conciliatory, nonviolent approach
toward those who had so recently enslaved and oppressed them, Wilson
stunned his Radical Republican colleagues in Congress. ``Wilson is a --
---------- fool!'' wrote Ohio Senator Ben Wade. Nevertheless, southern
delegates to the Republican convention generally supported Wilson's
candidacy.¹⁶
On the first ballot for vice president at the Chicago convention,
Ben Wade led with Wilson not far behind. That ballot marked Wilson's
peak, and he lost support steadily on subsequent ballots. When House
Speaker Schuyler Colfax gained strength, Wilson's delegates switched to
Colfax, giving him the nomination. Grant's election brought expectations
that Wilson might be named to the cabinet, but the senator asked that
his name be removed from consideration, citing his wife's critically ill
health--she died in 1870. Still, Wilson remained an influential and
frequently consulted senator throughout Grant's first term.

Grant's Second Vice President

By Grant's inauguration in 1869, Massachusetts boasted the most
powerful delegation in Congress. Wilson chaired the Senate Military
Affairs Committee, while Sumner chaired Foreign Relations. In the House,
four Massachusetts representatives chaired committees, including
Appropriations and Foreign Affairs. Commenting on the state's two
senators, Massachusetts Representative George F. Hoar noted that, while
Sumner was a man of great learning, great principle, and great ego,
``Wilson supplied almost everything that Sumner lacked.'' Wilson was the
more practical politician, with his finger on the public pulse. He
recognized the value of party organization and ``did not disdain the art
and diplomacies of a partisan.'' Wilson also combined practical politics
with a strong inclination for reform. He spoke out for civil rights for
the freedmen, voting rights for women, federal aid to education, federal
regulation of business, protection of women, and prohibition of liquor.
Hoar judged that no other man in the Senate, ``not even Sumner, had more
influence over his colleagues'' than did Henry Wilson.¹⁷
During Grant's first term, the imperious Sumner challenged the new
president and defeated his plans for incorporating Santo Domingo into
the United States. President Grant retaliated by goading the Senate
Republican caucus to remove Sumner as chair of the Foreign Relations
Committee (Wilson spoke in defense of retaining Sumner's chairmanship).
A wounded Sumner opposed Grant's renomination in 1872, raising concerns
that he and his allies might bolt to the Liberal Republican-Democratic
fusion ticket headed by the eccentric newspaper editor Horace Greeley.
After Vice President Schuyler Colfax released word that he did not
intend to stand for a second term, many Republican leaders calculated
that selecting Wilson for vice president would outflank Sumner and
strengthen Grant with workers and with the ``old anti-slavery guard.''
Saluting the working-class origins of their ticket, Republican posters
showed idealized versions of Grant, ``the Galena Tanner,'' and Wilson,
``the Natick Shoemaker,'' attired in workers' aprons.¹⁸
Just as the presidential campaign got underway in September 1872,
the New York Sun published news of the Credit Mobilier scandal, offering
evidence that key members of Congress had accepted railroad stock at
little or no cost, presumably to guarantee their support for legislation
that would finance construction of a transcontinental line. On the list
were the names of Grant's retiring vice president, Colfax, and his new
running mate, Henry Wilson. Newspaper correspondent Henry Van Ness
Boynton sent the New York Times a dispatch reporting that Senator Wilson
had made a ``full and absolute denial'' that he had ever owned Credit
Mobilier stock. In truth, Wilson had purchased the stock in his wife's
name but had later returned it. Called to testify before a House
investigating committee, Boynton recounted how he had gone to see Wilson
to ask if he would deny the charges against him and that Wilson had
given him an absolute denial, knowing that he would file the story that
night. Wilson did not contradict the reporter. ``General Boynton is a
man of character and truth,'' he told the committee, ``and I should take
his word.'' Although the committee cleared Wilson of any wrongdoing in
taking the stock, it concluded that the information Wilson had given the
Times had been ``calculated to convey to the public an erroneous
impression.'' ¹⁹

The Ravages of Ill Health

The Credit Mobilier scandal did not dissuade voters from reelecting
Grant and making Henry Wilson vice president. Wilson helped the ticket
by embarking on an ambitious speaking tour that took him some ten
thousand miles to deliver ninety-six addresses, ruining his health in
the process. In May 1873, the sixty-one-year-old Wilson suffered a
stroke that caused him to lose control of his facial muscles and to
speak thickly whenever fatigued. Although doctors ordered him to rest,
the advice went against his nature. A friend wrote, ``You know he was
never still for five minutes, and it is more difficult for him than for
most persons to sit quietly and dream away the time.'' After spending
the summer recuperating in Massachusetts, Wilson traveled to Washington
in December for the opening of the new Congress, but by January his poor
health forced him to return home once again. Instead of presiding over
the Senate, he spent his time writing a multi-volume history of the rise
and fall of the slave power, memorializing his own role in the great
events of the Civil War and Reconstruction.²⁰
Wilson's ill health kept him from playing any role of consequence as
vice president but did not suppress his political concerns and
ambitions. He lamented that a ``Counter-Revolution'' was overtaking
Reconstruction and urged his old antislavery veterans to speak out
against efforts to limit the rights of the freedmen. Wilson blamed the
decay of Reconstruction on the Grant administration. According to
Representative James Garfield, the vice president had asserted that
``Grant is now more unpopular than Andrew Johnson was in his darkest
days; that Grant's appointments had been getting worse and worse; that
he is still struggling for a third term; in short that he is the
millstone around the neck of our party that would sink it out of
sight.'' Yet Wilson could not bring himself to admit that his own
involvement in the Credit Mobilier scandal, as well as the involvement
of other members of Congress in the many other scandals of the era, had
dimmed the moral fervor of the antislavery movement and congressional
Reconstruction, thus undermining public confidence in an active federal
government. For the rest of the nineteenth century, political trends
moved away from Wilson's cherished reforms. A new generation of genteel
reformers advocated limited government, civil service reform, and other
administrative solutions and abandoned support for the voting and civil
rights of the freedmen, women's rights, and other social reforms that
Wilson esteemed.²¹
In the spring of 1875, Vice President Wilson made a six-week tour of
the South, raising suspicions that he intended to ``advertise himself''
for the presidential nomination the next year. He returned home
optimistic about the chances that the Republicans could build political
and economic ties to conservative southerners by appointing a southern
ex-Whig to the cabinet and by offering economic aid to southern business
(policies later adopted by the next president, Rutherford B. Hayes).
Although Grant desired a third term, Wilson's friends felt sure that the
vice president could win the presidential nomination and
election.²²
Wilson's great ambition went unfulfilled. That fall, he consulted
Dr. William Hammond, complaining of pain in the back of his head and an
inability to sleep. ``I enjoined rest from mental labor,'' the doctor
noted, but the vice president replied that he could not comply with
those wishes ``as fully as desirable.'' Dr. Hammond saw Wilson again in
early November and noted ``vertigo, thickness of speech, twitching of
the facial muscles, irregularity of respiration, and the action of the
heart, slight difficulty of swallowing, and intense pain in the back of
the head and nape of the neck.'' He observed that the vice president's
``hands were in almost constant motion and he could not sit longer than
a few seconds without rising and pacing the floor, or changing to
another chair.'' Wilson insisted that he must travel to Washington for
the new Congress but promised his doctor not to work too hard. He told a
friend that ``he would at least be able to preside at the opening of the
Senate, and perhaps through most of the session.'' ²³
During the nineteenth century, many members of Congress lived in
boardinghouses and hotels where the plumbing left much to be desired. To
accommodate them, the Capitol provided luxurious bathing rooms in its
basement for the House and Senate. There members could soak in large
marble tubs, enjoy a massage, and have their hair cut and beards
trimmed. On November 10, 1875, Wilson went down to soak in the tubs.
Soon after leaving the bath, he was struck by paralysis and carried to a
bed in his vice-presidential office, just off the Senate floor. Within a
few days, he felt strong enough to receive visitors and seemed to be
gaining strength. When he awoke in his Capitol office on November 22, he
was informed that Senator Orris Ferry of Connecticut had died. Wilson
lamented the passing of his generation, commenting ``that makes eighty-
three dead with whom I have sat in the Senate.'' Shortly thereafter, he
rolled over and quietly died, at age sixty-three. His body lay in state
in the Rotunda, and his funeral was conducted in the Senate chamber, the
vice-presidential chair arrayed in black crepe.
In his memory, the Senate in 1885 placed a marble bust of Wilson by
the sculptor Daniel Chester French in the room where the vice president
died.²⁴ There the Senate also installed a bronze plaque, with
an inscription written by his old friend and colleague, George F. Hoar:

In this room

HENRY WILSON

Vice President of the United States

and a Senator for Eighteen Years,

Died November 22, 1875

The son of a farm laborer, never at school more than twelve
months, in youth a journeyman shoemaker, he raised himself to the
high places of fame, honor and power, and by unwearied study made
himself an authority in the history of his country and of liberty
and an eloquent public speaker to whom Senate and people eagerly
listened. He dealt with and controlled vast public expenditure
during a great civil war, yet lived and died poor, and left to his
grateful countrymen the memory of an honorable public service, and a
good name far better than riches.²⁵
HENRY WILSON

NOTES

¹ George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (New
York, 1903), 1:218.
² Richard H. Abbott, Cobbler in Congress: The Life of
Henry Wilson, 1812-1875 (Lexington, KY, 1972), pp. 1-6; Elias Nason and
Thomas Russell, The Life and Public Services of Henry Wilson, Late Vice-
President of the United States (New York, 1969; reprint of 1876 ed.), p.
17.
³ Nason and Russell, pp. 18-21; Ernest A. McKay, Henry
Wilson: Practical Radical: A Portrait of a Politician (Port Washington,
NY, 1971), pp. 6-12.
⁴ Nason and Russell, pp. 29-34; Abbott, p. 11.
⁵ McKay, Henry Wilson: Practical Radical, p. 16; Abbott,
pp. 14-15.
⁶ Abbott, pp. 30, 36.
⁷ Ibid, pp. 27, 53.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 46-63; Ernest A. McKay, ``Henry Wilson:
Unprincipled Know Nothing,'' Mid-America 46 (January 1964): 29-37; David
Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Chicago,
1960), p. 268; William E. Gianapp, The Origins of the Republican Party,
1852-1856 (New York, 1987), pp. 135-36.
⁹ Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the
Civil War Senate (Ithaca, NY, 1981), pp. 33-34; Abbott, p. 18; George S.
Boutwell, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (New York,
1968; reprint of 1902 ed.), 1:228-29.
¹⁰ Abbott, p. 116; McKay, Henry Wilson: Practical
Radical, pp. 146-47.
¹¹ Abbott, p. 117; Margaret Leech, Reveille in
Washington, 1860-1865 (New York, 1941), pp. 134-38.
¹² Abbott, pp. 125-26; McKay, Henry Wilson: Practical
Radical, p. 161; Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty
Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1887), 2:99.
¹³ Wilson also introduced a bill to permit women to vote
and hold office in the District. Bogue, pp. 109-10, 152, 167, 169; T.
Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (Madison, WI, 1941), pp. 161,
309, 316; J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War
(Pittsburgh, 1955), p. 332.
¹⁴ Earl M. Maltz, Civil Rights, The Constitution, and
Congress, 1863-1869 (Lawrence, KS, 1990), pp. 43, 148; Michael Les
Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and
Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York, 1974), p. 24.
¹⁵ Abbott, pp. 200-202.
¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 196-99; Benedict, pp. 259-60.
¹⁷ Hoar, pp. 213, 215, 217-18; Abbott, p. 225. Henry
Wilson, History of Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and
Thirty-Eighth Congresses (Boston, 1865); History of the Reconstruction
Measures of the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Congress (Chicago, 1868);
History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 3 vols.
(Boston, 1872-1877).
¹⁸ William B. Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant, Politician
(New York, 1935), pp. 276-77; McKay, Henry Wilson: Practical Radical,
pp. 222-23.
¹⁹ Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the
Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 105-6.
²⁰ Abbott, p. 249.
²¹ Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished
Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), p. 527; William S. McFeely,
Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981), p. 406; see also Mark Wahlgren
Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York, 1993).
²² Abbott, p. 255.
²³ William A. Hammond, On The Cause of Vice-President
Wilson's Death (Cambridge, MA, 1875), pp. 7-8.
²⁴ In 1886 the Senate began the practice of acquiring
marble busts of all former vice presidents.
²⁵ Hoar, p. 219.
?

Chapter 19

WILLIAM ALMON WHEELER

1877-1881

WILLIAM A. WHEELER
WILLIAM A. WHEELER

Chapter 19

WILLIAM ALMON WHEELER

19th Vice President: 1877-1881

Who is Wheeler?
--Rutherford B. Hayes
In the wake of the Grant-era scandals, both the Republican and
Democratic parties searched for untarnished candidates as they
approached the presidential election of 1876. Democrats chose one of
their most prominent leaders, New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who
had won national attention by taking on the Tweed Ring in New York City.
Republicans passed over their party's bigger names, men who had been
stained by various exposes in the press, and settled instead on a ticket
of Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Representative William
A. Wheeler. Although neither man was very well known to the nation, both
had reputations for scrupulous honesty and independence. If history
remembers William Wheeler at all, it is for his character. In his
introduction to John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, the historian
Allan Nevins reproduced a colloquy between Wheeler and Senator Roscoe
Conkling, the Republican political boss of New York. ``Wheeler, if you
will act with us, there is nothing in the gift of the State of New York
to which you may not reasonably aspire,'' Conkling tempted; to which
Wheeler replied, ``Mr. Conkling, there is nothing in the gift of the
State of New York which will compensate me for the forfeiture of my
self-respect.'' ¹

A Cautious Politician

Among the stranger individuals to occupy the vice-presidency,
William Almon Wheeler seems to have been scarred by his father's ill
health, which left him neurotically obsessed with his own well-being. An
excessively cautious politician--to the point of timidity--he straddled
the various factions in his party, avoided all commitments, and advanced
himself politically while covering himself with obscurity. William
Wheeler was born on June 30, 1819, in the upstate New York town of
Malone, near the Canadian border. His father, Almon Wheeler, had
attended the University of Vermont and was a promising young attorney
and local postmaster who died at the age of thirty-seven, when William
was just eight years old. Left in debt, his mother, Eliza, took in
boarders from the nearby Franklin Academy to support her two children.
William attended the academy, farmed, and did whatever he could to save
money for college. At nineteen, with the help of a loan from a friend,
he entered the University of Vermont in Burlington. There he studied for
two years, at times living on bread and water, until ``an affection of
the eyes'' caused him to drop out.²
He returned to Malone, taught school and studied law. In 1845,
shortly after he was admitted to the bar, he married one of his former
students, Mary King. A Whig, Wheeler was soon running for office. He
became town clerk, school commissioner, and school inspector. In later
years he recalled that the thirty dollars a year he earned as town
clerk, recording deeds and laying out roads, ``were of more value to me
than the thousands I have since attained.'' He served as district
attorney for Franklin County from 1846 to 1849 and, from 1850 to 1851,
served in the state assembly, where he chaired the ways and means
committee. Joining the new Republican party, he moved to the state
senate in 1858 and was elected its president pro tempore. Wheeler also
conducted a private law practice until ``throat trouble'' interfered
with his courtroom advocacy and convinced him to abandon the law in
favor of running a local bank and serving as a railroad trustee,
positions that he held until ``driven from business in 1865, by broken
health.'' ³

A Silent Member of the House

Wheeler was elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives
from 1861 to 1863. He then returned to New York, where he chaired the
state constitutional convention, a prestigious body whose members
included two future presidential candidates, Horace Greeley and Samuel
J. Tilden. Although Wheeler spoke infrequently, his words carried
weight, and he gained high marks for fairness as presiding officer. In
1868 he again won election to the House, where he chaired the Committee
on Pacific Railroads. It was at this time that Iowa Representative Oakes
Ames, acting as an agent for the Credit Mobilier, the construction
company for the Union Pacific Railroad, began spreading railroad stock
among high-ranking members of Congress, ``where it would do the most
good.'' Wheeler not only refused all stocks offered to him, but resigned
his chairmanship to avoid further temptation. In 1872, when the Credit
Mobilier scandal broke in the newspapers, Wheeler remained clean as some
of the most prominent members of Congress were caught with the stock.
His rectitude even inspired him to oppose an appropriation to construct
a post office in his home town of Malone.
Wheeler stayed aloof from the New York state political machine run
by Senator Roscoe Conkling. In 1872, Conkling maneuvered to make Wheeler
Speaker of the House in place of his hated rival, James G. Blaine.
Wheeler declined to have anything to do with the scheme and supported
Blaine, who apparently had promised, but never delivered on the promise,
to make Wheeler chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Wheeler
also cited his poor health as a reason for not putting himself forward,
and only the persuasiveness of his wife and friends kept him from
retiring from Congress.⁴
In the House, Wheeler generally kept silent unless he was managing a
bill, but then he always proved to be well prepared and highly
effective. He remained in the political shadows until 1874, when as a
member of the House Committee on Southern Affairs he investigated a
disputed election in Louisiana. The election of 1872 had torn apart the
Republican party in the state, with half of the party machinery
supporting William Pitt Kellogg for governor, and the other half joining
the Democrats on a fusion ticket. The election board declared the
Democratic candidates the victors, but Republicans refused to concede.
They created their own election board, which gave the governorship to
Kellogg and a number of disputed elections to their candidates for the
state legislature. After President Grant recognized Kellogg as governor,
a battle erupted on the streets of New Orleans that left fifty-six
people dead. A mob ousted Kellogg, but federal troops restored him to
office.⁵

The Wheeler Compromise

Traveling to Louisiana, Wheeler and other committee members heard
highly emotional and contradictory testimony from both sides. It was
Wheeler who forged the compromise that let Kellogg remain as governor
and allowed the committee to arbitrate the disputed seats in the
legislature, most of which went to the Democrats. In March 1875, the
House endorsed the ``Wheeler compromise,'' a plan which essentially
undid federal Reconstruction of the state and held out hope for peace
between the North and South a decade after the Civil War had ended. When
Louisiana Democrats violated the spirit of the compromise by unseating
even more Republican state legislators, in order to elect a Democrat to
the U.S. Senate, most northern politicians and newspapers ignored the
violations. The North seemed relieved to escape the responsibilities of
Reconstruction. Representative Wheeler observed that northerners had
expected too much from the South and declared that it was time to admit
the failure of efforts to promote peace with the sword. His compromise
taught northern Republicans how to cut their losses. Thereafter the
party concentrated on preserving its power in the North while scaling
down its military efforts in the South, even if that meant abandoning
the political rights of the freedmen.⁶
Wheeler was content in his life as a member of the House of
Representatives and dreamed of becoming Speaker. However, in early 1876
some Republicans began talking of him as a candidate for president or
vice president. The politically astute manager of the Western Associated
Press, William Henry Smith, predicted that the GOP ticket would be Hayes
and Wheeler. Upon hearing this forecast, Ohio Governor Rutherford B.
Hayes wrote to his wife, ``I am ashamed to say, Who is Wheeler?''
Because Wheeler had served in the House from 1861 to 1863 and again from
1869 to 1877, while Hayes had been a representative during the
intervening years from 1865 to 1867, there had been no overlap in their
service.⁷

A Quiet Candidate

At the Republican convention in Cincinnati, Wheeler received a
handful of votes for president, but the major contest was between
Senator Conkling, House Speaker Blaine, and Governor Hayes. When
Conkling's nomination seemed impossible, his party machine, the
``stalwarts,'' threw their support to Hayes as the best way of stopping
Blaine, leader of the ``half-breed'' faction. Having helped Hayes win
the presidential nomination, the stalwarts considered the vice-
presidency theirs to name and they put forward New York Representative
Stewart Woodford. The half-breeds, however, wanted the stalwarts off the
ticket. Massachusetts half-breed Senator George F. Hoar promoted his
friend Wheeler as a man of high moral character. Hoar approached the
distinguished author James Russell Lowell, a member of the Massachusetts
delegation, on Wheeler's behalf. When Lowell replied that he was
unwilling to vote for anyone about whom he knew so little, Hoar
responded, ``Mr. Lowell, Mr. Wheeler is a very sensible man. He knows
The Bigelow Papers by heart.'' Lowell, the author of The Bigelow Papers,
said nothing but later was overheard telling other delegates, ``I
understand that Mr. Wheeler is a very sensible man.'' ⁸
Former Vermont Senator and Representative Luke Poland placed
Wheeler's name in nomination, while Conkling's lieutenant Tom Platt
nominated Woodford. The publicity Wheeler had received for his
compromise, coupled with his independence from the Conkling machine,
appealed to the delegates, who voted for him overwhelmingly. When the
roll call of the states reached New York, the stalwarts realized they
were about to lose and withdrew Woodford's name. The New York delegation
voted unanimously for Wheeler--a bitter pill for Conkling's supporters
to swallow.⁹
During the campaign, Democrats vainly sought scandals in the pasts
of the Republican candidates but could find nothing that would tar
Wheeler's reputation. One campaign biography boasted that, at the time
when it was fashionable for congressmen ``to dabble in railroad stocks
and bonds,'' Wheeler had neither bought nor sold a share of stock or a
single bond in any Pacific railroad. He had served his country in
Congress for ten years without adding to the personal wealth that he
brought to Washington. ``With simple tastes,'' his biographer extolled,
``he has never been greedy of gain either for its own sake or for the
luxury it would buy. As a legislator, the thought never occurred to him
that his influence could bring riches, and not the shadow of a stain
rests on his name.'' Wheeler had also voted against the ``salary
grab''--an unpopular attempt by members of Congress to raise their pay
retroactively--and refused the increase in his own salary.¹⁰
Wheeler also appealed to the professional songwriters, who in 1876
were just taking over the business of writing campaign songs from the
amateurs who had long prevailed. The Tin Pan Alley men leaned towards
puns, alliteration and other word-plays in their songs. Thus the sheet
music for ``We'll Go for Hayes! We'll Wheel'er in on Time'' showed
Wheeler pushing Hayes in a wheelbarrow toward the White
House.¹¹
While Wheeler did not detract from the ticket, he added little to it
and even refused to campaign. The Democratic vice-presidential nominee
Thomas Hendricks spoke in the swing state of Indiana, but Wheeler
declined all invitations from the Republicans. In a remarkable reply to
James G. Blaine's invitation to speak to a series of mass meetings in
Maine, Wheeler cited his frailty and insomnia as excuses:
I greatly regret my physical inability to do little in the way of
speaking in his canvass. But I have no reserve of strength to draw upon.
I was driven from business in 1865, by broken health and have never been
strong since. . . . My trouble for years has been wakefulness at night.
No resident of the grave or a lunatic asylum has suffered more from this
cause than I have. Speaking, and the presence of crowds, excite me and
intensify my wakefulness. . . . Gov. Hayes wrote me, asking me to go to
Indiana and Ohio, to which I answered as I write you. . . . I regret
that I was nominated. You know I did not want the place. I should have
gone back to the House, and into a Republican majority. I should have
almost to a certainty, been its Speaker, which I would greatly prefer to
being laid away.¹²
All that Wheeler would do was to issue the traditional letter of
acceptance of his nomination. The conciliatory tone of that letter
toward the South was seen as part of the Republicans' strategy of trying
to detach the old southern Whigs from the southern Democrats. Candidate
Hayes issued a similarly ambiguous endorsement of reconciliation with
the South. At the Republican convention, the civil rights leader
Frederick Douglass had challenged the delegates to decide whether they
meant to uphold for blacks the rights they had written into the
Constitution or whether they could ``get along without the vote of the
black man in the South.'' The Hayes and Wheeler ticket suggested that
the party had chosen the latter course.¹³

The Contested Election

On election night, it looked as if Tilden and Hendricks had defeated
Hayes and Wheeler, especially after Democrats captured Wheeler's home
state of New York. Republican newspapers conceded the election, but
Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, saw
hope in the southern electors and dispatched telegrams to party leaders
in those southern states still under Reconstruction rule, alerting them
that the election was still undecided. Three southern states each sent
two sets of electoral ballots, one set for Tilden and one set for Hayes.
One of the disputed states was Louisiana, where only a year earlier
Wheeler had found evidence that the state board of election had produced
fraudulent returns. Now his election as vice president depended upon
that same board.¹⁴
After a specially created electoral commission awarded all of the
disputed ballots to Hayes, a joint session of Congress still had to
count the ballots, and there was talk of angry Democrats marching on
Washington by the thousands to prevent this ``steal'' of the election.
To avoid bloodshed, friends of both candidates met at the Wormley Hotel
in Washington in late February 1877. There they agreed to a compromise
that settled the election and ended Reconstruction. In return for Hayes'
election, Republicans offered federal funds to build railroads through
the ravaged South and otherwise restore the southern economy, promised
to appoint a southerner to the cabinet, and--most important--pledged to
remove all federal troops from the southern states. When members of the
Democratic majority in the House of Representatives still tried to block
the counting of the electoral ballots, a Louisiana representative
assured them that an acceptable arrangement had been negotiated at the
Wormley Hotel. The revolt fizzled, and at 4 a.m. on March 2, senators
marched to the House chamber to declare Hayes president. Hayes upheld
the bargain and removed the federal troops, abandoning black voters to
disfranchisement and segregation.¹⁵

Hymn Singing and Square Talk

Although they had not known each other before their nomination,
Hayes and Wheeler developed an unusually friendly relationship while in
office. The Hayes family--scorned by many Washington politicos for their
old-fashioned manner and strict adherence to temperance--became a
surrogate family to the lonely vice president, a sixty-year old widower
with no children. The vice president was fond of hymn singing, and each
Sunday evening the Hayes family invited Wheeler and a few other friends
to the White House library, where Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz
played the piano and the vice president distributed copies of The
Presbyterian Hymn and Tune Book for ``a revelry of sweet sounds and
mingling of souls.'' ¹⁶
Wheeler also provided Hayes with advice about appointments,
recommending that selections be made according to ``personal character,
recognized capacity and experience.'' He especially warned Hayes about
the hostility that the Conkling machine exhibited toward the new
administration. At one point, Hayes noted in his diary that Wheeler was
critical of cabinet members who, when approached by jobseekers,
responded equivocally. ``When there is no hope tell the man so,''
Wheeler asserted. ``He will be disappointed at the time, but it is the
best way.'' Hayes observed that Wheeler was right. ``Prompt and square
talk is in the long run safest and is just to the parties concerned. I
must also bear this in mind.'' ¹⁷
Despite their friendship, Hayes rarely consulted Wheeler and did not
include him within his circle of advisers. Wheeler spent his vice-
presidency presiding over Senate debates, a job he found dull and
monotonous, comparing his role of repeating set phrases to that of a
parrot. During his term, he cast six tie-breaking votes, including one
that helped his old friend William Pitt Kellogg to be seated as senator
from Louisiana. Wheeler grew particularly frustrated at being left out
of both cabinet meetings and party caucuses and feeling that he was
generally ignored. The greatest trial of being vice president, he once
commented, was attending church. ``I hear the minister praying for the
President, his Cabinet, both Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the
governors and legislatures of all the states and every individual
heathen . . . and find myself wholly left out.'' ¹⁸

A Forgotten Man

Wheeler made it easy for his nation to forget that he existed. A
more assertive man might have risen to lead the opposition to the
Conkling machine, but Wheeler contented himself with sneering at
Conkling rather than challenging him. The vice president urged President
Hayes not to appear weak and yielding to Conkling. But when Hayes took
on Conkling by removing his lieutenants Chester A. Arthur and Alonzo
Cornell from their lucrative posts at the New York customhouse, Wheeler
disapproved the action because he feared it might split the party.
Wheeler even endorsed Cornell's candidacy for governor of New
York.¹⁹
In December 1879, the Republican National Committee met in
Washington, as a first step toward nominating the presidential ticket
for 1880. Hayes had let it be known that he would not stand for a second
term, and sentiments within the party seemed to be roughly divided
between Grant and Blaine. In his diary Hayes commented, ``If New York
could with a fair degree of unity, present a man like say the Vice
President . . . he would probably be nominated.'' But there was no hope
of the factions in New York uniting, especially over someone who opposed
Roscoe Conkling.²⁰ At the convention, James A. Garfield
defeated Grant, Blaine, and other candidates on the thirty-sixth ballot
to become the Republican nominee. He and his running mate Chester A.
Arthur went on to win the election.
In March 1881, Wheeler turned over the vice-presidency to his
successor, Conkling's confederate Chet Arthur. Within months, Conkling
launched his last great political battle against the new president. In
May, both New York senators, Conkling and Tom Platt, dramatically
resigned and returned to Albany, where they expected the state
legislature to reelect them as a sign of solidarity in their patronage
struggles with Garfield. Instead, the legislature rebelled. A number of
candidates entered the Senate race, including former Vice President
Wheeler. On several ballots, Wheeler ran ahead of Conkling. Although
neither won the election, Conkling's biographer concluded that ``the
ambition of former Vice-President Wheeler was a major contributing
cause'' to Conkling's defeat. Crushed by his defeat and by Garfield's
assassination, Conkling retired from politics to a lucrative Wall Street
law practice. William A. Wheeler also retired from public life, turning
down an appointment from President Chester Arthur to serve on a
commission to study the tariff because, he said, his health was not up
to it. He died on June 4, 1887, in Malone, a forgotten man.²¹
WILLIAM ALMON WHEELER

NOTES

¹ John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York, 1956),
p. xiv.
² William Dean Howells, Sketch of the Life and Character
of Rutherford B. Hayes, Also a Biographical Sketch of William A. Wheeler
(New York, 1876), pp. 5-7; see also James T. Otten, ``Grand Old
Partyman: William A. Wheeler and the Republican Party, 1850-1880,''
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1976), pp. 1-11, 285-
86.
³ Howells, p. 10; Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of
Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton
Rouge, LA, 1973), p. 123.
⁴ Otten, pp. 63-79, 288-89.
⁵ Polakoff, p. 181.
⁶ Ibid; William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction,
1869-1879 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979), pp. 133, 294.
⁷ Howells, p. 12; Polakoff, p. 37.
⁸ Herbert Eaton, Presidential Timber: A History of
Nominating Conventions, 1868-1960 (New York, 1964), pp. 55-59; Richard
E. Welch, Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans
(Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 55.
⁹ Polakoff, pp. 67-68; David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling
of New York: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, NY, 1971), p. 241.
¹⁰ Howells, pp. 16-17, 20.
¹¹ Irwin Silber, Songs America Voted By (Harrisburg, PA,
1971), p. 115.
¹² Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New
York, 1993), p. 281; Polakoff, p. 123.
¹³ Gillette, pp. 304, 419.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 332; Otten, p. 218.
¹⁵ For details of the compromise, see C. Vann Woodward,
Reunion and Reaction; The Compromise of 1877 and the End of
Reconstruction (New York, 1991; reprint of 1951 edition); Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York,
1988); and Polakoff. See also Chapter 21 of this volume, ``Thomas
Andrews Hendricks,'' p. 263.
¹⁶ Kenneth E. Davison, The Presidency of Rutherford B.
Hayes (Westport, CT, 1972), pp. 84-85.
¹⁷ Otten, p. 171; T. Harry Williams, ed., Hayes: The
Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New York, 1964), pp. 69, 129.
¹⁸ Howells, p. 26; Otten, pp. 176, 181, 292; U.S.,
Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989, by Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc. 100-
20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 4, Historical Statistics, 1789-1992,
1993, p. 644.
¹⁹ Williams, ed., p. 302; Otten, pp. 209, 256, 263.
²⁰ Williams, ed., pp. 256-57.
²¹ Jordan, pp. 407-8; Otten, pp. 277-79.
?

Chapter 20

CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR

1881

CHESTER A. ARTHUR
CHESTER A. ARTHUR

Chapter 20

CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR

20th Vice President: 1881

Such an honor and opportunity comes to very few of the
millions of Americans, and to that man but once. No man can
refuse it, and I will not.
--Chester A. Arthur
Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, ``boss rule'' and
``machine politics'' flourished in the United States, and nowhere more
intensely than in New York, the most populated state in the Union. The
Tweed Ring ran the Democratic party's Tammany Hall apparatus in New
York, and an equally powerful machine operated within the state's
Republican party. Throughout the 1870s, that party's ``stalwart''
faction, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling, dominated New York politics
until it reached both its apex and nadir within the space of a few
months in 1881. Although responsible for some of the most tawdry
politics in American history, Conkling's machine also produced two vice
presidents, Chester Alan Arthur and Levi P. Morton, one of whom--
Arthur--became president of the United States under tragic circumstances
and turned against the machine and its spoilsmen.
A spellbinding orator with a commanding presence, Senator Roscoe
Conkling was the uncrowned leader of the Senate in an era before
majority and minority leaders were formally designated. One woman
newspaper correspondent described him as the most alluring politician of
his time and ``the Apollo of the Senate.'' New York's other senator,
Thomas C. Platt, similarly considered Conkling one of the handsomest men
he had ever met.
He was over six feet tall, of slender build, and stood straight as
an arrow. . . . A curl, described as Hyperion, rolled over
his forehead. An imperial [air] added much to the beauty
of his Apollo-like appearance. His noble figure, flashing
eye and majestic voice made one forget that he was
somewhat foppish in his dress.A physical fitness fanatic,
Conkling boxed to keep in shape for his political battles,
and a journalist noted that Conkling also ``loved to use
words as a prize-fighter loves to use his fists.'' No one
admired Conkling's talents and abilities more than he
himself. A vain and haughty man with a monumental ego, he
believed himself unfettered by the rules that governed
lesser mortals. These impulses led him to carry on a
scandalous affair with Kate Chase Sprague, the wife of his
Senate colleague William Sprague, and to challenge openly
two presidents--Rutherford B. Hayes and James A.
Garfield--for power and patronage.¹
Conkling built his political machine on a rich source of patronage,
the New York customhouse, headed by the collector of the port of New
York. Before income taxes, the chief sources of federal revenue were the
duties charged on imported goods. The busy port of New York served as
the point of deposit for many imports, and its customhouse became the
largest federal office in the government, taking in more revenue and
handing out more jobs than any other. Since the days of Andrew Jackson,
the ``spoils system'' had prevailed in the hiring and retention of
federal employees. Each new administration cleaned house, regardless of
the ability of individual civil servants, making room for its own
appointees. As was the case at the city and state level, these federal
jobs provided the glue that united political party organizations. Yet
increasingly in the post-Civil War era, federal offices like the New
York customhouse became symbols of waste, fraud, and incompetence that
cost the government millions of dollars.²

Political Lieutenant in the Conkling Machine

From 1871 to 1877, the head of the New York customhouse was Roscoe
Conkling's close ally, Chester Alan Arthur. Born in North Fairfield,
Vermont, on October 5, 1829, Arthur was the son of a Baptist minister
who held a succession of pastorates throughout Vermont and upstate New
York. When his father finally settled at a church in Schenectady, young
Arthur was able to attend Union College, from which he graduated Phi
Beta Kappa in 1848. For a few years he taught school and was a
principal. He then studied law and gained admission to the bar in New
York City in 1854. During the Civil War, he became a judge advocate
general and later the quartermaster general of the New York militia.
Although he never saw combat, these posts enabled him to campaign as
``General Arthur'' in his later political career.
Arthur married Virginia-born Ellen Lewis Herndon in 1859 and
established his family in a handsome brownstone on Lexington Avenue near
Gramercy Park. His law practice enabled him to live in a conspicuously
stylish fashion. At first, Arthur was identified with the conservative
wing of his party, led by former Governor William H. Seward and Albany
boss Thurlow Weed. But at the state convention in 1867, he entered the
orbit of the rising political star Roscoe Conkling. An upstate
Republican, Conkling needed alliances with New York City men and
recruited Arthur into his organization. Conkling's biographer David
Jordan assessed Arthur as ``a shrewd, imaginative, and meticulous
political manager; he was a master organizer, a necessity for Conkling's
new organization.'' The popular ``Chet'' Arthur rose quickly within the
ranks of the machine. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant rewarded
Conkling's loyalty to his administration by appointing Arthur to the
highly lucrative post of collector of the port of New York.³
Numerous scandals within the administration of President Ulysses S.
Grant led Republicans to seek a less-tarnished candidate for the 1876
contest. Chet Arthur supported Conkling's bid for the Republican
presidential nomination, but when the nomination went instead to the
reform-conscious governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, Arthur threw the
support of his office behind Hayes, raising funds and getting out voters
to help Hayes carry New York and win the election. Rather than showing
his gratitude, however, President Hayes appointed a commission to
investigate the New York customhouse. When the group's report exposed
inefficiency, graft, and a bloated payroll, Hayes issued an order
forbidding federal officeholders to take part in political activities,
so that the customhouse could be run under a merit system. Conkling's
lieutenants, Arthur as collector and Alonzo Cornell as naval officer of
the port--both members of the Republican State Committee--should have
resigned under this order, but they refused. Hayes then fired both men
and nominated Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (father of the future president)
and L. Bradford Prince to replace them. An outraged Conkling persuaded
the Senate to reject both nominations.⁴

The Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds

As the election of 1880 approached, Hayes chose not to seek a second
term. Rather than become a candidate himself, Conkling threw his support
behind former president U.S. Grant. Conkling particularly wanted to
block the nomination of his longtime rival, Senator and former House
Speaker James G. Blaine of Maine. Back in 1866, when they were both
members of the House, Blaine had delivered a sarcastic speech that
mocked Conkling's ``turkey-gobbler strut'' and ``Hyperion curl.''
Delighted political cartoonists had seized on these characteristics to
mock Conkling. Although Blaine and Conkling served together in the House
and Senate for another fourteen years, they never spoke to one another
again. Each dedicated himself to blocking the other from becoming
president.⁵
At the national convention in June, Conkling proposed a unit rule to
force the entire New York delegation to support Grant, but William H.
Robertson, a Blaine supporter, led a minority of the delegation to rebel
against the stalwarts. Robertson's faction, known dismissively as
``half-breeds,'' joined with other independent delegates to defeat the
unit rule. The result was an extended deadlock that was broken only when
the Blaine forces swung their support to a darkhorse candidate, Ohio
Representative James A. Garfield. Garfield's supporters realized that
they needed a New Yorker on the ticket, not only for the state's large
potential harvest of electoral votes but also to mollify Conkling.
Garfield at first wanted Levi P. Morton, his friend from the House of
Representatives, but Morton felt he could not accept without Conkling's
approval. When Conkling made it clear that no friend of his should join
the ticket, Morton declined. The Garfield forces next turned to Chet
Arthur, who showed no such reluctance. ``Such an honor and opportunity
comes to very few of the millions of Americans, and to that man but
once,'' Arthur told Conkling. ``No man can refuse it, and I will not.''
⁶
The selection of Chet Arthur for vice president did not pacify
Conkling, whom Garfield knew was a man ``inspired more by his hates than
his loves.'' In August 1880, Garfield went to New York to make peace
with Conkling's machine. In the Fifth Avenue Hotel rooms of Levi Morton,
Garfield met with Arthur, Platt, and other machine leaders--but not with
Conkling, who stayed away. The Conkling men sought an understanding
about patronage in a Garfield administration. In return for assurances
that he would take their wishes into consideration for New York
appointments, they agreed to raise funds for his campaign. According to
Platt, Garfield also disavowed any close relations with Hayes' civil
service proposals. With these guarantees, the Conkling machine threw its
weight behind Garfield, enabling him to win a very narrow victory in
November. It was said that, while Garfield owed his nomination to
Blaine, he owed his election to Conkling.⁷
Party reformers were chagrined at the choice of Chet Arthur, the
recently deposed collector of the port of New York and a symbol of
corrupt machine politics, as Garfield's running mate. Most Republican
newspapers held the vice-presidential candidate in low esteem. One
campaign biography devoted 533 pages to Garfield and only 21 pages--
almost as an embarrassed aside--to Arthur. Enumerating his ``good''
qualities, the campaign tract observed that his face was ``full, fat and
fair,'' that he did not talk with ``offensive accents,'' that he dressed
``in perfect good taste,'' and that he was ``fairly corpulent as his
pictures very well suggest.'' ⁸ Arthur probably gained some
public sympathy for his wife's death in 1880, which left him to raise a
son and young daughter.

An Evenly Balanced Senate

Once elected, Vice President Arthur proved crucial to his party's
fortunes in the Senate. At the beginning of the Forty-seventh Congress,
the party balance in the Senate was exactly equal, a situation in which
the vice president's vote might be needed to give the Republicans a
majority to organize the body and chair its committees. When the Senate
met on March 4, 1881, there were 37 Republicans, 37 Democrats, and 2
Independents. One of the Independents, former Supreme Court Justice
David Davis, announced that he planned to vote with the Democrats to
organize the chamber. If the other Independent, William Mahone of
Virginia, could also be persuaded to join them, the Democrats would take
the majority. Rumors spread that the White House was plying Mahone with
``champagne and satisfaction,'' or promises of patronage, to win him for
the Republicans. With a noisy mob watching from the galleries, Vice
President Arthur directed the clerk to call the roll. When Mahone's name
was reached, the Virginia senator, sitting on the Democratic side of the
aisle, voted with the Republicans, giving Arthur the deciding vote. For
his vote, Mahone received a basket of flowers from the White House, the
chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee, and control of federal
patronage in Virginia. Democrats, however, intended to fight the
administration at every turn, making every vote--especially the vice
president's--critical.⁹
At this juncture, a fissure disrupted Republican ranks. Much to
Roscoe Conkling's chagrin, President Garfield had named James G. Blaine
as secretary of state, and from that post Blaine plotted against his
longtime rival. While a number of offices went to Conkling men, they
were excluded from the cabinet seats they desired--especially the
secretary of the treasury, which had jurisdiction over the collector of
the Port of New York. On the day before their inauguration, Arthur had
visited Garfield, along with Senators Conkling and Platt, to plead for
their candidate for treasury secretary. As Garfield noted in his diary,
Conkling seemed ``full of apprehension that he had been or was to be
cheated.'' ¹⁰

``A Square Blow at Conkling''

Conkling had good reason for apprehension. On March 23, Vice
President Arthur, while presiding over the Senate, received a list of
presidential nominations. His eye fell on the name of New York state
senator William H. Robertson for collector of the port of New York,
which, as one reporter described it, represented ``a square blow at
Conkling.'' Arthur folded the document so that Robertson's name appeared
uppermost and had a page deliver it to Senator Conkling. From the press
gallery, reporters watched Conkling walk rapidly to his colleague Platt
and hold a ``whispered conference.'' Conkling made it known that he
considered the nomination personally offensive, and Vice President
Arthur joined with Senators Conkling and Platt in a letter asking the
president to withdraw Robertson's name. At the Republican caucus,
Conkling delivered a long, eloquent, and bitter attack on the president
for his breach of senatorial courtesy. He persuaded Senate Republicans
to postpone the customs collectors' nominations and take up less
controversial posts. President Garfield retaliated by withdrawing the
nominations of five of Conkling's men. When it began to look as if
Senate Democrats would contribute enough votes to confirm Robertson,
Conkling and his colleague Tom Platt decided to resign from the Senate
and return to New York, where they expected the state legislature to
reelect them as a sign of endorsement in their power struggle with the
president.¹¹
Vice President Arthur had no trouble deciding which side to take in
this epic struggle between his president and his party boss. After the
Senate adjourned, Arthur also journeyed to Albany, where he lobbied for
Conkling's reelection. J. L. Connery, the editor of the New York Herald,
which the Conkling machine courted, recalled Arthur telling him in
confidence that Garfield had been neither honorable nor truthful. ``It
is a hard thing to say of a President of the United States, but it is,
unfortunately, only the truth,'' said Arthur. ``Garfield--spurred by
Blaine, by whom he is easily led--has broken every pledge made to us;
not only that, but he seems to have wished to do it in a most offensive
way.'' Garfield's supporters, however, never forgave Arthur for his
betrayal of the president.¹²

A Presidential Assassination

The strategy of the Conkling forces unraveled when the New York
legislature reacted negatively to the ``childish'' resignations of its
two senators. Led by state senate president pro tempore William
Robertson (the customs collector nominee), the half-breeds called on
legislators to ``stand by the administration,'' and the legislature
entered a month-long deadlock over the senatorial elections. On July 2,
Platt withdrew from the race in a last-ditch attempt to improve
Conkling's chances of reelection. That same day, on the brink of
victory, President Garfield walked arm in arm with Secretary of State
Blaine through Washington's Baltimore and Ohio railroad station. A
crazed assassin shot the president in the back and then identified
himself with Conkling's stalwarts. After lingering throughout the
summer, the mortally wounded Garfield died on September 19. By then the
New York legislature had rejected Conkling's bid for reelection. ``How
can I speak into a grave?'' Conkling complained. ``How can I battle with
a shroud. Silence is a duty and a doom.'' ¹³
Garfield's death elevated to the presidency a man who had shared an
apartment in Washington with Conkling and who had sided with Conkling
against Garfield. Political observers naturally assumed that Conkling
would dominate Chet Arthur's administration. Newspaper correspondent
Theron Crawford later noted that Conkling ``had been in the habit of
patronizing Mr. Arthur, and had given him political orders for so many
years that he could not imagine this pleasure-loving, easy-going man
capable of rebellion.'' Arthur was in New York when Garfield died, and
it was Roscoe Conkling who carried the new president's bag to the
station when he left for Washington.
Less than a month later, Conkling arrived in Washington and held a
private meeting with Arthur. Reporters speculated that the two had
chosen a new cabinet, yet no announcement was made to the press. Neither
man would publicly acknowledge what had transpired, but their associates
described a stormy session. Conkling presented his patronage demands: he
wanted William Robertson dismissed as collector and he himself was
willing to accept a cabinet portfolio. But Conkling underestimated how
deeply the assassination had shocked and sobered Chester Arthur. Senator
Platt described Arthur as ``overcome with grief,'' particularly after
newspapers quoted the assassin saying ``I am a Stalwart, and I want
Arthur for President.'' Feeling the weight of his new office and
calculating that public opinion would never tolerate Robertson's
removal, the president rejected Conkling's advice. A New York Republican
leader told a friend in the press that President Arthur felt very bitter
over the demands Conkling had made on him. ``You can put it down for a
fact that `Conk' wanted `Chet' to remove Robertson and appoint one of
our fellows collector.'' When Arthur refused, Conkling stormed out,
swearing that all of his friends had turned traitor to him.¹⁴
Conkling's mistress, Kate Chase Sprague, tried to intercede with the
president, reminding him of ``the vital importance of placing a robust,
courageous, clear-headed man at the head of the Treasury,'' and arguing
that Conkling would be a ``tower of strength'' in the cabinet. But
Arthur offered neither a cabinet appointment nor the removal of
Robertson as collector. Instead, Conkling went into permanent political
exile. Although Arthur later named Conkling to the Supreme Court, his
former leader declined. At the same time, Arthur accepted Blaine's
resignation as secretary of state, feeling that by doing so he had
neutralized the heads of both warring factions and could steer a course
between them. Senator Chauncey Depew later judged that, while Arthur
tried to govern fairly, ``he was not big enough, nor strong enough, to
contend with the powerful men who were antagonized.'' ¹⁵

Support for Civil Service Reform

Since the martyred President Garfield was regarded as a ``victim of
that accursed greed for spoils of office,'' his death rallied public
support behind civil service reform legislation. In Arthur's first
annual message to Congress in December 1881, he pledged his willingness
to enforce any reform legislation that Congress might enact modeled on
the British civil service system. Democratic Senator George H. Pendleton
of Ohio sponsored a measure that became known as the Pendleton Act,
which President Arthur signed in January 1883. The Pendleton Act
established a bipartisan Civil Service Commission to set rules by which
federal jobs would be filled. The act placed about 14,000 jobs, about
one-tenth of the total federal employment at the time, under civil
service. Although by no means a complete reversal of the spoils system,
it took a large step in that direction. As the journalist Henry Stoddard
mused, it was a strange turn of events that a spoilsman like Chester
Arthur should sign the first effective civil service law and also be the
first president to veto a river and harbor appropriations bill as
excessive ``--the bill that had come to be known as the `pork barrel'
bill into which both parties dug deep.'' ¹⁶
The initial reaction to Vice President Arthur's elevation to the
presidency had been one of universal dismay: ``Chet Arthur in the White
House!'' But, as chief executive, Chester Alan Arthur replaced Chet
Arthur. The new president acted in a dignified manner, made strong
appointments, and won approval for the ``elevated tone'' of his
administration. He redecorated the White House and entertained regally.
He became famous for his fourteen-course dinners that often kept his
guests at the table until after midnight, consuming fine wines and rich
foods. Overeating and underexercising did not help Arthur's health, and
during his presidency he suffered from kidney disease that slowly sapped
his strength. In 1884, he made himself available for renomination.
``Arthur has given us a good administration, but it has been negatively
rather than positively good,'' wrote one dubious journalist. ``He has
done well, in other words, by not doing anything bad. This kind of
goodness does not count for much in presidential campaigns.''
¹⁷
Arthur's attempt to steer a course between the stalwarts and half-
breeds succeeded only in alienating both sides. At the Republican
convention, the remnants of the stalwart wing (led by Tom Platt)
supported James G. Blaine, on the grounds that Arthur had deserted them.
When they tried to persuade Conkling, now a highly successful New York
attorney, to emerge from his political retirement and endorse Blaine's
presidential candidacy, Conkling acidly replied, ``No thank you, I don't
engage in criminal practice.'' Blaine lost New York by a whisker--and
with it the election. Grover Cleveland, who had owed his election as
governor of New York to the split between the stalwarts and the half-
breeds, now became the first Democratic president since the Civil War.
Chester Arthur returned to his New York law office. Rapidly declining in
health, he died on November 17, 1886, less than two years after leaving
the White House. He had been chosen as vice president without much
expectation but, when thrust into the presidency, he rose to the
occasion and conducted the office with style.¹⁸
CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR

NOTES

¹ David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United States
Senate, 1869-1901 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), pp. 27-30; Donald A. Ritchie,
Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge,
MA, 1991), p. 156; Louis J. Lang, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas
Collier Platt (New York, 1910), p. 55; Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew
Them: Presidents and Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York, 1927),
p. 115.
² Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the
Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883 (Urbana, IL, 1961), pp. 1-32.
³ David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in
the Senate (Ithaca, NY, 1971), pp. 146-48.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 155-78; Chester L. Barrows, William M.
Evarts: Lawyer, Diplomat, Statesman (Chapel Hill, NC, 1941), p. 326.
⁵ Ritchie, pp. 136-37.
⁶ Jordan, p. 341; Stoddard, pp. 118-19; Chauncey M.
Depew, My Memories of Eighty Years (New York, 1924), pp. 122-23.
⁷ Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies of James A.
Garfield & Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence, KS, 1981), pp. 26-27; Jordan, p.
439; Lang, ed., pp. 128-32; Alfred R. Conkling, The Life and Letters of
Roscoe Conkling, Orator, Statesman, Advocate (New York, 1889), p. 614.
See also Chapter 22 of this volume, ``Levi P. Morton,'' p. 271.
⁸ James S. Brisbin, From The Tow-Path to the White House:
The Early Life and Public Career of James A. Garfield (Philadelphia,
1880), pp. 546-47.
⁹ ``The Great Senate Deadlock: 1881,'' Senate History 9
(July 1984): 1, 9-10.
¹⁰ Harry James Brown and Frederic D. Williams, eds., The
Diary of James A. Garfield (East Lansing, MI, 1981), 4:552.
¹¹ Ben: Perley Poore, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty
Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1886), pp. 400-402;
Conkling, p. 640; Doenecke, p. 45.
¹² Theodore Clarke Smith, The Life and Letters of James
Abram Garfield (New Haven, CT, 1925), 2:1128-29; T.B. Connery, ``Secret
History of the Garfield-Conkling Tragedy,'' Cosmopolitan 23 (June 1897):
145-62.
¹³ Jordan, pp. 379-409; Henry L. Stoddard, p. 114.
¹⁴ Theron C. Crawford, James G. Blaine: A Study of His
Life and Career, from the Standpoint of a Personal Witness of the
Principal Events in his History (Philadelphia, 1893), p. 525; Thomas C.
Reeves, Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester A. Arthur (New York, 1975),
p. 256; William C. Hudson, Random Recollections of an Old Political
Reporter (New York, 1911), p. 127; Lang, ed., pp. 162-63.
¹⁵ Katherine Chase Sprague to Chester A. Arthur, October
21, 1881, Chester A. Arthur Papers, Library of Congress; Crawford, pp.
508, 546; Depew, p. 118.
¹⁶ Hoogenboom, pp. 213-53; Stoddard, p. 122.
¹⁷ Poore, p. 431; Stoddard, pp. 117, 285; Francis
Carpenter, ed., Carp's Washington (New York, 1960), p. 30; Doenecke, pp.
76-77, 80, 183-84.
¹⁸ Lang, ed., p. 181; Ritchie, p. 137.
?

Chapter 21

THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS

1885

THOMAS A. HENDRICKS
THOMAS A. HENDRICKS

Chapter 21

THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS

21st Vice President: 1885

There were no neutral tints in his own political colors.
--Senator Daniel Voorhees
American political parties have traditionally been coalitions of
contradictory and contentious forces. The electoral college is largely
responsible for the loose-knit nature of these political parties.
Victory requires a majority of electors from throughout the nation, a
feat nearly impossible for any party rooted in a single region or
clustered about one ideology or interest group. To build such national
coalitions, politicians must reach out to those with whom they may
disagree. The Democratic party emerged from Thomas Jefferson's defense
of the yeoman farmer against Alexander Hamilton's efforts to use the
government to promote American industry and finance. Yet to build a
national party, Jefferson needed to embrace New York's Tammany Hall,
which represented urban interests. Nearly a century later, Indiana's
Thomas A. Hendricks confronted that same split. He was a ``soft-money''
agrarian reformer, who ran twice for vice president on Democratic
tickets headed by two different ``hard-money'' New York governors.

Early Years

A son of the Mississippi Valley, Thomas A. Hendricks was born on a
farm near Zanesville, Ohio, on September 7, 1819, to John and Jane
Thomson Hendricks. When just six months old, he moved with his parents
to Indiana, where his father's older brother, William, was a U.S.
representative and a soon-to-be governor of that new state. Hendricks
was raised as a staunch Presbyterian and a Jacksonian Democrat, the two
pillars of his thinking throughout his life. He attended the
Presbyterian-run Hanover College in Indiana, where he proved an average
student but a skillful debater. After graduating, he went east to
Pennsylvania to study at a law school run by one of his uncles. In 1843
he was admitted to the bar and practiced in Shelbyville, Indiana. That
same year, he met Eliza Morgan, a vivacious teenager from Ohio who was
visiting in Indiana. After two years of correspondence, he felt
financially secure enough to propose, and they were married in 1845.
Their only child died at age three. In later years, an old neighbor said
that he doubted whether Hendricks could have achieved his political
success without Eliza. ``She is generous, wise and discreet. The man
born to get on in the world always marries that kind of woman, it
appears.'' ¹

Slavery and Politics

Always ambitious, Hendricks plunged into politics. He was elected to
the Indiana house of representatives in 1848, served as a delegate to
the state constitutional convention in 1849, and won a seat in the U.S.
House of Representatives in 1850. A popular member of the House, he
became a follower of Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and
supported Douglas' controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. That statute
repealed the Missouri Compromise and permitted residents of the
territories to determine whether or not to permit slavery, a concept
known as ``popular sovereignty.'' Public outrage in the North caused the
dissolution of the old Whig party and a period of political instability
that eventually resulted in the emergence of the new Republican party.
Hendricks believed his vote for the Kansas-Nebraska Act reflected the
sentiments of his constituents, although it was later cited as the cause
of his defeat for reelection in 1854. He was opposed by a former
Democrat representing a coalition of Free Soilers, abolitionists,
temperance advocates, Know-Nothings, and Whigs. Hendricks denounced the
nativism of the Know-Nothing movement and defended the rights of
immigrants and religious minorities. Despite these admirable stands for
minority rights, he had a blind eye on racial issues. As a delegate to
the Indiana constitutional convention in 1849, he had led the move to
enact ``Black Laws'' that promoted segregation and restricted the
migration of free blacks into the state.²
After losing his seat in Congress, Hendricks in 1855 accepted an
appointment from President Franklin Pierce to become commissioner of the
General Land Office in the Interior Department, a post he held through
1859. As a Douglas Democrat, he felt increasingly out of step with the
anti-Douglas administration of James Buchanan and resigned his office to
return to Indiana, where in 1860 he ran unsuccessfully for governor. He
then moved to Indianapolis to practice law.³

A Pro-Union Democrat

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, the Democratic party in Indiana
divided between peace and pro-Union factions. Jesse D. Bright, the
president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, led the party's peace wing,
while Hendricks became a leading ``War Democrat.'' Bright, an imperious
man who had tolerated no opposition in his twenty-year domination of the
state Democratic party, was expelled from the Senate in February 1862,
when it was discovered that he had written a letter addressed to
Jefferson Davis as ``President of the Confederate States,'' recommending
that the Confederacy purchase rifles from an Indiana manufacturer.
Bright expected that the Indiana legislature would reelect him, but
instead Judge David Turpie was chosen to fill the few months remaining
in his term. The legislature elected Thomas Hendricks to take the seat
during the next full term. Bright thereafter blamed Hendricks for his
defeat.⁴
When peace Democrats in the state legislature attempted to pass
antiwar resolutions, pro-Union members bolted. Hendricks recognized that
the peace movement would discredit the party, and he was sufficiently
familiar with the legislature to be certain that there were enough pro-
Union Democrats to defeat the resolutions. Accepting both his reasoning
and his head counting, the bolters resumed their seats and defeated the
peace resolutions.⁵
Hendricks took his oath as a U.S. senator in 1863, becoming one of
only ten Democrats facing thirty-three Republicans. He soon assumed the
role of his party's recognized leader in the Senate. Hendricks was a
thorough partisan. ``There were no neutral tints in his own political
colors,'' future Indiana Democratic Senator Daniel Voorhees later
commented. But even Republican senators acknowledged that his speeches
were well prepared and that his arguments were plausible--if one
accepted all of his premises. Assessing Hendricks' Senate career, the
journalist A.K. McClure later said, ``He was a Democratic Senator in the
most trying times of the war, when many less faithful or less discreet
men made hopeless shipwreck of their political future, but the record of
Mr. Hendricks has stood the severest test and is conspicuous for its
freedom from the partisan blunders which then and since have ranked as
crimes.'' ⁶
President Abraham Lincoln cultivated the support of War Democrats
like Hendricks. As Congress prepared to adjourn in March 1865, Hendricks
paid a last visit to the president, who told him, ``We have differed in
politics, Senator Hendricks, but you have uniformly treated my
administration with fairness.'' During the period of congressional
Reconstruction of the South that followed the war, Hendricks never
missed an opportunity to remind Republican senators that President
Lincoln had opposed such radical Reconstruction measures as the Wade-
Davis bill and had wanted a speedy return of the southern states to the
Union. Hendricks consistently opposed repealing the fugitive slave laws
until slavery was constitutionally abolished, and he tried to prevent
African Americans from gaining the right to vote. ``I say we are not of
the same race,'' Hendricks declared; ``we are so different that we ought
not to compose one political community.'' ⁷
Hendricks emerged as one of the few prominent Democrats not to be
stigmatized as a Copperhead (or southern sympathizer) during the war. As
a result, his name arose for the 1868 Democratic presidential
nomination. He lost the nomination to New York Governor Horatio Seymour
but went back to Indiana, where he was nominated to run for governor. In
the fall, both Seymour and Hendricks were defeated. Hendricks returned
to his law practice and bided his time for a revival of Democratic
fortunes. Looking toward the 1872 presidential election, former Iowa
Senator A.C. Dodge recommended Hendricks as a ``worthy, able and
excellent man.'' He believed that there was strong support throughout
the Midwest for the Indianan, although he doubted that Hendricks would
run well in the East. The Democrats instead nominated the eccentric
newspaper editor Horace Greeley for president on a fusion ticket with
liberal Republicans who opposed the corruption of the Ulysses Grant
administration. That same year, Indiana Democrats nominated Hendricks to
run again for governor and, while Greeley went down to a crashing
defeat, Hendricks won the Indiana state house.⁸

Tilden-Hendricks

His victory in that important swing state made Hendricks a
frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1876. However,
after the panic of 1873 and the widespread economic crisis that
followed, Hendricks became publicly identified with agrarian reform and
``soft money.'' Currency reformers believed that postwar contractions of
the currency had caused the economic depression and that inflation of
the currency through issuance of greenbacks or increased minting of
silver currency would lower farmers' costs of repaying their debts. Such
arguments struck fear into eastern financial circles, whose members
supported sound currency based on gold and believed that any debasing of
the currency would rob creditors of just returns on their investments.
The hard-money element within the Democratic party rallied behind the
nomination of Samuel J. Tilden, known in some circles as the ``Great
Forecloser.'' To balance Tilden, the party nominated the soft-money
Hendricks for vice president.
The Republican candidate, Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, carried
every midwestern state except Hendricks' Indiana. On election night, it
appeared that the Tilden-Hendricks ticket had won both the popular and
the electoral vote, but the outcome in three southern states still
controlled by Reconstruction governments remained in dispute. Both
Republicans and Democrats claimed these electoral votes. The Democrats
needed just one more state to win, the Republicans needed all of the
disputed votes. When a deadlock developed between the Republican Senate
and the Democratic House over counting the electoral votes, both sides
reluctantly agreed to set up a special electoral commission. Republicans
gained an 8-to-7 majority on the commission, and by that straight party
vote the commission assigned all of the disputed electoral votes to
Hayes, who was sworn in as president. To prevent a new civil war, Tilden
and Hendricks accepted the outcome, but thereafter Democrats charged
that the election had been stolen from them.⁹

Hobbled by Illness

After the electoral disappointment, Hendricks and his wife consoled
themselves with a long journey through Europe. He returned to his law
practice and continued to speak out on the issues of the day. Hoosiers
were ``a speech-loving people,'' as one of Hendricks' biographers noted,
and large crowds always showed up for his orations. In 1880, Indiana
once again boosted Hendricks for president, but while he was vacationing
at Hot Springs, Arkansas, Hendricks suffered a stroke. Two years later,
he developed a lameness in one foot--a result, claimed the journalist
Ben: Perley Poore, of Hendricks' frequent public speaking engagements:
While speaking he was in the habit of bending forward on the tip
of his right foot, resting the entire weight upon it. From
the pressure of his right shoe a swelling arose on one of
his toes. . . . In twenty-four hours erysipelas [an acute
skin inflammation] developed, and it was only after an
illness of six months that he recovered. But he always
afterwards was somewhat lame, especially when he was
fatigued.¹⁰
As the 1884 election approached, Samuel Tilden, who had also
suffered a paralytic stroke, mentioned to a newspaper reporter that his
old running mate Thomas Hendricks wanted a reprise of the 1876 ticket of
Tilden and Hendricks, ``and I do not wonder, considering my weakness!''
Tilden announced his withdrawal from the race, which left the Democratic
nomination wide open. No one doubted that Hendricks was available for
the nomination in 1884, but his constant availability in every
presidential election since 1868 had devalued his candidacy. The party
looked for a new face to unite them and lead them to victory after so
many years in the minority. Hendricks was dismissed as a man of
``inordinate ambition.'' ¹¹

Cleveland-Hendricks

Hendricks attended the Democratic National Convention in 1884 not as
a candidate but rather as a delegate who would nominate former Indiana
Senator Joseph E. McDonald. His appearance at the convention drew much
enthusiastic applause, since he represented the ``old ticket'' of 1876
that had been robbed of victory. As the convention moved toward
nominating the reform governor of New York, Grover Cleveland,
Cleveland's opponents--especially New York City's Tammany Hall--
concluded that Hendricks was the only man around whom the opposition
could be united. They planned a strategy to stampede the convention to
Hendricks the next day. Just as Indiana swung its vote to him, Hendricks
entered the convention hall through a door facing the delegates. The
band struck up a tune as Tammany Hall boss John Kelly and his henchmen
leaped from their seats and began shouting for Hendricks. As the
delegates paraded, Hendricks sat calmly. ``To those near him,'' Indiana
Senator Daniel Voorhees asserted, ``he simply appeared to enjoy in a
quiet silent way the popular approval of his long and faithful
services.'' ¹²
These tactics might have worked, except that Cleveland's managers
got wind of the conspiracy and sent messages to all the delegates
warning them not to get caught up in any spurious demonstrations.
Cleveland's supporters argued that New York was essential for a
Democratic victory and that Cleveland, a hard-money reform governor,
could attract liberal Republican voters, a group known as the mugwumps.
These arguments prevailed, and the Hendricks boom fizzled when Illinois
increased its vote for Cleveland, followed by enough other states to
give Cleveland the nomination at the end of the second ballot. Hendricks
was rewarded with the vice-presidential nomination, once again to
balance a hard-money presidential candidate and to offer the promise of
carrying the swing state of Indiana.¹³
The prospect of victory invigorated Hendricks, and he campaigned
valiantly, proving ``a tower of strength for the ticket'' in what has
often been described as the ``dirtiest'' campaign in American political
history. He attacked the incumbent Republican administration, helped
stop a party bolt by Tammany Hall, drew large crowds to his speeches,
and dramatically survived a late-night train wreck while campaigning in
Illinois. Hendricks won praise as an ``urbane leader.'' He stood five
feet nine inches tall and was described as ``well proportioned and
stoutly built, though not corpulent.'' His once light hair had turned
silver, and he wore ``the least of side whiskers, which are light gray,
and his complexion is fair.'' As a speaker he was clear and forceful,
while in conversation he was ``easy, courteous, cautious, and
deferential.¹⁴

Vice President of the Spoilsmen

In 1884, Democrats won their first presidential election since 1856,
and Thomas Hendricks returned as presiding officer to the Senate where
he had once served in a pitifully small minority. From the start,
however, Hendricks found himself at odds with President Cleveland, a
scrupulously honest man with good intentions but limited vision. Unlike
Hendricks, who had long called for more government intervention in the
economy to promote agrarian reform, Cleveland advocated laissez-faire
economics and was a Social Darwinist who thought the slightest hint of
government paternalism would undermine the national
character.¹⁵
Mugwump reformers waited to see if Cleveland would expand the Civil
Service System recently established by the Pendleton Act, but Democrats,
long out of power, demanded patronage. Vice President Hendricks and many
Democratic senators, furious when Cleveland ignored the patronage
requests of their state party organizations, considered the president's
conduct ``treacherous.'' Cleveland dismissed these complaints as the
howls of old Jacksonian spoilsmen and wild-eyed currency reformers,
among whom he counted his vice president. But by midsummer 1885,
Cleveland buckled at the threat of revolt within his party. He replaced
his civil-service-reform-minded assistant postmaster general with former
Illinois Congressman Adlai Stevenson, ``who understood practical
politics.'' Given free rein, Stevenson replaced Republican postmasters
with deserving Democrats at a fast clip, until more than 40,000 federal
jobs changed hands.¹⁶
The Indiana Democratic organization was particularly outspoken about
its dissatisfaction with Cleveland's skimpy patronage, and Vice
President Hendricks became known as ``Vice President of the spoilsmen.''
The label ``spoilsman'' distressed Hendricks. As one senator who knew
him explained, Hendricks felt the charge came from those who ``had been
wont to linger in the shade and slumber while he and the `boys,' as he
loved sometimes to call the party workers, had borne the heat and dust
and burden of the battle.'' ¹⁷
In September, Hendricks left Washington to attend the thirty-fifth
anniversary reunion of the surviving members of the constitutional
convention of Indiana and to rest in anticipation of the coming session
of Congress in December. While at home in Indianapolis, he died in his
sleep on November 25, 1885.

Death of the Vice President

Hendricks' death eliminated the leader of the possible rival camp to
Cleveland's presidency, but also for the second time in a decade
deprived the nation of a vice president for more than three years,
raising concerns about the problem of presidential succession. If
Cleveland should die, who would become president? The Presidential
Succession Act of 1792 provided that the Senate's president pro tempore
and the Speaker of the House, in that order, should succeed. There was
concern that one of these offices might soon be filled with members of
the opposition rather than members of Cleveland's party, since both
posts were vacant at the time of Hendricks' sudden death and, while
Democrats controlled the House, Republicans controlled the Senate. On
the recommendation of Massachusetts Republican Senator George F. Hoar,
Congress in 1886 adopted a law that eliminated congressional officers
from the line of succession in favor of cabinet officers, in order of
their rank. This system prevailed until 1947, when the death of a
president had again left the vice-presidency open for almost an entire
term, stimulating another reevaluation and a different solution to the
problem.¹⁸
When President Cleveland ran for reelection in 1888, Democrats had
to choose a replacement for Thomas Hendricks. The honor went to former
Ohio Senator Allen G. Thurman. This time, Cleveland faced a Hoosier
Republican, Senator Benjamin Harrison. Without Hendricks on the ticket,
the Democrats failed to carry Indiana. Although Cleveland won a
plurality of the popular vote, he lost the electoral college and with it
the presidency.
Hendricks' death, as the veteran journalist Ben: Perley Poore
judged, ``removed an official around whom the disaffected Democrats
could have crystallized into a formidable opposition,'' for Hendricks
had not been disposed to accept being what Hannibal Hamlin had described
as the fifth wheel on a coach.¹⁹
THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS

NOTES

¹ W.U. Hensel, ``A Biographical Sketch of Thomas A.
Hendricks,'' in William Dorsheimer, Life and Public Services of Hon.
Grover Cleveland (New York, 1884), pp. 184-95; John W. Holcombe and
Hubert M. Skinner, Life and Public Services of Thomas A. Hendricks with
Selected Speeches and Writings (Indianapolis, 1886), p. 93.
² Hensel, pp. 210-12; Holcombe and Skinner, pp. 117-18;
Ralph D. Gray, ``Thomas A. Hendricks: Spokesman for the Democracy,'' in
Gentlemen from Indiana: National Party Candidates, 1836-1940, ed. Ralph
D. Gray (Indianapolis, 1977), p. 126.
³ Gray, p. 128.
⁴ Holcombe and Skinner, pp. 195, 245.
⁵ Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats: The
Grand Erosion of Conservative Tradition (Rutherford, NJ, 1975), p. 201.
⁶ U.S., Congress, Memorial Addresses on the Life and
Character of Thomas A. Hendricks (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1886), pp. 26, 38-39; Hensel, p. 225.
⁷ Holcombe and Skinner, p. 267; Hensel, p. 226; Eric
Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New
York, 1988), pp. 278-79.
⁸ Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Democracy of the Middle
West, 1865-1896 (Seattle, 1967; reprint of 1953 edition), p. 71.
⁹ The best account of the disputed election is Keith Ian
Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of
Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, LA, 1976). See also Chapter 19 of this
volume, ``William Almon Wheeler,'' p. 246.
¹⁰ Hensel, pp. 279, 284; Ben: Perley Poore, Perley's
Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia,
1887), 2:503-4.
¹¹ Herbert Eaton, Presidential Timber: A History of
Nominating Conventions, 1868-1960 (New York, 1964), pp. 102-7; Allan
Nevins, Grover Cleveland, A Study in Courage (New York, 1932), pp. 146-
47; Memorial Addresses, p. 25.
¹² Nevins, p. 154; Memorial Addresses, p. 29.
¹³ Eaton, p. 111; Nevins, p. 154; Poore, p. 284; Richard
E. Welch, Jr., The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence, KS,
1988), pp. 28-29.
¹⁴ Nevins, p. 177; Hensel, p. 255; Holcombe and Skinner,
pp. 7, 363-64.
¹⁵ Vincent P. De Santis, ``Grover Cleveland:
Revitalization of the Presidency,'' in Six Presidents from the Empire
State, ed. Harry J. Sievers (Tarrytown, NY, 1974), pp. 90-91.
¹⁶ John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890 (New
York, 1968), pp. 288-90; Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grover
Cleveland and the Democratic Party (Boston, 1957), p. 99. See also
Chapter 23 of this volume, ``Adlai Ewing Stevenson,'' pp. 280-81.
¹⁷ Nevins, pp. 237, 247; Memorial Addresses, p. 63.
¹⁸ Chester L. Barrows, William M. Evarts: Lawyer,
Diplomat, Statesman (Chapel Hill, NC, 1941), p. 446; Richard E. Welch,
Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans (Cambridge, MA,
1971), p. 137; John D. Feerick, From Failing Hands: The Story of
Presidential Succession (New York, 1965), pp. 140-46.
¹⁹ Poore, 2:503-4.
?

Chapter 22

LEVI PARSONS MORTON

1889-1893

LEVI P. MORTON
LEVI P. MORTON

Chapter 22

LEVI PARSONS MORTON

22nd Vice President: 1889-1893

Business experience had taught him conservatism. He
never was influenced by crazy theorists.
--Senator Thomas C. Platt
Like a hero from the pages of a Horatio Alger novel, Levi P. Morton
worked his way up by pluck and luck to fame and fortune. From a boy
toiling in a country store, he rose to become one of the nation's
wealthiest and most influential bankers and vice president of the United
States. Morton might have become president as well, had his political
acumen matched his financial ability.

Youth

Born on May 16, 1824, in the little village of Shoreham, Vermont,
Levi Parsons Morton was named for his uncle, the first American
missionary to Palestine. He was the son of a Congregational preacher,
who moved his family from church to church in New England, never
accruing much wealth. Although young Morton wanted to attend college,
his father was too poor to send him. An older brother advised him not to
worry about further schooling since ``a self-taught man is worth two of
your college boys.'' Instead, Morton took a job in a country store.
After getting his fill of heavy manual labor, he sought respite as a
teacher in a country school. Then he took another clerkship in the
general store of W.W. Estabrook, in Concord, New Hampshire, where he
learned the bookkeeper's art of calculating profit and loss.¹
Estabrook dispatched Morton to run his store in Hanover, New
Hampshire. There the young Morton lived with the family of a Dartmouth
College professor and met Lucy Young Kimball, whom he would eventually
marry thirteen years later. But first he had a fortune to earn. Morton
later recalled that he was happiest ``when I was learning how to
accomplish things; when I was building up my business.'' When his
employer went bankrupt, the chief creditor, James M. Beebe, came to New
Hampshire to inspect the situation and was impressed enough with
Morton's industriousness to invite him to join James M. Beebe & Co. in
Boston--``the business Mecca for every Yankee boy.'' Beebe & Co.,
Boston's largest importing firm, soon took Junius Spencer Morgan as a
partner, thus introducing Levi Morton to Morgan's son, J.P. Morgan, who
would one day become his principal rival as a banker. In 1854, Beebe
sent Morton to New York City to take charge of the company's operations
there. A year later, Morton formed his own dry goods company in New
York. Finally wealthy and secure enough to settle down, he married Lucy
Kimball in 1856. The new Mrs. Morton disliked his Old Testament name of
Levi and began calling her husband ``L.P,'' as he became known among
family and friends thereafter.²

Banking and Politics

Morton's chief business was importing cotton from the South for New
England's textile industry and exporting manufactured goods from the
North to the agricultural South. When the Civil War broke out in the
spring of 1861, his loss of southern clients forced him to suspend
business. For the next decade, Morton worked to pay back his own
creditors, dollar for dollar. Although the war soon stimulated the
northern economy and rebuilt Morton's financial base, he saw a safer and
more profitable future in banking. In 1863, he founded a Wall Street
banking house, later named Morton, Bliss & Co., with a London firm
called Morton, Rose. By the end of the war, Morton's bank could
challenge the powerful Jay Cooke & Co. for the right to handle
government transactions. In 1873 Cooke's bank failed, leaving Morton as
one of the preeminent bankers in the nation.³
Morton's gracious manners and generous campaign contributions made
him many friends in Washington, among them President Ulysses S. Grant
and Grant's strongest supporter in Congress, Senator Roscoe Conkling of
New York. Morton and his British partner, Sir John Rose, expanded their
financial and political fortunes by facilitating U.S. negotiations with
Great Britain to settle the ``Alabama Claims.'' During the war, Britain
had violated its neutrality by allowing the construction of Confederate
shipping on its soil. Senator Charles Sumner, chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, pressed the administration to demand large-scale
compensation from Britain, including the annexation of Canada, even if
those claims led the two nations to war. Morton and Rose persuaded the
British and Americans to accept international arbitration of their war
claims; the U.S. to reduce its demands; and the British to pay $15
million in damages, for which the house of Morton, Rose acted as
disbursing office. When advised that the government's position would be
strengthened by using Morton, Rose as its agent, President Grant
questioned whether Morton's firm was strong because of the government's
patronage rather than the other way around.⁴
After his wife Lucy died in 1871, L.P. Morton married Anna
Livingston Reade Street in 1873. Anna's connections as a member of New
York's old Knickerbocker society helped propel Morton into New York's
political scene. From all accounts, Anna Morton combined great charm,
wisdom and prudence, making her admirably suited to be the wife of a
political man. In 1876, Morton became financial chairman of the
Republican National Committee. Aware that success in this position might
reward him with an attractive diplomatic post, he was also considering a
race for Congress. Morton asked his friend Whitelaw Reid, editor of the
New-York Tribune, ``If elected, and I wanted a foreign mission, could I
well resign and accept that, or if defeated, what then?'' adding ``I
have never made a speech in my life.'' Reid encouraged him not to worry
about speechmaking but advised that a resignation from a newly won
office would create some bitterness. When Morton declared his candidacy
for a House seat from New York's Eleventh District, a fashionable
residential area around upper Fifth Avenue, he ran on a platform of
sound currency based on the gold standard. That plank would remain
consistent through his next quarter century in politics. His opponents
pictured him as a plutocrat and ``a tool of Wall Street,'' charges that
would similarly follow him in every election. Morton lost by a narrow
margin but won when he ran again for the seat in 1878.⁵

The Conkling Machine

In politics, Morton identified himself with the New York political
faction, the ``stalwarts,'' headed by Republican Senator Roscoe
Conkling. Opposing the stalwarts were the ``half-breed'' Republicans who
rallied behind Senator James G. Blaine of Maine. Conkling and Blaine
were bitter personal and political rivals, yet few substantive
differences existed between their rival factions on the issues of the
day. Conkling's machine was more identified with New York's financial
interests and made sound currency its chief legislative aim, while the
half-breeds placed more emphasis on railroads, industry, and the
protective tariff. Both organizations, however, thrived on government
patronage and opposed civil service reform. Morton's presence in the
Conkling machine attested to its connections with Wall Street
financiers.
Entering Congress in 1879, Morton acted as much as a representative
of Morton, Bliss & Co. as he did as a representative of the Eleventh
District, since he saw no difference between his own interests and those
of his constituents. The newspaper reporter George Alfred Townsend
described Morton as ``not a loquacious man, and yet an interesting
talker, and one of the pleasantest expressions of his face is that of
the respectful, intelligent listener.'' He stood six feet tall,
straight-limbed and erect, and walked with ``flexible and quiet
movements.'' With close-cropped hair and a square jaw, his face had a
cosmopolitan appearance, ``though the New England lines are decided.''
The ``whole tone of his talk and character are toward tranquillity,''
Townsend observed. In the House, Morton was ``a close listener, a silent
critic, a genial answerer; neither intrusive nor obtrusive.'' Since
Morton was wealthier than his colleagues, he was able to establish his
family in a handsome house on Lafayette Square that became a popular
meeting place for politicos and high society. Morton won a reputation
for his urbanity and generous hospitality. Among the friends he made was
Representative James Garfield of Ohio.⁶

Declining the Vice-Presidency

In 1880, Morton went to the Republican convention as a Conkling
lieutenant, dedicated to winning a third-term nomination for Ulysses S.
Grant. Conkling's stalwarts were equally determined to stop the
nomination of Blaine. When a deadlock developed, Blaine's half-breeds
threw their support to Garfield, a darkhorse candidate. Once Garfield
won the nomination, he realized that he would need a New Yorker on the
ticket and immediately thought of his wealthy and well-positioned
friend, L.P. Morton. Morton scurried to find Conkling, who objected.
When Morton declined the offer, the vice-presidential nomination went
instead to another Conkling man, Chester A. Arthur, who had fewer
scruples about breaking with the boss.
Still trying to make peace with the Conkling faction, Garfield came
to New York in August 1880 for a meeting in Morton's suite at the Fifth
Avenue Hotel. There, Garfield promised to support the Conkling machine's
patronage demands, which included the post of secretary of the treasury.
The Treasury Department oversaw the New York customhouse, upon whose
patronage the New York machine had been built. Morton agreed to chair
Garfield's campaign finance committee, assuming that the treasury
portfolio would be his. After winning the election, however, Garfield
insisted that he had made no specific pledges. In December 1880,
Garfield recorded in his diary that Morton was ``under misapprehension''
that he had been promised the Treasury Department. ``This was not my
understanding and seems wholly inadmissable. It would be a congestion of
financial power at the money centre and would create jealousy at the
West.'' ⁷
Blaine, who had been named secretary of state, pronounced Morton
``unfit'' for the treasury, while Senator Conkling traveled to
Garfield's home in Mentor, Ohio, to lobby for Morton. Conkling wanted to
balance Blaine in the cabinet, to protect his organization's control
over the New York customhouse, and to remove Morton from a hotly
contested race for the other Senate seat from New York, which Conkling
wanted for Tom Platt. Haughtily, Conkling told the president-elect that
New York would rather be passed over completely in the cabinet if it
could not obtain the Treasury Department. Even Garfield's wife Lucretia
joined the fray when she wrote from a New York shopping trip:
Mr. [Whitelaw] Reid told me this morning that Morton had been very
ugly in his talk about you, using the expression that
seems to be so gratifying to the Conkling clique, ``That
Ohio man cannot be relied upon to stand by his pledges.''
⁸
Shortly before the inauguration, Garfield offered Morton the
secretaryship of the navy, which he accepted. But Conkling and Arthur
roused Morton from his bed in the middle of the night and persuaded him
to decline the post. The next day Garfield recorded: ``Morton broke down
on my hands under the pressure of his N.Y. friends, who called him out
of bed at 4 this morning to prevent his taking the Navy Dep't. . . . The
N.Y. delegation are in a great row because I do not give the Treasury to
that state.'' Despite his exasperation, Garfield still owed Morton
something for his work as campaign finance chairman and settled on
making him minister to France.⁹

Collapse of the Conkling Machine

As president, Garfield confronted the Conkling machine by appointing
the half-breed Republican William Robertson to be collector of the port
of New York and head of the customhouse. His action triggered a series
of events that culminated in the resignations of Senators Conkling and
Platt, who expected to be reelected by the New York legislature as a
show of support. Instead, both were defeated. In the midst of this
monumental struggle, on July 2, 1881, President Garfield was shot by a
deranged follower of Conkling's stalwarts. On July 20, when Morton
sailed for France, Garfield was still lingering and recovery seemed
possible. But on September 19, the president died, making Chester
Arthur--and not L.P. Morton--president of the United States. Morton
spent the next four years in the diplomatic service, attending largely
to the ceremonies connected with France's gift of the Statue of Liberty
to the United States. But he still harbored ambitions for a seat in the
Senate.¹⁰
By the time Morton returned to the United States, Roscoe Conkling
had quit politics for a lucrative law practice and Tom Platt had picked
up Conkling's leadership of the New York party. In 1884 Platt decided to
support Blaine for president, on the grounds that Chet Arthur had
deserted his former friends. Morton followed the Platt machine into the
Blaine camp. He was one of the two hundred businessmen who attended the
infamous ``millionaires' dinner'' given in Blaine's honor at Delmonico's
restaurant on October 29, 1884. At that dinner, a Protestant minister
rose to denounce the Democrats as the party of ``rum, Romanism, and
rebellion.'' Blaine ignored the remark, but Democrats seized upon it and
publicized it widely among Irish voters. Blaine lost New York by a
narrow margin and with it the presidency.¹¹
Platt put Morton forward unsuccessfully for senator in 1885 and
1887. In the former instance, Morton was perceived as the frontrunner,
having greater resources and the full backing of Platt's machine. But
Platt's men had made the mistake of taking all the key committee posts
in the state assembly, causing the ``soreheads'' who had been left out
to unite behind another candidate, who snatched away the coveted Senate
seat. The 1887 election was a three-man race, in which another candidate
appeared to have a better chance of winning for the stalwarts. Morton's
withdrawal from the race, seen as an expression of his selfless sense of
duty to his party (or faction of the party), raised his chances for the
vice-presidential nomination in 1888.¹²

A Strange Victory

When James G. Blaine, declining in health, made it clear he would
not run again for president in 1888, Tom Platt threw New York's support
to Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison--the grandson of former President
William Henry Harrison. Blaine recommended Harrison as the best
candidate and suggested for vice president former Representative William
Walter Phelps of New Jersey. However, Platt's support of Morton helped
the banker defeat Phelps by a margin of five to one. The ticket of
Harrison and Morton put together a strange victory in the presidential
election. They lost the popular vote by 90,000 but still managed to beat
the incumbent President Grover Cleveland in the electoral college, 233
to 168. The journalist Arthur Wallace Dunn attributed the Republican
success in 1888 to the combined political shrewdness of Republican
National Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Senator Matt Quay and New
York party boss Tom Platt.¹³
As president, however, Benjamin Harrison would not allow Platt and
Quay to dictate his cabinet and other federal appointments. Although
principled, his stand against the spoilsmen alienated him from those
most responsible for his election. A thoughtful man, Harrison was cold
in person but articulate and compelling as a public speaker. By
contrast, Vice President Morton was no public speaker, but ``a loveable
personality,'' who ``filled every position with grace, dignity, and
ability.'' In an era of greed, corruption, and excess, Harrison and
Morton both epitomized family life and puritanical religious values.
Harrison's cabinet was conservative and business oriented, with the
department store magnate John Wanamaker serving as postmaster general.
The political officeseekers ridiculed the publicity received by
Harrison's family, particularly his granddaughter, known as Baby Ruth
(namesake of the candy bar); they scoffed that the supposedly
puritanical Morton owned Washington's Shoreham Hotel (which he named
after his Vermont birthplace), where liquor was sold; and they belittled
the attention given to Wanamaker's Sunday school teaching. As a
spoilsmen's verse put it:

The baby rules the White House,
Levi runs the bar,
Wanny runs the Sunday school,
And dammit here we are! ¹⁴

Due to Mrs. Harrison's illnesses and death in 1892, Anna Morton
often entertained on behalf of the administration at the vice
president's mansion on Scott Circle. ``Mrs. Morton became the leader of
society in Washington, and there was never a more brilliant and popular
leader than she,'' according to one account. ``It was her innate
graciousness, her innate tact, and her kindness of heart . . . which won
her admiration and respect of all.'' Morton, whose only child by his
first marriage had died in infancy, had five daughters by his second
wife and boasted a lively home.¹⁵

The Businessman's Cabinet and the Millionaires' Club

Just as Harrison's cabinet was called the ``businessman's cabinet''
for its inclusion of Wanamaker and the Vermont marble baron Redfield
Proctor, the Senate over which Vice President Morton presided was dubbed
a ``millionaires' club.'' In the late nineteenth century, businessmen
had steadily gained control over both the Republican and Democratic
parties and used their political positions to advance their economic
interests. Senators became identified as spokesmen for railroads,
timber, mining, and other industries. As California Senator George
Hearst, who had made his millions in mining, proclaimed: ``the members
of the Senate are the survivors of the fittest.'' It seemed appropriate,
therefore, that the Senate's presiding officer should be one of the
nation's most prominent bankers.¹⁶
President Harrison considered the greatest failure of his
administration to be its inability to pass the federal elections bill
sponsored by Henry Cabot Lodge. Known as the ``Force bill,'' it was
intended to force the South to permit black men to vote and thereby
protect their civil rights. After Republican losses in the congressional
elections of 1890, the Senate had taken up the Lodge bill again, only to
encounter a Democratic filibuster by those who believed it would restore
a Reconstruction-like Republican rule in the South. Harrison summoned
Republican senators to the White House and urged them to do everything
possible to pass the bill. But western silver Republicans believed that
the nation's most pressing need was an inflated currency to cure
economic ills. These Republicans joined Democrats in passing a
resolution to take up a new currency measure in place of the elections
bill.
The elections bill reached the Senate floor only because of Vice
President Morton's tie-breaking vote. But the bill immediately
encountered another filibuster, and Morton did nothing to help
Republican efforts to break it. Republican senators hoped to persuade
Morton to vacate his chair, in order to allow a more sympathetic member
to preside, but Morton insisted on being present throughout the debate.
Because the vice president had announced that he planned to preside as a
neutral figure and not follow the dictates of the Republican caucus, he
was accused of doing little to maintain party discipline and compared
unfavorably to Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed, who presided
with an iron fist. Massachusetts Senator George F. Hoar sneered at
Morton as one of those vice presidents who ``asserted their authority
with as little show of force as if they were presiding over a company of
guests at their own table.'' Finally on January 22, 1891, a resolution
to replace the elections bill with another was passed 35 to 34, and the
elections bill died.¹⁷

Unceremoniously Dumped

As the Republican convention approached in 1892, Morton's supporters
floated his name for the presidency, but he lacked the necessary
delegate votes. Then Secretary of State Blaine resigned from Harrison's
cabinet to become a candidate himself. The ``Old Guard'' bosses, notably
Pennsylvania's Quay and New York's Platt, supported Blaine, but
President Harrison held the majority of the delegates. Morton was
unceremoniously dumped from the ticket in favor of another New Yorker,
his supposed friend Whitelaw Reid. President Harrison apparently had
never cared much for his vice president--or forgiven him for his
neutrality over the Force bill--and did not demand his renomination. At
the same time, the ``Platt Contingent'' at the convention determined
that a Harrison ticket was doomed to defeat, and they had better plans
for Morton.¹⁸
In 1894, Platt ran Morton for governor of New York, a race that he
won handily. Platt later memorialized Morton as ``the safest Governor
New York ever had. Business experience had taught him conservatism. He
never was influenced by crazy theorists, but conducted his
administration as he did his great private financial institutions.''
Senator Chauncey Depew similarly credited Morton as bringing to the
governorship ``business ability which had made him one of the great
merchants and foremost bankers.'' In 1896, Platt put the seventy-two-
year-old Governor Morton forward as New York's favorite son for the
Republican presidential nomination, to stop the nomination of Ohio
Governor William McKinley, whose past flirtation with free silver
worried the gold standard men of the East. Platt organized banquets and
planted newspaper editorials that encouraged Morton to envision himself
in the White House. But these efforts were routed by the campaign
strategies of the brilliant businessman-tactician Mark Hanna, who
engineered McKinley's nomination.¹⁹
Morton retired from politics and returned to his banking career,
organizing the Morton Trust Company. In 1909, when Morton was in his
eighties, an offer came from J.P. Morgan to merge the Morton bank into
the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. Morton deeply regretted that, as a
result of the merger, the company bearing his name was retired from the
business world. L.P. Morton died on his ninety-sixth birthday in 1920,
already a long-forgotten name in both banking and politics.²⁰
LEVI PARSONS MORTON

NOTES

¹ Robert McNutt McElroy, Levi Parsons Morton: Banker,
Diplomat and Statesman (New York, 1975; reprint of 1930 edition), pp.
25-26.
² Ibid., pp. 20-37, 39; George Alfred Townsend, ``Levi P.
Morton: A Biography,'' in Lew Wallace, Life of Gen. Ben Harrison
(Philadelphia, 1888), p. 361.
³ McElroy, pp. 42, 51.
⁴ David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in
the Senate (Ithaca, NY, 1971), pp. 151-52; William S. McFeely, Grant, A
Biography (New York, 1981), pp. 333, 336, 355.
⁵ Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid (New York,
1921), 1:351; McElroy, pp. 71-74.
⁶ McElroy, pp. 84-88, 97; Townsend, pp. 354-55, 372.
⁷ Theodore Clarke Smith, The Life and Letters of James
Abram Garfield (New Haven, CT, 1925), 2:1047, 1055; Louis J. Lang, ed.,
The Autobiography of Thomas Collier Platt (New York, 1910), pp. 128,
131-32. See also Chapter 20 of this volume, ``Chester Alan Arthur,'' p.
253.
⁸ Smith, pp. 1074, 1078, 1083-84.
⁹ Ibid., pp. 1090-91: Harry James Brown and Frederick D.
Williams, The Diary of James A. Garfield (East Lansing, MI, 1981),
4:552; Jordan, p. 376.
¹⁰ Smith, p. 1072; Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies
of James A. Garfield & Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence, KS, 1981), pp. 20-
21, 30, 95.
¹¹ Lang, ed., p. 181; Jordan, pp. 416-17.
¹² Chester L. Barrows, William M. Evarts: Lawyer,
Diplomat, Statesman (Chapel Hill, NC, 1941), pp. 436-37; Lang, ed., pp.
187-92; Paul Lancaster, Gentleman of the Press: The Life and Times of an
Early Reporter, Julian Ralph of the Sun (Syracuse, NY, 1992), p. 141.
¹³ Robert F. Wesser, ``Election of 1888,'' in History of
American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., and Fred L. Israel (New York, 1969), 2:1635; Arthur Wallace Dunn,
From Harrison to Harding: A Personal Narrative, Covering a Third of a
Century, 1888-1921 (Port Washington, NY, 1972; reprint of 1922 edition),
1:8.
¹⁴ Homer Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter, The Presidency
of Benjamin Harrison (Lawrence, KS, 1987), pp. 19-45; Frank Carpenter,
Carp's Washington (New York, 1960), p. 305; Chauncey M. Depew, My
Memories of Eighty Years (New York, 1924), p. 220; Herbert Adams
Gibbons, John Wanamaker (New York, 1926), 1:328.
¹⁵ Great Leaders and National Issues of 1896 (New York,
1896), p. 287.
¹⁶ Thomas C. Corchran and William Miller, The Age of
Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York, 1942), pp.
162-64.
¹⁷ McElroy, pp. 188-91; Socolofsky and Spetter, pp. 64-
65; Charles W. Calhoun, ``Civil Religion and the Gilded Age Presidency:
The Case of Benjamin Harrison,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 23 (Fall
1993): 658; George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (New York,
1903), 2:68.
¹⁸ McElroy, pp. 194-205; H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to
McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, NY, 1969), p.
415.
¹⁹ Lang, ed., pp. 332-33; Depew, pp. 147, 218, 220; James
A. Kehl, Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matt Quay of Pennsylvania
(Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 199-203; Morgan, p. 491.
²⁰ McElroy, p. 320.
?

Chapter 23

ADLAI EWING STEVENSON

1893-1897

ADLAI E. STEVENSON
ADLAI E. STEVENSON

Chapter 23

ADLAI EWING STEVENSON

23rd Vice President: 1893-1897

``Has Mr. Cleveland yet consulted you to that extent?''
Vice President Stevenson was once asked. ``Not yet,'' he
replied. ``But, there are still a few weeks of my term
remaining.''
In February 1900, the Chicago American ran a photograph of former
Vice President Adlai Stevenson holding his new grandson, Adlai Ewing
Stevenson II. That year the grandfather was again nominated to run for
vice president on the Democratic ticket. A half century later, the
grandson would run twice as the Democratic nominee for president and
gain even greater national and international prominence. Yet it was the
grandfather who came closest to becoming president of the United
States--when President Grover Cleveland underwent critical
surgery.¹

Youth

The Stevenson family were Presbyterians from Northern Ireland who
migrated first to Pennsylvania and then to North Carolina and Kentucky.
Adlai E. Stevenson, son of John Turner Stevenson and Eliza Ewing
Stevenson, was born on the family farm in Christian County, Kentucky, on
October 23, 1835. He attended the common school in Blue Water, Kentucky,
presided over by a ``dreaded schoolmaster,'' Mr. Caskie. Years later,
when as vice-presidential candidate Stevenson was about to speak at a
barbecue in Kentucky, the elderly schoolmaster approached the platform
and inquired, ``Adlai, I came twenty miles to hear you speak; don't you
remember me?'' Stevenson instantly replied, ``Yes, Mr. Caskie, I still
have a few marks left to remember you by!'' ²
In 1852, when Adlai was sixteen, frost killed the family's tobacco
crop. His father set free their few slaves and moved to Bloomington,
Illinois, where he operated a sawmill. Adlai worked in the mill and
taught school, earning money for college. He attended the Presbyterian-
run Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, headed by the Reverend Lewis
Warner Green. Adlai fell in love with Green's daughter Letitia, but
family problems delayed their marriage for nine years. His father's
death prompted Adlai to return to Bloomington to run the sawmill; then,
when the Reverend Green died, Letitia and her mother moved near
Bloomington. Mrs. Green considered the Stevensons socially inferior and
did not favor a marriage between the young people, even though Adlai had
studied law and had been admitted to the bar in 1858. Not until 1866 did
Adlai and Letitia finally marry. They had three daughters and a son,
Lewis, who became father to the later presidential
candidate.³

A Democrat in Republican Territory

As a young lawyer, Stevenson encountered such celebrated Illinois
attorneys as Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, campaigning for
Douglas in his 1858 Senate race against Lincoln. Stevenson also made
speeches against the ``Know-Nothing'' movement, a nativist group opposed
to immigrants and Catholics. That stand helped cement his support in
Illinois' large German and Irish communities. In a predominantly
Republican area, the Democratic Stevenson won friends through his
storytelling and his warm and engaging personality. In 1860 at the age
of twenty-five, he was appointed master in chancery (an aide in a court
of equity), his first public office, which he held during the Civil War.
In 1864 Stevenson was elected district attorney, and at the end of his
term in 1868 he entered law practice with his cousin, James S. Ewing.
Stevenson & Ewing became one of the state's most prominent law
firms.⁴
In 1874, when Stevenson ran for the House of Representatives as a
Democrat, local Republican newspapers painted him as a ``vile
secessionist,'' but the continuing hardships from the economic panic of
1873 caused voters to sweep him into office with the first Democratic
congressional majority since the Civil War. In the presidential election
year of 1876, however, the Republican ticket headed by Rutherford B.
Hayes carried his district, and Stevenson was narrowly defeated for
reelection, taking 49.6 percent of the vote. Then, in 1878, he ran on
both the Democratic and Greenback tickets and won. Returning to a House
from which one-third of his earlier colleagues had either voluntarily
retired or been retired by the voters gave Stevenson a sense of the
swiftly changing tides of politics. In 1880, again a presidential
election year, he once more lost narrowly, and he was defeated in his
final race for Congress in 1882.⁵

The Headsman of the Post Office

Stevenson served as a delegate to the Democratic convention of 1884
that nominated Grover Cleveland for president. Cleveland's reform record
as governor of New York helped win over Republican reformers, the
mugwumps, who enabled him to defeat the popular but scandal-ridden
Republican candidate James G. Blaine. When Cleveland took office as
president, the mugwumps expected him to carry out the goals of civil
service reform rather than return to the spoilsmanship of Jacksonian
Democracy. They felt reassured at first when Cleveland appointed an able
Republican as postmaster of New York City. But job-hungry Democrats
besieged the administration for patronage, and the president had to
respond to the angry rumblings from his party on Capitol Hill.
Particularly at stake were the 55,000 fourth-class postmasters.
Although paying just a thousand dollars a year, these offices were
critically important to local political operations. In small towns, the
postmaster knew everyone, as well as the mail they received and the
newspapers and magazines they read. This knowledge placed the
postmasters in an excellent position to keep the national party
organization informed on public opinion. The local postmasters would
also distribute party literature in bulk more cheaply than if it were
individually addressed. Former Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden, a
master political organizer, reminded the Cleveland administration that
these rural post offices essentially served as their party's local
headquarters. To leave them in the hands of Republicans would be
``infidelity to the principles and causes of the Administration.''
⁶
When First Assistant Postmaster General Malcolm Hay, a civil service
reformer, resigned due to ill health after only three months in office,
Cleveland appointed the more partisan Adlai Stevenson to succeed him.
Given free rein to remove Republican officeholders, Stevenson thoroughly
enjoyed swinging the axe. One Republican journalist described Stevenson
as ``an official axman who beheaded Republican officeholders with the
precision and dispatch of the French guillotine in the days of the
Revolution.'' Dubbed ``the Headsman'' for replacing some 40,000
Republicans with deserving Democrats, he once ``decapitated sixty-five
Republican postmasters in two minutes.'' Republicans protested but
recognized that they had swung the same axe, and even the mugwumps
realized that true civil service reform probably could not be achieved
until greater balance was achieved between Democratic and Republican
officeholders.⁷
Cleveland rewarded Stevenson with a judicial nomination to the
supreme court of the District of Columbia, but Senate Republicans
refused to confirm the man who had discharged so many of their
postmasters. When Cleveland was defeated for reelection in 1888,
President Benjamin Harrison appointed James S. Clarkson as first
assistant postmaster general, and Clarkson promptly undid Stevenson's
handiwork by replacing 32,335 of the fourth-class postmasters. When the
Democrats chose Cleveland once again as their standard bearer in 1892,
they appeased party regulars by the nomination of the ``headsman of the
post-office,'' Adlai Stevenson, for vice president. As a supporter of
using greenbacks and free silver to inflate the currency and alleviate
economic distress in the rural districts, Stevenson balanced the ticket
headed by Cleveland, the hard-money, gold-standard supporter. Just
before the election, Cleveland learned that Republicans were planning a
lurid expose of Stevenson's soft-money record. Cleveland's campaign
manager caught Stevenson at a speaking engagement in West Virginia and
handed him a letter endorsing sound money. Stevenson signed the letter
and released it to the press, thus defusing the issue. The winning
Cleveland-Stevenson ticket carried Illinois, although not Stevenson's
home district.⁸
Civil service reformers held out hope for the second Cleveland
administration but saw Vice President Stevenson as a symbol of the
spoils system. He never hesitated to feed names of Democrats to the Post
Office Department. Once he called at the Treasury Department to protest
against an appointment and was shown a letter he had written endorsing
the candidate. Stevenson told the treasury officials not to pay
attention to any of his written endorsements; if he really favored
someone he would tell them personally.⁹

Silver and Gold

While such stories about ``Uncle Adlai'' brought smiles around
Washington, Stevenson's presence as next in line to the presidency
frightened Cleveland's more conservative supporters. Just before
Cleveland took office, a financial panic on Wall Street had plunged the
nation into depression. As a staunch advocate of limited government,
Cleveland disapproved of any government program to reduce economic
suffering. By contrast, Vice President Stevenson represented the
``populist doctrines'' of currency reform that were creeping into the
Democratic party. In June 1893, after Cleveland proposed repeal of the
Sherman Silver Purchase Act and a return to the gold standard, one of
his hard-money supporters wrote Cleveland saying: ``I wish you had
Congress in session now. You may not be alive in September. It would
make a vast difference to the United States if you were not.'' The
writer did not know that Cleveland faced a potentially fatal operation.
A habitual cigar-smoker, Cleveland had developed cancer of the mouth
that required immediate surgery. The president insisted that the surgery
be kept secret to avoid another panic on Wall Street over the thought of
a silverite like Stevenson in the White House. While on a yacht in New
York harbor that summer, Cleveland had his entire upper jaw removed and
replaced with an artificial device, an operation that left no outward
scar. The cancer surgery remained secret for another quarter century.
Cleveland's aides explained that he had merely had dental work. His vice
president little realized how close he came to the presidency that
summer.¹⁰
Meanwhile, a major battle loomed in the Senate over currency reform.
In 1890, the Republican President Harrison had supported the Sherman
Silver Purchase Act in return for silver Republicans' support of the
protective tariff named after Ohio Representative--and future
President--William McKinley. But in the 1890 elections the unpopular
McKinley tariff defeated many Republicans, including McKinley, restored
Democratic majorities in Congress, and bolstered the populist movement
that was demanding more government intervention in railroad regulation,
currency reform, and farm relief. Disdainful of the populists, Cleveland
interpreted the Republican defeat as vindication of his policies. Upon
reentering the White House in 1893, he was determined to repeal the
Sherman Act to restore business confidence and therefore called Congress
into extraordinary session in August to consider the issue.¹¹
In October 1893, efforts to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act
met with a filibuster in the Senate. Indiana Senator Daniel Voorhees,
leader of the Cleveland Democrats, announced that the Senate would
remain in continuous session until a vote was taken. Opponents made
repeated calls for quorums, feigned illness, and refused to appear even
when summoned by the Senate sergeant at arms. Those conducting the
filibuster benefitted from the cooperation of the presiding officer.
Vice President Stevenson refused to turn his back on the silverites, who
had helped to nominate him, and gave no aid to the administration in
whipping the dissenters into line. The prominent Washington
correspondent Julian Ralph knew that the Senate had no formal cloture
procedure but heard that it might be possible for the vice president to
cut off debate by simply ordering a vote. Ralph asked the opinion of
former House Speaker Thomas B. Reed, who had broken similar dilatory
actions in the House by counting the minority as present even if they
failed to answer the roll. Reed asserted that the vice president ``could
do whatever he pleased if he had a majority behind him.'' But Democrat
Isham G. Harris of Tennessee, the president pro tempore, strongly
disagreed. ``Why, sir, I don't believe he would live to accomplish it,''
said Harris (who later repudiated the threatening quote when it appeared
in the Ralph story).¹²
New York Democratic Senator David Hill followed Ralph's suggestion
by circulating a petition to force the vice president to overrule all
dilatory motions, but it failed to attract many signers. Nor were
Democrats able to agree on adoption of a cloture rule. Finally, the
Senate accepted a compromise arranged by Maryland Democratic Senator
Arthur Pue Gorman that established a gradual reduction of silver
purchases over a three-year period. Although this agreement made
possible passage of the repeal, President Cleveland never forgave Gorman
for his compromise and thereafter rarely consulted this important
Democratic leader. Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act only
contracted the currency and further weakened the economy. Silverites
called it the ``Crime of 1893.'' The Democrats became tagged as the
party of the ``empty dinnerpail'' and suffered sweeping congressional
defeats in 1894.¹³

A Notable Sense of Humor

Adlai Stevenson enjoyed his role as vice president, presiding over
``the most august legislative assembly known to men.'' He won praise for
ruling in a dignified, nonpartisan manner. In personal appearance he
stood six feet tall and was ``of fine personal bearing and uniformly
courteous to all.'' Although he was often a guest at the White House,
Stevenson admitted that he was less an adviser to the president than
``the neighbor to his counsels.'' He credited the president with being
``courteous at all times'' but noted that ``no guards were necessary to
the preservation of his dignity. No one would have thought of undue
familiarity.'' For his part, President Cleveland snorted that his vice
president had surrounded himself with a coterie of free-silver men
dubbed the ``Stevenson cabinet.'' The president even mused that the
economy had gotten so bad and the Democratic party so divided that ``the
logical thing for me to do . . . was to resign and hand the Executive
branch to Mr. Stevenson,'' joking that he would try to get his friends
jobs in Stevenson's new cabinet.¹⁴
Toward the end of his term, ``Uncle Adlai'' was a dinner guest at
the home of Senator Gorman. The vice president had a strong sense of
humor, which he suppressed while presiding over the Senate but let loose
in private. At dinner, Stevenson said he resented the familiar charge
that vice presidents were never consulted by the president and told a
story about Vice President John Breckinridge once being consulted by
President James Buchanan--about the wording of his Thanksgiving message.
``Has Mr. Cleveland yet consulted you to that extent?'' Senator Gorman
asked. ``Not yet,'' Stevenson replied. ``But, there are still a few
weeks of my term remaining.'' ¹⁵
Stevenson was mentioned as a candidate to succeed Cleveland in 1896.
Although he chaired the Illinois delegation to the Democratic National
Convention, he gained little support. As one Democrat noted, ``the young
men of the country are determined to have something to say during the
next election, and are tired of these old hacks.'' Stevenson received a
smattering of votes, but the convention was taken by storm by a thirty-
six-year-old former representative from Nebraska, William Jennings
Bryan, who delivered his fiery ``Cross of Gold'' speech in favor of a
free-silver plank in the platform. Not only did the Democrats repudiate
Cleveland by embracing free silver, but they also nominated Bryan for
president. Many Cleveland Democrats, including most Democratic
newspapers, refused to support Bryan, but Vice President Stevenson
loyally endorsed the ticket. In the fall, Bryan conducted the nation's
first whistle-stop campaign, traveling extensively around the country
and capturing people's imaginations. Although he did far better than
expected, he lost the election to Ohio's Republican governor, William
McKinley.¹⁶
A bimetallist himself, McKinley ran on a gold-standard platform. But
McKinley wanted to enact a protective tariff, and, to win support from
silver Republicans, he promised to appoint a bipartisan commission to
negotiate an international agreement on bimetallism. Silverites hoped
that a prominent Democrat might be appointed, but when their leading
candidates declined they settled for ``a man of no particular weight,''
the former vice president. The work of the commission came to naught.
Stevenson found more satisfaction as a political speaker, addressing all
things ``purely and absolutely Democratic.'' ¹⁷
After the 1896 election, Bryan became the titular leader of the
Democrats and frontrunner for the nomination in 1900. Much of the
newspaper speculation about who would run as the party's vice-
presidential candidate centered on Indiana Senator Benjamin Shively. But
when reporter Arthur Wallace Dunn interviewed Shively at the convention,
the senator said he ``did not want the glory of a defeat as a vice
presidential candidate.'' A disappointed Dunn said that he still had to
file a story on the vice-presidential nomination, and then added: ``I
believe I'll write a piece about old Uncle Adlai.'' ``That's a good
idea,'' said Shively. ``Stevenson is just the man. There you have it.
Uniting the old Cleveland element with the new Bryan Democracy. You've
got enough for one story. But say, this is more than a joke. Stevenson
is just the man.'' For the rest of the day, Dunn heard other favorable
remarks about Stevenson, and by that night the former vice president was
the leading contender, since no one else was ``very anxious to be the
tail of what they considered was a forlorn hope ticket.'' ¹⁸
The Populists had already nominated the ticket of Bryan and Charles
A. Towne, a silver Republican from Minnesota, with the tacit
understanding that Towne would step aside if the Democrats nominated
someone else. Bryan preferred his good friend Towne, but Democrats
wanted one of their own, and the regular element of the party felt
comfortable with Stevenson. Towne withdrew and campaigned for Bryan and
Stevenson. As a result, Stevenson, who had run with Cleveland in 1892,
now ran with his nemesis Bryan in 1900. Twenty-five years senior to
Bryan, Stevenson added age and experience to the ticket. Nevertheless,
their effort never stood a chance against the Republican ticket of
McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Stevenson returned again to private
practice in Illinois, making one last attempt at office in an
unsuccessful race for governor in 1908. After that, he retired to
Bloomington, where his Republican neighbors described him as ``windy but
amusing.'' ¹⁹

Grandfather and Grandson

Through Stevenson's long career, his wife Letitia was a ``keen
observer and judge of people, and a charming hostess.'' Although
suffering from migraine headaches and severe rheumatism that forced her
to wear leg braces when standing at receptions, she dutifully supported
his many political campaigns. Letitia also helped establish the
Daughters of the American Revolution as a way of healing the divisions
between the North and South after the Civil War. She succeeded Mrs.
Benjamin Harrison as the DAR's second president-general. Adlai Stevenson
II remembered his grandparents' home as ``a very formal household.'' The
vice president addressed his wife as ``Mrs. Stevenson'' and she called
him ``Mr. Stevenson.'' Young Adlai considered his grandfather ``one of
the great raconteurs of his day'' and learned much about American
history and politics from him. At his grandfather's house in Bloomington
he met many ``distinguished Democrats'' from around the land, including
William Jennings Bryan. He recalled that hanging on the wall was a
lithograph, ``The Lost Bet,'' depicting a gentleman in top hat and frock
coat paying off an election bet by pulling a wagon down a street beneath
a banner that read: ``Grover Cleveland and Adlai E. Stevenson.''
²⁰
Adlai Stevenson died in Bloomington on June 14, 1914. Thirty-eight
years later, his grandson and namesake, then serving as governor of
Illinois, agonized over whether to make himself available for the
Democratic nomination for president. When Adlai E. Stevenson II appeared
on the television news show Meet the Press, a reporter from the Chicago
Daily News pressed him for a commitment by saying: ``Wouldn't your
grandfather, Vice President Stevenson, twirl in his grave if he saw you
running away from a chance to be the Democratic nominee in 1952?''
Stevenson, who loathed giving up his governorship for what most likely
would be a futile campaign against the war hero Dwight Eisenhower,
blanched at the comparison and replied, ``I think we have to leave
Grandfather lie.'' ²¹
ADLAI EWING STEVENSON

NOTES

¹ Jeff Broadwater, Adlai Stevenson and American Politics:
The Odyssey of a Cold War Liberal (New York, 1994), p. 1.
² Adlai E. Stevenson, Something Of Men I Have Known
(Chicago, 1909), p. 47.
³ Porter McKeever, Adlai Stevenson: His Life and Legacy
(New York, 1989), pp. 15-18; Jean H. Baker, The Stevensons: A Biography
of an American Family (New York, 1996), pp. 82-95.
⁴ George Spiel, The Battle of 1900 (Chicago, 1900), p.
475; Broadwater, p. 1.
⁵ McKeever, p. 17; Stevenson, p. 47; Baker, pp. 112-22.
⁶ Horace Samuel Merrill, William Freeman Vilas,
Doctrinaire Democrat (Madison, WI, 1954), pp. 100, 102-3.
⁷ David S. Barry, Forty Years in Washington (Boston,
1924), p. 191; Solomon X. Griffin, People and Politics: Observations by
a Massachusetts Editor (Boston, 1923), p. 307; Wayne Morgan, From Hayes
to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, NY, 1969), p.
446; Merrill, William Freeman Vilas, p. 105.
⁸ Griffin, pp. 307, 327; McKeever, p. 17; Herbert Eaton,
Presidential Timber: A History of Nominating Conventions, 1868-1960 (New
York, 1964), pp. 145-47; Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland, A Study in
Courage (New York, 1932), pp. 504-5.
⁹ Nevins, p. 518.
¹⁰ Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Democracy of the Middle
West, 1865-1896 (Seattle, 1967; reprint of 1953 edition), pp. 216, 237;
Morgan, p. 450; Richard E. Welch, Jr., The Presidencies of Grover
Cleveland (Lawrence, KS, 1988), pp. 60, 106, 119; Robert H. Ferrell,
Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust (Columbia, MO, 1992),
pp. 3-11.
¹¹ Paolo E. Coletta, ``The Democratic Party, 1884-1910,''
in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
(New York, 1980), 2:996.
¹² Paul Lancaster, Gentleman of the Press: The Life and
Times of an Early Reporter, Julian Ralph of the Sun (Syracuse, NY,
1992), p. 221.
¹³ John R. Lambert, Arthur Pue Gorman (Baton Rouge, LA,
1953), pp. 193, 195, 199; Baker, pp. 163-71.
¹⁴ Stevenson, pp. 63, 243-44; Spiel, p. 477; Allan
Nevins, ed., Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850-1908 (Boston, 1933), p.
380.
¹⁵ David S. Barry, Forty Years in Washington (Boston,
1924), pp. 191-92.
¹⁶ Merrill, William Freeman Vilas, p. 198.
¹⁷ Leon Burr Richardson, William E. Chandler, Republican
(New York, 1940), p. 551; Spiel, p. 477.
¹⁸ Arthur Wallace Dunn, From Harrison to Harding: A
Personal Narrative, Covering a Third of a Century, 1888-1921 (Port
Washington, NY, 1972; reprint of 1922 edition), 1:344; Baker, pp. 174-
77.
¹⁹ Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of
William Jennings Bryan (New York, 1971), p. 324; Broadwater, p. 2.
²⁰ McKeever, p. 18; John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson
(New York, 1952)., p. 41; Baker, pp. 154-63.
²¹ McKeever, p. 185.
?

Chapter 24

GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART

1897-1899

GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART
GARRET A. HOBART

Chapter 24

GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART

24th Vice President: 1897-1899

For the first time in my recollection, and the last for
that matter, the Vice President was recognized as somebody,
as a part of the Administration, as a part of the body over
which he presided.
--Veteran newspaper correspondent
It seems startling that someone who never held prior office outside
of a state legislature could be nominated and elected Vice President of
the United States, as was Garret Augustus Hobart in 1896. By the time
convention delegates chose the last nineteenth-century vice president,
they had come to regard that office as little more than a ``fifth wheel
to the executive coach.'' The nomination was in their view simply a
device for balancing the ticket, either by ideology or by region.
``Gus'' Hobart, an easterner chosen to run with a middle westerner,
William McKinley of Ohio, completely shared McKinley's conservative
political philosophy. With warm feelings for Hobart, President McKinley
decided to rescue the vice-presidency from its low estate. McKinley so
embraced the vice president as his friend, associate, and confidant that
Hobart's home on Lafayette Square became known as the ``Little Cream
White House,'' and Hobart as the ``Assistant President.'' ¹

Youth

Hobart was the descendant of a long line of clergymen, with a family
tree that dated back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the early
seventeenth century. In 1841 his father had left New England to open a
primary school in Long Branch, New Jersey. There, on June 3, 1844,
Garret Augustus Hobart was born. Young Hobart attended his father's
school and then went to boarding school. As a member of the Reformed
Church, he attended Rutgers College, which was then under that church's
control. He graduated at the top of his class in 1863. Although the
nation was deeply engaged in the Civil War, Hobart did not join the
Union army. Instead, he studied law in Paterson, New Jersey, under the
tutelage of Socrates Tuttle, a childhood friend of his father's. He
became a lawyer in 1866, and on July 21, 1869, married Tuttle's
daughter, Jennie. Hobart's family had long been Democrats, but marriage
into the Republican Tuttle household converted the young man to the
Grand Old Party.²

Not a Conventional Politician

After service as clerk of a grand jury, Hobart was elected a judge
in Paterson in 1868. In 1871, after his father-in-law became mayor,
Hobart was appointed to the post of city counsel. The following year he
went to the state assembly, rising speedily to become speaker in 1874.
In 1876 he won election to the state senate, which chose him as senate
president in 1881, according him the distinction of being the first
person to head both houses of the New Jersey legislature. Despite these
achievements, Hobart was no politician in the conventional sense. ``He
was not fond of standing in the public eye,'' a friend later assessed.
``He did not seek popularity by those methods which usually evoke the
applause and admiration of the multitude. He was not spectacular.''
³
A rotund, jovial, hospitable man, Hobart displayed much tact, charm,
and ability to work with other people. These qualities, which made him
an outstanding state legislator, should have helped him move up to the
national legislature, if it had not been for his increasingly lucrative
law practice in New Jersey. The many banks and railroads among his
clients made him wealthy, and he was loath to abandon his comfortable
family life in New Jersey for the demands of a political career in
Washington. (The Hobart home, ``Carroll Hall,'' was reputedly the
``largest and most sumptuous in Paterson.'') Several times Hobart stood
for the United States Senate but never fought hard enough to win
election from a state legislature in which he was immensely popular. He
served instead as chairman of the State Republican Committee from 1880
to 1891 and as a member of the party's national committee.⁴

A Homesick Candidate

Since the Civil War, New Jersey had leaned toward Democratic
presidential candidates. President Grover Cleveland had carried the
state in 1892, but, during the economic depression that followed, both
houses of the legislature and the governorship of New Jersey went
Republican, suggesting that the state could be taken by the national
ticket in 1896. Looking over the scene, the Democratic New York Graphic
noted that there was no other Republican in New Jersey as strong as this
``sturdy, bright faced, genial gentleman.'' ⁵
In 1896, the New Jersey delegation went to the Republican convention
in St. Louis determined to nominate Hobart for vice president, as a way
of consolidating the party's recent gains within their state. When Ohio
Governor McKinley defeated House Speaker Thomas Reed and several other
prominent candidates for the presidential nomination, newspapers
identified some twenty potential candidates for the vice-presidency. All
of them were governors, cabinet members, senators, and representatives,
with the exception of Hobart, who remained unknown outside of his state.
Yet when the vote was taken, Hobart, who had attended the convention as
a delegate, emerged the nominee.
Hobart insisted that he had not sought the nomination but that it
was handed to him as ``a tribute from my friends.'' It came equally as a
tribute from Marcus A. Hanna, the Cleveland industrialist and political
strategist who masterminded McKinley's nomination. Hanna wanted a ticket
to satisfy the business interests of America, and Hobart, a corporate
lawyer, fit that requirement perfectly. Hanna's biographer noted that,
even if Hobart did little to strengthen the ticket, ``he did nothing to
weaken it.'' ⁶
Hobart himself felt ambivalent about the honor. Ambitious for
national office, he was realistic enough to know what it would
ultimately cost him. From the convention, he wrote to his wife:
I have been too busy to be homesick, but, to tell the honest
truth, I am heart-sick over my own prospects. It looks to
me I will be nominated for Vice-President whether I want
it or not, and as I get nearer to the point where I may, I
am dismayed at the thought. . . . If I want a nomination,
everything is going my way. But when I realize all that it
means in work, worry, and loss of home and bliss, I am
overcome, so overcome I am simply miserable.⁷
Unlike the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan,
who barnstormed the country making speeches, William McKinley stayed at
home in Canton, Ohio, running his campaign from his front porch. Hobart
similarly limited his speaking to his portico in New Jersey. McKinley
and Hobart stood firm for the gold standard and the protective tariff.
Bryan, for his part, ran on a ``Free Silver'' platform and attracted
many desperate farmers and debtors to his crusade. But economic
conditions--and corporate interests--favored the Republicans. McKinley
won by a half million votes, or 51 percent of the total cast. His
Republican ticket carried 23 of the 45 states, including Hobart's New
Jersey.

The Little Cream White House

For a running mate, McKinley had preferred Speaker Thomas B. Reed,
with whom he had worked for many years in the House, but Reed would
accept only the top spot on the ticket. Although McKinley and Hobart
were strangers by comparison, the president had no difficulty warming up
to Gus Hobart. The wealthy Hobarts leased a house at 21 Lafayette
Square, which became known as the ``Little Cream White House.'' Built in
1828 by Col. Ogle Tayloe, the house had hosted Washington's high society
during the antebellum years. At the outset of the Civil War, General
George McClellan had taken it as his headquarters. After the war,
Pennsylvania Senator Don Cameron had remodeled and restored the old
house. The Hobarts used it to entertain lavishly--particularly because
President McKinley's wife was an invalid who could not shoulder the
traditional social burdens of the White House. The president frequently
attended Hobart's dinners and afternoon smokers, where he could meet
informally with party leaders from Capitol Hill.⁸
No previous vice president had visited the White House as often as
Gus Hobart, due in part to the warm friendship that developed between
Ida McKinley and Jennie Hobart. Mrs. McKinley suffered from epilepsy,
which left her a recluse in the White House. President McKinley doted on
his wife and grew to depend on Jennie Hobart, who visited Ida daily.
``The President constantly turned to me to help her wherever I could,''
Mrs. Hobart wrote in her memoirs, ``--not because I was Second Lady, but
because I was their good friend.'' Whenever McKinley had to be away from
his wife in the evenings, he would entrust her to Jennie Hobart's care.
He also invited Mrs. Hobart to White House social functions because her
presence ``gave him confidence.'' In addition to seeing each other in
Washington, the McKinleys and Hobarts vacationed together at Bluff Point
on Lake Champlain.⁹
McKinley looked on Hobart as a trusted adviser. Although the vice
president was not invited to join meetings of the cabinet, the president
and cabinet members consulted with him freely. The mutual regard between
the two men made them, in the words of one acquaintance, ``coadjustors
in the fixing of the policies of the Administration to an extent never
before known.'' Arthur Wallace Dunn, a newspaper correspondent who
covered presidents from Benjamin Harrison to Warren Harding, marveled
that ``for the first time in my recollection, and the last for that
matter, the Vice President was recognized as somebody, as a part of the
Administration, and as a part of the body over which he presided.'' Dunn
described Hobart as a ``business politician,'' whose knowledge of the
``relations between business and politics'' made his judgments extremely
useful. McKinley even turned to his vice president for personal
financial advice. Having once suffered the embarrassment of declaring
personal bankruptcy, McKinley turned over a portion of his monthly
presidential salary, which Vice President Hobart invested for
him.¹⁰

The Splendid Little War

Although Hobart socialized more frequently and worked more closely
with the president than had most of his predecessors, his primary
function remained that of presiding over the Senate. In his brief, self-
deprecatory inaugural address, Hobart had told the senators that, while
he was unfamiliar with their rules and procedures, he would work to the
best of his abilities, feeling confident that they would indulge him as
considerately as they had all of the previous occupants of the chair.
Hobart's experiences presiding over the New Jersey assembly and state
senate served him well, and he soon won favorable notices for impartial
and informed rulings. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge applauded
Hobart for abandoning his predecessors' habit of ``submitting nearly
every question of order to the Senate,'' and instead ruling promptly on
these points himself, ``as every presiding officer ought to do.'' One
newspaper correspondent wrote that, initially, Hobart's ``business-like
advice and warning intimations rather nettled many of the Senators,''
but that over time he appeared to captivate the Senate with his genial
good nature.¹¹
Hobart settled comfortably into the job. Senate vouchers show that
he purchased for the Vice President's Room in the Capitol silk mohair
carpeting, Neapolitan silk curtains, Persian throw rugs, and ``a silk
velour slumber robe'' made to match the velour cushions on his sofa.
Hobart also ordered the grandfather clock and the imposing mahogany desk
that his successors continue to use.¹² Presiding over the
Senate was no easy task, however. In 1898, following the unexplained
sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor, sentiment in the
Senate swung sharply toward war with Spain, which at that time still
ruled Cuba as a colony. President McKinley's cautious attempts to avoid
going to war made him seem indecisive. When McKinley's friend Senator
William Mason of Illinois announced in favor of war, a demonstration
broke out on the Senate floor that Hobart found impossible to quiet. As
Mrs. Hobart recalled, the vice president was ``worried to desperation''
over the rising rebelliousness of the Senate, and took his concerns to
McKinley. ``Mr. President, I can no longer hold back the Senate,'' he
warned. ``They will act without you if you do not act at once.''
Accepting the inevitable, McKinley called on Congress to declare that a
state of war existed with Spain. Hobart sent the president a pen to sign
the declaration.¹³
The ``splendid little war'' with Spain was fought and won within a
six-month period. At the conclusion of the Fifty-fifth Congress, Vice
President Hobart congratulated the Senate on this remarkable
achievement, noting that ``unlike any other session in the history of
our country, this Congress has witnessed the inception, prosecution, and
conclusion of a war.'' More than just a war Congress, it had also been a
peace Congress, having approved the ratification of the Treaty of Paris
that ended the Spanish-American War.
The vice president played a significant part in one aspect of that
peace treaty. Although the United States had pledged not to take Cuba as
its own territory, it did decide to hold the Philippine Islands,
unexpectedly acquired from Spain. After the Senate had approved the
peace treaty by the necessary two-thirds vote, Georgia Democrat Augustus
O. Bacon had sponsored an amendment promising independence to the
Philippines if it established a stable government. Due to the absence of
several administration supporters, the vote was tied at 29 to 29. Hobart
assured the taking of the territory for the United States by casting the
deciding vote against Bacon's amendment.¹⁴

The Vice President's Valedictory

The vice president's speech concluding the second session of the
Fifty-fifth Congress was in fact his valedictory, for he would die
before the next Congress convened. In addressing the senators for the
last time, he noted that ``the Senate of the United States is a peculiar
body. . . . made up, as you know of many elements, and in its membership
you will find not only straight and stalwart Republicans, to whose
active efforts the country is now looking for relief, but Bimetallists,
Populists, Silverites--both Republican and Democratic--and a few gold
Democrats.'' Despite the senators' many differences, Hobart as presiding
officer observed that each of them stood on the common ground of
patriotism, pride in the nation's history, zealousness for its
Constitution, and devotion to its flag. For a generation old enough to
remember the Civil War, the Spanish-American War appeared to represent
the end of the old divisions that had led to secession. Former Union and
Confederate soldiers supported a common war effort, with some from both
sides donning uniforms once again.¹⁵
Beginning in early 1899, Hobart suffered from fainting spells
triggered by serious heart problems. He never fully recovered. Yet that
summer he performed a last major service for the McKinley administration
when he helped the gentle president to fire his secretary of war,
General Russell A. Alger. A large, affable man with presidential
ambitions, Alger had become tarred by scandals that emerged during the
Spanish-American war--particularly charges that unscrupulous war
suppliers had fed ``embalmed beef'' to American soldiers. McKinley saw
the need to sacrifice his secretary of war to the demands of public
opinion, but could not bring himself to fire a friend. When Secretary of
State John Hay declined to deliver the bad news, the task fell to
Hobart. That summer, Alger and his wife regularly spent weekends with
the Hobarts at their summer house at Norwood Park, New Jersey. One
evening, Hobart took Alger into the smoking room and suggested that he
find some excuse for retiring from the cabinet. During the next week,
newspapers published stories that Alger had been pressured to step down
but that the president was standing loyally by him. The oblivious Alger
returned to Hobart's seaside home the next weekend and insisted that in
light of the president's loyal backing he had no reason to leave the
cabinet. Now Hobart bluntly explained that the president would feel
``very much relieved'' if the secretary would resign. Alger could not
believe what he was hearing until Hobart admitted that he was speaking
with the president's authorization. The shaken secretary of war hurried
back to Washington and at nine o'clock on Monday morning handed his
resignation to President McKinley.¹⁶
As Hobart suffered increasingly debilitating attacks and his
strength declined, rumors spread that his illness would keep him from
running again for vice president. In the fall of 1899, as McKinley was
preparing a grand reception to honor the return of Admiral George Dewey
from the Philippines, he invited the Hobarts to stay at the White House.
``I can imagine no place where you will be more comfortable than here.''
But Hobart declined. He conceded that he must remain in Paterson and
could not return to Washington either for the Dewey reception or to
preside again over the Senate when it reconvened that December. This
public announcement was an admission that the vice president was ``in
virtual retirement,'' with no hope of recovery. Hobart died on November
21, 1899. Arriving at the Hobart home in Paterson for the funeral,
President McKinley told the family, ``No one outside of this home feels
this loss more deeply than I do.'' ¹⁷
History has remembered Garret Hobart less for his life than for his
death. The void he left was quickly filled. The powerful Senator Mark
Hanna moved into the ``Little Cream White House,'' and the vacant vice-
presidency was soon occupied by one of America's most dynamic political
leaders, Theodore Roosevelt. McKinley's second running mate in 1900 bore
little resemblance to the man he succeeded. In short order the young,
energetic Roosevelt--and the progressive reform movement he embodied--
eclipsed not only Hobart but McKinley as well, as the United States
entered the twentieth century.
GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART

NOTES

¹ David S. Barry, Forty Years in Washington (Boston,
1924), p. 246; David Magie, Life of Garret Augustus Hobart, Twenty-
fourth Vice-President of the United States (New York, 1910), p. 169.
² Magie, pp. 1-26, 42; Jennie Tuttle Hobart, Memories
(Paterson, NJ., 1930), p. 3.
³ Address of Honorable John W. Griggs at the Unveiling of
the Statue of Garret Augustus Hobart, Late Vice-President of the United
States at Paterson, New Jersey, June 3, 1903 (Paterson, NJ, 1903), p. 4.
⁴ Magie, pp. 27-57; Edward S. Ellis, et al., Great
Leaders and National Issues of 1896 (William Ellis Scull, 1896), p. 542.
⁵ Magie, p. 50.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 58, 74; Margaret Leech, In The Days of
McKinley (New York, 1959), p. 83; Herbert D. Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna
(New York, 1912), p. 191.
⁷ Magie, p. 79.
⁸ Barry, pp. 245-46; Magie, pp. 116-17; H. Wayne Morgan,
William McKinley and His America (Syracuse, NY, 1963), pp. 220, 274.
⁹ Leech, p. 435; Magie, p. 170; Hobart, pp. 13-14, 19,
29.
¹⁰ Address of Honorable John W. Griggs, p. 9; Arthur
Wallace Dunn, From Harrison to Harding: A Personal Narrative, Covering a
Third of a Century, 1888-1921 (Port Washington, NY, 1972; reprint of
1922 edition), 1:224-25; Morgan, p. 321.
¹¹ U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 55th
Cong., special session, p. 1; Magie, pp. 151-52, 156.
¹² Hobart's purchases are documented in the reports of
the Secretary of the Senate and in a booklet published by the Office of
the Senate Curator, The Vice President's Room.
¹³ Horace Samuel Merrill and Marion Galbraith Merrill,
The Republican Command, 1897-1913 (Lexington, KY, 1971), p. 49; Leech,
pp. 184-85, 193; Hobart, pp. 58-60.
¹⁴ Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform and Expansion,
1890-1900 (New York, 1959), p. 258; Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of
William McKinley (Lawrence, KY, 1980), p. 150.
¹⁵ Magie, pp. 162-63.
¹⁶ Barry, pp. 256-59; Magie, pp. 209-11.
¹⁷ Magie, pp. 176, 212-17, 231; Hobart, p. 68.
?

Chapter 25

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

1901

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Chapter 25

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

25th Vice President: 1901

I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor
of history, than Vice-President.
--Theodore Roosevelt ¹
Senator Thomas C. Platt of New York declared that he went to the
presidential inaugural of 1901 ``to see Theodore Roosevelt take the
veil.'' ² Roosevelt, the governor of New York, had been
elected vice president the previous autumn on William McKinley's
Republican ticket, and Platt looked forward to having the maverick
governor in seclusion for four years. The new vice president was not
entirely certain of his own prospects, stating that ``it [the vice-
presidency] is not a steppingstone to anything except oblivion''--hardly
a ringing endorsement of the nation's second highest office.³
Yet this was the prevailing opinion about the vice-presidency at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Most of Roosevelt's nearest
predecessors were men of limited qualifications and interests whose
functions were primarily social. Some observers hoped that this office
would finally tame the firebrand Roosevelt, but if the Rough Rider's
active and adventurous past was any indication, the vice-presidency was
in for some changes.

Youth

The life of Theodore Roosevelt is one of the great American stories.
He was born on October 27, 1858, in New York City to a prominent family
of moderate wealth. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., a partner in the importing
firm of Roosevelt and Son, was a well-known philanthropist, teaching in
mission schools and founding the Children's Aid Society. His wife,
Martha Bulloch, was a woman of remarkable beauty and refined taste. The
couple made a striking contrast: Theodore being a vigorous entrepreneur
of somewhat mercurial temperament, while Martha, a Georgian, was the
stereotypical ``southern belle.'' Theodore, Jr., the second of four
children, was a frail boy, frequently suffering from severe asthmatic
attacks. As an adolescent, however, he had taken his father's advice to
``make'' his body, so that by the time he entered Harvard in 1876, he
was an accomplished athlete and outstanding boxer. At Harvard, Roosevelt
excelled in natural science and politics, graduating twenty-first in a
class of 177.
Upon graduation, Roosevelt had a number of careers open to him. He
had long considered science his greatest strength--his first published
work, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks, appeared in 1877 while he was
still an undergraduate--but was gradually losing professional interest
in the topic. He began studying law at Columbia and undertook his first
work of history, The Naval War of 1812 (published in 1882). It was
politics, however, that most piqued his interest. This possible vocation
horrified Roosevelt's family and social peers, most of whom considered
politics a low and dirty activity dominated by corrupt bosses and ill-
bred immigrants. Theodore, however, decided that he ``intended to be one
of the governing class,'' a determination that would dominate the rest
of his life.⁴

Legislator, Cowboy, and Naturalist

In 1881, at the age of twenty-three, Roosevelt was elected to the
New York state assembly as a Republican. He quickly established himself
as the leader of a group of young independent-minded Republican
legislators, known as the ``Roosevelt Republicans,'' who fought to clean
up New York politics by opposing the power of both the Republican state
machine and the Tammany Hall Democrats of New York City. Roosevelt
gained a widespread reputation for honesty, integrity, and vigor. In his
second term, he was made minority leader of the assembly and in his
third term collaborated often with Democratic Governor Grover Cleveland
to pass reform legislation, especially civil service reform.⁵
This seemingly charmed career was sidetracked in February of 1884,
when Roosevelt suffered the deaths of both his wife and his mother. He
had met the beautiful Alice Lee while he was at Harvard and they had
married on October 27, 1880, a handsome couple who delighted in the
social life of New York. Alice became ill with Bright's Disease
immediately after giving birth to their first child, also named Alice.
At the same time, Martha Roosevelt lay ill with typhoid fever in an
upstairs room. On Valentine's Day, 1884, Martha died, followed the next
morning by Alice, who died in her husband's arms. The blow was
tremendous, causing Theodore to lament in his diary, ``The light has
gone out of my life.'' He never spoke of Alice Lee Roosevelt again. He
declined to run for reelection to the assembly, deciding instead to go
west and forget his sorrows by becoming a cowboy. He purchased a ranch
in the Dakota Territory and spent the next two years tending to a large
herd of cattle, chasing outlaws, writing popular books about the West
such as Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), and creating an image as one
of the nation's most enigmatic cowboys.⁶
These sojourns in the West helped to expand one of Roosevelt's
greatest interests, his love of nature. As a young man Roosevelt had
enjoyed studying the plant and animal life of his native New York. The
Dakota Territory opened up new experiences and also fostered a concern
for the vanishing wildlife of the nation. Throughout his subsequent
political career, he would maintain an interest in preserving America's
natural beauty, despite his penchant for shooting at much of it on
western hunting trips. Whether it was the founding of Boone and Crockett
Clubs throughout the country or setting up wildlife preserves as
president, this interest would remain a constant throughout his life.
Another constant interest was history. In all, Roosevelt wrote fourteen
books on various topics, as well as numerous articles. While not
recognized as great works of history, his Naval War of 1812, Thomas Hart
Benton (1886), and Winning of the West (1889) were considered standard
works for decades. All of this he accomplished while pursuing an active
career in politics.⁷
Even in his attempts at seclusion, Roosevelt could not entirely
escape from politics. Before leaving for the Dakotas in 1884, he led the
New York delegation to the Republican National Convention in an attempt
to block the presidential nomination of James G. Blaine. When this
effort failed, Roosevelt declined to follow the example of other
reformers, who switched their allegiance to the Democratic candidate,
Grover Cleveland. As he boarded his train for the Dakotas, he indicated
that he would support the Republican nominee. The reform press reacted
with outrage, excoriating their former hero from afar. During his years
as a cowboy, Roosevelt made frequent trips back east to attend to family
business and regaled reporters with tales of his exotic adventures. This
ensured that his name remained in the papers in New York, as well as
spreading to more western locales. He remained enough in the public eye,
in fact, that upon one of his return trips in 1886, the party nominated
him for mayor of New York City.⁸

Politics and War

After losing the three-way mayoral race of 1886 and spending a few
years on his literary pursuits, Roosevelt held a succession of appointed
posts in which he performed well and continued to enhance his public
reputation. In 1889 he became a civil service commissioner under
President Benjamin Harrison. He left this position in 1895 to become a
New York City police commissioner, and then, in 1897, President William
McKinley appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt found
himself in this office when the United States declared war on Spain in
1898. Never one to miss the action, Roosevelt promptly resigned his post
to form a volunteer regiment of western cowboys and eastern adventurers
that the press dubbed ``Roosevelt's Rough Riders.'' The Spanish-American
War did not last long, but it was long enough for the Rough Riders to
ride (or march, since only Colonel Roosevelt was actually mounted) into
American folklore. After the well-chronicled Battle of San Juan Hill,
Roosevelt returned to the United States as the most famous man in the
nation.⁹
In the summer of 1898, the New York Republican party was searching
for a gubernatorial candidate. As the current Republican administration
was plagued with scandals and falling popularity, the prospects of a
Democratic victory in the fall were rising daily. It quickly became
obvious to party leaders that only a man of tremendous popularity and an
impeccable reputation for honesty and ``clean government'' could rescue
the party from defeat. That man was the vigorous colonel just returned
from Cuba, Theodore Roosevelt. The man whose opinion mattered most,
however, was not so sure. Senator Thomas Platt had risen to power in the
party the old-fashioned way, by climbing up through the party machinery.
By 1898, he had established himself as the unquestioned leader of the
state GOP. Known as the ``Easy Boss,'' Platt was in a position to decide
who the state convention would nominate for governor. As a veteran New
York politician, Platt had seen Roosevelt in action and was suspicious
of the young man's reform attitude, his lack of sympathy for the
machine, and his immense personal popularity. The last thing the Easy
Boss wanted was a challenge to his power within the party. On the other
hand, Roosevelt had shown his party regularity by not bolting the Blaine
campaign in 1884, and his most virulent tirades were usually reserved
for the Democratic Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Most of all,
Platt saw in the famous colonel a way to keep the party in office, an
outcome far preferable to the election of a hostile Democratic
administration.¹⁰
On September 17, Roosevelt went to see Platt at the senator's
apartment in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in order to come to some sort of
working agreement. The reformers once more cried out in protest that
their leader was consorting with the enemy. Roosevelt's ambiguous
relationship with many vocal reform advocates was a recurring theme
during his career. Those who worked to overthrow the machines did not
see how a politician could further the cause of reform while still
working with men like Tom Platt. Roosevelt was, above all else, a man of
action who measured success by results. He was willing to compromise in
order to accomplish gradual changes. He was contemptuous of what he
called ``professional reformers,'' men who refused to bend their ideals
to the realities of power. While others railed at the system from
without, Roosevelt would try to reform it from within, but to do this
required power.¹¹

Governor of New York

Senator Platt agreed to Roosevelt's nomination after the candidate
promised to consult him on appointments to office and important policy
matters. Roosevelt's campaign was rather simple; he promised merely to
run a ``clean'' administration and capitalized on his popularity with
the voters. Although he may not have had a clear program in mind while
running for office, once in, he quickly showed that he had no intention
of being a mere caretaker for the machine. It became apparent that he
and Senator Platt had different definitions of ``consultation.'' One of
the governor's first decisions was to appoint a new administrator for
the state canal system. It was in this office that most of the worst
scandals of the previous administration had taken place. Senator Platt
had promised the position to Francis J. Hendricks of Syracuse. When
Roosevelt refused to make the appointment (because Hendricks was from a
``canal county''), Platt was incensed. Roosevelt managed to calm the
situation by drawing up a list of names, all good party men, and
allowing Platt to choose from it. By this method, most future
appointments were made amicably, but the governor had shown his
independence and given the Easy Boss an uneasy feeling about the
future.¹²
Conflicts over policy would be a more difficult matter. Governor
Roosevelt supported legislation authorizing the state supreme court to
inspect the books of corporations, endorsed antimonopoly legislation,
pushed for better civil service laws, supported an eight-hour-day law
for public employees, and advocated a minimum wage for New York City's
school teachers. These and other measures ran afoul of Senator Platt's
wishes, but the issue which most disturbed him was Roosevelt's support
for a tax on public franchises. Platt's political machine was financed
primarily by large corporations in New York, many of which held public
franchises. Nothing was more hateful to these interests than corporate
taxes, especially on companies that were, in their eyes at least,
providing a public service such as water or gas. By forcing the
franchise tax through the legislature, Roosevelt made powerful enemies
who informed Senator Platt of their disapproval. The boss worried that
his hold on the party was fading because of his inability to control his
governor. He began reconsidering his relationship with Theodore
Roosevelt.¹³
Getting rid of Governor Roosevelt did not promise to be easy. While
the impetuous governor may have made enemies in the business community,
he was immensely popular with the public. In fact, it was this
popularity that made him such an effective governor. One reason Senator
Platt had acquiesced in Roosevelt's nomination was that the senator
anticipated controlling the state assembly. As long as Platt's will was
supreme in the legislature, the governor's most threatening schemes
could be defeated. Roosevelt, however, had developed a weapon capable of
changing the minds of wavering legislators. During his campaign for
election, the governor had demonstrated the power of his personality; as
one observer remarked, ``Teddy . . . [was] a wonder . . . there were
immense gatherings of enthusiastic people at every stopping place. . . .
[Even when] the speech was nothing, . . . the man's presence was
everything. It was electrical, magnetic.'' Roosevelt was aware of his
hold on the public imagination. As the most vigorous governor most New
Yorkers had ever seen, Roosevelt used constant publicity to push for his
programs. He regularly held two press conferences a day and consulted
experts of all kinds on complex issues.¹⁴ The growing media
of the day feasted on this constant flow of information, and the public
loved it. Under such intense public scrutiny, only the most intransigent
of legislators cared to challenge Roosevelt. This method of public
persuasion would serve Roosevelt well in the future, as it defined his
political style and formed his most lasting contribution to the
political process in the twentieth century.

Deciding Whether to Run for Vice President

During Roosevelt's term as governor, many of his friends and
admirers began once more to consider his future. As governor of New
York, he naturally became a potential candidate for president. Even
Senator Platt realized this when he was considering Roosevelt's
gubernatorial nomination, saying, ``If he becomes Governor of New York,
sooner or later, with his personality, he will have to be President of
the United States. . . . I am afraid to start that thing going.''
¹⁵ In 1900 however, the Republicans already had a candidate
in incumbent President William McKinley. Few doubted that Roosevelt
would be a candidate in 1904; the problem was what he should do until
then. Even if Roosevelt were reelected governor, he could only serve
until 1902, leaving two years before he could run for president.
Roosevelt himself did not believe that his current popularity could last
another four years.¹⁶ His friends, however, found a solution
to his problem: they would make him vice president.
The most conspicuous proponent of this idea was Massachusetts
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Roosevelt and Lodge had been close friends
for many years, and Lodge had no doubt about his friend's presidential
destiny. Lodge was sure that the vice-presidency was the way to the
Executive Mansion. This must have sounded odd to many since the vice-
presidency was widely perceived as ``a spot to gain four years of rest
and a good income,'' ¹⁷ hardly the sort of office to appeal
to an active man like Roosevelt. Lodge, however, knew his friend well
enough to realize that all Roosevelt needed to succeed was a place in
the spotlight. As Lodge later put it,
I do not pretend to say that the office [of vice president] in
itself is suited to you and to your habits, but for the future it
is, in my judgement, invaluable. It takes you out of the cut-throat
politics of New York, where I am sure they would have destroyed your
prospects, if you had remained two years longer, and it gives you a
position in the eyes of the country second only to that of the
President.¹⁸
Some of Roosevelt's other friends also speculated that the vice
president's role as presiding officer of the Senate would keep him in
the public eye much more effectively than his current position as
governor of New York. Finally, many of his western supporters were eager
for the opportunity to promote their man for a national office,
especially after his appearance at the Rough Riders' reunion in Las
Vegas in 1899. Newspapers all over the West championed him for the vice-
presidency in 1900 and the presidency in 1904. Some even suggested
replacing McKinley in 1900.¹⁹ The movement was gathering
momentum, and Vice President Garret A. Hobart's death in November 1899
only increased the pace--but what about the candidate?
While flattered by all the support for his candidacy, Roosevelt did
not relish the idea of being vice president. He worried that as vice
president he ``could not do anything.'' ²⁰ For a man who
thrived on the ``strenuous life,'' it was an unpleasant prospect indeed.
He would have few responsibilities in the office, and it would restrict
his ability to speak out on issues that greatly concerned him. He
worried that ``if I did anything [as vice president] I would attract
suspicion and antagonism.'' He considered the potential for a vice
president to be active in formulating policy to be ``infinitesimal.''
²¹ As governor of New York, at least, he was actively doing
the work that so stimulated him; as vice president that would not be
possible.
Presiding over the Senate did not appeal to him either. The job
would undoubtedly be a ``bore'' and might, in fact, prove quite
maddening. As he wrote to Lodge, ``I should be in a cold shiver of rage
at inability to answer hounds like [Senator Richard] Pettigrew [D-SD]
and the scarcely more admirable [Senator William] Mason [R-IL] and
[Senator Eugene] Hale [R-ME]. . . . I would be seeing continually things
that I would like to do, and very possibly would like to do differently
from the way in which they are being done.'' The vice president had
little, if any, real authority in the Senate, and Roosevelt was adamant
that he would ``not like to be a figurehead.'' ²²
There were also financial reasons for Roosevelt's reluctance to run.
He was, by his own standards, a man of ``very moderate means.'' The vice
president was expected to carry on an active social life in Washington,
which required ``the expenditure of a good deal of money for
entertaining and the like.'' Roosevelt could certainly not entertain on
a scale comparable to that of Levi Morton and Garret Hobart, the two
most recent Republican vice presidents. Still, if the office held
opportunities to do valuable work, Roosevelt would have tolerated the
financial problems.²³ Unfortunately, the vice-presidency
offered few such possibilities and promised to be a financial strain as
well.
The more Roosevelt thought about it, the less appealing the vice-
presidency became. He continually expressed this opinion to anyone who
asked, finally stating, ``I would a great deal rather be anything, say
professor of history, than Vice-President.'' ²⁴ It was not,
however, a teaching position that attracted his attention. The position
that Roosevelt really wanted was secretary of war, but McKinley
appointed Elihu Root to that recently vacated post. Roosevelt's second
choice was governor general of the Philippines, but the president, not
trusting Roosevelt's impetuous nature, was unlikely to grant him that
office.²⁵ With these options unavailable, the governor's
mansion seemed the best place for him. It was left for the Easy Boss to
step in and supply the final piece to the nomination puzzle.
Senator Platt was looking for a way to get Governor Roosevelt out of
New York. The corporations and large financial interests of the state
were increasingly disturbed by the governor's performance, especially
his support of the franchise tax, and were anxious to return to business
as usual. They placed growing pressure on Senator Platt to do something
about his governor. While reluctant to resort to a potentially
disastrous fight against Roosevelt's renomination for governor, the boss
saw an opportunity in all the talk about the vice-presidency. If he
could push Roosevelt into that position devoid of power, he would get
the young reformer out of the way, appease his financial supporters, and
be free to select a more pliable governor as Roosevelt's replacement. It
seemed the perfect solution.²⁶
The boss proceeded to push Roosevelt's name to party leaders and
hinted to the governor that he might not support him for a second
gubernatorial term. This challenge from the machine, however, only
raised the fighting spirit in Roosevelt, who was never one to a retreat
from political battle. In February 1900 Roosevelt therefore attempted to
remove himself from the vice-presidential race, telling the New York
Tribune that ``under no circumstances could I, or would I, accept the
nomination for the vice presidency.'' ²⁷ The boom for his
nomination, however, continued, with friends and foes alike fanning the
flames.
Meanwhile, in Washington, President McKinley remained silent on the
issue. The president had never been greatly impressed by Governor
Roosevelt for reasons of both personality and policy. Yet, after
Hobart's death, he gave no indication of preference in the selection of
his new running mate. Most Republican leaders believed Roosevelt would
bring a new kind of glamor and excitement to their ticket. The governor
was a recent war hero, whose record in office had been very popular and
less radical than some had feared. There were also no other similarly
attractive candidates available.²⁸ McKinley may have been
opposed to Roosevelt, but he proposed no alternatives, and his silence
seemed to indicate acceptance.

Election of 1900

By the time the Republican National Convention opened in June in
Philadelphia, it had become obvious that Roosevelt was the favorite to
receive the vice-presidential nomination. When he continued to protest
that he would rather be governor of New York, Lodge warned him that, if
he attended the convention, his nomination was assured. But Roosevelt
could not stay away, claiming that to do so would look like
cowardice.²⁹ As a result, despite his protestations, his
magnetic presence at the convention fired the enthusiasm of his
partisans to a fever pitch. When he appeared for the opening session
clad in a black hat reminiscent of the Rough Riders' Cuban campaign--
what one delegate called ``an acceptance hat''--his nomination was
sealed. Scores of western delegates spent that night parading and
chanting ``We want Teddy.'' As Senator Platt put it, ``Roosevelt might
as well stand under Niagara Falls and try to spit water back as to stop
his nomination by this convention.'' ³⁰ Ohio Senator Mark
Hanna, who opposed the Roosevelt nomination, tried to block the movement
from his position as convention chairman, but without support from the
president he could do little against the combined forces of Platt,
Pennsylvania boss Matthew Quay (who had an old score to settle with
Hanna), and genuine popular will. In desperation, Hanna could only
protest, ``Don't you realize that there's only one life between this
madman and the White House?'' ³¹
Theodore Roosevelt really did not want to be vice president, but he
was a confirmed political realist with presidential ambitions. He knew
that regaining the nomination for governor of New York would be
difficult, if not impossible, against the open opposition of Senator
Platt, and even a successful gubernatorial campaign promised only two
years of political struggle against growing corporate hostility.
Although Roosevelt continued to fight his own nomination, his protests
grew gradually weaker, until, by the time of the convention, they were
no longer convincing. Everything pointed to the vice-presidency, and
Theodore Roosevelt knew how to read the signs. He did not pursue the
office, but when it was thrust upon him, he accepted it. For good or
ill, he was now President McKinley's running mate and he was determined
to make the best of it.
Republican strategy in 1900 was to let their youthful vice-
presidential candidate take to the hustings while President McKinley
conducted his ``front porch campaign,'' just as he had in 1896, except
this time he received guests at the White House rather than his home in
Canton, Ohio. This strategy suited the vigorous Roosevelt extremely
well, as he proclaimed himself to be ``strong as a bull moose.'' It
allowed him to tour the West and Midwest, taking on Democratic
presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan on issues of the tariff,
the gold standard, and American empire. These two great orators set
standards of stamina never before seen. Roosevelt covered 21,000 miles
in twenty-four states, making over 600 speeches.³²
Roosevelt's tour helped the GOP compensate for Bryan's popularity in the
West and it added life to an otherwise dull campaign. The vice-
presidential candidate radiated energy, while McKinley sat on his porch
in Washington, reminding the nation how prosperous it was.
For Roosevelt, the campaign also provided an opportunity to perform
on a national stage. Everywhere he went, he drew huge crowds and
constant public attention. As historian John Milton Cooper, Jr., has put
it, ``The sheer fascination of his presence among people who had already
read or heard about him, together with the pungency of his personality,
made him the sensation of the 1900 campaign.'' ³³ Roosevelt's
nationwide tour helped accelerate the growing trend toward direct,
personal campaign techniques. Throughout the nation, ``boy orators''
such as Roosevelt, Bryan, and Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin were
altering the system of party campaigning that had persisted for decades.
Rather than relying solely on their parties to obtain office, they used
whistle-stop campaigns and the burgeoning mass media to take their
message directly to the voters. They pushed for direct primaries in
order to bypass the party machines and relied on public indignation to
insist on reforms. Theodore Roosevelt was helping to lead the way for
changes in American political campaigns that would reverberate
throughout the twentieth century.³⁴ Of course, the press
played its part in promoting these changes. Roosevelt, as the most
interesting candidate in 1900, received more press coverage than even
the presidential candidates, and certainly more than the Democratic
nominee for vice president, Adlai Stevenson. Reporters loved Roosevelt
because he was always good news copy. While other politicians relied on
editors for favorable press coverage, Roosevelt had an ongoing rapport
with reporters. They could go to any politician for opinions; they could
go to Roosevelt for stories. His campaign dominated the news. As
journalist Finley Peter Dunne's favorite character ``Mr. Dooley'' put
it, ``'Tis Teddy alone that's r-runnin', an' he ain't runnin', he's
gallopin'.'' ³⁵

An Unenthusiastic Presiding Officer

McKinley's reelection was nearly a foregone conclusion. The nation
was prosperous and the administration was popular. On election day,
McKinley received 51.6 percent of the vote, up from 51 percent in 1896.
He lost only one state (Kentucky) from the previous election while
adding Washington, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska.
Roosevelt's popularity in the West may have influenced these states, but
the prosperity of McKinley's first term had also reduced the impact of
``free silver'' as a decisive issue, depriving Bryan of his greatest
western appeal.³⁶
Roosevelt was not overjoyed at being vice president but was proud of
helping the ticket achieve victory. He did, however, show early signs of
frustration at the prospect of inactivity. He declined an invitation to
speak in February 1901, ``chiefly for the excellent reason that I have
nothing whatever to say.'' ³⁷ His penchant for speaking out
would return soon enough, but this initial hesitation reflected the
uncertainty of Roosevelt's new position. Accustomed to the aggressive
pursuit of his own policies, he now had to be careful not to offend
either his president or the party leadership, a goal he had failed to
achieve in New York. It was a potentially trying situation for an active
and outspoken young man.
The first task of the new vice president was to preside over the
Senate, meeting in a special session for four days beginning March 4.
This brief appearance did not give Roosevelt much time to make an
impression, but in those four days he impressed no one. He had not been
looking forward to this role, but as he characteristically put it, ``Now
all that there is for me to do is to perform with regularity and dignity
the duty of presiding over the Senate, and to remember the fact that the
duty not being very important is no excuse for shirking it.''
³⁸ He proved as ill-suited for the role as he was
unenthusiastic. His mind wandered, and he had a limited grasp of Senate
procedures. As Senator Joseph Foraker tactfully put it, ``his peculiar
qualifications for the public service fitted him better for wider,
broader and more useful fields.'' ³⁹ Roosevelt confessed to
being ``the poorest presiding officer the Senate ever had.''
⁴⁰ The first impressions made by the new vice president in
the Senate were hardly encouraging.
Once the Senate adjourned, Roosevelt returned home to New York to
spend the summer with his wife and seven children, his most enjoyable
vacation in years. Two years after the death of his first wife, Theodore
had married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow. Edith was a very
private woman who never seemed entirely comfortable with the publicity
that always surrounded her husband. Privately, however, her influence
went even beyond the difficult task of raising the rambunctious
Roosevelt children. She controlled the family's finances--Theodore
having never been good at managing his money-- and it was later
suspected that she was influential in his presidential appointments
because she was considered a better judge of character than he was.
(From 1901 to 1909, as first lady, Edith would help transform the White
House into a centerpiece for the social and cultural life of Washington
and the nation.) The lack of pressing business as vice president allowed
Theodore to spend time playing football with his sons and sparring with
his tempestuous older daughter, Alice. Theodore's relationship with
Alice would become increasingly strained during his presidency as she
struggled for greater independence. As he later put it, ``I can be
President of the United States, or I can attend to Alice. I can't do
both.'' During Roosevelt's presidency, ``Princess Alice'' would become a
celebrity as a Washington socialite and a prominent model of the
independent young woman of the new century. She would eventually marry
Republican Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, a future Speaker of
the House, in 1906, and become one of the most famous matrons of
Washington society.⁴¹
Because of his lack of interest in the official duties of his new
office, Roosevelt in the summer of 1901 began looking for other
activities and focused on two. First, he resumed a regular speaking
schedule. These speeches reveal that, without more immediate matters to
deal with, his thoughts were increasingly turning to one of his favorite
topics: foreign policy. He spoke to crowds in New York and New England
about the need for an effective navy and the threat from a newly
powerful Germany.⁴² Perhaps Roosevelt saw this as an area in
which he would have some freedom, because he and McKinley, while not
always in complete accord, had similar views on foreign policy.
Roosevelt's more virulent criticism was aimed at anti-imperialist
Democrats, who were McKinley's enemies as well. By spending his time
attacking the Democrats on foreign policy, he might avoid disturbing the
Old Guard in his own party with his progressive views on domestic
matters.
Vice President Roosevelt's second activity revealed his ambition. He
spent considerable time lining up support for a presidential bid in
1904. Despite his concerns that opposition from the party in New York
would deny him the nomination, he cautiously pursued a course designed
to build a broad base of popular support. He concentrated his efforts
especially in the West, where he was already popular and where the
Bryanite Democrats represented a significant electoral challenge.
Friends such as William Allen White in Kansas, Philip B. Stewart in
Colorado, and Booker T. Washington in the South began acting as
unofficial campaign managers, and he planned a national speaking tour
for 1902. Roosevelt also undertook a potentially more risky strategy of
supporting progressive-minded Republicans in state elections. He
volunteered to assist Albert B. Cummins of Iowa in his campaign for
governor. Cummins had defeated an Old Guard opponent for the nomination
and in supporting him too heartily, Roosevelt ran the risk of offending
the national party leadership. He may have been willing to take that
chance in order to build a separate base of party support and appeal to
the growing public interest in progressive candidates. Roosevelt was
preparing once more for political battle, and, on the whole, the odds
looked good.⁴³
It appeared that Vice President Roosevelt's official
responsibilities were to be limited, at least for the moment, since
President McKinley did not consult him either on policy or appointments.
Although McKinley had used Vice President Hobart as his liaison with the
Senate, Roosevelt was poorly suited for this role, since he shone more
as a public spokesman than as a parliamentary operator. In addition, the
Senate was dominated by Old Guard Republicans, most of whom were wary of
Roosevelt's insurgent impulses. In any event, McKinley was not likely to
entrust his impetuous vice president with legislative responsibilities,
because he distrusted the younger man's lack of caution. Roosevelt, for
his part, chafed under the restraints of McKinley's slowness in dealing
with contentious issues. As a result, while the relations between the
two men were amicable and professional, they were not
close.⁴⁴
Early in September 1901, everything changed. On September 5
President McKinley, a longtime advocate of protective tariffs, delivered
a major policy speech at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New
York. In his address, the president called for a new era of reciprocal
trade with other nations, in which the old trade barriers must fall.
``The period of exclusiveness is past . . . the expansion of our trade
and commerce is the pressing problem,'' he declared. The next day,
September 6, the president held a public reception in the Temple of
Music. At slightly after 4 p.m., a young anarchist named Leon Czolgosz
walked up to the president with a gun in his right hand, hidden in a
bandage. He fired two shots at the president: one bounced off a button,
but the other lodged in McKinley's stomach. For a week, the president
struggled to survive, but on September 14 he expired, whispering the
title of his favorite hymn, ``Nearer, My God, To Thee.'' ⁴⁵
McKinley's pathbreaking initiative for lower tariffs died with him.
Upon hearing of the shooting, Roosevelt had rushed to Buffalo, but
when the doctors had been encouraged by the president's progress after
three days, the vice president had departed for the Adirondacks. On
September 13, he was recalled by a note from Secretary of War Elihu
Root, ``The President appears to be dying, and members of the Cabinet in
Buffalo think you should lose no time in coming.'' Making a furious trip
by buckboard and special train, Roosevelt arrived in Buffalo on the
fourteenth to find the president already dead. After paying his respects
to Mrs. McKinley, he met with the cabinet, telling them, ``I wish to say
that it shall be my aim to continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy of
President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity, and the honor of our
beloved country.'' He then took the oath of office, becoming, at forty-
two, the youngest president in the nation's history.⁴⁶

A Popular President

Roosevelt's pledge to continue McKinley's policies was not only
meant to calm the nation, but was consistent with his conception of the
role of the vice president. In an article for Review of Reviews in 1896,
Roosevelt, then New York City's police commissioner, had described the
vice president as a ``functionless official'' except for the possibility
of becoming ``the head of the whole nation.'' He therefore stressed:
The Vice-President should so far as possible represent the same
views and principles which have secured the nomination and election
of the President, and he should be a man standing well in the
councils of the party, trusted by his fellow party leaders, and able
in the event of any accident to his chief to take up the work of the
latter just where it was left.⁴⁷
Of course, the man holding the office in September 1901 did not fit
this model. Roosevelt had not been selected because of his similarities
to McKinley and, now that he was president, would not take long to go
his own way. He almost immediately began pursuing a nature conservation
program and in a few months would instigate an antitrust suit against
the Northern Securities Company. He would genuinely attempt to steer a
middle course between the Old Guard and the insurgent Republicans, but
pressure for change was rising and Roosevelt's heart had always been
with the reformers.⁴⁸ His first annual message to Congress,
calling for some regulation of corporations, served notice that life
under Roosevelt would be different from life under McKinley.
President Roosevelt inherited a number of advantages from his
predecessor. The first was a powerful and efficient party organization,
built by Mark Hanna, which Roosevelt immediately began making his own.
He used appointments and the connections he had already made to give
power to his supporters and prepare for the convention of 1904. He also
inherited a talented and able cabinet. He would rely a great deal on men
like Secretary of State John Hay, Secretary of War Elihu Root, and
McKinley's personal secretary George Courtelyou. Roosevelt had also
learned some things about press relations from McKinley's White House.
The McKinley administration, thanks primarily to the enterprising
Cortelyou, had made innovative changes in handling the media. McKinley
had used press releases, pre-released speech transcripts, and ``trial
balloons'' to shape news reports as no other president had ever done.
Roosevelt combined this efficiency with his own tremendous personality
to dominate the news. His control of the information the papers reported
gave him extraordinary power to shape his own publicity.⁴⁹
Because Roosevelt was vice president for so short a time, he had
little impact on the office, but thanks to his skill at publicity, the
potential certainly existed for him to have played an influential role
in that office. Roosevelt had defied conventional practice by waging an
active national campaign for the vice-presidency, ⁵⁰
demonstrating his ability to publicize the Republican cause and reach
out to the voters in a way that McKinley could not. It seems likely that
McKinley, a man well aware of the power of the press, might have
continued to use Roosevelt in a similar fashion, as a sort of ``public
persuader'' for the administration.⁵¹ McKinley had indicated
that he would pursue trade reciprocity agreements in his second term,
had begun to prepare an antitrust agenda, and had hinted that he might
take up the tariff issue.⁵² If so, Roosevelt would have been
the ideal man to sell these programs to the public.
Theodore Roosevelt became one of the nation's most active and
popular presidents, easily winning reelection in 1904. He pursued
important domestic legislation, such as the Hepburn Act (for greater
regulation of railroads) and the Pure Food and Drug acts, and he led the
nation into a more active role in international relations. In 1906, he
became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace for his
mediation of the Russo-Japanese War.
After leaving office in 1909, Roosevelt embarked on a hunting safari
in Africa, returning home in 1910 to a hero's welcome. In 1912,
disenchanted with the policies of his presidential successor William
Howard Taft, Roosevelt decided to run for president once more. Denied
the nomination by the Republicans, he formed his own party, the
Progressive or Bull Moose party, chose Hiram Johnson of California as a
running mate, and ran against Taft. The three contenders, Roosevelt,
Taft, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the eventual winner, together
produced one of the most memorable presidential campaigns in U.S.
history. When the ballots were counted, Roosevelt's independent
candidacy came in second, ahead of Taft's Republican
ticket.⁵³
After the campaign of 1912, Roosevelt retired once more into private
life. He would not, however, remain in the background. Upon the outbreak
of World War I in Europe in 1914, Roosevelt called for immediate entry
by the United States on the side of the Allies. When President Wilson
adopted a policy of neutrality, Roosevelt became the president's most
vociferous critic. After the United States entered the war in 1917,
Roosevelt proposed to lead a division of volunteers, a reincarnation of
the Rough Riders, to fight in France and was outraged when President
Wilson refused him a command. Roosevelt continued to criticize Wilson
throughout the war, but late in 1918, as peace negotiations proceeded in
Paris, Roosevelt fell ill. On January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty,
Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep.⁵⁴
As Henry Cabot Lodge had predicted, the vice-presidency proved a
stepping stone for Roosevelt to the White House, though not in the way
he had foreseen. Theodore Roosevelt was elected vice president thanks to
a combination of Senator Platt's desire to get him out of the way and a
popular movement among friends and admirers within the GOP. Despite
Platt's hope that he would fade from view, Roosevelt appeared to be on
the path to the presidency, poised to use the vice-presidency in novel
ways to build his own support for 1904. Lodge thus proved a better
prophet than either Roosevelt or Platt. The vice-presidency led, not to
oblivion, but to the White House.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

NOTES

¹ Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, vol. 2, The Years of Preparation, 1898-1900 (Cambridge,
1951), p. 1174.
² Quoted in Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice
Presidency (Washington, D.C., 1956), p. 81.
³ Morison, 2:1439.
⁴ Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New
York, 1979), pp. 32-36, 60-70, 128, 135-56. This is the most detailed
and colorful account of Roosevelt's life and early career.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 159-201, 227-67; William Henry Harbaugh,
Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New
York, 1961), pp. 27-28. Harbaugh provides the most thorough scholarly
account of Roosevelt's public career.
⁶ Morris, pp. 240-45, 270-341. As chairman of the
Stockman's Association, Roosevelt was automatically a deputy sheriff of
Billings County, a responsibility he took very seriously.
⁷ Ibid., pp. 382-85, 153-56, 386-93. Boone and Crockett
Clubs were dedicated to preserving wildlife throughout the nation and to
westward expansion.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 261-68, 345-47.
⁹ Ibid., Chapters 16-25.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 665-66; Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility,
pp. 108-11.
¹¹ Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, pp. 109-11.
¹² Ibid., pp. 111-14.
¹³ Ibid., pp. 114-21.
¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 113-22; John Morton Blum, The Republican
Roosevelt, 2d ed. (New York, 1964), pp. 15-16.
¹⁵ Quoted in Morris, p. 666.
¹⁶ Henry Cabot Lodge, ed., Selections from the
Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918
(New York, 1925), 1:426.
¹⁷ David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United
States Senate, 1869-1901 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), p. 157.
¹⁸ Lodge, 1:467.
¹⁹ Morison, 2:1157; Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility,
p. 123.
²⁰ Morris, p. 718.
²¹ Lodge, 1:435, 442.
²² Morison, 2:1157; Lodge, 1:448.
²³ Morison, 2:1140; Lodge, 1:442.
²⁴ Morison, 2:1174.
²⁵ G. Wallace Chessman, ``Theodore Roosevelt's Campaign
Against the Vice-Presidency,'' Historian 14 (Spring 1952): 174-75;
Lodge, 1:442.
²⁶ Williams, p. 73; Morison, 2:449.
²⁷ Quoted in Chessman, ``Theodore Roosevelt's Campaign
Against the Vice-Presidency,'' p. 179.
²⁸ John Milton Cooper, Jr., Pivotal Decades: The United
States, 1900-1920 (New York, 1990), p. 29. This work offers an
outstanding general synthesis of the politics of this era.
²⁹ Lodge, 1:460.
³⁰ Quoted in Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, p. 135.
³¹ Quoted in Blum, p. 22.
³² Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, pp. 137-38.
³³ Cooper, Pivotal Decades, pp. 29-30.
³⁴ Ibid., pp. 28-30.
³⁵ Chalmers M. Roberts, The Washington Post: The First
100 Years (Boston, 1977), p. 57; David S. Barry, Forty Years in
Washington (Boston, 1924), p. 270; Morris, p. 731.
³⁶ William H. Harbaugh, ``The Republican Party, 1893-
1932,'' in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., vol. 3, 1910-1945, From Square Deal to New Deal (New York, 1973),
p. 2080; Cooper, Pivotal Decades, pp. 24-25.
³⁷ Morison, 2:1422; Lodge, 1:484.
³⁸ Morison, 2:1446.
³⁹ Quoted in Barry, p. 273.
⁴⁰ Quoted in Williams, p. 81.
⁴¹ Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, pp. 143-44;
Morris, pp. 26, 313, 359, 372; Lewis Gould, The Presidency of Theodore
Roosevelt (Lawrence, KS, 1991), pp. 102-4, 226.
⁴² Lodge, 1:484-88, 492-94.
⁴³ Morison, 3:121, 129; G. Wallace Chessman, Theodore
Roosevelt and the Politics of Power (Boston, 1969), pp. 79-83; Blum, p.
40; Williams, p. 81; Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, p.
128.
⁴⁴ Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of
Power, p. 77; Lewis Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence,
KS, 1980), p. 215; Morison, pp. 56-57.
⁴⁵ Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, pp. 251-52;
Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, pp. 144-45.
⁴⁶ Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, pp. 144-46.
⁴⁷ Theodore Roosevelt, ``The Three Vice-Presidential
Candidates and What They Represent,'' American Monthly Review of Reviews
14 (September 1896): 289-91.
⁴⁸ Harbaugh, ``The Republican Party, 1893-1932,'' p.
2080; Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power, pp. 82-84.
⁴⁹ Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of
Power, pp. 80-82; Blum, pp. 38-44; Gould, The Presidency of Theodore
Roosevelt, pp. 16-21; Robert C. Hilderbrand, Power and the People:
Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897-1921
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), pp. 52-61; John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and
the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, 1983), pp.
65, 70.
⁵⁰ Although most scholars have credited Roosevelt with
being the first vice-presidential candidate to wage a national campaign,
Richard Mentor Johnson also did so in 1840. See Chapter 9 of this
volume, ``Richard Mentor Johnson,'' p. 130.
⁵¹ This role is suggested in Horace Samuel Merrill and
Marion Galbraith Merrill, The Republican Command, 1897-1913 (Lexington,
KY, 1971), p. 95.
⁵² Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, pp. 249-51;
Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, p. 77. McKinley's untimely death
permits only speculation about his full intentions, but his public and
private statements indicate preparations for a more active agenda of
antitrust and tariff legislation.
⁵³ For the most penetrating discussions of Roosevelt's
presidency see Blum's Republican Roosevelt and Gould's Presidency of
Theodore Roosevelt. Chessman's Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of
Power is also helpful. For the election of 1912, see Cooper's The
Warrior and the Priest.
⁵⁴ The fullest account of Roosevelt's post-presidential
activities appears in Harbaugh's Power and Responsibility.
?

Chapter 26

CHARLES WARREN FAIRBANKS

1905-1909

CHARLES W. FAIRBANKS
CHARLES W. FAIRBANKS

Chapter 26

CHARLES WARREN FAIRBANKS

26th Vice President: 1905-1909

My name must not be considered for Vice President and if
it is presented, I wish it withdrawn. Please withdraw it.
--Charles Warren Fairbanks ¹
In the summer of 1904 Senator Charles Warren Fairbanks wanted to be
president of the United States. Many in 1900 had seen him as the natural
successor to his good friend President William McKinley. Now, however,
it was not the fallen McKinley who occupied the White House, but
Theodore Roosevelt, and the president appeared on his way to easy
renomination at the 1904 Republican convention. When members of the
Republican Old Guard suggested Fairbanks for vice president, the senator
saw an opportunity for advancement. After all, the second spot had led
to the presidency for Roosevelt, it might do the same for him. The vice-
presidency might prove a good place from which to maneuver for the 1908
convention, and anything could happen with the impetuous Roosevelt in
the White House. As Finley Peter Dunne's fictional character Mr. Dooley
speculated, ``Th' way they got Sinitor Fairbanks to accipt was by
showin' him a pitcher iv our gr-reat an' noble prisidint thryin to jump
a horse over a six-foot fence.'' ² Most of all, Roosevelt's
prodigious shadow seemed a natural place for a man described by friends
as ``a safe and popular politician'' to wait for his turn in the White
House.³ If ever a man seemed destined to remain in the
political shadows, it was Charles Warren Fairbanks.

Youth

Charles Fairbanks was born on May 11, 1852, in a modest log house in
Ohio. His father, Loriston Fairbanks, was a farmer and wagon maker who
had moved from New York to go into business for himself. He became
active in Union County as a member of the agricultural board, and his
wife, Mary Adelaide Smith, was a local temperance advocate. As a
moderately wealthy farmer, Fairbanks could afford to send his son
Charles to college at Ohio Wesleyan. Charles excelled at his studies,
graduating eighth out of forty-four in the class of 1874. He continued
his education at Cleveland Law College, taking only six months to
complete his courses and pass the bar.⁴
On October 6, 1874, Charles married Cornelia Cole and moved with her
to Indianapolis, Indiana, where, with the help of an uncle, Charles took
a position as attorney with the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad system.
Over the next decade, young Fairbanks built a sterling reputation--as
well as a personal fortune--as a lawyer for numerous railroad interests
in the Midwest. He specialized in dealing with bankrupt railroads and he
prosecuted strikers after the Indianapolis railroad strike in 1877.
These activities brought
the young lawyer to the attention of Indiana's Republican
party.⁵

Leader of the Indiana Republicans

In 1884, Indiana's Republicans split in their support of
presidential candidates, some favoring Walter Q. Gresham and others
preferring Benjamin Harrison. The election of Harrison in 1888 seemingly
jeopardized Fairbanks' prospects, since he had been active on behalf of
the Gresham faction. Harrison's lackluster performance in the White
House, however, followed by impressive Democratic victories in 1892,
gave Fairbanks the opportunity to return to prominence in the state by
helping to rebuild the party. The campaign of 1892 also brought him into
contact with the governor of Ohio, William McKinley. The two men formed
a friendship that lasted until McKinley's untimely death in 1901 and
proved extremely beneficial to the careers of both men.⁶
Even though he held no office, Fairbanks managed to gain control of
the Indiana Republican party, primarily because of his wealth. He spent
freely on campaigns and consistently urged party unity behind candidates
at all levels. Persistent letter writing and encouragement endeared him
to GOP officeholders throughout the state, and he used his connections
with the railroads to obtain passes for political allies. Perhaps most
importantly, he secretly owned a majority interest in the state's
largest newspaper, The Indianapolis News. By 1901, he had also purchased
the major opposition daily, The Indianapolis Journal. Fairbanks' control
of the press significantly promoted the Republican cause in
Indiana.⁷
As leader of his state's Republican party, Fairbanks stood in an
excellent position to command the attention of the national party. With
the parties almost evenly balanced in the late nineteenth century, a
small shift in the voting patterns of one of the more densely populated
industrial states could win or lose a presidential election. Indiana was
one of these vital states. In the thirteen presidential elections from
1868 to 1916, eleven of the national tickets boasted a Hoosier
candidate, usually running for vice president. Charles Fairbanks thus
became an important man in Republican electoral
considerations.⁸
When William McKinley ran for president in 1896, he made his friend
Fairbanks a key player in his campaign strategy. Fairbanks ran
McKinley's campaign in Indiana and delivered a united Hoosier delegation
for McKinley at the Republican National Convention in St. Louis. As
temporary chairman of that convention, Fairbanks uncharacteristically
delivered a stirring keynote address, in which he lambasted the
Democrats and advocated the gold standard for currency.⁹
McKinley won the Republican nomination handily, then defeated Democrat
William Jennings Bryan in the general election. Indiana, which he won by
only about 18,000 votes, proved instrumental to his
victory.¹⁰
On the state level, the Republicans also did well enough to regain
control of the Indiana legislature, guaranteeing that they would
determine that body's choice of a United States senator. Speculation
naturally turned to Charles Fairbanks. The wealthy lawyer had assisted
many of the Republican legislators during their campaigns; now they
could return the favor. With a little help from President McKinley,
Fairbanks easily won election to his first political
office.¹¹

A Senator with Presidential Ambitions

Fairbanks' Senate career proved competent if unspectacular. He stuck
to the party line and was well respected among his colleagues. As
chairman of the Immigration Committee, he favored restricting
immigration and requiring a literacy test before entry into the United
States--both popular positions. When the Immigration Committee proved
too contentious for his liking, Fairbanks moved to the chairmanship of
the more agreeable Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds. Although
he had originally opposed the pressure for war with Spain in 1898, he
faithfully followed President McKinley's lead when war came. The
president appointed him to the Joint-High Commission to decide the U.S.-
Canadian boundary in Alaska. No settlement was reached, but Fairbanks
helped his own popularity by declaring, ``I am opposed to the yielding
of an inch of United States territory.'' The people of Alaska showed
their appreciation by naming the city of Fairbanks in his honor. Perhaps
Fairbanks' only controversial stand in the Senate was his support for
the demands of black soldiers fighting in Cuba that they be commanded by
black officers. Thanks to the senator's intervention, Indiana became the
first state to accept this position as general policy for its militia
units.¹²
Fairbanks' calm demeanor and ``safe'' Republican views made him very
popular in the Senate. As a senator from a pivotal state and a
consistent defender of the McKinley administration, Fairbanks emerged as
a natural successor to McKinley. He certainly looked like a president:
tall (approximately six feet, four inches), dignified, always clad in a
proper Prince Albert coat.¹³ In 1900 some conservatives, most
notably Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, tried to maneuver Fairbanks into a
vice-presidential nomination.¹⁴ The conservative attempt to
block the nomination of New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt ended in
failure, but the mention of Fairbanks for vice president fueled the
senator's already growing ambition. The Indianan turned down Hanna's
offer for practical reasons and because he had set his sights higher. As
one journalist put it, ``[Fairbanks] had dreams of the White House. He
preferred to remain in the Senate until the real call came.''
¹⁵
Charles Fairbanks' political fortunes changed dramatically on
September 6, 1901, when President McKinley was assassinated while
visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He lost not only a
friend, but also a political patron. Although McKinley's successor,
Theodore Roosevelt, promised to continue the fallen president's
policies, Fairbanks' close connection to the White House was severed.
Beyond these personal considerations, the nation's political environment
was about to change--partly in response to Roosevelt--in ways that would
leave Fairbanks in the shadows. President Roosevelt brought a new
glamour to the presidency. He dominated the news and shifted the
national debate to new issues.¹⁶ None of these changes proved
helpful to Fairbanks' presidential ambitions.
Conditions were also changing in Indiana. In 1899 the state
legislature had elected a young firebrand named Albert J. Beveridge to
the Senate. The new junior senator from Indiana was a powerful orator
who shot to prominence by advocating a policy of overseas expansion for
the United States. His growing power in Indiana represented a challenge
to Fairbanks. The threat became increasingly severe as Beveridge
gradually broke away from the party's Old Guard and began siding with
the insurgents in calling for greater regulation of railroads and
business trusts. No longer merely over party power, the battle had come
also to concern policies. To make matters worse for Fairbanks, President
Roosevelt quite obviously preferred the counsel of Senator
Beveridge.¹⁷
This smoldering conflict erupted in 1901 when a federal judgeship
became available in Indiana. Beveridge recommended an old friend,
Francis Baker, whom Fairbanks adamantly refused to endorse. The squabble
became public and was widely seen as a test of prestige within the
state. Because this type of patronage could crucially affect a
politician's ability to accumulate and wield power, the dispute had
serious repercussions for Fairbanks. When Roosevelt nominated Baker,
apparently without much concern for the prerogatives of the senior
senator, there was little question which of Indiana's senators had the
favor of the White House.¹⁸

Vice-Presidential Candidate

Charles Fairbanks saw his presidential hopes gradually slipping
away. President Roosevelt effectively maneuvered throughout 1902 and
1903 to gain control of the party and ensure his renomination in 1904.
Some conservatives considered supporting Mark Hanna for the nomination,
but Hanna's death in February 1904 ended any real opposition to
Roosevelt within the GOP. With Hanna gone, Fairbanks became more closely
identified as the heir to McKinley, but Roosevelt's presence--rather
than McKinley's spirit--had come to dominate the party.
Still, the Old Guard could not simply be dismissed. If one of their
own could not be the presidential nominee, they would choose the vice-
presidential candidate. Fairbanks was the obvious choice, since
conservatives thought highly of him yet he managed not to offend the
party's more progressive elements. Roosevelt was far from pleased with
the idea of Fairbanks for vice president. He would have preferred
Representative Robert R. Hitt of Illinois, but he did not consider the
vice-presidential nomination worth a fight. For his part, Fairbanks
followed Roosevelt's example from 1900 by declaring that he was not a
candidate. His friends, however, had little doubt of his interest in the
position, and he privately informed Roosevelt that he would serve in any
way the president indicated. With solid support from New York,
Pennsylvania, and Indiana (thanks to the acquiescence of Senator
Beveridge) Fairbanks was easily placed on the 1904 Republican ticket in
order to appease the Old Guard.¹⁹
By avoiding controversy and contentious issues, Fairbanks made
himself a useful running mate, conservative enough to alleviate business
uneasiness about Roosevelt but not so outspoken as to be unacceptable to
the insurgents. Still, the reaction was not entirely favorable. The New
York Journal called Fairbanks ``a mere blank wall upon which the
influences that control the Republican party can paint what they will.''
²⁰
If the goal of constructing a national presidential ticket is to
achieve a complementary balance between its two members, the Republican
ticket of 1904 came close to being ideal. Roosevelt and Fairbanks
differed from one another in nearly every way. The ticket offered
balance both geographically, between New York and Indiana, and
ideologically, from progressive to conservative. Perhaps the greatest
contrast was one of personality. The vigorous and ebullient Roosevelt
differed markedly from the calm and cool Fairbanks. One wag called the
1904 ticket ``The Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle.'' Fairbanks' cool
demeanor often led cartoonists to portray him as a block of
ice.²¹ Although friends claimed he was a very genial fellow
in private and only appeared austere, ²² the icy image
remained the popular one, providing an interesting contrast to the
``strenuous life'' of President Roosevelt.
Mrs. Fairbanks partially offset this impression of coldness.
Cornelia Fairbanks had become one of the most popular hostesses in
Washington, renowned for her charm and tact. She also remained active as
president-general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The
Fairbanks' Washington home, the Van Wyck House near Dupont Circle,
occupied a prominent place in the capital's social
landscape.²³
Charles Fairbanks assumed the principal Republican campaign duties
for the ticket in 1904, as tradition dictated that incumbent presidents
remain at work in the White House. He toured all the northern states and
spent the final week ensuring a Republican victory in
Indiana.²⁴ His task turned out to be relatively easy thanks
to Theodore Roosevelt's enormous popularity and the Democratic
nomination of the rather lifeless Judge Alton B. Parker of New York. The
Republicans' landslide victory over Democrats Parker and Henry G. Davis
unquestionably resulted from Roosevelt's popularity, but Fairbanks was
now vice president and he hoped his star was on the rise once more. He
began making plans to pursue an even higher calling in 1908.

President of the Senate

In an 1896 article for Review of Reviews, Roosevelt, while New York
City police commissioner, had argued that the vice president should
participate actively in a presidential administration, including
attendance at cabinet meetings and consultation on all major decisions.
He even posited that the vice president should be given a regular vote
in the Senate.²⁵ Now that he was president, however,
Roosevelt displayed no intention of following his own advice. He did not
invite Fairbanks to participate in the cabinet and consulted the vice
president about nothing of substance. Roosevelt certainly showed no
inclination to support granting Fairbanks a vote in the Senate and,
given Fairbanks' conservative tendencies, would probably have opposed
any attempt to do so. Discussing the office abstractly turned out to be
quite different from dealing with a flesh-and-blood occupant.
The new vice president spent much of his time presiding over the
Senate. He undoubtedly felt comfortable dealing with his old friends on
Capitol Hill, and President Roosevelt gave him nothing else to do. As
Senate president, Fairbanks had little direct power to affect the course
of legislation, but working in tandem with the Republican leadership he
was able to play a role in passing the president's ambitious legislative
program that included the Hepburn Act regulating railroad rates, the
Pure Food and Drug Act, and an employer's liability law for the District
of Columbia.
Fairbanks, Republican Senate leader Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island,
and Speaker of the House Joe Cannon of Illinois also worked together
effectively to bury unwanted legislation in hostile committees and to
rule opposition speakers ``out of order'' at every
opportunity.²⁶ Fairbanks never had a chance to break a tied
vote, but he seldom missed a session and opposition speakers remained
sensitive to his vigilance in the chair.
In 1907, Fairbanks wielded the power of his office against his old
foe Albert Beveridge. When the Senate considered legislation for
government inspection of packaged meat, Beveridge advocated charging the
inspection fees to the meat packers, but was unsuccessful in his
attempts. Later in the session, he offered this plan as an amendment to
the agriculture appropriations bill. In order to stop the amendment,
Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming raised a point of order that the
amendment contained ``general legislation'' and, therefore, under Senate
rules, could not be added to an appropriations bill. The presiding
officer, Vice President Fairbanks, could either rule on the point of
order himself or present it to the Senate for a decision. Senator Jacob
Gallinger of New Hampshire submitted a list of precedents in which
previous officers had referred similar points of order to the Senate for
determination. Fairbanks promptly ignored these precedents and ruled
Beveridge's amendment out of order, observing, ``During the present
session the Chair has frequently been invited by Senators to submit to
the Senate points of order on amendments which were not in order, and in
every case of such invitation the Chair has felt obliged to decline to
do so.'' Fairbanks took further pleasure in chastising Beveridge for
offering an amendment that was very similar to a bill Beveridge had
introduced the previous December. If the matter were of ``such large
consequence,'' he asserted, the Senate would have dealt with it then, in
``an orderly and appropriate way.'' ²⁷ The vice-presidency
may not have had much power, but Fairbanks knew how to use what he had.
The most famous instance of Fairbanks' effectiveness as presiding
officer came in May 1908 during debate over the conference report on the
Aldrich-Vreeland Emergency Currency Act. This legislation authorized the
issuance of emergency currency based on state bonds, municipal bonds,
and railroad bonds. The inclusion of bonds from railroad companies
enraged many midwestern and southern progressives, who saw it as an
example of the railroads' control of Congress. As Senator Robert C. Byrd
observed in discussing this incident in a 1989 address to the Senate,
``Filibusters are inherently much more difficult to wage successfully on
conference reports than on bills, because conference reports are not
amendable.'' ²⁸ Nevertheless, Republican Senator Robert La
Follette of Wisconsin, leading the small but determined opposition to
the legislation, decided to filibuster. By holding the floor, La
Follette and Democratic Senators Thomas Gore of Oklahoma and William
Stone of Missouri hoped to force the leadership to drop railroad bonds
from the measure. La Follette began speaking at 12:20 p.m. on Friday,
May 29. Either Gore or Stone was to take the floor when he finished and,
by speaking in rotation, they could stifle Senate business indefinitely.
A filibuster in the early twentieth century could be particularly
unpleasant. In the summer, an extremely hot Senate chamber customarily
drove senators to the cloakrooms for relief. During a filibuster,
however, if too many members left the chamber, the speaker, or an ally,
could suggest the absence of a quorum without losing control of the
floor. This procedure required the vice president to direct that the
roll be called, and, if a quorum (forty-seven members at that time) were
not present, the Senate would adjourn until a quorum could be obtained,
further contributing to the filibuster's objective of delay. In any
event, the quorum call allowed the speaker a few moments to seek water
or food and some fresh air. When Robert La Follette took the floor on
May 29, 1908, he brought a clerk with him to keep track of the number of
senators present. Since the day turned out to be especially warm,
senators had no desire to linger in the sweltering chamber. Whenever the
count of members in the chamber fell below the required number, La
Follette would stop his speech to suggest the absence of a quorum,
forcing his colleagues to file back into the chamber to answer the roll.
This cycle continued for hours. When Vice President Fairbanks ordered La
Follette's clerk, who had been keeping count for his boss, to leave the
chamber, other members friendly to the Wisconsin senator's cause took up
the counting. Finally, at about 11:45 that night, after thirty-two
quorum calls, Fairbanks, under the guidance of party leader Aldrich,
managed to limit the tactic by making a resourceful parliamentary ruling
that some business other than debate must take place between quorum
calls. Not until 2:25 a.m. on Saturday, May 30, did La Follette finally
establish the absence of a quorum, at which point the Senate adjourned
until the sergeant at arms roused enough senators from bed to begin
debate once more, at 3:40 a.m., allowing La Follette a short nap.
La Follette continued until 7:00 a.m. William Stone followed,
holding the floor until 1:30 p.m., and then yielded to Senator Gore.
Gore was to speak until 4:30 p.m., when Stone would return. At the
appointed time, Gore, who was blind, heard that Stone had returned, but
when Gore yielded the floor, Stone, either by mistake or through
chicanery, had stepped outside the chamber for a moment. Vice President
Fairbanks, alert to his opportunity, immediately recognized Nelson
Aldrich, who moved that the vote be taken on his bill. Fairbanks,
ignoring other speakers shouting for recognition, directed the clerk to
call the yeas and nays, and Aldrich, first on the roll, answered in the
affirmative. Under Senate rules, once a vote began, it could not be
stopped for further debate. After more than twenty-eight hours, the
filibuster was broken.²⁹
The passage of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act pleased President Roosevelt,
but his vice president's other Senate rulings would not always produce
such agreeable results. Roosevelt spent most of 1907 and 1908 fighting
with Congress. The Senate, especially, erected roadblocks to the
president's legislative initiatives, particularly those seeking to
expand the powers of the executive branch. Roosevelt believed that
Congress was incapable of making the kind of informed, disinterested
decisions necessary to regulate the nation's powerful trusts. He
preferred to rely on executive agencies, staffed by experts whom he
considered capable of maintaining a careful watch over the nation's
business community. He argued that efficient executive power, rather
than clumsy intermittent legislation, would most effectively deal with
the trusts. The Hepburn bill included provisions allowing the Interstate
Commerce Commission to set railroad rates, and Roosevelt pursued
legislation to allow executive agencies to set maximum prices for
certain commodities. While the Senate eventually agreed to the Hepburn
bill with some modifications, it jealously guarded its prerogatives
against what it saw as presidential encroachment. Even a president as
persuasive as Theodore Roosevelt had difficulty convincing Congress to
expand the executive's power.³⁰
Opposition from his own party in the Senate constantly frustrated
Roosevelt, who attempted to rouse public opinion in support of greater
executive power. For their part, many Republican senators bristled at
the seemingly endless flow of presidential messages from the White
House, as well as at Roosevelt's constant public criticism of their
cherished institution.³¹ Vice president Fairbanks' sympathies
plainly lay with the Senate, and when his term ended in 1909, he used
his farewell address to launch a vigorous defense of his Senate
colleagues. He supported the record of the recent session against
``erroneous'' criticism that it was unresponsive to the popular will.
``The Senate of the United States,'' he said, ``was designed by our
fathers to be a deliberative chamber in the fullest and best sense--a
chamber where the passions of the hour might be arrested and where the
better judgement of the people would find ultimate expression.''
Offering a Senate response to Roosevelt's ``bully pulpit,'' he declared,
``A servile Senate was not contemplated by its founders.'' ³²

Pursuit of the Presidency

During his vice-presidency, Fairbanks also spent considerable time
trying to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1908. In this
endeavor, he faced serious obstacles. His own lackluster image offered
cartoonists and writers a favorite target. When President Roosevelt told
columnist Finley Peter Dunne that he was considering taking a ride in a
submarine, Dunne advised, ``You really shouldn't do it---unless you take
Fairbanks with you.'' ³³ Fairbanks even earned a short
mention in David Graham Phillips' 1906 expose The Treason of the Senate,
where he is referred to as the ``presiding genius'' of the
Senate.³⁴
Fairbanks' popularity increased somewhat after a supposed attempt on
his life. While the vice president was laying the cornerstone for a new
federal building in Flint, Michigan, police arrested a man in the crowd
carrying a thirty-two-caliber revolver and pockets full of ``socialistic
literature.'' This incident surely evoked memories of the assassination
of President McKinley. Fairbanks also tried to use favorable publicity
to bolster his image. He spent the summer of 1905 on a farm he owned in
Illinois trying to appeal to the farm vote. He had himself photographed
chopping down a tree and cutting it up, perhaps trying to emulate
Roosevelt's much-admired vigor. Still, no one outside the inner circle
of the Republican party seemed to pay much attention. The New York Daily
News committed his obscurity to verse, saying:

Fairbanks was in town two days
Yet no one seemed the wiser;
He yearned to meet the public gaze
His own press advertiser.
He strolled about the town at will
Without much molestation,
The only effect was a heavy chill
And his own great agitation.
A stranger on a foreign shore
Would scare up more attention;
And he is feeling extra sore
For lack of even mention.³⁵

In his effort to attract support, Fairbanks' oratory proved less
than appealing. The Nation declared, ``No public speaker can more
quickly drive an audience to dispair.'' ³⁶ He seemed both
uninspiring and out of step with the times. During an era of growing
clamor for progressive reforms, Fairbanks' speeches were full of what
one observer called ``splendid verbosity,'' simply equating the
Republican party with prosperity. During the congressional races of
1906, he spoke often for GOP candidates, stressing the theme ``Let Well
Enough Alone.'' Collier's Weekly summed up his performance with another
poem:

Then Mr. Fairbanks waxed quite warm;
His voice ris to a roar.
He yelled: ``I say to you, my friends,
That two and two make four,''
And thereupon all doubts dissolved,
All fears were put to rout;
Pie-seekers said that Fairbanks knew
Just what he was about.
He did not name unbusted trusts
Or mention Standard Oil;
He did not talk of railroad graft
Nor speak of children's toil.
He said the crops looked mighty well,
The cattle all seemed fat,
The sky was blue, the grass still grew,
And the G.O.P. stood pat.
And he let it go at that.³⁷

The only substantive issue that really seemed to hold Fairbanks'
attention was the gold standard. He had demanded a strong gold plank in
the Indiana platform in 1896 and succeeded in helping McKinley make that
a major part of the 1896 campaign.³⁸ After McKinley's victory
in 1900, however, the gold standard had ceased to be a salient issue for
the public. Fairbanks' continued reliance on it seemed safe and popular,
but not likely to create a groundswell of support. It was merely one
more instance of Fairbanks' failure to keep up with the rapid political
changes of the new century.
An even more serious problem for Fairbanks loomed in the form of
opposition from Theodore Roosevelt. The president had already announced
he would not run in 1908, but he intended to choose his own successor.
His list clearly did not include Fairbanks. Roosevelt preferred
Secretary of State Elihu Root, but his age (over sixty) and background
in corporate law made him an unlikely choice. The president, therefore,
settled on his secretary of war and close friend, William Howard Taft,
using the power of his office to secure convention delegations loyal to
Taft. By the time the convention began, Taft's selection was nearly
determined.³⁹ Against the power of a popular incumbent
president, Fairbanks never had a chance.
Roosevelt could hardly conceal his scorn for Fairbanks. The
president liked to tell amusing stories about his uninspiring vice
president and would often discuss his preferred successors in Fairbanks'
presence without mentioning the gentleman from Indiana.⁴⁰
When Fairbanks and New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes both showed
some strength as possible nominees in the summer of 1908, Roosevelt
seemed stunned. As he exclaimed to a Hughes supporter before the
convention, ``Do you know whom we have most trouble in beating? Not
Hughes--but Fairbanks! Think of it--Charley Fairbanks! I was never more
surprised in my life. I never dreamt of such a thing. He's got a hold in
Kentucky, Indiana, and some other states that is hard to break. How and
why is beyond me.'' ⁴¹ This strength, though, was illusory
compared to the influence wielded by Roosevelt on behalf of Taft. After
gaining the nomination, Taft went on to win an easy victory over William
Jennings Bryan in November.

Still Active in Politics

After the inauguration of Taft and new Vice President James Sherman
in March 1909, Fairbanks returned to Indiana to live the life of a
country gentleman. He remained marginally active in Indiana politics but
tried to maintain a low profile during the disastrous party split in
1912. In 1914, the former vice president returned to prominence once
more as the advocate of party unity. The Indiana delegation to the 1916
Republican National Convention supported him as a ``favorite son''
candidate for president, in hopes of a deadlocked convention. When
Charles Evans Hughes obtained the nomination, there was talk of
proposing Fairbanks for vice president. The prospect of reacquiring his
old position did not appeal to Fairbanks. He wired his friends in the
Indiana delegation, ``My name must not be considered for Vice President
and if it is presented, I wish it withdrawn. Please withdraw it.'' When,
despite Fairbanks' wishes, he was nominated on the first ballot,
⁴² his loyalty to the party induced him to accept the
nomination and fulfill his duty as a candidate. He toured the country
calling for a return to the high tariff policies that Democratic
President Woodrow Wilson had abandoned. Neither Fairbanks nor his
opponent and fellow Hoosier, Democratic Vice President Thomas Marshall,
aroused much enthusiasm. As the New Republic put it, ``Mr. Marshall is
an argument for the election of Mr. Hughes. Mr. Fairbanks is an argument
for the re-election of Mr. Wilson.'' Hughes and Fairbanks suffered a
narrow defeat in 1916, but Fairbanks could take comfort that Indiana
swung once more into the Republican column.⁴³
After the election, Charles Fairbanks again retired to private life.
He remained active in the Indiana Forestry Association, a conservation
group of which he was founder and first president (perhaps his only
similarity to Roosevelt). During the First World War, he visited several
army camps to encourage the troops and spoke for the Liberty Loan
campaigns. Fairbanks died on June 14, 1918, at the age of sixty-six.
Ironically, the message from the Republican National Convention in
1904 notifying Charles Fairbanks of his nomination for the vice-
presidency spoke in glowing terms of the party's unity. It lamented
previous selections that had been made to appease defeated factions and
rejoiced that this selection was not such a case. It compared the hoped-
for collaboration between Roosevelt and Fairbanks to that of McKinley
and Garret Hobart (conspicuously passing over McKinley and
Roosevelt).⁴⁴ The author of this message surely must have
been aware of its inaccuracy. Roosevelt accepted Fairbanks because he
did not consider the office worth a fight. Fairbanks took the position
in hopes that it would lead to the presidency. The two men never
cooperated well and spent the last two years of the administration
actually working at cross purposes. Roosevelt thwarted Fairbanks' bid
for the presidential nomination, while Fairbanks helped to bottle up
Roosevelt's legislation in the Senate.
Charles Fairbanks was neither a great orator nor a brilliant
political thinker. He succeeded by mastering the intricacies of the
Senate and by avoiding controversy. Like so many other Indiana
politicians, Fairbanks excelled as a political insider. He was skilled
in the arts of political management and compromise.⁴⁵ Those
skills made him a valued member of the Senate and an influential state
politician but were far less useful in presidential politics. Perhaps an
observer in 1897 had him pegged best when he said, ``Fairbanks may not
be a great Statesman, but he certainly is a great Politician.''
⁴⁶ By understanding party politics, Fairbanks advanced as far
as the vice-presidency. Yet, in an era dominated by the likes of
Roosevelt, Wilson, Bryan, and La Follette, Fairbanks' political skills
were not sufficient to allow him to escape the shadows of those men.
CHARLES WARREN FAIRBANKS

NOTES

¹ Quoted in Herbert J. Rissler, ``Charles Warren
Fairbanks: Conservative Hoosier,'' (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana
University, 1961), p. 266.
² James H. Madison, ``Charles Warren Fairbanks and
Indiana Republicanism,'' in Ralph D. Gray, ed., Gentlemen From Indiana:
National Party Candidates, 1836-1940 (Indianapolis, 1977), p. 184.
³ William Henry Smith, The Life and Speeches of Hon.
Charles Warren Fairbanks (Indianapolis, 1904), p. 7.
⁴ Rissler, pp. 5-27.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 28-35.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 40-62; Smith, p. 39.
⁷ John Braeman, Albert J. Beveridge: American Nationalist
(Chicago, 1971), pp. 73-77; Madison, p. 177; Donald A. Ritchie, Press
Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA,
1991), p. 182.
⁸ Rissler, preface; Ralph D. Gray, ed., Gentlemen From
Indiana: National Party Candidates, 1836-1940 (Indianapolis, 1977),
Chapters VII-XI.
⁹ Smith, pp. 44-55; Rissler, pp. 64-72; Madison, p. 179.
¹⁰ Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, 3d.
ed. (Washington, 1994), p. 444.
¹¹ Rissler, pp. 76-77; Madison, p. 179.
¹² Rissler, pp. 80-97.
¹³ Madison, pp. 181-82.
¹⁴ Lewis L. Gould, ``Charles Warren Fairbanks and the
Republican National Convention of 1900: A Memoir,'' Indiana Magazine of
History 77 (December 1981): 370.
¹⁵ Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew Them: Presidents and
Politics From Grant to Coolidge (New York, 1927), p. 248.
¹⁶ For the most thorough discussion of Roosevelt's
presidency, see Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt
(Lawrence, KS, 1991). For a discussion of Roosevelt's vice-presidency,
see Chapter 25 of this volume, ``Theodore Roosevelt,'' pp. 303-5.
¹⁷ For the life and career of Albert J. Beveridge, see
Braeman, Albert J. Beveridge: American Nationalist and Claude G. Bowers,
Beveridge and the Progressive Era (New York, 1932).
¹⁸ Braeman, pp. 76-77; Bowers, 175-76.
¹⁹ Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 135;
Rissler, pp. 135-50; Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency
(Washington, 1956), pp. 86-87.
²⁰ Rissler, p. 115.
²¹ Ibid., p. 151; Gould, ``Charles Warren Fairbanks,'' p.
361.
²² George F. Sparks, ed., A Many Colored Toga: The Diary
of Henry Fountain Ashurst (Tucson, 1962), p. 79.
²³ Thomas R. Shipp, ``Charles Warren Fairbanks,
Republican Candidate for Vice President,'' American Monthly Review of
Reviews 30 (August 1904): 181.
²⁴ Rissler, pp. 157-58.
²⁵ Theodore Roosevelt, ``The Three Vice-Presidential
Candidates and What They Represent,'' American Monthly Review of Reviews
14 (September 1896): 289-97.
²⁶ Williams, p. 90.
²⁷ Braeman, p. 109; Asher C. Hinds, Hind's Precedents of
the House of Representatives of the United States, vol. 2 (Washington,
1907), pp. 883-85.
²⁸ U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989:
Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd,
S. Doc., 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol 2, 1991, p. 108.
²⁹ Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M.
La Follette, June 14, 1855-June 18, 1925 (New York, 1953), pp. 238-56.
This source gives the most detailed and interesting, if one sided,
account of the filibuster.
³⁰ John M. Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, 2d ed. (New
York, 1964), pp. 87, 95-96, 105, 107-8.
³¹ Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 276-
77, 291-94.
³² U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 60th
Cong., 2d sess., 1909, p. 3825.
³³ Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the
Vice Presidency (New York, 1992), p. 58.
³⁴ David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate
(Chicago, 1964; reprint of 1906 edition), p. 198.
³⁵ Rissler, pp. 169-72.
³⁶ Ibid., pp. 145-46.
³⁷ Ibid., pp. 178-79, 202.
³⁸ Ibid., pp. 69-70; Stoddard, p. 239.
³⁹ Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 271-
73, 283-84.
⁴⁰ Williams, pp. 88-89.
⁴¹ Stoddard, p. 335.
⁴² Rissler, pp. 265-66.
⁴³ Ibid., pp. 266-71; Congressional Quarterly's Guide to
U.S. Elections, p. 449.
⁴⁴ Smith, pp. 234-35.
⁴⁵ For an excellent overview of Indiana politics and the
general skills of Hoosier politicians, see Philip R. VanderMeer, The
Hoosier Politician: Officeholding and Political Culture in Indiana 1896-
1920 (Urbana, IL, 1985).
⁴⁶ Madison, p. 173.
?

Chapter 27

JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT SHERMAN

1909-1912

JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT SHERMAN
JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT SHERMAN

Chapter 27

JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT SHERMAN

27th Vice President: 1909-1912

You will have to act on your own account. I am to be
Vice President and acting as a messenger boy is not part of
the duties as Vice President.
--James Schoolcraft Sherman to President William Howard Taft
A marble bust of James Schoolcraft Sherman has the distinction of
being the only vice-presidential bust in the United States Capitol with
eyeglasses. Sherman apparently had thought that no one would recognize
him without his glasses. However, over time he has grown so obscure that
no one recognizes him even with his glasses.¹ Capitol
visitors often confuse him with the more famous Senator John Sherman,
author of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Yet while he never authored a
famous bill, ``Sunny Jim'' Sherman was a powerful leader in the House of
Representatives, a skilled parliamentarian, and a popular presiding
officer of the Senate during his vice-presidency under William Howard
Taft.

Youth

James S. Sherman was born on October 24, 1855, in Utica, New York,
where his grandfather, Willett Sherman, ran a profitable glass factory
and owned an impressive farm. In later years, Senator Elihu Root
recalled spending summers at his own grandfather's farm and ``the big,
white house, with the great columns,'' of Sherman's grandfather's
adjoining farm. Root believed that Sherman inherited his probusiness
politics from his grandfather. Sherman's father, Richard U. Sherman,
headed a food canning company and published a Democratic newspaper.
Young James Sherman graduated from Whitestown Seminary in 1874 and
then attended Hamilton College, where he achieved recognition for his
skills in oratory and debate. His genial temperament made him ``the most
popular man in his class.'' He graduated from Hamilton in 1878, received
his law degree there the following year, and was admitted to the New
York state bar in 1880, practicing in a firm with his brother-in-law. In
1881, he married Carrie Babcock of East Orange, New Jersey; they would
have three sons.
Sherman was a joiner. In college he had joined the Sigma Phi
fraternity. He was active in the Dutch Reformed Church. He was a member
of the Royal Arcanum, the Order of Elks, and of all the local clubs in
Utica. In politics, he broke with his Democratic father to become a
Republican and at the age of twenty-nine won election as mayor of Utica.
Two years later, in 1886, his district elected him to the U.S. House of
Representatives. Except for the two years following his defeat for
reelection in 1890, he remained in national public office for the rest
of his life.²

A Jolly Coterie in the House

As a Republican committed to a high protective tariff, Sherman
blamed his single defeat on an angry voter reaction to the McKinley
Tariff of 1890, which had swept many members of his party out of
Congress (including William McKinley). In 1892 Sherman narrowly defeated
Democrat Henry Bentley, who had beaten him in 1890, and returned to
Congress. There Sherman reestablished himself as the leader of a ``jolly
coterie'' of New York Republicans. Speaker Thomas B. Reed, who enjoyed
the company of these younger men, promoted Sherman in the House
hierarchy. Democratic Leader Champ Clark identified him as among the
``Big Five'' in the House Republican leadership, but Sherman never held
a party leadership post or chaired a major committee. He served on the
committees on the Judiciary, Census, Industrial Arts and Expositions,
Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and Rules; and for fourteen years he
chaired the Indian Affairs Committee. Democratic Representative John
Sharp Williams believed that Sherman could have had a seat on either of
the most important House committees, Appropriations or Ways and Means,
``for the asking.'' But the New Yorker always stood aside in favor of
friends who wanted those appointments, ``thereby making the task of the
Speaker, who was in those days always the party leader, easier and the
pathway of his friends pleasanter.'' ³
The secret of Sherman's success in the House was his recognized
parliamentary ability. Whenever House Speakers Tom Reed, David
Henderson, and Joseph Cannon had to leave the chair, they knew that they
could trust Sherman with the gavel, because he was a ``decisive, self-
possessed, and able parliamentarian.'' Unlike the smaller Senate, the
House regularly used the device of a ``committee of the whole'' as a
means of suspending its rules and moving ahead more speedily on
legislation, since a smaller quorum was needed for the committee of the
whole, and debate was limited. Amendments could be voted upon, but the
final bill had to be reported back to the full House to be voted upon in
regular session. Officially known as the Committee of the Whole House on
the State of the Union, this committee comprised all House members and
met in the House chamber. To indicate that the House was meeting in the
committee of the whole rather than in regular session, the House
sergeant at arms lowered the House mace from its pedestal, and the
Speaker stepped down as presiding officer in favor of another member.
Henry Cabot Lodge declared that Sherman ``gradually came to be
recognized as the best Chairman of the Committee of the Whole whom that
great body had known in many years.'' Presiding effectively over the
committee of the whole, said Lodge, was ``a severe test of a man's
qualities, both moral and mental. He must have strength of character as
well as ability, quickness in decision must go hand in hand with
knowledge, and firmness must always be accompanied by good temper.''
⁴
While in the House, Sherman was a leader in the fight to preserve
the gold standard against Populist proposals for ``free silver''--by
which farmers hoped to reduce their debts by fueling inflation through
an expansion of the amount of money in circulation. Sherman also fought
Democratic President Grover Cleveland's efforts to lower the tariff.
When the Republicans returned to power with the election of William
McKinley as president in 1896, Sherman played a key role in passage of
the Dingley Tariff that reversed Democratic efforts and restored the
high protective tariff. As usual, Speaker Reed turned the gavel over to
Sherman to chair the committee of the whole throughout most of the
debate on the Dingley Tariff. When Speaker Reed retired in 1900, Sherman
sought the Speakership but lost to David Henderson. He became
Henderson's right-hand man and continued to play that role under
Henderson's successor, the powerful ``Uncle Joe'' Cannon.⁵
McKinley's assassination in 1901 transferred the presidency to the
dynamic Theodore Roosevelt, whose strong personality stimulated a
national reform movement that had grown out of a series of local
responses to the human abuses of industrialism. Progressives demanded
change, which conservative leaders in Congress resisted. Sherman stood
with the Old Guard. ``He was preeminently a stand-patter and proud of
it,'' recalled Senator Chauncey Depew. Having inherited the presidency
of the New Hartford Canning Company from his father, Sherman fought
progressive efforts to require accurate labeling of the weights and
measures of canned jelly, catsup, corn, and other foods. He proposed a
substitute amendment that required only that if a canner did label the
weight and measure of the product, that such labeling must be accurate.
This caused Dr. Harvey Wiley, who led the crusade for pure food and drug
laws, to rename ``Sunny Jim'' Sherman as ``Short-weight Jim.''
⁶

The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee

Sherman chaired the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee
during the congressional elections of 1906, raising large campaign
contributions from business interests and gaining further recognition
from his party's leaders. Sherman himself faced a hard fight for
reelection that year. At one point, he turned desperately to an old
fraternity brother, Elihu Root, then secretary of state in the Roosevelt
administration. Sherman invited Root to speak for him and for the New
York Republican gubernatorial candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, who was
locked in battle with the Democratic candidate, newspaper publisher
William Randolph Hearst. Other Republican leaders, fearing that Hearst
might exploit Root's corporate connections to embarrass the Republican
ticket, pleaded with Root to cancel his trip. But Sherman begged Root to
reconsider. Root made the speech, in which he strongly and eloquently
denounced Hearst, an attack that was credited with helping Hughes and
Sherman win their elections.⁷
In 1908, Sherman chaired the Republican state convention for the
third time (having previously done so in 1895 and 1900). His supporters
then launched a vice-presidential boom for him. President Theodore
Roosevelt had announced that he would not stand for a third term, and
had anointed Secretary of War William Howard Taft as his successor. The
New York delegation went to the convention pledged to their governor,
Charles Evans Hughes, for president, but as one journalist observed, the
state's delegation was actually anxious to nominate Sherman for the
second place on the ticket. Fortunately for Sherman's ambitions,
Governor Hughes did nothing to promote his candidacy. Hughes' cool
aloofness inspired a Gridiron Club parody of an old spiritual:

Swing low, sweet chariot,
You'll have to if you're after me;
Swing low, sweet chariot,
For I'm lying low, you see.⁸

A Machiavellian Nomination

Taft won the nomination and would have preferred a progressive
running mate, someone of the stature of Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge
or Iowa Senator Jonathan Dolliver. But House members, led by Speaker
Cannon, pressed for the nomination of James Sherman. On the surface, it
seemed as though Sherman won the nomination by default, after the more
progressive possibilities withdrew their names from consideration. But
years later, in his memoirs, Senator Chauncey Depew revealed a more
Machiavellian version of what had happened. The New York delegation had
lobbied hard to convince Taft's managers that New York would be a
critical state in the election, and that a New Yorker would most
strengthen the ticket headed by a ``westerner'' like Taft of Ohio. Since
Taft's managers had already discussed the nomination with several other
potential candidates, they could not turn to Sherman without first
dissuading these people--and doing so without offending their states. As
Depew explained:
The method adopted by one of the leading managers was both
adroit and hazardous. He would call up a candidate on the telephone
and say to him: ``The friends of Mr. Taft are very favorable to you
for vice-president. Will you accept the nomination?'' The candidate
would hesitate and begin to explain his ambitions, his career and
its possibilities, and the matter which he would have to consider.
Before the prospective candidate had finished, the manager would
say, ``Very sorry, deeply regret,'' and put up the telephone.
When the nomination was made these gentlemen who might have
succeeded would come around to the manager and say impatiently and
indignantly: ``I was all right. Why did you cut me off?'' However,
those gentlemen have had their compensation. Whenever you meet one
of them he will say to you: ``I was offered the vice-presidency with
Taft but was so situated that I could not accept.'' ⁹

Straddling Party Divisions

House Democratic minority leader Champ Clark agreed that Sherman
stood prominently in the House, but no more so than a half dozen other
Republicans. In Clark's estimation, Sherman was ``an industrious, level-
headed, capable member, and a capital presiding officer,'' but in truth
he received the nomination as a means of placating the GOP's
conservative wing, which viewed Taft suspiciously as a progressive.
``The Stand-patters selected Sherman partly because he wanted it, partly
because they could trust him, and partly because he was perhaps the most
acceptable of all the Old Guard chieftains in the House to President
Roosevelt,'' Clark assessed. The vice-presidential nomination was
clinched when Speaker Cannon stepped onto the platform, hiked up his
sleeves, and offered an impassioned endorsement of Sherman. With the Old
Guard's stamp of approval, ``the two wings flapped together.''
¹⁰
While well-known in Washington, Sherman had little popular
identification across the nation, and it is doubtful that he brought
many votes to the Taft ticket. The opposition Democratic candidate was
William Jennings Bryan, who had twice before lost the presidency, in
1896 and 1900. Few Republicans would have voted for Bryan regardless of
who ran with Taft, but Sherman campaigned with good grace. When the
Democratic candidate for vice president, John Worth Kern, came to Utica
he received a telegram from Sherman, who was campaigning elsewhere,
welcoming Kern to his home city and urging him to call upon the Sherman
family.¹¹
For the third and last time, William Jennings Bryan went down to
defeat as Taft and Sherman were elected. While Taft prepared to enter
the White House, Theodore Roosevelt made arrangements to leave the
country for an extended hunting trip in Africa and tour of Europe, to
give his successor a chance to establish himself. Even Taft had trouble
in accepting the departure of the dynamic Roosevelt from the presidency.
``When I hear someone say Mr. President,'' said Taft, ``I look around
expecting to see Roosevelt.'' Facing Taft was the problem of keeping
together the warring conservative and progressive factions of the
Republican party. Roosevelt had finessed party unity by talking publicly
of reform while working privately with conservative leaders in Congress,
and by steering absolutely clear of such divisive issues as the tariff.
Taft came into office with a reputation for progressivism but with the
support of such powerful conservatives as Rhode Island Senator Nelson
Aldrich, who had worked quietly behind the scenes for Taft's nomination.
During the campaign, Taft had managed to straddle party divisions, but
once he assumed the office, he would have to choose sides.¹²

No Messenger Boy

At first, Taft thought he had a perfect role for Sherman. The
president-elect said that he had no intention of having anything to do
with the reactionary House Speaker Cannon. ``I am going to rely on you,
Jim, to take care of Cannon for me,'' said Taft. ``Whatever I have to do
there will be done through you.'' ``Not through me,'' Sherman declined.
``You will have to act on your own account. I am to be Vice President
and acting as a messenger boy is not part of the duties as Vice
President.'' A month later, Taft invited Cannon to visit him, and
thereafter Taft and Cannon met regularly at the White House. It was the
beginning of a drift to the right that would eventually alienate Taft
from Republican progressives.¹³
Whatever ill-will may have resulted from Sherman's refusal to
cooperate over handling Speaker Cannon evaporated in the glow of the
inaugural festivities. Taft's wife, Helen, later wrote that Vice
President and Mrs. Sherman shared a box with them at the inaugural ball.
``They also had with them a large family party and were both so jolly
and so much in the festive spirit that formality disappeared.''
¹⁴
When Taft met with Speaker Cannon in December 1908, he learned that
the House Ways and Means Committee was at work on major tariff
revisions. Taft favored lowering tariff rates and negotiating reciprocal
trade agreements with other nations to stimulate international trade,
but congressional conservatives remained committed to high tariff duties
to protect American industries. House Ways and Means Committee chairman
Sereno Payne eventually produced the Payne bill, which pleased Taft by
its moderate tariff reductions. In the Senate, however, Finance
Committee chairman Nelson Aldrich amended the tariff with massive
increases in rates. Insurgent Republicans led by Wisconsin Senator
Robert La Follette fought the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, but Aldrich
prevailed. Never in doubt was the stance of the Senate's new presiding
officer, Vice President Sherman, a lifelong high-tariff man. In the end,
President Taft sided with Sherman and the protectionists and signed the
bill. As progressives began to reevaluate their assessment of Taft, the
president compounded his problems by speaking out in defense of the
Payne-Aldrich Tariff at Winona, Wisconsin, in Senator La Follette's home
state, describing the tariff as ``the best bill that the Republican
party ever passed.'' At the same time, Vice President Sherman was
telling people that the Republican party ``had fulfilled every campaign
pledge in passing the Aldrich bill.'' ¹⁵

Growing Relationship Between Taft and Sherman

The more conservative the president became, the closer he grew to
his vice president. Taft found that he liked Sherman, a man who ``hated
shams, believed in regular party organization, and was more anxious to
hold the good things established by the past than to surrender them in
search for less certain benefits to be derived from radical changes in
the future.'' Like Taft, Sherman possessed a jovial spirit, and the
president credited the vice president with accomplishing much on Capitol
Hill by his ``charm of speech and manner, and his spirit of conciliation
and compromise.'' Sherman succeeded through a ``sunny disposition and
natural good will to all.'' Yet he also manifested what Taft called ``a
stubborn adherence'' to his principles. ``In other words,'' said Taft,
``it would be unjust to Mr. Sherman to suggest that his sunny
disposition and his anxiety to make everybody within the reach of his
influence happy, was any indication of a lack of strength of character,
of firmness of purpose, and of clearness of decision as to what he
thought was right in politics.'' ¹⁶
From all accounts, Sherman showed fairness, judicial temperament,
and good humor in his capacity as presiding officer. ``In the Senate we
have no rules,'' observed New York Senator Chauncey Depew. Sherman had
risen in the House because of his mastery at presiding over the House,
whose rules were more rigid and its precedents voluminous. He thus found
it quite a change to ``preside over a body which is governed practically
by no rules whatever, but is a rule unto itself.'' Depew noted that the
older senators resented any effort on the part of the chair to curb
their wanderings or their ``very unregulated wills.'' He recalled how
the vice president had ruled against Texas Democrat Joseph W. Bailey,
one of the most quarrelsome senators, who
instantly declared that the independence of the Senate had been
invaded by the Vice President who was not a member of the
Senate but only its Constitutional presiding officer; that
he had no right to use a position which was largely one of
courtesy to violate the traditions of the most august body
in the world and deny, or attempt to deny, to a Senator
the rights to which every Senator was entitled.
Throughout this attack, Sherman showed no trace of emotion.
He was the presiding officer personified. With perfect calmness,
good humor, and dignity, he stated the case to a
breathless Senate. He did it so clearly and convincingly
that the Senate sat down upon the tumultuous senator, and
Sherman's decisions were never after
questioned.¹⁷
Always showing his sunny disposition in public, Sherman played
tough-minded, hard-ball politics in private. ``Sherman's indictments,''
President Taft once complained, ``are as abrupt and severe as a school
master's.'' When progressives revolted against the Payne-Aldrich tariff,
Sherman advised: ``Mr. President, you can't cajole these people. You
have to hit them with a club.'' Sherman recommended cutting off
postmastership appointments to the progressives as punishment for their
disloyalty, to which Taft replied: ``I hate to use the patronage as a
club unless I have to.'' ``It is your only club,'' Sherman rebutted.
``You have other weapons, but the appointing power is your only club.''
¹⁸

Roosevelt and Taft Split

In January 1910, Taft fired Theodore Roosevelt's good friend Gifford
Pinchot as head of the U.S. Forest Service, after Pinchot had accused
Taft's secretary of the interior, Richard Ballinger, of undermining the
conservation program in favor of business interests. Sherman strongly
backed Taft's decision, and when a joint congressional committee was
established to investigate the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, the vice
president made sure to name only Taft supporters to the committee. Not
surprisingly, the committee exonerated Ballinger, but the incident
further divided the Republican party.¹⁹
As the 1910 congressional elections approached, Taft dispatched Vice
President Sherman on a number of political missions. In Wisconsin, Taft
tried to block the renomination of the Senate's leading insurgent,
Robert La Follette. Although the state had abandoned party nominating
conferences in favor of primary elections, conservatives had organized a
``true Republican meeting.'' The president sent Sherman to bestow the
administration's blessing. Despite their efforts, however, La Follette
easily won renomination and reelection.²⁰
Sherman then plunged into New York state politics, where Governor
Charles Evans Hughes' resignation to become a Supreme Court justice had
triggered open warfare between conservative and progressive Republicans.
William Barnes of Albany, who led the party's Old Guard, selected Vice
President Sherman as temporary chairman of the state convention to
nominate the next governor. But Representative Herbert Parson, the
Republican national committeeman for New York and leader of the party
organization in New York City, appealed to former president Theodore
Roosevelt for help. Roosevelt, who had just returned from his long
overseas journey, was deeply angered over the Ballinger-Pinchot affair,
and dismayed by the increasingly conservative tendencies of the Taft
administration. Roosevelt agreed to run against Sherman for chairman to
help insure the nomination of a progressive candidate for governor and a
more progressive platform.²¹
Roosevelt maintained that his candidacy was directed against Sherman
and not against the administration. He portrayed Sherman as having
spread the erroneous impression of having Taft's support. Yet Sherman
remained in close communication with Taft by telephone throughout the
New York convention fight, and at one point the president laughed as he
told aides, ``They have defeated Theodore.'' But Sherman could not
overcome Roosevelt's immense popularity, and convention delegates voted,
568 to 443, to reject Sherman in favor of Roosevelt. Although Taft
maintained public neutrality, Sherman's defeat was widely perceived as a
defeat for the president.²²
The internal split proved a disaster for the Republican party in the
1910 congressional midterm elections. Republicans lost eight seats in
the Senate--where insurgents now held the balance of power--and lost
their majority in the House to the Democrats. In the hope of restoring
harmony, Taft invited the leading insurgent senators to the White House
to discuss patronage. All but the implacable La Follette attended. But
these efforts alarmed the party's conservatives, who warned that, if
Taft embraced the progressives, the Old Guard might throw their support
to Vice President Sherman in 1912. Harmony was the last thing that the
hapless Taft could achieve.²³

Death and Defeat

At first, Senator La Follette emerged as the principal challenger to
Taft's renomination, but when the overworked and exhausted La Follette
suffered a breakdown in February 1912, Theodore Roosevelt jumped into
the race for the Republican nomination. In a series of bitter
confrontations, Roosevelt won the popular primaries but Taft retained
control of the party machinery that chose a majority of the delegates.
In New York, Sherman's forces managed to gain 78 delegates for Taft,
with only 12 for Roosevelt.²⁴ Denied the nomination, the
former president walked out of the Republican convention to form the
Progressive (``Bull Moose'') party. Democrats meanwhile had nominated
the progressive governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who became the
frontrunner by virtue of the Republican split.
With Taft's defeat in the November elections an almost foregone
conclusion, the Republican convention renominated Sherman with little
fuss or attention. He became the first sitting vice president to be
renominated since John C. Calhoun, eighty years earlier. New York
Republicans continued to argue that Sherman would bring the most
strength to the ticket. In fact, Sherman was too ill to campaign that
year. Since 1904 he had suffered from Bright's disease, a serious kidney
ailment. During the long session of the Senate in 1912, Sherman's
discomfort had been increased by the Senate's inability to elect a
Republican president pro tempore who might spell him as presiding
officer. He returned to Utica, where his family doctor diagnosed his
condition as dangerous and prescribed rest and relaxation. His doctor
urged him not even to deliver his speech accepting the nomination, at
ceremonies planned for late August. ``You may know all about medicine,''
Sherman responded, ``but you don't know about politics.'' Sherman went
through with the ceremonies and spoke for half an hour. Two days later,
his health collapsed, leaving him bedridden. By mid-September, Sherman
felt well enough to travel to Connecticut, where he checked into an
oceanside hotel to recuperate. When reporters caught up with him and
asked why he had avoided campaigning, Sherman replied, ``Don't you think
I look like a sick man?'' ²⁵
His longtime colleague and adversary, Robert La Follette, later
noted that ``the hand of death'' had been upon Sherman throughout his
vice-presidency. ``From the first its shadow went with him in and out of
this Chamber, stood over him at his desk, followed him down the
corridors, pursued him to his home. Month after month, waking or
sleeping, in social cheer or the still hours of the night, it was his
constant companion. Before all others he was the first to know what
threatened him.'' Yet Sherman never allowed his illness to hamper him.
``He bore an outward geniality and spirit that dispelled fear from all
his friends.'' ²⁶
On October 30, 1912, President Taft was at a dinner at the Brooklyn
Navy Yard, after launching the battleship New York, when word came that
Vice President Sherman had died. He was fifty-seven years old. Taft
asked the diners to adjourn in Sherman's memory and later issued a
statement that he felt ``a sense of personal bereavement in the loss of
a friend.'' Privately, Taft fretted that Sherman's death might dissuade
people from voting for the ticket. Mrs. Taft considered Sherman's death
``very unfortunate'' coming just before the election. ``You have the
worst luck,'' she commiserated with her husband.²⁷

A Deceased Running Mate

Taft considered naming the progressive governor of Missouri, Herbert
S. Hadley, to replace Sherman, but members of the national committee
persuaded the president that it would be poor politics to choose someone
who was unlikely to carry his own state in the election. So Taft put off
the decision and went into the election with a deceased running mate. It
mattered little, since the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, won the
presidency with 435 electoral votes; the Progressive candidate, Theodore
Roosevelt, took second place with 88 electoral votes; and Taft came in a
dismal third, with only the 8 electoral votes of Vermont and Utah. In
January, the Republican National Committee named another New Yorker,
Columbia University president Nicholas Butler, to fill out the
Republican ticket for purposes of receiving electoral votes, which were
counted on February 12, 1913. Taft's reelection campaign remains one of
the worst defeats ever suffered by a Republican presidential candidate
(in 1936, Alf Landon tied Taft by winning only 8 electoral
votes).²⁸
Various memorial services were held to honor the deceased vice
president. Senator Elihu Root paid tribute to Sunny Jim, whose ``smile
was always bright; his fair, ruddy face was always glowing with kindly
feeling; and the impression produced by his just and sweet and serene
temperament was so strong that the world thought of him as a bright and
cheerful man. It was all real; there was none of it put on.'' Senator
Chauncey Depew commended Sherman's steadfast defense of the protective
tariff, ``the fundamental principle of all his political career.''
Democratic Senator John Worth Kern, who had lost the vice-presidency to
Sherman in 1908, recalled his arrival in the Senate in 1911. Vice
President Sherman had been so anxious to show his good will that within
minutes after Kern had taken the oath of office, Sherman invited him to
take the gavel and preside over the Senate. ``I protested that I was a
stranger, not only to this body but its procedure,'' said Kern,
but he insisted, saying, ``It will be only for a few minutes and
it is for my own pleasure and gratification that I ask you
to do me this personal favor.'' And from that time on
until the last he never lost an opportunity to make me
feel that however wide our political differences--and they
were irreconcilable--I had in him a friend on whose
fidelity I might always rely.
Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, who had served with Sherman in the
House, and who would follow him as vice president during Herbert
Hoover's administration, described Sherman as a fatherly man: ``He was
at once interested in the things in which you were interested, and
immediately took upon himself the cloak of helper and adviser. He was
thus particularly useful and congenial to new Members, and commanded for
himself respect and support in everything he undertook.'' ²⁹

An Unexpected Reappearance

Despite these eulogies, James Schoolcraft Sherman quickly
disappeared from public memory. He remained the least-remembered
twentieth-century vice president until 1974, when he made an unexpected
reappearance in E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel Ragtime. At a
climactic moment in the book, Sarah, a black domestic, tried to
intercede on behalf of her husband, when Vice President Sherman attends
a campaign rally in New Rochelle, New York:
When the Vice-President's car, a Packard, rolled up to the curb
and the man himself stepped out, a cheer went up. Sunny Jim Sherman
was a New York State politician with many friends in Westchester. He
was a round balding man and in such ill health that he would not
survive the campaign. Sarah broke through the line and ran toward
him calling, in her confusion, President! President! Her arm was
extended and her black hand reached toward him. He shrank from the
contact. Perhaps in the dark windy evening of impending storm it
seemed to Sherman's guards that Sarah's black hand was a weapon. A
militiaman stepped forward and, with the deadly officiousness of
armed men who protect the famous, brought the butt of his
Springfield against Sarah's chest as hard as he could. She fell. A
Secret Service man jumped on top of her. The Vice-President
disappeared into the hotel.³⁰
That scene, which led to Sarah's death in the novel, was entirely
fictitious. Sherman simply served as the novelist's metaphor of an
unhealthy and unresponsive political system. Although perhaps better
than total obscurity, it was not the way ``Sunny Jim'' would have wanted
to be remembered.
JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT SHERMAN

NOTES

¹ Senate Curator James Ketchum provided the following
information in response to the popular belief that Sherman's marble bust
was damaged in the 1983 explosion that took place on the second floor of
the Capitol's Senate wing, adjacent to the Sherman bust. ``As Bessie
Potter Vonnoh began working on the translation of her Sherman bust from
plaster to marble, she discovered an imperfection near the surface of
the stone. She raised her concern about its possible effect on the
finished piece with the Senate Library Committee. In response, Chairman
George Peabody Wetmore asked architect Thomas Hastings (of the firm of
Carrere and Hastings) and sculptor James Earle Fraser to look into the
matter. Both agreed that the discoloration on the right cheek was of
little concern. Unfortunately, as the carving progressed, the dark spot
became more apparent. There was little that could be done to minimize it
and the work proceeded to completion. After the 1983 bombing of the
Capitol, it was erroneously reported that the area in question, located
just below Sherman's glasses, resulted from the explosion. The bust of
J.S. Sherman, including his glasses, survived that bombing unscathed.''
² Memorial Services in Honor of the Memory of the Late
James Schoolcraft Sherman, Vice-President of the United States (New
York, 1913), pp. 12, 34-35.
³ Ibid., pp. 5-6; Samuel W. McCall, The Life of Thomas
Brackett Reed (Boston, 1914), p. 164; James Schoolcraft Sherman, Late
Vice President of the United States, Memorial Addresses Delivered at a
Joint Session of the Senate and the House of Representatives of the
United States, February 15, 1913 (Washington, 1913), p. 50.
⁴ Memorial Addresses, pp. 38-39, 50.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 21-22.
⁶ Ibid., p. 23; Mark Sullivan, Our Times, 1900-1925 (New
York, 1953), 2:521; James Harvey Young, Pure Food: Securing the Federal
Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton, NJ, 1989).
⁷ Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, A Biography (New
York, 1956), p. 318; Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (New York, 1938),
2:114-15, 122.
⁸ Arthur Wallace Dunn, From Harrison to Harding: A
Personal Narrative, Covering a Third of a Century, 1888-1921 (Port
Washington, NY, 1971; reprint of 1922 edition), 2:73, 201; Arthur
Wallace Dunn, Gridiron Nights (New York, 1915), p. 201.
⁹ Chauncey M. Depew, My Memories of Eighty Years (New
York, 1924), pp. 176-77.
¹⁰ Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics
(New York, 1920), 2:284-87.
¹¹ Memorial Addresses, p. 43.
¹² Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard
Taft (Norwalk, CT, 1967; reprint of 1939 edition), p. 399; Horace Samuel
Merrill and Marion Galbraith Merrill, The Republican Command, 1897-1913
(Lexington, KY, 1971), p. 274.
¹³ Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew Them: Presidents and
Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York, 1927), p. 347.
¹⁴ Mrs. William Howard Taft, Recollections of Full Years
(New York, 1914), p. 345.
¹⁵ Merrill and Merrill, pp. 277-98; George E. Mowry,
Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (New York, 1946), p. 70.
¹⁶ Memorial Services, pp. 9-10.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 28; Clark, 2:285.
¹⁸ Judith Icke Anderson, William Howard Taft, An Intimate
History (New York, 1981), pp. 132, 187.
¹⁹ William Manners, TR and Will: A Friendship That Split
the Republican Party (New York, 1969), pp. 104-23.
²⁰ George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-
1912 (New York, 1958), p. 267; Belle Case La Follette and Fola La
Follette, Robert M. La Follette, June 14, 1855-June 18, 1925 (New York,
1953), 1:298-99.
²¹ Stoddard, p. 381.
²² Elting E. Morison, et al., eds., The Letters of
Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 7:116, 140, 147; Henry F.
Holthusen, James W. Wadsworth, Jr.: A Biographical Sketch (New York,
1926), pp. 64-65.
²³ James Holt, Congressional Insurgents and the Party
System, 1910-1916 (Cambridge, MA, 1967), p. 44.
²⁴ Holthusen, p. 80.
²⁵ New York Times, September 17, October 31, 1912.
²⁶ Memorial Services, p. 48.
²⁷ New York Times, October 31, 1912; Washington Post,
October 31, 1912; Manners, p. 289.
²⁸ New York Times, November 3, 1912, January 5, 1913.
²⁹ Memorial Services, pp. 14, 19; Memorial Addresses, pp.
44, 54.
³⁰ E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York, 1974), p. 159.
?

Chapter 28

THOMAS R. MARSHALL

1913-1921

THOMAS R. MARSHALL
THOMAS R. MARSHALL

Chapter 28

THOMAS R. MARSHALL

28th Vice President: 1913-1921

[I]t has not been the practice for Presidents to throw
any of the burdens of their office upon the Vice President.
He rules the dignified and at times irascible Senate and
reflects upon the inactive character of his job. . . . He
has an automobile provided for him . . . but has to buy his
own tires, gasoline and supplies.
--Washington Evening Star, March 2, 1913 ¹
Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, who served two terms with
President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921, claimed that most of the
``nameless, unremembered'' jobs assigned to him had been concocted
essentially to keep vice presidents from doing any harm to their
administrations. One of these chores, according to Marshall, was that of
regent of the Smithsonian Institution. The vice president recalled that
at his first board meeting the other regents, including the chief
justice of the United States and the inventor Alexander Graham Bell,
discussed funding an expedition to Guatemala to excavate for traces of
prehistoric man. With the breezy manner of a self-described ``light-
hearted Hoosier,'' Marshall asked if the Smithsonian had ever considered
excavating in Washington, D.C. Judging from the specimens walking about
on the street, he said, they would not have to dig far below the capital
to discover prehistoric man. ``And then the utter uselessness and
frivolity of the vice-presidency was disclosed,'' Marshall confessed,
``for not a man smiled. It was a year before I had courage to open my
mouth again.'' ²
This typically self-deprecating story revealed much about Marshall's
lamentable vice-presidency. His feelings of inadequacy in both himself
and the position he held were reflected again in his reaction to an
invitation from President Wilson to attend cabinet meetings. Vice
President Marshall stopped going after a single session. When asked why,
he replied that he realized ``he would not be listened to and hence
would be unable to make any contribution.'' Marshall similarly attended
only one meeting of the Senate Democratic Caucus. ``I do not blame proud
parents for wishing that their sons might be President of the United
States,'' he later said. ``But if I sought a blessing for a boy I would
not pray that he become Vice-President.'' ³
Woodrow Wilson, a supremely self-confident intellectual, regarded
Marshall as a ``small-caliber man'' and had not wanted him on his ticket
in 1912.⁴ During their eight years together, Wilson
undoubtedly made Marshall feel uncomfortable. The editor William Allen
White once described presenting a proposal to Wilson at the White House.
Wilson ``parried and countered quickly, as one who had heard the
argument I would present and was punctiliously impatient. He presented
another aspect of the case and outtalked me, agreeing in nothing. I
could not tell how much he assimilated.'' ⁵ For a more
insecure man like Marshall, such a response must have been excruciating.
Convinced that the president and other high-ranking officials did not
take him seriously enough to listen to him, Marshall learned not to
speak, not to attend meetings, and not to offer suggestions. He became
the epitome of the vice president as nonentity. But this condition moved
from comedy to tragedy when President Wilson suffered a paralytic stroke
in 1919. Faced with the crisis of having to determine whether the
president was able to fulfill the duties of his office, Marshall failed
miserably.

A Man of Contradictions

Thomas Riley Marshall had been little known outside his home town of
Columbia City, Indiana, before he was elected governor in 1908. Born in
Indiana on March 14, 1854, he was the only child of a country doctor and
his sickly wife. After moving to Illinois and Kansas for Mrs. Marshall's
health, the family returned to Indiana where Thomas attended Wabash
College. From his youth he intended to become a lawyer and spent many of
his Saturdays in the courtroom listening to such prominent Indiana
lawyer-politicians as Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Hendricks, and Daniel
Voorhees--who became president, vice president, and senator,
respectively. Marshall read law and went into practice in Columbia City.
In his early years he was a hard-drinking man, who ``wanted a barrel,
not a drink.'' His intemperance persisted for years, and he often
appeared hung over in court. A seemingly confirmed bachelor, he lived
with his mother until her death. Shortly thereafter, however, at the age
of forty-one, he married Lois Kimsey, a deputy in the office of her
father, the county clerk in nearby Angola, Indiana. After several
difficult years, his wife persuaded him to stop drinking, and after 1898
he never touched another alcoholic beverage.⁶
Marshall's biographer, Charles M. Thomas, summarized the
contradictions of his subject's personality:
He was prior to 1898, a most pronounced drinker and at the same
time a leader in the church and a temperance lecturer. He
was inconsistent, yet he was trusted. He was a
fundamentalist in religion, yet not sectarian [that is,
not intolerant]. He was enjoyed as the biggest wit in
town, yet his judgment was respected by those who knew
him, and his leadership was accepted. His later political
career proves that, despite his conflicting traits, there
was something in his character which made men like
him.⁷

An Indiana Democrat

Marshall came from a traditionally Democratic family who traced
their political roots back to the age of Andrew Jackson. Marshall
himself was always a regular party man. In 1876 he became secretary of
the Democratic County Convention and spoke for many Democratic
candidates. In 1880 he lost an election for prosecuting attorney. For
years that defeat dissuaded him from campaigning for office. Although he
became a member of the Democratic State Central Committee, he did not
run again until 1908, when he sought the Democratic nomination for
governor. When the frontrunning candidates eliminated each other from
the race, Marshall won the nomination. He campaigned against Republican
Representative James ``Sunny Jim'' Watson, who would later become Senate
majority leader. Marshall was elected governor that year, even though in
the presidential election Republican William Howard Taft carried Indiana
against William Jennings Bryan, whose vice-presidential candidate, John
W. Kern, was a Hoosier. It was the first time that Indiana Democrats had
won the governorship since 1896.⁸
The ``boss'' of the Indiana Democratic party at that time was the
Irish-born Thomas Taggart, owner of a nationally famous hotel, health
resort, and gambling casino at French Lick, Indiana.⁹ After
William Jennings Bryan's two unsuccessful campaigns for president in
1896 and 1900, Tom Taggart had helped the anti-Bryan Democrats and
regular machine organizations to nominate the more conservative Judge
Alton B. Parker for president in 1904. Taggart managed Parker's campaign
as Democratic party national chairman.
Bryan recaptured the Democratic nomination in 1908, but Taggart, a
national committeeman, had enough influence in the party to ensure the
choice of Indiana's John Worth Kern for vice president. In 1912 Taggart
went to the Democratic convention with similar plans to recognize
Indiana Democrats by winning the second spot for the governor, who could
not succeed himself in the statehouse. A conventional, middle-of-the-
road politician, Marshall as governor had been neither in Taggart's
pocket nor much identified with his party's more progressive wing. But
Indiana was a pivotal state, carried by every winning presidential
candidate since 1880. Moreover, having Marshall on the national ticket
would help state Democrats elect the machine's new candidate for
governor.
Tom Taggart disliked New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, whom
progressive Democrats were supporting. Instead Taggart hoped for the
nomination of House Speaker Champ Clark. But the party boss was shrewd
enough to keep Indiana's 29 votes united for Marshall as their
``favorite son,'' until he could determine how to use them to the best
advantage. The Democratic convention required a two-thirds vote to
nominate a presidential candidate. On the first ballot, Clark had 440
delegates to Wilson's 324. Despite his majority of votes, Clark peaked
on the tenth ballot. On the fourteenth ballot, William Jennings Bryan
endorsed Wilson. Sensing the way the wind was blowing, Taggart on the
twenty-eighth ballot gave all of Marshall's delegates to Wilson, who
went on to win the nomination on the forty-sixth ballot. Wilson would
have preferred Alabama Representative Oscar W. Underwood for vice
president, but when Underwood declined, Taggart clinched the nomination
for Governor Marshall. As for Marshall, he had hoped that the
frontrunning Wilson and Clark would eliminate each other, giving him the
presidential nomination as the darkhorse candidate. When awarded the
vice-presidential nomination instead, Marshall's first inclination was
to decline on the ground that the job did not pay enough. But Mrs.
Marshall had always wanted to go to Washington, and her tears of
disappointment convinced him to change his mind and accept. In a
multicandidate race, the Democratic ticket won with 435 electoral votes
to 88 for Theodore Roosevelt's ``Bull Moose'' ticket and only a meager 8
for Republican William Howard Taft.¹⁰

Vice President

Thomas R. Marshall went to Washington ``with the feeling that the
American people might have made a mistake in setting me down in the
company of all the wise men in the land.'' His job as vice president
required him to preside over the Senate, but other than delivering his
gubernatorial messages to the Indiana legislature, Marshall had no
legislative experience. He assumed that as presiding officer of the
Senate he had some authority, but it did not take him long to discover
``that the Senate was not only a self-governing body but that it was a
quite willful set of men, who had not the slightest hesitancy in
overruling a presiding officer.'' Marshall and his wife also found that
they were invited everywhere to social functions in Washington. After a
while, however, he decided that these invitations were less out of
respect for him and his office, than Washington's efforts to ``size up''
a new man under the microscope. With whatever illusions he might have
had about his office quickly dispelled, Marshall came to agree with the
early senator who had suggested that Vice President John Adams be titled
``His Superfluous Excellency.'' ¹¹
A slight, bespectacled man, with his hat pushed back on his head, a
pipe or cigar always ready in his hand, Marshall knew that he ``was too
small to look dignified in a Prince Albert coat,'' and so he continued
his ordinary manner of dress. ``He is calm and serene and small; mild,
quiet, simple and old-fashioned,'' as one Indiana writer described him.
``His hair is gray and so is his mustache. His clothes are gray and so
is his tie. He has a cigar tucked beneath the mustache and his gray
fedora hat shades his gray eyes.'' Another observer characterized
Marshall's voice as ``musical, pleasant in tone, and . . . sufficient
for stump-speaking out of doors, altho you wouldn't think it to hear its
soft notes in conversation.'' ¹²
In later years, President Franklin D. Roosevelt loved to tell the
story of Vice President Marshall's arrival aboard the cruiser San Diego,
anchored off the Panama-Pacific Industrial Exposition, that took place
in 1915 in San Francisco. As assistant secretary of the navy, FDR had
designed the first vice-presidential flag, which was flown when Marshall
came on board. Apparently, the vice president had not been instructed
about naval etiquette. He came up the gangplank in the formal attire
that the occasion required: silk hat, frock coat, gloves, and cane, and
his ever-present cigar. When the band struck up the ``Star Spangled
Banner,'' the vice president ``realized his predicament,'' shifted the
cane from right hand to left, took the cigar out of his mouth, got the
hat off his head and saluted. But when the first gun went off: ``the
whole works went two feet into the air.'' After the hat, gloves, cane
and cigar were retrieved, Marshall tried to shake hands with the first
saluting sailor he approached. ``By that time,'' Roosevelt recalled,
``the Admiral and I had sprinted across the deck and rescued the Vice
President.'' Later at the exposition, Roosevelt and Marshall watched a
motion picture that included the scene aboard the cruiser. ``My God,''
said Marshall, ``if I looked like that I will never go on board another
ship as long as I live!'' ¹³

Witty but Overshadowed

From these descriptions, it is not surprising that Vice President
Marshall gained a reputation as a rustic provincial. He also won notice
for his folksy stories and down-home wit. In those days the Capitol
guides escorted visitors through the corridor behind the Senate chamber.
Whenever the vice president left the door to his office open, he could
hear the guides pointing him out as if he were a curiosity. One day he
went to the door and said, ``If you look on me as a wild animal, be kind
enough to throw peanuts at me.'' Seeking more space and more privacy,
Marshall requested and received an office in the recently opened Senate
Office Building, where he could ``put his feet on the desk and smoke.''
¹⁴
Compared with the president, or even the Speaker of the House, Vice
President Marshall could boast few perquisites of office. He had to
share his small quarters in the Capitol with a secretary and
stenographer. His $12,000 annual salary compared poorly with the
president's $75,000 stipend, and he lacked travel and housing
allowances. Awarded an automobile and a $1,000-per-year chauffeur,
Marshall had to finance auto repairs from his personal resources. Each
of the recent vice presidents had accepted from the Senate a solid
silver inkstand as a memento of their office, but Vice President James
Sherman had declined the honor, leaving Marshall to wrestle with the
inevitable questions of propriety.¹⁵
Serving under a vigorous and innovative president, Marshall had
difficulty determining his own role. Woodrow Wilson broke tradition in
April 1913 by personally coming to the Capitol to address a joint
session one day and the next by visiting the President's Room outside
the Senate chamber to lobby senators in support of his tariff proposals.
It was clear that the president intended to be his own lobbyist on
Capitol Hill and had no particular use for his vice president. Marshall
quickly ascertained that he was ``of no importance to the administration
beyond the duty of being loyal to it and ready, at any time, to act as a
sort of pinch hitter; that is, when everybody else on the team had
failed, I was to be given a chance.'' Marshall was probably also aware
of Wilson's belittling comments about the vice-presidency in his 1885
book Congressional Government. The position, Wilson the scholar of
government declared, ``is one of anomalous insignificance and curious
uncertainty,'' whose chief importance ``consists in the fact that he may
cease to be Vice President.'' ¹⁶
Although both men had served as Democratic governors and both were
Calvinist Presbyterians, Wilson and Marshall in fact had little in
common. Marshall had considered himself a progressive governor of his
state, but the president and his closest advisers looked upon him as a
conservative. The White House rarely consulted him, and many months
often elapsed between meetings of the president and vice president.
Marshall loyally supported Wilson's program but was by nature too
iconoclastic to embrace wholeheartedly Wilson's idealism. For instance,
the vice president never reconciled himself to child labor laws or woman
suffrage. Certainly Marshall lacked Wilson's imagination and
determination, two qualities that the vice president admired greatly in
his chief executive. ``Whether you may like Woodrow Wilson, or not, is
beside the point,'' Marshall wrote, ``this one thing you will be
compelled to accord him: he had ideas and he had the courage to express
them. He desired things done, and he had the nerve to insist on their
being done.'' ¹⁷
Even in the Senate, Marshall was overshadowed by his two fellow
Indianans, both progressive Democrats. Indiana's senior senator was
Benjamin Shively, whom Marshall described as ``one of the finest
specimens of physical manhood in the Senate--tall, commanding, of
striking appearance, and his brain was as large as his body.'' Shively
was also ``a great orator, and a great logician, and when he spoke his
words commanded careful consideration.'' The junior senator from Indiana
was John Worth Kern, chairman of the Democratic caucus and floor leader
for Wilson's New Freedom program. Kern was ``strong in debate, gentle as
a woman in his relations with his fellow-men, full of good ways and good
works.'' The majority leader had ``a weakness for the telling of
stories, and he told them in an inimitable way.'' ¹⁸
Correspondent Louis Ludlow, who covered Washington for various
Indiana newspapers, rated Marshall highly for his irrepressible wit.
Marshall's funny remarks ``at the expense of the Senate's dignity'' had
at first shocked the older and more staid senators, ``but out in the
cloakroom they would laugh over his sayings until their sides ached.''
Marshall described the Senate as ``the Cave of Winds'' and used humor to
belittle ``the idols of clay'' that populated it.¹⁹ President
Wilson apparently enjoyed hearing Marshall's stories and often repeated
them at cabinet meetings and dinner parties. But Wilson's close
confidant, Colonel Edward House, believed that Marshall's wit diminished
his standing as a serious statesman and made him appear just a jester.
``An unfriendly fairy godmother presented him with a keen sense of
humor,'' House commented. ``Nothing is more fatal in politics.''
²⁰
Ironically, Vice President Marshall did not deserve authorship of
his most famous quip about ``a good five-cent cigar.'' Although there
are many versions of this story, the most often repeated alleges that
Kansas Senator Joseph Bristow had been making a long-winded speech with
the repeated refrain ``What this country needs--'' causing the vice
president to lean over and whisper to one of the Senate clerks:
``Bristow hasn't hit it yet. What this country needs is a good five-cent
cigar.'' Newspapers repeated the quote and cigar makers gratefully
showered the vice president with their products. Immortalized in every
dictionary of quotations, the ``five-cent cigar'' quote remains just
about the only thing for which Thomas R. Marshall is remembered today.
But historian John E. Brown has traced the quotation back to the Indiana
newspaper cartoonist Kin Hubbard, who put the words in the mouth of his
popular character ``Abe Martin.'' As a fan of the cartoon strip,
Marshall simply picked up the phrase, repeated it, and became its
surrogate father.²¹
In 1916, the Democratic Convention renominated Wilson and Marshall.
Wilson gave little indication whether he wanted to retain or replace
Marshall. In late 1915, Arizona Senator Henry F. Ashurst had learned of
a plan to ``ditch'' Marshall from the ticket and had called on the
president to endorse Marshall for a second term, but Wilson simply
replied: ``I have a very high regard for Vice-President Marshall and I
wish you would tell him so.'' When the senator pressed harder, asking if
he could say that President Wilson was for Marshall's renomination,
Wilson ``gurgled out'' a positive response. Nevertheless, Secretary of
War Newton Baker had the strong impression that the president would have
preferred him for a running mate. Meanwhile, Marshall had increased his
income by giving numerous after-dinner talks on the lecture circuit
whenever Congress was not in session and had made himself a nationally
popular figure. With a difficult reelection campaign ahead, the
Democrats hesitated to drop the well-liked (if not necessarily well-
respected) vice president from the ticket. In November, Wilson and
Marshall won a narrow victory over the Republican ticket of Charles
Evans Hughes and Charles Fairbanks (also from Indiana--which went
Republican in the election). Marshall became the first vice president
since John C. Calhoun, almost a century earlier, to be reelected to a
second term.²²

A Stressful Second Term

Marshall's second term proved difficult and stressful. In April
1917, the United States entered the First World War, joining the allied
forces against Germany. Marshall spent much of the war speaking at
rallies to sell Liberty bonds. Victory on the battlefield then thrust
the United States into the negotiations to end the war and determine the
future of Europe and the world. On December 4, 1918, President Wilson
sailed for France to negotiate the peace treaty. Except for the few days
between February 24 and March 5, 1919, Wilson remained out of the
country until July, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed.
During Wilson's unprecedented long absences from the United States, he
designated Vice President Marshall to preside over cabinet meetings in
his place. The request startled Marshall, but he complied gamely. On
December 10, 1918, he presided over the cabinet for the first time, and
Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that Marshall
``was bright & full of jest.'' However, a photograph taken of him
presiding showed a man trying to look resolute but appearing decidedly
uncomfortable. As Louis Ludlow noted: ``This was the first instance in
history when a President showed an inclination to make a real use of his
spare tire.'' ²³
Marshall presided only briefly over the cabinet, withdrawing after a
few sessions on the grounds that the vice president could not maintain a
confidential relationship with both the executive and legislative
branches. Still, he had established the precedent of presiding over the
cabinet during the president's absence, making it particularly difficult
to understand why he failed to carry out that same duty in October 1919,
after Wilson suffered a paralytic stroke. Initially, Wilson's wife
Edith, his personal physician Admiral Cary Grayson, and his secretary
Joe Tumulty, kept the vice president, the cabinet, and the nation in the
dark over the severity of Wilson's illness. Noting with understatement
that the eighteen months of Wilson's illness were ``not pleasant'' for
him, Marshall recalled that the standing joke of the country was that
``the only business of the vice-president is to ring the White House
bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the
president.'' In fact, Marshall was admittedly afraid to ask about
Wilson's health, for fear that people would accuse him of ``longing for
his place.'' ²⁴
Secretary of Agriculture David Houston met Marshall while lunching
at the Shoreham Hotel, and recorded in his memoirs:
The Vice President was evidently much disturbed and expressed
regret that he was being kept in the dark about the
President's condition. He asked me if I could give him the
real facts, which I was unable to do. . . . The Vice
President expressed the view that he ought immediately to
be informed; that it would be a tragedy for him to assume
the duties of President, at best; and that it would be
equally a tragedy for the people; that he knew many men
who knew more about the affairs of the government than he
did; and that it would be especially trying for him if he
had to assume the duty without warning.²⁵
Tumulty eventually sent word to Marshall through a friendly
intermediary, Baltimore Sun correspondent J. Fred Essary, that the
president's condition was so grave that he might die at any time. A
stunned Marshall sat absolutely speechless. ``It was the first great
shock of my life,'' he later told Essary. Still, he could not bring
himself to act, or to do anything that might seem ambitious or disloyal
to his president. It was Secretary of State Robert Lansing rather than
Vice President Marshall who determined to call cabinet meetings in the
president's absence. Without the participation of either the president
or vice president, the cabinet met regularly between October 1919 and
February 1920, presided over by Secretary of State Lansing, or in his
absence, Secretary of the Treasury Carter Glass. When Wilson recovered
sufficiently, he fired Lansing for attempting to ``oust'' him from
office by calling these meetings. Wilson, who was never himself after
his stroke, argued that these meetings held no purpose since no cabinet
decisions could be made without the president. Yet Wilson himself had
sanctioned the cabinet meetings over which Marshall had presided a year
earlier. If nothing else, for the cabinet to hold regular meetings at
least assured the American public that their government continued to
function.²⁶
The Constitution declares that the vice president could assume the
duties of president in case of the president's ``Inability to discharge
the Powers and Duties of the said Office,'' but until the Twenty-fifth
Amendment was adopted in 1967, the Constitution said absolutely nothing
about how he should do it.²⁷ Marshall was clearly in a
difficult situation. As editor Henry L. Stoddard observed, ``Wilson's
resentment of Lansing's activities is proof that Vice President Marshall
would have had to lay siege to the White House, had he assumed the
Presidency.'' ²⁸ The eminent historian of American diplomacy
Thomas A. Bailey noted that President Wilson ``clung to his office,
without the power to lead actively and sure-footedly, but with
unimpaired power to obstruct.'' In his classic study of Wilson's
handling of the Treaty of Versailles, Bailey speculated that if Wilson
had died rather than been incapacitated by his stroke, the results would
have been far more positive, and that Wilson's historical reputation
would have eclipsed even Abraham Lincoln as a martyr. Had Wilson died,
the Senate might well have been shamed into action on the League of
Nations. ``Much of the partisanship would have faded, because Wilson as
a third-term threat would be gone, and Vice President Marshall, a small-
bored Hoosier, was not to be feared,'' wrote Bailey:
Marshall of course would have been President for seventeen months.
Having presided over the Senate for more than six years,
and knowing the temper of that body, he probably would
have recognized the need for compromise, and probably
would have worked for some reconciliation of the
Democratic and Republicans points of view. In these
circumstances it seems altogether reasonable to suppose
that the Senate would have approved the treaty with a few
relatively minor reservations.²⁹
Indeed, Marshall presided over the Senate during the ``long and
weary months'' of debate on the Treaty of Versailles. Although he stood
loyally with the president, he believed that some compromise would be
necessary and tried unsuccessfully to make the White House understand.
``I have sometimes thought that great men are the bane of
civilization,'' Marshall later wrote in his memoirs, in a passage about
the clash between Woodrow Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: ``[T]hey
are the real cause of all the bitterness and contention which amounts to
anything in the world. Pride of opinion and authorship, and jealousy of
the opinion and authorship of others wreck many a fair hope.''
³⁰
Despite assurances from members of both parties in Congress that
they would support him should he assert his claim to the presidency,
Thomas R. Marshall never sought to fill Woodrow Wilson's place. His
years in Washington had convinced him that he desired the good will of
others rather than the ``pomp or power'' of the presidency. Rather than
act as president, or even preside over cabinet meetings, Marshall
contented himself with replacing Wilson as ``official host'' for the
many visiting European royalty and other dignitaries who came to
Washington to offer thanks for American assistance during the First
World War.³¹ By shrinking from a distasteful duty, Marshall
gave himself peace of mind but deprived the nation of whatever
leadership he might have offered in trying times.
Marshall himself told the story of riding on a train behind a man
and a woman who were discussing the news that President Wilson had
removed Secretary of State Lansing for holding cabinet meetings. ``Why
what else could Mr. Lansing have done?'' the woman asked. ``Here the
President was sick. A lot of big questions had to be talked over and
there was the Vice President, who doesn't amount to anything. The only
thing Mr. Lansing could do, I tell you, was to call these Cabinet
meetings, and I think he did the right thing.'' Said Marshall, ``There
you have it in a nutshell. The woman was right. I don't amount to
anything.'' ³²
Although Thomas Marshall publicly hinted that he would accept the
Democratic nomination for president in 1920, few delegates outside of
Indiana cast any votes for him. Instead, Democrats nominated James M.
Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lost overwhelmingly to the Republican
ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Marshall left office as
vice president in March 1921 and returned to Indiana. He died while
visiting Washington on June 1, 1925, at age seventy-one. In 1922
President Harding had appointed him to serve on the Federal Coal
Commission to settle labor troubles in the coal mines, but otherwise
Marshall insisted he had retired. ``I don't want to work,'' he said.
``[But] I wouldn't mind being Vice President again.'' ³³
THOMAS R. MARSHALL

NOTES

¹ ``Vice President Marshall Has Fallen Into a Big Job
With Little Work, Many Peculiar Customs and Much Social Strain,''
Washington Evening Star, March 2, 1913, part 4, p. 6.
² Thomas R. Marshall, Recollections of Thomas R.
Marshall, Vice-President and Hoosier Philosopher: A Hoosier Salad
(Indianapolis, 1925), pp. 16-18.
³ Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters
(Garden City, N.Y., 1931), 4:104-9; and Daniel C. Roper, Fifty Years of
Public Life (Durham, NC, 1941); John E. Brown, ``Woodrow Wilson's Vice
President: Thomas R. Marshall and the Wilson Administration, 1913-1921''
(Ph.D. dissertation, Ball State University, 1970), p. 216.
⁴ Charles M. Thomas, Thomas Riley Marshall, Hoosier
Statesman (Oxford, OH, 1939), p. 129.
⁵ William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen
White (New York, 1946), pp. 615-16.
⁶ Thomas, pp. 27-28; Marshall, p. 96.
⁷ Thomas, p. 35.
⁸ Ibid., pp. 40-55.
⁹ Indianapolis News, March 6, 1929.
¹⁰ Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace,
1910-1917 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944), p. 550; Thomas, pp. 112-39; Brown, p.
146; Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, 3d ed.
(Washington, DC, 1994), p. 390. The 1912 election is also discussed in
Chapter 25 of this volume, ``Theodore Roosevelt,'', p. 306, and Chapter
27, ``James Schoolcraft Sherman,'' pp. 330-31.
¹¹ Marshall, pp. 221-25, 229.
¹² Ibid., p. 233; Brown, pp. 50-51.
¹³ Brown, pp. 250-51.
¹⁴ Marshall, p. 230; Thomas, p. 141; Washington Evening
Star, March 2, 1913, part 4, p. 6; March 4, 1913, p. 1; and March 6,
1913, ``Senate takes day off.''
¹⁵ Washington Evening Star, March 2, 1913, part 4, p. 6.
¹⁶ Marshall, p. 233; Woodrow Wilson, Congressional
Government: A Study in American Politics (Baltimore, 1981; reprint of
1885 edition), p. 162.
¹⁷ Brown, pp. 157-59, 171; Daniels, pp. 552-53; Thomas,
pp. 142-44; Marshall, p. 241.
¹⁸ Marshall, pp. 292-93.
¹⁹ Louis Ludlow, From Cornfield to Press Gallery;
Adventures and Reminiscences of a Veteran Washington Correspondent
(Washington, DC, 1924), pp. 311-15.
²⁰ Thomas, p. 153.
²¹ Ludlow, pp. 313-14; Brown, pp. 188-93.
²² George F. Sparks, A Many-Colored Toga: The Diary of
Henry Fountain Ashurst (Tucson, AZ, 1962), pp. 42-43; Thomas, pp. 234-
36.
²³ E. David Cronon, ed., The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus
Daniels, 1913-1921 (Lincoln, NE, 1963), p. 354; Ludlow, p. 301.
²⁴ Daniels, p. 558; Marshall, p. 368.
²⁵ David F. Houston, Eight Years With Wilson's Cabinet,
1913 to 1920 (Garden City, NY, 1926), pp. 36-38.
²⁶ Thomas, p. 207; see also Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of
Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, 1992; reprint of 1958 edition), pp. 270-78;
Robert H. Farrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust
(Columbia, MO, 1992), p. 16.
²⁷ See Birch Bayh, One Heartbeat Away: Presidential
Disability and Succession (Indianapolis, 1968).
²⁸ Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew Them: Presidents and
Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York, 1927), pp. 539-47.
²⁹ Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great
Betrayal (New York, 1945), pp. 137-38.
³⁰ Marshall, pp. 363-64.
³¹ Ibid., p. 368.
³² Brown, pp. 418-19.
³³ Ludlow, p. 312.
?

Chapter 29

CALVIN COOLIDGE

1921-1923

CALVIN COOLIDGE
CALVIN COOLIDGE

Chapter 29

CALVIN COOLIDGE

29th Vice President: 1921-1923

If the Vice-President is a man of discretion and
character so that he can be relied upon to act as a
subordinate in that position, he should be invited to sit
with the Cabinet, although some of the Senators, wishing to
be the only advisers of the President, do not look on that
proposal with favor.
--Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge came to the vice-presidency from the governorship of
Massachusetts, but he was at heart a Vermonter. Born in Vermont on the
Fourth of July 1872, he died in Vermont sixty-one years later, on
January 5, 1933. During the years between, he lived most of his adult
life in Massachusetts and worked out of the statehouse in Boston but
never identified with Back Bay society. ``I come from Boston,'' a lady
once identified herself to him when he was president. ``Yes, and you'll
never get over it,'' Coolidge replied dryly. One of Coolidge's first
biographers, Claude Fuess, identified him as the archetypical Yankee,
``with his wiry, nervous body, his laconic speech, his thrift, his
industry, his conservative distrust of foreigners and innovations, and
his native dignity.'' This dour, taciturn man served eight years as vice
president and president during the ``Roaring Twenties,'' an era
remembered for its speakeasies, flappers, and anything-goes attitudes.
Calvin Coolidge, as journalist William Allen White aptly recorded, was
``A Puritan in Babylon.'' ¹

Youth

Calvin Coolidge grew up in the bucolic setting of rural Vermont in
the late nineteenth century. He was a slight, red-headed, blue-eyed boy
whose decided nasal twang was made worse by numerous childhood allergies
until it gave his voice a quacking sound. His invalid mother died when
he was just twelve years old, and he was raised by his father, Colonel
John Coolidge, a talented jack-of-all-trades, who ran a general store
and farmed, as well as serving as justice of the peace and a member of
the state legislature. For all these accomplishments, Colonel Coolidge
was not a man who could express his emotions openly, and one senses from
reading Calvin Coolidge's Autobiography that he spent much of his life
trying to earn his father's respect and approval. As Coolidge later
noted, ``A lot of people in Plymouth can't understand how I got to be
President, least of all my father!'' ²

A Shy Politician

A painfully shy boy, Coolidge would go into a panic at the sound of
a stranger's voice in the house. Writing in a letter to a friend years
later, he recalled that when visitors would sit with his parents in the
kitchen, he found it difficult to go in and greet them. ``I was almost
ten before I realized I couldn't go on that way. And by fighting hard I
used to manage to get through that door. I'm all right with old friends,
but every time I meet a stranger, I've got to get through the old
kitchen door, back home, and it's not easy.'' ³
Shortly after his mother died, Coolidge escaped from the drudgery of
farm work to attend the Black River Academy in Ludlow, Vermont, his
``first great adventure,'' which he described as ``a complete break with
the past.'' His parents and a grandmother had attended the school
briefly, but Coolidge embraced schoolwork more thoroughly, going on to
Amherst as the first member of his family to attend college. He did well
enough to be chosen one of the three commencement speakers at his
graduation, assigned to deliver the ``grove oration,'' which was to
describe the class members in a witty and humorous manner. Coolidge
later related that he learned from the experience ``that making fun of
people in a public way was not a good method to secure friends, or
likely to lead to much advancement.'' ⁴
After college he read law with the firm of Hammond and Field in
Northampton, Massachusetts, before joining the bar in 1897. Politically
a conservative Republican, Coolidge had marched in a torchlight parade
for Benjamin Harrison's unsuccessful reelection campaign in 1892 and
wrote letters to the local papers in support of William McKinley's
election in 1896. In December 1898 he won his first election to the
Northampton city council, an unsalaried job that he saw primarily as a
means of making useful contacts for his law practice. He was then
elected city solicitor, a post that paid six hundred dollars annually,
which he believed would make him a better lawyer. Next came election to
the Massachusetts house of representatives, and appointment to its
judiciary committee, which he again considered more in terms of
promoting himself as a lawyer than as a politician. He ran for mayor of
Northampton, ``thinking the honor would be one that would please my
father, advance me in my profession, and enable me to be of some public
service.'' As a local office, it would not ``interfere seriously with my
work.'' ⁵
Coolidge always insisted that he never planned his political career.
He meant only ``to be ready to take advantage of opportunities.''
⁶ In 1911 he ran for the state senate and soon became its
president, a role that took him from local to statewide office. Coolidge
summed up his philosophy as a legislator in a letter to his father upon
the elder Coolidge's election to the Vermont Senate:
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good
ones, and better to spend your time on your own committee
work than to be bothering with any bills of your own. . .
. See that the bills you recommend from your committee are
so worded that they will do just what they intend and not
a great deal more that is undesirable. Most bills can't
stand that kind of test.⁷

A Return to Conservatism

Coolidge began his ascendancy in statewide politics at a time when
the Massachusetts Republican party was still divided between
conservatives and progressives. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had walked
out of the Republican party and campaigned for president on the ticket
of the Progressive (``Bull Moose'') party. In that election, the
Republican nominee, William Howard Taft, had come in a distant third
behind the more progressive candidacies of Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Coolidge was far from comfortable with the reform politicians and
muckraking magazines of the era. ``It appeared to me in January, 1914,
that a spirit of radicalism prevailed which unless checked was likely to
prove very destructive,'' he later wrote. ``It consisted of the claim in
general that in some way the government was to be blamed because
everybody was not prosperous.'' He believed that progressive reforms and
``unsound legislative proposals'' would destroy business and that the
country needed ``a restoration of confidence in our institutions and in
each other, on which economic progress might rest.'' Fittingly,
Coolidge's first address as president of the state senate appealed ``to
the conservative spirit of the people.'' ⁸
Coolidge correctly anticipated the shift in public opinion. Even
before the First World War, a conservative reaction to the progressive
era was apparent as voters grew tired of political crusades. In 1914, an
economic recession that was especially severe on the East Coast also
hurt progressive candidates. Conservative challengers argued that more
laws and more regulations would only mean more taxes. In one sign of the
changing atmosphere, when the first direct elections for U.S. senators
were held in 1914, progressive candidates went down to defeat.
Conservative Republicans swept the field in many states, reducing the
Democratic majorities in both the Senate and House. Most symbolically,
the staunchly conservative Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania beat
one of the nation's most prominent progressives, Gifford Pinchot. ``The
most curious part,'' Pinchot confessed, ``is that no one seemed to know
in advance that we were to be beaten and certainly no one thought the
defeat would be so complete.'' ⁹
Calvin Coolidge's fortunes rose as those of the progressives fell.
In 1915 he was elected lieutenant governor, and on January 1, 1919, he
was inaugurated as governor of Massachusetts. Before that year was out,
unexpected events had made him one of the most famous and admired men in
the country. ``No doubt it was the police strike of Boston that brought
me into national prominence. That furnished the occasion and I took
advantage of the opportunity,'' Coolidge wrote with characteristic
understatement in his Autobiography.¹⁰
Boston's police force was badly underpaid and overworked. As a
legislator, Coolidge had achieved a reasonably favorable record toward
labor, and as governor he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the
legislature to improve the policemen's lot. The police then organized
the Boston Social Club and sought to affiliate with the American
Federation of Labor, but Boston Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis had no
intention of dealing with a police union, and he suspended the police
union organizers from the force. Angry police voted to go out on strike,
throwing the city into a panic. There was an increase in looting and
robberies, and volunteers turned out to police the streets. Governor
Coolidge ignored all appeals to intervene, and his inactivity
undoubtedly allowed the situation to worsen. Finally, after much
confusion and delay, Coolidge sided with the hard-line Police
Commissioner Curtis, who had announced that the striking police would
not be reinstated. More than for his actions, ``Silent Cal'' became
famous for his words. In a telegram to AFL President Samuel Gompers, who
had sought his support for the police, Coolidge asserted, ``There is no
right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any
time.'' At a time when the nation was rocked by a series of often
violent postwar labor disputes, many citizens welcomed this message.
Coolidge became the ``law and order'' governor. His photograph appeared
on the front pages of newspapers nationwide, and thousands of telegrams
and letters poured in to congratulate him. There was talk of running
Calvin Coolidge for president in 1920.¹¹

The Coolidge Phenomenon

New York Times correspondent Charles Willis Thompson was among the
many journalists curious about this new phenomenon. Thompson noted that
Coolidge began making political speeches outside of Massachusetts but
not in such likely places as Chicago and New York. Instead, Coolidge
went to Oregon and to the Rocky Mountain states, and his speeches were
always on nonpolitical themes. ``Each one of these non-political
speeches had in it that quality of arrest; there was something in it,
unpretentious as it was as a whole, that made you stop and think,''
Thompson observed. ``There was nothing spectacular about him yet, or
ever.'' The 1920 Republican convention opened in Chicago with many
candidates and no clear frontrunner. The real story was not in the
primaries or in the main convention hall, but in the back rooms, which
became immortalized as the ``smoke-filled room'' where decisions were
made by a coterie of Republican senators. When the convention became
deadlocked between General Leonard Wood and Illinois Governor Frank
Lowden, the senators met privately to pick a candidate and prevent a
rift in the party. They were determined to name someone who would reduce
the powers of the presidency, which they believed had expanded
disproportionately during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson. To this end, they chose one of their most pliable
colleagues, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, as the Republican
presidential nominee.¹²
Harding had been far from a leading contender among the delegates,
who nominated him without much enthusiasm. Seeking to balance the
conservative Harding, and hoping to make it an all-senatorial ticket,
the senators first offered the vice-presidential nomination to
California Senator Hiram Johnson, who turned it down. They next went to
progressive Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin. When Illinois Senator
Medill McCormick stepped to the podium to nominate Lenroot, a delegate
from Portland, Oregon, former Judge Wallace McCamant, called out loudly,
``Coolidge! Coolidge!'' Other delegates took up the cry. When Senator
McCormick finished his address, McCamant leaped on a chair among the
Oregon delegation and nominated Governor Calvin Coolidge of
Massachusetts for vice president. Showing enthusiasm for the first time,
the delegates demonstrated spontaneously in Coolidge's behalf. Lenroot
would be ``just one too many Senators on the presidential ticket,'' a
reporter observed. Delegates for other candidates who felt they had been
denied their choice for the top spot were determined to have a voice in
the second place. They voted 674 for Coolidge to 146 for
Lenroot.¹³
Coolidge himself was back in Boston, in the hotel where he lived as
governor, nursing his disappointment that all of his quiet campaigning
had seemingly made no impact on the presidential race. That evening as
he and Mrs. Coolidge were preparing to go down to dinner, he received
news about McCamant's surprising speech and the demonstration that
followed. The phone rang again, and Coolidge turned to his wife to utter
a single word: ``Nominated.''
``You aren't going to take it are you?'' asked Mrs. Coolidge.
``Well--I suppose I'll have to.'' said Coolidge.¹⁴
It had been perhaps the most unusual and independent vice-
presidential nomination in American political history. Where parties
normally balance, both Harding and Coolidge were unabashed conservatives
and comprised the most conservative ticket since the party had gone down
to disastrous defeat in 1912. But in 1920 that proved to be exactly what
the nation wanted, and in November the Harding-Coolidge ticket
overwhelmed the Democratic ticket of James M. Cox and Franklin D.
Roosevelt. At his inauguration as vice president, Calvin Coolidge took
satisfaction that ``the same thing for which I had worked in
Massachusetts had been accomplished in the nation. The radicalism which
had tinged our whole political and economic life from soon after 1900 to
the World War period was passed.'' ¹⁵

An Impassive Senate President

``More hotel life, I suppose,'' Grace Coolidge commented on their
move to Washington, D.C. The U.S. vice president still had no official
place of residence, and Coolidge was not prepared to spend his $12,000 a
year salary on purchasing a house commensurate with his position.
``There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so
important, as living within your means,'' he observed. The Coolidges
moved into the suite of rooms at the Willard Hotel being vacated by Vice
President and Mrs. Thomas R. Marshall, for which they paid eight dollars
a day. As vice president, he occupied an office in the Capitol and
another in the Senate office building. His staff consisted of a
secretary, a clerk, an assistant clerk, and a chauffeur. He inherited
Vice President Marshall's Cadillac.¹⁶
``Presiding over the Senate was fascinating to me,'' Coolidge later
wrote. Although the Senate's methods at first seemed peculiar, he soon
became familiar with them and suggested that they were ``the best method
of conducting its business. It may seem that debate is endless, but
there is scarcely a time when it is not informing, and, after all, the
power to compel due consideration is the distinguishing mark of a
deliberative body.'' However, as Coolidge tried to master the Senate
rules, he soon discovered that there was but one fixed rule: ``that the
Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.
When I had learned that, I did not waste much time on the other rules,
because they so seldom applied.'' ¹⁷
Vice President Coolidge presided in a remarkably impassive manner.
Once James A. Reed, a Missouri Democrat, and Porter J. McCumber, a North
Dakota Republican, engaged in a shouting match on the Senate floor.
Other senators and the galleries joined in the uproar, while Coolidge
simply watched the commotion. When the parliamentarian begged him to use
his gavel to restore order, the vice president replied, ``Yes I shall if
they get excited.'' ¹⁸

Doomed to be an Outsider

Coolidge's most controversial moment as vice president came in July
1921. Midwestern progressive Republicans were seeking federal relief for
farmers, whose sales and purchasing power had collapsed after the war.
Senator George Norris of Nebraska introduced a bill that would make it
easier to market American farm products overseas. The Harding
administration countered with a bill sponsored by Minnesota Senator
Frank Kellogg to make domestic marketing of farm goods easier. Norris
had asked Coolidge, as presiding officer, to recognize Senator Joseph E.
Ransdell, a Louisiana Democrat, first. Coolidge had agreed, but then he
left the chair and asked Charles Curtis of Kansas, a tough-minded
partisan senator, to preside in his place. When Ransdell stood and
sought recognition, Curtis ignored him and instead called upon Kellogg,
who in fact was still in his seat and had not even risen to seek
recognition. After the ensuing hubbub, as Kellogg claimed the floor,
Coolidge reentered the chamber and once again presided. Progressive
Republicans and Democrats long remembered this maneuver and never fully
trusted Coolidge again. His biographer, Donald McCoy, concluded, ``The
episode may have doomed Coolidge to be an outsider for the rest of his
time as Vice President and even have contributed to his troubles with
Congress while he was President. He was now distrusted by the
progressives and perhaps even disliked by the regulars for violating one
of the unwritten rules of the Senate.'' He had gone back on his
word.¹⁹
Coolidge lacked either the jovial good humor of his predecessor
Thomas Marshall or the type of personality that would attract senators
to him. In the Senate restaurant, Coolidge ate alone, in a corner,
facing the wall. ``Is that how you treat your presiding officer?''
someone asked Senator Edwin Ladd of North Dakota. ``Nobody has anything
to do with him,'' said the Senator. ``After this, of course, he's
through.'' Coolidge cast no tie-breaking votes and spoke only as
required--and as briefly as possible. Biographer Donald McCoy noted
that, while Coolidge had been a success as presiding officer in
Massachusetts, in the U.S. Senate he was ``almost a nonentity.''
²⁰
Largely overlooked in the Senate, Coolidge won more notice for all
of the ``dining out'' that he and his wife did. ``As the President is
not available for social dinners of course the next officer in rank is
much sought after for such occasions,'' he noted. On an average they ate
out three times a week during the congressional season. At first the
Coolidges enjoyed these social dinners, since as the ranking guests they
were able to arrive last and leave first. He considered it an
opportunity to become acquainted with official Washington. But
Washington proved a cruel atmosphere for the Yankee Coolidge. Stories
spread through the city that the new vice president was either very dumb
or very shy. Coolidge's table manners were peculiar to say the least. He
sat quietly, nibbling nuts and crackers and saying next to nothing to
those around him. Soon it became a Washington parlor game to tease the
vice president into talking. One famous story had a Washington socialite
telling him that she had bet her friends she could get him to say three
words. ``You lose,'' Coolidge replied. ``They provoked him to Yankee
aphorisms and he knew what they were up to,'' wrote William Allen White.
``So he clowned a little for his own delight, played the dumb man,
impersonated the yokel and probably despised his tormenters in his
heart.'' New Hampshire Senator George Moses told of a stag party where
Coolidge was a guest, when several senators spiked the punch--this
during Prohibition--to loosen up the vice president, but the more
Coolidge drank, the quieter he became. The longer he stayed in
Washington, the more suspicious he grew of everyone he met. When an old
friend warned that this was an unhealthy state of mind, Coolidge
replied: ``I do not think you have any comprehension of what people do
to me. Even small things bother me.'' Later, when he was president,
Coolidge declined an invitation to a fashionable Washington home. ``When
I lived at the Willard and was vice president they didn't know I was in
town,'' Coolidge exploded. ``Now that I am President they want to drag
me up to their house for one of their suppers and show me off to a lot
of people, and I'm not going. . . . I'm not going, and I'm not going to
let that wife of mine go.'' ²¹
Coolidge was blessed with a wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, whose
warmth and charm more than made up for his aloofness and eccentricities.
However, Coolidge tightly restricted her activities, forbidding her to
drive, ride horseback, or fly, from wearing slacks, bobbing her hair, or
expressing her opinion on any political issue. In the age of the
liberated woman of the 1920s, he wanted Grace to be the model of old-
fashioned womanhood. As if this were not enough, he also made her the
target for his pent-up anger and unhappiness. Always a quiet man in
public, Coolidge would explode in private by throwing temper tantrums.
Historian Donald McCoy has noted that ``the reserved and unathletic New
Englander could not release his frustrations in a healthy way. Whatever
release he got came in the form of tantrums, the brunt of which his wife
bore. Anything that was unexpected could lead him to prolonged moods of
sulking and even to fits of yelling.'' Most likely, Coolidge's private
outbursts resulted from his disappointment in the vice-presidency, which
left him in the shadows, powerless.²²

Sitting with the Cabinet

A major exception to Coolidge's isolation during this period was
President Harding's invitation to him to sit with the cabinet. This was
probably a response to the unhappy situation in the last years of the
Wilson administration, when Vice President Marshall had declined to
preside over the cabinet during the president's illness, and Secretary
of State Robert Lansing had been fired by Wilson for holding cabinet
meetings without his authorization. Harding had made the offer first to
Irvine Lenroot, when he was considered for the vice-presidency, and then
to Coolidge.²³ When they met after the convention, Harding
told the press:
I think the vice president should be more than a mere substitute
in waiting. In reestablishing coordination between the
Executive Office and the Senate, the vice president can
and ought to play a big part, and I have been telling
Governor Coolidge how much I wish him to be not only a
participant in the campaign, but how much I wish him to be
a helpful part of a Republican
administration.²⁴
Coolidge joined the cabinet meetings, becoming the first vice
president to do so on a regular basis. He sat at the farthest end of the
table from Harding, listening to what was said and saying almost nothing
himself. In his Autobiography, Coolidge wrote, ``If the Vice-President
is a man of discretion and character so that he can be relied upon to
act as a subordinate in that position, he should be invited to sit with
the Cabinet, although some of the Senators, wishing to be the only
advisers of the President, do not look on that proposal with favor.''
Coolidge believed that, although the vice president could probably offer
little insight about the Senate, and virtually nothing about the House,
a vice president needed to be fully informed of what was going on in
case he should become president. ``My experience in the Cabinet,'' he
concluded, ``was of supreme value to me when I became President.'' By
contrast, Coolidge's own vice president, Charles Dawes, disagreed and
let it be known publicly that he did not consider it wise for vice
presidents to be invited to cabinet meetings because of the separation
of powers between the branches.²⁵
The Harding administration meanwhile had become mired in scandal.
The Senate had launched an investigation of improper leasing of naval
oil reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming. There were also indications of
scandals brewing in the Veterans Administration and the Department of
Justice. Whether Harding would be reelected, whether he would keep
Coolidge on the ticket, and whether the ticket could be reelected in the
face of these scandals were all unanswerable questions in the summer of
1923, when a dispirited Harding traveled to Alaska and the Pacific
Coast. Vice President Coolidge was on vacation at his father's home in
Plymouth, Vermont, when on the night of August 2, 1923, he was awakened
by his father calling his name. ``I noticed that his voice trembled. As
the only times I had ever observed that before were when death had
visited our family, I knew that something of the gravest nature had
occurred,'' Coolidge recorded. Colonel John Coolidge informed his son
that a telegram had arrived announcing that President Harding had died
in San Francisco. As Calvin Coolidge noted, his father ``was the first
to address me as President of the United States. It was the culmination
of the lifelong desire of a father for the success of his son.''
Coolidge quickly dressed, and in a downstairs parlor, lit by a
flickering kerosene lantern, his father as a notary public administered
to him the oath of office as president. Arizona Senator Henry Fountain
Ashurst, a Democrat, observed that ``the simplicity of this episode
fired the public imagination.'' Harding's death and ``the sportsmanship
of the American people,'' Ashurst believed, built public support for
Coolidge's presidency and revived Republican spirits.²⁶

A Surprisingly Popular President

After his unsatisfying years as vice president, Coolidge became a
surprisingly popular president, easily winning reelection in 1924.
Correspondent Charles Willis Thompson, a keen observer of presidents
during the first decades of this century, believed that the nation found
psychological relief in Coolidge after the high-minded oratory of Wilson
and the bombast of Harding. Recognizing that he did not have the voice
of an orator, Coolidge ``never wasted time trying to acquire it.'' His
message was straightforward, with ``no purple . . . no argument, no
stock official phrases. He told Congress what he thought would be for
the good of the country and told it as briefly as he could.'' Thompson
concluded that Coolidge was as good as elected the day he sent his first
message to Congress in 1923. ``Congress, with its historic political
wisdom, banged him around the Capitol walls by the hair of his head,''
but the people loved him, and decided to ``Keep Cool With Coolidge.''
²⁷
Coolidge had the advantage of being everything that Harding was
not--which provided him some comfortable distance as the news of the
Harding administration's scandals broke. Harding was tall and handsome.
Coolidge was smaller, five feet nine inches tall, and weighed perhaps a
hundred and fifty pounds. Harding had a famous smile. Coolidge's skin
was smooth, one biographer noted, ``because of lack of exercise in
either frowning or smiling.'' Harding was gregarious. Coolidge was
aloof. Harding tolerated his friends, even the most corrupt of them.
Coolidge preached thrift and honesty. During the 1924 campaign, the
Democratic and Progressive candidates tried to tar Coolidge with the
Teapot Dome scandal but not a trace stuck to him.²⁸
The press, which had belittled Coolidge during his vice-presidency,
now helped build up his public image. Coolidge said very little, but
newspaper reporters must have news. ``So we grasped at little incidents
to build up human interest stories,'' explained correspondent Thomas L.
Stokes. At first the press pictured Coolidge as a ``strong, silent
man,'' so much so that the Baltimore Sun's veteran Washington
correspondent Frank R. Kent accused his press corps colleagues of
inflating Coolidge to make him look good. Kent compared Coolidge's
``weak and watery utterances'' at his press conferences with the
``forceful and vigorous'' dispatches that reporters produced. He charged
reporters with turning a passive, indecisive chief executive into ``a
red-blooded, resolute, two-fisted, fighting executive, thoroughly
aroused and determined.'' This mythical presidential image served
reporters' interests by appealing to the illusions of their readers and
their editors. But as time passed and it became clear that Coolidge was
neither strong nor silent, newspapers shifted their emphasis to his dry
wit and created a national character: ``Cal.'' ``Everyone spoke of him
fondly as 'Cal.' He was one of us,'' observed correspondent Stokes. ``He
was the ordinary man incarnate.'' Another veteran correspondent, Delbert
Clark, speculated that the press enjoyed writing, and even
manufacturing, homey little stories about Coolidge because ``the
mounting evidence he gave of being a very small, very solemn man in a
very big job, intrigued them by reason of the contradictions involved.''
²⁹
The presidency was far more gratifying for Coolidge than the vice-
presidential years had been. He claimed to maintain as much simplicity
in life as possible, clearly disliking most formal ceremonies. Yet he
also enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of office, and he could not hide
the pleasure on his face when the band played ``Hail to the Chief.'' But
the presidency was not always a happy time for Calvin Coolidge. In July
1924, he was devastated by the death of his son, Calvin, Jr. In playing
lawn tennis on the White House South Grounds, the boy had raised a
blister on his toe which resulted in blood poisoning. ``In his suffering
he was asking me to make him well. I could not,'' Coolidge remarked.
``When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with
him.'' ³⁰
Coolidge was never an innovative or active president. He was largely
uninterested in foreign policy. Embracing a laissez-faire philosophy
opposed to government intervention, he had no bold domestic programs but
carried on the policies begun under Harding. As he had throughout his
political life, he felt more comfortable blocking legislation that he
opposed than he did in proposing new measures. Thus, he vetoed such
legislation as the soldiers' bonus, the McNary-Haugen farm bills, and
Senator Norris' efforts to develop water power in the Tennessee River
Valley. He believed in reducing government regulation, cutting taxes,
and allowing business to operate with as little restraint as possible.
His presidency coincided with a period of tremendous economic
prosperity, for which he reaped full credit. The stock market soared,
although an investigation by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee a
few years later concluded that fully half of the fifty billion dollars
worth of stocks sold during the 1920s had been ``undesirable or
worthless.'' His secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, repeatedly urged
Coolidge to increase federal controls on private banking and stock
trading practices. (Coolidge could barely hide his distaste for his
active, energetic commerce secretary, whom he mocked as ``The Wonder
Boy.'') But the government continued its ``hands-off policies'' under
Coolidge's dictum that ``the business of America is business.'' Coolidge
left the presidency in March of 1929. By November the stock market had
crashed, taking the Coolidge prosperity with it. By the time he died in
January 1933, the nation was paralyzed in the worst depression of its
history. Although his successor Herbert Hoover bore the weight of blame
for that depression, historians have found Calvin Coolidge culpable of
contributory neglect.³¹
Calvin Coolidge never made any pretensions to greatness. ``It is a
great advantage to a President and a major source of safety to the
country, for him to know that he is not a great man,'' he recorded in
his Autobiography. That seems the most fitting epitaph for the
man.³²
CALVIN COOLIDGE

NOTES

¹ Claude M. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont
(Boston, 1940), p. 5; William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The
Story of Calvin Coolidge (New York, 1938).
² Calvin Coolidge, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
(New York, 1929), pp. 99, 174; White, p. vii.
³ Donald R. McCoy, Calvin Coolidge, The Quiet President
(Lawrence, KS, 1988), p. 8.
⁴ Coolidge, p. 71.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 83-99.
⁶ Ibid., p. 99.
⁷ Fuess, pp. 107-8.
⁸ Coolidge, p. 107.
⁹ Gifford Pinchot to Lady Jonstone, November 9, 1914,
Gifford Pinchot Papers, Library of Congress.
¹⁰ Coolidge, p. 141.
¹¹ McCoy, pp. 83-94.
¹² Charles Willis Thompson, Some Presidents I Have Known
and Two Near Presidents (Indianapolis, 1929), pp. 327-29, 361; Coolidge,
p. 148; Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man: The Life Behind the Masks of
Warren Gamaliel Harding (New York, 1965), pp. 142-49.
¹³ Thompson, pp. 362-64; Fuess, pp. 234-67; Herbert F.
Margulies, ``Irvine L. Lenroot and the Republican Vice-Presidential
Nomination of 1920,'' Wisconsin Magazine of History 61 (Autumn 1977):
21-31.
¹⁴ White, p. 214.
¹⁵ Coolidge, p. 158.
¹⁶ Fuess, p. 287; McCoy, p. 134.
¹⁷ Coolidge, pp. 161-62.
¹⁸ Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency
(Washington, 1956), p. 124.
¹⁹ McCoy, p. 136.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 134-35, 145.
²¹ Ibid., p. 162; Coolidge, pp. 160, 173; White, p. 222;
Fuess, p. 303.
²² McCoy, p. 145; White House Chief Usher Ike Hoover
later wrote: ``Those who saw Coolidge in a rage were simply startled.
The older employees about the White House who had known [Theodore]
Roosevelt used to think he raved at times, but in his worst temper he
was calm compared with Coolidge.'' Relating the tempers of various other
presidents, Hoover concluded, ``It remained for Coolidge, the one who
from his reputation would be least suspected, to startle the household
with sparks from his anger. Many times, too, the cause was of but
trifling importance. He would just work himself up to a real
explosion.'' Irwin Hood (Ike) Hoover, Forty-Two Years in the White House
(Boston, 1934), p. 233.
²³ Margulies, p. 25. See Chapter 28 of this volume,
``Thomas R. Marshall,'' p. 342.
²⁴ McCoy, p. 123.
²⁵ Coolidge, pp. 163-64; George H. Haynes, The Senate of
the United States: Its History and Practice (Boston, 1938), 1:225, 228-
29.
²⁶ Coolidge, pp. 174-75; George F. Sparks, ed., A Many-
Colored Toga: The Diary of Henry Fountain Ashurst (Tucson, AZ, 1962),
pp. 211, 223.
²⁷ Thompson, pp. 354-55.
²⁸ McCoy, p. xv; John D. Hicks, The Republican
Ascendancy, 1921-1933 (New York, 1960), p. 81.
²⁹ Thomas L. Stokes, Chip Off My Shoulder (Princeton, NJ,
1940), pp. 135-41; Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the
Washington Correspondents (Cambridge,, MA, 1991), p. 210; Delbert Clark,
Washington Dateline (New York, 1941), pp. 62-66.
³⁰ White, p. 413; Coolidge, p. 190.
³¹ Stokes, p. 138; Donald A. Ritchie, ``The Pecora Wall
Street Expose,'' in Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792-
1974, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Bruns, (New York, 1975),
pp. 2555-56; David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York,
1979), pp. 244-45; William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity,
1914-32 (Chicago, 1958), p. 246.
³² Coolidge, p. 173.
?

Chapter 30

CHARLES G. DAWES

1925-1929

CHARLES G. DAWES
CHARLES G. DAWES

Chapter 30

CHARLES G. DAWES

30th Vice President: 1925-1929

I should hate to think that the Senate was as tired of
me at the beginning of my service as I am of the Senate at
the end.
--Charles G. Dawes
It is ironic that ``Silent Cal'' Coolidge should have a vice
president as garrulous as Charles Gates Dawes. A man of action as well
as of blunt words, ``Hell'n Maria'' Dawes (the favorite expression by
which he was known) was in so many ways the opposite of President
Coolidge that the two men were never able to establish a working
relationship. The president probably never forgave his vice president
for stealing attention from him at their inaugural ceremonies, nor did
he ever forget that Dawes was responsible for one of his most
embarrassing defeats in the Senate. As a result, although Dawes was one
of the most notable and able men to occupy the vice-presidency, his
tenure was not a satisfying or productive one, nor did it stand as a
model for others to follow.
Charles Dawes was not Calvin Coolidge's choice for a running mate.
It would have taken a far more self-confident president to want a vice
president with a longer and more distinguished career than his own.
Dawes had been a prominent official in the McKinley administration when
Coolidge was still a city council member in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Dawes became a highly decorated military officer during the First World
War, was the president of a prestigious financial institution, was the
first director of the Bureau of the Budget, and devised the ``Dawes
Plan'' to salvage Europe's postwar economy, for which he received the
Nobel Peace Prize. Dawes had a keen concern for foreign affairs, in
which Coolidge showed little interest. As an activist in domestic
policy, Dawes convinced the Senate to pass the McNary-Haugen farm relief
bill; Coolidge vetoed the bill. Dawes was a problem solver, Coolidge a
problem avoider. The 1920s might have been a very different decade if
the Republican ticket in 1924 had been Dawes-Coolidge rather than
Coolidge-Dawes.

Banking, Business and Politics

Born in Marietta, Ohio, on August 27, 1865, Charles Dawes was the
great-great grandson of William Dawes, who had ridden with Paul Revere
to warn the colonists that the Redcoats were coming. Dawes' father,
Rufus Dawes, was a Civil War veteran and lumber merchant who served as a
Republican for one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. Young
Charlie, who even as a boy had a reputation for ``flying off the
handle'' when something angered him, attended the Marietta Academy in
Ohio and graduated from Marietta College in 1884. Two years later he
received his law degree from the Cincinnati Law School. While in law
school he worked during the summers as a civil engineer for the
Marietta, Columbus & Northern Ohio Railway Company.¹
In 1887, former Ohio Governor Rufus Walton hired Dawes to go to
Lincoln, Nebraska, and look after his real estate holdings. Dawes was
admitted to the bar in Nebraska and opened the law office of Dawes,
Coffroth & Cunningham. He established a reputation for handling railroad
rate cases under the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and as a ``people's
advocate against the railroad lobby.'' The same year that Dawes opened
his law office, William Jennings Bryan started his law practice in the
same building in Lincoln. Dawes, who was then twenty-two, and Bryan, who
was twenty-seven, attended Sunday services and Wednesday night prayer
meetings at the same Presbyterian church and even lived two houses apart
on the same street. As a consequence, the two men, from different
parties and with very different views on the issues, had many
opportunities to meet and debate politics. (In 1924, Dawes would run for
vice president against Bryan's brother Charles, the Democratic vice-
presidential candidate.) Dawes became director of the American Exchange
National Bank, a small bank in Lincoln, which he and other directors
fought hard to save during the panic of 1893. As a bank director, he
strongly disagreed with Bryan's advocacy of free silver to stimulate
inflation and help the indebted farmers. Dawes became so engrossed in
the currency issue that he published his first book, The Banking System
of the United States and Its Relation to the Money and Business of the
Country, in 1894.²
``I struck Lincoln right at the top of a boom,'' Dawes noted, ``then
it started sliding.'' The panic of 1893 had undermined his business and
banking career in Lincoln, sending him in search of new business
ventures elsewhere. Attracted by the utilities industry, he bought
control of the La Crosse, Wisconsin, Gas Light & Coke Company, and
became president of the People's Gas Light & Coke Company of Chicago. In
January 1895, he moved his family to Chicago to make that city the
center of his business interests. But within two weeks he met the
Cleveland industrialist Marcus A. Hanna, who was promoting the
presidential aspirations of Ohio Governor William McKinley. Writing in
his diary that ``McKinley seems to be the coming man,'' Dawes was bitten
by the political bug. He managed McKinley's preconvention campaign in
Illinois, winning that state's delegates away from the erstwhile
``favorite son'' candidate, Senator Shelby M. Cullom. Not only did
McKinley win the Republican nomination, but Dawes' old friend William
Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination. While Dawes disagreed
profoundly with the logic of free silver, he listened to Bryan's ``Cross
of Gold'' speech with a feeling of great pride ``for the brilliant young
man whose life for so many years lay parallel to mine, and with whom the
future years may yet bring me into conflict as in the past.''
³

Comptroller of the Currency

Mark Hanna put Dawes in charge of the Chicago headquarters, which
largely ran the McKinley campaign. Dawes also served on the Republican
National Executive Committee as McKinley's ``special representative.''
McKinley's victory led to Dawes' appointment as comptroller of the
currency, a post in which he sought to reform banking practices that had
led to the depression of the 1890s. McKinley treated Dawes ``as a father
would a son.'' Dawes frequently had lunch at the White House with
McKinley and his invalid wife Ida and returned for an evening of cards
or of playing the piano for the McKinleys' entertainment. (A self-taught
pianist, Dawes later wrote a popular piano piece, ``Melody in A Major,''
and when lyrics were added in 1951 it became the well-known song ``It's
All in the Name of the Game.'') More than a companion to the president,
Dawes was a trusted adviser. In 1900 when Mark Hanna tried to block the
vice-presidential nomination of New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, it
was Dawes who intervened with McKinley on Roosevelt's
behalf.⁴
In June 1901, Dawes decided to resign as comptroller of the currency
to return to Illinois and run for the Senate. He was assured of
McKinley's endorsement, but his resignation did not take place until
October, a month after McKinley's assassination. Dawes' political
ambitions were thwarted by new President Theodore Roosevelt, who
endorsed another candidate, and by the ``blond boss'' of the Illinois
Republican party, William Lorimer. Running for vice president in 1924
and reflecting on his only other run for elected office in 1901, Dawes
remarked: ``I don't know anything about politics. I thought I knew
something about politics once. I was taken up on the top of a twenty
story building and showed the promised land--and then I was kicked
off.'' ⁵
A day after losing the Senate nomination, the thirty-six-year-old
Dawes began to organize the Central Trust Company of Illinois. He became
its president and devoted his attentions to banking and to family life
until the First World War. Dawes had married Caro Blymyer in 1889. They
had two children and later adopted two more. In the late summer of 1912,
Dawes suffered the greatest tragedy of his life when his only son
drowned at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, while on a brief vacation before
returning to Princeton University. Deeply saddened, Dawes and his wife
withdrew from most social life and turned to philanthropy. In memory of
their son, they founded the Rufus Fearing Dawes Hotel for Destitute Men
in Chicago and Boston, and later established the Mary Dawes Hotel for
Women in honor of Dawes' mother.⁶

Supplying the War in Europe

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Dawes
received a telegram from Herbert Hoover, who had organized American
relief efforts in Europe and was now serving as Food Administrator.
Searching for talented administrators, Hoover wanted Dawes to take
charge of grain prices. But instead of a desk job in Washington, Dawes
longed to be in uniform. Hoover considered that a mistake. ``I can find
a hundred men who will make better lieutenant colonels of engineers, and
I want you right here,'' he argued. ``No, Mr. Hoover, I don't want to
consider it,'' Dawes replied. A few days later, Dawes at age fifty-two
received his commission as a major in the 17th Railway Engineers, bound
for France, and, just as Hoover predicted, he was soon a lieutenant
colonel.⁷
The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was commanded by General John
J. Pershing, who had known Dawes since the 1890s when Pershing was a
military instructor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. In August
1917, Pershing summoned Dawes to Paris and made him chief of supply
procurement for the American forces in Europe, assigning him to head the
board that collected supplies and to coordinate purchases to hold down
inflation and duplication of orders. Dawes rose to the rank of brigadier
general. When the Allied command was unified, General Dawes became the
U.S. member of the Military Board of Allied Supply. While representing
the United States Army in conferences with other Allied armies and
governments, Dawes particularly admired men of action rather than those
who simply talked. ``Action, then, is everything--words nothing except
as they lead immediately to it,'' he commented, adding, ``I came out of
the war a postgraduate in emergency conferences.'' ⁸ After
the Armistice in 1918, he remained in Europe to oversee the disposition
of surplus military property. In 1919 he resigned his commission and
returned to the United States. His wartime experiences in negotiating
and coordinating efforts with his Allied counterparts left him an
internationalist in outlook, advocating ratification of the Treaty of
Versailles and United States membership in the League of Nations. After
the war, everyone called him ``General Dawes,'' despite his protests to
the contrary.⁹
In 1920 Dawes supported his good friend, Illinois Governor Frank
Lowden, for the Republican presidential nomination, but that prize went
to Ohio's Warren G. Harding. In February 1921, however, an event
occurred that brought Dawes to the attention not only of president-elect
Harding but of the entire nation. A House of Representatives committee
to investigate war expenditures called Dawes to testify. Republicans--
who held the majority--were clearly eager to uncover any information
about ``extravagant purchases'' in the AEF that might tarnish the
outgoing administration of Woodrow Wilson. Journalist Bascom Timmons
recorded that Dawes, a busy man, had resented being called by the
committee. On the morning that he was due to testify, he walked around
the Capitol waiting for the committee to assemble, getting angrier all
the time. It took only a spark to set him off. In the course of the
interrogation, Representative Oscar Bland, an Indiana Republican,
pressed Dawes on how much the American army had paid for French
horses.¹⁰
``Hell'n Maria!'' Dawes exclaimed, jumping up from his seat and
striding to the mahogany table where the committee sat. ``I will tell
you this, that we would have paid horse prices for sheep, if they could
have hauled artillery!'' Peppering his remarks with profanity, Dawes
lectured the committee on the urgency of getting supplies to soldiers
who were being shot at. He recounted how he had cut through the red tape
and ``had to connive with the smuggling of horses over there,'' but he
got the horses to drag the cannon to the front. Turning the fire on
``pinhead'' politicians, Dawes roared: ``Your committee can not put a
fly speck on the American Army. . . . I am against that peanut politics.
This was not a Republican war, nor was it a Democratic war. It was an
American war.'' ¹¹
Afterwards, Dawes explained that he had ``suddenly decided that so
far as I could bring it about either the Committee or I would go out of
business.'' His ``Hell 'n Maria'' testimony took up seven hours for
three sessions of the committee, with the official stenographers
complaining that he often spoke too rapidly. Dawes' defense of the AEF
won great praise from both parties. The newspapers, and especially the
editorial cartoonists, loved Dawes' indignant outburst and quaint
expletive. His published testimony, even with the expletives deleted,
became a Government Printing Office best seller. The incident made him a
national figure, and in July 1921, when Congress created the Bureau of
the Budget, Harding appointed Dawes as its first director. Adding to his
colorful personality, Dawes at this time adopted his trademark pipe. For
years he had smoked as many as twenty cigars a day, but during the war a
British officer had given him a pipe. Soon after his appointment to the
Bureau of the Budget, a newspaper photograph showed him smoking his pipe
on the Treasury Department steps. A Chicago pipe manufacturer sent him a
new, strangely shaped pipe with most of its bowl below rather than above
the stem. Dawes tried it, liked it, and ordered a gross more. From then
on, he was rarely seen without this distinctive pipe, which together
with his wing-tip collars and hair parted down the middle, reinforced
his individualistic, iconoclastic, and idiosyncratic public
image.¹²

The Nobel Peace Prize

After spending a year setting up the first federal budget under the
new act, Dawes returned to Illinois, concerned about graft and political
corruption, especially in Chicago. He organized ``The Minute Men of the
Constitution,'' to watch elections and prevent vote fraud. The group
opposed the political activities of the Ku Klux Klan, and it also
assailed what it considered to be unfair labor union practices. Dawes
insisted that his group was not anti-union, but that it opposed the
closed union shop. At one point the ``Minute Men'' had a membership of
25,000, but after his election as vice president the group disbanded.
In 1923, the economy of Germany had deteriorated drastically. Since
Germany was unable to repay its war debts, France sent troops to occupy
the industrial Ruhr valley. President Harding appointed Dawes to head a
commission to study and solve the German financial problem. The ``Dawes
Plan'' offered ways to stabilize the German currency, balance its
budget, and reorganize its Reichbank, but the plan postponed action on
the most difficult issue of delaying and reducing the German war
reparations. Nevertheless, the ``Dawes Plan'' was recognized as a
significant enough contribution to world peace to win Dawes the 1925
Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with his British counterpart, Sir
Austen Chamberlain. Dawes donated his share of the prize money to the
Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins
University.

The Second Choice for the Second Spot

At the Republican convention in 1924, Calvin Coolidge was nominated
without significant opposition, but the front-running candidate for vice
president, Governor Lowden, had let it be known that he did not want the
second spot on the ticket. Nor did the popular Idaho Senator William E.
Borah want to be the number two man. A story at the time recorded that
President Coolidge had offered Borah a place on the ticket. ``For which
position?'' Borah had supposedly replied. On the second ballot, the
delegates nominated Lowden, but he declined to run, as threatened.
Republican National Chairman William Butler promoted Commerce Secretary
Herbert Hoover, but Hoover remained too unpopular with the farm states
for his price fixing as food commissioner during the war, and the
delegates on the third ballot chose Charles G. Dawes for vice president.
President Coolidge, who had already sent a congratulatory note to Frank
Lowden, accepted Dawes as someone who would add strength to the campaign
and who he expected would remain personally loyal to him.¹³
When the unexpected news came over the radio, Dawes was back at his
birthplace of Marietta, Ohio, delivering the commencement address to his
alma mater. ``There is one recollection I shall always treasure,'' he
later wrote. ``It is of the gathering of thousands of the people of the
town, the next day, to hear me speak briefly from the front porch of the
old family home; and the church bells of the town were rung in honor of
the occasion. Some people may claim that the vice-presidency does not
amount to much, but just then it seemed to me the greatest office in the
world.'' ¹⁴
During the campaign, Coolidge maintained his stance of speaking
infrequently and keeping his remarks as bland and inoffensive as
possible. He left it to Dawes to attack the Democratic candidate, John
W. Davis, and the Progressive candidate, Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La
Follette. Dawes entertained his audiences with the type of ``Hell'n
Maria'' speeches they expected, shaking his fist and denouncing La
Follette--whose platform among other things advocated allowing Congress
to overturn Supreme Court decisions--as a demagogue and dangerous
radical ``animated by the vicious purpose of undermining the
constitutional foundation of the Republic.'' Dawes went so far as to
suggest that La Follette was a Bolshevik, although La Follette had
publicly rejected Communist support and had been attacked by
them.¹⁵
Coolidge and Dawes were overwhelmingly elected in 1924, winning more
votes than the Democratic and Progressive candidates combined. ``When
Coolidge was elected President the world desired tranquility,'' Dawes
noted in his journal, ``--a reaction of its peoples from the excesses of
war.'' ¹⁶ But tranquility was not Charles Dawes' style.

An Assault on the Rules of the Senate

At his swearing-in in the Senate chamber in March 1925, Dawes was
called upon to deliver a brief inaugural address, a tradition that dated
back to John Adams in 1789. What the audience heard, however, was far
from traditional. As the Senate's new presiding officer, Dawes addressed
himself to ``methods of effective procedure,'' rather than any
particular policies or programs. He then launched into an attack on the
Senate rules, ``which, in their present form, place power in the hands
of individuals to an extent, at times, subversive of the fundamental
principles of free representative government.'' The rules of the Senate,
he declared, ran contrary to the principles of constitutional
government, and under these rules ``the rights of the Nation and of the
American people have been overlooked.'' ¹⁷
Dawes focused his attack on filibusters, which at that time were
being carried out most frequently by the small band of progressive
Republicans, such as Robert La Follette, Sr., and George Norris, who
held the balance of power in the Senate. Dawes declared that Rule 22,
which required a two-thirds majority of those present and voting to shut
off debate, ``at times enables Senators to consume in oratory those last
precious minutes of a session needed for momentous decisions,'' thus
placing great power in the hands of a minority of senators. ``Who would
dare oppose changes in the rules necessary to insure that the business
of the United States should always be conducted in the interests of the
Nation and never be in danger of encountering a situation where one man
or a minority of men might demand unreasonable concessions under threat
of blocking the business of the Government?'' he asked. Unless the rules
were reformed, they would ``lessen the effectiveness, prestige, and
dignity of the United States Senate.'' He insisted that ``reform in the
present rules of the Senate is demanded not only by American public
opinion, but I venture to say in the individual consciences of a
majority of the Members of the Senate itself.'' He concluded by
appealing to senators' consciences and patriotism in correcting these
defects in their rules.¹⁸
Since Dawes had not given advance copies of the speech to the press
or anyone else, no one had anticipated his diatribe. In the audience,
President Calvin Coolidge attempted indifference, but could not hide his
discomfort. Dawes had managed to upstage the president's own inaugural
address, which was to follow at ceremonies outside on the Capitol's east
front. As the senators proceeded to the inaugural platform, they talked
of nothing else but their anger over Dawes' effrontery, making
Coolidge's address anticlimactic. After the ceremony, Dawes compounded
the ill will when he joined the president to ride back to the White
House, instead of returning to the chamber to adjourn the Senate. In the
Senate chamber, there was considerable confusion. Senator James A. Reed
of Missouri noted that the Senate did not adjourn, nor did it recess.
``It simply broke up.'' ¹⁹
Most senators were less than receptive to Dawes' advice. ``Dawes
showed as little knowledge of the Senate's rules as he did good taste,''
snapped Democratic minority leader Joseph T. Robinson. ``It was exactly
what should not have been said,'' added Robinson's colleague from
Arkansas, Thaddeus Caraway. ``I regret that such occasion was perverted
into a farce,'' complained Senator Claude Swanson of Virginia. ``I have
an opinion of the spectacle but do not care to express it,'' was George
Norris' response, and Republican majority leader Charles Curtis declined
to make any public comment on the vice president's remarks. But while
the senators disapproved, columnist Mark Sullivan observed that the
public was delighted. Sullivan described Dawes as a hero who had finally
made a dent ``in that fine old encrusted Senatorial tradition,
buttressed by antique rules and practices, and solemnly defended by
conservative and radical Senators alike.'' ²⁰

An Irritated President

After upstaging the president on inaugural day, Dawes compounded his
error by writing to inform Coolidge that he did not think the vice
president should attend cabinet meetings. President Harding had invited
Coolidge to cabinet meetings on a regular basis, but Dawes did not
believe that Harding's action should necessarily set a precedent for
future presidents. He took the initiative by declining even before
Coolidge had offered him an invitation. ``This was done to relieve him--
if he shared my views--of any embarrassment, if he desired to carry them
out,'' Dawes later explained, ``notwithstanding the fact that he had
accepted Harding's invitation.'' Dawes dismissed suggestions by the
``busybodies and mischievemakers'' in Washington, who imagined
``unpleasant relations between Coolidge and myself.'' What Coolidge
thought is less certain. In his Autobiography, Coolidge counted his
experiences in the cabinet as being ``of supreme value'' to him when he
became president and suggested that the vice president should be invited
to sit with the cabinet, if he was ``a man of discretion and character
so that he can be relied upon to act as a subordinate in that
position.'' The implication was that Dawes did not fit that description.
In addition, Coolidge never mentioned Dawes by name in his
memoirs.²¹
Coolidge also felt irritated over an incident that occurred on March
10, only days after Dawes started presiding over the Senate. Up for
debate was the president's nomination of Charles Warren to be attorney
general. In the wake of Teapot Dome and other business-related scandals,
Democrats and Progressive Republicans objected to the nomination because
of Warren's close association with the ``Sugar Trust.'' At midday, six
speakers were scheduled to address Warren's nomination. Desiring to
return to his room at the Willard Hotel for a nap, Dawes consulted the
majority and minority leaders, who assured him that no vote would be
taken that afternoon. After Dawes left the Senate, however, all but one
of the scheduled speakers decided against making formal remarks, and a
vote was taken. When it became apparent that the vote would be tied,
Republican leaders hastily called Dawes at the Willard. The roused vice
president jumped in a taxi and sped toward the Capitol. But enough time
intervened to persuade the only Democratic senator who had voted for
Warren to switch his vote against him. By the time Dawes arrived there
was no longer a tie to break, and the nomination had failed by a single
vote--the first such rejection in nearly sixty years. President Coolidge
angrily held Dawes responsible for his most embarrassing legislative
defeat, and the rest of Washington could not resist teasing the vice
president over the incident. The Gridiron Club presented him with a
four-foot high alarm clock. And Senator Norris read a parody of
``Sheridan's Ride'' on the Senate floor:

Hurrah, Hurrah for Dawes!
Hurrah! hurrah for this high-minded man!
And when his statue is placed on high,
Under the dome of the Capitol sky,
The great senatorial temple of fame--
There with the glorious General's name
Be it said, in letters both bold and bright,
``Oh, Hell an' Maria, he has lost us the fight.''
²²

Stimulating a National Debate

Dawes bore the criticism surprisingly well. He was never a man to
shy away from controversy, and he enjoyed being at the center of
attention. He also enjoyed occupying the Vice President's Room behind
the Senate chamber, which he found impressive, with its tall mahogany
cabinet, Dolly Madison mirror, Rembrandt Peale portrait of Washington,
and chandelier that once hung in the White House. When the Senate was
not in session, large delegations of visitors would tour the corridor
outside his office, and since the door was generally kept open for
better ventilation they would always ``stop and peek in.'' The senators,
too, would stop and talk with the vice president who took such an active
interest in their rules and proceedings. But Dawes found it curious that
conversation always seemed to get around to whether ``this or that
Senator will be willing to concede the right-of-way to this or that
piece of general legislation as a measure of surpassing public
importance.'' He remained convinced that, by allowing unlimited debate,
the Senate rules granted an intolerable power to the
minority.²³
Rather than cease his criticism, Dawes continued to seek public
forums to denounce the Senate filibuster. During the summer recess in
1925, he toured the country addressing public meetings on the subject.
He pointed out that filibusters flourished during the short sessions of
Congress, held between December and March following each congressional
election, and that these protracted debates tied up critical
appropriations bills until the majority would agree to fund some
individual senator's pet project. He frequently cited a filibuster by
Senator Benjamin Tillman that brought a $600,000 appropriation to South
Carolina. Dawes praised the work of Senators Francis Warren, chairman of
the Appropriations Committee, and Reed Smoot, chairman of Finance. ``It
is they and their like who perform most of the difficult, disagreeable
and necessary work, speaking only when they have something to say and
accomplish.'' By contrast to such ``constructive'' senators, he had no
use for legislative showmen, radicals, and filibusterers.²⁴
Dawes' campaign stimulated a national debate on the Senate rules. A
significant rebuttal to his assertions came from the political scientist
Lindsay Rogers, who argued that filibusters served a useful purpose. Too
much legislation was hammered out in committees that met in secret,
where powerful corporate interests held sway, and where progressive
reformers had little influence. Rogers pointed out that ``the powers of
delay given individual Senators force into pending bills some amendments
that the Senate leaders would not accept were they free to act as they
desired.'' He also pointed out that despite the filibuster, the Senate
got a ``creditable amount of business'' done each session. Changing the
rules would be inadvisable, since it would silence the minority and
allow the majority to act unimpeded.²⁵
Although the Senate did not change its rules during his vice-
presidency, Dawes noted with satisfaction that it invoked cloture more
frequently than ever before. After 1917, when the cloture rule was first
adopted, the Senate had voted to cut off debate on the Versailles Treaty
in 1919 but failed to invoke cloture on tariff legislation in 1921 and
1922. During the Sixty-ninth Congress, which ran from 1925 to 1927, the
Senate cast seven votes on cloture, and three times gained the two-
thirds majority sufficient to cut off filbusters. Not until the Ninety-
third Congress, from 1973 to 1975, after a rules change had reduced the
majority needed to vote cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths of the
members, did the Senate equal and surpass that number of successful
cloture votes.

Farm Relief and Banking Reform

Dawes also personally intervened in other attempts to cut off
debate, and his efforts led to the Senate's passage of bills that
extended the Federal Reserve banks and would have provided farm relief.
Agitation for farm relief became a pressing issue during the 1920s, when
American farmers were shut out of the general prosperity of the era.
After the First World War, farm prices had fallen and never recovered.
Members of Congress from midwestern and plains states therefore formed
the Farm Bloc, consisting of some twenty-five senators and one hundred
representatives. Holding the balance of power in Congress, they promoted
legislation to solve the problem of distributing surplus farm produce.
Each year between 1924 and 1928, Senator Charles McNary of Oregon and
Representative Gilbert Haugen of Iowa, both Republicans, sponsored the
McNary-Haugen bill to permit the federal government to buy crop
surpluses and sell them abroad while at the same time maintaining a high
tariff on the importation of farm goods. The result would have raised
prices in the United States.
Robert M. La Follette, Jr., who had succeeded his late father in the
Senate, led a filibuster against the McFadden-Pepper bill to extend the
charters of the Federal Reserve Banks. By holding up passage of the bank
bill, La Follette sought to pressure the Senate to vote on the McNary-
Haugen bill. The only way to break this logjam, as far as Dawes could
see, was to form a coalition ``between the conservatives favoring the
bank bill and certain radicals favoring the farm bill.'' The vice
president intervened, calling representatives of both groups to a
meeting in his room. One of the participants, Pennsylvania Senator
George Wharton Pepper, commented that ``by sheer force of his
personality, [Dawes] forced an agreement that both measures should be
voted upon. This agreement was carried out. Both bills passed.'' Pepper
gave Dawes the chief credit for enacting these bills, as did Senator
James E. Watson, the Indiana Republican who would soon become majority
leader. In the course of a speech on equalization fees, Watson noted,
``This explanation of the equalization fee was prepared by the Vice
President, who is a supporter of the McNary-Haugen bill.'' Although
Watson deleted this indiscretion from the Congressional Record, alert
reporters in the press gallery had already publicized the statement.
Dawes' interest in this legislation did not further endear him to
President Coolidge, who twice vetoed the McNary-Haugen bills that his
vice president had helped the Senate pass. Coolidge complained that
``the McNary-Haugen people have their headquarters in [Dawes']
chambers.'' ²⁶

An Irksome Job for a Man of Action

As a man of action, Charles Dawes found the job of presiding over
Senate debates ``at times rather irksome.'' He felt more comfortable in
executive and administrative positions with ``specific objectives and
well-defined authority and responsibilities.'' He preferred clear
statements of fact to speeches that appealed to prejudice or emotion. As
presiding officer, he enjoyed making decisions about rulings from the
chair and took some pride in the fact that the Senate had never
overturned one of his decisions, but he attributed much of his success
to the Senate's young journal clerk, Charles Watkins. Watkins had
studied the rules and compiled the Senate Precedents, making himself
``the actual parliamentarian'' of the Senate. ``Senate precedents are
almost always conflicting, and when Charley Watkins gives me a choice of
precedents to follow, I sometimes make my own decision. But it is
chiefly upon his advice that I act.'' A decade later, Watkins became the
Senate's first official parliamentarian, a post he held until his
retirement in 1964.²⁷
Dawes similarly bristled over the social requirements of the vice-
presidency, and as one Washington hostess recorded, ``his social
tactics, no less than his insubordination to the Senate, brought down
blame upon him in Washington.'' Although he frequently dined out and
entertained generously, it was always on his own terms. He would arrive
late, leave early, and smoke his pipe at the dinner table. Caro Dawes
also disappointed Washington's social set. Lacking the stamina that Mrs.
Thomas Marshall and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge had shown for attending a
continuous procession of luncheons and receptions, Mrs. Dawes declined
many invitations. She never seemed to enjoy ``presiding over the Ladies
of the Senate,'' and looked visibly relieved when her guests departed.
Yet even her critics conceded that her ``manner was sweet and gentle,
her conversation cultured, and her dignity unimpeachable,'' providing a
gentle counterpart to her ``Hell 'n Maria'' husband. The vice
president's estrangement from the president further shaded his social
standing. As one Senate wife later confided, ``I have always had a
feeling which many share, that a slightly different attitude on the part
of the Coolidges might have done much to relieve the strain so far as
the Dawes were concerned.'' ²⁸
In 1927, President Coolidge stunned the nation with his announcement
that he did not choose to run for reelection the following year.
Although pundits debated whether Coolidge wanted to accept a draft, his
announcement opened a spirited campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination. Although Dawes was frequently mentioned for the presidency,
he announced that he was not a candidate and instead favored his
longtime friend, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden. The nomination went
instead to Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, whose supporters
considered putting Dawes on their ticket as vice president. But
President Coolidge let it be known that he would consider Dawes'
nomination as a personal affront. Instead, the nod went to Senate
Majority Leader Charles Curtis of Kansas. For the third straight time,
the Republican ticket swept the national election.²⁹

A Travesty Upon Good Government

As Dawes' term of office approached its end, a senator told him how
much the members of the Senate thought of him, adding ``but the Senate
got very tired of you at the beginning of your service.'' Dawes replied,
``I should hate to think that the Senate was as tired of me at the
beginning of my service as I am of the Senate at the end.''
³⁰
At about this time, Dawes attended the annual Gridiron Dinner. He
and his successor, Charles Curtis, were ordered to stand while the
``Dawes Decalogue, or the Letter of a Self-made Has-Been to His
Successor'' was read, listing several commandments drawn from ``the
depths of my experience'':
Don't steal the first page on Inauguration Day, and you may be
invited to sit in the Cabinet.
Don't be afraid to criticize the Senate. You know how much it
needs it. The public likes it and the Senate thrives on it. . . .
Don't try to change the Senate Rules.
Don't buck the President if you want to stay more than four
years.
Don't do your sleeping in the day time.³¹
Ironically, Dawes spent his last days in the Senate watching another
filibuster, napping on the couch in his office and responding when the
quorum bells rang. When the Senate dispatched its sergeant at arms to
``arrest'' absent senators, Dawes considered listening to the profanity
of the arrested senators as they were brought in ``one of the few
pleasant incidents of such proceedings.'' He noted with some dismay that
the galleries were filled to watch the filibuster and grumbled that ``a
travesty upon good government in the Senate is regarded as an amusement
rivaling a picture show.'' In his farewell speech to the Senate on March
4, 1929, Dawes reiterated his objections to the Senate rules, saying,
``I take back nothing.'' ³²
Dawes had resigned as chairman of the board of the Central Trust
Company of Illinois when he was elected vice president. After his term
in Washington, he returned as honorary chairman, when it merged to
become the Central Republic Bank & Trust Co. He became chairman of a
financial commission to the Dominican Republic, and chairman of a
committee to finance the exposition ``A Century of Progress, Chicago,
1933.'' In April 1929, President Hoover appointed Dawes U.S. ambassador
to Great Britain, a post he held until 1932. He was scheduled to head
the American delegation to the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva,
Switzerland, when President Hoover persuaded him to take charge of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which Congress had just created to
assist corporations and banks in need of relief from the Great
Depression. Dawes' national standing rose so high that some Republicans
talked of dumping Vice President Curtis from the ticket in favor of
Dawes as a ``rip-snorting, hell-raising'' candidate to boost Hoover's
chances of reelection. Then in June 1932, Dawes abruptly resigned as
chairman of the RFC. His own financial base, the Central Republic Bank
of Chicago was near collapse and required a ninety million dollar loan
from the RFC to keep it alive and to keep the entire Chicago banking
structure from collapsing. Dawes had to resign to avoid a conflict of
interest.³³
Dawes, whose early career was shaken by the panic of 1893, was now
confronted by an even greater financial crisis, one that shook his
natural self-confidence and ended whatever remaining political chances
he might have had. Reporter Thomas L. Stokes met Dawes shortly after his
resignation from the RFC and found him ``a dejected, dispirited man.''
Dawes was distributing a typewritten statement to the press predicting
business improvement. ``That's all he had to say,'' wrote Stokes. ``He
was manifestly uneasy and nervous, not the hail fellow, the 'Hell and
Maria' I had known about Washington for several years. I wondered at the
time what was wrong.'' Several days later Stokes heard rumors about the
shaky banking situation in Chicago and then about the RFC loan.
Eventually the Central Republic Bank was placed in receivership and
liquidated. Dawes reorganized it as the City National Bank & Trust
Company of Chicago and paid back the RFC loans. He remained associated
with the bank until he died at the age of eighty-five, on April 23,
1951.³⁴
Historians have concluded that if Dawes was not really a leader, he
acted like one. As vice president, he would not accept direction from
the president, and whenever his views did coincide with Coolidge's his
lobbying on behalf of administration measures was more likely to hurt
rather than help. Dawes' forthrightness and tactlessness incurred the
anger of many senators. Although his ``bull-like integrity'' won Dawes
recognition as an outstanding vice president, that quality antagonized
the Coolidge Administration more than aiding it. As for Dawes, he
believed that the vice-presidency ``is largely what the man in it makes
it.'' And for his part, he made the most of it.³⁵
Charles G. Dawes

NOTES

¹ Paul R. Leach, That Man Dawes (Chicago, 1930), p. 32.
² Ibid., pp. 40-48; Bascom N. Timmons, Portrait of an
American: Charles G. Dawes (New York, 1953), p. 26; Charles G. Dawes, A
Journal of the McKinley Years (Chicago, 1950), pp. vii-viii; Dawes was
also the author of Essays and Speeches (1915), A Journal of the Great
War (1921), The First Year of the Budget of the United States (1923),
Notes as Vice President (1935), How Long Prosperity? (1937), A Journal
of Reparations (1939), A Journal as Ambassador to Great Britain (1939),
and A Journal of the McKinley Years (1950).
³ Timmons, p. 18; Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years,
pp. 51, 89.
⁴ Charles G. Dawes, Notes as Vice President, 1928-1929
(Boston, 1935), p. 49; National Cyclopedia of American Biography (New
York, 1958), p. 7; Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, pp. 232-33.
⁵ Leach, p. 102.
⁶ Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, pp. 443-49.
⁷ Leach, p. 149.
⁸ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, p. 10.
⁹ Leach, p. 167.
¹⁰ Timmons, pp. 194-95.
¹¹ The ``Hell 'n Maria'' reference does not appear in the
hearing transcripts. As the subcommittee chairman explained: ``Objection
has been made by members of the committee to the fact that at the
request of the witness, Mr. Dawes, the many fluent expressions of
profanity were omitted from the transcript.'' U.S. Congress, House of
Representatives, Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department,
War Expenditures, 66th Cong., 2d sess (Washington, 1921), pp. 4427,
4492, 4515; Timmons, pp. 195-98; Leach, pp. 175-78.
¹² Dawes, Notes as Vice President, pp. 10-12; Leach, pp.
186-88.
¹³ Claude M. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge: The Man From Vermont
(Boston, 1940), pp. 345-46.
¹⁴ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, p. 18.
¹⁵ Donald R. McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President
(Lawrence, KS, 1988), pp. 254-59; William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of
Prosperity, 1914-32 (Chicago, 1958), p. 134.
¹⁶ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, p. 32.
¹⁷ McCoy, pp. 264-65; U.S., Congress, Senate,
Congressional Record, 69th Cong., special sess., p. 3.
¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 3-4.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 8; Fuess, p. 361.
²⁰ Leach, pp. 249-50; Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The
United States, 1900-1925 (New York, 1935), 6:634-36.
²¹ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, pp. 33-34; Calvin
Coolidge, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (New York, 1929), pp.
163-64.
²² Richard Lowitt, George W. Norris: The Persistence of a
Progressive, 1913-1933 (Urbana, IL, 1971), pp. 279-80.
²³ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, pp. 154, 169.
²⁴ McCoy, pp. 268-69; Dawes, Notes as Vice President, pp.
110, 288.
²⁵ Lindsay Rogers, The American Senate (New York, 1926),
pp. 188-90.
²⁶ Dawes, Notes as a Vice President, pp. 62-70; McCoy, p.
323; Leach, p. 273; see also George Wharton Pepper, In The Senate
(Philadelphia, 1930).
²⁷ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, pp. 107, 179-80.
²⁸ Frances Parkinson Keyes, Capital Kaleidoscope: The
Story of a Washington Hostess (New York, 1937), pp. 140-43.
²⁹ ``Heap Big Chief,'' American Mercury 17 (August 1929):
404.
³⁰ Dawes, Notes as Vice President, p. 255.
³¹ Ibid., pp. 183-84.
³² Ibid., pp. 299, 304, 316.
³³ David Burner, Herbert Hoover, A Public Life (New York,
1979), p. 275.
³⁴ Thomas L. Stokes, Chip Off My Shoulder (Princeton, NJ,
1940), pp. 329-30.
³⁵ McCoy, p. 247; Dawes, Notes as Vice President, p. 4.
?

Chapter 31

CHARLES CURTIS

1929-1933

CHARLES CURTIS
CHARLES CURTIS

Chapter 31

CHARLES CURTIS

31st Vice President: 1929-1933

His politics were always purely personal. Issues never
bothered him.
--William Allen White
In the spring of 1932, George and Ira Gershwin's Broadway musical,
``Of Thee I Sing,'' spoofed Washington politics, including a vice
president named Alexander Throttlebottom, who could get inside the White
House only on public tours. The tour guide, who failed to recognize
Throttlebottom, at one point engaged him in a discussion of the vice-
presidency:
Guide: Well, how did he come to be Vice President?
Throttlebottom: Well, they put a lot of names in a hat, and he
lost.
Guide: What does he do all the time?
Throttlebottom: Well, he sits in the park and feeds the peanuts
to the pigeons and the squirrels, and then he takes walks, and goes
to the movies. Last week, he tried to join the library, but he
needed two references, so he couldn't get in.¹
Audiences laughed heartily at these lines, in part because they
could easily identify the hapless Throttlebottom with the incumbent vice
president, Charles Curtis. Curtis was never close to President Herbert
Hoover and played no significant role in his administration. Despite
Curtis' many years of experience as a member of the House and Senate and
as Senate majority leader, his counsel was rarely sought on legislative
matters. His chief notoriety as vice president came as a result of a
messy social squabble over protocol, which only made him appear
ridiculous. Many Republicans hoped to dump Curtis from the ticket when
Hoover ran for reelection. Given Curtis' Horatio Alger-style rise in
life, and his long and successful career in Congress, how did he become
such a Throttlebottom as vice president?

Formative Years on the Reservation

Although colorful in itself, Charles Curtis' actual life story often
became obscured by its political mythology.² He began life in
1860 in North Topeka, Kansas, where he spent his earliest years partly
in the white and partly in the Native American community. The son of
Orren Curtis, a white man, and Ellen Pappan, who was one-quarter Kaw
Indian, Charles Curtis on his mother's side was the great-great grandson
of White Plume, a Kansa-Kaw chief who had offered assistance to the
Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. White Plume's daughter married Louis
Gonville, a French-Canadian fur trader, and their daughter, Julie
Gonville, married Louis Pappan. As a result of the Kansa-Kaw treaty of
1825, the tribe relinquished its claims to its traditional lands in
Missouri and Kansas. A two-million-acre reservation was established west
of Topeka for full-blooded Indians, while a series of fee-simple land
grants along the Kansas river were set aside for ``half-breeds''--those
who had intermarried with whites. Curtis' grandmother Julie Gonville
Pappan received ``Half-Breed Reservation No. Four,'' directly across the
river from the Kansas capital, where she and her husband ran a
profitable ferry business.
Reflecting his mother's heritage, Charles Curtis spoke French and
Kansa before he learned English. His mother died in 1863, about the time
that his father left to fight in the Civil War. Soon thereafter, Orren
Curtis remarried, divorced, remarried again, and was dishonorably
discharged from the Union army. At the end of the war, Curtis was court
martialled for having hanged three prisoners in his custody--or as the
charges read for ``executing the bushwakers.'' Sentenced to a year's
hard labor at the Missouri State Penitentiary, he was pardoned a month
later and returned to Kansas. Given Orren's unstable circumstances and
roving nature, young Charley remained in the custody of his paternal
grandparents. In 1865, his maternal grandparents, Louis and Julie Pappan
Gonville, left North Topeka to return to the Kaw reservation at Council
Grove, concerned that otherwise they might be excluded from future land
settlements and compensation. The next year, young Charley went to live
with them on the reservation.³
Since Charley could speak the Kaw language, he fit comfortably into
the tribe. ``I had my bows and arrows,'' he later recalled, ``and joined
the other boys in shooting arrows at nickles, dimes, and quarters which
visitors would place in split sticks.'' In those still-frontier days,
the Kaw reservation was frequently raided by nomadic Cheyenne Indians,
and during one attack Charley was sent on a mission to inform Topeka.
``I volunteered to make the trip,'' he later told audiences. ``When we
heard the Cheyennes were coming, the horses and ponies were driven to
pasture, some distance from my grandpa's home, so there was no horse or
pony to ride. I therefore, started out on foot, traveling during the
night.'' The next day, he arrived in Topeka, some sixty miles away.
Curtis' ``cross-country run'' made him a celebrity in North Topeka, but
the incident also convinced his paternal grandparents, William and
Permelia Curtis, that their grandson should be raised in the more
``civilized'' atmosphere of Topeka rather than return to the
reservation.⁴
Curtis had learned to ride Indian ponies bareback and won a
reputation as a ``good and fearless rider.'' Back in North Topeka, his
grandfather William Curtis had built a race track, and in 1869 Charles
Curtis rode in his first race. He soon became a full-fledged jockey and
continued to ride until 1876. A fellow jockey described Curtis as
``rather short and wiry'' and ``just another brush boy jockey,''
explaining that eastern riders ``called us brush boys because we rode in
what would be called the sticks.'' As a winning jockey, Curtis was known
throughout Kansas as ``The Indian Boy.'' His mounts made a lot of money
for the local gamblers and prostitutes who bet on him, and he recalled
that after one race a madam bought him ``a new suit of clothes, boots,
hat and all,'' and had a new jockey suit made for him; others bought him
candy and presents. ``I had never been so petted in my life and I liked
it,'' Curtis reminisced.⁵
His family, however, had greater ambitions for the boy than horse
racing. In 1871, grandfather William Curtis brought suit on behalf of
Charley and his sister Elizabeth to establish their claim, over that of
their father, for title to their mother's share of the Half-Breed Lands
in North Topeka. When Curtis' father lost this suit, he left Topeka for
good. Grandfather Curtis wanted Charley to stop racing and go back to
school, but after his grandfather's death in 1873, the boy set out to
join his other grandparents Louis and Julie Pappan, who were traveling
with the Kaw Tribe from Kansas to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.
Still on the tribal roll, and ``longing for the old life,'' he wanted to
live on the reservation. Grandmother Julie talked him out of it. She
invited him to her wagon and asked why he wanted to go to the Indian
Territory. While she would have liked nothing better than to have him
live with her, she told him that on the reservation he would end up
``like most of the men on it,'' without an education or future
prospects. If Charley expected to make something of himself, he should
return to Topeka and attend school. ``I took her splendid advice and the
next morning as the wagons pulled out for the south, bound for Indian
Territory, I mounted my pony and with my belongings in a flour sack,
returned to Topeka and school,'' Curtis recounted. ``No man or boy ever
received better advice, it was the turning point in my life.''
⁶

A Passion for Politics

In Topeka, Curtis lived with grandmother Permelia Hubbard Curtis, a
decidedly strong-minded woman. ``She brooked no opposition,'' recalled
Charley's half-sister, Dolly. ``I think she regarded being both a
Methodist and a Republican as essential for anyone who expected to go to
heaven.'' When Charley was offered a contract to race at the
Philadelphia Centennial in 1876, Permelia Curtis put her foot down.
Instead, he retired as a jockey and went to high school. After
graduating, he studied law, supporting himself by working as a custodian
in a law firm and by driving a hack. When he had no customers, he would
stop under street lamps to read his law books. In 1881, at the age of
twenty-one, Charles Curtis was admitted to the Kansas bar. Although his
life appeared to be a rags-to-riches story, Curtis had in fact a
considerable inheritance in land in North Topeka. The young lawyer
plunged into real estate, selling lots and building houses. He also
opened his own firm and practiced criminal law. In 1884, Charles Curtis
married Anna Baird. They had three children and also took in his half-
sister Dolly when her mother died.⁷
As a young man, Curtis showed a passion for politics. In 1880,
during James Garfield's campaign for president, Curtis donned an
oilcloth cap and carried a torch in a Republican parade through Topeka.
It was only a matter of time before the popular ``Indian jockey'' ran
for office himself. In 1884, after shaking every hand in the district,
Curtis won election as Shawnee county attorney. Since both his father
and grandfather Curtis had operated saloons in North Topeka, he was
supported by the liquor interests, which had also retained his law firm.
But once elected, Curtis insisted on enforcing the state's prohibition
laws and closed down all of the saloons in the county. He won attention
not only as a ``dry,'' but as a law-and-order prosecutor.⁸
By a single vote in 1889, Curtis lost the nomination to fill a
vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives. It was a time of agrarian
depression, when voters in the West were turning away from conservatives
like Curtis in favor of the more radical solutions put forward by the
Farmers' Alliance and its political offspring, the Populist party. In
1891, William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette, first met the
``young prince,'' Charles Curtis, and later provided this description:
He came down from Topeka to campaign the county, sent by the
Republican state central committee. His job was to fight
the Farmers' Alliance. He had a rabble-rousing speech with
a good deal of Civil War in it, a lot of protective
tariff, and a very carefully poised straddle on the
currency question (which, I was satisfied then--and still
think--that he knew little about, and cared nothing for).
For his politics were always purely personal. Issues never
bothered him. He was a handsome fellow, five feet ten,
straight as his Kaw Indian grandfather must have been,
with an olive skin that looked like old ivory, a silky,
flowing, handlebar mustache, dark shoe-button eyes, beady,
and in those days always gay, a mop of crow's wing hair, a
gentle ingratiating voice, and what a smile! ⁹
For three days, White and Curtis toured the county together, with
White making the introductions and Curtis making the speeches. Never had
White met anyone who could charm a hostile audience as effectively as
did Curtis, whose personality could overshadow whatever he was speaking
about. This trait helped Curtis defeat the Populist and Democratic
fusion candidate for a seat in the House in 1892--the same election that
saw Kansas vote for the Populist presidential candidate and elect a
Populist governor. Curtis' upset victory brought him to the attention of
prominent easterners, such as House Republican leader Thomas B. Reed,
who were delighted that someone who thought the way they did on tariff,
railroad, and currency issues could win election in so Populist a state
as Kansas. Reed took a particular liking to ``the Indian,'' as he called
Curtis, and made him one of his lieutenants.¹⁰

``Our Charley''

When Curtis first came to Washington, Democrats firmly controlled
the federal government. Grover Cleveland had just been elected to his
second term as president, and in the House Democrats held 218 seats,
Republicans 124, and the Populists 14. Then in 1893 a severe economic
depression dramatically reversed party fortunes. Campaigning against the
Democrats as the party of the ``empty dinner pail,'' Republicans won 254
seats in the next Congress, leaving the Democrats with 93 and the
Populists with 10. Tom Reed, who had resumed the speakership with the
return of a Republican majority, trusted Curtis' political judgment.
According to an often-repeated story, Curtis once entered Speaker Reed's
office and found a group of Republicans discussing the restoration of
the gold standard. ``Indian, what would you do about this?'' Reed asked.
Curtis suggested taking the matter out of the hands of the standing
committees that had been dealing with it, since it was apparent they
would never agree. Instead, he recommended appointing a special
committee to write a new bill. Reed liked the idea so much that he
appointed Curtis as a member of the special committee that drafted the
Gold Standard Act of 1900.¹¹
Curtis devoted most of his attention to his service on the Committee
on Indian Affairs, where he drafted the ``Curtis Act'' in 1898. Entitled
``An Act for the Protection of the People of the Indian Territory and
for Other Purposes,'' the Curtis Act actually overturned many treaty
rights by allocating federal lands, abolishing tribal courts, and giving
the Interior Department control over mineral leases on Indian lands.
Having reinstated his name on the Kaw tribal rolls in 1889, Curtis was
able, through his position on the House Indian Affairs Committee, to
calculate the benefits he might receive from government allotments to
his tribe. In 1902, he drafted the Kaw Allotment Act under which he and
his children received fee simple title to Kaw land in
Oklahoma.¹²
Congressman Curtis, hailed throughout Kansas as ``Our Charley,''
assiduously built his political base in the state. William Allen White
recalled that Curtis carried with him little books containing the names
of all the Republicans in each township and used to mumble these names
``like a pious worshiper out of a prayer book'' to commit them to
memory. When Curtis greeted a voter, he could recall the man's name and
ask about his wife, children, and business. He left voters convinced
that they were intimates. In 1903, Curtis made a bid for a Senate seat,
competing against fellow Republican Representative Chester Long. Both
men had strong support from the railroads, Long being allied with the J.
P. Morgan interests and Curtis identified with the Jay Gould railroads.
Editor William Allen White grumbled that the money and influence in the
election came from the railroads and ``the people had nothing to do with
it.'' ¹³
When the Republicans deadlocked, Long and Curtis reached an
agreement that Long would gain the nomination in 1903 and would then
support Curtis for the next Senate opening--which occurred sooner than
anyone anticipated. In 1904, Kansas Senator Joseph R. Burton was
indicted by a federal grand jury in St. Louis, Missouri, for
representing clients for a fee before the Post Office in violation of
federal statutes. Although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this
conviction on the grounds that Missouri lacked jurisdiction, Burton was
tried and convicted again in 1905. In May 1906, the Supreme Court upheld
Burton's second conviction, and as the Senate prepared to expel him,
Burton resigned on June 4, 1906.
At that time, state legislatures still elected U.S. senators, but
since the Kansas legislature was not in session, the governor appointed
Alfred W. Benson to fill the vacancy. When the legislature reconvened,
Curtis and several other Republicans challenged Benson for the seat.
Kansas progressives promoted the candidacy of Joseph L. Bristow, arguing
that he would more faithfully support the reform legislation of
President Theodore Roosevelt. Curtis turned for help to Roosevelt's
chief conservative opponent, Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich. As
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Aldrich handled all tariff
legislation and was able to channel considerable amounts of money from
business interests to pro-tariff politicians. Aldrich supplied Curtis
with funds to purchase newspapers that would support his senatorial
candidacy. William Allen White, who supported Bristow, warned President
Roosevelt that attorneys for every railroad in the state were for
Curtis. ``Two railroad attorneys when I asked them why they were for
Curtis, frankly told me in confidence of friendship that orders came
from higher up to be for Curtis and they are obeying orders,'' White
wrote to the president. But Roosevelt seemed less concerned, assuring
White that ``so far my experience with Curtis has been rather more
pleasant than with the average of his colleagues.'' ¹⁴

A High-Tariff Man

The state legislature elected Charles Curtis senator on January 23,
1907, and he took his seat a week later. Just as he had worked closely
with Tom Reed in the House, Curtis became a chief lieutenant for Senator
Aldrich. Then in his last years in the Senate, and having outlasted his
most powerful allies, Aldrich came to rely on a group of younger, high-
tariff colleagues, including Curtis, W. Murray Crane of Massachusetts,
Eugene Hale of Maine, and Reed Smoot of Utah. In 1909, Curtis played an
influential role in the passage of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which
raised rates so high that it helped split the Republican party into
warring conservative and progressive factions. Two years later, that
split claimed Curtis as a victim, when he was defeated for renomination
by a progressive Republican--who in turn was defeated by a
Democrat.¹⁵
As a result of the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, the
first direct popular elections of senators were held in 1914.
Progressives were confident that the people would support their
candidates, but with an economic recession at home and war in Europe,
voters nationwide instead turned to conservative candidates. After
defeating the progressive incumbent Joseph Bristow for the Republican
Senate nomination, Charles Curtis went on to defeat both a Democratic
and a Progressive party opponent that November.¹⁶
Curtis returned to the Senate in 1915 as a symbol of the rewards of
party regularity and the defeat of insurgency. Following the pattern set
by Senate Democrats, who had created the post of party whip in the
previous Congress, Senate Republicans appointed New York Senator James
Wadsworth as both conference secretary and whip. Then, within a week,
the party decided to split these posts and elected Charles Curtis
Republican whip. He served under the party leadership of New Hampshire
Senator Jacob Gallinger from 1915 to 1918 and of Massachusetts Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge from 1918 to 1924. In 1918, when Republicans won back
the majority in the Senate, Curtis' role as whip expanded, as he led
much of the Republican opposition to the Wilson administration. ``No one
ever accused him of being a Progressive,'' wrote one Washington
correspondent, ``but the feminists nevertheless called him friend, and
it is one of the proudest of his claims that he led the floor fight for
the Nineteenth Amendment,'' granting women the right to
vote.¹⁷
Senator Curtis went to the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago as
head of the Kansas delegation. When the convention reached a stalemate
between the presidential candidacies of General Leonard Wood and
Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, Curtis was one of the senators who
gathered in the famous ``smoke-filled room'' and anointed their
colleague, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, as the party's nominee.
Curtis then returned to the Kansas delegation and told them frankly, as
William Allen White recalled, ``that it had been decided (the phrase was
his) to give Harding a play.'' The hot and tired delegates were glad to
take orders and break the deadlock. Kansas switched from Wood to
Harding, whose bandwagon began its roll toward the White
House.¹⁸
Harding's election took Curtis into the inner circle of Washington
power, where he remained a poker-playing adviser to Harding throughout
that ill-fated presidency. In 1923, as Harding considered running for a
second term, Curtis inquired about his intentions of keeping Vice
President Calvin Coolidge on the ticket, perhaps hoping for the job
himself. ``We are not worrying about that little fellow in
Massachusetts,'' Harding supposedly told him. ``Charlie Dawes is the
man!'' Harding's sudden death elevated Coolidge to the presidency, and
the following year it was indeed Dawes, not Curtis, who won the
nomination for vice president.¹⁹

Senate Majority Leader

In 1923, Curtis became chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and
two years later he succeeded Lodge as majority leader--becoming the
first Republican to hold the official title of party floor leader. He
did not occupy the front-row desk that was subsequently reserved for the
party's leaders but instead led from the back-row seat on the center
aisle. As floor leader, Curtis limited his role to that of a legislative
tactician who tried to keep his party united. ``You boys tell me what
you want, and I'll get it through,'' Curtis promised. He was said to
know ``every senator's feelings on any pending legislation so thoroughly
that he can tell in advance how that senator is going to vote.''
Remarkably, Curtis maintained good relations with both the conservative
and progressive wings of his party. The conservative Pennsylvania
Senator George Wharton Pepper recorded that Curtis as majority leader
``displayed a remarkable talent for accomplishing good results for his
party by what in international parlance are termed `conversations' with
the other side. He was unusually adept at making deals.'' The
progressive Nebraska Senator George Norris noted that, while he often
disagreed with Curtis on legislative matters, he never knew Curtis to
violate his word or fail to carry out an agreement. Idaho Senator
William Borah acclaimed Curtis ``a great reconciler, a walking political
encyclopedia and one of the best political poker players in America.''
²⁰
Journalists described majority leader Curtis as one of the greatest
``whisperers'' in Congress. ``Whenever he took his favorite pose, with a
short fat arm coiled around another Senator's shoulders, the Press
Gallery got busy,'' wrote one reporter. ``It was a sure sign that
something was doing. . . .`Talk, talk, talk,' he would complain to the
reporters about the endless Senate deliberations.'' Curtis believed
``that everything can be fixed by friendly and confidential getting
together.'' The press depicted Curtis as taciturn, not given to long
speeches, and unhappy with the Senate's penchant for filibustering
(Curtis had supported creating a cloture rule as early as 1911). He had
a ``poker face'' that masked his feelings, which some attributed to his
Indian ancestry.²¹
As majority leader, Curtis loyally supported the Coolidge
administration, but as a farm-state senator he strongly advocated the
kind of federal farm relief that the president opposed. He consistently
voted for the McNary-Haugen bills that Coolidge vetoed. In May 1928,
however, he shifted his vote to sustain--by a one-vote margin--
Coolidge's veto. He explained that, regardless of his belief in the
issue, he felt it was his duty as leader to stand by the president. This
was not an easy vote for Curtis, who at the time was an announced
candidate to succeed Coolidge in that year's presidential election, and
who was counting on strong support from the farm states. Significantly,
another senatorial candidate for the presidency, Indiana's ``Sunny Jim''
Watson (who later followed Curtis as majority leader), voted to override
the veto.²²

Presidential Candidate

Curtis had harbored presidential ambitions for some time. In 1924 he
had been widely mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate, but his
wife, Anna, was seriously ill at the time. His sister Dolly volunteered
to stay with her, so that Curtis could attend the convention and improve
his chances for the vice-presidential nomination. ``Dolly,'' he replied,
``I would not leave Anna now to be President of the United States, and
certainly not for the Vice Presidency.'' (Anna Curtis died on June 29,
1924.) In 1927 President Coolidge jolted the nation by announcing that
he did not choose to run in 1928. Potential candidates and the press
speculated endlessly about what Coolidge meant--whether he expected the
convention to deadlock and then draft him or whether he would not run
under any circumstances. Curtis assumed that Coolidge was out of the
race and felt assured that Coolidge favored him for president. Even
Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover privately conceded that Curtis ``was a
natural selection for Mr. Coolidge's type of mind.'' ²³
Hoover was the frontrunner, but the farm states had remained
strongly opposed to him ever since his service as ``Food Czar'' during
the First World War, as well as because he opposed the McNary-Haugen
bills. Curtis and Hoover had never been close. Recalling that Hoover had
campaigned for Democratic candidates in 1918, Curtis had tried to
prevent President Harding from appointing Hoover to the cabinet. Hoover
saw Curtis as one of a half-dozen senators who were trying to stop his
nomination by heaping attacks on him. ``Their favorite name for me was
`Sir Herbert,' a reference to my periodic residence in England,'' Hoover
recalled with some indignation.²⁴
After announcing for president, Curtis made no speeches and
continued to devote his attention to his functions as Senate majority
leader. The New York Times called his campaign ``quieter than
gumshoes.'' This was how Curtis wanted it. Serving as his own campaign
manager, he planned to work the back rooms as he always had, hoping that
if the convention frontrunners deadlocked, he would emerge as the
compromise candidate--in the way the delegates had turned to Warren
Harding in 1920. About the only publicity his campaign received occurred
when a Senate page stamped the words ``Curtis for President'' in the
snow around the Capitol. Not until Curtis reached the convention in
Kansas City did he speak out against Hoover. He warned that the
Republicans could not afford to nominate a candidate who would place the
party ``on the defensive from the day he is named.'' Despite caravans of
farmers who protested against Hoover, the commerce secretary easily won
the Republican nomination on the first ballot.²⁵

Eating Bitter Words

To balance the ticket, Republicans sought a farm-state man for vice
president and chose Charles Curtis of Kansas. Insisting that he had
never sought the vice-presidency, Curtis agreed to run because of his
loyalty to the party. Reporters viewed the choice of Curtis as ``the
perfect touch of irony'' for the convention, given his earlier
opposition to Hoover. ``I can see him yet as he stood before the
convention gulping at his pride under the klieg lights,'' recalled
reporter Thomas L. Stokes:
He had eaten his bitter words, but he was suffering from
indigestion, you could see. His bald head gleamed, as if
still feverish under the indignity of second place on the
ticket. His mustache twitched in pain, as he tried to
smile. It was only a contorted grin that creased his
swarthy face. In the press section we nudged each other
and chuckled cruelly.²⁶
During the campaign, Curtis visited the incumbent vice president,
Charles Dawes. Sympathetically, Dawes noted that Curtis looked pretty
worn out, his hand was in a sling because a car door had slammed on his
fingers, and he had not much voice left. Later, however, listening to
Curtis speak on the radio, Dawes bristled when Curtis referred to the
vice-presidency as amounting to nothing. Although he recognized that the
remark was intended to sound modest and was made in jest, Dawes recorded
in his journal, ``But when I find him tired, with a husky voice and
bandaged arm, resting after a five thousand-mile trip and preparing to
start on ten thousand miles more, I am inclined to think that he places
quite a high value on the office.'' ²⁷
The Hoover-Curtis ticket rode to victory that November over the
Democratic ticket of Alfred Smith and Joseph T. Robinson. Each of the
vice-presidential candidates served as his party's floor leader in the
Senate, and, despite their political differences, the two were known as
``chums.'' Curtis was celebrated as a ``stand patter,'' the most regular
of Republicans, and yet a man who could always bargain with his party's
progressives and with senators from across the center aisle. Newspapers
claimed that Curtis knew the Senate rules better than any other senator
and declared him ``the most competent man in Congress to look after the
legislative program of the administration.'' ²⁸
This was not to be. Hoover and Curtis remained alienated after the
strains of campaigning against each other for the nomination. Since
their ticket had been a marriage of convenience, there was little love
to lose over the next four years. Neither man mentioned the other in his
inaugural address, and except for formal occasions they seem to have had
as little to do with each other as possible. A politico not identified
with issues or ideas, Curtis could never measure up to Hoover's
standards and never became an inside player. Although Curtis attended
some cabinet meetings, his advice was neither sought nor followed. He
spent his vice-presidency presiding over the Senate, and on a few
occasions casting tie-breaking votes. Sixty-nine years old when he took
office, Curtis was no longer the vigorous politician of his
youth.²⁹

A Subtle Transformation

Curtis enjoyed the status of the vice-presidency and made much of
his rise ``from Kaw tepee to Capitol.'' As the first American of Indian
ancestry to reach high office, he decorated his office with Native
American artifacts and posed for pictures wearing Indian headdresses.
But the press who covered him noted that Charles Curtis had changed in
many ways, both subtle and conspicuous. As a senator, he had always been
a ``placid, humble, unchanging, decent fellow,'' but when he began to
harbor presidential ambitions ``his humility turned inside out.'' Curtis
grew pompous, demanding that past intimates address him as the vice
president of the United States and giving the impression that he felt
that he, rather than Herbert Hoover, should be occupying the White
House. Perhaps sensing that resentment, the Hoover White House never
trusted Curtis as a legislative lieutenant. Reporters who watched him
believed that the frustrated Curtis, having been so busy and influential
as majority leader, ``just had to have something to do'' as vice
president. He found his outlet as ``a stern and unbending disciplinarian
in the Senate and a defiant defender of vice presidential rank and
precedent there and elsewhere, particularly at dinner tables.'' Or, as
one Washington hostess noted archly, ``Mr. Curtis openly exulted in the
ephemeral effulgence of the limelight which shone upon him.''
³⁰
Curtis' search for status revived the issue of an official vice-
presidential residence. The wealthy widow of Missouri Senator John B.
Henderson lived in a brownstone castle on 16th Street, on a hillside
several blocks north of the White House. For years Mrs. Henderson had
lobbied to rechristen 16th Street as the Avenue of the Presidents and
had persuaded many embassies to locate along the street--by selling them
inexpensive parcels of land. Mrs. Henderson became convinced that the
street would be the perfect location for a permanent vice-presidential
dwelling, suitable for entertaining, and she offered to give the
government a house overlooking Meridian Hill Park, whose land she had
also contributed to the city. Earlier, Vice President Calvin Coolidge
had declined a similar offer, but Curtis was much more receptive, and
sent his sister Dolly Curtis Gann out to inspect the property. She
pronounced the house ``lovely'' and appropriate for its purposes,
arguing that a vice president ``should not have the social duties now
incumbent upon him unless he is to be in a position to fulfill them
properly and comfortably.'' But a member of the Henderson family
objected to the elderly Mrs. Henderson's penchant for giving away her
property, and the deal fell through. Not for another half century would
vice presidents have an official residence.³¹

A Tempest in a Teapot

When the stock market crashed in 1929, the nation began to slip into
the worst economic depression in its history. At a moment when people
wanted positive action from their political leaders, poor Curtis became
embarrassingly embroiled in a ``tempest in a teapot.'' His sister Dolly
openly feuded with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore
Roosevelt and wife of House Speaker Nicholas Longworth, over their
relative positions in protocol. ``Princess Alice'' admitted making a
``little mischief'' over the affair. After Curtis' wife died, Dolly had
invited him to live at her Washington home and had acted as his official
hostess. Dolly Gann asserted that as hostess for the vice president she
should be seated ahead of the congressional and diplomatic wives at
Washington dinners. ``At that there was a cackle of excited discussion
about the propriety of designating any one not a wife to hold the rank
of one,'' observed Alice Longworth. Alice raised the issue with her
husband Nick, who disapproved of Dolly Gann's pretensions and used the
controversy as an excuse to avoid going to Prohibition-era ``dry''
dinner parties that he hated to attend. All this caused a ``torrent of
newspaper publicity,'' predominantly negative. William Allen White's
Emporia Gazette proclaimed:
If Washington does not do right by our Dolly, there will be a
terrible ruckus in Kansas. We will be satisfied with
nothing less than that she be borne into the dinner on the
shoulders of Mrs. Nick Longworth, seated in the center of
the table as an ornament with a candelabra in each hand
and fed her soup with a long-handled spoon by the wife of
the Secretary of State.³²
Bad press dogged Curtis and he assumed the public image of a
Throttlebottom, especially as a result of his panicky response to the
bonus marchers in 1932. World War I veterans had marched on Washington
to demand that Congress pass legislation enabling them to receive early
payment of their promised bonus for wartime service. As a senator,
Curtis had sponsored an earlier bonus bill and, although he himself had
never served in the military, he frequently cited his father's Civil War
service in seeking veterans' support for his campaigns. But when the
marchers camped around Washington and paraded to the Capitol, Curtis
urged President Hoover to call out the troops. The president, however,
tried to keep calm and maintain the peace.³³

The Depression Sinks the Ticket

In July 1932, some four hundred men marched to the Capitol grounds.
When the architect of the Capitol had the lawn sprinklers turned on, the
marchers gave up their idea of camping on the grounds and instead began
a single-file march around the Capitol Building. A nervous Vice
President Curtis announced that ``Neither Speaker [John Nance] Garner
nor I issued any permits to parade inside Capitol Grounds, and for this
reason I believe they should be kept off.'' The vice president had a
``stormy session'' with the District of Columbia's police chief, Pelham
Glassford, who informed him that only the president could call out the
army. Curtis then contacted the U.S. Marines to have them stand ready
for an emergency. But the marines took the vice president too literally
and sent two companies wearing trench helmets to the Capitol, riding on
the city trollies. Curtis claimed to have been misunderstood, but his
calling out the marines made him even more the subject of national
jokes.³⁴
As the depression worsened and the presidential election approached,
many Republicans talked of dumping Curtis from the ticket in favor of a
stronger candidate who might help Hoover's chance of reelection. Curtis
himself recognized his vulnerability and talked of running for the
Senate seat from Kansas instead. But with his sister Dolly rallying
support among the delegates, Curtis was renominated on the Hoover ticket
to face Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner. In the depth of the
depression, the Hoover-Curtis campaign never stood a chance. Hecklers
challenged Curtis when he spoke. Why had he not fed the veterans in
Washington? they yelled at one stop. ``I've fed more than you have, you
dirty cowards!'' Curtis shouted back at the crowd. ``I'm not afraid of
you!'' The crowd chanted ``Hurrah for Roosevelt!'' ³⁵
A landslide defeat in November 1932 retired Charles Curtis from a
political career that had begun almost fifty years earlier when he ran
for Shawnee County district attorney. Now, to the surprise of many
Kansans, Curtis seemed to have ``lost interest in Kansas.'' Having spent
so much of his life in the nation's capital, he remained in Washington,
where he practiced law and talked politics. In 1935 he became chairman
of the Republican senatorial campaign committee, hoping the party could
win back the Senate majority the next year, but he died in February 1936
at his sister Dolly's home. A party regular--``one-eighth Kaw Indian and
a one-hundred per cent Republican'' as he liked to tell audiences--he
had been yoked to one of the most intellectual and least political of
all American presidents, and the incompatibility of the team made his
vice-presidency a dismal failure.³⁶
CHARLES CURTIS2

NOTES

¹ Quoted in Chalmers Roberts, First Rough Draft: A
Journalist's Journal of Our Times (New York, 1973), p. 268.
² For an especially egregious example, see Don C. Seitz,
From Kaw Teepee to Capitol: The Life Story of Charles Curtis, Indian,
Who Has Risen to High Estate (New York, 1928).
³ William E. Unrau, ``The Mixed-Blood Connection: Charles
Curtis and Kaw Detribalization,'' in Kansas and the West: Bicentennial
Essays in Honor of Nyle H. Miller, ed. Forrest R. Blackburn, et al.
(Topeka, KS, 1976), pp. 151-61; William E. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and
Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity
(Lawrence, KS, 1989), pp. 9-10, 58, 64-65; Marvin Ewy, ``Charles Curtis
of Kansas: Vice President of the United States, 1929-1933,'' Emporia
State Research Studies 10 (December 1961): 6-9.
⁴ Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, pp. 70-75.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 61-62, 81-82; New York Times, June 17, 1928;
Seitz, p. 128.
⁶ Unrau, Mixed Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, pp. 92-93;
Ewy, p. 11.
⁷ Dolly Gann, Dolly Gann's Book (Garden City, NY, 1933),
pp. 1, 4-5; Unrau, Mixed Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, pp. 97-98.
⁸ Unrau, Mixed Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, pp. 99-101;
Ewy, pp. 15-17.
⁹ William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen
White (New York, 1946), p. 196.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 196-97.
¹¹ Seitz, pp. 161-62; Ewy, p. 23.
¹² Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, pp. 119-
23; Unrau, ``The Mixed-Blood Connection,'' p. 159.
¹³ White, pp. 304, 352, 366.
¹⁴ Horace Samuel Merrill and Marion Galbraith Merrill,
The Republican Command, 1897-1913 (Lexington, KY, 1971), pp. 26, 288.
¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 27, 295.
¹⁶ Ewy, pp. 27-29.
¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 30-31; ``Heap Big Chief,'' American Mercury
17 (August 1929): 401.
¹⁸ Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man: The Life Behind
the Masks of Warren Gamaliel Harding (New York, 1965), pp. 143-49;
White, p. 546.
¹⁹ Curtis served as an honorary pallbearer at Harding's
funeral, and was later active in the effort to suppress news of
Harding's illegitimate child by Nan Britton. Francis Russell, The Shadow
of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York, 1968), pp.
571, 597, 626.
²⁰ Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency
(Washington, D.C., 1956), p. 144; Seitz, pp. 172, 178; George Wharton
Pepper, In The Senate (Philadelphia, 1930), p. 35: New York Times, June
19, 1928; Washington Evening Star, February 8, 1936.
²¹ ``Heap Big Chief,'' p. 410; Seitz, pp. 172-73.
²² New York Times, May 26, 1928.
²³ Gann, p. 74; Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert
Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920-1933 (New York, 1952), p.
194.
²⁴ John D. Hicks, Republican Ascendancy, 1921-1933 (New
York, 1960), p. 201; Sinclair, p. 184; Russell, p. 433; Hoover, p. 192.
²⁵ New York Times, February 3, April 26, June 11-15,
1928; Ewy, pp. 38-39.
²⁶ Thomas L. Stokes, Chip Off My Shoulder (Princeton, NJ,
1940), pp. 230-31.
²⁷ Charles G. Dawes, Notes as Vice President, 1928-1929
(Boston, 1935), p. 123.
²⁸ New York Times, September 2, November 11, 1928.
²⁹ Williams, p. 146; Ewy, p. 43.
³⁰ ``Heap Big Chief,'' pp. 401-6, 411; Gene Smith, The
Shattered Dream: Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. (New York,
1970), p. 185; Frances Parkinson Keyes, Capital Kaleidoscope: The Story
of a Washington Hostess (New York, 1937), p. 245.
³¹ Gann, pp. 191-92.
³² Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours (New York,
1933) pp. 73, 330-33; David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New
York, 1979), p. 291.
³³ Daniel J. Lisio, The President and Protest: Hoover,
Conspiracy, and The Bonus Riot (Columbia, MO, 1974), p. 218.
³⁴ Fleta Campbell Springe, ``Glassford and the Siege of
Washington,'' Harpers 165 (November 1932): 649-51; Smith, p. 149.
³⁵ Williams, p. 147; Ewy, pp. 51-52; Lisio, p. 244.
³⁶ Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, p. 112.
?

Chapter 32

JOHN NANCE GARNER

1933-1941

JOHN NANCE GARNER
JOHN N. GARNER

Chapter 32

JOHN NANCE GARNER

32nd Vice President: 1933-1941

My belief has always been in Executive leadership, not
Executive rulership.
--John Nance Garner
``There is hardly any limitation upon the ways in which the Vice
President might be of service to the President,'' wrote Franklin Delano
Roosevelt in a 1920 issue of the Saturday Evening Post when he was the
Democratic vice-presidential candidate. The vice president, Roosevelt
suggested, should be entrusted with ``carrying the large burden of
interpreting administration policies to Congress and to the public.''
Like the vice president in a modern corporation, he should be a ``super
handy man,'' handling various matters of detail and ``leaving the
president free to deal mainly with matters of policy.'' ¹
Upon becoming president a dozen years later, however, Roosevelt had
adjusted his image of the vice-presidency to more closely match the
predispositions of the man that the Democratic National Convention
nominated to be his running mate, John Nance Garner. As vice president,
Garner would indeed work extensively at ``interpreting administration
policies to Congress,'' as the White House's chief liaison to Capitol
Hill, but he did little to communicate these policies to the public
because he refused to be a spokesman or campaigner. He did provide the
administration with expertise on ``matters of detail'' but limited this
advice mostly to the intricacies of maneuvering legislation through
Congress.
Garner's long career in the House of Representatives had prepared
him for the vice-presidency. He had rarely originated innovative ideas
to answer the problems of the country, yet once someone else conceived
an idea for legislation, Garner was often called upon to serve as a
parliamentary midwife. He would expertly guide the plan through the
House, from negotiations in smoky back rooms to a debate and vote on the
floor.
On the surface, there appears to be little mystery about John Nance
Garner. Plainspoken and refreshingly unpretentious, ``Cactus Jack'' from
the tiny back-country town of Uvalde, Texas, was by all accounts a man
of common words, simple tastes, a frugal lifestyle, and an unswerving
pragmatism that prompted Roosevelt to dub him ``Mr. Common Sense.'' Yet,
for all his uncomplicated personality, Garner remains an enigmatic
presence in history. For thirty-eight years in Washington, from 1903 to
1941, Garner continued to be a secretive back-room operator. Because
nearly all of his most important political activities took place out of
the public eye and off the record, his personal motivations or
convictions remain unclear. It is particularly difficult to gauge the
degree to which, in his role as vice president, Garner should be
credited for the legislative successes of the first Roosevelt
administration or be blamed for the failures of the second.²

Youth

Garner was born on November 22, 1868, in Red River County, Texas.
Although political promoters later romanticized his modest upbringing in
a mud-chinked log cabin, his mother, Rebecca Walpole Garner, was the
daughter of the town banker and a descendent of English aristocracy. At
age eighteen, young Garner set off to enroll at the University of
Tennessee, the state in which both sides of his family had roots.
Finding himself handicapped by an insufficient preparatory education and
various respiratory problems, however, the young man soon returned home
and found work in a law office. By studying in his spare time, Garner
gained entrance to the bar in 1890. He then failed in his first bid for
political office as a twenty-one-year-old candidate for city attorney.

A Back-Room Politician

Garner moved to Uvalde, Texas, for the health benefits of its dry
climate. During his successful campaign for judge of Uvalde County, he
met Ettie Rheiner, who soon became his cherished partner as both beloved
wife and career-long personal secretary.³ Garner served as
county judge from 1893 to 1896, followed by a tenure in the Texas state
legislature from 1898 to 1902. When Texas gained an additional
congressional seat after the 1900 census, Garner managed to secure the
chairmanship of a special redistricting committee. He used this position
to carve out an advantageous congressional district, from which he ran
successfully in 1902 for the U.S. House of Representatives.
During his first several years in the House, Garner was a silent
backbencher who ingratiated himself with his colleagues by cultivating
friendships and by his record of party loyalty. He was eventually
rewarded with coveted committee appointments, and by the 1920s his
seniority had made him the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means
Committee and chairman of the Democrats' Committee on Committees, which
chose that party's members for all House committees. His vociferous
attacks on Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's economic programs earned
him a national reputation as ``a Jefferson/Jackson Democrat--
egalitarian, rural, states' rights oriented, and populist.''
⁴
In 1929, Garner was elected the floor leader of a House Democratic
party whose morale and representation had suffered a crushing blow in
the 1928 elections. As minority leader, Garner relied upon informal
methods to strengthen the party's influence. He enjoyed a close rapport
with Republican Speaker Nicholas Longworth, his debonair alter ego. Said
Garner, ``I was the heathen and Nick was the aristocrat.'' This
congressional odd couple cohosted a daily bipartisan gathering of
lawmakers in a small room, deep in the bowels of the Capitol, which
became known as the ``Bureau of Education.'' Like The Boar's Head Club,
the site of Speaker Joe Cannon's drinking and gambling congregations
that Garner had attended decades earlier, the bureau provided a place
for politicians to relax and get to know one another over a cordial
drink, ignoring the Eighteenth Amendment's ban on alcoholic beverages.
The bureau also served as an informal forum for constructive, off-the-
record communications and negotiations between the two parties. In this
setting, Longworth said that Garner operated as ``a one man cabal''
⁵
Garner presented only four major bills to Congress under his own
name in his entire three decades in the House, a fact a longtime House
colleague, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, attributed to Garner's
collaborative parliamentary style: ``It was his policy, whenever he had
an idea . . . to induce a prospective opponent or a doubtful supporter
to sponsor the legislation. When he achieved that, he knew his purpose
was accomplished.'' As a result, Byrnes noted, ``The Congressional
Record will not show the remarkable influence he exercised upon the
members of the House and Senate during his long service.'' Garner
himself later asserted that he had ``no more useful years than those in
the ranks of or as the leader of the opposition to the majority.''
⁶
Between the 1930 congressional elections and the opening of the
Seventy-second Congress on December 7, 1931, fourteen members-elect,
including Longworth, died.⁷ After special elections were held
to replace the deceased, the Democrats emerged with a 219 to 214
advantage, enabling Garner to become Speaker and the titular head of his
party as its highest national officeholder. Garner did not share the
same close personal friendship with the new Republican minority leader,
New York's Bertrand Small, that he had enjoyed with Longworth. The two
parties were becoming increasingly polarized in their approaches to
solving the crisis that gripped the national economy. In addition, a
decade in the minority had permitted many House Democrats to lapse into
habits of frequent absenteeism and maverick voting patterns, which the
party with its slim majority could now ill afford.
The new Speaker enforced party discipline with a severity that
inspired Sam Rayburn to call him, ``a terrible, table-thumping
Democrat.'' Under the slogan ``You've got to bloody your knuckles!''
Garner regularly summoned House Democrats to caucus or bureau meetings,
where they wrangled out consensus policies to which he would then
``bind'' all of their votes. ``And if they didn't stay bound,'' he
recalled, ``I'd put 'em down in my book and they'd never get through
paying for it.'' Of his overriding concern for party solidarity, Garner
once declared, ``I have always done what I thought was best for my
country, never varying unless I was advised that two-thirds of the
Democrats were for a bill and then I voted for it.'' ⁸
In his response to the Great Depression, this dedication to
maintaining a governing consensus eventually outweighed Garner's
normally conservative principles, and he grew increasingly supportive of
federal intervention in economic affairs. At first, the Speaker
attempted to forge bipartisan cooperation in support of Herbert Hoover's
economic programs, such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and
the Glass-Steagall banking bills. This conciliatory approach meant
reversing his previous opposition to such measures as a manufacturers'
sales tax designed to increase government revenue in the face of
mounting deficits--favored by business groups for more than a decade--
and establishment of a moratorium on foreign debts in order to relieve
some of the financial burden on the nation's European trading
partners.⁹
By 1932, however, the overwhelming consensus among congressional
Democrats and the public against the sales tax and in favor of
additional relief measures convinced Garner to repudiate Hoover's
program. He proposed his own federal relief spending bill through a
massive public works program. This action was highly uncharacteristic,
given his reluctance to offer his own proposals and his long record of
opposition to increased government spending. Hoover vetoed the bill,
condemning it as ``the most gigantic pork barrel raid ever proposed to
an American Congress!'' Relations between the two men never
recovered.¹⁰

The Election of 1932

A ``Garner for President'' movement emerged in January 1932.
Instigated by an editorial campaign in the newspapers of William
Randolph Hearst, it was independent of any initiative or encouragement
by Garner. Over such other prospective nominees as Franklin Roosevelt,
Al Smith, and former Secretary of War Newton Baker, Hearst endorsed
Garner as the candidate he considered most likely to adhere to his own
agenda, which included instituting a national sales tax and keeping the
United States out of the League of Nations.¹¹ The Garner
bandwagon included many conservative southern and western politicians
who felt ideologically and personally comfortable with Garner. A
contemporary journalist attributed the attraction of the Garner
candidacy to the desire of ``the rank and file Democrats to get away
from everything the East implies and to find a good, safe politician
with an innocuous record, what they want is a Democratic Coolidge.''
Others supported Garner only as a stalking-horse for another candidate
or as one of a variety of candidates whose delegates could collectively
block Roosevelt.¹²
Garner himself was less interested in becoming president than in
ensuring his tenure as Speaker by nominating a candidate who could
capture the White House with long enough coattails to solidify the
party's majority in Congress. Roosevelt's candidacy, he concluded, was
the best bet to unite and strengthen the party enough to achieve this
goal. Garner therefore ignored the efforts of his promoters and refused
to proclaim himself a candidate, although he never actually ordered them
to desist. As a consequence, Garner found himself holding a tiger by the
tail at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he placed
third on the first ballot behind Roosevelt and Smith. After three
ballots, during which Garner's numbers increased marginally, Roosevelt's
strategists realized that without Garner's support they would never
achieve the necessary two-thirds vote that the party's century-old rule
mandated for nomination. They feared they were about to lose the
Mississippi delegation, which operated under a rule that gave all twenty
of its votes to the candidate favored by a simple majority of its
members. To break the impasse, Roosevelt campaign manager James Farley
called Garner's campaign manager, Representative Sam Rayburn, to a
meeting in Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison's hotel room. They agreed to
ask Garner to transfer his delegates to Roosevelt in return for the
vice-presidential nomination. Garner reluctantly agreed in order to
avoid the type of deadlocked convention that in 1924 had produced the
unsatisfying compromise candidacy of John W. Davis and his losing
campaign. Garner consoled himself with the thought that the apparently
less demanding office ``might be a nice way for me to taper off my
career.'' ¹³
Roosevelt wanted to use Garner's homespun appeal in extensive
campaigning as a sort of ``Texas Al Smith.'' But Garner refused,
believing that such efforts would be irrelevant, since he regarded
elections as merely a referendum on the incumbent's performance. He made
only two speeches and was briefly employed as Roosevelt's peacemaking
mediator to Smith before being dismissed to go home to Uvalde. There he
was reelected to his House seat on the same day he was elected vice
president of the United States.¹⁴
Between the November 1932 election and the March 1933 inauguration,
Roosevelt frequently phoned Garner in Uvalde to solicit his opinions
about proposals for legislation and organizing the new government.
Although Garner offered relatively few legislative proposals, he did
advocate government guarantees of banking deposits, an idea he promoted
in Congress despite the objections of the president-elect. Eventually,
the groundswell of congressional support for the plan won Roosevelt
over, and he endorsed the Vandenberg Amendment to the Glass-Steagall
Banking Act, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In this
case, Garner appeared to be ahead of the ``New Deal'' curve, belying his
later reputation as an inflexible reactionary.
Inauguration Day in 1933 marked a ceremonial demonstration of mutual
affection and gratitude between the outgoing Speaker and his House
colleagues as the procession of 400 House members and another 150
members-elect escorted Garner through the Capitol to the Senate chamber,
where he thanked them with an emotional farewell speech in which he
grieved, ``my heart will always be in the House.'' ¹⁵

First Term--Supporting the President's Program

In many respects, Garner's new job was a step down. He called the
vice-presidency ``the spare tire on the automobile of government,'' ``a
no man's land somewhere between the legislative and the executive
branch,'' and ``not worth a bucket of warm spit.'' He bemoaned the fact
that the vice president had ``no arsenal from which to draw power,''
believing that only when men ``have friendship for him and faith in and
respect for his judgement can he be influential.'' ¹⁶
In the Senate, the new vice president renewed political alliances
with over twenty of his former colleagues who had moved there from the
House, including such influential Democratic senators as Arkansas' Joe
Robinson, Mississippi's Pat Harrison, Kentucky's Alben Barkley,
Virginia's Carter Glass, South Carolina's James Byrnes, Texas' Morris
Sheppard, and Maryland's Millard Tydings. These men were products of the
Wilsonian progressive New Freedom movement, but by the 1930s some of
them had become the leaders of the party's conservative wing of southern
and western Democrats, who held the key committee chairmanships.
Garner's vice-presidency enhanced the influence of these men because he
often sympathized with them in their efforts to limit the liberalism of
the New Deal.¹⁷
Garner's familiarity with the mechanics and personalities of
Congress initially proved invaluable to the new Roosevelt
administration. Before committing himself to the innovative experiments
of his ``Brains Trust,'' Roosevelt asked for Garner's realistic
assessment of congressional reaction. After observing Garner in cabinet
meetings, Roosevelt's Postmaster General James Farley came ``to look
upon him as one of the truly great public men of this generation''
because of Garner's mastery of ``such intricate problems as government
financing, taxation, tariffs, and revenue bills.'' Once Roosevelt
decided on a new proposal, Garner acted as his political general,
personally leading the White House troops as they stormed Capitol
Hill.¹⁸
Most of Garner's political generalship was of the guerrilla variety.
He continued to host regular Bureau of Education meetings in a room near
the Senate floor. Darrell St. Claire, assistant secretary of the Senate,
remembered that ``the whiskey vapor would come flowing into the chamber
from the formal office, along with the laughter.'' Garner would lure
guests there from both the legislative and the executive branches,
ambushing them with bombardments of reason and liquor designed to
``hypnotize, mesmerize and otherwise to get our friends to approve
matters in a helpful way.'' ¹⁹
Garner did not always agree with Roosevelt's policies during the
``First One Hundred Days'' of the new administration, but he encouraged
other reluctant lawmakers to follow him in supporting the president
because it was ``good politics and good patriotism.'' ``Sometimes
conditions in a country justify temporary violations of deep principles
of government,'' he reasoned to one congressman, ``if ever there was
such a time it is now.'' To another Democrat who was skeptical of
Roosevelt, ``It doesn't matter what kind of a fool you think he is; he's
your fool just as long as he's President and the leader of your party.''
In a letter responding to criticism of the administration from a Texas
lumberman friend named John Henry Kirby he admitted, ``You can't do
everything you want to and I can't do half of what I would like to do.
You can't control everybody you would like to and I am in a similar
fix.'' ²⁰
One historian of the vice-presidency rated Garner as ``a combination
presiding officer, Cabinet officer, personal counselor, legislative
tactician, Cassandra and sounding board'' for the administration and
``undoubtedly one of the most powerful of the twentieth century Vice-
Presidents.'' ²¹ However, there were some tasks that Garner
stubbornly avoided, especially those that would involve publicity, which
he felt was inappropriate for a vice president. He refused to act as a
spokesman for the administration because, he told Roosevelt, ``Any
speech or statement I made would be searched to find a difference
between you and me.'' Instead, when the press begged him for comments,
he declared, ``I'm a member of a firm--the junior member. Go to
headquarters for the news.'' Just as he had in 1932, he begged out of
campaigning publicly for his party in the national and statewide
elections. He also declined a radio station's offer to give weekly
fifteen-minute addresses at $1,500 each, which he thought would be
exploitative of his office.²²
Garner further absolved himself of the traditional vice-presidential
obligations to represent the administration at a variety of ceremonial
and gala affairs. He adamantly protected his privacy and his personal
time with his wife, refusing even the accompaniment of the Secret
Service. ``I don't want those constables protecting me. There is not
anybody crazy enough to shoot a Vice-President,'' he
declared.²³
Thanks to the large Democratic majorities, Garner needed to cast a
tie-breaking vote in the Senate on only two minor matters, but he still
made his presence felt as presiding officer. One of the cagey veteran's
favorite parliamentary tricks was to ``buggy-whip'' bills through debate
with an unexpected staccato call of ``There-being-no-objections-the-
bill-is-passed'' and a sudden rap of the gavel. He also descended
frequently from the dais to lobby the senators in
attendance.²⁴
The cantankerous Garner had little patience with the flamboyant
senator from Louisiana, Huey Long. Long once asked Garner to require all
of his colleagues to stay and listen to his filibuster on the National
Recovery Act, to which Garner retorted: ``In the first place the Senator
from Louisiana should not ask that. In the second place, it would be
cruel and unusual punishment.'' Another time he remarked to humorist
Will Rogers before the convening of a session, ``Will, sometimes I think
the hearing in my right ear and the vision in my right eye isn't as good
as it used to be. Long sits on my right. . . . I may not be able to hear
or see Huey this morning.'' ²⁵
Long antagonized Garner on another occasion by drawling: ``Mr.
President, I rise to make a parliamentary inquiry. How should a Senator
who is half in favor of this bill and half against it cast his vote?''
Snapped an exasperated Garner: ``Get a saw and saw yourself in two.
That's what you ought to do anyway!'' ²⁶
Roosevelt's first term was not without a few points of contention
between the president and his vice president, foreshadowing their later
problems. Garner had grave misgivings about the National Recovery Act,
diplomatic recognition of Russia, and the embargo clause in the
Neutrality Act. Roosevelt was somewhat dissatisfied with Garner's
choices when the Senate authorized him to select one member to the
London Economic Conference in 1933 and three to the Nye munitions
industry investigation committee. The president also suspected that
Garner had botched his plan to slip the soldier's bonus bill of 1935
through Congress by leaking the strategy to his congressional
friends.²⁷
At the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Pittsburgh, the
cumbersome 1832 rule requiring that two-thirds of all delegates approve
both the presidential and vice-presidential nominations was overturned
in favor of a simple majority. The rules change enabled future
Democratic presidential nominees to choose their own running mates,
rather than accept the consensus of the convention. Initiated by
Roosevelt, this reform was passed largely in deference to his personal
prestige. Yet Garner's presence on the ticket also must have made the
delegates feel comfortable in doing so. It is difficult to imagine the
same rule passing in 1940, when Roosevelt offered as his running mate
Henry Wallace, a less popular man within the party, who would not likely
have been approved under the former rules.

Second Term--An Obstacle to Roosevelt

The second term of the Roosevelt-Garner administration saw the
breakdown of the working relationship between the president and vice
president. Garner objected to Roosevelt's determination to escalate the
New Deal's centralizing of the federal government, expanding government
regulation and spending programs, and ``revolutionizing'' the Democratic
party.
The first issue over which the two men had a truly acrimonious
dispute was Roosevelt's labor agenda. Garner objected to such New Deal
prolabor legislation as the Wagner-Connery Act of 1935 and the Black-
Connery bill of 1937. He fiercely opposed organized labor's 1936 sit-
down strikes, considering them a violation of business owners' property
rights. When the president proved reluctant to repudiate these tactics,
Garner secretly lobbied Congress in support of efforts by Texas
Representative Martin Dies, Jr., and South Carolina Senator James Byrnes
to pass congressional resolutions condemning the strikes. When
Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan gave a ringing speech
on the floor of the Senate in support of Byrnes' amendment, Garner
jumped down from his presiding seat to offer his
congratulations.²⁸
On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt called Garner and a handful of
Democratic congressional leaders to a meeting at the White House, where
he stunned them with an audacious plan to reorganize the Supreme Court.
Up to six new justices would be chosen by the president in an attempt to
ensure many years of judicial approval for his liberal legislative
agenda.
Garner himself was not among those critics who considered the
proposal to be a threat to the judiciary's independence, believing that
``no President can control that court.'' However, he was deeply
concerned about the threat to party unity posed by Roosevelt's somewhat
reckless method of handling such a controversial proposal. Garner
complained that the president sent the plan to Congress, ``without
notice after saying he had no legislative program other than outlined .
. . it was not in the party platform nor was it taken after consultation
with Congressional leaders who would have to put it through. Party
policy is not made by one man without consultation with elected
officials from another branch of government.'' ²⁹
While never issuing a public statement against the bill, Garner
demonstrated his disapproval with two symbolic gestures. First, he held
his nose and gave an emphatic ``thumbs-down'' sign as the bill was
introduced on the floor of the Senate. Then, during the subsequent
congressional debate, Garner suddenly departed from the capital in June
to return to Texas. It was the first time he had left Washington while
Congress was in session. Roosevelt was furious. ``Why in hell did Jack
have to leave at this time for?'' he fumed, ``This is a fine time to
jump ship.'' In response to widespread speculation in the press about a
rift between the president and himself, Garner issued a public statement
from Texas declaring that his departure was in no way meant as a
protest. ``I asked the Boss,'' he claimed, ``and he told me it was all
right for me to go fishing.'' Garner eventually returned to Washington,
but the death of Senate Democratic Majority Leader Joseph Robinson in
July 1937 mortally wounded Roosevelt's court proposal. The faithful
Robinson had tenaciously led the fight for the bill on the president's
behalf. After his passing, Roosevelt assigned that task to the
unenthusiastic Garner. Meanwhile, Roosevelt's intervention to help loyal
New Dealer Alben Barkley succeed Robinson as majority leader provoked
resentment from many senators, as well as the vice president. When the
Judiciary Committee reduced Roosevelt's Court packing plan to the point
where it became unrecognizable, Roosevelt was convinced that Garner had
collaborated with the opposition. For his part, Garner blamed Roosevelt
for antagonizing the Senate by interfering in its internal affairs.
Neither man completely trusted the other again. ³⁰
Roosevelt and Garner had fundamentally different styles and
philosophies of governing. Garner was a strict traditionalist in his
attitudes toward party affairs and a strict and unbending
constructionist in his literal interpretations of the constitutional
doctrine of separation of powers. He was a staunch defender of the
sovereignty of the legislature from undue interference by the executive.
Citing the low-key approach of Calvin Coolidge as a model, he once
stated ``My belief has always been in Executive leadership, not
Executive rulership.'' ³¹
Roosevelt, in contrast, used the powers of the presidency to set the
agenda of his party and the tone of the legislative debate. Under
Roosevelt, the White House increasingly issued preemptive public
announcements to marshal public support to gain political leverage.
Garner objected to Roosevelt that this threatened to ``jeopardize the
legislative program by giving out premature information.'' He complained
privately that Roosevelt wanted too much power. ``He has changed in
office. He does not delegate. His nature is [to] want to do everything
himself.'' ³²

Purging the Party

By 1938, the president was sufficiently frustrated by the
conservative Democrats in Congress to attempt a ``purge'' of the party.
He embarked on a campaign through southern and western states to endorse
liberal candidates in primary challenges to such conservative incumbents
as Senators Millard Tydings of Maryland, Walter George of Georgia, and
Guy Gillette of Iowa. Garner argued to Roosevelt that his intervention
in local elections was an unfair invasion of a local politician's ``own
constituency and his own orbit'' and could only provoke resentment from
voters who would regard it as ``Presidential arrogance.'' He warned
Roosevelt, ``You can't defeat the Southern Democrats and if you defeat
the Democrats in the North you will get Republicans instead.''
³³
This prediction proved true, as the November elections resulted in
the Republicans gaining eighty-one House and eight Senate seats.
Although only one of Roosevelt's primary election targets
(Representative John J. O'Connor of New York City) lost, several of
Garner's close friends in the Senate, including Connecticut's Augustine
Lonergan, New Hampshire's Fred Brown, and Wisconsin's Francis Duffey,
were among the Democratic casualties in the general elections. Roosevelt
then further insulted conservatives by appointing to key administrative
posts several New Dealers who had been defeated in the elections. Garner
lamented to Postmaster General James Farley that Roosevelt had ``stirred
up a hornet's nest'' by entering into the primary fights. ``There are
now twenty men--Democrats--in the Senate who will vote against anything
he wants.'' ³⁴ In 1939, Congress denied virtually everything
Roosevelt requested, including an undistributed profits tax, government
reorganization, increased funding for the Works Progress Administration,
and revision of the neutrality laws. Convinced that the crisis of the
depression was essentially over and that continued relief programs
threatened to create a complacently dependent lower class, Garner
considered it time to roll back some of the regulatory legislation and
``pump-priming'' expenditures that had been passed for emergency relief
during the first term.³⁵
Privately, Garner confided his suspicions of several ardent New
Dealers in the Roosevelt ``Brains Trust.'' ``I am not worried about the
Boss. It's the people around him. I have no confidence in them.''
Another time Garner claimed, ``I have more honest affection for him
[Roosevelt] in my little finger that they have in their whole bodies.''
This hostility was mutual. The New Dealers were contemptuous of Garner's
conservatism and his occasionally coarse behavior and disdained his
somewhat shady style of old-fashioned, back-room horse trading.
Identifying Garner as a convenient scapegoat for Roosevelt's
frustrations in guiding his agenda through Congress, liberals within the
administration launched assaults to discredit his character. Harold
Ickes, writing in a June 1939 issue of Look magazine, accused Garner of
``a traitorous knifing in the back of the commander in chief.''
³⁶
The coming 1940 presidential election sparked the final break.
Garner claimed that at the inauguration ceremony in 1937 he and the
president had taken a mutual pledge to retire at the end of that term.
As tumultuous events unfolded abroad, however, it became increasingly
apparent that Roosevelt intended to run for an unprecedented third term,
arguing that the volatility of the international situation made his
presence indispensable.³⁷
In December of 1939, Garner announced that, while he would not
actively campaign, he would not reject the presidential nomination if he
were offered it at the 1940 convention, regardless of whether Roosevelt
chose to retire or run again. He thus became the first vice president of
the modern era to challenge his own chief executive for the office.
Garner admitted that his passive candidacy was hopeless if Roosevelt
really wanted to be reelected and that he would be happy to retire to
Uvalde. But his opposition to a third term motivated him to join the
``Stop Roosevelt'' movement. He considered himself the only candidate
with a chance of attracting enough support to convince the president to
retire.
During the last two years of Roosevelt's second term, Garner was the
consistent frontrunner among the possible successors to Roosevelt in
public opinion polls. Although the public rarely got to observe Jack
Garner's actions directly, what they did know about him--or at least
what they thought they knew--captured their imagination. His wheeler-
dealer image, self-made wealth, and free-market convictions made him a
symbol of the emerging business age. At the same time, as a rugged,
individualistic frontiersman, he was a nostalgic throwback to a
vanishing age, a reassuringly simple figure in an increasingly complex
world. It was obvious to all that ``Cactus Jack'' had earned his
nickname because he was a hardy survivor with a tough hide, stumpy
stature, prickly disposition, and deep Texas roots.
Conservative congressmen praised Garner to their favorite reporters.
The press, in turn, was usually eager to carry ``good copy'' about the
legendary cowboy vice president who rode herd on Washington and plotted
in the cloakrooms. Complained one contemporary critic, ``the newspaper
men have never lost an opportunity to apotheosize his mediocrity.''
Despite this build-up, Roosevelt correctly doubted that Garner possessed
enough ambition or standing to mount a serious challenge in 1940. Yet
Garner believed Roosevelt resented the press attention that was often
lavished on his vice president. Postmaster General James Farley noted
that Roosevelt sometimes seemed quick to blame Garner for the
administration's legislative failures and that the president ``did not
like to see the trees grow too tall around him.'' ³⁸
Hitler's offensive across Western Europe in 1940 and the patriotic
rallying around the president that the crisis inspired effectively
precluded any challenge to Roosevelt's nomination. He was renominated on
the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with
the votes of 946 delegates. Farley and Garner were far behind with 72
and 61 votes, respectively. Not only did Garner not campaign for
Roosevelt, he could not even bring himself to vote in the 1940 election.
He went home to Uvalde, where he lived in retirement until his death at
the age of ninety-eight twenty-seven years later.

Conclusion

Years after his retirement from politics, Garner mused that the
country might have benefited more had he retained the speakership and
used it to check the growth of Franklin Roosevelt's ambitions and powers
in much the way Speaker Cannon had restrained Theodore Roosevelt. ``I
think I could have talked him out of a lot of things. That could have
been my contribution. I would have had no desire to dictate his
decisions,'' Garner told Bascom Timmons, his newspaper correspondent
biographer, ``but there would have been times when I would have told him
what he could not do.'' ³⁹ In a 1957 interview, Garner
lamented, ``If I hadn't been nominated for Vice President, I might still
be speaker today.'' This claim does not seem farfetched, given Garner's
relish for the position, his robust health, and the preservation of a
Democratic majority in the House for all but two congresses during the
rest of his long life.⁴⁰
The memory of his sour second term with Garner encouraged Roosevelt
to redefine drastically what he was looking for in a vice president in
1940. Henry Agard Wallace was in many ways the antithesis of Garner. As
vice president, Wallace was without either the inclination or access to
make his own clandestine alliances and deals that might undermine the
president's authority. While Garner was a parochial thinker with
isolationist convictions, Wallace was fascinated with foreign affairs
and peoples and entertained ideas about how Americans could help solve
their problems. An administrator rather than a politician like Garner,
Wallace lacked legislative experience and extensive party ties. To some
degree, Wallace resembled the corporate vice president that Roosevelt
had advocated in 1920, who could handle ``matters of detail.''
⁴¹
The vice-presidency of John Nance Garner stands as a watershed in
the evolution of the office. His first term marked the apex of the
parliamentarian as vice president; his second term represented its
nadir. Perhaps no other vice president had as much impact, both positive
and negative, on the legislative efforts of his administration. Garner
was a specialist in an office that would soon require generalists. He
was the last vice president whose duties were primarily legislative.
Garner was also the last of the largely silent, Washington-based vice
presidents before the coming age of modern telecommunications and travel
enabled future vice presidents to assume higher profiles as
representatives of their administrations, as wide-ranging campaigners,
public spokesmen, and foreign emissaries.⁴²
During his first term, Garner may have made a more valuable and
positive contribution to his administration than any of his
predecessors, but his actions in the second term did more to undermine
the administration than those of any vice president since John C.
Calhoun. Chosen to balance the ticket in 1932, Garner felt obligated to
use all of the formal and informal powers of his office to protect the
interests of the party's conservative wing that had, against his better
judgment, moved him from Speaker to vice president.
JOHN N. GARNER

NOTES

¹ Franklin D. Roosevelt, ``Can the Vice President Be
Useful?'' Saturday Evening Post 193 (October 16, 1920): 8. Roosevelt
also wrote that the very ambiguity of the office placed its occupant in
a unique position to serve as an ``additional set of eyes and ears'' and
as ``a kind of roving commission'' to study the fundamental structural
problems in government, ``especially where the jurisdiction or control
does not rest in one department but partly in one and partly in
others.'' By the time Roosevelt finally attempted to realize his
longtime ambition to radically reorganize the federal government in
1937, however, he chose a commission of academicians rather than his
vice president to study the matter and make recommendations. See Richard
Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government, 1936-1939 (Cambridge,
MA, 1966).
² Attempts to solve the mysteries of Garner's career are
not helped by the fact that he burned all of his personal papers soon
after retiring from Washington. ``I didn't want to go through the files
myself,'' he explained. ``I needed all my own energies for present
activities.'' Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas: A Personal History
(New York, 1948), p. 286. An excellent bibliography of sources on Garner
can be found in Donald R. Kennon, The Speakers of the U.S. House of
Representatives: A Bibliography, 1789-1984 (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 226-
36.
³ See Mrs. John N. [Marietta] Garner, ``30 Years of
Dictation,'' Good Housekeeping 94 (May 1932): 28.
⁴ For an account of Garner's maneuvers for position and
influence within his party, see Alex Arnett, ``Garner versus Kitchin: A
Study of Craft and Statecraft'' in Vera Largent, ed., The Walter Clinton
Jackson Essays in the Social Sciences (Chapel Hill, NC, 1942), pp. 133-
45; Ronald M. Peters, Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in
Historical Perspective (Baltimore, 1990), p. 111.
⁵ D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon, Rayburn: A
Biography (Austin, TX, 1987), pp. 114, 303; Timmons, p. 122.
⁶ Timmons, pp. 110, 293.
⁷ The 14 House members who died between the November 4,
1930, elections and the December 7, 1931, convening of the 72nd Congress
were Ernest Ackerman (R-NJ), James Aswell (D-LA), Henry Cooper (R-WI),
Charles Edwards (D-GA), Fletcher Hale (R-NH), George Graham (R-PA),
Nicholas Longworth (R-OH), Samuel Major (D-MO), Charles Mooney (D-OH),
David O'Connell (D-NY), Matthew O'Malley (D-NY), John Quayle (D-NY),
Bird Vincent (R-MI), and Harry Wurzbach (R-TX).
⁸ Hardeman and Bacon, pp. 116, 346; Allan Andrew Michie,
Dixie Demagogues (New York, 1939), p. 25.
⁹ For highly critical views of Garner's speakership see
George Milburn, ``The Statesmanship of Mr. Garner,'' Harper's Magazine
(November 1932), pp. 669-82; Jordan A. Schwarz, ``John Nance Garner and
the Sales Tax Rebellion of 1932,'' Journal of Southern History 30 (May
1964): 162-80; and Jordan A. Schwarz, The Interregnum of Despair:
Hoover, Congress and the Depression (Urbana, IL, 1970), chapter 5.
¹⁰ Milburn, p. 679.
¹¹ Roosevelt waited until February 2, 1932, to announce
his own repudiation of the League of Nations, after Hearst had endorsed
Garner. Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency (Washington,
DC, 1956), p. 150.
¹² Schwarz, ``John Nance Garner and the Sales Tax
Rebellion of 1932,'' p. 165; Douglas Craig, After Wilson: The Struggle
for the Democratic Party, 1920-1934 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), p. 244.
¹³ Hardeman and Bacon, pp. 137-38; David Robertson, Sly
and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York, 1994), pp.
138-40.
¹⁴ Williams, p. 152.
¹⁵ Timmons, p. 174.
¹⁶ Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the
Vice Presidency (New York, 1992), p. 400; Timmons, pp. 176, 178.
¹⁷ See James Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and
the New Deal (Lexington, KY, 1967).
¹⁸ James A. Farley, Jim Farley's Story: The Roosevelt
Years (New York, 1948) pp. 91, 163; James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots:
The Personal History of a Politician (New York, 1973).
¹⁹ Darrell St. Claire, Assistant Secretary of the Senate,
Oral History Interviews, December 1976-April 1978 (U.S. Senate
Historical Office, Washington, DC); John Michael Romano, ``The Emergence
of John Nance Garner as a Figure in American National Politics, 1924-
1941,'' (Ph.D. dissertation, St. John's University, 1974), p. 231.
²⁰ Timmons, pp. 182, 183; Patterson, p. 40; Michie, p.
39.
²¹ Williams, pp. 159, 175.
²² Timmons, pp. 140, 202; U.S. News and World Report,
November 21, 1958, p. 107.
²³ Timmons, p. 208.
²⁴ Besides presiding regularly over the Senate, he also
frequented the Senate Democrats' party conferences. See Romano, pp. 185,
212.
²⁵ Timmons, p. 186. In fact, Garner admitted in an
interview in U.S. News and World Report, November 21, 1958, pp. 101-2,
that he had been diagnosed as permanently hard of hearing in his left
ear sometime during the Taft administration but had managed to keep the
fact a secret throughout his career.
²⁶ Paul Boller, Congressional Anecdotes (New York, 1991),
p. 255.
²⁷ Romano, pp. 219, 268; Farley, Jim Farley's Story, p.
54.
²⁸ Patterson, p. 137.
²⁹ Timmons, pp. 219, 225.
³⁰ Farley, Jim Farley's Story, p. 84; Henry M. Hyde,
``White House No-Man,'' Saturday Evening Post 25 (June 25, 1938): 23.
³¹ Timmons, pp. 291-92.
³² Ibid., pp. 228, 255.
³³ Ibid., pp. 234-35.
³⁴ Farley, p. 137.
³⁵ Romano, p. 291; Timmons, pp. 291-92.
³⁶ Farley, Jim Farley's Story, p. 206; Ickes quoted in
Romano, p. 99.
³⁷ See Bernard Donahoe, Private Plans and Public Dangers
(South Bend, IN, 1965).
³⁸ Milburn, p. 669; Farley, Jim Farley's Story, pp. 230,
168, 172, 70.
³⁹ Timmons, p. 279.
⁴⁰ U.S. News and World Report, March 8, 1957, p. 68. See
also U.S. News and World Report, November, 21, 1958, pp. 98-105, and
January 16, 1967, pp. 44-45. Garner's greatest contribution to the
office of the Speaker may have occurred during his vice-presidency, when
in 1936 he endorsed his longtime apprentice Sam Rayburn for House
majority leader, the stepping stone to his speakership.
⁴¹ Garner had a low opinion of his successor, whom he
considered ``a dangerous character . . . not because he's bad at heart,
but because he doesn't know where he's going.'' Farley, Jim Farley's
Story, p. 205.
⁴² Ironically, the parochial Garner became the first vice
president to be sent abroad. In 1935, he led a delegation to the Far
East, although he merely silently attended ceremonies as an official
representative while Secretary of War George H. Dern spoke for the
president. Later that year, Garner went to Mexico as part of the ``Good
Neighbor'' policy and gave a speech on the Laredo Bridge. Williams, p.
162.
?

Chapter 33

HENRY AGARD WALLACE

1941-1945

HENRY A. WALLACE
HENRY A. WALLACE

Chapter 33

HENRY AGARD WALLACE

33d Vice President: 1941-1945

No matter what he does, it is always going to seem
faintly ridiculous, and no matter how he acts, it is always
going to seem faintly pathetic--at least to the cold-eyed
judgments of the Hill.
--Allen Drury
Prefaced by the stormy Democratic nominating convention of 1940, the
vice-presidency of Henry A. Wallace concluded with the equally
tempestuous 1944 convention. In 1940, when Vice President John Nance
Garner broke with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and withdrew to Texas,
Roosevelt designated Wallace as his running mate over the considerable
objection of many convention delegates. Four years later, in 1944,
Roosevelt jettisoned Wallace in favor of Harry S. Truman, who then
succeeded to the presidency following Roosevelt's death. During his
single term, Henry Wallace became more involved in administrative and
foreign policy matters than any of his predecessors. Although widely
judged a failure as vice president, Wallace was in many ways a
forerunner of the modern vice presidents, who often serve as executive
assistant and international emissary for the president.
As Roosevelt planned to run for a third term in 1940, he wanted to
revolutionize the role of the vice president and make the office into an
``additional set of eyes and ears.'' He sought someone who could handle
administrative questions and large national policies without being a
member of the cabinet. As an active secretary of agriculture and a
committed New Dealer, Henry Wallace seemed the ideal person for the job.
But Wallace's visionary social liberalism, his mysticism, his curiously
shy and introspective personal demeanor, and his political
insensitivity, all prevented him from gathering the support from
congressional leaders that would have enabled him to sustain a
successful political career in Washington. Because few senators came to
know Wallace personally, they often judged his character on the basis of
his poorly delivered speeches and unusual appearance. Journalist Allen
Drury, who observed the vice president often from the Senate press
gallery, described Wallace as follows: ``A shock of silver-graying hair
sweeps over to the right of his head in a great shaggy arc. He looks
like a hayseed, talks like a prophet, and acts like an embarassed
schoolboy.'' Drury recorded sympathetically in his diary that he found
it difficult to ``put into exact words the combination of feelings he
arouses. The man's integrity and his idealism and his sainted other-
worldliness are never in question; it's just the problem of translating
them into everyday language and making them jibe with his shy,
embarrassed, uncomfortable good-fellowship that is so difficult.'' Drury
considered Henry Wallace doomed by fate. ``No matter what he does, it is
always going to seem faintly ridiculous, and no matter how he acts, it
is always going to seem faintly pathetic--at least to the cold-eyed
judgments of the Hill.'' ¹

Youth

Henry A. Wallace was born on October 7, 1888, near the town of
Orient, Iowa, an oddly appropriate location for someone who would become
so fascinated with oriental philosophy. Wallace was also deeply
influenced by Iowa's rural culture. The agrarian lifestyle and communal
society of turn-of-the-century Iowa formed his values, especially the
idealism for which he is remembered. As a student at Iowa State College
he studied plant genetics and crossbreeding. He discovered and patented
a successful strain of corn that produced a greater yield while
resisting disease better than normal corn. This triumph allowed the
young Wallace to found his own business to manufacture and distribute
the plants, a venture that gave him valuable experience for his later
career in public service.
The future vice president was actually the third Henry Wallace. The
first, his grandfather, had been a Presbyterian preacher turned farmer,
who became editor of the Iowa Homestead and publisher of Wallace's
Farmer. These heavily read agricultural journals spread the Wallace name
over the Iowa countryside and throughout the rural Midwest. The vice
president's father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, served as secretary of
agriculture in the administrations of presidents Warren G. Harding and
Calvin Coolidge from 1921 until his death in 1924. Henry Agard Wallace
took over as publisher of the family journal when his father went to
Washington, continuing in that role until he himself moved to Washington
as secretary of agriculture in 1933.²
The Wallaces had traditionally been a Republican family, but the
shock of the Great Depression and its impact on rural America forced
Henry A. Wallace to reevaluate his political affiliations. Disgruntled
by the Coolidge and Hoover agricultural policies, Wallace threw his
support to the Democrats. In 1932, Wallace supported Franklin Roosevelt,
who in turn selected Wallace as his secretary of agriculture.

Secretary of Agriculture

An active secretary of agriculture, Wallace took to heart the needs
and fears of his agricultural constituents. In addition to helping
American farmers sustain themselves during the economic downturn, his
Department of Agriculture oversaw the creation and development of the
food stamp and school lunch programs that greatly aided urban America.
In 1934, Wallace published a book about the economic turbulence of the
depression and its repercussions on farmers, which he titled New
Frontiers. In it Wallace outlined the visionary politics that he
employed in his subsequent writings and speeches. Later observers would
compare both the title and the themes of this book with the ideas
espoused by John F. Kennedy.³
Drastic times called for drastic measures. A firm supporter of
government economic intervention, Wallace vigorously implemented the
controversial measures of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Never
before in peacetime, had the federal government sought to regulate
production in American farming, with government planning designed to
battle overproduction and low prices. Additionally, Wallace offered hog
and cotton farmers a single opportunity to improve their stagnating
markets by ploughing under ten million acres of cotton and slaughtering
six million pigs. For these losses, the government would issue relief
checks totalling millions of dollars. Although it earned him the
nickname ``The Greatest Butcher in Christendom,'' the program
essentially worked, and the market experienced a 50-percent rise in
prices. Wallace scorned those who ridiculed his plans without
considering the logic behind them, observing, ``Perhaps they think that
farmers should run a sort of old-folks home for hogs.'' ⁴
Having proved himself an effective, energetic cabinet member,
Wallace remained in office through Roosevelt's first two terms. By 1940,
with Europe plunged into war, there was talk of an unprecedented third
term, and Wallace was among those who endorsed the president's
reelection. Because Vice President John Nance Garner, who aspired to the
presidency himself, strongly opposed a third term, Roosevelt sought a
new running mate for the 1940 election once he made the decision to run.
FDR's choice of Wallace marked a turning point in the history of the
vice-presidency. Never before had the president so openly made the
selection. In the past, the main function of a vice president was
usually to balance the ticket, to unite the party, and to pull in voters
not normally drawn by the presidential candidate himself, with
comparatively little attention paid to the compatibility of the two men.
Presidential candidates generally acceded to the wishes of their party
conventions in completing the ticket.

The 1940 Election

The Republicans in 1940 had chosen a dynamic darkhorse candidate for
president, Wendell Willkie, and to balance the ticket the convention had
selected the Republican Senate minority leader, Charles McNary of
Oregon. During the 1920s, McNary had chaired the Senate Agriculture
Committee and had won national attention, particularly in agricultural
areas, for his sponsorship of the McNary-Haugen bills. Vetoed by
presidents Coolidge and Hoover, these bills were forerunners of the New
Deal's agricultural program. Seeking to neutralize McNary's popularity
in the farm belt, FDR decided to make his secretary of agriculture his
vice president. Roosevelt also felt confident that, if anything happened
to him, Wallace would vigorously pursue the liberal objectives of the
New Deal. Democratic convention delegates were furious, however, since
they considered the former Republican Wallace as an outsider, lacking
any of the qualities of a typical politician. When warned that the
delegates might revolt, Roosevelt made it clear that ``they will go for
Wallace or I won't run, and you can jolly well tell them so.'' Party
leaders reluctantly capitulated to the president's demand and nominated
Wallace, but the convention's mood was so sour that Wallace decided not
to make an acceptance speech.⁵
Shortly after Wallace became the vice-presidential candidate,
stories circulated about his religious beliefs. Having abandoned the
Calvinism of his youth, he had studied Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism,
Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Christian Science, finally settling into the
Episcopal Church in Washington. But Wallace had also fallen under the
influence of a Russian-born ``guru'' named Nicholas Roerich. During the
1930s, Wallace had written a series of letters to one of Roerich's
associates, detailing his spiritual beliefs and his candid observations
about contemporary political leaders. These so-called ``guru letters''
fell into the hands of Republicans, who considered releasing them to
embarrass Wallace during the campaign. Democrats countered with evidence
that presidential candidate Willkie had carried on an extramarital
affair. Although the two parties eventually agreed to a quid pro quo
that suppressed both the ``guru letters'' and the Willkie affair, the
news shook some of Roosevelt's confidence in his running mate.
Nonetheless, the Democratic team swept the election.⁶

Wartime Vice President

When he first took office, Wallace found the job of vice president
untaxing. During the early months of his tenure, he had more time for
tennis than ever before, but as the United States moved closer to war
the vice president began to assume unprecedented duties, being assigned
executive tasks to allow Roosevelt more freedom to deal with
international affairs. One of Wallace's biographers, Richard Walton, has
asserted that ``never before, nor since, has a Vice President had so
much direct executive authority.'' Others referred to him as the first
``working'' vice president. Named a member of FDR's secret ``war
cabinet,'' Wallace chaired the Economic Defense Board, the Supply
Priorities and Allocations Board, and the Board of Economic Warfare.
Journalists began to refer to him as ``Mr. Assistant President.''
⁷
Divided into an Office of Imports, Office of Exports, and Office of
War Analysis, the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) supported the Allied
war effort through procurement of strategic resources. As chairman,
Wallace freed himself to deal with long-term policy matters by
delegating the day-to-day management of the BEW to Milo Perkins, an
associate from the Agriculture Department. Like many special boards
created by President Roosevelt, the BEW came in for its share of
interdepartmental bickering, rivalries, and conflicts of authority.
Although Roosevelt expressly forbade federal government agencies to
publicly criticize each other during the war, Wallace, after eight years
of fighting within the cabinet, failed to recognize that the president
was serious about this order.⁸ Wallace's diary traces his
fight to gain greater autonomy for the BEW and his many clashes with
cabinet officers like Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of
Commerce Jesse Jones. These established bureaucrats did not relish the
thought of an activist vice president assuming responsibilities that
their departments normally held. Wallace believed that the wartime
emergency required drastic action to deal with problems like rubber
shortages, while Jones and Hull believed that existing mechanisms could
solve even wartime demands. Wallace's assertion of his authority to
purchase materiel vital to the war effort spawned conspicuous political
battles.⁹
When Roosevelt signed an executive order in April 1942 allowing the
BEW to negotiate contracts with foreign governments, Secretary Hull saw
it as an attempt to create a second Department of State. Wallace's goals
for social justice ran against the grain of Hull's State Department
policies. For instance, Wallace was firmly convinced that the Latin
American rubber supply could be increased dramatically if the living
standards of that region's rubber workers were raised to reduce the
incidence of chronic malnutrition and malaria. He attempted to force
negotiated contracts to provide for socially beneficial improvements to
the Latin American infrastructure, with the United States funding half
the cost of these programs. Wallace's acquisition of executive authority
had been unpopular with the rank and file in Congress, and most members
supported Hull, a former senator, in his attacks on the BEW and its
chairman. A growing consensus that Wallace had pushed a too active
program in Latin America caused Roosevelt to issue another executive
order, which preserved the State Department's monopoly on negotiations
with foreign governments, a blow aimed directly at Wallace's
authority.¹⁰
The BEW controversy climaxed in February 1943, when Wallace tried to
place the purchasing authority of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation
(RFC) under the BEW's jurisdiction. An infuriated Commerce Secretary
Jesse Jones roundly denounced what he considered Wallace's arrogant
action. When Wallace retaliated by accusing Jones of delaying shipments
of quinine to marines dying of malaria, the imbroglio became too hot for
Roosevelt to ignore. The embattled vice president wrote to the
president, asking for either complete vindication for his actions in the
matter or relief of his duties as chairman of the BEW. Roosevelt
responded on July 15, 1943, by dissolving the BEW and reconstituting its
function under a new Foreign Economic Administration, headed by Leo
Crowley, a known supporter of Jones. By revealing the strained relations
between the president and vice president, the order substantially
weakened Wallace's position in Washington politics. Until then, Wallace
had been ``the ideal and inspiration of every little world-planner in
Washington,'' wrote the commentator Raymond Moley. ``After Roosevelt
abolished the BEW . . . it was clear to them that they must forsake
their high priest and follow the president.'' ¹¹

As Senate President

In spite of his earlier success as agriculture secretary, Wallace
demonstrated acute political insensitivity in his failure at BEW. ``I
did not look on myself as very much of a politician,'' he said,
revealingly. Wallace disliked the formalities and superficialities of
the political world, particularly as practiced on Capitol Hill, and he
lacked the small-talk abilities critical in a system so dependent on
unofficial meetings and social politics. Senate staff member Richard
Riedel judged Wallace ``the least congressional of all the Vice
Presidents'' and recorded that he possessed ``none of the political
talents that enable public figures to mingle with and influence each
other.'' ¹²
Wallace never fit into the Senate's club-like atmosphere, in part
because he refused to join the club. One of his first acts as president
of the Senate was to close down the private bar that ``Cactus Jack''
Garner had maintained to entertain senators in his office--Wallace
himself neither drank nor smoked. Later, when Wallace hit a home run
during a congressional baseball game, a senator observed that it clearly
``furnished more pleasure [for him] than any political contest.'' The
Spartan, health-conscious Wallace chose to demonstrate his physical
prowess over the men who held him at a political arm's length. During a
friendly boxing match, he knocked out Louisiana Senator Allen Ellender,
who had been less than supportive of Wallace's vice-
presidency.¹³
As the Senate's presiding officer, Wallace found his duties
monotonous and boring. He disdained the senators' right of unlimited
debate and slumped down ``unceremoniously'' in the presiding officer's
chair during the proceedings. When he tried to intervene in debate, the
senators slapped him down. Wallace once suffered an embarrassing
browbeating from Tennessee's crusty Kenneth McKellar, who had been
arguing over the rules of the Senate for several hours. When Wallace,
from the chair, declared this tirade a ``parliamentary trick,'' McKellar
launched into an attack on the presiding officer and ultimately forced
Wallace to apologize for his impetuous insult. Left only with his
constitutional role of breaking tie votes, Wallace was able to cast only
four votes--the most satisfying being to prevent the Senate from
terminating the Civilian Conservation Corps.¹⁴

A Roving Vice President

It soon became clear that Wallace's aspirations lay beyond the
Senate chamber. More interested in the issues of the world, he became
the first vice president to take an active role in foreign policy,
serving as the president's personal ambassador. Wallace made his first
trip in late 1940, when Roosevelt sent him to the inauguration of
Mexican President Camacho, whose disputed election threatened Mexican
political stability and U.S. access to Mexican trade. Having studied the
language, Wallace eagerly delivered a speech in Spanish to the crowd
gathered at the Mexican capital--an effort that won him thunderous
applause. In 1943 Wallace made an official tour of Costa Rica, Panama,
Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. At every stop he took pains
to meet the common people and converse with them in their native tongue.
He traveled without a large entourage and refused to accept costly
ceremonial gifts. The images of bitter suffering and poverty that he
encountered in these underdeveloped countries convinced Wallace of the
need for U.S. humanitarian aid and strengthened his resolve to struggle
for a lasting postwar peace.¹⁵
In 1944 the president asked Wallace to make an even more ambitious
and dangerous trip to China and the Soviet Union. Historians continue to
speculate on whether Roosevelt expected Wallace to accomplish anything
diplomatically or simply wanted the vice president out of the country
while preparing to dump him from the Democratic ticket. Whatever was at
stake, Wallace felt exuberant and optimistic about the possibilities of
his venture. FDR asked him to foster greater cooperation between Chiang
Kai-shek and the Communist forces in China and to prod the Nationalists
into stepping up their campaign against the Japanese.¹⁶
Arriving in Siberia, Wallace tried again to meet the indigenous
population as he had in Latin America. Even though he spoke little
Russian and had to use an interpreter, he insisted on delivering an
address in Russian at Irkutsk. He visited the collective farms in
several Siberian villages and seemed most impressed with their
productivity. These observations planted the seeds of Wallace's
respectful impression of the Soviet Union. Later analysis revealed that
his visit had been considerably more orchestrated by the Soviets than
Wallace or the rest of his party had realized. Wallace saw the famous
Soviet Academy of Science but not the advanced atomic experiments being
conducted there. Similarly, he was never taken to visit the nearby
forced-labor camps and consequently gained a distorted view of Soviet
life.¹⁷
After touring Russia, Wallace's modest entourage of diplomats
arrived in Chungking to begin their most difficult and least successful
task--trying to solve China's major wartime problems. Unprepared for the
sad state of Chiang Kai-shek's regime, Wallace concluded that
cooperation between the Nationalists and Communists would be nearly
impossible. Nevertheless, he managed to negotiate an agreement by which
U.S. forces were to enter northern China to set up weather stations to
aid in bombing raids against the Japanese. Although the publicity from
Wallace's first two goodwill tours had been highly positive and had
helped him to redefine the vice president's role in foreign relations,
his final journey gravely damaged his political career.¹⁸
Wallace's favorable view of the Soviet Union became increasingly
pronounced and more widely discussed. Shortly before his marathon tour
of Russia and China, Wallace wrote an article for the New York Times,
called ``The Dangers of American Fascism,'' in which he condemned the
rising tide of anti-Soviet propaganda. Seeking to break down the wall of
ignorance between the Russian and American cultures, he anticipated that
the two peoples would eventually find they shared the same hopes and
fears and could live together in friendship. His visit to Russia, and
the warm welcome he received there, further softened his views. Wallace
compared the Soviet citizens he visited in Siberia with the farm
families of the Midwest whom he had known as a boy. His warm regard for
the Soviet Union earned him a liberal identity during the war and a
heretical image during the cold war that followed.¹⁹

Wallace's Idealism

Wallace envisioned a postwar era governed by an international
peacekeeping force and an international court, rather than through
balance-of-power politics. His plan also called for an end to European
imperialism in Asia and Africa. In an address to the Free World
Association on May 8, 1942, Wallace outlined his ``Century of the Common
Man,'' in which he endorsed federal support for education and collective
health care for workers. These proposals would have required continuing
the initiatives of the New Deal era that Wallace so admired, but the
administration lacked sufficient political capital to promote an
expanded program of domestic social welfare, because of the enhanced
executive war powers adopted by the president. More than the New Deal
inspired Henry Wallace. Christian morality and the social gospel formed
the fundamental inspiration behind his speeches. As a product of
Protestant liberalism, he adhered to the principles of the Sermon on the
Mount and saw himself as bound to accomplish the work of the
Lord.²⁰
President Roosevelt admired and sought to harness his vice
president's idealistic liberalism, while at the same time trying to
teach him how the political machinery of Washington really operated.
Roosevelt thought that Wallace was a few years ahead of his time and
expected that his ideas would eventually be realized. Yet Wallace's
inability to grasp Washington politics led to a marked decline in the
vice president's stature on Capitol Hill in the final year of his
tenure. Growing hostility between the executive branch and the
conservatively oriented Congress finally convinced FDR that Wallace had
become an expensive political liability.

The 1944 Election

As the 1944 elections approached, four influential Democrats decided
to ensure that Wallace was not nominated in the next Democratic
convention. Terming themselves the ``Conspiracy of the Pure in Heart,''
the four consisted of Democratic party chairman Robert Hannegan,
Postmaster General Frank Walker, New York Democratic party chief Ed
Flynn, and Democratic party treasurer Edwin Pauley. The Democratic
leadership had unsuccessfully opposed Wallace in the 1940 nomination
convention, but this time they had the advantage of Roosevelt's
declining health and his increasing preoccupation with wartime
diplomacy.²¹
Roosevelt himself appears to have grown dissatisfied with the vice
president's record. Wallace had not proved himself to be the political
partner Roosevelt had hoped he would become. The president's motivation
in sending Wallace overseas at a critical political time at home may
therefore have been devious. The Asian journey allowed Wallace no time
to campaign and made him vulnerable to political attack. When Wallace
returned to Washington's National Airport, he faced reporters who asked
if he planned to withdraw from the race. The vice president replied, ``I
am seeing the president at 4:30. I have a report to make on a mission to
China. I do not want to talk politics.''
But Wallace did try to make a compelling case that he should
continue as FDR's running mate, indicating that he had the support of
labor leaders and rank and file Democrats.²² In that
conversation on July 11, Roosevelt appeared sympathetic to keeping
Wallace on the team. Wallace asked the president to communicate his
support in writing to the Democratic leadership, assuming that the
endorsement of the terribly popular chief executive would resolve the
matter as it had four years earlier. Roosevelt's letter, however,
emphasized that he had no desire to dictate to the convention. This
approach left the door open to the ``Conspiracy of the Pure in Heart''
to find a replacement for Wallace. These party leaders first considered
the director of the Office of War Mobilization, James F. Byrnes of South
Carolina, a former senator and Supreme Court justice, before finally
settling on Senator Harry Truman of Missouri. In effect, FDR had
astutely removed his hand from the process, knowing full well what would
happen to Wallace without his active support.²³
Nonetheless, at the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago, Wallace
showed surprising popularity among the delegates, threatening to ruin
the Democratic leadership's carefully orchestrated plan to dump him.
After his rousing speech, cheering delegates began to shout for
``Wallace in '44.'' The convention chairman, Indiana Senator Samuel D.
Jackson, noted the crowd's enthusiasm and feared that Wallace might win
on the first ballot. He therefore called for an adjournment until the
next day, blaming fire code infractions due to the more than capacity
crowd at the convention center. Although the nays drowned out the ayes
on the motion, the chairman declared the session adjourned. During the
night, Roosevelt's ambiguous letter of support circulated among the
delegates and undermined Wallace's position. The next day, the delegates
selected Senator Truman for vice president. Jubilant Democratic leaders
later boasted of their role in the affair. Party chairman Hannegan told
friends that his epitaph should read, ``Here lies the man who kept Henry
Wallace from being President of the United States.'' ²⁴

Commerce Secretary

Although defeated for renomination, Wallace did not retire from
politics. His active campaigning for FDR's fourth term led the president
to reward his loyalty with appointment as secretary of commerce. Some
have suggested that Roosevelt believed the Senate would never confirm
Wallace. In his letter firing Jesse Jones as commerce secretary, FDR
admitted that Wallace's appointment was a repayment for his ``utmost
devotion to our cause.'' This letter caused a storm of debate in
Congress and the press. Members of Congress expressed serious doubt
about Wallace's abilities and were particularly disturbed at the
prospect that he would take charge of the billions of dollars of loans
made by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). As a compromise,
senators who wished to let the president have his appointment yet
shuddered at giving their former presiding officer power, voted to
transfer the money-lending responsibilities of the RFC out of the
Commerce Department's jurisdiction. Stripped of his economic influence,
Wallace was confirmed.²⁵
Wallace's short career directing the Commerce Department was racked
with controversy. Eighty-two days after Wallace left office as vice
president, Franklin Roosevelt died, making Harry Truman president.
Truman's administration took a decidedly hard-line turn against the
Soviet Union, a policy that, coupled with the increasing influence of
conservatives in Truman's cabinet, confounded and alienated Wallace.
Expressing his disapproval of Truman's foreign policy, Wallace wrote a
twelve-page letter urging the United States to exercise caution in
abandoning its powerful wartime ally. Wallace firmly believed that the
only way to end the spread of communism was to raise the world's
standards of living. In a speech at Madison Square Garden in September
1946, Wallace warned that American foreign policy towards Russia could
lead to a third world war. Although Wallace had previously cleared his
remarks with Truman, his speech occurred at the very time Secretary of
State James Byrnes was negotiating with Soviet authorities in Paris.
Byrnes charged that Wallace's speech had undermined U.S. policy and
suggested damaging disunity within the administration. Shortly
thereafter, Truman fired Wallace as secretary of commerce.²⁶

Later Years

Wallace's final public action was a failed bid for the presidency in
1948. Still commanding a modest following from left-wing groups, he ran
on the Progressive ticket, campaigning against Truman, the Republican
candidate Thomas E. Dewey, and the Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond.
Support from the Communist party damaged Wallace's campaign by
alienating many liberals and other voters. The aggressive actions of the
Soviets in Berlin and Czechoslovakia also turned voters against Wallace.
The former vice president had little impact on the election, except by
capturing enough votes in New York to throw that state to Dewey. Rather
than present himself as the liberal, internationalist alternative to the
cold warriors, Wallace had bolted to a third party. This action,
combined with the walkout of conservative southern Democrats over the
issue of civil rights, made Truman appear to be the centrist candidate
carrying on the traditions of Roosevelt and the New Deal, thus enabling
him to win the upset victory of the century.
Following his defeat in 1948, Henry Wallace retired from official
political life. He still believed in his concept of world peace and
worked for social justice in Latin America, travelling there on numerous
occasions and persuading foundations to support the region's developing
nations. In retirement, Wallace continued his genetic experimentation on
various strains of corn and other crops, a scientific inquiry that
provided him with the satisfaction his political career had lacked. At
the end of his life, as he suffered from Lou Gehrig's Disease, Wallace
continued to reflect on international issues and worried about the
United States' deepening involvement in Vietnam. He traced the origins
of that war back to the beginning of the cold war, ``when I was getting
the hell kicked out of me for suggesting that we were taking on more
than we could chew.'' Wallace died on November 18, 1965, in Danbury,
Connecticut.²⁷
Henry Wallace will be remembered as an unusual vice president
because of the circumstances of his rise and fall from power and because
of his unprecedented executive responsibilities. His foreign travels
also forged new political paths that later vice presidents would follow.
Clearly Wallace's personal eccentricities contributed to his political
failure in Washington politics. Yet, viewed in retrospect from after the
end of the cold war, his visionary social liberalism--so radically
different from the politics of Harry Truman--raises the question of how
world events might have been different had the vote for vice president
at the 1944 Democratic convention not been delayed overnight.
HENRY AGARD WALLACE

NOTES

¹ Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice
Presidency (New York, 1992), pp. 405-6; Allen Drury, A Senate Journal,
1943-1945 (New York, 1963), pp. 137-38.
² J. Samuel Walker, Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign
Policy (Westport, CT, 1976.), pp. 3-8.
³ Witcover, pp. 77-78.
⁴ Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People's
Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (New York,
1973), pp. 15-27; Witcover, p. 77.
⁵ Markowitz, pp. 28-31; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary
Time: Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
(New York, 1994), pp. 128-33.
⁶ Walker, pp. 50-60; Charles J. Errico and J. Samuel
Walker, ``The New Deal and the Guru,'' American Heritage (March 1989),
pp. 92-99.
⁷ John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary
of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Boston, 1973), pp. 23-24; Richard J.
Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (New York, 1976),
p. 8; Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Prophet in Politics: Henry
A. Wallace and the War Years, 1940-1965 (Ames, IA, 1970), p. 22.
⁸ Walton, pp. 8-10; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 50-
71.
⁹ Blum, pp. 53-229.
¹⁰ Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, p. 20; Markowitz, pp. 65-
70.
¹¹ Markowitz, pp. 70-73; Moley quoted in Donald Young,
American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency (New
York, 1972), p. 194.
¹² Blum, p. 22; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, p. 7;
Richard Langham Riedel, Halls of the Mighty: My 47 Years at the Senate
(Washington, 1969), p. 193.
¹³ Blum, pp. 22-23; Riedel, p. 193.
¹⁴ Drury, p. 121.
¹⁵ Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 38-49; Drury, pp.
137-38.
¹⁶ Walton, pp. 15-16; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, p. 91.
¹⁷ Blum, pp. 335-48; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 85-
91.
¹⁸ Blum, pp. 349-60; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 91-
98.
¹⁹ Witcover, p. 82.
²⁰ Walker, pp. 83-97; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp.
30-37; Blum, pp. 13-15.
²¹ Walton, pp. 22-23; Witcover, pp. 84-87.
²² Blum, pp. 361-62.
²³ Witcover, pp. 84-87; Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp.
102-3.
²⁴ Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 104-9; Markowitz, p.
91; David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), pp. 292-323.
²⁵ Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 114-19; Drury, pp.
345-55; U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 79th Cong., 1st
sess., pp. 694-95, 1163-67.
²⁶ Walker, pp. 133-63; McCullough, pp. 513-18.
²⁷ Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier, pp. 224-39; Walker, p.
212.
?

Chapter 34

HARRY S. TRUMAN

1945

HARRY S. TRUMAN
HARRY S. TRUMAN

Chapter 34

HARRY S. TRUMAN

34th Vice President: 1945

I enjoyed my new position as Vice-President, but it took
me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the
voting privileges I had enjoyed for ten years as a senator.
--Harry S. Truman
When Democratic party leaders determined to dump Vice President
Henry Wallace from the ticket in 1944, they looked for a suitable
replacement. They considered Wallace too unpredictable to serve another
term under Roosevelt, whose health had visibly declined during the
Second World War. There was no shortage of candidates: Majority Leader
Alben Barkley, presidential assistant James F. Byrnes, Supreme Court
Justice William O. Douglas, and others advertised their availability.
But the nomination went to someone who did not want it. Missouri Senator
Harry S. Truman had committed himself to nominating Byrnes. When a
reporter asked why he did not become a candidate himself, considering
that the next vice president might likely ``succeed to the throne,''
Truman shook his head and replied, ``Hell, I don't want to be
President.'' Harry Truman felt content to stay in the Senate, where he
had spent ten happy years.¹

A Farm Boy at Heart

Despite a long record of public service, the always underestimated
Truman made an unlikely candidate for national office. He was at heart a
farm boy, born in the rural village of Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884.
His father, John Truman, was a farmer and livestock dealer. For much of
their childhood, Harry and his brother and sister lived on their
grandmother's six hundred-acre farm near Grandview, Missouri. Poor
eyesight corrected by thick glasses kept him from playing sports but
failed to hamper his love of books. When the children were old enough
for schooling, the Truman family moved to Independence. Then, in 1903,
after John Truman went bankrupt speculating in grain futures, the family
moved to Kansas City, where John Truman took a job as night watchman at
a grain elevator. Harry applied to West Point but was rejected because
of his poor eyesight. Instead of attending college, he worked as a
timekeeper on a railroad construction crew, a newspaper wrapper, and a
bank teller. In 1905 the parents returned to the Grandview farm, and
Harry and his brother followed the next year. After John Truman died in
1914, Harry Truman assumed the supervision of the farm, plowing, sowing,
harvesting, and repairing equipment himself. For the rest of his life,
Truman always enjoyed returning to the family's farm (now subdivided
into suburban housing, although the farmhouse stands as part of the
Harry S. Truman National Historical Site). As president, he later
asserted: ``I always give my occupation as farmer. I spent the best
years of my life trying to run a 600-acre farm successfully, and I know
what the problems are.'' ²
Farming meant hard work and isolation. Nor did it produce sufficient
income for Harry to marry his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth (Bess)
Wallace. Truman proposed in 1911, but Bess turned him down. Undaunted,
he pursued the courtship for another eight years. After long days on the
farm, Harry devoted his evenings to practicing the piano and reading
history. He had other dreams as well: as a boy, he and his father had
attended the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City in 1900 and
watched William Jennings Bryan be nominated a second time for president.
The ``Great Commoner'' always remained one of his heroes. Truman's
father loved politics. ``Politics is all he ever advises me to neglect
the farm for,'' Harry wrote to Bess.³
The United States entered the First World War in 1917. At thirty-
three, Truman was two years over the age limit for the draft and would
also have been exempted as a farmer. But he turned the farm over to his
mother and sister and enlisted, overcoming his poor eyesight by
memorizing the eye chart. Having served in the National Guard, Truman
helped organize a regiment from a National Guard company in Kansas City
and was elected first lieutenant. When the 129th Field Artillery went
overseas, he was promoted to captain and placed in command of Battery D.
The ``Dizzy D'' had a wild and unruly reputation, but Captain Harry
whipped them into line. They encountered heavy fighting in the Meuse-
Argonne offensive, from which Truman emerged with the undying respect of
his troops and increased confidence in his own abilities. His exploits
also lifted him in the eyes of Bess Wallace, who at last married him
after the war, in June 1919.⁴

Machine Politics

Truman temporarily moved into his in-laws' house in Independence,
Missouri, an arrangement that lasted for the rest of his life. Instead
of returning to the farm, he started a haberdasher's shop in Kansas City
with his Battery D sergeant, Eddie Jacobson. When Truman & Jacobson
failed during the recession of 1922, bankruptcy turned Harry Truman from
business to politics. Another army buddy, Jimmy Pendergast, introduced
Truman to his uncle Thomas Pendergast, the Democratic political boss of
Kansas City. In 1922 the Pendergast machine endorsed Truman for county
judge in Jackson County, which was an administrative rather than a
judicial function. After narrowly winning the primary, he sailed easily
to election as the Democratic candidate that fall. In this and all
future elections, Truman could count on the loyal support of the
veterans of the 129th, most of whom lived in the Kansas City vicinity.
In 1924, the year his only daughter, Margaret, was born, Truman lost his
bid for reelection when the anti-Pendergast faction of the Democratic
party split away and swung its support to the Republicans. He then sold
memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club until he won reelection
in 1926. During the next twenty-six years of uninterrupted public
service, he never lost another election--to the surprise of everyone
except Harry Truman.⁵
Like most political machines, the Pendergast organization depended
upon patronage and government contracts. Pendergast owned the Ready-Mix
Concrete Company and held interests in a variety of construction,
paving, pipe, and oil companies that built roads, courthouses, and other
public works in and around Kansas City. As an activist administrator,
Truman sought to build roads and public buildings, but he held out
against funneling county projects to corrupt contractors. Pendergast's
interests got county contracts only when they were the lowest bidders.
``Three things ruin a man,'' Truman later said. ``Power, money, and
women. I never wanted power. I never had any money, and the only woman
in my life is up at the house right now.'' Once, when Truman discovered
that an associate had taken money to cut a deal with a road builder, he
kept silent to ensure that the construction went forward. In
frustration, Truman poured out his feelings privately on paper:
I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried
out . . . I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer,
a friend of the Boss's, steal about $10,000 from the
general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal
associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or
more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound
a felony? I don't know.⁶
Despite his machine connections, Truman developed a progressive
reputation as county judge. In 1934 he wanted to run for the U.S. House
of Representatives, but Pendergast had already picked another candidate.
Instead, to Truman's astonishment, the boss wanted him to run for the
Senate. In fact, Pendergast's first four choices had turned him down.
Few gave Truman much of a chance. Missouri's anti-Pendergast Senator
Bennett Champ Clark mocked Truman's assertion that if elected he would
not attempt to boss or dictate to anyone. ``Why, bless Harry's good kind
heart--no one has ever accused him of being a boss or wanting to be a
boss and nobody will ever suspect him of trying to dictate to anybody in
his own right as long as a certain eminent citizen of Jackson County
remains alive.'' But, in the Democratic primary, Truman waged a vigorous
campaign over the entire state and won the three-way race by a wide
margin. Since Missouri was a Democratic state, he coasted to victory in
November. As Truman left for Washington, Tom Pendergast gave him some
parting advice: ``Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your
mail.'' ⁷

A Workhorse in the Senate

Reversing historical trends, the Democrats gained ten Senate seats
during the congressional midterm elections of 1934. The new class of
Democrats included James Murray of Montana, Joseph Guffey of
Pennsylvania, Francis Maloney of Connecticut, Sherman Minton of Indiana,
and Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington. In contrast to these liberal
Democrats, Harry Truman was more conservative and less known. ``I was as
timid as a country boy arriving on the campus of a great university for
his first year,'' he later admitted. Following Pendergast's advice, he
kept his mouth shut and his eye on his new colleagues. Before long he
had separated out the ``workhorses'' from the ``showhorses'' and
concluded that the real business of the Senate was conducted by
conscientious senators who usually attracted the least publicity. Having
also discovered that ``the real work'' of the Senate took place in
committee rooms rather than on the floor, he devoted himself to
committee work, through research, correspondence, and hearings. He made
it his business ``to master all of the details'' of the legislation that
came before his committees. ``My ten years in the Senate had now
begun,'' he wrote two decades later, ``--years which were to be filled
with hard work but which were also to be the happiest ten years of my
life.'' The only painful memories were of the scorn that some
journalists continued to heap on him as Pendergast's errand
boy.⁸
As a new senator, Truman relied on the veteran Democratic secretary,
Leslie Biffle, to counsel him on how to act, when to speak, what
committees to request, and other practical advice. Truman's down-home,
poker-playing style soon won him friendships with many senators as well
as with Vice President John Nance Garner--who invited Truman to join
those who met at the ``doghouse,'' his hideaway office, to ``strike a
blow for liberty'' with shots of bourbon. Accepted as an insider, Truman
had nothing but contempt for the Senate's most famous outsider, Huey
Long. The Louisiana senator's flamboyant style and long-winded
filibusters represented the entirely opposite route from the one Truman
took in the Senate.⁹
Appointed to the Interstate Commerce Committee, Truman and its
chairman, Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, began a long, detailed
investigation of the nation's transportation system. Their efforts
resulted in the Wheeler-Truman Transportation Act of 1940, which
established new standards of federal regulation for the nation's
railroad, trucking and shipping industries. It was the signal
accomplishment of his first term. Most Washington observers doubted that
Truman would have a second term. The U.S. district attorney in Kansas
City, Maurice Milligan, was prosecuting Tom Pendergast for vote fraud
and income tax evasion. Loyally standing by the boss, Truman delivered a
blistering attack in the Senate chamber accusing the president,
Milligan, and the federal courts of playing politics with Pendergast.
But Pendergast was convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in
1939. Seeing Truman as just an extension of the machine, Milligan then
ran for the Democratic nomination for the Senate in 1940, as did
Missouri Governor Lloyd Stark, who previously had sought Pendergast's
endorsement but now presented himself as a reformer. President Roosevelt
leaned toward Stark, and Truman seemed doomed to defeat, but Milligan
and Stark split the anti-Pendergast vote, enabling Truman to squeak
through to a victory in the Democratic primary, which ``virtually
guaranteed'' his reelection in November.¹⁰

The Truman Committee

Returning to Washington his own man, Truman moved for the creation
of a special committee to investigate the national defense preparations
on the eve of World War II. He had heard of waste and extravagance and
contractors overcharging the government at Missouri military bases, and
he believed that a watchdog committee would be essential as the
government pumped massive amounts of money into its defense industries.
With the help of party secretary Les Biffle, Truman was appointed chair
of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program,
which became nationally known as the Truman Committee. As an avid
student of history, Truman knew what havoc the Joint Committee on the
Conduct of the War had created for President Abraham Lincoln, and he was
determined to assist rather than to combat President Roosevelt. The
Truman Committee investigated business, labor, and government agencies,
seeking ways to make all three cooperate. Whenever the Truman Committee
concluded that reforms were needed in war agencies, Truman took care to
inform the president first, before he talked to the press, giving
Roosevelt the chance to institute the necessary changes before being
pressured by negative publicity.¹¹
Harry Truman was fifty-seven when he assumed the chairmanship of the
special committee and rose to national prominence. Of average height and
appearance, speaking with a midwestern twang, and earthy in his
expressions, he was known in Washington as diligent and unprepossessing.
Over time, his voting record had increasingly conformed to Roosevelt
administration policies, and he remained a loyal Democrat, more likely
to complain in private than in public about any differences with the New
Deal. The Truman Committee won its chairman favorable press notices for
saving the taxpayers millions of dollars and the Roosevelt
administration much potential embarrassment. ``I have had considerable
experience in letting public contracts,'' Truman said, recalling his
Jackson County days, ``and I have never yet found a contractor who, if
not watched, would not leave the Government holding the bag.'' The
public agreed. As Harper's Magazine concluded in June 1945, before the
war Truman had been ``just another obscure junior Senator,'' but three
years later ``he had made himself known, and respected, as the chairman
of a special committee investigating war production and, in consequence,
the almost inevitable choice of his party as a compromise candidate for
the Vice Presidency.'' ¹²

Choosing Truman for Vice President

While it later seemed inevitable, there was nothing predictable
about Truman's selection for vice president in 1944. Vice President
Henry Wallace's unpopularity among party leaders had set off a
monumental contest for the second spot at the Chicago convention.
Senator Alben Barkley wanted the job, but his hot-tempered resignation
and swift reelection as majority leader in protest over President
Roosevelt's veto of a revenue bill in February 1944 eliminated him as an
acceptable choice to the president. Barkley and ``Assistant President''
James Byrnes--a former senator and former Supreme Court Justice--each
asked Truman to nominate him at the convention. Byrnes asked first, and
Truman readily agreed. Senator Truman consistently told everyone--even
his daughter Margaret--that he was not a candidate himself. The only
race in his mind was for his reelection to the Senate in
1946.¹³
The pivotal person at the convention was Bob Hannegan, a St. Louis
political leader serving as commissioner of internal revenue and tapped
as the next Democratic National Committee chairman. During the heated
Senate campaign of 1940, Hannegan had switched his support from Governor
Stark to Truman as the better man, and he delivered enough St. Louis
votes to help Truman win. Hannegan, Bronx boss Ed Flynn, Chicago mayor
Ed Kelly, key labor leaders, and other party movers and shakers viewed
Wallace as a liability for his leftist leanings. Byrnes was equally
vulnerable for his segregationist record and his conversion from
Catholicism. When these party leaders expressed their opposition to
Wallace and Byrnes, Roosevelt suggested Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas. The group then countered with Harry Truman, whom Roosevelt
agreed had been loyal and ``wise to the ways of politics.'' After much
discussion, Roosevelt turned to Hannegan and conceded, ``Bob, I think
you and everyone else here want Truman.'' ¹⁴
Hating to disappoint and alienate any of the potential candidates,
Roosevelt kept them all guessing. At lunch with Vice President Wallace,
Roosevelt informed him that the professional politicians preferred
Truman as ``the only one who had no enemies and might add a little
independent strength to the ticket.'' Roosevelt promised Wallace that he
would not endorse another candidate, but would notify the convention
that if he were a delegate he would vote for Wallace. At the same time,
the president held out hope to Byrnes that he was ``the best qualified
man in the whole outfit,'' and urged him to stay in the race. ``After
all, Jimmy,'' you're close to me personally,`` Roosevelt said. ''I
hardly know Truman.'' (Roosevelt, whose own health was growing
precarious, did not even know Truman's age--which was sixty.) Despite
encouraging Wallace and Byrnes, the president had written a letter for
Hannegan to carry to the convention:
Dear Bob: You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas.
I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of
them and believe that either one of them would bring real
strength to the ticket.¹⁵
Meanwhile, Senator Truman continued to deny any interest in the
vice-presidency. In an off-the-record interview, he explained to a
reporter that if he ran for vice president the Republicans would raise
charges of bossism against him. He did not want to subject his family to
the attacks and negative publicity of a national campaign. Bess Truman
was against it, and so was Truman's ninety-one-year-old mother, who told
him to stay in the Senate. ``The Vice President simply presides over the
Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral,'' Truman protested. ``It is
a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don't have any
ambition to hold an office like that.'' His secret ambition, admitted on
a visit to the Senate chamber twenty years later, was to occupy the
front row seat of the majority leader.¹⁶
In an overheated hotel room, the politicians leaned heavily on
Truman to run. They placed a call to Roosevelt, and as Truman sat
nearby, Hannegan held the phone so that he could hear. ``Bob, have you
got that fellow lined up yet?'' Roosevelt asked. ``No. He is the
contrariest Missouri mule I've ever dealt with,'' Hannegan replied.
``Well, you tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic party
in the middle of the war, that's his responsibility,'' Roosevelt
declared and hung up the phone. Stunned, Truman agreed to run, but
added: ``why the hell didn't he tell me in the first place?''
¹⁷
Henry Wallace appeared personally at the convention to seek
renomination, stimulating an enthusiastic reception from the galleries.
On the first ballot, Wallace led Truman 429 to 319. But the party's
leaders swung their delegations and put Truman over the top on the
second ballot. In a speech that lasted less than a minute, Truman
accepted the nomination. Democratic liberals bemoaned the choice, while
Republicans mocked the ``little man from Missouri.'' Newspapers charged
him with being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, when in fact he had
vigorously fought the Klan in Jackson County. Critics also noted that
Truman had placed his wife on his Senate payroll, but Truman rejoined
that hiring her had been legal and that she had earned every penny.
(Truman's sister Mary Jane had also been on his Senate payroll since
1943.) None of these controversies mattered much. On election day, a
majority of voters did not want to change leaders in wartime and cast
their ballots for Roosevelt regardless of who ran with him. Eleanor
Roosevelt, who had preferred Wallace and distrusted Byrnes, reflected
the prevailing sentiment that the vice-presidential candidate had been a
safe choice. She wrote that while she did not know Truman, ``from all I
hear, he is a good man.'' ¹⁸

Roosevelt and Truman

After his nomination, Truman had gone to the White House for lunch
with Roosevelt and had been shocked at the president's gaunt appearance
and trembling hands. Only to his most intimate friends did Truman
confide his fears that Roosevelt would never survive his fourth term. On
a cold January 20, 1945, Truman stood with Roosevelt on the South
Portico of the White House to take the oath as vice president. The
ceremonies had been moved from their traditional location at the Capitol
as a concession to the war and Roosevelt's health. After the post-
inaugural luncheon, the new vice president slipped away and telephoned
his mother who had heard the inauguration over the radio at Grandview.
``Now you behave yourself,'' she instructed.¹⁹
Truman's vice-presidency was practically a continuation of his years
in the Senate. The Trumans kept their same apartment at 4701 Connecticut
Avenue, and he retained the same office in Room 240 of the Senate office
building. He spent most of his time presiding over the Senate, whose
rules and procedures he had already mastered, and whose members he
already knew. ``I enjoyed my new position as Vice-President,'' he late
wrote, ``but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer
had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for ten years as a senator.''
During his eighty-two days as vice president, Truman had only one
opportunity to vote, on an amendment to limit the extension of Lend-
Lease. The vice president voted against the amendment. As the United
Press reporter Allen Drury observed: ``Harry Truman, with all the brisk
eagerness of someone who is bored to death, seized his first chance to
vote in the Senate today and made the most of it. The vote wasn't
necessary, for under the rules a tie kills a proposal, but he cast it
anyway, with obvious satisfaction.'' ²⁰
During Truman's vice-presidency, critical decisions were being made
regarding ending the war and planning for the future peace, but the
president neither advised nor consulted him. Roosevelt left Washington
for his long journey to Yalta two days after the inauguration and did
not return for almost a month. Even then, he saw the vice president only
twice more, on March 8 and March 19, before he left for a rest at the
``Little White House'' in Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt assumed there
would be time to educate his vice president later.²¹
Truman's major assignment was to help his predecessor, Henry
Wallace, win confirmation as secretary of commerce. Roosevelt had
appointed Wallace as a gesture of consolation to his former vice
president, and enlisted Truman to win support from recalcitrant
senators. To pacify Wallace's critics, the Democratic leadership cut a
deal to remove the Federal Loan Agency from the Commerce Department. The
House passed the measure first, and when it reached the Senate, Majority
Leader Barkley planned to call it up for immediate consideration, to
clear the way for Wallace's confirmation. Barkley, however, was not
paying attention when Ohio Republican Senator Robert Taft sought
recognition to move Wallace's confirmation vote first. Truman looked to
the majority leader. ``Finally, Barkley woke up and I recognized him,''
Truman commented, believing that his action saved Wallace from defeat.
Ironically, as president, Truman would fire Henry Wallace from his own
cabinet a year later.²²
As vice president, Truman aspired to mend fences between Congress
and the Roosevelt administration. During the depression, Roosevelt had
ridden Congress like a rodeo cowboy, but he had been badly bucked during
the ``Court packing'' fight in 1937. Despite large Democratic
majorities, Congress not only rejected Roosevelt's efforts to add
several new liberal justices to the Supreme Court, but also turned down
his requests to reorganize the executive branch and to expand New Deal
economic programs. The legislative and executive branches finally
reconciled on the eve of the Second World War, when the president and
Congress joined together to suspend American neutrality and aid the
Allies. The war relegated Congress to a back seat behind the president
as commander in chief, causing resentment, suspicion, and hostility
toward the administration to simmer on Capitol Hill. During the war, a
coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats pruned many
New Deal programs. Truman thought that he could help reestablish some
common ground. Although recognizing that a vice president could never
exert open influence in the Senate, Truman believed that ``if he is
respected personally and if he maintains good relations with the members
of the Senate, he can have considerable power behind the scenes.''
²³
A week after the January 1945 inauguration, Truman's political
mentor, Tom Pendergast, died in Kansas City. Released from prison,
Pendergast had spent his last years estranged from his family and old
friends. Truman had not seen the boss in years, but he determined to go
to Pendergast's funeral. He owed his rise in politics to Pendergast,
who, he insisted, ``never asked me to do a dishonest deed. He knew I
wouldn't do it if he asked me. He was always honest with me, and when he
made a promise he kept it.'' Although Truman meant this as an act of
friendship and loyalty, many considered it disgraceful for a vice
president to pay homage to a convicted criminal and interpreted the
incident as evidence that Truman remained a parochial machine
politician. The vice president earned more bad publicity a few weeks
later when he played the piano at the Washington Press Club's canteen
for servicemen. As Truman played, the movie actress Lauren Bacall posed
seductively atop the piano, allowing photographers to snap some
decidedly undignified pictures.²⁴
The vice president spent most of his time around the Senate chamber,
talking with senators and listening to tedious speeches as he presided.
Watching him from the press gallery on April 12, 1945, Associated Press
reporter Tony Vaccaro commented, ``You know, Roosevelt has an awfully
good man in that Truman when it comes to dealing with the Senate if
he'll only make use of him.'' Then he added, ``He doesn't make use of
him though. Truman doesn't know what's going on. Roosevelt won't tell
him anything.'' That day, Truman used his time while presiding to keep
in contact with his mother and sister in Missouri. ``I am trying to
write you a letter today from the desk of the President of the Senate,''
he wrote, ``while a windy Senator from Wisconsin [Alexander Wiley] is
making a speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar.'' He
reminded them to turn on their radios the next evening to hear him make
a Jefferson Day speech to the nation and to introduce the president.
While Truman was presiding that afternoon, Roosevelt collapsed and died
of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs.²⁵
Unaware of his impending fate, Truman recessed the Senate at five
that afternoon and strolled through the Capitol, without his Secret
Service agent. He was the first vice president to be assigned a regular
Secret Service agent, after his military aide, Harry Vaughn, pointed out
to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau how odd it was to have scores of
agents guarding the president and no one protecting the vice president.
But the protection was somewhat erratic, enabling Truman to saunter
unaccompanied through the Capitol to House Speaker Sam Rayburn's
hideaway office, the ``Board of Education.'' There he planned to mix a
drink and spend some time talking politics with the Speaker and a
handful of congressional cronies. When Truman arrived, Rayburn relayed a
message that the president's press secretary wanted him to call right
away. Truman called and was told to come to the White House as ``quickly
and quietly'' as possible. ``Holy General Jackson!'' he exclaimed, the
color drained from his face. Still not knowing exactly what had
happened, Truman hurried back the length of the Capitol, still alone. At
his office he grabbed his hat and his driver. They headed straight to
the North Portico of the White House, where Truman was ushered up to the
family quarters. There Eleanor Roosevelt told him that the president was
dead.²⁶

President Truman

That evening, Harry Truman took the oath as president in a somber
ceremony in the Cabinet Room. He placed his first call from the Oval
Office to Secretary of the Senate Leslie Biffle, asking him to arrange
for the congressional leadership to attend the ceremony and to set up a
luncheon at the Senate the next day. As Republican Senator Arthur
Vandenberg noted in his diary:
Truman came back to the Senate this noon for lunch with a few of
us. It shattered all tradition. But it was both wise and
smart. It means that the days of executive contempt for
Congress are ended; that we are returning to a government
in which Congress will take its rightful place.
After Roosevelt's funeral, Truman returned to address a joint session of
Congress. ``Now Harry--Mr. President--we are going to stand by you,''
Speaker Rayburn assured him. ``I think you will,'' Truman replied.
Majority Leader Alben Barkley further urged Truman to have confidence in
himself. ``If you do not, the people will lose confidence in you.''
²⁷
Three months in the vice-presidency had given Truman no preparation
for the nation's highest post. He was thrust into the role of commander
in chief while war was still underway in Europe and the Pacific. He knew
little about the development of the atomic bomb, yet within months he
would be called upon to decide whether to use this weapon against Japan.
Nor did he know much about the agreements Roosevelt had reached with the
Russians and British at Yalta. Truman talked with everyone who had
accompanied Roosevelt to learn as much as possible about what Roosevelt
had agreed to and what he intended to do in foreign policy. Truman's
inexperience in international matters contrasted sharply with his
abundant knowledge of domestic affairs, gained from ten years in local
government and another ten in the Senate.²⁸
Truman's assets were his firm personal principles, his honesty,
humility, and homespun character, and his ability to speak plain truths.
Regardless of his lack of preparation, these qualities enabled him to
face the challenges of the cold war, make portentous decisions, and
retain the respect of the electorate, who accepted him as one of them.
He could be magnanimous, as in his gesture of consulting with former
President Herbert Hoover, long barred from the Roosevelt White House. He
could be intrepid, as in his determination to remove General Douglas
MacArthur from command in Korea, in order to preserve the superiority of
the civilian government over the military. In 1948 Truman won the most
unexpected election upset of the century. Although he left the
presidency in 1953 at a low ebb in his popularity, his standing rose
again over the years. After his death on December 26, 1972, he achieved
the status of folk hero. Songs proclaimed: ``America Needs You Harry
Truman.'' A Broadway play, ``Give 'Em Hell, Harry,'' was based on his
life story, and biographies of him became best sellers. Presidential
candidates from both parties claimed Truman rather than Roosevelt as
their model. In retrospect, his selection for vice president had been a
wise move by the party leaders.²⁹
HARRY S. TRUMAN

NOTES

¹ Edward A. Harris, ``Harry S. Truman: `I Don't Want to
be President,''' in J.T. Salter, ed., Public Men: In and Out of Office
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1946), pp. 4-5; Robert H. Ferrell, Choosing Truman:
The Democratic Convention of 1944 (Columbia, MO, 1994), pp. 1-34.
² Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Autobiography of Harry S.
Truman (Boulder, CO, 1980), pp. 17-20; Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman
(New York, 1973), p. 47; U.S., Congress, House, Congressional Record,
103d Cong., 1st sess., pp. H10918-20.
³ David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), pp. 63, 88-
90.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 102-44; Richard Lawrence Miller, Truman: The
Rise to Power (New York, 1986), pp. 103-48; Jhan Robbins, Bess & Harry:
An American Love Story (New York, 1980), pp. 23-37.
⁵ Margaret Truman, pp. 59-82; Ferrell, ed., The
Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, pp. 81-84.
⁶ Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia,
MO, 1994), pp. 91-116; McCullough, pp. 181-86.
⁷ Margaret Truman, pp. 83-89; Ferrell, Truman: A Life,
pp. 124-32; McCullough, pp. 202-13.
⁸ Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, vol. 1,
Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY, 1955), pp. 142-43, 149; Alonzo L.
Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York, 1995) pp.
200-212; Harris, p. 9; Margaret Truman, p. 91.
⁹ Ernest Barcella, ``They Call Him Mr. Baffle,'' Colliers
(January 29, 1949), pp. 27, 61-62; Margaret Truman, pp. 100-102.
¹⁰ Truman, Memoirs, 1:159-63; McCullough, pp. 234-52;
Hamby, pp. 213-47.
¹¹ Ferrell, Truman: A Life, pp. 153-61.
¹² Theodore Wilson, ``The Truman Committee, 1941,'' in
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Bruns, eds., Congress
Investigates: A Documented History, 1792-1974 (New York, 1975), 4:3115-
3262; Hamby, pp. 248-60.
¹³ Margaret Truman, p. 167; Miller, pp. 381-85.
¹⁴ McCullough, pp. 292-301; Ferrell, Choosing Truman, pp.
35-50.
¹⁵ McCullough, pp. 299-306; David Robertson, Sly and
Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York, 1994), pp. 8-
9; Robert H. Ferrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust
(Columbia, MO, 1992), p. 44.
¹⁶ McCullough, pp. 298-99, 317-318; Harris, pp. 4-5;
Remarks by Former President Harry S. Truman and Responses by Members of
the Senate Thereto in the United States Senate on May 8, 1964
(Washington, 1964), p. 3.
¹⁷ Truman, Memoirs, 1:192-93; Hamby, pp. 274-84.
¹⁸ Miller, pp. 381-87; McCullough, pp. 324-33; Ferrell,
Choosing Truman, pp. 57-61; Harris, pp. 5-6; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No
Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World
War II (New York, 1994), p. 530.
¹⁹ Jonathan Daniels, The Man of Independence (Port
Washington, NY, 1971; reprint of 1950 edition), p. 255; Truman, Memoirs,
1:1-4, 194-95.
²⁰ Truman, Memoirs, 1:195-96; Allen Drury, A Senate
Journal, 1943-1945 (New York, 1963), p. 409.
²¹ Margaret Truman, pp. 203-5.
²² Truman, Memoirs, 1:195; Daniels, p. 257.
²³ Truman, Memoirs, 1:196-97; McCullough, pp. 335-36; see
also James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal:
The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939
(Lexington, KY, 1967).
²⁴ Harris, p. 18; McCullough, pp. 336-37.
²⁵ Drury, p. 410; McCullough, p. 340.
²⁶ Margaret Truman, pp. 201-3; McCullough, pp. 335-42;
Ferrell, Truman: A Life, pp. 174-76. Others have reported Truman's April
12, 1945, exclamation as ``Jesus Christ and General Jackson!''
(McCullough, p. 341; Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The
Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-1948 (New York, 1977), p. 4.
²⁷ Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., ed., The Private Papers of
Senate Vandenberg (Boston, 1952), p. 167; H.G. Dulaney, Edward Hake
Phillips, and MacPhelan Reese, eds., Speak Mr. Speaker (Bonham, TX,
1978), p. 120; McCullough, p. 356.
²⁸ Marie D. Natoli, ``Harry S. Truman and the
Contemporary Vice Presidency,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 14
(Winter 1988): 81-84.
²⁹ Ferrell, Choosing Truman, pp. 89-95. On Truman's
presidency see Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of
Harry S. Truman, 1945-1948 (New York, 1977), and Tumultuous Years: The
Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949-1953 (New York, 1977).
?

Chapter 35

ALBEN W. BARKLEY

1949-1953

ALBEN W. BARKLEY
ALBEN W. BARKLEY

Chapter 35

ALBEN W. BARKLEY

35th Vice President: 1949-1953

Barkley, as Vice President, was in a class by himself.
He had the complete confidence of both the President and the
Senate.
--Harry S. Truman
Alben W. Barkley, who served as vice president of the United States
from 1949 to 1953, was popularly known as the ``Veep.'' His young
grandson had suggested this abbreviated alternative to the cumbersome
``Mr. Vice President.'' When Barkley told the story at a press
conference, the newspapers printed it, and the title stuck. Barkley's
successor as vice president, Richard Nixon, declined to continue the
nickname, saying that it had been bestowed on Barkley affectionately and
belonged to him. While commentators may occasionally use ``veep'' as a
generic term for vice presidents, historically the term is Barkley's
alone.¹
A storyteller of great repute, Alben Barkley frequently poked fun at
himself and his office. He was especially fond of telling about the
mother who had two sons. One went to sea; the other became vice
president; and neither was heard from again. In Barkley's case, the
story was not at all true. He made sure that the public heard from him,
and about him, as often as possible. And what the public heard, they
liked, for Alben Barkley performed admirably as vice president of the
United States.
Seventy years old when he was sworn in as vice president, Alben
Barkley was a genial grandfatherly figure--but with enough life left in
him to court and marry a widow half his age and to captivate national
attention with their May-December romance. In many ways, Barkley was the
last of the old-time vice presidents, the last to preside regularly over
the Senate, the last not to have an office in or near the White House,
the last to identify more with the legislative than the executive
branch. He was an old warhorse, the veteran of many political battles,
the perpetual keynote speaker of his party who could rouse delegates
from their lethargy to shout and cheer for the party's leaders and
platform. His stump-speaker's lungs enabled him to bellow out a speech
without need for a microphone. He was partisan to the marrow, but with a
sense of humor and a gift of storytelling that defused partisan and
personal animosities.²

Campaigning on Horseback

Ever the politician, Alben Barkley loved to point out that he had
been born in a log house, in Graves County, Kentucky, on November 24,
1877. The baby was named Willie Alben, a name that always embarrassed
him, and as soon as he was old enough to have a say about it, he
reversed the order and formalized the name to Alben William. ``Just
imagine the tribulations I would have had,'' he later commented, ``a
robust, active boy, going through a Kentucky childhood with the name of
'Willie,' and later trying to get into politics!'' ³
Barkley worked his way through Marvin College, a Methodist
institution in Clinton, Kentucky. He also briefly attended Emory College
and the University of Virginia law school. As did most lawyers in those
days, he learned his trade mainly by ``reading'' law, in a Paducah law
office, before hanging out his own shingle. In 1903 he married and began
to raise a family. Two years later, Alben Barkley ran for prosecuting
attorney of McCracken County. Later he would deny the stories that he
campaigned on a mule. ``This story is a base canard, and, here and now,
I wish to spike it for all time,'' he wrote in his memoirs, That Reminds
Me. ``It was not a mule--it was a horse.'' ⁴
From prosecuting attorney, Barkley ran for county judge, and in
1912, at the age of thirty-five, he won a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives. His victory began a forty-two-year career in national
politics that would take him from the House to the Senate to the vice-
presidency. Barkley entered politics as a Democrat in the mold of
Jefferson, Jackson, and William Jennings Bryan, but in Congress he came
under the powerful influence of President Woodrow Wilson. As a
Wilsonian, Barkley came to define flexibility of government and a
willingness to experiment with social and economic programs as the
policies of ``a true Liberal.'' Although he was later closely identified
with the New Deal, Barkley asserted: ``I was a liberal and a progressive
long before I ever heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt.'' ⁵
In 1923, Representative Barkley made an unsuccessful run for the
Democratic nomination as governor of Kentucky. That sole electoral
defeat actually helped propel him into the Senate, because the race gave
him name recognition throughout Kentucky and won him the title ``iron
man,'' for his ability to give as many as sixteen speeches a day on the
campaign trail. In 1926 Barkley won the nomination for the United States
Senate and defeated an incumbent Republican to win the seat. By the
1930s he had moved into the Senate Democratic leadership as an assistant
to Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson. He also received national
attention as the keynote speaker at the 1932 Democratic convention that
first nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for president.⁶

The Struggle for the Majority Leadership

During the early New Deal, Barkley served shoulder to shoulder with
Majority Leader Robinson. Rarely were two leaders so starkly different
in nature, which perhaps explains the effectiveness of their combined
efforts. Joe Robinson of Arkansas, who had led the Democratic minority
in the 1920s and became majority leader in 1933, gave the impression
``of brute, animal strength, and a willingness to use it.'' He ran the
Senate by a mix of threats, favors, and parliamentary skill. Robinson
had no patience to cajole, and left such tasks to trusted aides like
Barkley, South Carolina's James F. Byrnes, and Mississippi's Pat
Harrison. ``Scrappy Joe'' could annihilate an opponent in debate, but
for the most part he preferred to leave the oratory to Barkley, who
could talk on any subject for any amount of time. Unlike Robinson,
Barkley had no ability when it came to threatening and domineering. He
succeeded through the art of compromise, and through his convivial
personality and gift of storytelling.⁷
When Robinson died during the fierce legislative battle to enact
President Roosevelt's ``Court packing'' plan in 1937, a contest
developed between Senators Barkley and Harrison to become majority
leader. Pat Harrison was chairman of the influential Finance Committee,
and a beloved figure in the Senate who held the loyalty of many members.
It appeared that Harrison would win the race--much to President
Roosevelt's dismay. Although Harrison had worked for enactment of much
New Deal legislation, he was too conservative and too independent for
Roosevelt's taste. Moreover, most of the opponents of Roosevelt's Court
plan stood with Harrison, who had refrained from speaking out on that
controversial issue. Although professing neutrality, Roosevelt privately
threw his support behind Barkley, pressing state Democratic leaders to
lobby their senators in Barkley's behalf. Roosevelt also addressed a
public letter to ``My dear Alben,'' implying his endorsement of the
Kentucky senator. When Barkley won the majority leadership by a single
vote, many senators--including his own supporters--interpreted his
election as a victory for the president rather than for Barkley. For
many years thereafter his colleagues assumed that he spoke primarily for
the White House to the Senate, rather than for the Senate to the White
House.⁸
After the forceful leadership of Joe Robinson, any successor would
suffer by comparison, and the press soon began to taunt ``bumbling
Barkley.'' On paper he led an enormous majority of 76 Democrats against
16 Republicans and a handful of independents. But in fact the Democratic
party was seriously divided between its liberal and conservative wings,
and Barkley could not guarantee a majority behind any of the
administration's domestic programs. Not until World War II forged a new
cohesiveness in the Senate did Barkley truly have a majority behind him.
Without question, he grew in office, gaining respect from both senators
and journalists for his dogged hard work and persistent good nature.

The Majority Leader Resigns

Senator Barkley was part of the ``Big Four'' that included Vice
President Henry Wallace, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, and House Majority
Leader John McCormack. The Big Four met regularly with President
Roosevelt to map the administration's legislative strategy. Barkley saw
himself as the leader of the president's forces, out to enact the
president's program. But in 1944 even Barkley's loyalty was stretched to
the breaking point. Relations between the administration and Congress
had grown strained during the war, as the chief executive was
preoccupied by military and diplomatic affairs. In February 1944,
Roosevelt became the first president to veto a revenue bill, rejecting a
two-billion-dollar tax increase as insufficient and declaring it a
relief measure ``not for the needy but for the greedy.'' Senator
Barkley, who had worked out the compromises within the Senate Finance
Committee, of which he was a member, and who believed it was the best
bill he could get passed, felt incensed over the president's
accusations. He rose in the Senate to urge his colleagues to override
the president's veto. Then he resigned as majority leader.⁹
The next day, the Senate Democrats unanimously reelected Barkley as
their leader, and from then on it was clear that Barkley spoke for the
Senate to the White House. The dramatic resignation and reelection
elevated Barkley's respect and standing as a leader but also dampened
his relations with President Roosevelt. That summer, when the Democratic
convention met and it became clear that the unpopular Henry Wallace
would need to be replaced as vice president, the mood of the convention
favored Barkley for the job, but Roosevelt would not tolerate one who
had so recently rebelled against him. Instead he chose the less-known
Missouri Senator Harry Truman. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won election
in the fall, and in April 1945 it was Vice President Truman, not Alben
Barkley, who inherited the presidency upon Roosevelt's
death.¹⁰
Whatever bitterness Barkley might have felt he put aside,
transferring his loyalty completely to Truman. During Truman's short
vice-presidency, they enjoyed what Barkley called a ``catcher-pitcher''
relationship, with the majority leader calling the signals. They
continued to work together closely after Truman moved to the White
House. These were rough years for the Democrats. In the 1946 elections
voters sent Republican majorities to the Senate and House for the first
time since the Great Depression. Barkley became minority leader during
the Eightieth Congress in 1947 and 1948. It was a foregone conclusion
that the Republicans would also win the presidency in 1948, and the
smart money was on New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey to become the next
president.

A Remarkable Upset

A dispirited Democratic convention met in Philadelphia in 1948. Yet,
once again, Alben Barkley was able to lift his party's spirits and get
the delegates cheering with an old-fashioned, rip-roaring, Republican-
bashing keynote address. The demonstration that followed his speech was
so long and so enthusiastic that Barkley became the obvious choice for
vice president. President Truman, suspicious that Barkley, who had
mentioned him only once in the hour-long speech, was trying to replace
him at the top of the ticket, was not eager to have the senator as his
running mate. ``Old man Barkley,'' as Truman called him, was seventy
years old, and their neighboring states were too similar to balance the
ticket regionally. But since others--like Supreme Court Justice William
O. Douglas--had turned him down, Truman agreed to accept Barkley for his
running mate if the delegates wanted him. ``It will have to come
quick,'' Barkley said of his selection. ``I don't want it passed along
so long it is like a cold biscuit.'' When offered the second place on
the ticket, Barkley, so often the bridesmaid in the past, accepted with
pleasure and set out on a grueling speaking tour that showed he was
still an ``iron man'' at age seventy.¹¹
While the president whistle-stopped by train, Barkley made the first
``prop stop'' campaign by air. He had come a long way since the days
when he first campaigned for office on horseback. In six weeks he toured
thirty-six states and gave more than 250 speeches. He spoke to so many
small audiences that the press dubbed him ``the poor man's candidate.''
But his strength and stamina refuted the charges that he had been too
old to run.¹²
The election of 1948 proved to be the most dramatic upset of all
time. It is doubtful whether there is a single American history textbook
in the schools today that fails to include the famous picture of a
smiling Harry Truman holding up the Chicago Tribune's erroneous
headline: ``Dewey Defeats Truman.'' So in January 1949 Alben Barkley
stepped down again as Senate Democratic leader, this time to become
president of the Senate. As vice president, Barkley buried whatever
differences he had with Truman and the two men got along well, although
some mutual suspicions lingered on. For years in the Senate it had been
Truman who called Barkley ``boss.'' And Barkley must surely have thought
of President Truman: ``There but for the spite of Franklin Roosevelt, go
I.'' Yet in every respect, politically, ideologically, and socially, the
two men were remarkably alike and worked together harmoniously.

The Delicate Nature of the Vice-Presidency

Having served in the job, even if briefly, Harry Truman understood
the delicate nature of the vice-presidency, which he noted fell between
the legislative and executive branches without being responsible to
either. ``The Vice-President cannot become completely acquainted with
the policies of the President, while the senators, for their part, look
on him as a presiding officer only, who is outside the pale as far as
the senatorial club is concerned.'' Despite being presiding officer, the
vice president was ``hardly ever'' consulted about legislative matters.
Although he could lobby for the president's legislation, he had nothing
to trade for votes. Truman noted that the status of John Nance Garner
had rested more on his position within the Democratic party than on the
vice-presidency, while Henry Wallace was a party outsider who had little
influence within the Senate. Alben Barkley, by contrast, ``was in a
class by himself,'' declared Truman. ``He had the complete confidence of
both the President and the Senate.'' ¹³
Although new in the job, Barkley had long experience in dealing with
vice presidents. He recalled how as a freshman senator in 1927 he had
gone to the rostrum in the Senate chamber to chat with Vice President
Charles Dawes, who said, ``Barkley, this is a helluva job I have as
Vice-President.'' ``What is the matter with it?'' Barkley asked, to
which Dawes replied: ``I can do only two things here. One of them is to
sit up here on this rostrum and listen to you birds talk without the
ability to reply. The other is to look at the newspapers every morning
to see how the President's health is.'' ¹⁴
As party leader in the Senate, Alben Barkley had assessed the
influence of several vice presidents over legislation and decided that
the degree of influence depended on the person who held the office. Vice
presidents with experience in the House or Senate could occasionally
exercise some leverage on legislation. As an example, Barkley cited
former House Speaker John Nance Garner as the vice president who
``exercised larger influence in the passage of legislation than any
other occupant of the Office.'' Garner assisted the passage of early New
Deal legislation ``in an informal and entirely proper way,'' helping to
speed emergency bills through the Senate. Barkley therefore declared
that ``a Vice-President who is well liked by members of the Senate and
by the corresponding members of the House in charge of legislation can
exercise considerable power in the shaping of the program of legislation
which every administration seeks to enact.''
Unlike some of his predecessors, Barkley was determined not to enter
into a ``four-year period of silence.'' He accepted hundreds of
invitations to speak at meetings, conventions, banquets, and other
partisan and nonpartisan programs. ``I like to do it,'' he explained.
``I like people and I enjoy the thrill of crowds. I have always believed
it to be the duty of those who are elected to high office by the people
to take government to them whenever and by whatever legitimate means
possible.'' Traveling almost exclusively by air, Barkley claimed to have
spent more time in the air than all his predecessors combined. Having
served twenty-two years as a member of the House and Senate, and the
past twelve as Democratic leader, he missed taking an active part in the
debates and piloting legislation through to passage. He found that the
office did not consume all his energies. Barkley constantly sought other
activities to occupy his time, attending meetings of the Senate
Democratic Policy Committee, legislative conferences with the president,
and cabinet meetings. He was the first vice president to become a member
of the National Security Council, as provided by the National Security
Act of 1947. ``All these conferences I attend regularly,'' he said in
1952, noting that he enjoyed them and engaged freely in the
discussions.¹⁵

Proud to be the Presiding Officer

Nevertheless, Alben Barkley was also the last vice president to
preside regularly over the Senate. Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick
estimated that Barkley presided between 50 and 75 percent of the time, a
figure that seems incredibly high today, but which reflected the
traditional concept of the vice president's constitutional
responsibility. As one who presided routinely, Barkley also used the
Vice President's Room, outside the chamber, as his working office. He
was proud to occupy that historic room, and liked to keep a wood fire
burning in its fireplace, the smell of wood smoke reminding him of the
open hearth in his childhood home. He also took pleasure in the
furnishings and art works of the room that were associated with famous
names from the past.¹⁶
In the Eighty-first Congress, which began in January 1949, the
Democrats enjoyed a 54-to-42 majority in the Senate. By the Eighty-
second Congress, their margin had shrunk to 49 to 47. But in both of
those congresses the real majority belonged to a coalition of
conservative Democrats and Republicans. This conservative coalition had
emerged out of the opposition to FDR's Court packing plan in 1937 and
predominated in the Senate at least until the liberal Democratic sweep
of Senate elections in 1958. During the Second World War and throughout
the Truman administration, this conservative coalition frequently
frustrated administration efforts to enact domestic reform
legislation.¹⁷
President Truman had proposed an ambitious Fair Deal program to deal
with national health insurance, farm supports, labor-management
relations, and civil rights, but the conservative coalition repeatedly
derailed his legislative initiatives, often through the use of
filibusters. In the field of civil rights, for instance, the president
desegregated the armed forces through executive order but had no luck in
winning congressional approval of bills to outlaw the poll tax, make
lynching a federal crime, or prohibit segregation and discrimination in
interstate commerce. More typical of congressional attitudes at the time
was the passage of a bill to authorize segregated schools on federal
property--a bill which President Truman vetoed. ``Step by step we are
discarding old discriminations;'' he declared, ``we must not adopt new
ones.'' ¹⁸
The Senate overturned some of Vice President Barkley's rulings.
Charles Watkins, who served as parliamentarian during Barkley's vice-
presidency, observed that, while Barkley was well acquainted with the
Senate's rules, he would sometimes get them mixed up or become obstinate
about how a rule should be applied. On a few occasions, Barkley
persisted in his own interpretations of the rules in spite of Watkins'
advice, only to have the Senate reverse his rulings--which dealt with
efforts to enact civil rights legislation. Early in 1949, Barkley's
successor as majority leader, Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois, attempted
to amend the rules to make cloture easier to obtain as a way of ending a
filibuster. Georgia Senator Richard Russell led the opposition to any
rules changes that might favor civil rights legislation. In a procedural
move--and against the parliamentarian's advice--Barkley ruled against
Russell's point of order, but the Senate, by a vote of 41 yeas to 46
nays, failed to sustain the chair's ruling. Barkley was apparently
willing to take the risk of defeat both because of his support for the
administration's civil rights program and because of his own frustration
at the Senate's inability to invoke cloture and end debate during his
years as majority leader.¹⁹
As vice president, Barkley did what he could to help his successors
as majority leader, Scott Lucas (who served from 1949 to 1951) and
Ernest McFarland (who held the leadership from 1951 to 1953). Barkley
continued to interpret the relationship between the vice president and
the floor leader as that of catcher and pitcher. With the divisions
inside the ranks of the Democratic party, however, as well as the
rapidly diminishing popularity of the Truman administration, Barkley
often watched his successors' pitches go wild. Lucas and McFarland were
more legislative mechanics than floor leaders, and neither achieved
Barkley's status or prestige in the post. As one journalist observed,
they made the job of majority leader ``misery without splendor.''
Despite their leadership roles, Lucas and McFarland were each in turn
defeated when they ran for reelection. Perhaps the sight of their
increasing discomfort and distress may have added to Barkley's own
comfort and pleasure in his position as presiding officer rather than
floor leader.²⁰

An Activist Vice President

As vice president, Alben Barkley tried to be as much of an activist
as his office would allow. He was assisted by a sympathetic president,
who not only had held the job, but was a student of American government
and history and thought seriously about how to enhance the vice-
presidency. By executive order, President Truman proclaimed a new coat
of arms, seal, and flag for the vice president. ``You can make 'em step
aside now,'' Truman assured Barkley when the new symbols of office were
unveiled. Truman also supported a raise in the vice president's salary
and expenses.²¹ When Barkley celebrated his thirty-eighth
anniversary of service in the legislative branch, President Truman paid
a surprise visit to the Senate chamber to present to the vice president
a gavel made from timber taken from the White House during its
reconstruction. Barkley was deeply touched by the gesture. In accepting
the gift, Barkley noted that President Truman frequently said that no
president and vice president got along together as well as they did.
``The reason for this,'' Barkley told the Senate, ``is that I have let
him have his way about everything.'' ²²
During the 1950 congressional campaign, which occurred after the
United States had entered the Korean War, President Truman left the job
of campaigning for Democratic candidates to Vice President Barkley, who
barnstormed the nation. Although Barkley's party suffered losses, the
Democrats retained their majorities in both houses of
Congress.²³ Yet, despite his vigorous campaigning, it became
evident that age was beginning to catch up with Alben Barkley. In 1950,
the columnist Drew Pearson attended a dinner for the vice president, at
which the president, chief justice, and Speaker of the House were
present. Barkley gave a brief speech and ``seemed a little old and
tired,'' Pearson recorded in his private diary. ``It was about the first
time that his speech wasn't all it usually is.'' ²⁴
Even though he was exempted from the Twenty-second Amendment to the
Constitution, ratified in 1951, that limited future presidents to two
terms, Truman announced his decision not to seek a third term. Vice
President Barkley then sought the Democratic nomination for president,
but his age and failing eyesight defeated his candidacy. Organized
labor, which exerted great influence within the Democratic party
organization, openly opposed his nomination because he was too old.
Although deeply hurt, Barkley accepted the decision and withdrew from
the race. He was invited to deliver a farewell address to the convention
and did so with characteristic grace and style, celebrating the
Democratic ``crusade'' that he had helped to lead to ensure a ``happier
and fuller life to all mankind in the years that lie before us.'' When
he bid the convention good-by, the delegates awarded him a forty-five-
minute ovation, demonstrating the enormous affection that the party felt
for him, even as they denied him his heart's desire.²⁵

Return from Retirement

Alben Barkley retired to Kentucky but could not stay retired for
long. In 1954 he ran once again for a seat in the Senate against the
incumbent Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper. Campaigning always
seemed to invigorate him, and he swept back into office by a comfortable
margin. His victory helped return the Senate Democrats to a one-vote
majority and made Lyndon Johnson majority leader. Two years later, in
1956, students at Washington and Lee University invited Senator Alben
Barkley to deliver the keynote address at their mock convention. He
accepted and gave one of his classic rip-snorting, Republican-bashing,
Democratic-praising orations. At its conclusion he reminded his audience
that after all of his years in national politics he had become a
freshman once again, but that he had declined an offer of a front row
seat with other senior senators. ``I'm glad to sit on the back row,'' he
declared, ``for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord
than to sit in the seats of the mighty.'' Then, with the applause of the
crowd in his ears, Alben Barkley collapsed and died from a massive heart
attack. For an old-fashioned orator, there could have been no more
appropriate final exit from the stage.²⁶
Clearly, Alben Barkley enjoyed being vice president of the United
States. Although he missed the opportunity to speak out, maneuver, and
vote on bills as he had as senator and majority leader, he enjoyed
promoting the president's legislative program. He also savored the
thrill of the crowds that a vice president can attract, relished
performing the ceremonial duties, and delighted in the prestige of
national office. ``I hope the Vice-Presidency continues to hold the
respect of the American people,'' he said. ``The qualifications for it
are the same as for the Presidency itself. They have to be; for he may
become the President in case of a death or disability.'' The best way
for vice presidents to retain respect, he concluded, was to deserve it.
``I have always felt that public officers should lean backwards in the
performance of their official duties because, to a larger extent than
many people realize, they are looked upon as examples of probity and
propriety in dealing with public matters. It will be a sad day for this
country and its institutions if and when the people lose confidence in
their public servants.'' For his part, Alben Barkley retained public
confidence--even public affection--throughout his long career in the
legislative branch and for four years cast the vice presidency in a
highly positive light.
ALBEN W. BARKLEY

NOTES

¹ Alben W. Barkley, That Reminds Me (Garden City, NY,
1954), pp. 21-22.
² For Barkley's life and career, see James K. Libbey,
Dear Alben: Mr. Barkley of Kentucky (Lexington, KY, 1976), and Polly Ann
Davis, Alben Barkley: Senate Majority Leader and Vice President (New
York, 1979).
³ Barkley, That Reminds Me, p. 27.
⁴ Ibid., p. 77.
⁵ Donald A. Ritchie, ``Alben W. Barkley: The President's
Man,'' in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among
Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington,
1991), pp. 130, 146.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 129-31.
⁷ Donald C. Bacon, ``Joseph Taylor Robinson: The Good
Soldier,'' in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, pp. 63-66.
⁸ Ritchie, pp. 127-29.
⁹ The events surrounding Barkley's resignation are
dramatically recounted in Allen Drury's A Senate Journal, 1943-1945 (New
York, 1963), pp. 85-97.
¹⁰ Barkley, That Reminds Me, pp. 169-94.
¹¹ Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S.
Truman (New York, 1995), pp. 448-51; Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and
Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-1948 (New York, 1977),
pp. 405-6; Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York, 1973), pp. 9-11;
David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), pp. 637-38.
¹² Barkley, That Reminds Me, pp. 195-204.
¹³ Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, vol. 1,
Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY, 1955), p. 57.
¹⁴ Alben W. Barkley, ``The Vice-Presidency,'' May 1952,
pp. 7-8, Alben W. Barkley Papers, University of Kentucky.
¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 12-14.
¹⁶ Floyd M. Riddick: Senate Parliamentarian, Oral History
Interviews, June 26, 1978 to February 15, 1979 (U.S. Senate Historical
Office, Washington, DC), p. 66; Barkley, That Reminds Me, p. 210.
¹⁷ See James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and
the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress,
1933-1939 (Lexington, KY, 1967).
¹⁸ Harold F. Gosnell, Truman's Crises: A Political
Biography of Harry S. Truman (Westport, CT, 1980), pp. 439-49, 481-90.
¹⁹ Floyd M. Riddick, pp. 67, 126-28, 144-46; U.S.,
Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 81st Cong, 1st sess., p. 2274;
Gilbert C. Fite, Richard B. Russell, Jr.: Senator From Georgia (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1991), pp. 245-46.
²⁰ Ritchie, pp. 156-57.
²¹ Davis, pp. 280-81.
²² Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess, p. 1710.
²³ Gosnell, pp. 453-54.
²⁴ Tyler Abell, ed., Drew Pearson, Diaries, 1949-1959
(New York, 1974), pp. 128-29.
²⁵ Barkley, That Reminds Me, pp. 231-51.
²⁶ Ibid., pp. 312-14.
?

Chapter 36

RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON

1953-1961

RICHARD M. NIXON
RICHARD M. NIXON

Chapter 36

RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON

36th Vice President: 1953-1961

[I]t just is not possible in politics for a Vice
President to ``chart out his own course''.
--Richard M. Nixon ¹
On the morning of April 16, 1956, Vice President Richard Nixon
served notice that the vice-presidency had finally become an office to
be sought after by ambitious politicians rather than a position in which
to gain four years of rest. After weeks of speculation that Nixon would
be dropped from the Republican ticket in the coming presidential race,
fueled by President Dwight Eisenhower's comment that the vice president
had to ``chart his own course,'' Nixon decided to force Ike's hand. The
young politician walked into the Oval Office and said, ``Mr. President,
I would be honored to continue as Vice President under you.''
² Eisenhower now had to either accept his running mate or
reject him openly. Not willing to risk a party squabble during what
promised to be a successful reelection bid, Eisenhower told the press he
was ``delighted by the news.'' Richard Nixon had defied pressure to
leave office voluntarily that came from within the White House, the
press, and some segments of the party. In the process, he had been
offered a major cabinet position and had been urged to run for a seat in
the Senate. Instead, this ambitious young politician fought to remain in
what had once been considered a meaningless office. Over the previous
four years, Nixon had not only worked hard to promote the policies of
the Eisenhower administration but had used the vice-presidency to build
a foundation of support among the regulars of the Republican party that
made him the early favorite for the presidential nomination in 1960. He
had fought hard for the office in 1952 and was not about to let anyone
but Eisenhower take it from him.

From Whittier to Congress

Richard Nixon's career seems best described as a series of fierce
political battles. Every campaign was bruising, and he never occupied a
``safe'' seat, perhaps only fitting for a man who had come so far, so
fast. Born on January 9, 1913, to a Quaker family in Yorba Linda,
California, Richard Milhous Nixon spent his childhood reading and
working in the various family enterprises. As a teenager in Whittier,
California, he split his time between the family grocery store and the
high school debating team, where he received numerous awards. He went on
to Whittier College, a small Quaker school not far from home, and then
received a scholarship to attend law school at Duke University. Nixon's
academic performance was characterized by perseverance and a
determination to work harder than any of his classmates. That
determination pushed him to finish third in his class at Duke in 1937
but did not result in any job offers from well-known firms in New York
City, as Nixon had hoped. Disappointed, he returned to Whittier, joined
a small firm, and began dabbling in local politics. In 1940 he married
Thelma ``Pat'' Ryan, after wooing her persistently for more than two
years.
As was the case for so many men of his generation, World War II
interrupted Richard Nixon's plans. His Quaker background made Nixon
reluctant to volunteer for duty in the armed services, but in 1942, he
obtained a job with the Office of Price Administration in Washington
that allowed him to contribute to the war effort and gain valuable
government experience. Soon, however, the call to arms became too great
to resist, and in August of 1942 he joined the navy. He served in the
South Pacific Air Transport Command, operating airfields during General
Douglas MacArthur's island-hopping campaign. While the war unexpectedly
altered Nixon's career path, his service record made him an even more
attractive political candidate than he had been previously. Even before
his discharge was official, the Committee of 100, a group of southern
California business and professional leaders looking for a promising
Republican candidate to sponsor against incumbent Democratic
Representative Jerry Voorhis, asked if Nixon was available as a
congressional candidate. After brief interviews to determine that this
returning young veteran held acceptably Republican views, the group
helped launch a career that was more promising than they could have
foreseen. Despite this impressive backing, however, the campaign against
Voorhis was a hard-nosed affair that gained Nixon both ardent admirers
and fierce enemies. Nothing ever came easily for Dick Nixon.³
That first campaign in 1946 gave Richard Nixon the issue that would
catapult him to prominence. He vigorously attacked Representative
Voorhis for being dominated by Communist-controlled labor unions. Like
many Republican candidates across the country, Nixon accused the
Democrats of allowing Communists to enter important positions in the
federal government, thus undermining American security and threatening
to ``socialize'' the United States. As the cold war began to heat up in
Europe and Asia, the American public reacted positively to Republican
appeals to throw the Communists out of government, as well as to calls
for cutting back on the New and Fair Deals. Republicans swept to victory
in congressional elections across the country, winning majorities in the
House and Senate for the first time since 1928. Nixon rode this wave of
protest, receiving a whopping 57 percent of the vote in his district.
The anticommunism that won him a seat in Congress became his trademark
issue on Capitol Hill when he gained appointment to the House Committee
on Un-American Activities (HUAC).⁴
Formed in the 1930s to investigate the activities of Nazi and
Communist organizations in the United States, HUAC had also served as a
forum for attacks on Jews, civil libertarians, and labor union
activists. By the late 1940s, the committee had a tarnished reputation
as an ineffective and irresponsible group that was more dedicated to
attracting publicity than to preserving American security. But, with
public anxiety on the rise, HUAC members had the opportunity to lead the
fight against domestic communism. Nixon took little part in the
committee's investigations of Hollywood during 1947, but he became the
leading figure in its highly publicized investigation of Alger Hiss.
In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, an editor for Time and a former
Communist, testified that Hiss, a former State Department official and
adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, had been a Communist agent.
Hiss denied the charge, but over the next year and a half, the attempt
to uncover the real story thrust Richard Nixon into the spotlight. Nixon
led the investigation that eventually sent Hiss to prison for perjury.
The case gave Nixon a national reputation as a diligent hunter of
Communists and established him as a rising, if controversial, young star
in the GOP.⁵
Nixon was not content to remain in the House of Representatives.
After only four years in the House, he set his sights on the Senate seat
held by Democrat Sheridan Downey. Facing a primary challenge from
Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, an aggressive opponent, Downey
decided to retire and to endorse another Democrat, Chester Boddy. While
Douglas and Boddy engaged in a vicious primary battle, Nixon watched and
waited. When Douglas, a former actress, narrowly won the nomination, one
of the nastier senatorial campaigns in U.S. history began. Nixon
attacked Douglas for having voted against appropriations for HUAC and
insinuated that she was a Communist sympathizer, charges that Boddy had
used during the primaries. The Nixon campaign distributed pink leaflets
comparing Douglas' House voting record with that of Labor party member
Vito Marcantonio of New York, while the candidate and others referred to
her as ``the Pink Lady.'' Douglas fought just as hard, implying that
Nixon had fascist tendencies and was controlled by oil interests. She
even pinned on him the label that would haunt him for years, ``Tricky
Dick.'' When the smoke cleared, Nixon emerged with an overwhelming
victory, garnering 59 percent of the vote. Nixon ran well throughout the
state, exhibiting an ability to win votes in traditional Democratic
areas and gaining continued attention from Republican leaders
nationwide. The campaign also brought harsh criticism. For years
afterward, his opponents would point to the 1950 race as an example of
the mean streak they considered so much a part of Richard Nixon's
character. The victory brought him increased prestige within the
Republican party and among conservatives generally, but it also formed
the foundation for his reputation as an unscrupulous
campaigner.⁶
Even a seat in the United States Senate, however, could not entirely
satisfy the restless Californian. In 1951, he embarked on a national
speaking tour, delivering forty-nine speeches in twenty-two states. His
travels boosted his already rising popularity with Republicans, and he
was soon regarded as the party's most popular speaker.⁷
During these speeches, Nixon also showed his dexterity at reaching out
to the different factions within the party. In the early 1950s,
Republicans were deeply divided between the conservative party regulars,
usually known as the Old Guard and personified by Ohio Senator Robert
Taft, and the more liberal eastern wing of the party, led by Thomas
Dewey of New York. Nixon's anticommunism appealed to conservatives, but
his firm internationalism and moderate views on domestic policy also
made him popular with more liberal audiences. This ability to appeal to
the party as a whole would serve him well in the future. By 1952, people
were already thinking of him as a national candidate. Any Republican
presidential nominee would be under tremendous pressure to ``balance''
the ticket by finding a vice-presidential candidate who would be
acceptable in both the East and the Midwest. Richard Nixon's consensus
approach to Republican politics positioned him to fill that role.

Campaigning for the Vice-Presidency

In 1952 the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination
centered around Taft and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Senator Taft had
been an influential force in the party for more than a decade, leading
the opposition to President Harry Truman's ``Fair Deal.'' Eisenhower,
the commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II, had been
sought by both parties as a nominee ever since the end of the war. In
1952, he announced that he was a Republican and that he was willing to
run. Widely, though not always accurately, considered more liberal than
Taft, Eisenhower was primarily concerned that the Republicans were in
danger of rejecting internationalism. After failing to convince Taft to
support an internationalist program, Ike threw his hat in the ring.
The contest threatened to polarize the party, and a number of
darkhorse candidates entered the Republican national convention hoping
for a deadlock. The most prominent of these hopefuls was Governor Earl
Warren of California. As a member of the California delegation, Senator
Nixon was obligated to support Warren's candidacy until the governor
gave up the race. Nixon, however, used the train ride to the convention
in Chicago to lobby his fellow delegates on behalf of Eisenhower. He
argued that, when (rather than if) Warren released his delegates, they
should throw their support to Eisenhower, because Taft could not win the
general election. Many Taft supporters later referred to Nixon's efforts
as ``the Great Train Robbery,'' claiming he sold out both Taft and
Warren in exchange for the vice-presidential nomination. Nixon's support
for Eisenhower was sincere, but both Thomas Dewey and Ike's campaign
manager, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had told Nixon weeks earlier that he
was the probable choice if Eisenhower should win. These promises,
coupled with Taft's preference for Nixon's California colleague Senator
William Knowland, undoubtedly spurred his efforts. After Eisenhower won
the nomination, he put together a list of potential running mates with
Senator Nixon's name at the top. Party leaders had already decided that
Nixon was their man.⁸
Richard Nixon was, in many ways, the ideal running mate for Dwight
Eisenhower. The general indicated that he wanted someone ``who was
young, vigorous, ready to learn, and of good reputation.'' ⁹
Only on the last of these criteria was Nixon suspect, and the most
outspoken critics of Nixon's tactics were liberal Democrats who probably
would not have voted for the Republican ticket in any event. Aside from
providing a youthful counter to the sixty-two-year-old Eisenhower, Nixon
balanced the ticket geographically, since Eisenhower's campaign relied
heavily on New Yorkers. His nomination also indicated that California
was becoming increasingly vital in presidential politics. Perhaps most
important, Nixon was one of only a very few Republicans of national
stature acceptable to both the Eisenhower camp and the Old
Guard.¹⁰ His selection was intended to foster unity within
the party and to calm the strife that could lead to another electoral
disaster like that of 1948. Calm, however, was seldom to be associated
with Richard Nixon.
On September 18, 1952, barely two months after the Republican
convention and just as the campaign was beginning to heat up, the front
page of the New York Post ran the headline, ``Secret Nixon Fund!'' The
story reported that Nixon had established a ``millionaire's club'' to
help pay his political expenses. About seventy California businessmen
contributed $100 to $500 each to pay the senator's travel and postage
bills and prepare for future campaigns. Unconcerned by the article at
first, Nixon argued that the fund was hardly secret and was intended as
a means of saving public funds that would otherwise have been applied to
his Senate expense account. He apparently forgot that such uses of his
account would have been illegal. The Truman administration had been
rocked by a series of scandals over the previous two years, and one of
the keys to the Republican campaign was Eisenhower's pledge to clean the
``crooks and cronies'' out of Washington. The Democrats charged the
Republicans with hypocritically attacking the administration when the
GOP's vice-presidential nominee was taking money from business
interests. Democratic leaders called on Nixon to resign, and public
pressure began to build for the Republicans to come clean about the
``secret fund.'' The Washington Post and New York Herald Tribune joined
the call for Nixon's resignation. His candidacy was in jeopardy before
it could even get started.¹¹
Eisenhower, meanwhile, remained cautious. He asserted his belief
that his running mate was an honest man and that the facts would
vindicate him. But Ike did not dismiss the possibility of Nixon's
resignation, saying only that he would talk with Nixon about the
situation as soon as possible. When Eisenhower later told the press that
the Republican campaign must be ``clean as a hound's tooth,'' Nixon
advisers took it as a sign that their man was in trouble with the boss.
Relations between the two camps had been strained from the beginning.
Some of Eisenhower's advisers were uncomfortable with Nixon on the
ticket, because they mistakenly viewed him as a tool of the Old Guard,
and they would have been more than happy to see him go. For their part,
Nixon's supporters resented the disdain they felt coming from
Eisenhower's people and were angry that Ike was leaving Nixon to fend
for himself.¹² Finally, Nixon decided to force a decision by
appearing on national television to explain his actions. On September
23, just hours before he went on the air, he received a call from Tom
Dewey, who explained that Eisenhower's ``top advisers'' had decided that
it would be best if Nixon ended his speech by offering his resignation.
Nixon was momentarily stunned, but when Dewey asked what he was going to
do, he replied, ``Just tell them I haven't the slightest idea as to what
I am going to do and if they want to find out they'd better listen to
the broadcast. And tell them I know something about politics too!''
¹³
What Nixon did that night saved his candidacy. From a studio in Los
Angeles, Nixon gave the nation a detailed report of his financial
history, everything from the mortgage on his house to the one political
gift he said he intended to keep, a little dog his daughters named
``Checkers.'' While this reference to his dog provided the popular name
for one of the twentieth century's most significant political speeches,
Nixon did much more than create a colorful image. He effectively refuted
the ridiculous charge that he used the fund to live a life of luxury,
while deflecting the more fundamental questions involving the influence
gained by its contributors--questions that the Democrats seemed to lose
sight of in their haste to sensationalize the story. Nixon also
challenged the other candidates to make a full disclosure of their
assets, knowing that Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson had
problems with a fund of his own. Finally, he urged viewers to write to
the Republican National Committee to state whether Nixon should leave or
remain on the ticket. He presented himself as a common American,
struggling to pay the bills, doing his part to clean up ``the mess in
Washington,'' and suffering the attacks of vicious foes.
Many observers found Nixon's ``Checkers'' speech repulsive.
Journalist Walter Lippmann called it ``the most demeaning experience my
country has ever had to bear,'' and Eisenhower's close friend, General
Lucius Clay, thought it was ``corny.'' But the speech seemed to touch a
chord in what is often called ``Middle America'' that elite observers
failed to understand. Historian Herbert Parmet has argued that the
appeal was like that of a Frank Capra movie, with Nixon playing the role
of ``Mr. Smith.'' Nearly sixty million people watched the telecast (a
record audience that would not be broken until Nixon debated John F.
Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race), and the response was
overwhelming. Over 160,000 telegrams poured into Republican national
headquarters, and switchboards around the country were jammed with calls
to local and state party officials urging Nixon to stay on the ticket.
There was little Eisenhower could do but consent. In a bold stroke,
Nixon had effectively taken the decision away from Eisenhower by
appealing to the party faithful. Nixon remained on the ticket, and ``Ike
and Dick'' cruised to a comfortable victory in November.¹⁴

The Eisenhower Team

Over the next eight years, Richard Nixon elevated the office of vice
president to a position of importance never before seen. No previous
vice president was ever as active within the administration or enjoyed
as much responsibility, partly because of Nixon's own energetic habits.
He was always looking for something to do and took a keen interest in
almost every aspect of government. Circumstances also played a part
because of Eisenhower's occasional health problems. Believing that
Franklin Roosevelt's failure to keep Vice President Harry S. Truman
informed of government initiatives like the Manhattan Project had been
dangerous, Eisenhower was determined that his own vice president would
be as well informed as anyone in the administration.¹⁵ But
the primary reason for Nixon's activist status was that Eisenhower
provided him with unique opportunities. Apart from the vice president's
constitutional role as presiding officer of the Senate, the occupant of
that office can only safely take up the activities that the president
indicates are appropriate. Most presidents made little use of their vice
presidents. Eisenhower, however, with his military experience confirming
the value of a well-trained subordinate officer, found that Nixon could
be an important part of his ``team'' concept of presidential
administration, especially since Nixon possessed many of the political
skills that were lacking in some of Eisenhower's other key advisers.
Also, unlike some other vice presidents, Nixon did not represent a
former or potential challenger to Eisenhower. Ike was, therefore,
willing to use his youthful vice president for important tasks, and
Nixon was willing to be so used. When they differed on questions of
policy, there was never any question that Nixon would follow the
president's lead. Because Nixon could perform smoothly in the several
roles that Eisenhower needed filled, he was able to cultivate the image
of an active and important vice president.

Party Liaison

Nixon's most important function in the administration was to link
Eisenhower with the party leadership, especially in Congress. Nixon and
Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., were the only former congressmen in the
Eisenhower cabinet, and no one else had Nixon's connections with the
Senate. Although the Republicans held a slim majority in Congress, it
was not certain that the Old Guard, many of whom were influential
committee chairmen, would rally to Eisenhower's legislative agenda. If
the president was going to push through his program of ``modern
Republicanism'' and stave off unwanted legislation, he needed a former
member who could ``work the Hill'' on his behalf. Nixon advised
Eisenhower to go to Congress ``only in dramatic circumstances,'' because
``Truman came so often there were occasions when he didn't have a full
House,'' but he need not have worried. Eisenhower had no intention of
trying to dominate Congress the way his predecessors had. Eisenhower and
Nixon held regular meetings with the Republican congressional
leadership, but the president had little contact with other GOP members
of Congress, and he seldom tried to harness public pressure against
Congress to support his legislation. This approach suited Eisenhower's
``hidden hand'' style of leadership, but to be effective, someone had to
serve as the administration's political broker with the rest of the
Republicans. Nixon was the obvious candidate.¹⁶
One of the more immediate tasks for the new vice president was to
help the administration defeat the Bricker amendment. In 1951,
Republican Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio had introduced a
constitutional amendment that would have drastically curtailed the
ability of the president to obtain treaties and executive agreements
with other nations. Bricker's immediate purpose was to prohibit
President Truman from entering into agreements such as the United
Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, for
fear that it would compromise the sovereignty of the United States. More
generally, the Bricker amendment aimed to increase the influence of
Congress in making foreign policy. Even with a Republican in the White
House, Bricker refused to back away from his amendment, offering it as
the first order of business in the new Congress, with the support of
almost every Republican senator. Eisenhower, however, believed the
amendment would severely restrict the necessary powers of the president
and make the nation ``helpless in world affairs.'' Rather than confront
his own party leadership, he hoped to delay action on the measure in
order to gradually chip away at its support. He sent Nixon and others to
work with Bricker on compromises and suggested a ``study committee,''
with Bricker as its chair, to come up with an agreeable
alternative.¹⁷ Bricker, however, would not yield on the
substance of his amendment. Finally, in 1954, after much wrangling, the
administration convinced Democrat Walter George of Georgia to offer a
much less stringent substitute. On the crucial roll call, the substitute
received a vote of 60 to 31, falling one short of the two-thirds
majority necessary for passage of a constitutional amendment. Bricker
tried to revive his amendment, but too many Republicans had changed
sides.¹⁸ Vice President Nixon had been one of the
administration's most active lobbyists in defeating the amendment
without splitting the party. His other primary assignment as party
intermediary proved more demanding.
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) shot to fame in 1950 by brazenly
claiming that the State Department was full of ``known Communists.''
Over the next two years, he waged a running battle with the Truman
administration over its conduct of foreign policy and the loyalty of its
appointees. Many Republicans and some conservative Democrats joined in
this anticommunist ``crusade.'' They averred that the nation had been
betrayed at Yalta and that Truman had ``lost China.'' McCarthy promised
to clean the Communists out of government and to end ``twenty years of
treason.''
When Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House, he and his advisers
hoped that Vice President Nixon could keep McCarthy in line if the
senator continued his attacks. The results of this strategy were mixed.
Nixon was certainly the right man for the job. As historian David
Oshinsky writes, ``Only Taft and Nixon seemed able to reach him
[McCarthy], and Taft was now too sick to try.'' ¹⁹ Nixon was
also one of the few people in the nation who could safely deal with the
``McCarthy problem,'' because, as Eisenhower put it, ``Anybody who takes
it on runs the risk of being called a pink. Dick has had experience in
the communist field, and therefore he would not be subject to
criticism.'' ²⁰ Nixon succeeded in convincing McCarthy not to
pursue an investigation of the CIA, but the senator was soon talking
about ``twenty-one years of treason,'' implying that Eisenhower had not
stemmed the tide. Neither Nixon nor anyone else could convince McCarthy
not to investigate the U.S. Army. As chairman of the Committee on
Government Operations' Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, McCarthy
had wide discretion to conduct investigations, but Eisenhower publicly
claimed that he would not allow members of the executive branch to
testify about private conversations. He also supported army officers who
refused to appear before the subcommittee. As the president did what he
could to divert the hearings, he had Nixon make a national speech
emphasizing the need to be ``fair'' in the pursuit of Communists. In the
end, McCarthy went too far. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings
revealed to the public a bellicose senator viciously attacking the army
and the administration. As the president refused to give executive
information to the committee, and as McCarthy's public support waned,
his Senate colleagues finally decided they had seen enough. On December
2, 1954, with Vice President Nixon presiding, the Senate voted 67 to 22
to condemn McCarthy's behavior. Republicans split 22 to 22 on the vote,
with Democrats unanimously in favor. Thus, after Eisenhower's attempt to
use Nixon to contain McCarthy failed, the administration had resorted
instead to quiet resistance, allowing McCarthy himself to bring about
his own downfall.²¹

Adviser and Campaigner

Apart from his specific assignments, Nixon also served as the
administration's general political expert. No one in the administration
had a more thorough knowledge of the way Congress worked and how to get
legislation passed. He always attended cabinet meetings and contributed
his insight by pointing out the political implications of any decision.
He urged cabinet members to get to know the chairmen of the committees
that had jurisdiction over their departments. Eisenhower's speech
writer, Emmett Hughes, described Nixon as ``crisp and practical and
logical: never proposing major objectives, but quick and shrewd in
suggesting or refining methods.'' ²² Nixon also emphasized
the need to sell ``modern Republicanism'' to the public. Cabinet
members, he said, should not be afraid to make partisan speeches and
should concentrate them in competitive congressional districts. He even
suggested that they should welcome the chance to appear on such
television interview shows as Meet the Press.²³ Meanwhile,
both Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used Nixon to
publicly explore policy options and propose ideas that they were wary of
advocating themselves. As Ike put it, ``He [Nixon] can sometimes take
positions which are more political than it would be expected that I
take.'' ²⁴
Nowhere was this approach more in evidence than on the campaign
trail. The Republican strategy in 1952 had been simple. While Eisenhower
ran a positive campaign that emphasized his appeal to citizens of all
parties, Nixon's job was to ``hammer away at our opponents.'' He quickly
gained a reputation as the Republican ``hatchet man,'' an image that
would be captured by Washington Post cartoonist ``Herblock's'' portrayal
of him as a mud-slinging sewer dweller, an image that Nixon deeply
resented. Nixon's campaign was a hard-hitting anticommunist assault,
charging that Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, ``had lost
China, much of Eastern Europe, and had invited the Communists to begin
the Korean War,'' and calling Democratic presidential candidate Adlai
Stevenson a graduate of Acheson's ``Cowardly College of Communist
Containment.'' ²⁵ But Nixon's campaigning was hardly over
after 1952. In fact, it seemed as though he were campaigning throughout
his vice-presidency. In 1954 he hit the campaign trail once more on
behalf of congressional Republicans.
In many ways, Nixon emerged as the party's spokesman during these
years because Eisenhower was unwilling to take on that role. Eisenhower
was determined to be president of ``all the people,'' and did not
``intend to make of the presidency an agency to use in partisan
elections.'' ²⁶ Apparently, he had no such qualms about the
vice-presidency, and who better to rally the party faithful than Nixon,
the man a contemporary observer called the ``scientific pitchman of
politics.'' ²⁷ While Eisenhower would not go after the
Democrats, he was quite willing to let Nixon do so. According to White
House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, ``[Ike] told Nixon and others,
including myself, that he was well aware that somebody had to do the
hard-hitting infighting, and he had no objection to it as long as no one
expected him to do it.'' ²⁸ Nixon therefore conducted another
aggressive campaign for the midterm election, covering nearly 26,000
miles to ninety-five cities in thirty states on behalf of Republican
candidates. The outcome was not favorable for the GOP, which lost two
Senate seats and sixteen House seats, and Nixon received little public
credit for his efforts.²⁹
Eisenhower's ambivalence about Nixon's attacking campaign style
emerged forcefully two years later in their 1956 reelection campaign.
Eisenhower told Nixon that he should try to elevate the level of his
speeches and that he should avoid ``the exaggerations of partisan
political talk.'' Unlike Harry Truman's ``give 'em hell'' campaign of
1948, Ike wanted Nixon to ``give 'em heaven.'' This more dignified
campaign style led to discussions of a ``new Nixon.'' He talked about
``Republican prosperity'' and Eisenhower's positive accomplishments as
president. It seemed that Nixon had finally decided to put away his
rhetorical boxing gloves. But it was a false impression. Nixon was
uncomfortable with this approach. Republican crowds did not react with
the same vigor as when he ripped into the Democrats, and he found it
hard to suppress his ``normal partisan instincts,'' and to ``campaign
with one arm tied behind [his] back.'' ³⁰ Yet this was not
entirely his campaign, and he had to abide by Eisenhower's wishes. Ike,
however, soon remembered why he had chosen Nixon in the first place. As
the campaign intensified and Stevenson (running once more) and the
Democrats stepped up their attacks on the administration, Eisenhower
decided to give his aggressive vice president a bit more rope. He told
him, ``Look, Dick, we've agreed that your speeches generally in this
campaign ought to be on a higher level than in the past. Still I think
it's perfectly all right for you to pick up on some of these wild
charges and throw them back at the other fellow.'' ³¹
Eisenhower, of course, did not intend to follow this course himself. So,
while Eisenhower's staff privately worried about Nixon ``running loose
through the country,'' the ``old Nixon'' reemerged with Eisenhower's
blessing and once more provided Democrats with their favorite target.
Two years later, many of Nixon's friends advised him to stay away
from the 1958 congressional elections. Despite Eisenhower's continued
popularity and his comfortable victory in 1956, Republicans had lost
ground in Congress in 1954 and again in 1956. Most observers predicted
further losses in 1958. Many of Nixon's friends in the party,
anticipating that he would run for president in 1960, thought that being
associated with the certain disaster of 1958 would only get in the way.
As Tom Dewey told him, ``I know that all those party wheelhorses will
tell you stories that will pluck your heartstrings, but you're toying
with your chance to be President. Don't do it, Dick. You've already done
enough, and 1960 is what counts now.'' ³²
If Nixon did not carry the banner for the party, who would?
Eisenhower was not willing to do so, and no one else could. In the end,
Nixon could not resist, and he took to the campaign trail once more. He
was more disenchanted with the party's organization than ever, and the
results of the elections confirmed his pessimism. (He reported to the
cabinet, ``There were just too many turkeys running on the Republican
ticket.'') ³³ The GOP lost 13 seats in the Senate and 47 in
the House while losing 13 of 21 gubernatorial races. The only really
impressive victories for the Republicans were for governors Nelson
Rockefeller in New York and Mark Hatfield in Oregon, and Senator Barry
Goldwater in Arizona. The press proclaimed that the big winner was
Rockefeller, while the big loser was Nixon. Years later, Nixon would
lament, ``Perhaps Dewey had been right: I should have sat it out.''
³⁴ Despite the immediate disaster, Eisenhower was not the
only beneficiary of Nixon's campaigning. Rank-and-file Republicans did
not forget that Nixon had tried to help, and party leaders throughout
the nation owed the vice president a significant political debt. He
would collect in 1960.

Goodwill Ambassador

While Nixon's roles as political adviser and campaigner were the
most important ones in defining his place in the administration, it was
his role as international goodwill ambassador that brought him the most
praise. Henry Wallace had been the first vice president to travel
abroad, but no one either before or since did so with greater fanfare
than Nixon. On most occasions his visits were intended only as gestures
of American friendship. Nixon's 1958 trip to Argentina for the
inauguration of that nation's first democratically elected leader was
one such visit. Sometimes, however, the vice president's travels had a
more substantive purpose. On his first trip abroad, to Asia in 1953,
Nixon took with him a note from Eisenhower to South Korean leader
Syngman Rhee. The letter made it clear that the United States would not
support a South Korean invasion of the North, and Nixon was sent to
obtain a promise from Rhee that such an action would not take
place.³⁵ Nixon visited a number of countries in Asia from
Japan to Pakistan, travelling 38,000 miles. He established a practice of
meeting with students, workers, and opposition leaders as well as with
government officials. His openness seemed popular in most of these
nations, and he developed an abiding interest in the continent and its
politics. His travels gave him a reputation at home as an expert on
Asian affairs that would remain with him throughout his life. He also
travelled to Austria in 1956 to meet with Hungarian refugees and to
Africa a year later.
But Nixon's most famous trips were still to come. When he set off
for South America in 1958, he anticipated an uneventful tour that would
merely distract him from his attempts to talk the administration into
cutting taxes at home. He was unprepared for the vehemence of the anti-
American demonstrations he would encounter from those opposing U.S.
policy toward Latin America. In Peru, Nixon was blocked from visiting
San Marcos University by a crowd of demonstrators chanting ``Go Home
Nixon!'' He was met in Venezuela by hostile crowds that spat at him as
he left his plane. In the capital, Caracas, the scene turned violent. A
mob surrounded his car and began rocking it back and forth, trying to
turn it over and chanting ``Death to Nixon.'' Protected by only twelve
Secret Service agents, the procession was forced to wait for the
Venezuelan military to clear a path of escape. But by that time, the car
had been nearly demolished and the vice president had seen his fill of
South America. President Eisenhower sent a naval squadron to the
Venezuelan coast in case they needed to rescue the vice president, but
Nixon quietly left the country the next day. He returned to Washington
to a hero's welcome. Over 15,000 people met him at the airport,
including President Eisenhower and the entire cabinet. Over the next few
days, politicians of both parties throughout the nation praised Nixon's
courage, and congratulations poured in by the thousands. It was Nixon's
shining moment, but the respect was more the result of Americans
rallying behind their vice president than any change in Nixon's
standing.³⁶
Nixon's final trip abroad brought him more favorable reviews. In
1959, he travelled to the Soviet Union to open the United States
Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow, part of a new cultural exchange
program. As he and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev toured the exhibit,
they engaged in a lengthy and sometimes heated debate on the merits of
capitalism versus communism. Much of this debate was captured by
American television, which transmitted an image of the nation's vice
president standing in a model American kitchen defending American
progress against a belligerent Khrushchev. The encounter became known as
``The Kitchen Debate,'' and the nation once more took pride in its
feisty vice president. Nixon concluded his trip with a thirty-minute
speech on Soviet television, becoming the first American official to
address the Soviet Union in a live broadcast. He stressed ``peaceful
competition'' between the East and West and expressed hope that the
``Spirit of Geneva'' would include a freer exchange of information. On
his return, Nixon stopped in Warsaw, Poland, and was given a remarkable
and touching reception by the people of that city, who crowded the
streets, throwing roses and shouting ``Long Live Nixon.'' While the trip
contained little of real substance, it showed Americans an energetic
young leader acting on the world stage, an impressive image and one that
Nixon would try to cultivate for the future. In all, Nixon visited
fifty-four countries and met forty-five heads of state during his eight
years as vice president, setting a standard difficult for his successors
to match and his opponents to discount.³⁷
The vice president, of course, did not travel alone. Pat Nixon
always accompanied her husband overseas and established her own role in
spreading American ``goodwill.'' She had vigorously campaigned with him
for Congress in 1946 and 1950, but by 1952 she had grown weary of
politics. Still, when her husband received the vice-presidential
nomination, she took up campaigning with him once again. She seemed
resigned to being married to a politician and concentrated on raising
their two daughters, Tricia and Julie, with minimal privacy at their
home on Tilden Street in Washington's Spring Valley section. However, as
Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken puts it, ``Pat longed for that peace
which the world of politics cannot give.'' She did, however, enjoy
travelling and developed a reputation as an ambassador in her own right.
While the vice president met with political leaders, Mrs. Nixon visited
hospitals and schools, mixing with people wherever she went. She gave
the first press conference exclusively for women reporters in Japan and
dined in a previously all-male club in Kuala Lumpur. Everywhere she
went, she was extremely popular and only added to the positive image of
her husband. If anyone deserved the title ``goodwill ambassador,'' it
was Pat Nixon.³⁸

Constitutional Roles

Apart from the jobs Eisenhower gave him, Nixon was also the
presiding officer of the Senate, as provided in the Constitution. Like
many of his predecessors, Nixon did not find this task to be
particularly interesting. He was too energetic and ambitious to sit and
listen to Senate speeches without being able either to vote or to
intervene and was therefore seldom present in the Senate chamber. After
the 1952 elections, Republicans held a one-vote majority in the Senate,
with 48 members; the Democrats had 47; and Wayne Morse (OR) had just
left the Republican party and intended to vote as an Independent. But
when Senate Republican Leader Robert Taft died in July 1953, Ohio's
governor replaced him with a Democrat, Thomas A. Burke, shifting the
one-vote majority to the Democrats. Wayne Morse made it clear, however,
that he would vote with his former Republican colleagues on
organizational matters, giving the Republicans exactly half the votes of
the ninety-six-member Senate, with Vice President Nixon available to
break a tied vote in the Republicans' favor. The Democrats therefore
realized it would be futile to offer the resolutions necessary to give
them control of the Senate's committee chairmanships and majority floor
leadership offices. For the remainder of that Congress, Nixon
occasionally appeared if he thought it would be necessary to break a
tie, but otherwise he customarily left after the opening prayer and
majority leader's announcements, turning over the chair to a junior
member.³⁹
As the Democratic majority grew during the 1950s, Nixon spent even
less time in the Senate. Because Nixon had never been known as a
legislative tactician or parliamentarian, and his one constitutionally
mandated job did not provide any real opportunities to use his political
skills, he avoided his duties in the Senate whenever possible.
The vice president did try to take a more active role in the
Senate's deliberations on one occasion, but his effort failed. In 1957,
the Eisenhower administration decided to push for a civil rights bill
and anticipated that opponents of the bill would use a filibuster to
kill it if necessary. Senate Rule XXII provided that cloture could not
be invoked on a rules change, making it impossible to stop such a
filibuster. At the opening of the first session of the Eighty-fifth
Congress in 1957, Senator Clinton Anderson (D-NM), in a strategy
intended to make cloture easier to obtain, moved that the Senate
consider new rules. Nixon--over the objections of the Republican
leadership, which supported the existing cloture provisions--stated that
``in the opinion of the Chair,'' the membership after each election
composed a new Senate rather than a continuing body. As a result, he
ruled, the Senate could change the rules at the beginning of each
Congress by vote of a simple majority. The Senate, however, tabled
Anderson's motion the next day by a vote of 55 to 38. Later that year,
after repeated attempts to change the cloture rule in order to pass the
Civil Rights Act of 1957, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson
engineered a compromise that applied cloture to debate on motions for
changes in rules, but declared that ``the rules of the Senate shall
continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they be changed
as provided in these rules.'' ⁴⁰
The other task that is inherent in the vice president's job is, as
Charles Dawes put it, ``to check the morning's newspaper as to the
President's health.'' ⁴¹ For Richard Nixon, that was not just
an idle activity. On September 24, 1955, Nixon received a call informing
him that the president had suffered a coronary attack. Nixon was placed
in a very delicate situation. While the president was ill, Nixon needed
to show that the nation's business was being handled effectively so as
not to seem weak, but if he attempted to take too much control it would
arouse fears of a power grab by an overly ambitious understudy. He
recognized that ``even the slightest misstep could be interpreted as an
attempt to assume power.'' ⁴² Nixon and other members of the
cabinet decided to emphasize that Eisenhower's team concept would ensure
the government could operate without difficulty until the president
recovered. The vice president would preside at cabinet and National
Security Council meetings, just as he had done numerous times when the
president had been away. White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams flew
to Denver, where Eisenhower was hospitalized, to assist the president,
and when Ike was feeling better Nixon was one of the first to visit him.
Still, Nixon was careful to observe proper protocol. He presided over
cabinet meetings from the vice president's chair and conducted business
from his office in the Capitol. He even made sure to visit cabinet
members rather than having them come to see him. As he put it, he had
``to provide leadership without appearing to lead.'' ⁴³ Nixon
handled this ambiguous situation with considerable skill, leading Emmett
Hughes, a frequent critic, to call it his ``finest official hour.''
⁴⁴
But while the vice president's actions, and inactions, brought
widespread praise, they also raised fears that the Eisenhower
administration could suddenly become the Nixon administration,
especially when the president underwent an operation for ileitis in June
of 1956. Eisenhower's health would become a primary issue in the 1956
election, as Democrats reminded voters that a vote for Eisenhower was
also a vote for Nixon. Ike's health would continue to be a subject of
concern during his second term, and after Eisenhower suffered a stroke
in 1957 he decided that it was time to set out procedures for how Nixon
should proceed if the president were to become incapacitated. He drafted
a letter stating that, if he were unable to perform his duties, Nixon
would serve as ``acting president'' until he recovered. Eisenhower would
determine when he was sufficiently able to take control once more. The
agreement was strictly between Eisenhower and Nixon and therefore
amounted only to a shaky precedent (although Kennedy and Johnson copied
it later).⁴⁵ Not until passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment
in 1967 was the issue of presidential incapacity officially dealt with.

Nixon and Eisenhower

In the end, Richard Nixon filled with considerable skill the roles
that President Eisenhower gave him. So why did Eisenhower come close to
dropping him from the ticket in 1956? Eisenhower's opinion of his vice
president was most ambiguous. The president appreciated Nixon's efforts
in carrying out his assigned tasks. He told associates, ``it would be
difficult to find a better Vice President'' and publicly repeated such
praises on a regular basis. He also ``believed Nixon to be the best
prepared man in government to take over [his] duties in any emergency.''
⁴⁶ This was more than just public flattery for a subordinate.
Because of his wide-ranging interests and Eisenhower's willingness,
Nixon was perhaps the most informed member of the administration.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles kept him briefed on State
Department affairs, and even the CIA was willing to provide outlines of
its current activities.⁴⁷
For Eisenhower, this faith in Nixon as vice president did not
translate into confidence about Nixon's potential for the presidency. He
saw Nixon as a dedicated junior officer who performed his duties with
skill but had not developed into a true leader. He worried constantly
that his young vice president had not ``matured.'' Eisenhower saw the
presidency as the office of a statesman rather than a partisan
politician. The 1960s image of Eisenhower as being naive or nonpolitical
is inaccurate, but he did believe that presidential politics was
different from congressional or statewide politics. The office required
a person who could rise above unseemly partisan bickering (at least in
public) to represent the national interest, and he did not believe that
Richard Nixon had shown that kind of potential. This was partially an
unfair assessment, since Nixon's public image as a fierce partisan was
magnified by Eisenhower's insistence on using him to conduct the
president's public political battles. Still, Nixon's ``natural partisan
instincts,'' as Nixon called them, were never far from the surface, and
they made Eisenhower uncomfortable. In the end, Eisenhower decided that
Nixon just had not ``grown,'' and that he was not ``presidential
timber.'' ⁴⁸
When Eisenhower decided to run for reelection in 1956, he also began
to feel uneasy about not having established a ``logical successor.''
⁴⁹ He would have liked to run with Robert Anderson, his
treasury secretary, but Anderson, a Democrat, knew the GOP would never
accept him. The president hoped to find a way to get Nixon off the
ticket without seeming to ``dump'' him. As a result, when he announced
his own candidacy and the press asked him about Nixon, he dodged by
claiming it was ``traditional . . . to wait and see who the Republican
Convention nominates.'' ⁵⁰ Since this was a ``tradition''
that had been broken by Franklin Roosevelt and had not been observed by
Eisenhower himself in 1952, it was obvious that Eisenhower was being
disingenuous. No one saw this more clearly than Richard Nixon.
Eisenhower hoped to avoid a decision by convincing Nixon to leave
the ticket voluntarily. He offered to appoint Nixon secretary of defense
in a new administration. He argued that Nixon's low poll numbers might
be a drag on the ticket and that Nixon needed to gain executive
experience in order to improve his future prospects. Nixon replied that
he would do whatever Eisenhower decided was best for the campaign, but
that was exactly the decision the president was trying to avoid. He told
the press that Nixon would have ``to chart out his own course.''
Eisenhower's evasions infuriated Nixon, and after days of dangling on
Ike's hook, he decided to force the issue by telling the president that
he wanted to run again. Eisenhower, finally forced to choose,
relented.⁵¹
There was one more ``dump Nixon'' attempt in 1956, led by Harold
Stassen, Eisenhower's ``secretary of peace'' and foreign policy adviser,
after Eisenhower's ileitis operation, but, by that time, Nixon already
had the support of the party leadership and the convention delegates.
Since Nixon had used the vice-presidency to build a strong base of
support within the party and to gain tremendous press coverage, the
argument that he would be better off in the cabinet was simply not
credible. He realized that the rest of the nation would see it as a
replay of the 1944 ``demotion'' of Henry Wallace rather than as a move
into a more responsible position.⁵² While it was not wise to
say so, he also realized that he was only one uncertain heartbeat away
from the presidency, and that was a chance worth taking.
Nixon, however, would have to deal with Eisenhower's ambivalence
again in 1960. Nixon was clearly the favorite for the Republican
presidential nomination that year, but he faced a significant challenge
from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Eisenhower did not openly
endorse Nixon even though he certainly preferred Nixon and was furious
with Rockefeller for attacks he had made on the administration. While
Nixon managed to hold off Rockefeller, the governor's criticisms pointed
out what would become an essential problem for Nixon during the general
election: while Eisenhower personally maintained immense popularity, his
administration did not. Nixon's campaign stressed his experience. In
contrast to his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Senator John F.
Kennedy, Nixon had met with world leaders, led sessions of the cabinet,
and had better presidential ``credentials'' than any man in America. But
this approach put Nixon in the difficult position of defending an
administration for which he was not responsible. For two years he had
privately urged a tax cut to stimulate the economy, but Ike would not
unbalance the budget. Nixon had also urged increases in defense
expenditures and an invasion of Cuba, but the president said they were
unnecessary. These criticisms would be taken up by the Democrats in
1960, and Nixon had to defend the administration, even while privately
agreeing with the critics. He refused campaign help from the White House
staff but could not assemble a full staff to generate innovative policy
ideas for fear of offending Ike.⁵³ It seemed he was boxed in.
Eisenhower himself exacerbated the problem. While Nixon campaigned
as an experienced leader, the press asked Eisenhower what policy
suggestions Nixon had made that had been implemented. Eisenhower
replied, ``If you give me a week, I might think of one.'' ⁵⁴
This was hardly the sort of endorsement Nixon needed--and it was not
entirely fair. Elliot Richardson, who served during Eisenhower's second
term as an assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, tells the story of a 1959 cabinet meeting at which Nixon
stood against a majority opposed to a higher education subsidy proposal.
This followed a typical pattern of cabinet disinterest in the electoral
value of its decisions. Richardson reported, ``Time and again I would
see Nixon get up from the table after Cabinet meetings so tense that
beads of sweat were standing out on his brow.'' At the 1959 meeting,
Nixon realized that a record of support for this legislation would be
highly desirable in his 1960 presidential campaign. Consequently, he
structured that day's discussion so that the opponents had to
acknowledge that the bill would have little immediate budgetary impact,
that it established no new precedent for federal support of education,
and that it indeed met an important national priority. Eisenhower
reluctantly added his support.⁵⁵
Eisenhower mostly stayed out of the campaign until the last weeks,
when he made several speeches on Nixon's behalf. His reluctance was due
as much to Nixon's determination to run his own campaign as to Ike's ill
health or indifference. The race itself was one of the closest in
American history. It featured two bright young candidates who evinced an
unbounded optimism about the nation's future squaring off in the
historic television debates that captured the attention of the nation.
In the end, Kennedy won by the narrowest of margins, but Nixon had run a
highly competent campaign in spite of the handicaps of representing a
minority party, being tied to an unpopular administration, and facing a
charismatic opponent. He also was attempting to become the first sitting
vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren. In light
of these obstacles, it is amazing that he came as close as he did to
winning, but he had been campaigning almost continuously since 1946,
developing an ability to discern voters' concerns. He also devised
innovative campaign techniques, using television and advertising, that
allowed him to address those concerns. Only the magical charm of Jack
Kennedy could finally defeat him.⁵⁶
Most of Nixon's opponents hoped that his career was over, but more
perceptive observers knew better. As Republican Congressional Campaign
Committee Chairman William Miller said, ``Any man who, at 47, comes
within 300,000 [sic] votes of winning the presidency--for a party that
is greatly outnumbered--has to be reckoned with. It's far too early to
bury Dick Nixon.'' ⁵⁷
Nixon, however, soon walked into another disaster. He returned to
California and challenged Democratic Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in
the 1962 gubernatorial race. Amid speculation that he only wanted the
office as a step toward another presidential race, Nixon was defeated
soundly and responded with a vitriolic ``last'' press conference in
which he blamed the media for his defeat and declared, ``You won't have
Nixon to kick around anymore.'' But his retirement proved temporary, as
he staged a remarkable comeback to gain the GOP nomination in 1968 and
to win the presidency amid the national turmoil over the Vietnam War.
Nixon's presidency would be marked by a new spirit of detente with the
Soviet Union and by the establishment of diplomatic relations with the
People's Republic of China, but all would be overshadowed by the tragedy
of Watergate.
President Nixon was accused of using his office to cover up crimes
in his reelection campaign, including a break-in at Democratic national
headquarters in the Watergate office building, and misusing federal
funds to influence government witnesses. Under threat of impeachment,
Richard Nixon, in 1974, became the only president in American history to
resign from office. This time, his retirement was permanent, but he
remained in the public eye as a prolific author and one of the nation's
most cogent commentators on international politics. He even served as an
informal adviser to many of his successors. Richard Nixon died on April
22, 1994, at the age of 81.⁵⁸
Nixon's opinion of the vice-presidency changed with his situation.
Early on, he declared, ``I like it much better than service in the House
or Senate. In the vice-presidency you have an opportunity to see the
whole operation of the government and participate in its decisions.''
⁵⁹ But at other times he was frustrated about being
Eisenhower's ``hatchet man.'' ⁶⁰ Appropriately, his opinion
of his chief also fluctuated. Nixon admired Eisenhower's political
savvy, calling him a ``far more complex and devious man than most people
realize, and in the best sense of those words.'' ⁶¹ But,
Nixon was also deeply hurt by Eisenhower's unwillingness to come to his
support in the 1952 fund crisis, the ``dump Nixon'' movement of 1956, or
his own election bid in 1960.⁶² As a Nixon aide put it, the
vice president's opinion of Eisenhower went from ``hero worship, to
resentment, to hero worship, to disenchantment.'' ⁶³
Yet Nixon's fortunes were intimately tied to Eisenhower's coattails.
Years later, in 1968, Nixon would remind crowds that he ``had a good
teacher,'' and could still exhort crowds, ``Let's win this one for
Ike!'' One of his first acts as president-elect would be a public visit
to the dying general.⁶⁴ But it was never a comfortable
situation. When reporters in 1960 asked Nixon what president best fit
his idea of being ``good for the country,'' Nixon praised Woodrow Wilson
but settled on Theodore Roosevelt. Significantly, he did not mention
Dwight D. Eisenhower.⁶⁵
Franklin Roosevelt had briefly envisaged expanding the vice-
presidency by making it a kind of ``assistant presidency,'' with greater
executive responsibilities. This is not the role that Eisenhower
intended for Nixon. In fact, in 1959 Eisenhower proposed to his cabinet
that he recommend legislation to create an office of assistant
president. He envisioned perhaps two assistants, one dealing with
foreign policy, the other with domestic matters. Nixon was horrified,
arguing that the change would make the vice-presidency even more
superfluous than it already was. More important, Secretary of State
Dulles was equally mortified, and the plan was quickly dropped.
Eisenhower's suggestion revealed that he never really considered Nixon a
potential executive assistant.⁶⁶
Nixon did expand the visibility and duties of the vice-presidency as
none of his predecessors had, but those new duties were of a personal
nature rather than an inherent part of the office, because they resulted
more from the particular needs of President Eisenhower than from a
reconstructed vision of the vice-presidency. As a result, the changes in
the office were limited and unique to the situation. Nixon's new jobs
were overwhelmingly political, as party liaison, campaigner, and
goodwill ambassador, although he did have a few executive functions. He
established an important precedent by presiding over nineteen cabinet
meetings and twenty-six meetings of the National Security
Council.⁶⁷ He also chaired the President's Committee on
Government Contracts and the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability, but
these jobs were minor, because it was Nixon's political role that
mattered to the president. Not many presidents would need this kind of
political troubleshooter, because Eisenhower was unusual in his lack of
connections with his own party. Only the role of goodwill ambassador was
really the kind of task future vice presidents could be expected to fill
with regularity. The vice-presidency had become more visible, but
whether it would continue to be more important would depend on the needs
of future presidents.
When Eisenhower hoped Nixon would take a cabinet spot, he had
worried that ``Nixon can't always be the understudy to the star.''
⁶⁸ But Nixon was not even really the understudy. He was one
part of Eisenhower's ``team.'' His position on that team was one to
which he was well suited, thus his determination to stay. He was
constantly campaigning for Eisenhower and for other Republicans, but he
realized that he was also campaigning for Richard Nixon. He had
discovered how to turn the vice-presidency into a platform for greater
ambitions, but he was always dependent on Eisenhower's needs. Nixon was
right that he could not truly chart his own course. Luckily for him, the
course laid out by Eisenhower was one Nixon wanted to follow, because it
pointed toward the White House.
RICHARD M. NIXON

NOTES

¹ Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New
York, 1978), p. 170.
² Ibid., p. 172.
³ The two most comprehensive works on Nixon's early life
and career are Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an
American Politician (New York, 1990) and Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life
(Washington, DC, 1993).
⁴ Morris, pp. 257-337.
⁵ For the history of HUAC, see Walter Goodman, The
Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-
American Activities (New York, 1968). The most thorough work on the Hiss
case is Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York,
1978).
⁶ Morris, pp. 515-624.
⁷ Ibid., pp. 628-29; Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The
Education of a Politician, 1913-1962 (New York, 1987), p. 225; Aitken,
pp. 193-94.
⁸ For the details on the 1952 race, see George H. Mayer,
The Republican Party, 1854-1962 (New York, 1964), pp. 482-95; James T.
Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston, 1972),
pp. 499-568; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the
Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952 (New York, 1983), pp. 529-72. For
Nixon's selection, see Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, 1953-
1956 (New York, 1963), p. 46; Morris, pp. 625-736; and Aitken,pp. 201-6.
⁹ Eisenhower, p. 46.
¹⁰ Ambrose, Nixon, p. 262. On Nixon's relationship with
the Old Guard, see David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945
(Lexington, KY, 1983), pp. 131-32.
¹¹ Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York, 1962), pp. 78-88;
Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 256-58; Morris, pp. 757-850.
¹² Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 281-83. For his part, Eisenhower
said privately that if he was still in the army and Nixon was a junior
officer, Nixon would have been dismissed immediately, but politics was
run by different norms. See Elmo Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D.
Eisenhower (Lawrence, KS, 1979), p. 20; Aitken, pp. 208-13.
¹³ Nixon, Six Crises, p. 110.
¹⁴ Herbert S. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America
(Boston, 1990), pp. 238, 248-49; Nixon, Six Crises, pp. 117-19. Nixon's
appeal to ``Middle America'' would continue to astound his critics in
the future, see Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal
Republicans: From 1952 to the Present (New York, 1989), p. 41; Aitken,
pp. 213-20.
¹⁵ Ambrose, Nixon, p. 309; Parmet, p. 316.
¹⁶ Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 304-6, 309; Gary W. Reichard, The
Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty-Third Congress
(Knoxville, TN, 1975), p. 219. The seminal work on Eisenhower's
leadership style is Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency:
Eisenhower as Leader (New York, 1982).
¹⁷ Reichard, The Reaffirmation of Republicanism, p. 62.
¹⁸ Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A
Test of Eisenhower's Political Leadership (Ithaca, NY, 1988), pp. 72,
157-215.
¹⁹ David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World
of Joe McCarthy (New York, 1983), p. 317.
²⁰ Nixon, RN, p. 144.
²¹ Oshinsky, pp. 416-95; Gary W. Reichard, Politics as
Usual: The Age of Truman and Eisenhower (Arlington Heights, IL, 1988),
pp. 98-109. For McCarthy and the Senate, see also Robert Griffith, The
Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington, KY,
1970).
²² Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political
Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York, 1962, 1963), p. 117.
²³ Ibid., p. 103; Ambrose, Nixon, p. 309; Irving G.
Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency (Washington, 1956), p. 247.
²⁴ Nixon, RN, p. 144. See also, Parmet, pp. 333-36.
²⁵ Nixon, Six Crises, p. 77; Nixon, RN, p. 110.
²⁶ Quoted in Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice
on the Vice Presidency (New York, 1992), p. 125.
²⁷ Philip Potter, ``Political Pitchman--Richard M.
Nixon,'' in Eric Sevareid, ed., Candidates 1960: Behind the Headlines in
the Presidential Race (New York, 1959), p. 69.
²⁸ Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the
Eisenhower Administration (New York, 1961), p. 167.
²⁹ Nixon, RN, pp. 161-62.
³⁰ Ibid., pp. 177-78. For the ``new Nixon,'' see
Witcover, p. 133.
³¹ Hughes, p. 161.
³² Nixon, RN, p. 199.
³³ Ibid., p. 163.
³⁴ Ibid., p. 200; Nixon, Six Crises, pp. 233-34.
³⁵ Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 322-23.
³⁶ See Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 462-82; Nixon, RN, pp. 185-93;
and Aitken, pp. 250-54.
³⁷ Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 509-34, 569; Aitken, pp. 258-65.
³⁸ Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 326, 621; Aitken, p. 235.
³⁹ Ambrose, Nixon, p. 308.
⁴⁰ Jacob K. Javits with Rafael Steinberg, Javits: The
Autobiography of a Public Man (Boston, 1981), pp. 256-59; U.S.,
Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989: Addresses on the History of the
United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd, S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong.,
1st sess., vol. 2, 1991, p. 129; Ambrose, Nixon, p. 609.
⁴¹ Quoted in Nixon, Six Crises, p. 131.
⁴² Ibid., p. 134.
⁴³ Ibid., pp. 144, 148.
⁴⁴ Hughes, p. 275.
⁴⁵ Nixon, Six Crises, pp. 177-79. For a provocative
discussion of Eisenhower's health and of presidential health generally,
see Robert H. Ferrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust
(Columbia, MO, 1992).
⁴⁶ Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (New
York, 1965), p. 8; Ambrose, Nixon, p. 387.
⁴⁷ Parmet, pp. 316-25.
⁴⁸ Richardson, p. 35; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The
President (New York, 1984), pp. 319-20; Hughes, p. 152.
⁴⁹ Reichard, Politics as Usual, p. 120.
⁵⁰ Quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, p. 296.
⁵¹ Nixon, RN, pp. 166-73.
⁵² Ambrose, Nixon, p. 381.
⁵³ Hughes, p. 277; Theodore H. White, The Making of the
President, 1960 (New York, 1961), p. 201. It is possible that Nixon
would not have assembled such a group anyway. Even in Congress, Nixon
did not have any legislative assistants, relying only on secretaries to
deal with constituent services and dealing with all policy matters
himself. Len Hall, his campaign manager in 1960, complained that Nixon
insisted on running even the most minute details of the campaign
himself. (See Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made
Man (Boston, 1970), p. 16.) This pattern of personal control would
persist even in his presidency.
⁵⁴ Quoted in Aitken, p. 284.
⁵⁵ Aitken, pp. 265-66.
⁵⁶ For the election of 1960, see White, The Making of the
President, 1960.
⁵⁷ Quoted in Reichard, Politics as Usual, p. 166.
⁵⁸ For Nixon's later life and career, see Stephen E.
Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 (New York, 1989)
and Ambrose, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990 (New York, 1991). For
his presidency, see Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York, 1994) and
Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York,
1975).
⁵⁹ Quoted in Donald Young, American Roulette: The History
and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency (New York, 1965, 1972), p. 260.
⁶⁰ Ambrose, Nixon, p. 360.
⁶¹ Nixon, Six Crises, p. 161.
⁶² See Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 618-20.
⁶³ Potter, p. 88.
⁶⁴ Wills, pp. 116, 138.
⁶⁵ Potter, pp. 77-78.
⁶⁶ See Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 511-13.
⁶⁷ Interestingly, one of the most fervent advocates of
Nixon's responsibility to preside in the president's absence was John
Foster Dulles. As the nephew of Robert Lansing, Dulles vividly
remembered Wilson's rage when Secretary of State Lansing presided over
the cabinet while the president was disabled. Dulles wanted no confusion
about where responsibility resided. See Chapter 28 of this volume,
``Thomas R. Marshall,'' p. 342.
⁶⁸ Quoted in Ambrose, Nixon, p. 392.
?

Chapter 37

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

1961-1963

LYNDON B. JOHNSON
LYNDON B. JOHNSON

Chapter 37

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

37th Vice President: 1961-1963

I think a fair assessment would be that there was a big
sigh of relief when Johnson departed the Senate. Not that
they didn't like Johnson . . . but he was so strong, and so
difficult, and so tough, that it was a relief to get him
over to the vice president's office.
--George A. Smathers
The only thing that astonished politicians and the press more than
John F. Kennedy's offer of the vice-presidential nomination to Lyndon B.
Johnson was Johnson's acceptance. Neither man particularly liked the
other, and their styles contrasted starkly. Kennedy cultivated a smooth,
sophisticated and self-deprecating image, while Johnson often appeared
boorish, bullying and boastful. In the U.S. Senate, Johnson, as majority
leader, for years had stood second only to the president of the United
States in power and influence, whereas Kennedy was an unimpressive back
bencher. Although Kennedy's choice for the second spot on the ticket
dismayed his liberal supporters, the candidate recognized that Johnson
could help him carry Texas and the South and that he would undoubtedly
be easier to deal with as vice president than as majority leader.
Johnson's reasons for accepting were more enigmatic, for he was trading
a powerful job for a powerless one.

From Farm to Congress

Johnson reached the dubious pinnacle of the vice-presidency after a
remarkable climb to power in Washington. It started on a farm near
Stonewall, Texas, where he was born on August 27, 1908, the son of the
Texas politico, Sam Ealy Johnson, and his refined and demanding wife,
Rebecca Baines Johnson. Sam Ealy Johnson served six terms in the Texas
House of Representatives, faithfully supporting the interests of his
constituents, until his various real estate, insurance brokering, and
ranching ventures began to drag him into debt. Throughout his life,
Lyndon Johnson never forgot the impact his father's economic disgrace
had on his family.¹
Graduating from high school in 1924, Johnson escaped both his family
and the rugged Texas Hill Country by heading toward California in search
of work. When nothing but hard labor turned up, Johnson returned home a
year later and attended Southwest Texas State Teacher's College in San
Marcos. Depleted funds forced him to leave college and spend a year as
principal and teacher at a Mexican-American school in Cotulla, Texas,
near the Mexican border. Years later he asserted, ``You never forget
what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars in the face of a
young child.'' ²
When a candidate for governor failed to appear at a rally in 1930,
Johnson delivered an impromptu campaign speech for him. This speech so
impressed a candidate for the state senate, Welly Hopkins, that he
recruited Johnson to manage his own successful campaign. Later, while
Johnson was teaching high school in Houston, Hopkins recommended him to
the newly elected Representative Richard Kleberg. Hired as Kleberg's
secretary, Johnson arrived in Washington with a congressman more
interested in golf than in legislating, a situation that gave the young
aide the opportunity to take charge and make himself known. Directing
Kleberg's staff, Johnson learned how Washington worked and also got
himself elected Speaker of the Little Congress, an association of House
staff members. In 1934, after he courted and married Claudia Alta ``Lady
Bird'' Taylor, Johnson sought wider career horizons and was soon
appointed Texas state director of the National Youth Administration, a
New Deal agency designed to help students afford to stay in school.
Success in that job propelled him into a special election for Congress
in 1937, campaigning under banners that proclaimed ``Franklin D. and
Lyndon B.'' ³

A New Deal Congressman

Johnson's victory began a thirty-two-year political career that
would end in the White House. After the election, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt visited Galveston, Texas, and warmly greeted the new
congressman. FDR admired Johnson's vitality and predicted that someday
he would become the ``first Southern President'' since the Civil War.
Johnson had also become a protege of his fellow Texan, Sam Rayburn, the
future House Speaker, who guided much of his career. An active
congressman, Johnson used his New Deal connections to bring rural
electrification and other federal projects into his district, then,
ambitious and in a hurry, he ran in a special election for the U.S.
Senate in 1941. On election night, Johnson held a lead but announced his
vote tallies too soon, allowing the opponent to ``find'' enough votes to
defeat him. When America entered the Second World War, Johnson briefly
served in uniform as a navy lieutenant commander. He received a silver
star from General Douglas MacArthur for having flown as a passenger in a
bomber that was attacked by Japanese planes (none of the others on board
received a medal). When President Roosevelt called on members of
Congress to choose between military and legislative service, Johnson
returned to the House for the duration of the war. In 1948 he again ran
for the Senate and fought a celebrated campaign for the Democratic
nomination against the popular Governor Coke Stevenson. Having learned
his lesson from the previous Senate race, Johnson held back on
announcing his vote tallies and with the help of some friendly political
machines eked out an 87-vote victory for which he was dubbed ``Landslide
Lyndon.'' ⁴

A Southern Moderate

Johnson rode into the Senate in 1949 on the political wave that
returned Harry Truman to the White House and Democratic majorities to
both houses of Congress. His class of freshmen senators included
Democrats Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, Clinton
Anderson of New Mexico, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Paul Douglas of
Illinois. Seeking to establish himself quickly against this formidable
competition, Senator-elect Johnson called in the Senate's twenty-year-
old chief telephone page, Bobby Baker, who had already gained a
reputation as a head counter. ``Mr. Baker, I understand you know where
the bodies are buried in the Senate,'' he began their critical
relationship by remarking. ``I gotta tell you, Mr. Baker, that my state
is much more conservative than the national Democratic party. I got
elected by just eighty-seven votes and I ran against a caveman.''
⁵
Johnson sought to move to a middle ground that would enable him to
rise in the national ranks of his party without losing his base in
Texas. Just as Sam Rayburn had promoted Johnson's career in the House,
Georgia Senator Richard Russell became the Senate mentor for the young
Texan. Russell, a powerful, highly respected ``senator's senator,''
might have served as Democratic floor leader in the Senate, except that
he could not follow the Truman administration's lead on civil rights. He
therefore preferred to exercise his influence as chairman of the Armed
Services Committee and of the Southern Caucus. Johnson won the affection
of the bachelor senator by adopting Russell as part of his family,
inviting the Georgian to his Washington home on lonely Sundays and to
Texas for Thanksgiving. Russell not only placed Johnson on the Armed
Services Committee but made him chairman of its Preparedness
Subcommittee. In 1952 Russell formally entered the race for the
Democratic nomination for president, in part to prevent another
``Dixiecrat'' boycott of the party like the one that had occurred in
1948. Russell's defense of racial segregation, however, doomed his
nomination--and served as a vivid example to Johnson of the need to rise
above the image of a southern senator if he wished to realize his
national ambitions.⁶
Turmoil in the Democratic ranks elevated Johnson swiftly in the
Senate. In 1950 the Democratic majority leader and whip were both
defeated for reelection. Democrats then chose Arizona Senator Ernest
McFarland for leader and the freshman Johnson as their new whip. Two
years later, MacFarland was himself defeated. At first Johnson urged
Russell to take the leadership, already knowing that the Georgia senator
did not want the job. When Russell declined, Johnson asked his support
for his own bid, arguing that the prestige of the office would help his
reelection in Texas. Although a handful of liberal Democrats backed
Montana Senator James Murray for the post, Johnson with Russell's
backing was overwhelmingly elected Democratic floor leader. He was still
serving in his first senatorial term.⁷

Democratic Leader

Johnson led Senate Democrats during the entire eight years of the
Republican Eisenhower administration, as minority leader for the first
two years and as majority leader for the last six. The two parties were
so evenly balanced that during Johnson's minority leadership the death
and replacement of senators occasionally gave the Democrats a majority
of the senators. After the 1954 election, the switch of Oregon Senator
Wayne Morse from independent status helped give the Democrats a slim
majority, but the party faced a deep internal division between southern
conservatives, who opposed civil rights legislation, and northern
liberals, who advocated racial integration. As Johnson moved to the
center of his party, he worked to prevent an open split, commenting that
his major concern was to keep Senator Russell and other southern
conservatives ``from walking across the aisle and embracing [Republican
leader] Everett Dirksen.'' ⁸
As majority leader, Lyndon Johnson demonstrated unrelenting energy,
ambition, attention to detail, and an overwhelming personality. His
close aide John Connally described Johnson as alternately
cruel and kind, generous and greedy, sensitive and insensitive,
crafty and naive, ruthless and thoughtful, simple in many
ways yet extremely complex, caring and totally not caring;
he could overwhelm people with kindness and turn around
and be cruel and petty towards those same people; he knew
how to use people in politics in the way nobody else could
that I know of.
Above all, Johnson was a compromiser, a broker, and a master of the
art of the deal. His hands-on method of persuading other senators, with
its sweet talk, threats, and exaggerated facial expressions and body
language, became widely known as ``the treatment.'' ⁹
Other politicians, regardless of party, admired Johnson as a
virtuoso at their craft. Republican Representative Gerald Ford met
Johnson in 1957 when they served on a bipartisan House-Senate committee
to draft new legislation on space policy. ``Johnson elected himself
chairman,'' Ford recalled, ``and boy, did he operate.'' The Senate
leader did not twist arms, but ``the pressure of his presence and the
strength of his voice and the movement of his body made it hard to say
no.'' A keen judge of people, Johnson knew how far to push and when to
coax. ``Any compromise that Lyndon made,'' Ford concluded, ``he got
better than fifty percent.'' Johnson insisted that his only power as
majority leader was the power to persuade. But his friend George
Smathers, senator from Florida, noted that ``persuasion'' often meant
doing favors: putting senators on desired committees, sending them on
trips, arranging for campaign contributions, and even getting them
honorary college degrees. ``He was a consummate artist,'' said Smathers.
``How he did it, a color here, a little red here, a little purple there,
beautiful.'' ¹⁰
Senator Smathers was with Johnson on the weekend in 1955 when the
majority leader suffered his first heart attack. When doctors advised
Johnson that it would take weeks of recuperation before he could return
to the Senate, Johnson delegated Smathers to stand in for him as floor
leader. ``We never saw Johnson again for some forty days, although he
began to call us on the telephone in about a week,'' Smathers recalled.
``Just ran us crazy talking to him on the phone, getting things done. He
was the most hard-driving guy I ever saw in my life.'' The heart attack
made Johnson pace himself differently than before. Periodically, he
would leave Washington to spend time on his ranch in the Texas Hill
Country. Typically, however, Johnson could not relinquish control and
made the Senate adjust to his schedule. Whenever Johnson was absent,
little could take place. Although the Democratic whip, Montana Senator
Mike Mansfield, tried to move legislation along, Democratic Secretary
Bobby Baker would circulate through the chamber advising senators to
stall because ``Johnson wants this kept on the burner for a while.''
When Johnson returned he would insist on passing things in a rush:
``We've got to get this damn thing done tonight!'' By letting measures
pile up, sufficient pressure would have built up to pass everything in
short order. ``Who can remember,'' asked one journalist, ``when one
legislator so dominated Congress?'' ¹¹

Civil Rights

The majority leader's signal achievement was the passage in 1957 of
the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. It served as a large
step in his transformation from southerner to national figure. His
patron, Richard Russell, had given Johnson ``elbowroom'' to move toward
the center, protecting him from attack on the right and exempting him
from signing ``The Southern Manifesto'' against the Supreme Court's
ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Although Johnson's move may have
had an element of cynical maneuvering, those closest to him believed
that he also felt genuine compassion for African Americans, for the
poor, and for the disadvantaged. He spoke often of the hardships of his
own childhood, and those memories seemed to inspire him to achieve
something significant with his life. ``Nobody needed to talk to him
about why it's important to get ahead,'' George Smathers commented. ``He
was preaching that all the time to everybody.'' ¹²
Although the civil rights bill had been proposed by the Eisenhower
administration and was ostensibly managed by Republican leader William
Knowland, it was Lyndon Johnson who fashioned the compromises that led
to its passage. In return for significant modifications in the bill, he
persuaded southern conservatives not to filibuster, and he advised
northern liberals to accept his deal as the best they could get. The
fact that Congress passed any civil rights bill held symbolic
significance, but angry liberals felt that the watered-down bill simply
elevated ``symbol over substance.'' Liberals pointed out that the bill
provided southern blacks with little protection for either civil or
voting rights. Criticism came from the right as well. One columnist in
Dallas wrote that ``Johnson did his party a great favor by his
engineering of the Civil Rights Bill of 1957, but he did himself no good
at all in Texas.'' ¹³
During those congresses when the Senate was almost evenly divided,
Johnson perfected his role as cautious broker. Then a severe economic
recession triggered a Democratic landslide in the congressional
elections of 1958. The Senate Democratic majority of 49 to 47 in the
Eighty-fifth Congress swelled to 65 to 35 in the Eighty-sixth Congress,
with the added margin of four Democratic seats from the newly admitted
states of Alaska and Hawaii. Liberals who entered in the new class
quickly became impatient with Johnson's moderate approach. While the
majority leader sought to appease the newcomers with appointments to
major committees, he found himself attacked as a dictator by mavericks
like Pennsylvania's Joseph Clark and Wisconsin's William Proxmire. They
demanded more meetings of the Democratic Conference so that other
senators could have a say in setting the party's agenda. Johnson held
his own, telling Proxmire that ``it does not take much courage, I may
say, to make the leadership a punching bag.'' But he faced a quandary,
as his aide Harry McPherson noted, since ``he had enough Democrats
behind him to create major expectations, but not enough to override the
President's vetoes.'' ¹⁴
Johnson found it harder to control the larger majority but still
retained his firm hand on the leadership and enjoyed the ``perks'' of
office. When the New Senate Office Building (later named the Dirksen
Building) opened in 1958, it allowed many committees to move out of the
Capitol. Johnson took over the District of Columbia Committee's two-room
suite just outside the Senate chamber, turning it into his leadership
office. The larger of the two rooms--dubbed the ``Taj Mahal'' by
reporters--with its elegant frescoed ceilings, crystal chandelier, and
marble fireplace, symbolized the preeminence of the majority leader.
``Behind his desk in his imperial suite,'' wrote one journalist,
``Johnson is the nerve center of the whole legislative process.''
¹⁵ (Later, during Johnson's vice-presidency, the Senate named
the room in his honor.)
As the election of 1960 approached, several senators jumped into the
presidential race, but Lyndon Johnson held back. Some joked that, as
Democratic leader under Eisenhower, Johnson had already served eight
years as president and was constitutionally ineligible to run. Despite
the power and prestige of his office, however, its duties kept him from
stumping the country as did Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy.
Rather than enter the primaries and challenge Kennedy (whom he privately
derided as ``Sonny Boy''), Johnson chose to wage his presidential
campaign through House Speaker Rayburn and other powerful congressional
leaders, confident that they could corral their state delegations at the
Democratic National Convention in support of his candidacy. ``He thought
that national politics were the same as Senate politics,'' said Howard
Shuman, a Senate staff member who observed Johnson at the time. ``He
tried to get the nomination by calling himself a Westerner and combining
the southern and mountain states to give him the nomination. That is the
way he dominated the Senate.'' But Johnson was caught off-guard by
Kennedy's savvy and sophisticated campaign, with advanced polling
techniques identifying those issues that would strengthen or weaken the
candidate in every state. As Johnson later told Bobby Baker, if he
learned anything from the campaign it was ``that Jack Kennedy's a lot
tougher, and maybe a lot smarter, than I thought he was.'' ¹⁶
Johnson waited until July 5, 1960, to announce his formal candidacy
and then fought a bitter fight against the front-running Kennedy. When
the two met at the convention on July 12 to address a joint session of
the Texas and Minnesota delegations, Johnson portrayed himself as the
diligent legislator who had fought the good fight, dutifully answering
every quorum call on the recent civil rights bill, in contrast to
Kennedy, who had missed all of the quorum calls while out campaigning.
Kennedy refused to be baited. He wittily commended Johnson's perfect
record on quorum calls and strongly endorsed him--for majority
leader.¹⁷

The 1960 Election

The next day, Kennedy won the Democratic nomination on the first
ballot and then had twenty-four hours to select a vice president. He had
given no indication of having made up his mind in advance. The party's
pragmatists urged Kennedy to choose Johnson in order to carry Texas and
the South, but conservatives like Richard Russell urged Johnson to stay
off the liberal-leaning ticket. Still recalling the bitter experience of
``Cactus Jack'' Garner, who traded the House speakership for the vice-
presidency with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rayburn and the Texas delegation
adamantly opposed the notion that Johnson should give up the majority
leadership for the hollow status of being vice president. Liberal
Democrats reacted negatively to Johnson as a wheeler-dealer, and Robert
Kennedy, as the campaign manager, had given his word to labor leaders
and civil rights groups that Johnson would never be the vice-
presidential candidate. When John Kennedy reported that he would offer
the second spot to Johnson, his brother interpreted the move as only a
token gesture of party solidarity, since Johnson had told people he
would never accept the second spot. Then Johnson astonished both
brothers by accepting. Considering the choice a terrible mistake, Robert
Kennedy was delegated to talk the Texan out of running. Going to
Johnson's suite, he proposed that the Texas become instead the
Democratic party's national chairman. But a tearful Johnson declared,
``I want to be Vice President, and, if the President will have me, I'll
join him in making a fight for it.'' John Kennedy chose to retain him on
the ticket, but the animosity between Johnson and Robert Kennedy never
diminished.¹⁸
Pondering why Johnson had accepted, some of his aides thought that
he saw no future in being Kennedy's majority leader. If he succeeded in
enacting the party platform, the credit would have gone to the
president. If he failed, the blame would have been his. Since the Texas
state legislature had passed a law permitting Johnson to run for
reelection to the Senate at the same time that he sought national
office, Johnson may also have been gambling that Kennedy would lose to
Richard Nixon, leaving Johnson as majority leader with a Republican in
the White House. Another factor, mentioned by Johnson's friends, was
that Lady Bird Johnson had influenced his decision by reasoning that,
after his heart attack, the vice-presidency would be less strenuous than
the majority leadership. Johnson offered his own reason when he called
Richard Russell and explained that, if he had declined the vice-
presidency, he would have been ``left out'' of party affairs in the
future.¹⁹
Before the campaign could begin, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket had to
return to Washington for a post-convention session of the Senate. On the
assumption that he would be the party's standard bearer, Johnson had
devised this session to demonstrate his legislative prowess and launch
his fall campaign. Instead, he found himself playing second fiddle.
Republican senators mocked the majority leader, asking if he had cleared
moves in advance with ``your leader.'' When the Democratic Policy
Committee met for its regular luncheon, everyone waited to see whether
Kennedy would bounce Johnson from his usual place at the head of the
table. Kennedy dodged the issue by not showing up. With the Republican
presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, presiding over the Senate as vice
president, Senate Republicans were not likely to hand Kennedy any
victories. The session failed dismally.²⁰
In the fall, Johnson campaigned intensely, conducting a memorable
train ride through the South. He also pressed for a joint appearance of
the Democratic candidates somewhere in Texas. They arranged the meeting
at the airport in Amarillo, where campaign advance men stopped all air
traffic during the brief ceremonies so that the candidates could address
the crowd. But they had not counted on the Republican-leaning airline
pilots, who deliberately ran the engines of their planes in order to
drown out the speakers. At the close of the ruined appearance, a
photographer snapped a concerned Kennedy placing his hand on Johnson's
shoulder, trying to calm his angry, gesticulating running mate. Then,
just before the election, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were jeered and
jostled by a hostile crowd of right-wingers in Dallas, Texas. Dismayed
over this event, Senator Richard Russell cut short a tour of Europe and
flew to Texas to campaign for Johnson. News of Russell's endorsement was
carried in newspapers throughout Dixie, helping to solidify the
Democratic ticket's hold on the increasingly unsolid South.²¹

Vice President Johnson

Those who spent election night with Johnson later observed that he
showed no signs of jubilation at the narrow victory over Richard Nixon
and gave every impression of not wanting to become vice president. After
the election, he used his influence to recommend candidates for cabinet
appointment--especially Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright to be
secretary of state, but Fulbright withdrew his name from consideration.
The chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl
Marcy, recalled an encounter in the Democratic cloakroom where Johnson
grabbed him by the lapels, breathed in his face and said: ``What's wrong
with Bill Fulbright? I had it set for him to be Secretary of State and
he turned it down.'' Johnson helped to assure Senate approval of Robert
Kennedy's nomination for attorney general by persuading conservative
opponents to drop their request for a recorded vote, but when Johnson
promoted his supporter Sarah T. Hughes for federal judge, Robert Kennedy
rejected the sixty-four-year old Dallas lawyer as too old. Later, when
Johnson was out of the country, House Speaker Sam Rayburn traded passage
of an administration bill in return for Hughes' appointment. It was an
object lesson in the power of the Speakership versus the powerlessness
of the vice-presidency.²²
Not intending to become an inactive vice president, Johnson retained
the ``Taj Mahal'' as his office and anticipated keeping the rest of his
authority as majority leader. He proposed that, as vice president, he
continue to chair the meetings of the Democratic Conference. Although
the new majority leader, Montana Senator Mike Mansfield, did not object,
other senators warned him that the scheme would never work. As Hubert
Humphrey observed, Johnson ``was not an easy man to tell that you can't
do something.'' When the Democratic Conference met on January 3, 1961,
senator after senator stood to denounce the proposal, including some
whom Johnson had considered his supporters. Although the conference
voted 46 to 17 to permit the vice president to preside, it was clear
that he could not play the role of ``super majority leader.''
Afterwards, Johnson pulled back and seemed reluctant to approach
senators and lobby for their votes. ``I think a fair assessment would be
that there was a big sigh of relief when Johnson departed the Senate,''
his friend George Smathers concluded. ``Not that they didn't like
Johnson . . . but he was so strong, and so difficult, and so tough, that
it was a relief to get him over to the vice president's office.'' The
Senate now shifted from ``the benevolent dictatorship'' of Lyndon
Johnson to the more democratic leadership of Mike Mansfield. On the
occasions when Johnson presided over the Senate, he habitually appeared
bored.²³
Facing constraints in his legislative role, Johnson sought to expand
his activities within the executive branch. In addition to the Taj Mahal
at the Capitol, he occupied a large suite in the Executive Office
Building next to the White House. Johnson's staff prepared a draft of an
executive order making the vice president in effect a deputy president,
giving him ``general supervision'' over most space and defense programs.
The proposal went to President Kennedy and never returned, although the
president did appoint Johnson to chair the Space Council and the White
House Committee on Equal Employment. These posts were not sufficient to
halt the vice president's shrinking status. When Johnson entered the
Democratic cloakroom, senators treated him courteously, but since he was
no longer in a position to court their votes or distribute coveted
committee assignments, he was no longer the center of their
attention.²⁴
Johnson grumbled in private but kept his silence in public and at
White House meetings. President Kennedy always treated his vice
president cordially, but the president's young aides, mostly ivy
leaguers, snickered about ``Uncle Cornpone.'' Acutely aware of their
contempt, Johnson attended National Security Council and other policy-
making sessions but said nothing unless questioned directly. He felt
insecure and ignored and wore his feelings openly. ``I cannot stand
Johnson's damn long face,'' John Kennedy once complained to George
Smathers. ``He comes in, sits at the cabinet meetings, with his face all
screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.'' ²⁵
Seeking to boost the vice president's spirits by giving him some
public exposure, Kennedy sent Johnson on a string of foreign missions
and goodwill tours. The elixir worked. Johnson attracted enthusiastic
crowds and reveled in the press attention. Traveling in Pakistan in
1961, Johnson repeated a line that he often used while campaigning:
``You-all come to Washington and see us sometime.'' To his surprise, an
impoverished camel driver, Bashir Ahmed, took the invitation literally
and set out for America. When the press mocked the story, Johnson
arranged for the People-to-People program to pay the camel driver's
costs, personally met him at the airport in New York and flew him to his
Texas ranch, turning a potential joke into a public relations coup. On
the negative side, Johnson's taste for hyperbole led him to proclaim
South Vietnam's ill-fated President Ngo Dinh Diem to be the ``Winston
Churchill of Asia.'' These persistent journeys prompted The Reporter
magazine to define the vice president as someone ``who chases around
continents in search of the duties of his office.'' ²⁶
The press attention garnered on foreign visits tended to evaporate
as soon as Johnson returned to the Capitol. One reporter who had covered
his years as majority leader spent an hour in the vice president's
office and noticed a striking difference: not one other visitor appeared
and the phone rang only once. Late in the afternoons, Johnson's aides
would invite reporters from the Senate press gallery down for a drink
with the vice president. ``When a vice president calls he might have
something to say,'' United Press reporter Roy McGhee reasoned.
``Generally, he didn't, except blowing his own horn.'' Little
substantive news ever came out of the meetings, and sometimes the press
would leave with nothing to write about at all. The press considered
Johnson no longer a significant player in Washington events. The
television program ``Candid Camera'' exploited his growing obscurity by
asking: who is Lyndon Johnson? People guessed a baseball player, an
astronaut, anything but vice president of the United
States.²⁷
Where Johnson most logically might have played a constructive role
in helping pass the president's legislative agenda, he seemed to
abdicate responsibility. John F. Kennedy had promised a vigorous
administration, but his proposals on issues from Medicare to civil
rights had stalled in Congress. The power of conservative southern
Democratic committee chairmen, the death in November 1961 of Speaker Sam
Rayburn, and the passive leadership style of Senator Mansfield combined
to deadlock the legislative process. As part of the Kennedy
administration, Johnson was moving leftward away from his former power
base of southern conservatives, and this further reduced his
effectiveness in planning legislative strategy. Harry McPherson noted
that by mid-1963 the vice president seemed to share in the ``general
malaise'' of the time, and that he ``had grown heavy and looked
miserable.'' Rumors persisted that he would be dropped from the
Democratic ticket in 1964.

A Scandal

Johnson saw Attorney General Robert Kennedy as his chief adversary,
but rather than Bobby Kennedy, it was Democratic Majority Secretary
Bobby Baker who most threatened his political survival. For years, Bobby
Baker had been Johnson's alter ego, known as ``Little Lyndon.'' Baker
combined unlimited energy and ambition with poor judgment. While Johnson
served as majority leader he dominated Baker's activities, telling him
exactly what he wanted done. ``Get so and so on the telephone,'' Johnson
would snap his fingers, sending Baker off to relay the leader's wishes.
Senator Mansfield retained Baker as the Democratic secretary, but left
him to his own devices. During the 1960s, Baker devoted as much time to
his own finances as he did to Senate business.²⁸
Dabbling in everything from vending machines to motels and real
estate ventures, Bobby Baker was sued by one of his partners in August
1963. This event triggered press inquiries into Baker's financial
dealings and reports of his influence peddling. As the story unfolded,
Johnson's name surfaced in connection with an insurance agent close to
Baker who charged that he had given the vice president kickbacks in the
form of gifts and advertising on the Johnson family television and radio
stations as conditions for selling him an expensive life insurance
policy. Republican senators demanded a full-fledged investigation, and
on October 7, Baker resigned his Senate position. ``I knew Johnson was
petrified that he'd be dragged down,'' Baker later wrote; ``he would
show this by attempting to make light of our former relationship and
saying that I had been more the Senate's employee than his own.'' One
day, when Senator Russell rose to pay tribute to Harry McPherson, who
was leaving to take a post at the Pentagon, Johnson as presiding officer
called over one of the Democratic cloakroom staff and muttered:
Now here's a boy--Harry McPherson--from Tyler, Texas. I brought
him up here. I put him on the policy committee. . . . Now
here is Senator Russell down there on the floor saying
what a great man he is. . . . On the other hand, when I
came here Bobby Baker was working here. . . . Then he gets
in trouble. Everybody says he's my boy. But they don't say
anything about Harry McPherson being my boy.²⁹
Despite the negative publicity, John Kennedy gave every indication
of keeping Lyndon Johnson as vice president during his second term. Late
in 1963, reporter Charles Bartlett privately asked why he did not get
another vice president. Kennedy replied that dumping Johnson would only
hurt the Democratic ticket's chances in Texas. It was to mend political
fences between Democratic factions in Texas that Kennedy traveled to
Dallas in November 1963. Johnson met the official party and planned to
entertain them at his ranch. The vice president was riding in a car
behind Kennedy's limousine when shots were fired. When the motorcade
rushed to the hospital, Johnson learned that Kennedy was dead. Taking
the oath of office from Judge Sarah T. Hughes--herself a symbol of his
limited influence as vice president--Johnson returned to Washington as
president of the United States. Half of Kennedy's cabinet had been
flying to a meeting in Tokyo when they received the news. As the plane
changed course for home, someone spoke what they were all thinking: ``I
wonder what kind of a president Johnson will make?'' ³⁰

Suddenly President

Lyndon Johnson underwent a remarkable transformation. The
disaffected vice president grew into a remarkably active and determined
president. He set out to heal a shocked nation, to enact Kennedy's
legislative program, and to leave his own mark on the presidency. Freed
from his obligations to the southern conservatives in the Senate,
Johnson won passage of the most significant civil rights and voting
rights legislation of the century. Following his landslide reelection in
1964, Johnson enacted the most sweeping domestic reforms since the New
Deal. Few areas of American social and economic life were left untouched
by his ``Great Society'' programs. Commented the liberal Democratic
Senator Paul Douglas, ``Had I been told in 1956 that ten years later I
would be one of Lyndon Johnson's strongest supporters, I would have
thought the seer was out of his mind.'' ³¹
As president, Johnson played the ultimate majority leader, although
as the chief executive he found there were some areas where he could not
cut a deal. His civil rights triumphs could not stop racial turmoil and
riots in American cities. Nor could his ability to ram the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution through Congress ensure a military victory in
Southeast Asia. There his efforts to fortify the shaky government of
South Vietnam led to America's longest and most unpopular war and
ultimately to his withdrawal as a candidate for reelection in 1968.
Returning to his Texas ranch a rejected and deeply wounded man, Lyndon
Johnson died on January 23, 1973, just as the peace accords in Vietnam
were being finalized. Recalling his old friend's career, George Smathers
asserted that of all the people with whom he served Johnson ``was far
and away the man who accomplished the most, by far. He deserves to be
remembered for the good things that he did, and not just to be
remembered as sort of a lumbering, overbearing, sometimes crude
individual who tried to dominate everybody he was with.'' ³²
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

NOTES

¹ Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path
to Power (New York, 1982), pp. 79-137.
² Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American
Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston, 1995), p. 9.
³ Ibid., p. 18; Caro, The Path to Power, pp. 217-40, 261-
68.
⁴ Schulman, p. 19; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon
Johnson: Means of Ascent (New York, 1990).
⁵ Bobby Baker, Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a
Capitol Hill Operator (New York, 1978), pp. 34, 40.
⁶ John A. Goldsmith, Colleagues: Richard B. Russell and
His Apprentice, Lyndon B. Johnson (Washington, 1993), pp. 9-30; Robert
Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960 (New
York, 1991), pp. 378-80.
⁷ Dallek, pp. 421-23; Bobby Baker, pp. 59-63.
⁸ Goldsmith, p. 73.
⁹ Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (New York,
1980), p. xvi; Harry McPherson, A Political Education (Boston, 1972), p.
159; Robert L. Riggs, ``The South Could Rise Again: Lyndon Johnson and
Others,'' in Eric Sevareid, ed., Candidates 1960; Behind the Headlines
in the Presidential Race (New York, 1959), pp. 299-300; Rowland Evans
and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New York,
1966), p. 104.
¹⁰ James Cannon, Time and Chance: Gerald Ford's
Appointment with History (New York, 1994), p. 67; George A. Smathers,
United States Senator from Florida, Oral History Interviews, 1989, (U.S.
Senate Historical Office, Washington, DC), pp. 45, 74-75.
¹¹ Smathers oral history, p. 22; Darrell St. Claire:
Assistant Secretary of the Senate, Oral History Interviews, 1976-1978
(U.S. Senate Historical Office, Washington, DC), pp. 134, 214-15; Riggs,
p. 295.
¹² George Reedy, The U.S. Senate: Paralysis or a Search
for Consensus? (New York, 1986), p. 107; Smathers oral history, pp. 57,
70.
¹³ Howard E. Shuman, ``Lyndon B. Johnson: The Senate's
Powerful Persuader,'' Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds.,
First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century
(Washington, 1991), pp. 222-29; Dallek, pp. 517-27.
¹⁴ McPherson, pp. 159, 168; Jay G. Sykes, Proxmire
(Washington, 1972), pp. 109-20.
¹⁵ Riggs, p. 301.
¹⁶ McPherson, p. 171; Dallek, p. 569; Howard E. Shuman,,
Legislative and Administrative Assistant to Senators Paul Douglas and
William Proxmire, 1955-1982, Oral History Interviews, 1987 (U.S. Senate
Historical Office, Washington, DC), pp. 116-17; Bobby Baker, p. 138.
¹⁷ Evans and Novak, p. 273.
¹⁸ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times
(Boston, 1978), 1: 209-21; Dallek, pp. 574-81.
¹⁹ McPherson, pp. 178-79; Smathers oral history, p. 88;
Goldsmith, p. 77.
²⁰ McPherson, p. 179; Dorothye G. Scott, Administrative
Assistant to the Senate Democratic Secretary and the Secretary of the
Senate, 1945-1977, Oral History Interviews, 1992 (U.S. Senate Historical
Office, Washington, DC), pp. 140-41.
²¹ Goldsmith, p. 81; Rein J. Vander Zee, Assistant to the
Senate Democratic Whip and Assistant Secretary of the Majority, 1961-
1964, Oral History Interviews, 1992 (U.S. Senate Historical Office,
Washington, DC,) p. 65. The photograph is included in Susan Kismaric,
American Politicians: Photographs from 1843 to 1993 (New York, 1994), p.
166.
²² Miller, pp. 272-73; Carl Marcy, Chief of Staff,
Foreign Relations Committee, 1953-1973, Oral History Interviews, 1983
(U.S. Senate Historical Office, Washington, DC), p. 128; Goldsmith, p.
86; Evans and Novak, pp. 314-15.
²³ Goldsmith, pp. 83-84; Leonard Baker, The Johnson
Eclipse: A President's Vice Presidency (New York, 1966), pp. 22-28, 32;
Smathers oral history, pp. 89, 121; Shuman oral history, p. 239.
²⁴ Goldsmith, p. 86; McPherson, pp. 184-85.
²⁵ William S. White, The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson
(Boston, 1964), pp. 227-46; Goldsmith, p. 87; Leonard Baker, pp. 42-48;
Smathers oral history, pp. 86, 89.
²⁶ Leonard Baker, pp. 62-67, 167; Paul Conkin, Big Daddy
from the Pedernales: Lyndon Baines Johnson (Boston, 1986), pp. 167-69.
²⁷ Booth Mooney, LBJ: An Irreverent Chronicle (New York,
1976), p. 141; Roy L. McGhee, Superintendent of the Senate Periodical
Press Gallery, 1973-1991, Oral History Interviews, 1992 (U.S. Senate
Historical Office, Washington, DC), pp. 22-23.
²⁸ Evans and Novak, pp. 311-13; Goldsmith, p. 91;
McPherson, p. 200; Smathers oral history, pp. 61-62.
²⁹ Bobby Baker, pp. 172-91; Vander Zee oral history, pp.
87-88.
³⁰ Miller, pp. 308, 316.
³¹ Paul H. Douglas, In the Fullness of Time: The Memoirs
of Paul H. Douglas. New York, 1972), p. 233.
³² Smathers oral history, pp. 165-66.
?

Chapter 38

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

1965-1969

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY
HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

Chapter 38

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

38th Vice President: 1965-1969

I did not become vice president with Lyndon Johnson to
cause him trouble.
--Hubert H. Humphrey, 1965
As vice president during 1968--arguably the United States' most
politically turbulent post-World War II year--Hubert Humphrey faced an
excruciating test of statesmanship. During a time of war in Southeast
Asia when the stakes for this nation were great, Humphrey confronted an
agonizing choice: whether to remain loyal to his president or to the
dictates of his conscience. His failure to reconcile these powerful
claims cost him the presidency. Yet few men, placed in his position,
could have walked so agonizing a tightrope over so polarized a nation.
Near the end of his long career, an Associated Press poll of one
thousand congressional administrative assistants cited Hubert Humphrey
as the most effective senator of the preceding fifty years.¹
A biographer pronounced him ``the premier lawmaker of his generation.''
² Widely recognized during his career as the leading
progressive in American public life, the Minnesota senator was often
ahead of public opinion--which eventually caught up with him. When it
did, he was able to become one of Congress' most constructive
legislators and a ``trail blazer for civil rights and social justice.''
³ His story is one of rich accomplishment and shattering
frustration.
Hubert Humphrey's oratorical talents, foremost among his abundant
personal and political qualities, powered his rapid ascent to national
prominence.⁴ Lyndon Johnson remarked that ``Hubert has the
greatest coordination of mind and tongue of anybody I know,''
⁵ although Harry Truman was one among many who recognized
that this ``Rembrandt with words'' frequently talked too
much.⁶ Dubbed ``Minnesota Chats,'' ⁷ by Johnny
Carson, Humphrey often left himself open to the charge that he was ``a
gabby extremist of the Left,'' a label that stuck with him despite his
moves towards moderation.⁸ Any lapses of caution may have
been the result of Humphrey the orator being an ``incandescent
improviser,'' ⁹ with overstatement being the price he paid
for his dazzling eloquence.
Humphrey drew his oratorical power from his emotional temperament,
which sometimes left him in tears on the stump, undoubtedly moving many
in his audience. He would say that he had a ``zealous righteousness
burning within him,'' yet his ultimate legislative accomplishments were
achieved when he moderated the firebrand and willingly compromised with
his opponents.¹⁰ In fact, Humphrey learned to combine his
rhetorical talents effectively with his substantive goals by developing
into a persuader and for the most part foregoing intimidation, unlike
his colleague and mentor Lyndon Johnson. It is not surprising that,
while Johnson hated the powerlessness of the vice-presidency, Humphrey
relished the national podium it offered.

A Prairie Progressive

The origins of the Minnesotan's ``zealous righteousness'' can be
found in his home state's tradition of agrarian reformism that
tenaciously promoted ``the disinherited'' underdogs at the expense of
``the interests.'' ¹¹ Humphrey personally was a warm,
sincere, even ``corny'' populist, an old-time prairie progressive
politically descended from the likes of William Jennings Bryan, George
Norris, and Robert La Follette, Sr.
Born in South Dakota in 1911, Humphrey learned his ideology first
hand in the persistent agricultural depression of the Midwest during the
1920s and 1930s. He and his family were victims, like so many others, of
the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression that had evicted them from their
home and business. Humphrey's poor, rural upbringing stirred both him
and his pharmacist father to become politically conscious, ardent New
Dealers. Thus Humphrey was ``permanently marked by the Depression,''
which in turn stimulated him to study and teach college political
science in the employ of the New Deal's Works Progress
Administration.¹² After Humphrey became an administrator in
that agency, the Minnesota Democratic party recognized his oratorical
talents and, in their search for ``new blood,'' tapped him as candidate
for mayor of Minneapolis.¹³ Although he lost his first race
in 1943, he succeeded in 1945. This post would prove to be Humphrey's
sole executive experience until the time of his vice-presidency. He made
the most of it, successfully impressing his reformist principles on
organized crime by stretching his mayoral powers to their limit on the
strength of his personality and his ability to control the city's
various factions.
Hubert Humphrey's mayoral success and visibility propelled him
directly into the Senate for a career that would encompass five terms.
He was first elected in 1948 after gaining national attention at the
Democratic National Convention with his historic plea for civil rights
legislation. Although no strong constituency existed for this issue in
Minnesota, the position was in line with Humphrey's championing of
others among his state's underdogs, including farmers, labor, and small
business. In hammering his civil rights plank into the platform,
Humphrey helped to bring the breakaway progressive supporters of Henry
Wallace back into the Democratic fold, while simultaneously prompting
the Dixiecrats to walk out of the convention hall and the party.

In the Senate

Humphrey's headline-grabbing civil rights speech appealed to
Minneapolis' liberal community, and his stand in favor of the Marshall
Plan and against the Taft-Hartley labor-management relations law
attracted the support of farmers and labor. As a result, Minnesota
elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1901. In his
first feisty days in the Senate, Humphrey immediately moved to the
cutting edge of liberalism by introducing dozens of bills in support of
programs to increase aid to schools, expand the Labor Department,
rescind corporate tax loopholes, and establish a health insurance
program that was eventually enacted a decade and a half later as
Medicare. In addition, Humphrey spoke as a freshman senator on hundreds
of topics with the ardor of a moralizing reformer. Accustomed to
discussing candidly and openly policy matters that disturbed him, the
junior senator quickly ran afoul of the Senate's conservative
establishment. He found that many senators snubbed him for his support
of the Democratic party's 1948 civil rights plank and, as Senator Robert
C. Byrd has written, Humphrey ``chose his first battles poorly, once
rising to demand the abolition of the Joint Committee on the Reduction
of Nonessential Federal Expenditures as a nonessential expenditure.''
Committee chairman Harry Byrd, Sr., happened to be away from the Senate
floor at the time, but he and other powerful senior senators punished
this breach of decorum by further isolating Humphrey.¹⁴
Yet Humphrey, under the guidance of Democratic leader Lyndon
Johnson, soon moderated his ways, if not his goals. As New York Times
congressional correspondent William S. White observed in his classic
study of the early 1950s Senate, Humphrey's
slow ascent to grace was [due to] the clear, but far from simple,
fact that he had in him so many latently Senatorial
qualities. Not long had he been around before it became
evident that, notwithstanding his regrettable past, he had
a tactile sense of the moods and the habits and the mind
of the place.¹⁵
By the mid-1950s, Humphrey had moved into the ranks of the Senate's
``Inner Club.''
It is hardly surprising that a politician so filled with energy and
vision had presidential ambitions dating from the time of his mayoral
election. Indeed, on six occasions during his career Humphrey sought
either the presidency or the vice-presidency. His first foray into the
vice-presidential race was 1952, but it was the 1956 contest that
revealed the essential Humphrey, as he campaigned vigorously for that
office after presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson threw open the
nomination. Undaunted by his failure in that contest, Humphrey continued
his advocacy role in the Senate. Then, in 1958, during a visit to the
Soviet Union as part of a fact-finding trip to Europe, Humphrey engaged
in a historic eight-and-a-half-hour impromptu conversation on
disarmament with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. This event thrust him
into the international spotlight, and the publicity he gained made him
an instant presidential candidate for 1960. Yet Humphrey, a longtime
proponent of disarmament, then paradoxically exploited this publicity to
criticize President Dwight Eisenhower for allowing a ``missile gap'' to
develop.
In 1960 a defense issue of a more personal stripe helped to
undermine Humphrey's presidential bid. More than in any other of his
many election years, his World War II draft deferment--first as a father
and then for a medical condition identified as a right scrotal hernia
¹⁶--was used against him in the primaries. Although
Humphrey's draft status seemed to invite exploitation by his political
opponents, his chronic lack of campaign funds and organization, as well
as his moderate liberal image, actually lost him the nomination.
Out of defeat, the irrepressible Minnesotan snatched senatorial
victory by becoming the choice of departing Majority Leader and Vice
President-elect Lyndon Johnson for Senate majority whip. Humphrey used
his new post to become a driving force in the Senate. Johnson had
promoted Humphrey for this leadership position as a reward for his
cooperation in the Senate and to solidify a relationship for the benefit
of the Kennedy administration. Newly elected Majority Leader Mike
Mansfield noted Humphrey's ``vibrant personality and phenomenal
energy.'' These traits, coupled with a new-found pragmatism, gained him
appointment to the Appropriations Committee and a solid record of
legislative accomplishment.¹⁷ Humphrey went on to become a
major congressional supporter of a number of New Frontier programs, many
of which had been originally outlined in his own bills in the 1950s.
Chief among these were the Job Corps, the Peace Corps, an extension of
the Food for Peace program, and ``a score of progressive measures''
pertaining to health, education, and welfare.¹⁸
Humphrey's role in pressing for the landmark 1963 Limited Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union ranks as one of his greatest
triumphs. A supporter of disarmament since the 1950s, he helped persuade
President Eisenhower to follow the Soviets into a voluntary testing
moratorium. Humphrey was a follower of George Kennan's geo-strategic
analysis, which counselled a moderate course designed selectively and
nonprovocatively to contain Soviet probes into areas vital to the United
States. This middle way between provocation and disarmament also
encouraged pragmatic negotiations, and Humphrey continued to prod
President John F. Kennedy into the more permanent test ban treaty and
the establishment of a U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. At the
treaty-signing ceremony, President Kennedy recognized Humphrey's years
of often lonely efforts, commenting, ``Hubert, this is your treaty--and
it had better work.'' ¹⁹
The principal items on Humphrey's longstanding domestic legislative
agenda failed to advance significantly until the so-called ``Great
Society'' period that followed Kennedy's death. The first, and perhaps
biggest, breakthrough came with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
which he managed in a Senate obstructed by southern filibusterers. In
working for that legislation, Humphrey skilfully combined his talent as
a soft-spoken, behind-the-scenes negotiator with a rhetorical hard sell
focused on the media. Humphrey's subsequent record of legislative
achievement was remarkable. With his support, federal aid to farmers and
rural areas increased, as did the new food stamp program and foreign-aid
food exports that benefitted the farms. Congress authorized
scholarships, scientific research grants, aid to schools, rehabilitation
of dropouts, and vocational guidance. Legislation promoted public power
projects, mass transportation, public housing, and greater unemployment
benefits.
While the Minnesota senator could claim credit for helping to create
millions of jobs, he also reaped the scorn of critics fearful of deficit
spending. Humphrey replied that ``a balanced budget is a futile dream,''
which could not be attained anyway until ``the world is in balance.''
Dismissing those ``Scrooges'' who harbored a ``bookkeeper's mentality,''
Humphrey, a self-proclaimed ``jolly Santa,'' reiterated his priority,
people's ``needs and desires.'' ²⁰

Campaigning for Vice President

Hubert Humphrey was convinced he could fulfill these ``needs and
desires'' only by becoming president. He saw the vice-presidency as the
major stepping stone to this objective, reasoning that, as vice
president, he would also have greater access to the president than he
did as Senate whip. Humphrey believed he would need the national
prominence of the vice-presidential office to secure the presidency
because he lacked the requisite financial base to run such a large
national campaign. Since 1945 the vice-presidency had come to be viewed
as a viable springboard to the presidency--a notion furthered by the
near success of Vice President Nixon in the 1960 presidential contest.
Yet Humphrey recognized that the vice-presidential office itself was
``awkward'' and ``unnatural'' for an energetic politician.²¹
Humphrey realized that he would have to pay the price for his
greater access to power by compromising some of his principles, because,
above all, Johnson demanded loyalty from his vice president. But in
1964, the cost did not appear to be substantial, since Johnson needed
Humphrey and the entree he provided to the Democratic party's liberal
wing. There was, however, never any question as to who was boss. Even
when both men served together in the Senate, their relationship was
``one of domination-subordination.'' ²² Humphrey had been
Johnson's protege, his ``faithful lieutenant'' and go-between with the
liberals.²³ It is ironic that when Humphrey actually became
Johnson's vice president, one of the closest political relationships in
Congress eventually turned into one of the most mutually frustrating
presidential-vice-presidential relationships in history. This conflict
occurred even though the new vice president sought to accommodate the
chief executive by adopting a more conservative stance on both domestic
and foreign policy issues, with the resulting erosion of his former
liberal credentials.
Johnson succeeded in effectively manipulating Humphrey by running
hot and cold, alternately favoring and punishing him. Such behavior
modification began early in the political season of 1964, when Johnson
played Humphrey off against rivals for the vice-presidency, encouraging
all the potential candidates to campaign publicly for popular support.
Humphrey's political adroitness in arranging a compromise solution for
the racially divided Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National
Convention impressed Johnson and finally clinched the nomination for the
Minnesotan. Humphrey augmented his popularity by delivering a speech at
the convention with a famous refrain attacking right-wing opposition to
the Great Society programs that many Republicans had indeed voted for:
``But not Senator Goldwater.'' ²⁴ The charges by the
Republican vice-presidential candidate William Miller during the fall
campaign that Humphrey was a ``radical,'' on the ``left bank . . . of
the Democratic Party'' ²⁵ had little impact on the voters.
Humphrey campaigned persuasively, dispelling his past reputation as a
``flaming radical'' by explaining that, although he retained his old
goals, he was now willing to take an incremental approach and ``make
what progress is available at the moment.'' ²⁶

Lobbying for the Administration

After the landslide mandate of the 1964 election, Humphrey
enthusiastically reverted to type and became, according to biographer
Albert Eisele, ``the busiest vice president in history during his first
year in office.'' ²⁷ An active vice-presidential lobbyist, he
sought to trade on his former status as ``one of the most well-liked
members of the Senate.'' ²⁸ Concentrating on selling Congress
and the nation on the domestic measures to bring about the Great
Society, Humphrey maintained a degree of involvement that was
unprecedented for a vice president. No previous vice president had been
so intimately associated with crafting such a body of legislation. The
``legislation long dear to his heart'' included the 1965 Voting Rights
Act, Medicare, establishment of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development and the Office of Economic Opportunity, and creation of the
Head Start program.²⁹ Humphrey's vision for the Great Society
included providing federal funds for the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Public Broadcasting Service, and solar energy research.
Instrumental in passage of the Food Stamp Act of 1964, Humphrey was also
the White House's most vigorous salesman in persuading farmers to accept
the Model Cities program, African-Americans to abide the draft, and
conservatives to tolerate the expanded welfare state.³⁰
The president assigned Humphrey his primary job inside the halls of
Congress, where his knowledge and contacts would be invaluable. After
presiding in the Senate chamber, Humphrey took his campaign for the
administration's agenda into the adjacent cloakrooms--the most effective
legislative venue, as his long years of experience had taught him.
Humphrey's tenure as a member also made him acutely aware of the
Senate's unwritten codes of behavior. The vice president understood that
as Senate president he must never forget the difference between its
chamber and its cloakrooms: now that he was no longer a regular member
of the ``club,'' he must confine his political dealings to the
cloakrooms, while limiting his chamber activities to the strictly
procedural.
After Johnson announced in 1965 that his Great Society programs and
the mission in Vietnam could be accomplished simultaneously, Humphrey
worked the Senate on a daily basis, encouraging the sale of some raw
materials from the U.S. strategic stockpile to pay for the rapidly
escalating costs of military involvement, since the administration did
not propose to increase taxes.
Humphrey's lobbying activity on Capitol Hill reflected his style of
perpetual exertion. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield utilized the
vice president's consensus-gathering talents when he asked him to
mediate between contentious factions supporting the 1965 Voting Rights
bill. The next year, the vice president dealt directly with
congressional leaders to push the administration's version of the Model
Cities bill.³¹ Humphrey understood that he no longer had any
legislative authority, but in his capacity as the president's ``field
marshal on Capitol Hill,'' he ``collect[ed]'' debts that were ``due''
him from his past accumulation of goodwill. In 1965, Humphrey spent far
more time in his chandeliered office a few steps from the Senate chamber
than he did across town in the Old Executive Office Building. On Capitol
Hill he exercised his skills as a ``legislative troubleshooter'' and
``intermediary'' between factions. ``Time and again,'' the vice
president ``delivered votes from lawmakers who seemed immune to
blandishments from any other quarter.'' According to Newsweek's Charles
Roberts, Humphrey sometimes cautioned senators in the cloakroom that he
would be obligated to make unflattering speeches about them in their
districts if they did not vote his way.³²
By 1966, however, Great Society programs began to stall in Congress
and racial tensions mounted, prompting Humphrey to increase the pressure
for summer jobs for inner city youth. In frustration, the vice president
blurted out one day that, if he were a slum dweller, immersed in rats
and garbage, he himself might ``revolt.'' ³³ When riots broke
out a week later, Humphrey, under fire from both critics and the White
House, qualified his earlier statement by adding that ``we cannot
condone violence.'' ³⁴ And when urban riots flared again in
the summer of 1967, while the administration's agenda remained in limbo,
Humphrey called for a ``Marshall Plan'' for the cities.³⁵
Johnson, burdened by soaring inflation, interest rates, and government
debt, immediately rebuked his vice president, who did not mention his
plan again.
On the domestic front Humphrey was motivated by the disparity in
standards of living he observed in the richest country on earth. He
constantly pressed for increases in Aid to Families with Dependent
Children, Social Security, and welfare benefits.³⁶ The glory
of the Great Society was its future-oriented generosity, yet as the
economic consequences became apparent, President Johnson grew more
fiscally conservative. As a result, Vice President Humphrey felt doubly
cheated, not only because his long-held vision was being constrained,
but also because, despite his continuous congressional lobbying efforts,
the more parsimonious president--and not he--received all the credit for
the successes that were achieved.³⁷ Nevertheless, Humphrey
could hardly be dissatisfied with the results of the domestic policy
labors that he so enjoyed.

A Varied Role

Although domestic legislation consumed most of Humphrey's energies
early in his term, his vice-presidential role can be divided into
roughly three separate functions. He was, at various times, the
executive branch's representative in the Senate, the chief of numerous
executive councils, and the president's spokesman-at-large. Among the
statutory duties assigned to the vice-presidency were the administration
of oceanography and the space race. As the chairman of councils on
topics ranging from Native Americans to the environment, youth, and
tourism, Humphrey served as titular head of a wide variety of executive
branch enterprises.
But Humphrey soon abandoned most of these White House duties when he
realized that the president personally controlled everything of
significance. He did, however, maintain his role as liaison to the
country's mayors, a duty that dovetailed nicely with his assignment as
civil rights coordinator and liaison to the country's African American
leaders. These activities were all part of Humphrey's political mission
to reduce racial inequities and conflicts by instituting just
governance.
In 1966, with the Great Society's remaining legislation stalled in
Congress, Humphrey used his vice-presidential platform to support
Democrats seeking congressional seats in the coming midterm elections.
To that end, Humphrey campaigned in almost every state as party
cheerleader and presidential surrogate. He also used his liaison duties
to channel political information back to the president, thereby
influencing the aid many candidates would receive and gaining a
substantial hand in overall campaign strategy. Humphrey proved to be a
vigorous campaigner. As the escalating war in Vietnam slowly smothered
domestic legislative initiatives, he advised campaigners to ``Run on
Vietnam'' and became the administration's ``chief spear carrier.''
³⁸
Despite Humphrey's energetic Senate lobbying, by 1966 events had
shifted the focus of his vice-presidency from Capitol Hill to the White
House. Indeed, he became the most active White House spokesman, and his
nationwide speaking tours were geared to a ``frantic pace.''
³⁹ Humphrey's frenzy may be traced in part to the insecurity
that his mercurial and manipulative boss engendered. Johnson had a
``routine of slapping Humphrey one day and stroking him the next.''
⁴⁰ The president would publicly praise his vice president and
then, shortly afterward, exclude him from the inner councils, chiefly
because Humphrey talked too much and too freely in public. Johnson,
inordinately concerned with leaks and their relationship to loquacity,
ended up giving Humphrey little opportunity to contribute to
administration policy decisions. The more Humphrey was shut out, the
more he became a mere ``political spokesman,'' as he put it, falling
back on his formidable rhetorical talents.⁴¹ This choice
reflected not only his pledge of loyalty to the president, but also his
inclination to seek compromise.
With the situation in Vietnam heating up, Johnson made Humphrey his
primary spokesman on war policy. The vice president duly visited
university campuses to answer questions and reiterate the
administration's policy line. But his new, more conservative stance
began to alienate liberal supporters as he uttered such hawkish
assertions as, ``only the Viet Cong commit atrocities.'' ⁴²

Anticommunist and Internationalist

The president also sent Humphrey to Europe to gather support for the
administration's war policy, along with a nuclear nonproliferation
treaty, increased East-West trade, and international monetary reform.
Although many considered the vice president's efforts on his European
trip a diplomatic success, he encountered antiwar demonstrators
everywhere he went. Humphrey handily dismissed these Europeans as
``Communist led,'' ⁴³ an assessment in keeping with his
political record, since he had supported United States cold war policy
since 1950. Even as mayor, Humphrey had battled Communists and pro-
Soviet leftists for control of his Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. In the
Senate, Humphrey had joined the anticommunist crusade in the interest of
protecting his noncommunist friends in labor unions. Ideologically, he
had always been an internationalist, a Wilsonian, committed to worldwide
free trade and open markets, which would, ``coincidentally,'' benefit
his Minnesota farm constituents.
The Minnesota Democrat was not always consistent in his
internationalist motivations and foreign policy views. For example,
although he was a longtime advocate of disarmament, chairman of the
Senate disarmament subcommittee, and later father of the Limited Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty of 1963, Humphrey had also attacked the Eisenhower
administration's ``missile gap'' in 1960. Even though he may have
indulged in a measure of political inconsistency, his views were
fundamentally moderate. He never espoused unilateral disarmament but
rather supported an active policy of negotiating mutual nuclear and
conventional cutbacks with the Soviets. While he advocated outright
independence for the ``captive nations'' of Eastern Europe, he denounced
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' ``brinksmanship'' over Vietnam,
Taiwan, and Korea as a dangerous game of threatening to use massive
nuclear force.
Humphrey's record on the cold war at home was even more complex. He
had voted for the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 and had
introduced the Communist Control Act of 1954, both of which severely
repressed those identified as American Communists. Humphrey later
regretted his participation in the latter act and called for its repeal.
Yet, at the time, he was silent regarding the actions of Senator Joseph
McCarthy, even though he did deplore the ``psychosis of fear'' and
``this madness of know-nothingness.'' ⁴⁴ In the 1950s
Humphrey supported the generally held view that agents of foreign
governments committed to the overthrow of the U.S. government were not
entitled to civil liberties. Yet, this stance could also be explained as
a cynical attempt to save the Democrats from the ``soft on communism''
label, especially during the election year of 1954, the apogee of
McCarthyism.
While Humphrey's staunch anticommunism became even more pronounced
as he progressed into the upper echelons of the ``Establishment,'' he
struggled to maintain his position as a moderate, shifting nimbly to the
right and left of center as the circumstances warranted--the so-called
``Humphrey duality.'' ⁴⁵ By the time of the 1964 presidential
campaign, Humphrey labeled Goldwater and his faction as ``reactionary,''
predicting that, if Goldwater were elected, he would institute a
``nuclear reign of terror.'' ⁴⁶ In spite of his strong
anticommunism, Humphrey feared that an East-West confrontation could
escalate into nuclear warfare. Thus, his conservative detractors were
able to label him ``soft on communism'' when the compromiser in him
proposed, for instance, the solution of coalition governments in
Southeast Asia.⁴⁷ Humphrey believed that, if the native
Communist and anticommunist elements could pragmatically combine in a
parliamentary forum, the local military conflict would be less likely to
engender an eventual superpower confrontation.

The Vietnam War I: Opposition

As early as 1954, Humphrey had opposed any continuance of the French
war in Vietnam by the United States. On that issue, his pre-vice-
presidential foreign policy can generally be described as ``dovish,''
despite the often precarious balance he sought to strike. Humphrey did
lead the effort to ratify the SEATO treaty in 1955 and asserted in 1960
that, ``I happen to believe that the most dangerous, aggressive force in
the world today is Communist China.'' ⁴⁸ But for Vietnam, he
advocated the counterinsurgency techniques of General Edward Lansdale
that, rather than a conventional military strategy, emphasized an
unconventional and, above all, a political solution incorporating a
``rural reconstruction'' program.⁴⁹ In the 1964 campaign,
although Humphrey endorsed a ``free civilization'' resisting the
``expansion of Communist power,'' he remained a relatively consistent
moderate as the campaign's political rhetoric focused more on domestic
affairs and the larger cold war, in which the Democrats appeared more
moderate than the saber-rattling Goldwater and his running mate, William
Miller.⁵⁰
Just a few weeks after the newly elected Johnson administration took
office, however, the Viet Cong attacked and killed American troops in
South Vietnam, spurring the president to retaliate by bombing the North.
Humphrey, virtually alone among Johnson's inner circle, immediately
opposed this ``Operation Rolling Thunder'' with several arguments. The
first was drawn from the advice of Undersecretary of State George Ball.
A former member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey after World War II,
Ball understood the limited capabilities of the U.S. Air Force. Humphrey
himself reminded the cabinet that the United States' experience in Korea
demonstrated the pitfalls of the nation engaging in a land war in Asia,
even though that earlier conflict had indeed represented a clearer case
of a conventional invasion. Citing that precedent, Humphrey warned that
U.S. escalation in Vietnam could provoke an intervention by the Chinese
or even by the Soviets, with potential nuclear consequences. The vice
president asked what good reason the United States could have to
interject itself into ``that faraway conflict'' when ``no lasting
solution can be imposed by a foreign army.'' ⁵¹
In 1965 Humphrey pushed for a political resolution as the only hope
to save not only the unstable government of South Vietnam, but also the
full funding of the Great Society programs. The vice president included
these points in both verbal counsel and memos to the president, also
reminding him that direct bombing by the United States had been
Goldwater's position during the campaign. Humphrey predicted that the
president would eventually be opposed not by the Republicans, but more
dangerously, from within his own party. Johnson's response was
increasingly to freeze the vice president out of the Vietnam councils,
forcing him to concentrate on Great Society issues. Although Humphrey
lost access to the president because of a variety of injudicious public
comments, the gulf over Vietnam was the principal cause of his year-long
executive exile. This period proved to be the turning point not only of
his vice-presidency, but also of his political career.

The Vietnam War II: A Change of Position

As Humphrey's legislative and executive opportunities dwindled, the
penitent vice president eventually became only too happy to carry out
the new role Johnson had assigned him, that of special envoy. The
president sent him on propaganda and fact-finding trips to Southeast
Asia to gather evidence of Chinese aggression. On his first trip in
early 1966, Humphrey was strongly influenced by the hawkish views of
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General William Westmoreland. So eager
was Humphrey to regain the good graces of the president that, even as
early as November 1965, he had reported back from his visits to college
campuses, which were now holding ``teach-ins'' against the war, that
students were increasingly supporting the Vietnam policy. As Humphrey
found that his hopes for compromise were not always attainable, he began
to make his irrevocable political choice between loyalty to his lifelong
conscience and loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. ``I did not become vice
president with Lyndon Johnson to cause him trouble,'' he declared in
1965.⁵² The president may have somewhat appeased Humphrey
just before his February 1966 conversion with the Christmas 1965 bombing
pause of which Johnson said that he was now trying ``Hubert's way.''
⁵³
Humphrey departed on his extended peace offensive throughout
Indochina and South Asia, which even included some impromptu, and
ultimately fruitless, negotiations with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in
India. At the end of this publicity-laden circuit, Johnson continued his
pattern of molding Humphrey's behavior. The president rewarded--or
exploited--depending on one's perspective, Humphrey's demonstration of
renewed loyalty by permitting him to announce ambitious plans ``to
export the Great Society to Asian countries,'' like South
Vietnam.⁵⁴ Humphrey instinctively responded to the idea of
extending the war on poverty and injustice to other nations.
During the vice president's grand tour of South and Southeast Asian
capitals, the local leaders easily persuaded him that the Red Chinese
menace and its advance ``agent North Vietnam'' necessitated U.S.
military aid to their countries.⁵⁵ Humphrey returned to the
United States convinced that Chinese ``imperialism and expansion''
threatened to topple Asian dominos as far as Australia.⁵⁶ He
dismissed Senator Mike Mansfield and other skeptical senators as having
missed the ``big picture'' regarding the Communist ``master plan'' and
the Chinese ``epidemic [that] we must stop'' before they come ``closer
to home'' and all the way to Honolulu and San Francisco.⁵⁷
When Senator Robert F. Kennedy suggested the possibility of a coalition
government for South Vietnam, a position Humphrey himself had espoused
in his pre-vice-presidential days, the vice president retorted that
would be like ``putting a fox in a chicken coop.'' ⁵⁸
Humphrey soon came to regret the memorable quality of some of his more
strident statements, as he lost the support of many liberals and
midwestern progressives who now characterized him as being ``more
royalist than the crown.'' ⁵⁹ Newsweek magazine observed that
Humphrey was ``the scrappiest warrior in the White House phalanx.''
⁶⁰

The Vietnam War III: Public Support and Private Doubts

Johnson again tapped Humphrey's inherent exuberance in a successful
campaign to persuade Congress to vote more money for the war. As one
Democratic liberal commented, the vice president was ``one hell of a
salesman.'' ⁶¹ Humphrey declared that his new position was
born out of ``conscience'' ⁶² and that the war was ``a matter
of survival.'' He pointed out that ``Vietnam today is as close to the
U.S. as London was in 1940'' and would require the same kind of long-
term U.S. commitment.⁶³ Such statements were more than enough
to get Humphrey readmitted to the administration's inner circle of
Vietnam advisers. Having done his duty, the vice president was rewarded
with a second trip to Southeast Asia in 1967. There, shortly after
hearing another of General William Westmoreland's optimistic estimates,
he publicly hailed the Vietnam war as ``our great adventure,'' which was
making the world freer and better.⁶⁴
Humphrey's closest foreign policy adviser, George Ball, recognized
that the vice president ``could never do anything half heartedly.'' Yet
as a genuine intimate, Ball also knew that ``Humphrey's loyal and
excessively exuberant support'' masked a vice president who ``was
personally revolted by the war.'' ⁶⁵ Ball believed that a
Humphrey administration would pull out of Vietnam quickly. Although
Humphrey had no input into the Johnson administration's Vietnam policy,
as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford was well aware, the vice president
did join Clifford's faction in the White House, which advocated a more
dovish diplomacy. This group pushed for a pause in bombing North Vietnam
without precondition as an inducement to the Communists to reciprocate.
The more hawkish faction demanded advance concessions by the North
Vietnamese. Humphrey was caught between loyally supporting the hawks in
public and actually being antiwar, ``in his heart.'' ⁶⁶
Humphrey had already begun to rediscover the doubts in his heart
during his second trip to Southeast Asia. He observed the continuing
indifference of South Vietnamese Generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen
Cao Ky to their own forces and their apparently unlimited demands on the
United States at the very time the war was supposedly being ``de-
Americanized.'' After that second trip, Humphrey implied to his close
friend, Dr. Edgar Berman, that he identified with Republican
presidential candidate George Romney, who had destroyed his political
future by admitting in 1967 that he had been ``brainwashed'' by American
officials into believing the United States was winning the
war.⁶⁷ Berman later related that Humphrey had told him
privately that the United States was ``throwing lives and money down a
corrupt rat hole'' in South Vietnam.⁶⁸ When Humphrey sent a
confidential memo suggesting this to Johnson, who was beginning to have
private doubts of his own, the president typically became infuriated by
the dissent. In fact, the vice president was the associate on whom
Johnson took out most of his anger, remaining rigid in his insistence
that it was the North Vietnamese who had to yield a concession first
before U.S. deescalation could occur.
Neither the president nor the vice president, however, could ignore
for long the fact that their administration was publicly backing a
seemingly losing cause that was also undermining Humphrey's homegrown
American Great Society. When the U.S. bombing neither forced North
Vietnam to the negotiating table nor did much strategic damage, since
that country had little infrastructure, Humphrey in the spring of 1968
strongly advised a halt. This action was Humphrey's first serious
divergence from Johnson's policy since 1965.

The 1968 Election

This vice-presidential advice, delivered just days before the end of
March 1968, was not the only instance of a prominent Democrat dissenting
from Johnson's policy. As Humphrey had predicted three years earlier,
the president's own party was now sharply divided, resulting in a strong
showing by the peace candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, in the New
Hampshire and Wisconsin presidential primaries. When Johnson on March 31
announced his decision not to run for reelection, Humphrey was in Mexico
City initialing a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The vice president
immediately became the Democratic frontrunner, although he declined to
enter any primaries. Robert Kennedy's assassination in June, after
winning the California primary, assured Humphrey the nomination by
default but left the Democratic party in serious disarray. The path to
the November election was strewn with other obstacles, as well, not the
least of which was Humphrey's late start due to Johnson's last-minute
surprise withdrawal. As a result, Humphrey lacked either sufficient
campaign funds or a mature organization to apply them. Moreover, the
vice president contributed to his own organizational inefficiency by
decentralizing his campaign structure.
The Democrats projected an image of disorganization and chaos to the
nation that year, as the party at one time or another split as many as
four ways into factions supporting Humphrey, Johnson, Eugene McCarthy,
and George Wallace. The raucous Chicago convention--with nationally
televised images of police beating young antiwar protesters in the
parks--further weakened Humphrey's standing in the polls, and the
extreme polarization within the party prevented him from achieving his
trademark unifying compromise. The vice president struggled to avoid
either being too closely identified with the unpopular president, or
dissociating himself so far that he would lose his Democratic party
support and Johnson-controlled campaign funds. Even though Johnson had
withdrawn from the race in March, the possibility remained that the
president might reenter the campaign if circumstances allowed him to be
drafted at the August convention. With this sword hanging over
Humphrey's head, he did not feel secure enough to risk provoking Johnson
into such a move by openly opposing the president's policy. As a result,
the vice president had publicly associated himself with the president's
policy for so long that a post-convention switch would lack credibility
with the voters.
Johnson not only intimidated Humphrey, but he also cajoled the vice
president into supporting the administration's line on the war in order
to avoid jeopardizing the delicate Paris peace talks. Since Republican
nominee Richard Nixon had adopted the patriotic stance of not
criticizing Johnson's current handling of the war, Humphrey could not
differentiate himself from his Republican opponent on that score without
being perceived as disloyal either to the president, to the country, or
to his own vice-presidential record. In classic fashion, Humphrey
presented ambiguous scenarios for a bombing halt and troop withdrawal.
These proposals were directly rejected by Johnson, who thus appeared to
move closer to Nixon! In the face of the national crisis, both
candidates chose to divert their attention to the domestic problems of
law and order and inflation.⁶⁹ As these issues, too, were
inextricably bound to the war itself, all topics seemed to associate the
party in power with the general chaos. Humphrey refused to repudiate
either the positions taken during his vice-presidency or his belief that
there would be a breakthrough at Paris. Johnson had convinced Humphrey
that the latter was imminent, even while denying his vice president
detailed information from those negotiations.⁷⁰
Badly behind in the polls, Humphrey took to television in late
September to try to solve the dilemma of his private opposition to the
war and his public pledge to bring it to an ``honorable conclusion.''
⁷¹ For the first time, he publicly proposed halting the
bombing as an inducement to North Vietnamese reciprocity once he became
president. As a result, his popularity rebounded in the final month of
the campaign. When the election returns came in, Humphrey had collected
42.7 percent of the popular vote to Richard Nixon's 43.4 percent,
although the Republican had 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191. Too
many voters had remembered the vice president's overselling of the war
and distrusted his recent apparent conversion.⁷²
After the election, Humphrey blamed the loss on his failure to break
with Johnson but contended that he could not have proceeded differently.
A more dovish or hawkish approach might not have secured Humphrey the
presidency, but it is probable that a less ambivalent, less inconsistent
message might have satisfied enough of the electorate. In the end,
perhaps Humphrey could not have overcome the profound irony inherent in
the fact that the war that gave him his presidential chance also took it
away.

Back in the Senate

Humphrey's electoral defeat finally removed the constraints of his
office, allowing him to express his personal political opinions. He did
so in his newspaper column, his memoirs, and as a college political
science teacher, along with other educational ventures. Humphrey almost
immediately began to seek the Minnesota Senate seat that Eugene McCarthy
planned to vacate in 1970. Easily winning on his old populist platform
and underplaying the Vietnam issue, Humphrey resumed his prior
senatorial pattern of introducing an abundance of bills that were mostly
domestic in content. As in his early Senate career, most of his new
legislative proposals were stymied. Returning as a new senator without
seniority or important committee assignments, Humphrey also had lost
many of his valuable former contacts, who had left the Senate. The times
had passed him by.
But the irrepressible warrior already had his eye on the 1972
presidential contest, believing he could successfully challenge Richard
Nixon on economic issues. Humphrey also criticized the administration's
rough handling of dissidents, asserting that ``you can't have civil
order without civil justice.'' ⁷³ Still, he remained
vulnerable on Vietnam, especially after the 1971 publication of the
Pentagon Papers, which revealed that a deceitful Johnson had decided
before the 1964 election to bomb North Vietnam and thus escalate the
war. These disclosures resuscitated Humphrey's image as Johnson's dupe
or shill and convinced many citizens that the former vice president
could not be trusted. Although leading in the national polls in December
1971, Humphrey was soon accused of waffling even on domestic issues, and
another poll that same year found that he was viewed as ``too talkative,
too willing to take both sides of an issue.'' ⁷⁴ Too many
Democrats saw the former vice president as part of the ``Establishment''
and turned to his Senate colleague George McGovern as the agent of
change. Despite failing to win the 1972 nomination, Humphrey tried
unsuccessfully once more in 1976.
During his typically active Senate term, Humphrey resumed his seat
on the powerful Appropriations Committee and by 1975 was chairman of the
Joint Economic Committee. In 1974 he introduced the highly ambitious
Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and National Growth bill, which
eventually passed after his death in 1978. This final legislative
monument symbolizes Humphrey's entire career, which was committed to
``the humanitarian goals of the New Deal.'' ⁷⁵ Humphrey
realistically understood that his core constituency comprised those
Americans from the lower social and economic classes--the disadvantaged
underdogs--a positioning that flowed from what journalist Murray Kempton
called Humphrey's ``overabundance of feeling for humanity.''
⁷⁶ Although this instinct lit his way onto the public stage
in 1948 when he made his singular stand for civil rights, his historical
vision became blinded by his failure to recognize that the Vietnam war
could destroy his hopes for the Great Society. Humphrey's digression
into self-delusion had prompted him in 1968 to stump for ``the politics
of joy,'' a slogan that many viewed as entirely inappropriate in the
midst of wartime and civil disorder.⁷⁷ Humphrey's greatest
asset, his enthusiasm, paradoxically may have also been his greatest
liability. In the course of pragmatically compromising on the chief
issue of the day, Vietnam, he allowed himself to become the
administration's loudest proponent of the war.
Although Humphrey's tactics may have sometimes veered off course, he
understood the profound value of the strategy of compromise, without
which, he said, the Great Society legislation would not have been
possible. In 1971 Humphrey called himself a gradualist, the soundest
course by which one can make ``steady progress if we don't bite off too
much.'' ⁷⁸ In 1973, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk
echoed Humphrey's self-assessment by characterizing him as ``a liberal
with common sense.'' ⁷⁹ Humphrey was able to realize the
difference between campaigning, where it was constructive to be
partisan, and governing, where to hold grudges would be, in his words,
``Neanderthal.'' ⁸⁰ While this generosity of spirit made him
incapable of being ruthless, a trait probably essential to a
presidential aspirant, it also made him an ideal senator or vice
president, an advocate and deal maker who ``was a terrific fighter but
no killer.'' ⁸¹ As a result, the ``Happy Warrior'' in the
public service knew enough defeats to ensure that his ``name had become
synonymous with cheerfulness in the face of adversity.'' ⁸²
Humphrey's behavior during his last days testifies to his awe-inspiring
strength of character. Terminally ill and in great physical discomfort,
he continued his senatorial workload with the same intensity and
affability as always. He died on January 13, 1978.
Perhaps the key to Humphrey's indefatigable essence was that he
placed personal political ambition below his support of a larger agenda.
The innumerable bills that he introduced and shepherded through Congress
demonstrate that, with Humphrey, the people and their issues came first.
HUBE2RT H. HUMPHREY

NOTES

¹ Edgar Berman, Hubert, the Triumph and the Tragedy of
the Humphrey I Knew, (New York, 1979), p. 23.
² Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography, (New York,
1984), p. 214.
³ Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice
Presidency, (New York, 1992), p. 182.
⁴ Solberg, p. 387.
⁵ Ibid., p. 12.
⁶ Ibid., p. 167.
⁷ Hays Gorey, ``I'm a Born Optimist,'' American Heritage,
December 1977, p. 63.
⁸ Allan H. Ryskind, Hubert, An Unauthorized Biography of
the Vice President, (New York, 1968), p. 234.
⁹ Solberg, p. 91.
¹⁰ Ryskind, p. 300.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 231.
¹² Berman, p. 17.
¹³ Solberg, p. 89.
¹⁴ U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989:
Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd,
S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 1, 1989, p. 606.
¹⁵ William S. White, Citadel: The Story of the Senate
(New York, 1957), pp. 112-13.
¹⁶ Solberg, pp. 99, 209.
¹⁷ Albert Eisele, Almost to the Presidency, a Biography
of Two American Politicians (Blue Earth, MN, 1972), p. 179.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 181.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 185.
²⁰ Ryskind, pp. 280, 281.
²¹ Berman, p. 87.
²² Marie D. Natoli, ``The Humphrey Vice Presidency in
Retrospect,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 12 (Fall 1982): 604.
²³ Ryskind, p. 319.
²⁴ Solberg, p. 258.
²⁵ Joel K. Goldstein, The Modern American Vice
Presidency, (Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 121, 122.
²⁶ Eisele, pp. 206, 212.
²⁷ Ibid., p. 235.
²⁸ Natoli, p. 604.
²⁹ Witcover, p. 197.
³⁰ Solberg, pp. 462-63; Berman, p. 97.
³¹ Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 89th Cong., First
sess., 1965, vol. 21 (Washington DC, 1966), pp. 547, 821, 829; vol. 22,
p. 226.
³² Charles Roberts, LBJ's Inner Circle, (New York, 1965),
pp. 190-91.
³³ Ryskind, p. 324; Eisele, p. 249.
³⁴ Eisele, p. 249.
³⁵ Solberg, p. 309.
³⁶ Berman, pp. 27, 31.
³⁷ Goldstein, p. 181.
³⁸ Solberg, p. 297; Eisele, pp. 249-50.
³⁹ Ibid., p. 236.
⁴⁰ Witcover, p. 199.
⁴¹ Natoli, p. 605.
⁴² Solberg, p. 301.
⁴³ Ibid., p. 304.
⁴⁴ Eisele, p. 99.
⁴⁵ Gorey, p. 62; Eisele, p. 99; Solberg pp. 157-59, 468.
⁴⁶ Ryskind, p. 266.
⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 275.
⁴⁸ Eisele, p. 229.
⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 230; Solberg, p. 276.
⁵⁰ Witcover, p. 195.
⁵¹ Berman, p. 102.
⁵² Eisele, p. 224.
⁵³ Solberg, p. 284.
⁵⁴ Eisele, p. 243.
⁵⁵ Solberg, p. 291.
⁵⁶ Eisele, p. 243.
⁵⁷ Solberg, p. 289; Goldstein, p. 194; Eisele, p. 243.
⁵⁸ Ryskind, p. 303.
⁵⁹ Solberg, p. 290.
⁶⁰ Goldstein, p. 194.
⁶¹ Eisele, p. 246.
⁶² Ibid., p. 246.
⁶³ Solberg, p. 291.
⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 312.
⁶⁵ George Ball, The Past has Another Pattern: Memoirs
(New York, 1982), pp. 445, 409.
⁶⁶ Clark Clifford, with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to
the President: Memoirs (New York, 1991), pp. 527, 570.
⁶⁷ Berman, p. 111.
⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 115.
⁶⁹ Eisele, p. 369.
⁷⁰ Solberg, pp. 347-48, 350.
⁷¹ Eisele, p. 379; Berman, p. 215.
⁷² Solberg, p. 407.
⁷³ Eisele, p. 432.
⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 440.
⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 445.
⁷⁶ Berman, p. 40.
⁷⁷ Solberg, p. 332.
⁷⁸ LBJ Oral History Collection, Joe B. Frantz interview
with Hubert Humphrey, 1971, University of Texas Oral History Project, p.
17.
⁷⁹ Natoli, p. 604.
⁸⁰ Berman, p. 60.
⁸¹ Solberg, p. 469.
⁸² Eisele, p. 393.
?

Chapter 39

SPIRO THEODORE AGNEW

1969-1973

SPIRO T. AGNEW
SPIRO T. AGNEW

Chapter 39

SPIRO THEODORE AGNEW

39th Vice President: 1969-1973

A little over a week ago, I took a rather unusual step
for a Vice President . . . I said something.
--Spiro Agnew
On November 13, 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew became a household
word when he vehemently denounced television news broadcasters as a
biased ``unelected elite'' who subjected President Richard M. Nixon's
speeches to instant analysis. The president had a right to communicate
directly with the people, Agnew asserted, without having his words
``characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics.'' Agnew
raised the possibility of greater government regulation of this
``virtual monopoly,'' a suggestion that the veteran television
newscaster Walter Cronkite took as ``an implied threat to freedom of
speech in this country.'' But Agnew's words rang true to those whom
Nixon called the Silent Majority. From then until he resigned in 1973,
Agnew remained an outspoken and controversial figure, who played
traveling salesman for the administration. In this role, Spiro Agnew was
both the creation of Richard Nixon and a reflection of his
administration's siege mentality.¹

Early Years

The son of a Greek immigrant whose name originally was
Anagnostopoulos, Spiro Theodore Agnew was born in Baltimore, Maryland,
on November 9, 1918. He attended public schools and went to Johns
Hopkins University in 1937 to study chemistry, before transferring to
the University of Baltimore Law School, where he studied law at night
while working at a grocery and an insurance company during the day. In
1942 he married a fellow insurance company employee, Elinor Isabel
Judefind, known to all as Judy. Drafted into the army during World War
II, he won a Bronze Star for his service in France and Germany. He
returned to school on the GI Bill of Rights, received his law degree in
1947, practiced law in a Baltimore firm, and eventually set up his own
law practice in the Baltimore suburb of Towson.

Remaking His Image

Moving from city to suburb, Agnew remade his own image. When he
recalled the ethnic slurs he suffered about ``Spiro'' while a school
boy, he now called himself ``Ted'' and vowed that none of his children
would have Greek names. Agnew similarly changed party affiliations.
Although his father was a Baltimore Democratic ward leader and Agnew had
first registered as a Democrat, his law partners were Republicans and he
joined their party. In 1957 the Democratic county executive of Baltimore
County appointed him to the board of zoning appeals. In 1960 Agnew made
his first race for elective office, running for associate circuit judge,
and coming in fifth in a five-person contest. In 1961, when a new county
executive dropped him from the zoning board, Agnew protested vigorously
and in so doing built his name recognition in the county. The following
year he ran for county executive. A bitter split in the Democratic party
helped make him the first Republican elected Baltimore County executive
in the twentieth century. In office he established a relatively
progressive record, and in 1966, when nominated as the Republican
candidate for governor of Maryland, Agnew positioned himself to the left
of his Democratic challenger, George Mahoney. An arch segregationist,
Mahoney adopted the campaign slogan, ``Your Home Is Your Castle--Protect
It,'' which only drove liberal Democrats into Agnew's camp. Charging
Mahoney with racial bigotry, Agnew captured the liberal suburbs around
Washington and was elected governor.²
It came as a shock to Agnew's liberal supporters when as governor he
took a more hard-line conservative stance on racial matters than he had
during the campaign. Early in 1968, students at the predominantly
African American Bowie State College occupied the administration
building to protest the run-down condition of their campus--at a time
when Maryland essentially ran separate college systems for black and
white students. Instead of negotiating, Agnew sent the state police to
take back the administration building. When the students went to
Annapolis to protest, Agnew ordered their arrest and had the college
temporarily closed down. Then in April, when riots broke out in
Baltimore following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Governor Agnew summoned black leaders to his office. Rather than appeal
for their help, he castigated them for capitulating to radical
agitators. ``You were intimidated by veiled threats,'' Agnew charged,
``you were stung by . . . epithets like `Uncle Tom.''' Half of the black
leaders walked out before he finished speaking. ``He talked to us like
we were children,'' one state senator complained. The incident
dramatically reversed Agnew's public image, alienating his liberal
supporters and raising his standing among conservatives.³

Spiro Who?

On the national scene, Agnew formed a committee to draft New York
Governor Nelson Rockefeller for president in 1968. In March, during his
weekly press conference, Agnew watched on television what he expected
would be Rockefeller's declaration of candidacy. Without warning,
Rockefeller withdrew from the contest, humiliating Agnew in front of the
press corps. Rockefeller later jumped back into the race, but by then
Agnew had moved toward the frontrunner, Richard Nixon. When polls showed
none of the better-known Republicans adding much as Nixon's running
mate, Nixon surprised everyone--as he liked to do--by selecting the
relatively unknown Agnew. ``Spiro who?'' asked the pundits, who
considered Agnew unqualified for national office. Despite such doubts,
Nixon saw much promise in his choice. ``There can be a mystique about
the man,'' Nixon assured reporters. ``You can look him in the eyes and
know he's got it.'' ⁴
Nixon expected Agnew to appeal to white southerners and others
troubled by the civil rights movement and recent rioting in the cities.
Attention shifted from this issue during the campaign, however, when
Agnew made a number of gaffes, including some ethnic slurs and an
accusation that Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic
candidate, was soft on communism. Agnew also encountered allegations of
having profited financially from his public office, charges that he
flatly denied. Agnew's biggest problem was that he seemed so ordinary
and unremarkable. A tall, stiff, bullet-headed man and the sort of
fastidious dresser who never removed his tie in public, he tended to
speak in a deadening monotone. Whether he helped or hurt the campaign is
not clear, but in November the Nixon-Agnew ticket won a razor-thin
victory over the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey and the
independent candidacy of Alabama Governor George Wallace.⁵

Learning the Constraints of the Office

Although Nixon had chosen a running mate who would not outshine him,
he had pledged to give his vice president a significant policy-making
role and--for the first time--an office in the West Wing of the White
House. Nixon also encouraged Agnew to use his position as presiding
officer of the Senate to get to know the members of Congress in order to
serve as their liaison with the White House, and Agnew enthusiastically
charged up Capitol Hill. Having had no previous legislative experience,
he wanted to master the techniques of presiding over the Senate. For the
first months of his vice-presidency, he met each morning with the Senate
parliamentarian, Floyd Riddick, to discuss parliamentary procedures and
precedents. ``He took pride in administering the oath to the new
senators by never having to refer to a note,'' Riddick observed. ``He
would study and memorize these things so that he could perform without
reading.'' According to Riddick, at first Agnew presided more frequently
than had any vice president since Alben Barkley.⁶
``I was prepared to go in there and do a job as the President's
representative in the Senate,'' said Agnew, who busily learned to
identify the senators by name and face. Yet he quickly discovered the
severe constraints on his role as presiding officer. Agnew had prepared
a four-minute speech to give in response to a formal welcome from
Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. When Mansfield moved that the vice
president be given only two minutes to reply, Agnew felt ``it was like a
slap in the face.'' The vice president also unwittingly broke precedent
by trying to lobby on the Senate floor. During the debate over the ABM
(Anti-Ballistic-Missile) Treaty, Agnew approached Idaho Republican
Senator Len Jordan and asked how he was going to vote. ``You can't tell
me how to vote!'' said the shocked senator. ``You can't twist my arm!''
At the next luncheon of Republican senators, Jordan accused Agnew of
breaking the separation of powers by lobbying on the Senate floor, and
announced the ``Jordan Rule,'' whereby if the vice president tried to
lobby him on anything, he would automatically vote the other way. ``And
so,'' Agnew concluded from the experience, ``after trying for a while to
get along with the Senate, I decided I would go down to the other end of
Pennsylvania Avenue and try playing the Executive game.'' ⁷
The vice president fit in no better at the White House than at the
Capitol. Nixon's highly protective staff concluded that Agnew had no
concept of his role, especially in relation to the president. Nixon
found their few private meetings dismaying because of Agnew's ``constant
self-aggrandizement.'' Nixon told his staff that as vice president he
rarely had made any requests of President Dwight Eisenhower. ``But
Agnew's visits always included demands for more staff, better
facilities, more prerogatives and perquisites.'' The anticipated use of
Agnew as a conduit to the nation's mayors and governors floundered when
it became apparent that Agnew did nothing more than pass their gripes
along to the president. When Agnew protested that Nixon did not see
enough of his cabinet, Nixon grumbled that his vice president had become
an advocate for all the ``crybabies'' in the cabinet who wanted to plead
their special causes. Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman took Agnew
aside and advised him that ``the President does not like you to take an
opposite view at a cabinet meeting, or say anything that can be
construed to be mildly not in accord with his thinking.'' ⁸
Nixon appointed Agnew head of the National Aeronautics and Space
Council but again found the vice president more irritant than asset. In
April 1969, while at Camp David, Nixon summoned Haldeman to complain
that the vice president had telephoned him simply to lobby for a
candidate for director of the Space Council. ``He just has no
sensitivity, or judgment about his relationship'' with the president,
Haldeman noted. After Agnew publicly advocated a space shot to Mars,
Nixon's chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, tried to explain to him
the facts of fiscal life:
Look, Mr. Vice President, we have to be practical. There is no
money for a Mars trip. The President has already decided
that. So the President does not want such a trip in the
[Space Council's] recommendations. It's your job . . . to
make absolutely certain that the Mars trip is not in
there.
From such experiences, the White House staff concluded that Agnew was
not a ``Nixon team player.'' ⁹

Unleashing Agnew

Throughout his first term, President Nixon was preoccupied with the
war in Vietnam. By the fall of 1969, Nixon came to the unhappy
conclusion that there would be no quick solution in Vietnam and that it
would steadily become his war rather than Lyndon Johnson's. On November
3, Nixon delivered a television address to the nation in which he called
for public support for the war until the Communists negotiated an
honorable peace. Public reaction to the speech was generally positive,
but the Nixon family was ``livid with anger'' over the critical
commentary by various network broadcasters. Nixon feared that the
``constant pounding from the media and our critics in Congress'' would
eventually undermine his public support. As president he wanted to
follow the Eisenhower model of remaining above the fray and to use Agnew
for the kind of hatchet work that he himself had done for Ike. When his
speech writer Pat Buchanan proposed that the vice president give a
speech attacking network commentators, Nixon liked the idea. H.R.
Haldeman went to discuss the proposed speech with the vice president,
who was interested ``but felt it was a bit abrasive.'' Nevertheless, the
White House staff believed the message needed to be delivered, ``and
he's the one to do it.'' ¹⁰
Agnew already had some hard-hitting speeches under his belt. On
October 20, 1969, at a dinner in Jackson, Mississippi, he had attacked
``liberal intellectuals'' for their ``masochistic compulsion to destroy
their country's strength.'' On October 30 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
he called student radicals and other critics of the war ``impudent
snobs.'' On November 11 in Philadelphia he decried the ``intolerant
clamor and cacophony'' that raged in society. Then, on November 13 in
Des Moines, Iowa, he gave Buchanan's blast at the network news media.
Haldeman recorded in his diary that, as the debate on Agnew mounted, the
president was ``fully convinced he's right and that the majority will
agree.'' The White House sent word for the vice president ``to keep up
the offensive, and to keep speaking,'' noting that he was now a ``major
figure in his own right.'' The vice president had become ``Nixon's
Nixon.'' ¹¹
Agnew relished the attention showered upon him. He had been
frustrated with his assignment as liaison with the governors and mayors,
and dealing with taxation, health, and other substantive issues had
required tedious study. By contrast, he found speechmaking much more
gratifying. As John Ehrlichman sourly noted, Agnew ``could take the
texts prepared in the President's speechwriting shop, change a phrase
here and there, and hit the road to attack the effete corps of impudent
snobs.'' His colorful phrases, like ``nattering nabobs of negativism,''
and ``radiclibs'' (for radical liberals) were compiled and published as
``commonsense quotations.'' ``I have refused to `cool it'--to use the
vernacular,'' Agnew declared, ``until the self-righteous lower their
voice a few decibels. . . . I intend to be heard over the din even if it
means raising my voice.'' ¹²

The Agnew Upsurge

The ``Agnew upsurge'' fascinated President Nixon, who took it as
evidence that a new conservative coalition could be built between blue-
collar ethnic voters and white-collar suburbanites. Nixon believed that
Agnew was receiving increasing press coverage because his attacks on the
media ``forced them to pay attention.'' When some of his advisers wanted
to put Agnew out in front in opposition to expanded school
desegregation, Nixon hesitated because he did not want to ``dilute or
waste the great asset he has become.'' By March 1970, the relationship
between the president and vice president reached its apex when the two
appeared for an amusing piano duet at the Gridiron Club. No matter what
tunes Nixon tried to play, Agnew would drown him out with ``Dixie,''
until they both joined in ``God Bless America'' as a
finale.¹³
As the strains of their duet faded, Nixon began having second
thoughts and concluded that he needed to ``change the Agnew approach.''
He informed Haldeman that the vice president had become a better
salesman for himself than for the administration, emerging as ``too much
of an issue and a personality himself.'' That month, when the Apollo
XIII astronauts had to abort their mission and return to earth, Haldeman
worked frantically to keep Agnew from flying to Houston and upstaging
the president. Agnew sat in his plane on the runway for over an hour
until Nixon finally canceled the trip. ``VP mad as hell,'' Haldeman
noted, ``but agreed to follow orders.'' In May 1970, after National
Guardsmen shot and killed four students at Kent State University, Nixon
cautioned Agnew not to say anything provocative about students. Word
leaked out that the president was trying to muzzle his vice president.
The next time Buchanan prepared ``a hot new Agnew speech,'' Nixon felt
more leery than before.¹⁴
By the summer of 1970, Nixon pondered how best to use Agnew in that
fall's congressional elections. The president himself wanted to remain
remote from partisanship and limit his speaking to foreign policy issues
while Agnew stumped for candidates. Nixon worried that, if Agnew
continued to appear an unreasonable figure, using highly charged
rhetoric, he might hurt rather than help the candidates for whom he
campaigned. ``Do you think Agnew's too rough?'' Nixon asked John
Ehrlichman one day. ``His style isn't the problem, it's the content of
what he says. He's got to be more positive. He must avoid all personal
attacks on people; he can take on Congress as a unit, not as
individuals.'' Some Republican candidates even asked Agnew to stay out
of their states. As the campaign progressed, Agnew's droning on about
law and order diminished his impact. Nixon felt compelled to abandon his
presidential aloofness and enter the campaign himself, barnstorming
around the country, as Attorney General John Mitchell complained, like a
man ``running for sheriff.'' The disappointing results of the midterm
elections--Republicans gained two seats in the Senate but lost a dozen
in the House--further shook Nixon's confidence in Agnew.¹⁵

The Number One Hawk

In 1971 the president devoted most of his attention to foreign
policy, planning his historic visit to China, a summit in Moscow, and
continued peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris. The vice
president went abroad for a series of good-will tours and ached for more
involvement in foreign policy--an area that Nixon reserved exclusively
for himself and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Nixon
preferred that Agnew limit himself to attacking the media to ``soften
the press'' for his foreign policy initiatives. He decided to keep the
vice president out of all substantive policy decisions, since Agnew
seemed incapable of grasping the big picture. For his part, Agnew
complained that he was ``never allowed to come close enough'' to Nixon
to participate in any policy discussions. ``Every time I went to see him
and raised a subject for discussion,'' the vice president later wrote,
``he would begin a rambling, time-consuming monologue.'' ¹⁶
Agnew, who described himself as the ``number-one hawk,'' went so far
as to criticize Nixon's ``Ping-Pong Diplomacy'' with the People's
Republic of China. The dismayed president considered Agnew ``a bull in
the . . . diplomatic China shop.'' Nixon had H.R. Haldeman lecture the
vice president on the importance of using the China thaw to ``get the
Russians shook.'' ``It is beyond my understanding,'' Nixon told
Ehrlichman. ``Twice Agnew has proposed that he go to China! Now he tells
the world it's a bad idea for me to go! What am I going to do about
him?'' ¹⁷

The Connally Alternative

By mid-1971, Nixon concluded that Spiro Agnew was not ``broad-
gauged'' enough for the vice-presidency. He constructed a scenario by
which Agnew would resign, enabling Nixon to appoint Treasury Secretary
John Connally as vice president under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth
Amendment. By appealing to southern Democrats, Connally would help Nixon
create a political realignment, perhaps even replacing the Republican
party with a new party that could unite all conservatives. Nixon
rejoiced at news that the vice president, feeling sorry for himself, had
talked about resigning to accept a lucrative offer in the private
sector. Yet while Nixon excelled in daring, unexpected moves, he
encountered some major obstacles to implementing this scheme. John
Connally was a Democrat, and his selection might offend both parties in
Congress, which under the Twenty-fifth Amendment had to ratify the
appointment of a new vice president. Even more problematic, John
Connally did not want to be vice president. He considered it a
``useless'' job and felt he could be more effective as a cabinet member.
Nixon responded that the relationship between the president and vice
president depended entirely on the personalities of whoever held those
positions, and he promised Connally they would make it a more meaningful
job than ever in its history, even to the point of being ``an alternate
President.'' But Connally declined, never dreaming that the post would
have made him president when Nixon was later forced to resign during the
Watergate scandal.¹⁸
Nixon concluded that he would not only have to keep Agnew on the
ticket but must publicly demonstrate his confidence in the vice
president. He recalled that Eisenhower had tried to drop him in 1956 and
believed the move had only made Ike look bad. Nixon viewed Agnew as a
general liability, but backing him could mute criticism from ``the
extreme right.'' Attorney General John Mitchell, who was to head the
reelection campaign, argued that Agnew had become ``almost a folk hero''
in the South and warned that party workers might see his removal as a
breach of loyalty. As it turned out, Nixon won reelection in 1972 by a
margin wide enough to make his vice-presidential candidate
irrelevant.¹⁹
Immediately after his reelection, however, Nixon made it clear that
Agnew should not become his eventual successor. The president had no
desire to slip into lame-duck status by allowing Agnew to seize
attention as the frontrunner in the next election. ``By any criteria he
falls short,'' the president told Ehrlichman:
``Energy? He doesn't work hard; he likes to play golf.
Leadership?'' Nixon laughed. ``Consistency? He's all over
the place. He's not really a conservative, you know.''
Nixon considered placing the vice president in charge of the American
Revolution Bicentennial as a way of sidetracking him. But Agnew declined
the post, arguing that the Bicentennial was ``a loser.'' Because
everyone would have a different idea about how to celebrate the
Bicentennial, its director would have to disappoint too many people. ``A
potential presidential candidate,'' Agnew insisted, ``doesn't want to
make any enemies.'' ²⁰

Impeachment Insurance

Unbeknownst to both Nixon and Agnew, time was running out for both
men's political careers. Since the previous June, the White House had
been preoccupied with containing the political repercussions of the
Watergate burglary, in which individuals connected with the president's
reelection committee had been arrested while breaking into the
Democratic National Committee headquarters. Although Watergate did not
influence the election, persistent stories in the media and the
launching of a Senate investigation spelled trouble for the president.
Innocent of any connection to Watergate, Agnew spoke out in Nixon's
defense.
Then, on April 10, 1973, the vice president called Haldeman to his
office to report a problem of his own. The U.S. attorney in Maryland,
investigating illegal campaign contributions and kickbacks, had
questioned Jerome Wolff, Agnew's former aide. Wolff had kept verbatim
accounts of meetings during which Agnew discussed raising funds from
those who had received state contracts. Agnew swore that ``it wasn't
shakedown stuff, it was merely going back to get support from those who
had benefitted from the Administration.'' Since prosecutor George Beall
was the brother of Maryland Republican Senator J. Glenn Beall, Agnew
wanted Haldeman to have Senator Beall intercede with his brother--a
request that Haldeman wisely declined.²¹
President Nixon was not at all shocked to learn that his vice
president had become enmeshed in a bribery scandal in Maryland. At
first, Nixon took the matter lightly, remarking that taking campaign
contributions from contractors was ``a common practice'' in Maryland and
other states. ``Thank God I was never elected governor of California,''
Nixon joked with Haldeman. But events began to move quickly, and on
April 30, 1973, Nixon asked Haldeman and Ehrlichman to resign because of
their role in the Watergate coverup. Then, that summer, the Justice
Department reported that the allegations against Agnew had grown more
serious. Even as vice president, Agnew had continued to take money for
past favors, and he had received some of the payments in his White House
office.²²
Nixon had quipped that Agnew was his insurance against impeachment,
arguing that no one wanted to remove him if it meant elevating Agnew to
the presidency. The joke took on reality when Agnew asked House Speaker
Carl Albert to request that the House conduct a full inquiry into the
charges against him. Agnew reasoned that a vice president could be
impeached but not indicted. That line of reasoning, however, also
jeopardized the president. For over a century since the failed
impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, it had been commonly accepted
reasoning that impeachment was an impractical and inappropriate
congressional tool against the presidency. Agnew's impeachment would set
a precedent that could be turned against Nixon. A brief from the
solicitor general argued that, while the president was immune from
indictment, the vice president was not, since his conviction would not
disrupt the workings of the executive branch. Agnew, a proud man filled
with moral indignation, reacted to these arguments by digging in his
heels and taking a stance that journalists described as ``aggressively
defensive.'' He refused the initial suggestions from the White House
that he resign voluntarily, after which Agnew believed that high-level
officials ``launched a campaign to drive me out by leaking anti-Agnew
stories to the media.'' ²³

``I Will Not Resign If Indicted!''

By September, it was a more desperate, less confident-looking man
who informed Nixon that he would consider resignation if granted
immunity from prosecution. Nixon noted that ``in a sad and gentle voice
he asked for my assurance that I would not turn my back on him if he
were out of office.'' Believing that for Agnew to resign would be the
most honorable course of action, Nixon felt confident that, when the
vice president left for California shortly after their meeting, he was
going away to think matters over and to prepare his family for his
resignation. But in Los Angeles, fired up by an enthusiastic gathering
of the National Federation of Republican Women, Agnew defiantly shouted,
``I will not resign if indicted!'' As Agnew later explained, he had
spent the previous evening at the home of the singer Frank Sinatra, who
had urged him to fight back.²⁴
Nixon's new chief of staff and ``crisis manager,'' General Alexander
M. Haig, Jr., was haunted by the specter of a double impeachment of the
president and vice president, which could turn the presidency over to
congressional Democrats. General Haig therefore took the initiative in
forcing Agnew out of office. He instructed Agnew's staff that the
president wanted no more speeches like the one in Los Angeles. He
further advised that the Justice Department would prosecute Agnew on the
charge of failing to record on his income tax returns the cash
contributions he had received. Haig assured Agnew's staff that, if the
vice president resigned and pleaded guilty on the tax charge, the
government would settle the other charges against him and he would serve
no jail sentence. But if Agnew continued to fight, ``it can and will get
nasty and dirty.'' From this report, Agnew concluded that the president
had abandoned him. The vice president even feared for his life, reading
into Haig's message: ``go quietly--or else.'' General Haig similarly
found Agnew menacing enough to alert Mrs. Haig that should he disappear
she ``might want to look inside any recently poured concrete bridge
pilings in Maryland.'' ²⁵

A Plea of Nolo Contendere

Meanwhile, Agnew's attorneys had entered into plea bargaining with
the federal prosecutors. In return for pleading nolo contendere, or no
contest, to the tax charge and paying $160,000 in back taxes (with the
help of a loan from Frank Sinatra), he would receive a suspended
sentence and a $10,000 fine. On October 10, 1973, while Spiro T. Agnew
appeared in federal court in Baltimore, his letter of resignation was
delivered to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Agnew was only the
second vice president to resign the office (John C. Calhoun had been the
first). Prior to resigning, Agnew paid a last visit to President Nixon,
who assured him that what he was doing was best for his family and his
country. When he later recalled the president's gaunt appearance, Agnew
wrote: ``It was hard to believe he was not genuinely sorry about the
course of events. Within two days, this consummate actor would be
celebrating his appointment of a new Vice-President with never a thought
of me.'' ²⁶
Nixon still wanted to name John Connally as vice president, but
Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield intimated that Congress would
never confirm him. On October 12--even as pictures of Agnew were being
removed from federal offices around the country--Nixon appointed House
Republican Leader Gerald R. Ford as the first vice president to be
selected under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Agnew was stunned by the
laughter and gaiety of the televised event that seemed ``like the
celebration of a great election victory--not the aftermath of a stunning
tragedy.'' ²⁷
The coda to the Agnew saga occurred the following year, as Nixon's
presidency came to an end. In June 1974, the besieged president dictated
an entry in his diary in which he confronted the real possibility of
impeachment. Nixon reviewed a series of decisions that now seemed to him
mistakes, such as asking Haldeman and Ehrlichman to resign, appointing
Elliot Richardson attorney general, and not destroying the secret tape
recordings of his White House conversations. ``The Agnew resignation was
necessary although a very serious blow,'' Nixon added,
because while some thought that his stepping aside would take some
of the pressure off the effort to get the President, all
it did was to open the way to put pressure on the
President to resign as well. This is something we have to
realize: that any accommodation with opponents in this
kind of a fight does not satisfy--it only brings on
demands for more.
On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon joined Spiro Agnew in making theirs the
first presidential and vice-presidential team in history to resign from
office.²⁸
Following his resignation, the vice president who had made himself a
household word faded quickly into obscurity. Agnew moved to Rancho
Mirage, California, where he became an international business
consultant, tapping many of the contacts he had made with foreign
governments on travels abroad as vice president. He published his
memoir, ominously entitled Go Quietly . . . or else, and a novel, The
Canfield Decision, whose protagonist was a wheeling and dealing American
vice president ``destroyed by his own ambition.'' For the rest of his
life, Agnew remained largely aloof from the news media and cut off from
Washington political circles. Feeling ``totally abandoned,'' he refused
to accept any telephone calls from former President Nixon. When Nixon
died in 1994, however, Agnew chose to attend his funeral. ``I decided
after twenty years of resentment to put it aside,'' he explained. The
next year, Spiro Agnew's bust was at last installed with those of other
vice presidents in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. ``I'm not blind or
deaf to the fact that there are those who feel this is a ceremony that
should not take place,'' he acknowledged. Agnew died of leukemia on
September 17, 1996, in his home state of Maryland.²⁹
SPIRO THEODORE AGNEW

NOTES

¹ John R. Coyne, Jr., The Impudent Snobs: Agnew vs. the
Intellectual Establishment (New Rochelle, NY, 1972), pp. 7-18, 265-70.
² Jim G. Lucas, Agnew: Profile in Conflict (New York,
1970), pp. 9-37.
³ Ibid., pp. 37-62.
⁴ Jules Witcover, White Knight: The Rise of Spiro Agnew
(New York, 1972), pp. 4-10, 180-99; Robert W. Peterson, ed., Agnew: The
Coining of a Household Word (New York, 1972), pp. 1-25; Dan Rather and
Gary Paul Gates, The Palace Guard (New York, 1974), p. 295.
⁵ Witcover, pp. 234-82; Lucas, pp. 19, 63-100; Richard
Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York, 1978), 311-13.
⁶ Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American
Dream (New York, 1991), p. 344; Peterson, ed., p. 9; Nixon, p. 340;
Allen Drury, Courage and Hesitation (Garden City, NY, 1971), p. 98;
Floyd M. Riddick: Senate Parliamentarian, Oral History Interviews, 1978-
1979 (U.S. Senate Historical Office, Washington, DC), p. 68.
⁷ Drury, pp. 98-100; Witcover, p. 293.
⁸ H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries; Inside the Nixon
White House (New York, 1994), p. 27; John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power:
The Nixon Years (New York, 1982), pp. 106, 111, 145-46; Spiro T. Agnew,
Go Quietly. . . or else (New York, 1980), pp. 31-32.
⁹ Haldeman, p. 53; Ehrlichman, pp. 144-45, 152.
¹⁰ Nixon, pp. 409-12; Haldeman, pp. 99, 106; Witcover,
pp. 296-97, 449.
¹¹ Coyne, pp. 253-70; Haldeman, p. 109; Rather and Gates,
p. 296.
¹² Ehrlichman, p. 146; James Calhoun, The Real Spiro
Agnew: Commonsense Quotations of a Household Word (Greta, LA, 1970), p.
45.
¹³ Haldeman, pp. 118, 127-28.
¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 147, 150, 161-62, 169.
¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 179-80; Ehrlichman, p. 103; Rather and
Gates, pp. 300-302.
¹⁶ Haldeman, pp. 240-41; Agnew, p. 34.
¹⁷ Nixon, p. 549; Haldeman, p. 247; Ehrlichman, pp. 154-
55; Agnew, p. 23.
¹⁸ Haldeman, pp. 275, 296, 306-7, 317, 327; Witcover, pp.
432-33; Agnew, pp. 38-40.
¹⁹ Nixon, pp. 674-75; Haldeman, pp. 356-57.
²⁰ Ehrlichman, p. 142; Haldeman, p. 534; Agnew, pp. 37-
38.
²¹ Haldeman, p. 629; Agnew, pp. 50-51, 57-58; Richard M.
Cohen and Jules Witcover, A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and
Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (New York, 1974), pp. 3-16.
²² Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (Washington, 1993), pp.
356-57, 503-4; Nixon, p. 823; Ehrlichman, pp. 142-43; Agnew, pp. 98-99.
²³ Agnew, pp. 100-103, 130-32; Cohen and Witcover, pp.
149, 190-216.
²⁴ Nixon, pp. 912-18; Agnew, p. 178.
²⁵ Agnew, pp. 182-83, 186-90; Alexander M. Haig, Jr.,
Inner Circles: How America Changed the World: A Memoir (New York, 1992),
pp. 350-67.
²⁶ Agnew, pp. 192-99.
²⁷ Ibid., pp. 201-2, 220-21; Haig, pp. 367-70.
²⁸ Nixon, pp. 1002-5.
²⁹ Washington Post, September 19, 1996.
?

Chapter 40

GERALD RUDOLPH FORD

1973-1974

GERALD R. FORD

(Addressing a joint session of Congress after
his swearing in as vice president on December 6,
1973)
GERALD R. FORD

Chapter 40

GERALD RUDOLPH FORD

40th Vice President: 1973-1974

Life plays some funny tricks on people. Here I have been
trying . . . for 25 years to become Speaker of the House.
Suddenly, I am a candidate for President of the Senate,
where I could hardly ever vote, and where I will never get a
chance to speak.
--Gerald R. Ford
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963
placed Lyndon Johnson in the White House and--for the sixteenth time in
American history--left the vice-presidency unoccupied. Just months
later, former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, his political career
seemingly terminated by his loss to Kennedy in the presidential election
of 1960 and his subsequent defeat for governor of California in 1962,
appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional
Amendments to discuss means of filling vice-presidential vacancies. The
existing order of succession that placed the Speaker of the House and
president pro tempore of the Senate next in line to the presidency
troubled Nixon. He pointed out that there were no guarantees that either
of these legislative officials would be ideologically compatible with
the president or even of the same party. He similarly disliked proposals
for the president to nominate a vice president subject to confirmation
by Congress, since a Congress controlled by the opposition party might
unduly influence the president's choice. Nixon proposed that the
Electoral College elect the new vice president. Not only would this
method guarantee that the same electors who chose the president would
choose the vice president, but having been elected by the people the
electors would give additional legitimacy to the new vice
president.¹
Chairman Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, and other subcommittee
members listened respectfully to Nixon's arguments but were unpersuaded.
They considered the Electoral College ``too much of a historical
curiosity,'' too cumbersome, and too far removed from public awareness
to make such an important decision. Instead, the subcommittee reported
an amendment that provided:
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of Vice President, the
President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take
the office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both
houses of Congress.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment, which also included provisions for the vice
president to take charge during a president's disability, was passed by
Congress and ratified by the required three-quarters of the states in
1967.
Six years later the amendment was implemented by none other than
President Richard Nixon. Following Spiro Agnew's resignation, Nixon
nominated Gerald R. Ford as his new vice president. Confronting the
scenario that he had described in his earlier testimony, Nixon could not
choose the candidate he preferred, John Connally. Because the Democratic
majorities in both houses of Congress opposed Connally, the president
was forced to settle for someone more likely to win confirmation. For
the Democrats, there was also some irony involved. Less than a year
later, when Nixon himself resigned, it was the former Republican leader
of the House who succeeded him. Had the Twenty-fifth Amendment not been
adopted, the resignations--or impeachments--of Nixon and Agnew would
have handed the presidency to the Speaker of the House, a
Democrat.²

An Uncomplicated Man

The amendment's first beneficiary, Gerald Rudolph Ford, was an
uncomplicated man who traveled a complex path to become vice president.
He was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14, 1913.
His mother, after having been physically abused by his father, obtained
a divorce and moved to her parents' home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
There she met and married Gerald R. Ford, a paint salesman, who formally
adopted her son and renamed him. The novelist John Updike has observed
that Ford therefore became ``the only President to preside with a name
completely different from the one he was given at birth,'' which was
just as well, since `President King' ``would have been an awkward
oxymoron.'' ³
After this uncertain start, Jerry Ford lived a normal Middle
American childhood in what he described as a ``strait-laced, highly
conservative town.'' He attended public schools, excelled in athletics,
and worked lunch times grilling hamburgers. His mother was an active
member of her church, garden clubs, and various civic organizations, and
his stepfather was a Mason, Shriner, and Elk. Jerry became an Eagle
Scout. The family fortunes alternated between prosperous and strapped,
more often the latter; some football boosters arranged for Ford to
receive scholarships and part-time jobs to help him attend the
University of Michigan, where he became a star football player. The
Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions offered to sign him as a
professional player, but Ford chose instead to attend the Yale Law
School. To support himself, he coached Yale's freshman football squad,
two of whose members--William Proxmire and Robert Taft, Jr.--would one
day as senators vote for his confirmation as vice president.⁴
A ``B'' student among Phi Beta Kappas, Ford found the academic
competition as tough as anything he had experienced on a football field.
His classmates at Yale included Cyrus Vance, Potter Stewart, and Sargent
Shriver. Yet Ford managed to rank in the top third of his class. ``How
that happened,'' he later commented, ``I can't explain.'' He completed
course work in 1941 and went back to Michigan to take the bar exam and
start a law practice. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the navy and
spent the war in the Pacific. Discharged in 1946, he returned to Grand
Rapids, moved to a larger law firm, and joined the American Legion and
Veterans of Foreign Wars. In 1947 Ford began dating Elizabeth (Betty)
Bloomer Warren, the fashion coordinator for a local department store,
who was in the process of obtaining a divorce.
Politics also attracted him. At Yale he had supported the Republican
presidential candidate Wendell Willkie in 1940 and had become involved
in the isolationist group America First. Ford would remain a Republican,
but Pearl Harbor and the Second World War converted him to an
internationalist foreign policy. He modeled himself after his state's
senior senator, Republican Arthur Vandenberg, who had similarly reversed
his position on America's role in world affairs. In 1948, the thirty-
four-year-old Ford decided to challenge the renomination of Republican
Representative Barney Jonkman, an outspoken isolationist and critic of
Senator Vandenberg. Conventional wisdom pictured Jonkman as unbeatable,
but when President Harry Truman called the Eightieth Congress back into
special session that summer, Ford had the district to himself for
campaigning, while the incumbent was busy in Washington. He drew support
from internationalists in both parties--since Democrats knew they had no
chance of electing a Democrat in that district. In the primary, Ford
beat Jonkman 2 to 1. On October 15, 1948, shortly before the general
election, Ford married Betty Warren. He had been campaigning just
minutes before the ceremony, and the next day the newly married couple
attended a political rally. ``I was very unprepared to be a political
wife,'' Betty Ford later observed, ``but I didn't worry because I really
didn't think he was going to win.'' She was wrong. Although Truman and
the Democrats carried the election of 1948, Gerald Ford won election to
Congress with 61 percent of the vote.⁵

Rising in the House Leadership

When Ford entered the House of Representatives in the Eighty-first
Congress, an oldtimer on the Michigan delegation advised him that he
could either spend his time in committee, mastering one area of
legislation, or on the floor, learning the rules, parliamentary
procedure and debating tactics. Ford chose the latter. It was on the
House floor that he first met Richard Nixon, who had already achieved
notoriety during the House Un-American Activities Committee's
investigation of the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers controversy.
Impressed with Nixon's performance, Ford tried to be present whenever
the Californian spoke in the House. The two men shared similar
backgrounds and outlooks on foreign and domestic politics and liked to
talk about football and baseball. In 1951, Ford invited the newly
elected Senator Nixon to speak at a Lincoln Day banquet in Grand
Rapids.⁶ The next year, when Nixon delivered his famous
``Checkers'' televised speech to save his vice-presidential candidacy,
Ford wired him:
Over radio and newspapers I am in your corner 100 percent. Fight
it to the finish as you did the smears by Communists when
you were proving charges against Alger Hiss. . . . I will
personally welcome you in Grand Rapids or any other part
of Michigan.⁷
As Nixon's horizons expanded, Ford retained his seat in the House,
slowly amassing seniority and respect. Ford had joined with Nixon and
other new members of the House to organize the Chowder and Marching
Society, an informal caucus of Republican veterans of the Second World
War, which became his first stepping stone to leadership. In 1960,
Ford's name surfaced as a possible vice-presidential candidate to run
with Nixon. In 1963, Lyndon Johnson appointed him a member of the Warren
Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But Ford
focused his ambition principally on the House, where he hoped someday to
become Speaker. Elected chairman of the Republican Conference in 1963,
Ford was also moving up in seniority on the powerful Appropriations
Committee. In 1965, after his party suffered a thirty-six-seat loss and
had its ranks reduced to the lowest level since the Great Depression, a
group of dissatisfied Republicans known as Young Turks promoted Ford as
their candidate to replace the incumbent Charles Halleck as minority
leader. Ford attributed his narrow victory over Halleck to the help of
Representative Bob Dole, who delivered the support of the Kansas
delegation to him as a bloc.⁸
President Johnson, having worked closely with Halleck, deplored
Ford's elevation to the Republican leadership. Expecting Ford to be more
partisan than Halleck and less cooperative, Johnson made wisecracks that
the trouble with Ford was that ``he used to play football without a
helmet'' and that he was ``too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same
time.'' Johnson also told reporters that Ford had violated national
security by leaking stories told to him in confidence. These charges
were untrue, and reporters backed Ford's denial, but the incident
revealed the depth of Johnson's animosity toward the new Republican
leader. Ford's friend and supporter, New York Representative Charles
Goodell, believed that ``Johnson thought Ford was stupid because he was
predictable.'' Goodell saw Ford as a solid fellow who had no instinct
for the kind of political manipulation upon which men like Johnson and
Nixon thrived.⁹
In September 1965, at a time when Ford's star was on the rise and
Richard Nixon's had gone into political eclipse, the two men met for
breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel to discuss rebuilding their damaged
party. Nixon, who still harbored presidential ambitions, pledged to
campaign for House Republican candidates, admitting that he was
motivated by ``pragmatism more than altruism.'' Thereafter, Nixon
maintained close ties with Ford, calling him sometimes from pay phones
during his political journeys around the country. ``Many people in
politics respected Richard Nixon's abilities,'' the journalist Richard
Reeves observed, ``but Ford was one of the few who talked about liking
Nixon.'' ¹⁰
Ford also spent much of the time between 1965 and 1968 traveling
from state to state to speak for Republican candidates and reinforce his
political base in the House. During his first six months as leader, Ford
visited thirty-two states. When reporters asked if he was running for
something, he replied: ``I'm running for House Speaker.'' Given that the
Republicans held only 140 out of 435 House seats, this was an
extravagant ambition, but in 1966 his efforts helped House Republicans
make a remarkable rebound with a gain of 47 seats. Ford's long hours on
Capitol Hill and frequent absences from home for political speaking
engagements, however, took their toll on his family, especially on his
wife Betty, who turned to alcohol and pain-killers to compensate for her
loneliness. ``I'd felt as though I were doing everything for everyone
else, and I was not getting any attention at all,'' she
lamented.¹¹

The Ultimate Nixon Loyalist

In 1968, a ``new Nixon'' won the Republican presidential nomination,
and Ford was again mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate. Ford, the
permanent chairman of the convention, had been an unequivocal Nixon
supporter from the beginning of the campaign. At a strategy session,
Nixon turned to him and said, ``I know that in the past, Jerry, you have
thought about being Vice President. Would you take it this year?'' Ford
replied that, if the Republicans did as well in 1968 as they had two
years earlier, they might take the majority in the House, and he would
prefer to become Speaker. He endorsed New York Mayor John Lindsay for
vice president. But in fact, Nixon had already decided on Maryland
Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate--even before asking Ford. Ford
shook his head in disbelief at that choice.¹²
During Nixon's first term, House Republican leader Gerald Ford was
the ultimate Nixon loyalist in Congress. In May 1971, when the House
voted to restore funds for the Supersonic Transport (SST) project, but
not enough votes could be found in the Senate, President Nixon ruminated
to his aide, H.R. Haldeman, on the ``lack of leadership'' in Congress,
``making the point that Gerry Ford really is the only leader we've got
on either side in either house.'' Ford annoyed conservative Republicans
by his support for Nixon's Family Assistance Plan and angered liberals
by his efforts to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas--an
action widely interpreted as a response to the defeat of two of Nixon's
Supreme Court nominations.¹³
For all these efforts, Ford and his Republican counterparts in the
Senate ``had trouble finding anyone on the White House staff dealing
with policy who was interested in consulting with us on domestic
legislative priorities.'' Whenever the Republican congressional
leadership met with Nixon at the White House, the members received
promises that his aides would work with them, ``but they never did.''
Ford attributed this unresponsiveness to the ``us versus them''
mentality of Nixon's staff. He also regretted Vice President Agnew's
intemperate attacks on the news media, which Ford believed would only
reopen old wounds. Nevertheless, Ford felt confident that Nixon's
coattails in 1972 would carry a Republican majority into the House and
finally make him Speaker. On election night, he was deeply disappointed
with the results. ``If we can't get a majority [in the House] against
McGovern, with a Republican President winning virtually every state,
when can we?'' Ford complained to his wife. ``Maybe it's time for us to
get out of politics and have another life.'' He began to think seriously
of retiring as House leader when Nixon's second term was over in
1976.¹⁴

The First Appointed Vice President

Unforseen events during the next year completely changed Gerald
Ford's life. When stories broke that Vice President Agnew had taken
kickbacks from Maryland contractors, the vice president visited Ford to
swear to his innocence. Although Ford professed not to doubt Agnew's
word, after that meeting he made certain that someone else was always
present whenever he saw the vice president. On October 10, 1973, Nixon
called Ford to his hideaway office at the Executive Office Building and
told him that there was evidence that Agnew had received illegal
payments in his office in the West Wing of the White House and that the
matter was going to court. Ford returned to the House chamber, where
just minutes later the word was passed: ``Agnew has resigned.'' The next
day, Nixon met with Ford and Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott at the
White House to discuss filling the vacancy under the Twenty-fifth
Amendment and asked them to have their Republican colleagues each send
him their top three choices for the office.¹⁵
Nixon knew that Democrats felt apprehensive about confirming someone
who might be a strong contender for the presidency in 1976 and that they
preferred ``a caretaker Vice President who would simply fill out Agnew's
unexpired term.'' Nixon wanted to appoint his Treasury Secretary, John
Connally, but after meeting with the Democratic congressional leadership
he concluded that Connally would have a difficult time being confirmed.
At Camp David, Nixon prepared an announcement speech with four endings,
one each for Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, Connally, and Ford.
Looking through the names that Republican party leaders had suggested,
he found that Rockefeller and Reagan had tied, Connally was third, and
Ford last. However, among members of Congress, including such Democrats
as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and House Speaker Carl Albert,
Ford's name came in first and, as Nixon noted, ``they were the ones who
would have to approve the man I nominated.'' As Speaker Albert later
asserted, ``We gave Nixon no choice but Ford.'' ¹⁶
The Watergate scandal had so preoccupied and weakened Nixon that he
could not win a fight over Connally. Choosing either Rockefeller or
Reagan would likely split the Republican party. That left Ford. Nixon
reasoned that, not only were Ford's views on foreign and domestic policy
practically identical with his, but that the House leader would be the
easiest to confirm. He had also received assurances that Ford ``had no
ambitions to hold office after January 1977,'' which would clear the
path for Connally to seek the Republican presidential nomination. On the
morning of October 12, 1973, Nixon called Ford to a private meeting.
While he intended to nominate Ford for vice president, Nixon explained,
he planned to campaign for Connally for president in 1976. Ford raised
no objections to that arrangement, and that evening, Nixon announced the
news publicly from the East Room.¹⁷
Ford's nomination was subject to confirmation in both the Senate and
House, where Democrats held commanding majorities. Because of the
Watergate scandal, congressional Democrats were concerned that the
individual they confirmed as vice president might well become president
before Nixon's term was completed. Liberals expressed displeasure with
Ford's conservative voting record on social welfare and other domestic
issues and his undeviating loyalty to President Nixon's foreign policies
but did not believe they could withhold confirmation merely because of
policy disagreements. A few liberals, led by New York Representative
Bella Abzug, tried to block action on Ford's nomination, anticipating
that Nixon's eventual removal would make House Speaker Albert president.
Albert, however, pushed for Ford's speedy confirmation. Then, on October
20, Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in defiance of his
attempts to subpoena the White House tape recordings, an event the press
dubbed the ``Saturday Night Massacre.'' Both Democrats and Republicans
now felt it legitimate to ask what position Ford would take as president
on such questions as executive privilege and the independent
jurisdictions of the legislative and judicial branches. Congress
appeared to hold Ford's nomination hostage until Nixon complied with the
subpoenas of his tapes.¹⁸
White House chief of staff Alexander Haig worried that, if Nixon
were impeached before Ford became vice president, Democrats might delay
his confirmation in order to make Speaker Albert president. Haig
therefore helped break the logjam by pressing Nixon to move on the
appointment of a new special prosecutor and a new attorney general
(since Elliot Richardson had resigned rather than fire Cox), as well as
to guarantee some compliance on the matter of the tapes. On November 27
the Senate voted 92 to 3 to confirm Ford, and on December 6, the House
agreed, 387 to 35 (with Ford voting ``present''). President Nixon wanted
Ford to take the oath of office in the East Room of the White House, but
Ford thought it more appropriate to hold the ceremony in the Capitol,
where he had served for a quarter of a century. Nixon had little desire
to appear in a House chamber where impeachment motions were being filed
against him, and where he might be booed, but at last he relented.
Addressing his enthusiastic former colleagues, the new vice president
modestly identified himself as ``a Ford, not a Lincoln.'' General Haig
complained about the atmosphere in the House chamber: ``Ford was treated
throughout the ceremony and afterwards as a President-in-waiting,
especially by Republicans, and there can be little question that Richard
Nixon's presidency was over, in their minds, from the moment his
successor took the oath.'' ¹⁹

A Catalyst to Bind the National Wounds

Although warmly cheered in Congress, the new vice president received
only a lukewarm reception in the press. Many journalists did not believe
Ford measured up to the job. The New York Times dismissed him as a
``routine partisan of narrow views,'' and the Washington Post regarded
him as ``the very model of a second-level party man.'' The columnist
David Broder thought that Nixon did not want ``a partner in policy-
making or an apprentice President.'' The harshest criticism came from
the conservative Wall Street Journal, which pronounced, ``The nomination
of Mr. Ford caters to all the worst instincts on Capitol Hill--the
clubbiness that made him the choice of Congress, the partisanship that
threatened a bruising fight if a prominent Republican presidential
contender were named, the small-mindedness that thinks in terms of those
who should be rewarded rather than who could best fill the job.''
²⁰
During the confirmation process, Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of
Oregon asked Ford whether his role might be that of ``a catalyst to bind
up some of these deep-seated wounds, political and otherwise?'' Ford
replied that he expected to make speeches around the country. ``I would
maximize my efforts not to do it in an abrasive way,'' he promised,
``but rather to calm the waters.'' Ford carried out that promise so well
that President Nixon discovered he had a new political weapon: an
honest, believable, and congenial vice president. Although some skeptics
regarded Ford, in the words of the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, as
just ``Agnew without alliteration,'' the public generally accepted the
new vice president as trustworthy, forthright and unpretentious if not
particularly brilliant. Ford spent most of his eight months as vice
president on the road rather than in the Senate chamber, delivering an
almost continuous stream of speeches, holding fifty-two press
conferences, and giving eighty-five formal interviews, in an effort to
demonstrate a new openness in government.²¹
Vice President Ford balanced precariously between supporting the
president and maintaining some distance from the Watergate scandal. ``I
am my own man,'' he proclaimed. The Nixon White House thought
differently. Ford's top aide, Robert Hartmann, a crusty former newspaper
correspondent, was summoned by General Haig's staff secretary to receive
a lengthy list of priorities for the new vice president. Included were
congressional relations, speaking engagements outside of Washington,
serving as the administration's point man during the 1974 campaign, and
being available for foreign travel. If Ford needed assistance in speech
writing, scheduling, and advance personnel, the White House would
provide it. Hartmann concluded that Nixon's staff ``intended to
integrate [Ford's] supporting staff so completely with the White House
that it would be impossible for him to assert even the little
independence Agnew had managed.'' At the meeting's end, the staff
secretary shook Hartmann's hand and declared, ``What we want to do is to
make the Vice President as much as possible a part of the White House
staff.'' ²²

The Smoking Gun and the President's Resignation

Although Ford steadfastly defended Nixon throughout the Watergate
crisis, he could never understand why the president did not simply
release the tapes to clear his name and end the controversy, if he was
as innocent as he professed. The longer Nixon stonewalled, the more
pressure mounted from members of his own party on Capitol Hill for the
president to resign before the midterm elections of 1974. Where Nixon
and Ford had once hoped to achieve Republican majorities in Congress,
they now faced the prospect of massive losses of seats. In the first few
months of 1974, Republicans lost four of five special elections--
including Ford's old Grand Rapids district. In May 1974, when Nixon
released the first, highly edited transcripts of his secret tapes,
public opinion turned even further against him. Senate Republican leader
Hugh Scott called the language and contents of the transcripts
``deplorable, shabby, disgusting, and immoral.'' Ford also admitted that
the tapes ``don't exactly confer sainthood on anyone.'' The vice
president attended a Senate Republican Policy Committee luncheon where
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater rose and said: ``I'm not yelling at you,
Mr. Vice President, but I'm just getting something off my chest. The
president ought to resign. It's not in the best interest of everybody to
have to face an impeachment trial.'' Ford immediately excused himself
and left.²³
The release of the additional tapes finally produced the ``smoking
gun'' that demonstrated beyond question that Nixon--despite his
protestations to the contrary--had personally directed the cover-up of
the Watergate scandal. By the beginning of August, Nixon realized that
he would have to resign to avoid impeachment, and he instructed General
Haig to tell Ford to be prepared to take over the presidency within a
matter of days. Nixon noted that, while Ford was not experienced in
foreign affairs, ``he's a good and decent man, and the country needs
that now.'' General Haig went to Ford's office, but finding Ford's aide
Robert Hartmann there, Haig hesitated to give Ford a list of options
prepared by the president's legal counsels that included the power of
the incoming president to pardon his predecessor (the legal counsels had
gone so far as to draft a pardon in Ford's name, dated August 6, 1974).
After the first meeting concluded, Haig called Ford at his Capitol
office to set up another meeting--alone--where he could be more candid.
Ford seemed receptive, but the next time they talked, Haig observed that
Ford's voice had grown more formal and that he called him ``General''
rather than ``Al.'' ``I want you to understand,'' Ford said, ``that I
have no intention of recommending what the President should do about
resigning or not resigning, and nothing we talked about yesterday
afternoon should be given any consideration in whatever decision the
President may wish to make.'' Haig concluded that Ford was trying to
protect himself from potential charges that he had made a deal to get
the presidency. Haig insisted that Nixon had never known of the list of
options, and that his own actions had not been
Machiavellian.²⁴
On August 8, Nixon called Ford to the Oval Office and told him that
he was resigning. ``Jerry,'' he added, ``I know you'll do a good job.''
He recommended that Ford keep Henry Kissinger as secretary of state,
because if Kissinger were to leave along with Nixon ``our foreign policy
would soon be in disarray.'' He also urged him to retain Haig as chief
of staff during the transition, to handle the inevitable ``scramble for
power'' within the staff and cabinet. Ford accepted both
recommendations. Nixon noted that he would be gone by noon the next day
so that Ford could take the oath of office at the White House as Truman
had done. A tearful Nixon closed the conversation by thanking Ford for
his long loyal support.²⁵

The First Nonelected President

The next morning, Nixon departed from the White House lawn by
helicopter while Gerald Ford waved goodbye. The first nonelected vice
president was then sworn in as president of the United States. In his
inaugural address, Ford proclaimed that ``our long national nightmare is
over.'' The nation agreed, and Ford entered office on the crest of
favorable public opinion. Within a month, however, the good will
dissipated when Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Although deeply dismayed
when the tapes showed that Nixon had lied to him, Ford felt personally
concerned about Nixon's mental and physical health and politically
concerned about the national impact of a trial of a former president. He
decided that Nixon's resignation and the sentence of having to live with
the humiliation was as severe a punishment as a jail term. ``You can't
pull a bandage off slowly,'' he concluded, ``and I was convinced that
the sooner I issued the pardon the better it would be for the country.''
²⁶
Although Ford pardoned Nixon, he declined to pardon Nixon's
coconspirators, many of whom served jail terms for obstruction of
justice; he also declined advice to issue a general amnesty for Vietnam-
era draft evaders. The Nixon pardon proved more unpopular than Ford
expected and forced him to spend the rest of his presidency explaining
and justifying the action to a suspicious public. Adverse reaction to
the pardon precipitated a Democratic landslide in the congressional
elections of 1974, with House Democrats gaining forty-eight seats.
A man of Congress, who had wanted to restore a sense of cooperation
and conciliation between the executive and legislative branches,
President Ford confronted a hostile legislature that turned his
presidency into a clash of vetoes and veto overrides. During his term,
Congress further trimmed the powers of the ``imperial presidency'' and
challenged executive authority in foreign and domestic affairs. Ford
fought back, becoming an outspoken critic of Congress. The veteran
Washington correspondent Sarah McClendon interpreted Ford's
aggressiveness as his response to all those frustrating years of serving
in the House without becoming Speaker. She imagined him thinking: ``Now
that I am president, I can finally be Speaker of the House, too. I am
going to make up for all those years by driving those Democrats out of
their seats, and out of their minds, if I can.'' She concluded that he
almost did.²⁷
Ford sought reelection to the presidency in 1976 but was challenged
in the primaries by former California governor Ronald Reagan. Once
having secured the nomination, Ford chose as his running mate Senator
Robert J. Dole of Kansas. In the first presidential race under the new
Federal Election Campaign Act that provided partial public funding to
presidential candidates, Ford and Dole faced former Georgia governor
Jimmy Carter and Minnesota Senator Walter F. Mondale. The candidates
engaged in the first televised presidential campaign debates since 1960.
Although Ford stressed his many years of government experience, Carter,
the outsider, won a narrow victory, denying Ford election to a full term
in the office he had held for two years.
GERALD RUDOLPH FORD

NOTES

¹ U.S., Congress, Senate, Judiciary Committee,
Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, Presidential Inability and
Vacancies in the Office of Vice President (Washington, 1964), pp. 234-
50.
² U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Rules and
Administration, Nomination of Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be Vice
President of the United States (Washington, 1973), pp. 4, 144-64.
³ John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration: A
Novel (New York, 1992), p. 354.
⁴ Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of
Gerald R. Ford (New York, 1979), pp. 42-56; James Cannon, Time and
Chance: Gerald Ford's Appointment with History (New York, 1994), pp. 1-
38.
⁵ Ford, pp. 57-68; Cannon, pp. 32-52.
⁶ Ford, pp. 68-70; Cannon, pp. 54-55.
⁷ Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New
York, 1978), pp. 101-2.
⁸ Ford, pp. 72-78; Cannon, pp. 53-55; Nixon, pp. 215-16.
⁹ Ford, pp. 78-79; Samuel Shaffer, On and Off the Floor:
Thirty years as a Correspondent on Capitol Hill (New York, 1980), pp.
264-65; Richard Reeves, A Ford, Not a Lincoln (New York, 1975), p. 26.
¹⁰ Cannon, pp. 89-90; Reeves, p. 115.
¹¹ Clark R. Mollenhoff, The Man Who Pardoned Nixon (New
York, 1976), p. 13; Jerald F. terHorst, Gerald Ford and the Future of
the Presidency (New York, 1974), p. 97; Cannon, p. 88.
¹² Ford, pp. 85-86; Cannon, p. 95.
¹³ H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon
White House (New York, 1994), pp. 286, 288; Mollenhoff, p. 14; Nixon,
pp. 427, 438.
¹⁴ Ford, pp. 89-90; Cannon, p. xv.
¹⁵ Robert T. Hartmann, Palace Politics: An Inside Account
of the Ford Years (New York, 1980), pp. 14-17.
¹⁶ Nixon, p. 925; Cannon, p. 205.
¹⁷ Nixon and Ford tell different versions of the event in
their memoirs: Nixon, pp. 926-27; and Ford, pp. 104-6; see also Cannon,
pp. 210-11.
¹⁸ Committee on Rules and Administration, Nomination of
Gerald R. Ford, p. 5.
¹⁹ Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Inner Circles: How America
Changed the World: A Memoir (New York, 1992), pp. 427, 439-41; Hartmann,
p. 87.
²⁰ Mark J. Rozell, The Press and the Ford Presidency (Ann
Arbor, MI, 1992), pp. 15-16.
²¹ Ibid., p. 19; Ford, p. 127; Cannon, p. 273.
²² Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last
Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York, 1990), p. 420; Hartmann, p. 82.
²³ Nixon, pp. 988-89, 996-97, 1001; Shaffer, p. 293.
²⁴ Nixon, pp. 1057-58; Haig, pp. 481-86; Kutler, p. 555;
Ford, pp. 4-6.
²⁵ Nixon, pp. 1078-79.
²⁶ Ford, pp. 157-82; Hartmann, p. 255.
²⁷ Haig, pp. 512-15; Cannon, pp. 359-91, 414-15; Sarah
McClendon, My Eight Presidents (New York, 1978), pp. 186-87.
?

Chapter 41

NELSON ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER

1974-1977

NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER
NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER

Chapter 41

NELSON ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER

41st Vice President: 1974-1977

I've known all the Vice Presidents since Henry Wallace.
They were all frustrated, and some were pretty bitter.
--Nelson Rockefeller
Television cameras that had been installed in the Senate chamber to
cover the expected impeachment trial of President Richard M. Nixon were
used instead to broadcast the swearing-in of Nelson A. Rockefeller as
vice president on December 19, 1974. A year earlier, Gerald Ford had
chosen to take his oath as vice president in the House chamber, where he
had served as Republican floor leader. Rockefeller might have opted for
a White House ceremony but decided to take the oath in the chamber where
he would preside as president of the Senate. With President Gerald Ford
attending and Chief Justice Warren Burger administering the oath,
Rockefeller became the nation's second appointed vice president. After
the brief ceremony, the cameras were switched off. Not until 1986 would
Senate proceedings be televised on a regular basis.¹

A Family of Wealth and Power

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller came to the vice-presidency boasting a
remarkable pedigree. His maternal grandfather, Rhode Island Senator
Nelson Aldrich, had been the Senate's most powerful member at the turn
of the century. Aldrich chaired the Senate Finance Committee and played
the key role in passage of tariffs that influenced every industry and
agricultural product. In 1901, Aldrich's daughter Abby married John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., son of the nation's wealthiest man, the founder of
Standard Oil. Although they combined political power and corporate
wealth, the reputations of Nelson Aldrich and John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
were less than stellar. In a series of articles for Cosmopolitan
magazine during 1906, muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips
portrayed Aldrich as a corrupt boss who contributed to the ``Treason of
the Senate.'' Similarly, writer Ida Tarbell exposed the senior
Rockefeller as a ruthless robber baron, and President Theodore Roosevelt
included him among the ``malefactors of great wealth.'' At the time of
Nelson Rockefeller's birth, on July 8, 1908, both of his grandfathers
were afflicted by negative publicity. Senator Aldrich withdrew from
politics in 1911, while John D. Rockefeller, Sr., hired one of the first
public relations specialists to reshape his public image into that of a
kindly old gentleman handing shiny dimes to children.²
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller inherited both a vast family fortune and
a family image that he had to live down in order to achieve his
political ambitions--because even as a little boy he wanted to be
president of the United States. ``After all,'' he reasoned, ``when you
think of what I had, what else was there to aspire to?'' The third of
five brothers, Nelson was the energetic, outgoing leader within his own
family. He and his brothers grew up in the family home on West 54th
Street in New York, which was so filled with art that his parents bought
the town house next door just to house their collection. Eventually the
Rockefellers gave the property to the Museum of Modern Art. Nelson
attended the progressive Lincoln School of Teachers College at Columbia
University, but dyslexia hindered his schooling and prevented him from
attending Princeton. With the help of tutors he graduated Phi Beta Kappa
from Dartmouth in 1930. Shortly thereafter, he married Mary Todhunter
Clark, known as Tod, whose calm reserve seemed to balance his boundless
enthusiasms. After a round-the-world honeymoon, they settled in New York
and Nelson went to work for the family business.³
Nelson Rockefeller proved so successful in renting out space in the
newly constructed Rockefeller Center that his father made him president
of the Center. He earned negative publicity after he ordered the removal
from Rockefeller Center of murals painted by the noted Mexican artist
Diego Rivera, which contained a heroic Lenin and a villainous-looking
J.P. Morgan. Otherwise, Rockefeller won high praise for his executive
abilities. He became a director of the Creole Petroleum Company, a
Rockefeller subsidiary in Venezuela. He learned Spanish and began a
lifelong interest in Latin-American affairs. Art was another of his
passions, and during the depression he served as treasurer of the Museum
of Modern Art. In 1939 he became the museum's president, encountering
such intense infighting that he boasted, ``I learned my politics at the
Museum of Modern Art.'' ⁴
In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed the thirty-two-year-
old Rockefeller to the new post of coordinator of the Office of Inter-
American Affairs. It was a shrewd move on Roosevelt's part, designed to
mute the Rockefeller family's support of Wendell Willkie for president
that year. Although his brothers served in uniform, Nelson held civilian
posts throughout World War II, becoming assistant secretary of state for
American republics affairs in 1944. He played a key role in hemispheric
policy at the United Nations Conference held in San Francisco,
developing consensus for regional pacts (such as the Rio Pact and NATO)
within the UN's framework. Although President Roosevelt tried to lure
Rockefeller into the Democratic party, he remained loyal to his family's
Republican ties. When Roosevelt died, his successor showed less
appreciation for Rockefeller's talents. In August 1945 the failed
haberdasher Harry Truman fired the multimillionaire Rockefeller, in
order to settle a dispute within the State Department.⁵

Reputation as a Spender

Rockefeller returned to government during Dwight Eisenhower's
administration, where he chaired a committee on government organization,
became under secretary of the new Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, served as special assistant to the president for cold war
strategy, and headed the secret ``Forty Committee,'' a group of high
government officials who were charged with overseeing the CIA's
clandestine operations. He was slated for a high-level post in the
Department of Defense until fiscally conservative Secretary of the
Treasury George Humphrey vetoed Rockefeller as a ``spender.''
⁶
Rockefeller returned to New York determined to establish his own
political career. In 1958 he challenged the popular and prestigious
governor Averell Harriman, in what the press dubbed the ``battle of the
millionaires.'' Rockefeller campaigned as a man of the people, appearing
in shirtsleeves and eating his way through the ethnic foods of New York
neighborhoods. His victory in a year when Republicans lost badly
elsewhere made him an overnight contender for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1960. Republicans who distrusted Vice
President Richard Nixon rallied to Rockefeller, and Democrats like
Senator John F. Kennedy considered him the most formidable candidate
that the Republicans might nominate. Because Rockefeller's advisers were
reluctant to have him enter the party primaries, however, he was never
able to demonstrate his popular appeal or overcome Nixon's lead among
party loyalists. Instead, Rockefeller used his clout to summon Nixon to
his Fifth Avenue apartment and dictate terms for a more liberal party
platform. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater denounced this event as ``the
Munich of the Republican Party,'' the beginning of a long estrangement
between Rockefeller and the Republican right.⁷
Nixon's defeat in 1960 made Rockefeller the frontrunner for the
Republican nomination in 1964. But between the two elections he stunned
the nation by divorcing his wife of thirty-two years and marrying a
younger woman, Margaretta Fitler Murphy, better known as ``Happy.'' She
was the recently divorced wife of an executive in the Rockefeller
Medical Institute. The birth of their son, Nelson, Jr., on the eve of
the Republican primary in California reminded voters of the remarriage
and contributed to Rockefeller's loss to Goldwater. At the party's
convention in San Francisco, Goldwater's delegates loudly booed
Rockefeller when he tried to speak. To them, he embodied the hated
``Eastern liberal establishment.'' Rockefeller sat out the election, an
act that further branded him as a spoiler.⁸

An Impressive Record as Governor

Unsuccessful in his presidential bids, Rockefeller achieved a more
impressive record as governor. He was a master builder, overseeing
highway construction, the expansion of the state university system, and
the erection of a vast new complex of state office buildings in Albany.
Although New Yorkers joked about their governor's ``edifice complex,''
they elected him to four terms. To pay for his many projects without
raising taxes excessively, Rockefeller consulted the prominent municipal
bond specialist John Mitchell (later attorney general under Richard
Nixon) who advised the creation of quasi-independent agencies that could
issue bonds. The State University Construction Fund would repay its
bonds through tuition and fees, while other agencies would build roads,
public housing, and hospitals. As a result, control of a large part of
the budget and of state operations shifted from the legislature to the
governor. It was later revealed during Rockefeller's vice-presidential
confirmation hearings that he had also made personal financial
contributions to the chairmen of these independent agencies, thereby
reinforcing their loyalty to the governor.⁹
In perpetual motion, Governor Rockefeller tackled one project after
another. He waded into campaigning with similar gusto, shaking hands and
giving his famous greeting: ``Hiya, fella!'' He laced his speeches with
superlatives and platitudes and so often repeated the phrase, ``the
brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God,'' that reporters
shortened it to create the acronym BOMFOG. Although he campaigned as a
man of the people, he lived in a different world. When aides proposed a
plan for the state to take over state employee contributions to Social
Security, in order to increase their take-home pay, Rockefeller asked,
``What is take-home pay?'' ¹⁰
A staunch anticommunist, Rockefeller never opposed the war in
Vietnam, explaining that he did not want to offend President Lyndon
Johnson and risk cuts in federal aid to New York. In 1968 Johnson tried
to convince Rockefeller to run for president. ``He told me he could not
sleep at night if Nixon was president, and he wasn't all that sure about
Hubert [Humphrey] either,'' Rockefeller later revealed. The governor
responded that he had promised his wife not to run again, but Johnson
insisted, ``Let me talk to Happy,'' and took her off in the White House
to apply some of his famed personal persuasion. ``They came back a half
hour later,'' Rockefeller recalled, ``and Lyndon said, `I've talked her
into letting you run.''' Rockefeller announced his candidacy, but
Nixon's powerful campaign apparatus rolled over him. When Humphrey
became the Democratic nominee, he invited Rockefeller to run as his vice
president. ``I turned him down,'' Rockefeller said. ``Franklin Roosevelt
wanted me to be a Democrat (back in the 1940s). It was too late.''
¹¹
Despite an inability to hide his personal disdain for Richard Nixon,
Rockefeller campaigned for Nixon in both 1968 and 1972. He admired
Nixon's tough stands in Vietnam and Cambodia--shaped by National
Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who originally had served as
Rockefeller's foreign policy adviser. Nixon appointed Rockefeller to
serve on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to oversee CIA
activities. Meanwhile, Rockefeller's own politics were shifting toward
the right, partly to make peace with conservative Republicans who had
vilified him, and partly in response to the so-called ``conservative
backlash'' of the late 1960s. Rockefeller's tough ``law and order''
stand during the Attica prison riots in 1971 further diminished his
liberal image. The governor refused demands of rioting prisoners at the
state penitentiary that he negotiate with them in person and instead
sent in state troops, resulting in the deaths of many inmates and their
captives. At the Republican convention in 1972, Rockefeller nominated
Nixon. After the election, as Nixon sank into the Watergate scandal,
Rockefeller steadfastly resisted attacking him while he was
down.¹²

Broadening the Ticket's Electoral Appeal

When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973,
Rockefeller let it be known that he would not turn down a vice-
presidential nomination, as he had done in 1960 and 1968. But Nixon,
believing that choosing Rockefeller would offend Republican
conservatives, instead selected the more centrist Gerald Ford. Happy
Rockefeller said she never expected Nixon to pick her husband because
``weakness never turns to strength.'' That December, Rockefeller
resigned after fourteen years as governor, to give his long-serving
lieutenant governor, Malcolm Wilson, a chance to run for the office as
the incumbent. Rockefeller then devoted his attention to the newly
created Commission on Critical Choices for America, which many expected
he would use as a vehicle to run for the presidency in
1976.¹³
Rockefeller was firmly convinced that Nixon would never resign, but
events proved him wrong. In August 1974, when Gerald Ford assumed the
presidency and prepared to appoint his own vice president, Rockefeller
and George Bush headed his list of candidates. Bush, a former Texas
congressman and chairman of the Republican National Committee, was the
safer, more comfortable choice. But Ford believed in a balanced ticket
(in 1968 Ford had urged Nixon to select New York City's liberal
Republican mayor John Lindsay as his running mate). Weighing the assets
and deficits, Ford acknowledged that Rockefeller was still anathema to
many conservatives. Still, the new president believed that the New
Yorker was well qualified to be president, would add executive expertise
to the administration, and would broaden the ticket's electoral appeal
if they ran in 1976. Also, by selecting as strong a man as Rockefeller,
Ford would demonstrate his own self-confidence as
president.¹⁴
Robert Hartmann, one of Ford's closest aides, asked Rockefeller why
he had accepted the vice-presidency now after turning it down before.
``It was entirely a question of there being a Constitutional crisis and
a crisis of confidence on the part of the American people,'' Rockefeller
replied. ``I felt there was a duty incumbent on any American who could
do anything that would contribute to a restoration of confidence in the
democratic process and in the integrity of government.'' Rockefeller
also reasoned that, while Ford as a former member of Congress understood
the ``Congressional-legislative side'' of the issues, he as governor had
mastered the ``Executive-administrative side,'' and that together they
could make an effective team. Although fully aware of the limitations of
his office, and recognizing that he was ``just not built for standby
equipment,'' Rockefeller had accepted because Ford promised to make him
a ``partner'' in his presidency.¹⁵

Number One Achievement

The media applauded the selection. After berating Nixon for picking
Ford, reporters praised Ford's appointment of ``a man of national
stature.'' The New York Times called it a ``masterly political act,''
and Newsweek congratulated Ford for adding a ``dollop of high style'' to
his ``homespun Presidency.'' Time observed that President Ford felt
secure enough to name a dynamic personality as vice president. Ford
basked in his accomplishment. In November, when reporters asked him what
he considered the top achievements of his first hundred days as
president, Ford replied: ``Number one, nominating Nelson Rockefeller.''
¹⁶
Yet nomination was only half the process, for the Twenty-fifth
Amendment to the Constitution required confirmation by both houses of
Congress. Democrats and some conservative Republicans relished the
prospect of opening the books on the private finances of one of the
nation's wealthiest families. Even President Ford expressed fascination
with the details as they emerged. ``Can you imagine,'' he said
privately, ``Nelson lost $30 million in one year and it didn't make any
difference.'' After the shocks of Watergate and the revelations that
Agnew had taken kickbacks, it was reassuring to have a vice president
too rich to be bought. But the confirmation hearings revealed that
Rockefeller had been making personal contributions to government
officials, including Henry Kissinger and the administrators of New
York's supposedly independent commissions. Since state law had
prohibited making large financial gifts to state appointees, Rockefeller
had given the money as ``loans'' that he never expected to be
repaid.¹⁷
Rockefeller's confirmation hearings dragged on for months, and House
and Senate leaders talked of delaying his confirmation until the new
Congress convened in January. ``You just can't do that to the country,''
President Ford complained to House Speaker Carl Albert and Senate
Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. ``You can't do it to Nelson Rockefeller,
and you can't do it to me. It's in the national interest that you
confirm Rockefeller, and I'm asking you to move as soon as possible.''
The Senate finally acted on December 10, and the House on December 19.
That evening, Rockefeller took the oath in the Senate
chamber.¹⁸
The secretary of the Senate found it amusing to give Rockefeller the
standard orientation, signing him up for health insurance and other
benefits he did not need. Ironically, Rockefeller was also the first
vice president eligible to occupy the new vice-presidential mansion--
formerly the residence of the chief of Naval Operations--on
Massachusetts Avenue. ``Congress has finally determined to give the Vice
President a home in Washington,'' Ford told Rockefeller. ``It's up on
Admiral's Hill, and you'll have to live in it.'' Rockefeller grimaced
but nodded in agreement. He already had a home in Washington that he
purchased during the Second World War, a colonial-era farmhouse situated
on twenty-seven acres of land, one of the most expensive properties in
the District of Columbia. Rockefeller spent only a single night in the
vice-presidential mansion, but he stimulated some publicity by
installing a mink-covered bed designed by Max Ernst that was valued at
$35,000. Press criticism later resulted in the bed being loaned to a
museum. Years after, when Happy Rockefeller visited George and Barbara
Bush at the vice-presidential mansion, she offered to return the bed to
the mansion. Barbara Bush insisted that Mrs. Rockefeller was always
welcome to spend the night and did not need to bring her own
bed.¹⁹

Less Than a Full Partner

Gerald Ford told the nation that he wanted his vice president to be
``a full partner,'' especially in domestic policy. ``Nelson, I think,
has a particular and maybe peculiar capability of balancing the pros and
cons in many social programs, and I think he has a reputation and the
leadership capability,'' Ford explained. ``I want him to be very active
in the Domestic Council, even to the extent of being chairman of the
Domestic Council.'' But during the months while Rockefeller's nomination
stalled in Congress, Ford's new White House staff established its
control of the executive branch and had no intention of sharing power
with the vice president and his staff. One Rockefeller aide lamented
that the ``first four month shakedown was critical and he wasn't
involved. That was when the relationship evolved and we were on Capitol
Hill fighting for confirmation.'' ²⁰
Rockefeller envisioned taking charge of domestic policies the same
way that Henry Kissinger ran foreign policy in the Ford administration.
Gerald Ford seemed to acquiesce, but chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld
objected to the vice president preempting the president. When
Rockefeller tried to implement Ford's promise that domestic policymakers
would report to the president via the vice president, Rumsfeld
intervened with various objections. Rockefeller shifted gears and had
one of his trusted assistants, James Cannon, appointed chief of the
Domestic Council. Rumsfeld responded by cutting the Council's budget to
the bone. Rockefeller then moved to develop his own policies independent
of the Domestic Council. Tapping the scientist Edward Teller, who had
worked for Rockefeller's Commission on Critical Choices, he proposed a
$100 billion Energy Independence Authority. Although Ford endorsed the
energy plan, the president's economic and environmental advisers lined
up solidly against it.²¹
Usually, Ford and Rockefeller met once a week. Ford noted that
Rockefeller ``would sit down, stir his coffee with the stem of his horn-
rimmed glasses and fidget in his chair as he leaped from one subject to
another.'' Nothing, Ford observed, was too small or too grandiose for
Rockefeller's imagination. Beyond the substantive issues, the two men
also spent much time talking over national politics. Yet Ford and his
staff shut Rockefeller out of key policy debates. In October 1975, when
Ford proposed large cuts in federal taxes and spending, the vice
president complained, ``This is the most important move the president
has made, and I wasn't even consulted.'' Someone asked what he did as
vice president, and Rockefeller replied: ``I go to funerals. I go to
earthquakes.'' Rockefeller had disliked the vice-presidential seal, with
its drooping wings and single arrow in its claw. He had a new seal
designed with the eagle's wings outspread and multiple arrows in its
clutch. As one of his aides recalled, ``One day after a particularly
long series of defeats, I walked into the Governor's office
[Rockefeller's staff always referred to him as ''Governor``] with yet
another piece of bad news. The Governor turned to me and pointed at the
new seal and flag, sighing, `See that goddamn seal? That's the most
important thing I've done all year.' '' ²²

An Impervious Senate

Vice President Rockefeller found the Senate equally impervious to
his desire to exert leadership. In January 1975, when the post-Watergate
Congress met, the expanded liberal ranks in the Senate moved to amend
Rule 22 to reduce from two-thirds to three-fifths of the senators the
number of votes needed to invoke cloture and end a filibuster. Minnesota
Democratic Senator Walter Mondale introduced the amendment, and Kansas
Republican James Pearson moved that the chair place before the Senate a
motion to change the cloture rule by a majority vote. When the Senate
took up the matter in February, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Mike
Mansfield raised a point of order that the motion violated Senate rules
by permitting a simple majority vote to end debate. Instead of ruling on
the point of order, Vice President Rockefeller submitted it to the
Senate for a vote, stating that, if the body tabled the point of order,
he ``would be compelled to interpret that action as an expression by the
Senate of its judgment that the motion offered by the Senator from
Kansas to end debate is a proper motion.'' The Senate voted 51 to 42 to
table Mansfield's motion, in effect agreeing that Senate rules could be
changed by a simple majority vote at the beginning of a Congress. The
Senate, however, adjourned for the day without actually voting on the
resolution to take up the cloture rule change. The leaders of both
parties then met and determined that they disagreed with this procedure,
which they felt had set a dangerous precedent. The leadership therefore
devised a plan to void the rulings of the chair and revise the cloture
rule in a more traditional manner. More than a week later, in early
March, the Senate voted to reconsider the vote by which the Mansfield
point of order had been tabled and then agreed to Mansfield's point of
order by a majority vote. A cloture motion was then filed and agreed to,
73 to 21, after which the Senate adopted a substitute amendment
introduced by Senator Robert C. Byrd, which specified that cloture could
be invoked by a three-fifths vote on all issues except changes in the
rules, which would still require a two-thirds vote. ²³
In making his controversial ruling, Rockefeller had notified the
Senate parliamentarian that he was making the decision on his own,
contrary to the parliamentarian's advice. As parliamentarian emeritus
Floyd Riddick observed,
Certainly it was contrary to the practices and precedents of the
Senate, and I think that is why the leadership, under Mr.
Mansfield as majority leader, wanted to vitiate in effect
all of the statements made by the vice president and come
back and do it under the rules, practices, and precedents
of the Senate.²⁴
On another occasion as presiding officer, Rockefeller tried to break
a filibuster by declining to recognize Senators James Allen of Alabama
and William Brock of Tennessee and instead ordering the roll call to
proceed. Senator Barry Goldwater challenged him, but Rockefeller
replied, ``It says right here in the precedents of the Senate, `The
Chair may decline to respond; the chair may decline to answer a
parliamentary inquiry.' '' ``That is correct,'' Goldwater countered.
``That is what it says, but I never thought I would see the day when the
chair would take advantage of it.'' Later, Rockefeller apologized for
any ``discourtesy'' he may have shown the Senate by this incident. ``If
I make a mistake I like to say so.'' ²⁵

Investigating the CIA

President Ford also sought to use Rockefeller to head off a Senate
investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency. In December 1974, the
New York Times' reporter Seymour Hersh published an expose of CIA spying
on antiwar activists that constituted domestic activities in violation
of the CIA's charter. When Democrats called for an investigation, Ford
appointed a blue-ribbon Commission on CIA Activities and made
Rockefeller its chairman. But the Senate went ahead and established its
own Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church
of Idaho. When Senator Church asked for materials from the White House,
he was told that the papers had been given to the Rockefeller
Commission. When the senator demanded the papers from Rockefeller, the
vice president declined to provide them on the grounds that only the
president could grant access to the papers. One Church aide called
Rockefeller ``absolutely brilliant'' in denying them access in a
friendly manner. ``He winked and smiled and said, `Gee, I want to help
you but, of course I can't--not until we've finished our work and the
president approves it.' '' Said Senator John Tower, vice chair of the
committee, ``We were very skillfully finessed.'' ²⁶
The CIA assignment put Rockefeller in the crossfire between critics
and defenders of the agency. Whether his report was critical or lenient,
it was sure to draw fire. Rockefeller himself had a long involvement in
CIA matters, dating back to the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations,
when he served on panels that oversaw the highly secret agency. Yet even
Rockefeller seemed unprepared for the revelations that the intelligence
agency had plotted the assassinations of foreign leaders. To the
surprise of both Senator Church and President Ford, the Rockefeller
Commission chose to adhere to its original mandate and not investigate
the assassinations. The panel turned those records over to the Senate
committee, allowing Rockefeller to extricate himself from a difficult
situation.²⁷

Ford's Biggest Political Mistake

In the fall of 1975, President Ford determined to run for election
and appointed Howard ``Bo'' Callaway of Georgia as his campaign manager.
Ford did not consult Rockefeller until the day he announced the choice.
Callaway immediately began spreading the word that Rockefeller was too
old, and too liberal, and too much of a detriment to the ticket. Some
administration officials believed that Donald Rumsfeld wanted the vice-
presidential nomination for himself and hoped that this humiliation
would encourage Rockefeller to remove himself from contention. President
Ford was given opinion polls that showed twenty-five percent of all
Republicans would not vote for him if Rockefeller remained on the
ticket. Ford's advisers complained that Rockefeller was not a ``team
player,'' and that he had been a ``commuting'' vice president, flying
weekly to New York where his wife and sons had remained. Still,
Rockefeller hung on doggedly, patching up his difference with Barry
Goldwater and making public appearances in the South--to prove, as he
said, that he did not have horns. After one rally in South Carolina, a
Republican leader conceded that the vice president had changed some
minds from ``hell no,'' to ``no.'' ²⁸
When it became clear that former California Governor Ronald Reagan
would challenge Ford for the Republican nomination, Ford reluctantly
resolved to jettison Rockefeller. Putting the situation to him, Ford
insisted that he was just telling him the facts, not what to do.
Rockefeller, however, had been in politics long enough to know that he
was being asked to leave gracefully. He announced that he would not be a
candidate for vice president the following year. Although he publicly
insisted that he jumped without having been shoved, privately he told
friends, ``I didn't take myself off the ticket, you know--he asked me to
do it.'' ²⁹
Rockefeller's withdrawal, along with Ford's clumsy firing of Defense
Secretary James Schlesinger--replacing him with Donald Rumsfeld--became
known as the ``Halloween Massacre.'' It resulted in a plunge in Ford's
popularity and polls that showed Reagan leading him for the Republican
nomination. Southern Republicans largely deserted the president for
Reagan, causing Rockefeller to comment that he had made a mistake in
withdrawing when he did. ``I should have said in that letter . . . when
Bo Callaway delivered to you the Southern delegates, then I'm off the
ticket.'' Ford responded, ``You didn't make the mistake. We made the
mistake.'' Dumping Rockefeller embarrassed Ford as much as it did
Rockefeller. ``It was the biggest political mistake of my life,'' Ford
confessed. ``And it was one of the few cowardly things I did in my
life.'' ³⁰
Despite being dropped, Rockefeller still wanted to be a major
player. Before the Republican convention in 1976, he even proposed
taking over as White House chief of staff, to help boost morale and
public confidence. At the convention, Rockefeller delivered the large
New York state delegation to Ford, participated in the choice of Senator
Robert Dole as Ford's running mate, and placed Dole's name in
nomination. He campaigned hard for the Republican ticket in the fall. At
one stop in Birmingham, New York, hecklers provoked the vice president
into making an obscene gesture back at them. Photographs of the vice
president ``giving the finger'' were widely reprinted as a symbolic act
of signing out of politics.³¹
Leaving office in January 1977, Rockefeller retired from politics
and devoted his last two years (he died on January 26, 1979) to other
interests, primarily in the arts. He always insisted that he had
understood full well what he was getting into when Ford offered him the
vice-presidency. ``I've known all the Vice Presidents since Henry
Wallace,'' he said. ``They were all frustrated, and some were pretty
bitter. So I was totally prepared.'' Rockefeller expressed thanks for
the respectful way in which Ford had treated him. ``I was never told to
make a speech or to clear a speech with the President,'' he noted. But
he regretted not having had more responsibilities in the administration
and not being able to make a greater contribution to public policy.
``The Vice-Presidency is not much of a job,'' he concluded. ``But at
least Washington is where the action is.'' ³²
NELSON ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER

NOTES

¹ Floyd M. Riddick: Senate Parliamentarian, Oral History
Interviews, June 16, 1978 to February 15, 1979 (U.S. Senate Historical
Office, Washington, DC), pp. 255-65.
² For Aldrich, see Horace Samuel Merrill and Marion
Galbraith Merrill, The Republican Command, 1897-1913 (Lexington, KY,
1971); for Rockefeller see Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic
Age of American Enterprise (New York, 1940), 2 vols.
³ Memorial Addresses and Other Tributes in the Congress
of the United States on the Life and Contributions of Nelson A.
Rockefeller, S. Doc. 96-20 (Washington, 1979), p. 16.
⁴ Joseph E. Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A
Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York, 1982), pp. 25-32; Peter
Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New
York, 1976), pp. 206-10.
⁵ Collier and Horowitz, pp. 214, 237, 242-43.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 272-76; Michael Kramer and Sam Roberts, ``I
Never Wanted to Be Vice-President of Anything!'' An Investigative
Biography of Nelson Rockefeller (New York, 1976), p. 373.
⁷ Collier and Horowitz, p. 342.
⁸ See Theodore H. White, The Making of the President,
1964 (New York, 1965).
⁹ Ibid., pp. 469-77.
¹⁰ Persico, p. 227; Memorial Addresses, p. 229.
¹¹ Richard Reeves, A Ford, Not a Lincoln (New York,
1975), p. 150; Memorial Addresses, p. 237.
¹² Persico, p. 241.
¹³ Robert T. Hartmann, Palace Politics: An Inside Account
of the Ford Years (New York, 1980), p. 238.
¹⁴ Reeves, p. 149; Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The
Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York, 1979), pp. 143-44.
¹⁵ Hartmann, pp. 230-36; Persico, p. 245.
¹⁶ Mark Rozell, The Press and the Ford Presidency (Ann
Arbor, MI, 1992), pp. 45-46; Reeves, p. 147.
¹⁷ Reeves, p. 147; Kramer and Roberts, pp. 369-70.
¹⁸ Ford, p. 224.
¹⁹ Dorothye G. Scott: Administrative Assistant to the
Senate Democratic Secretary and the Secretary of the Senate, 1945-1977,
Oral History Interviews, 1992 (U.S. Senate Historical Office,
Washington, DC), p. 174; Ford, p. 145; Persico, pp. 262-63.
²⁰ ``How It Looks to Ford,'' Newsweek (December 9, 1974),
p. 37; Paul C. Light, ``The Institutional Vice Presidency,''
Presidential Studies Quarterly 13 (Spring 1983): 210; Paul C. Light,
Vice-Presidential Power: Advice and influence in the White House
(Baltimore, Press, 1984), pp. 180-83.
²¹ Hartmann, pp. 304-10; Kramer & Roberts, pp. 372-73.
²² Ford, p. 327; Persico, p. 262; Light, ``The
Institutional Vice Presidency,'' p. 211.
²³ Riddick Oral History, pp. 212-219; U.S., Congress,
Senate, Committee on Rules and Administration, Senate Cloture Rule, by
Congressional Research Service, S. Print 99-95, 99th Cong., 1st sess.,
1985, pp. 30-31.
²⁴ Riddick Oral History, pp. 218-19; U.S., Congress,
Senate, Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess., p. 3841.
²⁵ Kramer and Roberts, p. 371.
²⁶ Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate
Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, KY, 1985), pp. 30-31, 41-43.
²⁷ Ibid., p. 48; Light, Vice-Presidential Power, pp. 184-
87.
²⁸ Light, Vice-Presidential Power, pp. 183, 189-90;
Hartmann, p. 354; Persico, p. 272; Kramer and Roberts, p. 375.
²⁹ Ford, p. 328; Hartmann, pp. 357, 365-66.
³⁰ Ford, p. 331; Hartmann, p. 367; James Cannon, Time and
Chance (New York, 1994), p. 407.
³¹ Hartmann, p. 400; Persico, pp. 274-75.
³² Ford, p. 437; Hartmann, p. 231; Persico, pp. 245, 277.
?

Chapter 42

WALTER F. MONDALE

1977-1981

WALTER F. MONDALE
WALTER F. MONDALE

Chapter 42

WALTER F. MONDALE

42nd Vice President: 1977-1981

We understood each other's needs. We respected each
other's opinions. We kept each other's confidence. Our
relationship in the White House held up under the searing
pressure of that place because we entered our offices
understanding--perhaps for the first time in the history of
those offices--that each of us could do a better job if we
maintained the trust of the other. And for four years, that
trust endured.
--Walter F. Mondale
The wisest decision Walter Mondale ever made was not to run for
president in 1976. For two years, the Minnesota senator tested the
waters for a presidential campaign, conducting an extensive fund-raising
and public relations tour of the country. Concluding that he had
neglected both his family and his senatorial responsibilities, that he
had little taste for mass media image making, and that his standing in
the polls had not risen, he dropped out of the race in November 1974. At
the time, he explained that he lacked ``the overwhelming desire to be
President'' and dreaded spending another year ``sleeping in Holiday
Inns.'' A number of Democratic senators announced for president in 1976,
but the candidate who won the nomination was the little-known former
governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who showed the determination to
conduct precisely the kind of campaigning that Mondale had rejected.
Carter then bypassed the senators who had run against him and tapped
Mondale for his running mate. Although he would never become president,
Walter Mondale proved himself one of the more successful vice presidents
in American history, in terms of shaping administration policies and
exercising influence over cabinet appointments.¹
Being selected by Carter for the vice-presidential nomination
followed a familiar pattern for Mondale, in which he was admired,
trusted, and promoted by other politicians. His career progressed as
much by selection as by election. As a college student in the 1940s he
organized a ``Diaper Brigade'' of student volunteers to help Hubert
Humphrey, Orville Freeman, and Karl Rolvaag take control of the
Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, and each of those leaders later
fostered his career. Mondale was twenty-one when he first went to
Washington as a protege of Senator Humphrey; at thirty-two Governor
Freeman appointed him state attorney general; and at thirty-six Governor
Rolvaag appointed him to fill Humphrey's vacant seat in the United
States Senate. Despite his youth when he entered the Senate, Mondale
held values closer to those of the older generation of Democrats--forged
by the Great Depression and the New Deal and influenced by the
liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt--than they were to the new
generation of postwar politicians of the era of John F. Kennedy. As a
senator, vice president, and presidential candidate, Mondale played a
transitional role in the Democratic party, seeking to bridge the
generational and ideological divisions that racked the party during and
after the 1960s.²

``Crazy Legs'' from Elmore

A small-town, midwestern preacher's son, Walter Frederick ``Fritz''
Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minnesota, on January 25, 1928. His father
Theodore Sigvaard Mondale was a Methodist minister and his mother
Claribel Hope Mondale taught music. The family's Norwegian surname
originally had been Mundal. As a child, Fritz moved with his family when
his father was reassigned to a church in Elmore, Minnesota, in 1937. A
strong believer in the social gospel of helping the poor and needy, who
feared the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, Mondale's
father regularly talked politics with his family at mealtimes. The
family's heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Minnesota's radical governor
Floyd Olson.³
Fritz was an ambitious youth, eager to make a name for himself.
Showing more interest in sports than religion, Mondale excelled at
basketball and track in high school, and won the nickname ``Crazy Legs''
as a star football player. He also showed an interest in politics,
founding the ``Republicrats,'' a student political organization and
winning election as president of the junior class (although he lost his
race for senior class president). Once, on a summer job, his wisecracks
caused a fellow worker to lose his temper. ``I'm sorry, George, I didn't
mean any harm,'' Mondale apologized. ``But I'm planning to go into
politics someday, and I've gotta learn how to get people's hackles up.''
In 1946 he enrolled in Macalester College in St. Paul, working at odd
jobs to pay his way.⁴
As a college freshman in the days of the cold war, Mondale
encountered political science professors who warned against the extremes
of both the right and left and called for liberals to seek the middle
ground. In October 1946, Mondale heard the left-leaning former Vice
President Henry Wallace speak at the campus. A few months later he was
more impressed when he heard Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey. A
political science professor had taken Mondale to a rally that aimed at
merging the Democratic party with the Farmer-Labor party to support
Humphrey's reelection as mayor. Captivated by the thirty-five-year-old
mayor's energy and rhetoric, Mondale volunteered his services to
Humphrey's campaign. Campaign manager Orville Freeman enlisted him to
put up signs and hand out leaflets. Humphrey and other liberal Democrats
were attempting to steer the leadership of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor
party away from the Communists and other radical groups of the type that
had coalesced around Wallace. In 1948, Mondale again volunteered to help
Humphrey win first the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against
the radical Elmer Benson and then the Senate seat from the Republican
incumbent Joseph Ball.⁵ Humphrey had helped organize the
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and Mondale became active in its
campus offshoot, Students for Democratic Action (SDA). After his father
died in 1948, Mondale dropped out of college. Too excited by politics to
sit passively in college lectures, he followed Humphrey to Washington to
become national secretary of the SDA. Writing to his mother, he
described the post as placing him ``in an excellent position to meet and
know national figures in the liberal movement'' and that he was
``exploiting this advantage to its fullest.'' Labor unions, however,
withheld funding from the ADA, which they dismissed as comprised of
college professors and visionaries. Mondale therefore spent his time
raising money and shuffling paperwork rather than pursuing politics,
which left him disillusioned. An SDA colleague, Norma Dinnerstein, to
whom he was briefly engaged, diagnosed his discontent: ``because you
were moving so very fast and seeking so very much, you found corruption
and a certain defeat in every victory,'' she wrote. ``And worst of all,
you figured out that `Crazy Legs' from Elmore wasn't worth so very much
in the big wide world.'' ⁶

A Rising Young Politician

In January 1950, Mondale returned to college at the less-expensive
University of Minnesota, graduating in the summer of 1951, cum laude.
With the United States fighting a war against Communist North Korea,
Mondale enlisted in the army. Stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, he was a
corporal in education programs at the time of his discharge in 1952.
Armed with the GI Bill, he entered the University of Minnesota Law
School and received his law degree in 1956. He then practiced law in
Minneapolis until 1960. A blind date during the summer of 1955
introduced him to Macalester student Joan Adams. He did not know her,
but she had heard of him, since ``he was well known on campus.''
Although more interested in art than politics, she, too, was the child
of a small-town minister, and the two found they had much in common.
They married on December 27, 1955.⁷
In 1958, Mondale managed Orville Freeman's gubernatorial race and
became the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party's finance director, as well as
a special assistant to the state attorney general on interstate trade
matters. The next year, the Mondales moved into a house located in a
newly created state senate district, because he planned to run for
office. Before he could announce, however, he received an appointment
from Governor Freeman to be state attorney general--making him the
youngest state attorney general in the nation.⁸
Mondale catapulted to national attention by investigating the
celebrated Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation, a Minneapolis-based
charity that advertised nationally in its crusade to help the
handicapped. When allegations arose that the Foundation's directors had
been diverting millions of dollars from the donations to their private
use, Mondale investigated and found that only 1.5 percent of the money
raised actually supported medical services. The resulting press
attention kept him on the front pages and assured his election to the
attorney general post. Mondale won by 246,000 votes, while Freeman lost
his bid for reelection as governor. In office, Mondale solidified his
reputation as an active ``people's lawyer,'' pursuing consumer
protection and civil rights cases. Rather than running for governor in
1962, as many had expected, Mondale deferred to Lieutenant Governor Karl
Rolvaag, who defeated the incumbent Republican Governor Elmer Anderson
by only ninety-one votes. Meanwhile, Mondale won reelection as attorney
general with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot. In 1963
he persuaded twenty-three other state attorney generals to sign a brief
in favor of the indigent prisoner Clarence Earl Gideon, who was urging
the U.S. Supreme Court to establish the right to free counsel for those
charged with major crimes but unable to hire their own
attorneys.⁹

The Great Society and the Vietnam War

In the presidential election of 1964, Lyndon Johnson chose Hubert
Humphrey as his running mate. With their landslide victory, Humphrey's
Senate seat became available. Governor Rolvaag appointed Mondale to the
vacancy over several more senior Democrats--because he considered
Mondale the most likely to win reelection. The appointment sent Fritz
Mondale to Washington at an auspicious moment for Democratic liberals.
Following the Johnson landslide, the Senate of the Eighty-ninth Congress
opened with 68 Democrats facing 32 Republicans and a similarly lopsided
margin in the House. So many Democrats crowded the Senate chamber, in
fact, that an extra fifth row of desks was set up to accommodate
Mondale, Robert Kennedy of New York, Joseph Tydings of Maryland, and
Fred Harris of Oklahoma. The younger, more liberal senators were eager
to help Johnson build his ``Great Society.'' In 1966 Mondale sponsored
the Fair Warning Act, requiring automotive manufacturers to notify
owners of any defects in their cars. He then surprised everyone by
forging the legislative compromise that led to the enactment of an open
housing amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Mondale steadfastly
endorsed Lyndon Johnson's handling of both domestic and foreign policy
issues and stuck with the president even when the Democratic party began
to divide over the Vietnam War.¹⁰
As a senator, Mondale labored long hours and demanded similar
stamina from his staff. He revealed little of Hubert Humphrey's
passionate political style. Cool, deliberate, and rarely emotional,
Mondale wore a coat and tie even to the most informal gatherings,
refused to be photographed smoking the cigars he loved, sported bad
haircuts, and tended to look wooden and formal. Although he attracted
respectful notice from the press, he was uncomfortable speaking on
television, unable to adopt the more relaxed and natural style that
medium favored. Balancing these shortcomings were Mondale's natural
decency and seriousness. ``The thing that is most evident about
Mondale,'' Hubert Humphrey once observed, ``is that he's nonabrasive. He
is not a polarizer.'' These were not attributes that drew public
attention or acclaim. Mondale could walk through any airport in the
country, he joked, ``and not a head will turn.'' Nevertheless, when he
stood for election to his Senate seat in 1966, a year that favored
Republican candidates, he won by a comfortable margin.¹¹
When Johnson withdrew from the presidential campaign of 1968,
Mondale cochaired Hubert Humphrey's bid for the Democratic nomination.
That tragic campaign year was marred by the assassination of Senator
Robert F. Kennedy and by riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
Humphrey gained the nomination but also a badly tattered party. ``I
didn't leave Chicago,'' Mondale later recalled, ``I escaped it.'' During
the campaign, he urged Humphrey to support a bombing halt over North
Vietnam, a position that Humphrey finally embraced in late September.
The Democratic ticket then gained in the polls and in the end lost the
election to the Republican candidate Richard Nixon by less than one
percent of the popular vote.¹²
Nixon's entrance into the White House gave Walter Mondale and other
liberal Democrats an opportunity to reevaluate their views about the war
and the ``imperial presidency.'' In a speech at Macalester College in
October 1969, Mondale reversed his position on the Vietnam War. He
called the war ``a military, a political and a moral disaster'' and
declared that the United States government could not impose a solution
on Vietnam's essentially internal conflict. As a liberal, Mondale also
feared that the war was draining financial resources that should be
applied to domestic problems. In 1971 he voted for the McGovern-Hatfield
Amendment to stop American military actions in Cambodia and to set a
timetable for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. In 1973 he
cosponsored the War Powers Resolution. Mondale had come to the Senate
sharing the conventional view that ``we had to rely greatly on the
President of the United States.'' But the events had showed him ``the
consequences of having a President who is largely unaccountable to
Congress, to the law or to the American people.'' ¹³
The Nixon administration provided a natural foil for Mondale's
liberalism. As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Equal
Educational Opportunity, Mondale fought Nixon's proposed antibusing
legislation. He similarly opposed the administration's plans to build
costly antiballistic missile systems and supersonic transport aircraft.
But, facing reelection in 1972, Mondale was careful to avoid unpopular
causes that might alienate him from his middle-class constituency. ``I
don't like wasting my time slaying windmills,'' he insisted. When
Senator George McGovern emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic
presidential nomination that year, he sent his campaign manager Gary
Hart and the Hollywood actor Warren Beatty to ask whether Mondale would
be a vice-presidential candidate. The Minnesotan declined to give up his
Senate seat to join a losing campaign, headed by a candidate with whom
he often disagreed. Although Mondale's opponent in his Senate race tried
to paint him as a ``McGovern liberal,'' Mondale won by an even greater
margin than in his previous race.¹⁴

Running for President--and for Vice President

After 1972 the Watergate scandal inverted the political landscape.
Democratic chances looked brighter with Nixon crippled by a string of
devastating revelations about illegal activities, combined with public
concerns over a weakened economy. Early in 1973, Mondale began
constructing a campaign for the next presidential nomination. To gain
more depth in foreign policy issues, he toured foreign capitals from
London to Jerusalem. In order to raise both funds and his public
visibility, he logged some 200,000 miles, visiting thirty states,
campaigning for Democratic candidates for Congress, meeting with local
party organizers, and engaging in as many radio and television
interviews as possible. Mondale and his legislative assistant, Roger
Colloff, also wrote a book, The Accountability of Power: Toward a
Responsible Presidency, discussing ways to keep the presidency strong
and yet fully accountable to the Congress and the people. But before the
book was published in 1975, Mondale had already dropped out of the
race.¹⁵
Mondale found the road to the nomination tortuous and unendurable.
``It is a process which involves assembling an experienced and qualified
core staff, raising funds in staggering quantities, and traveling to
every corner of the nation in preparation for a series of delegate
selections each of which is unique.'' The time required to campaign kept
a candidate away from his family, his job, and his rest. For all the
agony, Mondale's standing in the polls never rose. On November 21, 1974,
he surprised everyone by announcing his withdrawal from the race. Many
lamented his decision as a sign that only someone ``single-mindedly
obsessed'' with pursuing the presidency could achieve it.¹⁶
Free of the campaign, Mondale returned to his Senate duties. With
civil rights legislation primarily in mind, he led a movement in 1975 to
change the Senate cloture rule in order to make ending a filibuster
easier, by reducing the votes needed from two-thirds to three-fifths of
the senators. He also won recognition for his diligent work as a member
of the select committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, that
investigated the covert activities of the CIA and FBI. Having done the
necessary background research to ask incisive questions, Mondale
regularly upstaged Church, who was still actively campaigning for
president. Church, Henry Jackson, Birch Bayh, and other senators
appeared to be the leading contenders for the nomination until a
surprise candidate claimed victory in the Iowa caucuses. Former Georgia
Governor Jimmy Carter campaigned as an ``outsider,'' removed from the
Washington political scene that had produced the Vietnam War, the
Watergate scandal and other policies that dismayed and disillusioned
American voters. Carter's freshness, down-to-earth style, and promise of
a government that would be honest, fair, and compassionate seemed a
welcome antidote to the ``imperial presidency.'' By June, Carter had the
nomination sufficiently locked up and could take time to interview
potential vice-presidential candidates.¹⁷
The pundits predicted that Frank Church would be tapped to provide
balance as an experienced senator with strong liberal credentials.
Church promoted himself, persuading friends to intervene with Carter in
his behalf. If a quick choice had been required as in past conventions,
Carter later recalled, he would probably have chosen Church. But the
longer period for deliberation gave Carter time to worry about his
compatibility with the publicity-seeking Church, who had a tendency to
be long-winded. Instead, Carter invited Senators Edmund Muskie, John
Glenn, and Walter Mondale to visit his home in Plains, Georgia, for
personal interviews, while Church, Henry Jackson, and Adlai Stevenson
III would be interviewed at the convention in New York.¹⁸
When Mondale arrived in Plains, it was evident that he had studied
for the interview. He had researched Carter's positions on every issue
to identify their similarities and differences. He read Carter's book,
Why Not the Best? and talked to those who knew the Georgia governor.
Carter found him ``extremely well prepared'' and was also impressed by
Mondale's assertion that he would not trade in his Senate seat for a
purely ceremonial office. He was only interested in being vice president
if the position became ``a useful instrument of government.'' There were
many similarities in the two men's lives, both having grown up in small
towns with strong religious influences. Of all the potential candidates,
Carter found Mondale the most compatible. When reporters asked why the
Minnesotan wanted to get back into a race he had already dropped out of
and spend more nights in Holiday Inns, he replied wryly, ``I've checked
and found out they've all been redecorated.'' ¹⁹
Mondale's longtime mentor Hubert Humphrey strongly advised him to
accept the second spot. ``My vice presidential years were tough years
but I am a better man for it and I would have made a better President,''
he counseled. ``I learned more about the world and the presidency than I
could have ever learned in the Senate.'' To provide some suspense for
the convention, Carter waited until the last moment to announce his
choice. When the offer finally came, Mondale accepted instantly. The
press dubbed the ticket ``Fritz and Grits.'' After the convention,
Mondale set off on a rigorous campaign that emphasized economic issues.
The high point of the campaign for him came during his televised debate
with the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Senator Robert Dole.
Carter's advisers felt so certain that Mondale had won the debate that
they featured it in televised advertisements, asking, ``When you know
that four of the last six vice presidents have wound up as president,
who would you like to see a heartbeat away from the presidency?''
²⁰

Teamwork in the Carter White House

A close election put Carter in the White House and made the Mondales
the first family to settle into the vice-presidential mansion on
Massachusetts Avenue. That twenty-room Victorian house, previously
occupied by the chief of Naval Operations, was, Mondale observed, ``the
best house we've ever had.'' No longer did American vice presidents have
to provide their own lodging. Joan Mondale won the nickname ``Joan of
Art'' for her elaborate presentations of artworks in the vice
president's mansion and her promotion of American artists. She also
expanded the role of ``second lady'' by reviving, and serving as
honorary chair of, the Federal Council on the Arts and
Humanities.²¹
Carter and Mondale formed a remarkably close team. Carter was
conscious that previous ``forced marriages'' of presidents and vice
presidents had not worked, that White House staff had shut out vice
presidents, and that strong men like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson
Rockefeller had been frustrated in the job. Determined to make Mondale
more of a partner, Carter directed that Mondale be given an office
inside the West Wing--the first since Spiro Agnew--and instructed that
the presidential and vice-presidential staffs be integrated ``as a
working team'' (Mondale had a vice presidential staff that ranged from
fifty-five to sixty members). The office space proved critical, since as
one vice-presidential aide commented, ``Mondale didn't have to beg
anyone to visit him in the West Wing.'' Not everyone was happy with this
arrangement, especially the Georgians who had accompanied Carter to
power. Attorney General Griffin Bell thought that moving the vice
president into the White House had been a mistake, noting that, even
though Carter was a more conservative Democrat than Mondale, the vice
president had shaped much of the administration's program to his own
liking. ``He managed to do this because of his physical location in the
West Wing of the White House,'' Bell concluded, ``and because of placing
some close aides in crucial posts in the policy-making apparatus.''
²²
Famous as a politician who always did his homework, Mondale studied
the vice-presidency to determine why so many of his predecessors had
failed. He had not paid much attention to the subject previously; his
book on the presidency, Accountability of Power, had mentioned the vice-
presidency only in terms of succession. Mondale identified Nelson
Rockefeller's chairing of the Domestic Council as a mistake and observed
that vice presidents too often took minor functions ``in order to appear
that their role was significant.'' Instead of specific assignments, he
preferred to remain a generalist and a troubleshooter, someone consulted
on all issues. At one point he even turned down Carter's suggestion that
the vice president become the chief of staff. ``If I had taken on that
assignment,'' Mondale reasoned, ``it would have consumed vast amounts of
my time with staff work.'' The vice president also planned to avoid
being shunted into such ceremonial functions as attending state
funerals. The chief exception that he made was to travel to Yugoslav
President Tito's funeral in 1980, because high-level diplomatic contact
was required.²³
From the start, Carter invited Mondale to every meeting that he
scheduled and gave him the opportunity to pick and choose those he
wished to attend. Carter and Mondale also held private luncheons each
Monday to discuss any matters that either wanted to bring up. Mondale
received the same daily intelligence information that Carter got and met
regularly with the senior staff and the National Security Council. Yet
the vice president usually kept silent in group meetings, knowing that
he would later have an opportunity to talk with Carter alone. Having
played junior partner to men like Hubert Humphrey and Orville Freeman,
Mondale instinctively understood his role as vice president. In groups
of any size he automatically deferred to Carter. The president responded
by threatening to fire any staff member who assailed the vice president.
Hamilton Jordan, Carter's eventual chief of staff, also made sure that
Mondale and his staff were never isolated from current policy
discussions. ``I consider I work for Mondale,'' Jordan insisted. ``He's
my second boss, the way Carter is my first boss.'' Jordan, whose office
was located next to Mondale's, liked the vice president, whom he
considered shrewd. ``In the White House, he played his cards wisely,''
Jordan reflected.²⁴
``We understood each other's needs,'' Mondale later said of his
relationship with Carter. ``We respected each other's opinions. We kept
each other's confidence. Our relationship in the White House held up
under the searing pressure of that place because we entered our offices
understanding--perhaps for the first time in the history of those
offices--that each of us could do a better job if we maintained the
trust of the other. And for four years, that trust endured.'' The vice
president's free access to the Oval Office gave him considerable
leverage over the administration's agenda. Unlike many of his
predecessors, he could bring ideas to the table and win recognition for
them. When Mondale took a position, Carter usually listened. In 1978,
when Congress passed a defense authorization bill that provided $2
billion for a new aircraft carrier that Carter opposed, Mondale
advocated a veto. Carter's top aides believed that a veto would surely
be overridden, embarrassing the president, but Mondale went to Carter
and argued that he had to take a stand against unnecessary spending,
saying, ``If you don't do it now, you'll never get control.'' Carter
vetoed the bill, and Congress upheld his veto.²⁵

A Crisis of Confidence

At the same time, Mondale cringed at Carter's inept handling of
Congress and tried unsuccessfully to stop actions that might alienate
the administration from its erstwhile supporters on Capitol Hill.
Mondale watched Carter squander the initial good will afforded his
administration by pursuing a legislative agenda that was much too
ambitious and complicated, rather than focusing on a few major issues.
In one instance, however, Mondale himself became the object of
congressional ire. In 1977 Senate liberals led by Howard Metzenbaum of
Ohio and James Abourezk of South Dakota filibustered against Carter's
proposal to deregulate natural gas. Using the recently devised tactics
of the ``post-cloture filibuster,'' they filed more than five hundred
amendments to the bill. After the Senate debate had dragged on for
twelve days, including an all-night session, Majority Leader Robert C.
Byrd persuaded Mondale to cooperate in a daring strategy to cut off the
filibuster. On the floor, Byrd raised points of order that many of the
amendments should be ruled out of order as incorrectly drawn or not
germane. As presiding officer, Mondale ruled thirty-three amendments out
of order in a matter of minutes. The Senate erupted into angry protest,
with even senators who had not filibustered denouncing the tactic. The
vice president was lectured by many senators, including some of his
longtime friends, for abusing the powers of the presiding officer. In
his defense, Senator Byrd pointed out that the vice president was not
there to ``pull the rug out'' from under the Senate. ``The Vice
President is here to get the ox out of the ditch.'' Although the
strategy worked and the bill was enacted, ``the struggle had left some
deep wounds,'' Byrd later concluded.²⁶
Repeatedly, Mondale urged President Carter to make clear his goals
for the nation and the reasons the public should follow his lead.
Neither a New Deal nor a Great Society liberal, nor a traditional
conservative, Carter seemed to straddle the issues and avoid choosing
sides. Ironically, when Carter finally did attempt to define his
presidential identity, he left Mondale in despair. During the summer of
1979, Carter abruptly canceled a planned televised address on energy
policy and closeted himself at Camp David with groups of citizen
advisers to help him rethink his administration's aims. Pollster Patrick
Caddell wanted the president to address the ``malaise'' that seemed to
have settled on America. Mondale thought Caddell's analysis ``crazy''
and warned that if the president made such a negative speech he would
sound like ``an old scold and a grouch.'' Although Carter's other
advisers reluctantly came around, Mondale could not reconcile himself to
Carter's position. ``I thought it would destroy Carter and me with
him,'' Mondale later noted. He felt so strongly about this issue that he
contemplated resigning if Carter gave Caddell's speech. The president
took Mondale for a long walk at Camp David and tried to calm him down.
``I had only partial success,'' Carter recorded, ``convincing him to
support my decision even though he could not agree with it.'' Carter
went on to deliver a televised speech warning of a ``crisis of
confidence'' and to charge that Americans were suffering from a national
malaise. He followed that speech with a drastic overhaul of his cabinet,
giving the impression that his administration was falling to pieces. The
negative public reaction proved Mondale's concerns fully
justified.²⁷
The Carter administration's standing in the public opinion polls
slipped steadily. In November 1978, Republicans had made considerable
gains in the congressional elections, including winning both Senate
seats in Minnesota. The ``malaise'' speech and cabinet shake-ups further
disenchanted the voters. Exhausted staff members, pessimistic about the
president's reelection chances, began making plans for themselves after
the 1980 election. The Georgians in the president's inner circle grew
increasingly protective of him and complained about the lack of loyalty
in the cabinet, and some also criticized the vice president. Reporters
noted that Mondale no longer attended the White House weekly staff
sessions on congressional relations.²⁸
One crisis after another eroded public confidence in the president's
abilities. The nation sustained gasoline shortages, double-digit
inflation, and a serious recession. Carter's decision to impose an
austerity budget to cut inflation, rather than stimulating the economy
to end the recession, offended Democratic liberals, who urged
Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy to challenge the president for
renomination. As matters grew worse, Mondale took a less visible and
active role. ``I thought there was not much I could do to change
things,'' he later explained, ``so why break my health trying.'' In
November 1979, militant Iranians seized the American embassy in Teheran
and took sixty-three hostages. In December, Soviet troops invaded
Afghanistan. Initially, these foreign policy crises boosted Carter's
popularity and were enough to help Carter and Mondale win renomination.
But as the months wore on with no solutions, Carter again slipped in the
polls. The Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, portrayed the Carter
administration as weak abroad and in disarray at home. Mondale
campaigned vigorously for the Democratic ticket, but as vice president
he drew little media attention. ``I'd have to set my hair on fire to get
on the news,'' he complained.²⁹

Titular Leader and Presidential Candidate

Reagan's election discredited Carter and left Mondale as the titular
leader of the Democratic party. Although he returned to private law
practice in Minnesota, Mondale had determined, even before he left the
vice-presidency, to run for president in 1984. As a private citizen, he
traveled abroad to meet with foreign leaders, consulted with leading
American economists, and sought to build bridges to reunite the
Democratic party. During the 1982 congressional elections, Mondale
campaigned far and wide for Democratic candidates. A deep recession
swung many voters back to the Democratic party and made Reagan
vulnerable as a candidate for reelection, but in 1983 the economy began
to revive, for which ``Reaganomics'' took full credit. Surprise
contenders for the Democratic nomination also appeared, among them the
Reverend Jesse Jackson and Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Although Mondale
had the support of labor and other traditional elements of the
Democratic coalition, he was more reserved, less charismatic, and less
telegenic than his competitors. Hart campaigned as the candidate of
``new ideas,'' but Mondale countered with a parody of a popular
television commercial, asking: ``Where's the beef?'' He won the
nomination but then faced Ronald Reagan in the general election
campaign.³⁰
The 1984 race between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan offered a
clear-cut choice between liberal and conservative candidates and
philosophies. While running against one of the best-loved presidents,
Mondale won credit for being one of the best-informed candidates ever to
run for the presidency. He also added some spark to his campaign by
selecting the first woman candidate for vice president on a major party
ticket, Representative Geraldine Ferraro, a liberal who also appealed to
many conservatives in her Queens, New York, district. During the first
television debate of the campaign, Reagan seemed to appear distracted
and show his age. In a later debate, however, the seasoned performer
bounced back by promising not to make an issue of Mondale's ``youth and
inexperience.'' With the nation facing huge deficits, Mondale told the
voters that a raise in taxes was inevitable. ``Mr. Reagan will raise
taxes, and so will I,'' he said. ``He won't tell you, I just did.'' It
was a disastrous strategy. Reagan promised prosperity, a strong defense,
and balanced budgets without raising taxes. Mondale ended his campaign
in Minneapolis, telling the crowd, ``You have given me, a small-town boy
from Elmore, a chance to shape our country and to shape our times,'' but
on election day, he lost forty-nine states and carried only Minnesota
and the District of Columbia. Assessing the results, Mondale commented,
``Reagan was promising them `morning in America,' and I was promising a
root canal.'' ³¹
In later years, many anticipated that Mondale would challenge
Minnesota Republican Rudy Boschwitz for his Senate seat in 1990. Polls
showed Mondale running ahead, but at age sixty-two he chose not to
reenter politics. ``I believe it's time for other candidates to step
forward,'' he said, admitting that it had been a difficult decision to
make. When Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, he offered Mondale
the ambassadorship to Japan, which he accepted. The Mondales had
frequently visited that country, and Joan had considerable knowledge of
Japanese pottery and art. The Japanese dubbed Fritz Mondale an Oh-mono,
which roughly translates, ``big wheel,'' or ``big cheese.'' As reporter
T.R. Reid commented, ``Mondale brings to the Tokyo embassy everything
Japan wanted in a U.S. ambassador: political clout, personal access to
the president and a genuine appreciation for Japanese culture and
traditions.'' One Japanese newspaper described him as ``A man with real
power in Congress and the Democratic Party!!'' Mondale professed to be
``glad to be back in public life'' with such ``an exciting, challenging
undertaking.'' He was sworn in as ambassador by Vice President Al Gore,
who declared that Mondale's experiences as a senator had prepared him
for a diplomatic life ``full of tribal feuds and strange languages.''
Responding in kind, Mondale insisted that ``Nothing could be more
ennobling that to be sworn in by a Democratic vice president.''
³²
WALTER F. MONDALE

NOTES

¹ Finlay Lewis, Mondale: Portrait of a Politician (New
York, 1984), pp. 160-61; Paul C. Light, Vice-Presidential Power: Advice
and Influence in the White House (Baltimore, 1984), p. 1.
² Steven M. Gillon, The Democrats' Dilemma: Walter F.
Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (New York, 1992), pp. x-xiv.
³ Ibid., pp. 1-15; Lewis, pp. 9-11.
⁴ Lewis, p. 15.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 20-34; Gillon, pp. 17-21.
⁶ Gillon, pp. 21-40.
⁷ Ibid., pp. 41-52; Lewis, pp. 49-52.
⁸ Gillon, pp. 51-54.
⁹ Ibid., pp. 56-66; Lewis, pp. 62-75.
¹⁰ Gillon, pp. 69-97; Lewis, pp. 76-84.
¹¹ Gillon, pp. 99-111, 146-47; Lewis, p. 43.
¹² Gillon, pp 111-22.
¹³ Ibid., pp. 123-30; Walter F. Mondale, The
Accountability of Power: Toward a Responsible Presidency (New York,
1975), pp. vii-ix.
¹⁴ Gillon, pp. 130-41.
¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 143-53; Mondale, pp. ix-xv.
¹⁶ Mondale, pp. 23-30; Gillon, p. 152.
¹⁷ Gillon, pp. 153-62; Loch K. Johnson, A Season of
Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, KY, 1985),
pp. 105, 153-56.
¹⁸ LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer, Fighting the Odds: The
Life of Senator Frank Church (Pullman, WA, 1994), pp. 522-26; Jimmy
Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York, 1982), pp. 35-
36.
¹⁹ Gillon, pp. 163-67; Carter, p. 37.
²⁰ Gillon, pp. 163-85.
²¹ Washington Post, August 14, 1993; Lewis, pp. 230-40.
²² Carter, pp. 39-40; Light, pp. 75, 164-65, 207.
²³ Mondale, pp. 72-76; Light, pp. 29, 47, 206.
²⁴ Light, pp. 49-50, 141, 146, 208-9, 212-15, 229.
²⁵ Ibid., pp. 42, 213, 251.
²⁶ U.S., Congress, Senate, The Senate, 1789-1989:
Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, by Robert C. Byrd,
S. Doc. 100-20, 100th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 2, 1991, pp. 154-56;
Gillon, pp. 187-93.
²⁷ Gillon, pp. 200-203, 260-66; Lewis, pp. 214-15; Light,
p. 255; Carter, pp. 115-16; Garland A. Haas, Jimmy Carter and the
Politics of Frustration (Jefferson, NC, 1992), pp. 83-85.
²⁸ Light, p. 216; Haynes Johnson, In the Absence of
Power: Governing America (New York, 1980), p. 287.
²⁹ Gillon, pp. 251-57, 267-76, 289; Lewis, pp. 208-10.
³⁰ Lewis, p. 245; Gillon, pp. 301-32.
³¹ Gillon, pp. 365-90, 394; Elizabeth Drew, Campaign
Journal: The Political Events of 1983-1984 (New York, 1985), pp. 555-57,
619-22.
³² Roll Call, June 4, 1989; Washington Post, August 14,
September 15, 1993.
?

Chapter 43

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

1981-1989

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

(Presiding in old Senate chamber)
GEORGE H.W. BUSH

Chapter 43

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

43rd Vice President: 1981-1989

Only the President lands on the south lawn.
--Vice President George Bush, March 30, 1981
Rarely had a vice president come to the office so eminently
qualified as George Bush. He had been a businessman, United States
representative, United Nations ambassador, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, chief U.S. liaison officer to the People's Republic
of China, Central Intelligence Agency director, and presidential
contender. Yet while his vice-presidential predecessors had struggled to
show they were part of the president's inner circle of policymakers,
Bush found himself having to insist that he was ``out of the loop.''
While he occupied the vice-presidency, he kept his profile low, avoided
doing anything that might upstage his president, and remained ever loyal
and never threatening. That strategy made him the first vice president
in more than 150 years to move directly to the presidency by election.

A Tradition of Public Service

Bush dedicated his vice-presidential memoirs, Looking Forward, to
his mother and father, ``whose values lit the way.'' ``Dad taught us
about duty and service,'' he said of Senator Prescott S. Bush. The son
of an Ohio steel company president, Prescott Bush had attended Yale,
where he sang with the Whiffenpoofs and excelled in athletics. After
military service in the First World War, he married Dorothy Walker in
1921 and produced a family of five children. In 1923 Prescott Bush moved
east to take a managerial position in Massachusetts, and two years later
shifted to New York City, establishing his family in suburban Greenwich,
Connecticut. In 1926 he became vice president of W.A. Harriman and
Company, an investment firm, later Brown Brothers, Harriman. In addition
to his Wall Street activities, Prescott Bush served as president of the
United States Golf Association during the 1930s. During World War II, he
helped to establish the United Service Organization (USO). Prescott Bush
also sought elected office. From 1947 to 1950 he was finance chairman of
the Connecticut Republican party. He lost a race for the Senate in 1950
by just a thousand votes, and in 1952 defeated Representative Abraham
Ribicoff for a vacant seat in the Senate. Tapping his golf skills,
Prescott Bush became a frequent golfing partner with President Dwight
Eisenhower. After two terms in the Senate, he retired in 1962, an
exemplar of the eastern, internationalist wing of the Republican
party.¹
As much as George Bush physically resembled his tall, lean, athletic
father and followed his footsteps in business and politics, he was
raised primarily by his mother, Dorothy. An athletic woman herself (she
was runner-up in the national girls' tennis tournament of 1918), Dorothy
Bush brought up her large family while her husband absented himself to
devote long hours to business and public service. She taught her
children kindness, charity, and modesty--and rebuked them for any signs
of self-importance. George Bush's closest associates attributed his
difficulty in talking about himself to his mother's admonitions. Once
when he was vice president, Dorothy complained that her son had been
reading while President Ronald Reagan delivered his State of the Union
address. Bush explained that he was simply following the text of the
speech, but she still thought it showed poor manners.²
George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, at Milton,
Massachusetts, where his father was then working. His mother named him
for her father, George Herbert Walker, and since Walker's children had
called him ``Pop,'' his namesake won the unfortunate diminutive
``Poppy.'' George grew up in Greenwich and spent his summers at his
grandfather's vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine. At twelve he went
off to the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in
preparation for entering his father's alma mater, Yale. When the
Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, George Bush
determined to enlist. Secretary of War Henry Stimson delivered the
commencement address at Andover, urging the graduating class to get a
college eduction before putting on a uniform. ``George, did the
Secretary say anything to change your mind?'' his father asked. ``No,
sir. I'm going in,'' Bush replied. He was sworn into the navy on his
eighteenth birthday.³
The youngest aviator in the navy, Bush was sent to the Pacific and
flew missions over Wake Island, Guam, and Saipan. On September 2, 1944,
his plane was hit by antiaircraft fire. Bush managed to drop his cargo
of bombs (winning the navy's Distinguished Flying Cross for completing
his mission under fire) before he flew out to sea to give his crew a
chance to parachute. However, one crew member was trapped on the plane
and the other's chute failed to open. Bush ejected, drifted alone at sea
on a raft, and was rescued by the American submarine, U.S.S. Finback.
Rejoining his squadron, he saw further action over the Philippines,
flying a total of fifty-eight combat missions before he was finally
ordered home in December 1944.⁴
Two weeks later he married Barbara Pierce in her home town of Rye,
New York. They had met as teenagers at a Christmas dance and become
engaged in 1943 (in the Pacific he had nicknamed his plane ``Barbara'').
The newlyweds headed to New Haven, where George Bush enrolled at Yale.
Their first child--a future governor of Texas--was born there in July
1946. Having a wife and child to support deterred Bush neither from his
education nor from his extracurricular activities. He graduated Phi Beta
Kappa, captained the Yale baseball team, and was admitted to the
prestigious Skull and Bones Club. Unlike fellow student William F.
Buckley, Bush was not offended by the liberal humanism of Yale in the
1940s. Neither a political activist nor an aggrieved conservative, Bush
concerned himself primarily with winning a national baseball
championship at the College World Series.⁵

A Shift to the Sunbelt

Having graduated in two and a half years with honors and won two
letters in sports, Bush considered applying for a Rhodes scholarship but
concluded that he could not afford to bring his wife and son with him to
England. He turned instead to a career in business and accepted an offer
from a close family friend, Neil Mallon, to work in the Texas oil
fields. Bush started as an equipment clerk at Odessa, Texas. The company
then transferred him to California as a salesman and then called him
back to Midland, Texas. George and Barbara Bush moved frequently and
calculated that they had lived in twenty-eight different houses before
eventually reaching the White House. During these years their family
increased to four sons and two daughters, although, tragically, their
first daughter, Robin, died of leukemia as a child. Bush coached Little
League and was less an absentee father than his own father had been, but
it was Barbara Bush who served as the disciplinarian and kept the
growing family in line.⁶
Once back in Texas, George Bush decided to go independent. He and a
neighbor, John Overby, formed the Bush-Overby Oil Development Company,
which benefitted from Bush family connections on Wall Street that
financed its operations. His uncle Herbert Walker invested nearly a half
million dollars, for instance. Others, including Washington Post owner
Eugene Meyer, were willing to invest in a ``sure-fire'' business headed
by Senator Prescott Bush's son. By 1953 Bush-Overby had merged with
another independent oil company to form Zapata Petroleum--picking the
name from the Mexican revolutionary and Marlon Brando film, Viva Zapata!
In 1959 the company split its operations between inland and offshore oil
and gas, and Bush moved to Houston as president of Zapata
Offshore.⁷
The moving force for Bush's energetic business career was a desire
to amass sufficient capital to enter politics. His father had been
elected to the Senate in 1952 from Connecticut, but the son, born and
raised a Yankee, staked his claim instead in the ``Solid South.'' In
1952 Democrats held almost every House and Senate seat in the
southeastern and southwestern states, a vast expanse sweeping from
Virginia to Southern California. Yet dramatic change was already
underway. In 1948 southern delegates had walked out of the Democratic
convention in protest over including a civil rights plank in the
platform and had run South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond as the
``Dixiecrat'' candidate for president. In 1952 Republican presidential
candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower made inroads into the states of the old
Confederacy, carrying Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and his birth state
of Texas. Texas' conservative governor Allan Shivers led a ``Democrats
for Eisenhower'' movement, and in 1961 a political science professor
named John Tower won Vice President Lyndon Johnson's vacated Senate
seat, becoming the first Texas Republican senator since
Reconstruction.⁸
George Bush reflected a significant political power shift in post-
World War II America. Young veterans like himself sought a fresh start
by moving from inner cities into new suburbs and from the Rust Belt to
the Sunbelt. Throughout the South, military bases established or
expanded during the Second World War continued to grow during the cold
war. In Texas, the postwar demand for energy sources brought boom times
to the oil fields. The state attracted eager young entrepreneurs not
bound by old party loyalties. In 1962, a group of Republicans fearful
that the reactionary John Birch Society might take over the local party
operations invited Bush to head Houston's Harris County Republican party
organization. ``This was the challenge I'd been waiting for,'' he said,
``--an opening into politics at the ground level, where it all starts.''
⁹
Bush did not plan to stay at the ground level for long. In 1963 he
announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the Senate to
oust the incumbent liberal Democrat Ralph Yarborough. Bush won the
primary with 67 percent of the vote. Although the Texas electorate was
lopsidedly Democratic, Bush believed he could appeal to its conservative
majority. But in 1964 he ran on a ticket headed by Barry Goldwater,
while Yarborough had the coattails of Texas' own Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ
took 63 percent of the state's votes, while Bush managed to pare
Yarborough's winning margin to 56 percent. It was a creditable first
race for a novice politician.¹⁰
The national population shift also added new members to the Texas
delegation in the House of Representatives. In 1963, as Harris County
chairman, Bush had filed suit under the Supreme Court's one-man-one-vote
ruling for a congressional redistricting in Houston. Victory in court
led to the creation of a new Seventh Congressional District, for which
Bush ran in 1966. To finance his campaign, he resigned from Zapata,
selling his share for more than a million dollars. His opponent, the
Democratic district attorney of Houston, portrayed Bush as a
carpetbagger, but Bush knew that three-fourths of the district's
residents were also newcomers. It was a ``silk-stocking'' district--
white, wealthy, and with only a small Hispanic and African American
population. Cashing in on the name recognition he had gained from his
Senate bid, Bush took the House seat with 57 percent of the
vote.¹¹

Congressman Bush

The 1966 election provided a midterm rebound for Republicans after
the disaster two years earlier. Former Vice President Richard Nixon
canvassed the nation for Republican congressional candidates, building a
base for his own political comeback. Nixon toured Houston for Bush, as
did House Republican leader Gerald Ford in his bid to become Speaker.
Both Nixon and Ford had known Prescott Bush in Washington. Due to his
father's prominence and his own well-publicized race for the Senate,
George Bush arrived in the House better known than most of the forty-six
other freshmen Republicans. As a freshman he won a coveted seat on the
Ways and Means Committee (which put the Bushes on everyone's ``list'' of
social invitations). He paid diligent attention to constituent affairs
and in 1968 was reelected without opposition. That year, after a single
term in Congress, his name surfaced on the short list of candidates whom
Nixon considered as running mates. Holding a safe seat and fitting
comfortably into the camaraderie of the House, Bush might have made his
career there, except for his greater ambitions and for the urging of two
presidents of the United States that he run for the Senate.¹²
Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon cared for the liberal
Democratic senator Ralph Yarborough, and both appealed to Bush to
challenge him again. Nixon added a particular inducement by promising
Bush a high-level post in his administration should he lose the race.
Calculating the conservative mood of his state, Bush concluded that he
could unseat Yarborough in a rematch. In 1970 he easily won the
Republican nomination but was distressed when Yarborough lost the
Democratic primary to the more conservative Lloyd Bentsen. Rather than
campaigning from the right of his opponent, Bush found himself situated
on the left. Democrats portrayed him as a liberal, Ivy League
carpetbagger. (At a Gridiron dinner years later, Texas Representative
Jim Wright was still teasing Bush as ``the only Texan I know who eats
lobster with his chili. . . . He and Barbara had a little down-home
quiche cook off.'') Bush lost the race with 46 percent of the vote. It
would take him eighteen years to even the score with
Bentsen.¹³

Politics and Foreign Policy

Bush reminded President Nixon of his offer of a job but did not want
anything in the White House, where he might be under the thumb of
Nixon's ``praetorian guard,'' H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. He
volunteered instead for the post of United Nations ambassador, arguing
that it would position him within New York's social circles, where Nixon
lacked a strong political base. That argument appealed to Nixon, who was
very concerned about his own reelection in 1972. Bush's appointment
raised complaints that he was a Texas oilman-politician with no previous
experience in foreign affairs. He retorted that his experience as a
salesman would make him ``the American salesman in the world marketplace
for ideas.'' ¹⁴
Nixon won a landslide reelection in 1972 and went to Camp David to
reorganize his administration, determined to put absolute loyalists in
every top position. In his memoirs, Bush later recalled that he hoped
for a cabinet appointment, but when he received his summons to the
president's mountain retreat it was to take over the Republican National
Committee from Senator Bob Dole. Bush reluctantly agreed to take the job
but only if he could attend cabinet meetings. At the time, he had no
notion that the Watergate break-in of June 1972 would erupt into a post-
election scandal and destroy Nixon's presidency. But from the moment he
took office, Bush recalled, ``little else took up my time as national
committee chairman.'' Throughout the storm, Bush defended the president
against all charges. Finally, the release of the ``smoking gun'' tape
revealed that Nixon had participated in the Watergate cover-up, eroded
what was left of the president's support on Capitol Hill, and changed
Bush's mind.¹⁵
On Tuesday, August 6, 1974, Nixon called a cabinet meeting to dispel
rumors of his impending resignation. He announced that had decided not
to resign because it would weaken the presidency and because he did not
believe he had committed an impeachable offense. As Nixon then tried to
steer the discussion onto economic issues, White House chief of staff
Alexander Haig heard a stir from the group sitting away from the cabinet
table:
It was George Bush, who as a guest of the President occupied one
of the straight chairs along the wall. He seemed to be
asking for the floor. When Nixon failed to recognize him,
he spoke anyway. Watergate was the vital question, he
said. It was sapping public confidence. Until it was
settled, the economy and the country as whole would
suffer. Nixon should resign.
Surely it was unprecedented, Haig observed, for the chairman of the
Republican National Committee to advise a Republican president to resign
from office at a cabinet meeting. The cabinet sat in shocked silence as
all realized that Nixon's resignation was inevitable. Bush, who thought
that Nixon had looked ``beleaguered, worn down by stress, detached from
reality,'' felt that the issue needed to be addressed squarely. In a
letter the next day he reiterated that Nixon should resign, adding that
his view was ``held by most Republican leaders across the country.''
¹⁶
Nixon's resignation on August 9 made Gerald Ford president and
opened a vacancy in the vice-presidency. Bush let Ford know that he was
available for the post. A poll of Republican officeholders put Bush at
the top of the list, but he was passed over for New York Governor Nelson
Rockefeller, who carried more independent stature. To soften the blow,
Ford offered Bush a choice of ambassadorships to London or Paris.
Instead, Bush asked to be sent to China. There he thought he could both
broaden his foreign policy expertise and remain politically visible.
Nixon's initiatives in 1971 had drawn great public attention and put
China back on the American political map. During his year in Beijing,
China attracted a steady stream of American visitors, from President
Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to members of Congress and
countless delegations of prominent American citizens.¹⁷
When he made the appointment, Ford told Bush to expect to stay in
China for two years, but after a year Bush wrote the president that he
wanted to return to the United States. His letter arrived while Ford was
preoccupied with congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence
Agency. Considering Bush an able administrator and a savvy politician,
Ford telegraphed him to come home to be CIA director. The ``for eyes
only'' cable came as a shock to Bush, who had expected a cabinet
appointment. He never anticipated taking charge of an agency that was
under investigation for everything ``from lawbreaking to simple
incompetence.'' Since the post had traditionally been nonpolitical, Bush
suspected his rivals within the administration wanted to bury him there.
Yet he felt he had no choice but to accept. His confirmation was stalled
when congressional Democrats demanded that Bush promise not to run for
vice president in 1976. ``If I wanted to be Vice President,'' Bush
demurred, ``I wouldn't be here asking you to confirm me for the CIA.''
He refused to renounce his ``political birthright'' for the price of
confirmation. The senators persisted until Bush finally asked Ford to
exclude him from consideration for the second spot. ``I know it's
unfair,'' he told the president, ``but you don't have much of a choice
if we are to get on with the job of rebuilding and strengthening the
agency.'' After Ford notified the Senate Armed Services Committee that
Bush would not be considered for vice president, the CIA confirmation
followed speedily.¹⁸
Although he briefed the president each week on intelligence matters,
Bush found that the CIA directorship was not a policy-making position.
It also kept him on the fringe of politics. From his offices in Langley,
Virginia, Bush watched the 1976 presidential race take place in the
distance. Challenged from the right by former California Governor Ronald
Reagan, Ford dropped Rockefeller and selected Kansas Senator Bob Dole
for vice president. An even more unexpected political saga was unfolding
on the Democratic side, where a pack of senior Democratic senators vying
for the nomination were eliminated by an obscure political ``outsider,''
former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. In Iowa, Carter scored an upset by
persistent personal campaigning and by promising to create a less
``imperial'' presidency. As CIA director, Bush briefed candidate Carter,
then later returned to Plains, Georgia, to brief him as president-elect.
Bush informed Carter that if the president wanted to name his own
director he would resign from the CIA.¹⁹

Running for President--and Vice President

Back in private life in Houston for the first time in a decade, Bush
laid the groundwork for a presidential campaign in 1980. As with the
Democrats, Republican party reforms had shifted control of the delegate-
selection process from state party organizations to primary elections.
In 1979, Bush logged more than 250,000 miles to attend 850 political
events. Like Carter, he intended to make his mark in the Iowa caucuses.
The field of Republican contenders included Senators Howard Baker and
Bob Dole, Representatives John Anderson and Philip Crane, and former
Texas Governor John Connally, but the man to beat was Ronald Reagan.
After narrowly losing the nomination in 1976, Reagan made it clear that
despite his age he planned to run again. As the frontrunner, Reagan
initially pursued a more traditional campaign, spending most of his time
in New Hampshire and the northeast, while Bush devoted nearly every day
to Iowa. A week before the Republican caucuses, Bush's organization sent
a million pieces of mail to party members across the state. When the
caucuses met on January 21, 1980, Bush won 31.5 percent to Reagan's 29.4
percent. The margin was slim but enough to enable Bush to claim
momentum--or as he called it ``the Big Mo.'' ²⁰
The news from Iowa jolted Ronald Reagan, who learned the result
while watching an old movie. Rather than become unnerved, however,
Reagan found the loss reinvigorating. He reorganized his staff, replaced
his campaign manager, and concentrated his fire on Bush in New
Hampshire. Reagan and Bush agreed to meet at a head-to-head debate
sponsored by the Nashua Telegraph. When four other Republican candidates
objected to the two-person format, Bush opposed opening the debate,
while Reagan dramatically appeared at the debate trailed by the four
excluded candidates. As Bush sat stiffly, Reagan started to explain why
he had brought the others. The debate moderator, Nashua Telegraph editor
Jon Breen, ordered Reagan's microphone turned off. Reagan replied, ``I
am paying for this microphone.'' No matter that he had swiped the line
from an old Spencer Tracy movie, State of the Union, Reagan had given a
memorable performance. Leaving the debate, Reagan's staff told him that
``the parking lot was littered with Bush-for-President badges.'' Having
regained command of the race, Reagan remained in the state until
election night, convincingly beating Bush by 50 to 23
percent.²¹
Bush was frustrated at the way the public perceived him and his
opponent. Bush had been a combat pilot in the Second World War, but
Reagan was widely known for his war movies. Bush had actually ``met a
payroll'' as an independent oil company executive, while Reagan had
simply preached the free-enterprise system to appreciative audiences.
Bush was a devoted family man, while Reagan won attention for defending
family values, despite being divorced and estranged from his children.
Bush looked and sounded awkward and inarticulate on television, while
Reagan mastered the medium. Bush's media advisers warned him about his
``preppy'' and ``elitist'' appearance, but when he asked why the public
had never held Ivy League attendance against the Roosevelts, Tafts, and
Kennedys, they had no explanation. He concluded that his image was
``just something I'd have to live with.'' ²²
The New Hampshire primary effectively ended Bush's presidential
campaign well before he formally dropped out of the race in May. It was
during this interregnum, when his political future seemed doubtful, that
Bush sold his home in Houston and purchased his grandfather's old
estate, Walker's Point, at Kennebunkport, Maine. This move further
blurred his identity: was he a Texan or a Yankee? In July, he went to
the Republican convention in Detroit with a slim hope for the vice-
presidential nomination but encountered a boom for Gerald Ford. With a
good chance of defeating the incumbent President Jimmy Carter and the
divided Democrats, Reagan wanted to unify the Republican party. At Henry
Kissinger's suggestion, Reagan approached Ford with the novel idea that
the former president run for vice president. Ford indicated he might
accept if assured a meaningful role in the administration.
Word of this ``dream ticket'' sparked considerable enthusiasm at the
Republican convention. Then Ford visited the CBS booth to be interviewed
by Walter Cronkite. The veteran broadcaster pressed Ford about the
details of how a former president might accept the second spot,
prompting Ford to elaborate on his ideas for a co-presidency. From his
hotel room, Bush watched the interview with the sinking feeling that
Ford would never talk so freely unless all of the arrangements for his
candidacy had been completed. But Ronald and Nancy Reagan also watched
Ford's interview, with mounting dismay. ``Wait a minute'' Reagan later
recalled thinking, ``this is really two presidents he's talking about.''
Later that night, Reagan called Ford to his hotel suite, where the two
men met behind closed doors. When they emerged after ten minutes alone
together, the ``dream ticket'' had evaporated. ``The answer was no,''
Reagan told his staff. ``He didn't think it was right for him or for me.
And now I am inclined to agree.'' Reagan knew he needed to make a prompt
decision about a replacement, since any delay would cause a letdown
among the delegates and raise questions about his decision-making
abilities. As Michael Deaver described the scene, Reagan ``picked up the
phone and said, to the amazement of everyone in the room, `I'm calling
George Bush. I want to get this settled. Anyone have any objections?' ''
Recognizing the need to broaden the ticket ideologically, no one could
offer an alternative. Reagan placed the call, telling Bush that he
wanted to announce his selection right away, if he had no objection.
Surprised and delighted, Bush had none.²³

Joining the Reagan Team

Reagan had not been impressed by Bush during the primaries. During
their contest, Bush had leveled the charge of ``voodoo economics''
against Reagan's programs, a taunt that still stung. Reagan thought Bush
lacked ``spunk'' and became too easily rattled by political criticism.
``He just melts under pressure,'' Reagan complained. Thus when Reagan
won the presidency in 1980, there were indications that Bush would
remain an outsider from the Reagan team. Washington observers commented
that the Reagans and the Bushes rarely socialized. Yet Bush had several
advantages as vice president. His personality and his long experience in
appointed offices made him naturally deferential to the president. He
avoided criticizing or differing with Reagan in any way. He also had the
good fortune of seeing his campaign manager, James A. Baker III,
appointed chief of staff in the Reagan White House. While other vice
presidents had to combat protective chiefs of staff, the longtime
friendship of Bush and Baker continued throughout Reagan's
administration. Although Baker served Reagan foremost, he made sure
nothing would jeopardize Bush's eventual succession to the
presidency.²⁴
George and Barbara Bush moved into the vice-presidential mansion at
the Naval Observatory and thrived on the many social duties of the
office. Bush's attendance at a string of state funerals became a common
joke for comedians. Barbara Bush felt such criticism was shortsighted,
since ``George met with many current or future heads of state at the
funerals he attended, enabling him to forge personal relationships that
were important to President Reagan--and later, President Bush.'' From
the start, Bush recognized the constitutional limits of the office. He
would not be the decision maker, since that was the president's job. His
position would be meaningful therefore only if the president trusted him
enough to delegate significant responsibilities to him. He determined to
be a loyal team player and not to separate himself when things got
tough. As president of the Senate, he also tried to stay in close touch
with the senators and to keep the president informed of what was
happening on the Hill. Respecting the limitations on his legislative
role, however, he avoided trying to intervene in Senate
deliberations.²⁵
That attitude served Bush well during the first crisis of his vice-
presidency. Touring Texas, where he had unveiled a historical marker at
the hotel where John Kennedy spent his last night before Dallas, Bush
received word that President Reagan had been shot and seriously wounded.
He immediately flew to Washington. When his plane landed at Andrews Air
Force Base, aides wanted him to proceed directly to the White House by
helicopter. They thought it would make dramatic television footage and
demonstrate that the government was still functioning. Bush vetoed the
idea, declaring that ``only the President lands on the south lawn.'' His
helicopter instead flew to the vice-presidential residence, from which
he drove to the White House. The gesture was not lost on Ronald Reagan,
who slowly warmed to his vice president.²⁶
Over time, Reagan grew comfortable with his vice president. The
genial Reagan especially appreciated Bush's effort to start staff
meetings with a ``joke of the day.'' The two men had lunch together
every Thursday and their discussions, according to Bush, were ``wide-
ranging, from affairs of state to small talk.'' The vice president made
a point of never divulging publicly the advice he gave the president in
private, and Reagan clearly appreciated his loyalty and
discretion.²⁷
As vice president, Bush devoted much attention to two special
projects the president assigned to him. One was to chair a special task
force on federal deregulation. The task force reviewed hundreds of rules
and regulations, making specific recommendations on which ones to revise
or eliminate in order to cut red tape. Bush chaired another task force
on international drug smuggling, to coordinate federal efforts to stem
the flow of drugs into the United States. Not coincidentally, both
efforts--against big government and illegal drugs--were popular issues
with Republican conservatives. Having joined the Reagan ticket as a
representative of the moderate wing of his party, Vice President Bush
courted conservatives to erase their suspicions. His conspicuous efforts
to befriend the likes of New Hampshire publisher William Loeb and Moral
Majority leader Jerry Falwell drove the newspaper columnist George Will
to comment: ``The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from
one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf--the sound of
a lap dog.'' ²⁸

A Troubled Second Term

Bush so solidified his position by 1984 that there was no question
of replacing him when Reagan ran for a second term. By then, Barbara
Bush had also become a national figure in her own right. The public
enjoyed her direct, warm, and casual style. In 1984 she published a
popular children's book, C. Fred's Story, about the family's basset
hound--a forerunner of the best-selling Millie's Book by C. Fred's
replacement. Yet George and Barbara Bush found the reelection campaign
far more trying than the race four years earlier. The Democratic
candidate, Walter Mondale, had made history by choosing the first woman
candidate for vice president on a major national ticket. New York
Representative Geraldine Ferraro was an attractive and aggressive
candidate. Although a millionaire herself, she represented a blue-collar
district in Queens that placed her in sharp contrast to Bush's Ivy
League image. While Ferraro encountered significant problems of her own,
she brought color to an otherwise dull and packaged campaign. Many
reporters, especially women members of the press, cheered her campaign,
leaving Bush at a decided disadvantage. As his anger flared after his
televised debate with Ferraro, Bush was quoted as saying that he had
``tried to kick a little ass last night.'' Despite Reagan's landslide
reelection, the campaign left Bush feeling depressed and wondering if he
still had a future in politics.²⁹
Bush's friends Jim Baker and Nicholas Brady quickly helped revive
his optimism and enthusiasm, and by that Christmas they were already
planning strategy for his run for the presidency in 1988. From the
Reagan camp, Bush hired Craig Fuller as his vice-presidential chief of
staff, and from Reagan's campaign team he selected Lee Atwater as his
chief campaign strategist. Before the end of 1985, Atwater had set up a
political action committee, the Fund for America, that had raised more
than two million dollars. Well in advance of the election, Bush became
the conceded frontrunner to replace Reagan. The strategy, however,
depended upon Reagan retaining his phenomenal popularity. Then news of
the Iran-Contra scandal shook the Reagan administration.³⁰
The press and public were astonished in the fall of 1986 to learn
that the Reagan administration had secretly reversed its declared
intention not to sell arms to Iran. Designed to free American hostages,
the arms sales had produced revenue that administration officials had
diverted to support anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua, in direct
violation of the law. These revelations implicated President Reagan's
national security advisers, Robert McFarland and John Poindexter, and a
National Security Council aide, Oliver North. When Secretary of State
George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made it clear
that they had opposed the Iran-Contra plan, they left open the question
of the vice president's position. Either way, whether he had supported
the illegal plan or been kept in the dark about it, Bush stood to lose.
Alexander Haig, one of his opponents for the Republican nomination,
asked: ``Where was George Bush during the story? Was he the copilot in
the cockpit, or was he back in economy class?'' ³¹
The vice president maintained that those who ran the operation had
``compartmentalized'' it, so that he knew of only some parts of the plan
and had been ``deliberately excluded'' from others. Despite his claims
of being ``out of the loop,'' public opinion polls indicated that people
had trouble believing Bush was an innocent bystander. The issue burst
open in a live television encounter between Bush and CBS anchorman Dan
Rather on January 25, 1988. Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, Bush's campaign
director and media adviser, worried much over the vice president's image
as a ``wimp.'' Before the interview, they convinced Bush that the
broadcaster was setting a trap for him and planned to ``sandbag'' him
over the Iran-Contra affair. Rather prefaced the interview by suggesting
that Bush had been present at numerous White House meetings on Iran-
Contra and then devoted his first question to the scandal. Bush angrily
charged that CBS had misrepresented the purpose of the interview. Rather
replied that he did not want to be argumentative, but Bush retorted,
``You do, Dan. . . . I don't think it's fair to judge a whole career . .
. by a rehash on Iran.'' Atwater, and Ailes were delighted. Bush's
obvious fury had put ``the wimp issue'' to rest.³²

Winning the Presidency in His Own Right

By the time Bush had officially declared his candidacy for
president, his campaign had already raised ten million dollars, but he
was by no means assured of the nomination. No vice president since
Martin Van Buren in 1836 had won election on his own immediately
following the term of the president with whom he had served. While
Reagan was still personally popular, the Iran-Contra scandal had hobbled
his administration. Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole was pressing a
hard campaign against Bush, as was televangelist Pat Robertson.
Returning to an economically depressed Iowa, Bush campaigned surrounded
by Secret Service agents and rode in a motorcade of official limousines
that looked like ``the caravan of an Eastern potentate.'' The results of
the Iowa caucuses relegated Bush to a dismal third place behind Dole and
Robertson.³³
As it did for Ronald Reagan eight years earlier, the embarrassing
loss in Iowa forced Bush to revamp his strategy. The Bushes flew to New
Hampshire, where Governor John Sununu assured Barbara: ``Don't worry.
He'll win in New Hampshire. `Mr. Fix-it' will see to it.'' Bush followed
the advice of his ``handlers''--Sununu, Baker, Atwater, and Ailes. He
abandoned his set speeches in favor of meeting voters at factories and
shopping malls and drove an eighteen-wheel truck, trying to shed his
``preppy'' image and show a more down-to-earth personal side. He also
went on the attack, pledging that he would never raise taxes as
president, while claiming that Senator Dole had straddled the tax issue.
The New Hampshire campaign saw the beginning of the negative attack
advertisements that would mark the Bush campaign for the rest of the
year. The decent, affable, self-effacing Bush, who had trouble boasting
about his own impressive resume, had fewer compunctions about attacking
his opponents. Bush defeated Dole and Robertson in New Hampshire and
went on to take the Republican nomination.
Although he started well behind in the polls at the outset, he waged
a vigorous general election campaign against Massachusetts Governor
Michael Dukakis and his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen (who had defeated
Bush for the Senate in 1970). Atwater and Ailes crafted a campaign of
direct attacks on the Democratic candidate for refusing to sign a bill
making the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory for school children, for
allowing a weekend parole system that released convict Willie Horton
from prison, and for not having cleaned up a badly polluted Boston
harbor. Never appreciating the impact of the negative ads, Dukakis
responded to them inadequately. Bush won an impressive victory in
November, portraying himself as proudly patriotic, tough on crime,
opposed to taxes, and sympathetic to educational and environmental
issues.³⁴
The chief circumstance in which candidate Bush ignored the advice of
his ``handlers'' concerned the choice of his own vice-presidential
candidate. Neither James Baker nor Lee Atwater was impressed with the
qualifications of Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, although Roger Ailes and
Craig Fuller saw Quayle's potential to attract younger and more
conservative voters. Quayle had also been conducting his own ``sub
rosa'' campaign to bring his availability to Bush's attention. Bush
viewed Quayle as a young, good-looking, successful politician who was
likely to play the same appreciative and deferential role that Bush had
as vice president. Whatever Quayle's merits, the Bush campaign's
strategy of keeping his choice secret until the last moment to add some
drama to an otherwise predetermined convention, proved to be a mistake.
Quayle was so little known to the nation--even to the media--that his
public image became shaped entirely by initial perceptions, which were
not favorable. One 1988 Democratic campaign button read simply,
``Quayle--A Heartbeat Away.'' ³⁵
George Bush served one term as president of the United States. His
years of experience in foreign policy prepared him well to serve as the
nation's first post-cold war president. When the Iraqi army under Saddam
Hussein invaded Iraq's oil-rich neighbor Kuwait, Bush responded promptly
and boldly on both the diplomatic and military fronts. The lightning-
quick Persian Gulf war lifted his public approval rating to an
astonishing 91 percent. On the domestic front, his administration fared
less well, diminished by a persistent economic recession, mounting
federal deficits, and his broken campaign pledge not to raise taxes.
Bush also suffered from his lack of what he called ``the vision thing,''
a clarity of ideas and principles that could shape public opinion and
influence Congress. ``He does not say why he wants to be there,''
complained columnist George Will, ``so the public does not know why it
should care if he gets his way.'' Standing for reelection, Bush faced a
``New Democrat,'' Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and a scrappy Texas
billionaire independent candidate, Ross Perot. In November 1992,
President Bush finished second with 38 percent of the vote to Clinton's
43 percent and Perot's 19 percent.³⁶
In retrospect, George Bush lost in 1992 for the same reason he had
won in 1988. Having served as Reagan's vice president, he personified a
continuation of the previous policies. By 1992, Barbara Bush concluded
that ``we lost because people really wanted a change. We had had twelve
years of a Republican presidency.'' Seen in those terms, Bush's defeat
represented the vice-presidential conundrum: once having achieved the
office, one never escapes it.³⁷
GEORGE H.W. BUSH

NOTES

¹ George Bush with Victor Gold, Looking Forward (New
York, 1987), p. 26; Leonard Schlup, ``Prescott Bush and the Foundations
of Modern Republicanism,'' Research Journal of Philosophy and Social
Sciences (1992), pp. 1-16; Garry Wills, ``Father Knows Best,'' New York
Review of Books (November 5, 1992), pp. 36-40.
² George Bush, pp. 26-27; Washington Post, November 20,
1992.
³ George Bush, pp. 30.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 32-40; Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An
Intimate Portrait (New York, 1989), pp. 27-40.
⁵ George Bush, pp. 41-45; Barbara Bush, Barbara Bush: A
Memoir (New York, 1994), pp. 16-29; see William F. Buckley, God and Man
at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago, 1951).
⁶ George Bush, pp. 46-58; Green, pp. 55-58, Barbara Bush,
pp. 30-49.
⁷ Green, pp. 59-74; George Bush, pp. 61-68.
⁸ See Dewey W. Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid
South: A Political History (Lexington, KY, 1988).
⁹ Green, pp. 75-81.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 81-87; George Bush, pp. 77-89.
¹¹ Barbara Bush, pp. 57-63; George Bush, pp. 89-93.
¹² George Bush, pp. 93-98; Barbara Bush, p. 67; Richard
Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York, 1978), p. 312.
¹³ George Bush, pp. 99-103; Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul
Gates, The Acting President (New York, 1989), p. 317; Washington Times,
March 24, 1986.
¹⁴ Schieffer and Gates, p. 317; Barbara Bush, p. 79;
Green, pp. 115-17; George Bush, pp. 107-20; H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman
Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York, 1994), p. 217.
¹⁵ George Bush, pp. 120-25; Haldeman, pp. 540, 545, 553.
¹⁶ Alexander M. Haig, Jr., with Charles McCarry, Inner
Circles: How America Changed the World: A Memoir (New York, 1992), pp.
492-93; George Bush, pp. 122-25.
¹⁷ George Bush, pp. 129-49.
¹⁸ Barbara Bush, pp. 108, 130-31; George Bush, pp. 153-
59; Gerald Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford
(New York, 1979), pp. 325-26, 337-38; Loch K. Johnson, A Season of
Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, KY, 1985),
pp. 158-59.
¹⁹ George Bush, pp. 164-79.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 184-85; Lou Cannon, Reagan (New York,
1982), pp. 229, 247-48.
²¹ Cannon, pp. 249-54; Ronald Reagan, An American Life
(New York, 1990), pp. 212-13.
²² Schieffer and Gates, p. 341; George Bush, p. 203.
²³ Marie D. Natoli, ``The Vice Presidency: Gerald Ford as
Healer?'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 10 (Fall 1980): 662-64;
Schieffer and Gates, pp. 313-14; Cannon, pp. 265-67; Reagan, pp. 214-16;
Michael Deaver, Behind the Scenes (New York, 1987), pp. 96-97; Barbara
Bush, p. 169.
²⁴ Cannon, pp. 262-63; Schieffer and Gates, p. 125.
²⁵ Barbara Bush, p. 182; Green, pp. 185-96; George Bush
to Senator Mark Hatfield, April 14, 1995, Senate Historical Office
files.
²⁶ George Bush, pp. 217-32.
²⁷ Schieffer and Gates, p. 318.
²⁸ George Bush, p. 233; Schieffer and Gates, p. 320.
²⁹ Barbara Bush, pp. 194-97; Schieffer and Gates, p. 318.
³⁰ Schieffer and Gates, p. 319.
³¹ William S. Cohen and George J. Mitchell, Men of Zeal:
A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings (New York, 1989), p.
268; see also Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs
(New York, 1991).
³² George Bush, pp. 240-41; Green, pp. 216-18; Cohen and
Mitchell, p. 264; Schieffer and Gates, pp. 347-50; Jack W. Germond and
Jules Witcover, Whose Bright Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial
Pursuit of the Presidency, 1988 (New York, 1989), pp. 118-30.
³³ Schieffer and Gates, pp. 321-23, 342-45; Germond and
Witcover, pp. 65-80, 101-18.
³⁴ Barbara Bush, pp. 224-25; Schieffer and Gates, pp.
353-55, 373; Germond and Witcover, pp. 399-467.
³⁵ Schieffer and Gates, pp. 365-67; Germond and Witcover,
pp. 375-95; David S. Broder and Bob Woodward, The Man Who Would be
President: Dan Quayle (New York, 1992), p. 15.
³⁶ George F. Will, The Leveling Wind: Politics, the
Culture and Other News, 1990-1994 (New York, 1994), pp. 282-94; on Bush
and the Persian Gulf War, see Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York,
1991).
³⁷ Barbara Bush, p. 498.
?

Chapter 44

J. DANFORTH QUAYLE

1989-1993

J. DANFORTH QUAYLE
J. DANFORTH QUAYLE

Chapter 44

J. DANFORTH QUAYLE

44th Vice President: 1989-1993

The essence of the vice presidency is preparedness.
--Vice President Dan Quayle
New Orleans' Spanish Plaza, on a hot August day in 1988, teemed with
people waiting for the SS Natchez to steam down the Mississippi River.
On board the riverboat was Vice President George Bush, soon to become
the Republican nominee for president of the United States. Frantically
pushing their way through the mob on the plaza were Indiana Senator Dan
Quayle and his wife Marilyn. Those who had been standing in the broiling
sun for hours understandably were not anxious to make way for the late
arrivals. Only the Quayles knew that he was to join Bush on deck to be
announced as the vice-presidential candidate. Bush had insisted that the
choice remain secret to add drama to the event. ``This was not the best-
planned episode in political history,'' Quayle lamented. The Quayles
waved vainly at Bush's staff members on the boat but went unnoticed
until South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and a few others on board
pointed them out in the crowd, and the Secret Service parted the way for
the Quayles to board. Barbara Bush later commented that ``Dan and
Marilyn had trouble getting to the platform because they looked too
young and no one realized why they needed to be up there.'' ¹
More of a problem for Quayle than reaching the boat was being taken
seriously once he got there. Bush's tactic of not revealing his vice-
presidential choice until the last moment added suspense to an otherwise
predictable convention but did a disservice to Quayle. Little known to
the national media and to the public outside of his own state, the
forty-one-year-old senator found his public identity shaped by some
unfortunate first impressions. Jacketless on the sweltering deck, Quayle
grabbed Bush's arm and shouted ``Let's go get 'em!'' He reminded
reporters less of a vice-presidential candidate than an elated game show
contestant who had just won a car. Even Bush's own staff had to order
speedy background research to find out about their nominee. When keen
observers like journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward and political
scientist Richard Fenno examined his background and positions closely,
Quayle appeared fairly substantial. Yet his initial image as a
lightweight made his selection seem so inappropriate that the entire
vice-presidency, in the metaphor of journalist Jules Witcover, appeared
to be a ``crapshoot.'' ²
The media legitimately wanted to know what credentials Quayle
possessed for the nation's second-highest job. Could he confirm reports
that he had been a poor student? What was his family's financial
standing? Had he dodged the Vietnam War? Quayle did not handle these
initial inquiries well. He seemed tongue-tied and flustered, wearing a
stunned expression that Bush's media adviser Roger Ailes described as
``that deer-in-the-headlights look.'' Campaign managers made things
worse by staging Quayle's first formal news conference in his home town
of Huntington, Indiana, among a crowd of supporters so protective of
their candidate and hostile to the reporters that the event soured
Quayle's relations with the press from the start.³

A Problem of Perception

Quayle perceived himself quite differently from the image he saw in
the general media. The press pictured him as wealthy, because his
grandfather Eugene Pulliam owned radio stations and such newspapers as
the Indianapolis Star and the Arizona Republic. But Quayle argued that
his own family had lived a much more modest, middle-class life. His
grandfather had actually left his money in a series of trusts designed
to protect the financial security of his newspapers rather than to
enrich his family.
Born on February 4, 1947, in Indianapolis, the son of Corrine
Pulliam Quayle and James C. Quayle, he was named James Danforth Quayle
after a college friend of his father who was killed in World War II.
James Quayle, a manager for the Pulliam newspapers, moved the family to
Scottsdale, Arizona, in the mid-1950s and then back to Huntington,
Indiana, in 1963, where he published the Huntington Herald-Press. Dan
Quayle grew up in a Republican family--he recalled once walking behind
his grandfather and his golfing partner Dwight Eisenhower--and the
family newspapers were staunchly conservative. But Dan Quayle ``was
never much of a student government type,'' and at DePauw University his
prime interests were golf and the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He
described himself as a ``late bloomer,'' and admitted that he enjoyed
the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off because it reminded him of his own
lackadaisical schooldays.⁴
Intending to go to law school, Quayle realized that his draft
deferment would expire when he graduated from DePauw in 1969. He
therefore chose to join the Indiana National Guard, which would most
likely keep him out of the Vietnam War. Countless other young men of his
generation were making similar decisions, but this act would have
serious consequences when Quayle was selected to run for vice president.
Grilled by Bush's staff regarding whether he had any regrets about going
into the Guard rather than to Vietnam, he replied, ``I did not know in
1969 that I would be in this room today, I'll confess.'' A related
question was whether Quayle's family pulled any strings to get him into
the Guard. Interviewed during the convention, Quayle could not recall
any special connections but speculated that ``phone calls were made.''
Identification with his family's newspaper had further helped gain him
assignment as an information officer with the Guard's public relations
unit.⁵
After his six months in the National Guard, Quayle applied to
Indiana University Law School. His poor college grades kept him out of
the main law school in Bloomington, but he was admitted to the night
school in Indianapolis. Quayle studied harder in law school, finding
time also to work as a research assistant for the state attorney
general, as an administrative assistant in the governor's office, and as
director of inheritance taxes for the state department of revenue. A
joint project on a capital punishment brief introduced him to fellow law
student Marilyn Tucker, and a short courtship led to their marriage ten
weeks later in 1972. Two years later, after they both passed the bar
exam on the same day (and in the same month that their first child was
born) the Quayles moved back to Huntington. They set up a law practice,
Quayle and Quayle, in the building that housed his father's newspaper.
Marilyn handled most of the legal business, while Dan spent his time as
an associate publisher of the paper. His real career objective, however,
was politics rather than journalism. They chose a house in a district
represented in the state legislature by a Democrat, whom Quayle planned
to challenge in 1976.⁶

Upset Victories

Unexpectedly, in February 1976, Republican county chairman Orvas
Beers approached the twenty-nine-year-old Quayle and asked him to run
for Congress. ``You mean now?'' the astonished Quayle asked, thinking of
his plan to start in the state legislature. Beers explained that no one
else wanted to run for the House seat against eight-term Democrat Ed
Roush. After consulting with his wife and his father, and obtaining
promises from Beers to provide enough money to mount a creditable
campaign, Quayle announced his candidacy. Copying Jimmy Carter's style,
Quayle ran as a Washington ``outsider,'' attacking the Democratic
Congress and Roush's liberal voting record. While he went out
campaigning, Marilyn Quayle set up a headquarters in a back room of
Mother's Restaurant in Fort Wayne, where she ``met with the county
chairmen and stroked everybody and made everybody fall into place.''
Rather than rely on the party organization, Quayle developed his own
cadre of volunteers, drawn especially, as he noted, from ``the Christian
community.'' Roush failed to take his challenger seriously and agreed to
a series of debates that gave the newcomer much-needed exposure.
Election day provided ample Republican coattails, as Indianans cast
their votes for Republicans Gerald Ford for president, Otis Bowen for
governor, and Richard Lugar for senator. Dan Quayle upset Ed Roush with
54 percent of the vote. In the wake of the victory, both Dan and Marilyn
Quayle suspended their law practice.⁷
Congressman Quayle began his term by introducing a term-limit bill
that would restrict himself and his colleagues to no more than twelve
years' service. He identified himself as a critic of ``the old ways''
and as an opponent of pork barrel politics, congressional pay raises,
and government bureaucracy. Yet Quayle had a lackluster attendance
record in the House, often skipping committee meetings and missing votes
to play golf. People referred to him as a ``wet head,'' because he
always seemed to be coming from the House gymnasium. The House never
engaged his interest. ``Almost as soon as I was in, I wanted out--or
up,'' he admitted. Since, as a freshman member of the minority party,
Quayle would have little influence over legislation, he devoted most of
his attention to constituent services and building a strong base back
home, spending most of his second year running for reelection. For years
Quayle's district had been considered marginal, with only a few
percentage points dividing the two parties. But in 1978 he won
reelection by a smashing two-to-one margin, causing people to talk about
him challenging Birch Bayh for the Senate.⁸
Quayle approached ``Doc'' Bowen, the popular governor of Indiana,
offering to support Bowen for the Senate in 1980 but stating that, if
Bowen chose not to run, then Quayle would declare his own candidacy. He
repeated that message to Republican leaders across the state. Bowen's
decision in 1979 not to make the Senate race cleared the way for Quayle.
As a thirty-three-year-old challenger, Quayle reversed the tables on the
veteran Bayh, who himself had challenged and upset a three-term
incumbent while still in his thirties. It was a classic race of a
liberal versus a conservative, with the two men differing on every issue
from abortion to welfare. The political scientist Richard Fenno joined
Quayle on the campaign trail while the candidate was still the decided
underdog. ``He struck me as a remarkably handsome kid, but more kid even
than handsome,'' Fenno noted. ``As a campaigner, he was a natural--
vigorous (but not polished) in speech, attentive in personal contact,
open in dialogue and undaunted by potentially unfriendly audiences.''
The National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and the
Moral Majority ran ads attacking Bayh, but, even more significantly,
double-digit inflation and unemployment in the state undermined the
incumbent. Ronald Reagan's 1980 challenge to Jimmy Carter provided a
further boost to Republican senatorial candidates. Carter dragged down
to defeat with him such senior Democratic senators as George McGovern,
Frank Church, Warren Magnuson, and Birch Bayh. For the first time since
1952, Republicans won control of the Senate.⁹
Quayle found it both a curse and a blessing to be so constantly
underestimated. Like Roush, Bayh had agreed to a series of debates,
assuming that he could easily outshine his opponent. By the end of the
campaign, Bayh regretted the decision. Although not particularly
articulate as a debater, Quayle exuded confidence and demonstrated his
highly competitive nature. Even after this second impressive upset,
however, Quayle arrived in the Senate identified as a ``golden boy'' who
had led a ``charmed life.'' Reinforcing this image, his name surfaced in
a scandal in March 1981, when it was revealed that he and two
representatives on a golfing weekend in Florida had shared a cottage
with an attractive female lobbyist. Both representatives lost their
seats in the next election, while Quayle lost face. He also found the
transition to the Senate difficult, especially missing the afternoon
basketball games in the House gym. ``There aren't many senators under
thirty-five with children under six,'' he observed (the Quayles by then
had three small children). Sessions in the Senate ran late into the
nights. Good advice, however, came from Senator Mark Hatfield, who took
Quayle aside and said, ``Look, you're young and you've got a family.
Make time for them.'' Marilyn Quayle later commented that there was
probably not another U.S. senator who rearranged his schedule to coach
his sons' basketball teams.¹⁰

Building a Record in the Senate

In choosing committees, Quayle had hoped for Foreign Relations and
Finance. Instead he was assigned to Armed Services, Budget, and Labor
and Human Resources. Initially, Quayle showed no interest in the Labor
Committee but took it when he determined that he could achieve seniority
there faster than on any other committee. In the past, freshman senators
had to bide their time before they could chair a committee, but Senate
reforms in the 1970s had ensured that most new senators of the majority
party would chair a subcommittee. Quayle had sought to chair the Labor
Committee's subcommittee on Health, but committee chairman Orrin Hatch
chose that spot for himself. Instead, Quayle chaired the Employment and
Productivity Subcommittee, which would handle the reauthorization of the
Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). During his campaign,
Quayle had criticized CETA as one of the worst examples of big
government programs, yet he recognized that any jobs program would
impact on the high unemployment in Indiana.¹¹
President Ronald Reagan was leading a concerted effort to trim
government spending on domestic programs, particularly those identified
with the welfare state. Quayle also wanted to cut government, but he had
stepped up from representing a single, fairly prosperous district to
serving a state with a severe unemployment crisis. ``The scale of
problems Gary has is so much greater than Fort Wayne,'' he commented. If
CETA were abolished, who would help poor and unskilled workers retrain?
Since the members of the slim Republican majority might not be united on
this issue, Quayle sought to build a bipartisan coalition. He
sidestepped the subcommittee's cantankerous ranking Democrat, Ohio
Senator Howard Metzenbaum, and forged an alliance instead with
Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy. When reporters asked about this
pragmatic union, which flew in the face of ideological differences,
Quayle replied:
They don't know who Dan Quayle is in Massachusetts. But they do
know who Ted Kennedy is in Indiana. I don't think there will be any
recall. Actually, the fact that the two of us would get together
underscores the seriousness of the problem of unemployment, and it
emphasizes our commitment.¹²
The Quayle-Kennedy alliance caught the Reagan administration off
guard and disrupted its plan to let CETA expire. The administration
countered with an alternative bill, but Quayle's bipartisan approach
enabled him to negotiate between Kennedy, Hatch, and the Reagan
administration. The eventual Quayle-Kennedy bill resulted in creation of
the Jobs Training Partnership Act of 1982. Senator Kennedy congratulated
Quayle for having worked hard to develop a common consensus while
remaining consistent with his own principles. Both congressional
Democrats and the Reagan administration claimed credit for the act, and
to Quayle's dismay the White House scheduled the signing ceremony for a
day when he would be out of town. Still, his success won considerable
attention, gave him credibility as an effective senator, and provided
him with ammunition for his Senate reelection campaign.¹³
In foreign affairs, Quayle was eclipsed by Indiana's senior senator,
Richard Lugar, who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. Yet Quayle
involved himself in foreign policy issues through the Armed Services
Committee. As a freshman, he took the lead in persuading other freshmen
Republicans to reach a compromise on a Reagan administration plan to
sell AWACS surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia. Quayle arranged for
Reagan to sign a ``letter of certification'' that satisfied enough
otherwise doubtful senators to win approval for the sale. Quayle was
also willing to take positions independent of the administration. In
1987, as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty moved toward
completion, Quayle joined a group of conservative Republican senators in
opposition. When President Reagan accused them of accepting the
inevitability of war, Quayle denounced the president's comments as
``totally irresponsible.'' A question arose over whether the treaty
covered such ``futuristic'' weapons as lasers, particle beams and
microwaves. Both the State Department and the Soviets agreed they were
covered, but Quayle insisted they were not. (Later it became evident
that the economic deterioration of the Soviet Union severely hampered
its ability to compete with the United States in developing such
sophisticated space weapons.) ``Senator Quayle came at me repeatedly
with complaints about this issue,'' Secretary of State George Shultz
recalled. At last the secretary begged, ``Dan, you have to shut down! We
can't have the president's achievement wrecked by Republicans!'' The
treaty was finally approved by a vote of 93 to 5, with Quayle voting in
favor.¹⁴
Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker appointed Quayle in 1984 to
chair a special committee to examine procedural chaos in the Senate.
Quayle had impressed the leadership, as Alan Ehrenhalt noted, for
``asking troublesome questions in a way that might lead to constructive
answers.'' The Quayle Committee argued that too many committees and
subcommittees stretched senators' time too thin. It recommended that
senators serve on no more than two major committees and one secondary
committee and chair no more than two committees or subcommittees. The
panel urged that the number of committee slots be reduced and called for
no more than five subcommittees per committee. Reviewing floor
procedures in the Senate, the committee proposed limiting ``nongermane''
amendments and other dilatory tactics. None of these rules changes was
adopted, but based on the report, seventeen senators gave up their extra
committee seats, and one committee reduced its subcommittees. Secretary
of the Senate William Hildenbrand, who had followed the process closely,
called it remarkable that any senators gave up committee memberships,
since they ``had staff on those committees, and they didn't want to lose
staff.'' Hildenbrand said Quayle succeeded ``beyond my wildest
expectations.'' Quayle, however, considered the achievements more modest
than the recommendations. He was especially disappointed when the
Democrats reversed several committee cutbacks after they won back
control of the Senate in 1987.¹⁵
These accomplishments gave Quayle a strong record on which to
campaign in 1986, and he defeated his opponent, Jill Long, by an
impressive 61 percent of the vote. His reelection was more notable
because, without Ronald Reagan heading the ticket, many other first-term
Senate Republicans--including Mark Andrews of North Dakota, Jeremiah
Denton of Alabama, Paula Hawkins of Florida, and Mack Mattingly of
Georgia--went down to defeat when they ran on their own. As a result,
Democrats won enough seats to regain the chamber's majority. Quayle's
margin of victory was large enough to give him thoughts of running for
president. But when Vice President George Bush survived the Iran-Contra
scandal and reestablished himself as the Republican frontrunner, Quayle
shifted his attention to the vice-presidency.¹⁶

The Unexpected Vice-Presidential Candidate

No one runs for vice president so much as making oneself
strategically available for the selection. Quayle consciously began to
give more Senate speeches, particularly on such high-profile issues as
the INF Treaty. He issued more press releases and wrote more op-ed
pieces to raise his name recognition. He made a point of dropping by
George Bush's office at the Capitol for informal chats. He also
maintained contact with Bush's campaign aides. He tried ``as subtly as I
could, to make it clear I was both qualified and available.''
¹⁷
Although some of Bush's top staff considered Quayle a lightweight,
the sixty-four-year-old Bush had compelling reasons for picking the
Indiana senator as his running mate. Youthful and photogenic, Quayle
would appeal to a younger generation of voters. He had proven his
ability to campaign by his upset victories for the House and Senate. He
had applied himself seriously as a senator, building a strong
conservative voting record and receiving high marks from conservative
groups that were suspicious of Bush's moderation. As a midwesterner,
Quayle would add regional balance to Bush's Texas-New England
background. And especially since Quayle had not yet established a
national identity, he would be likely to remain dependent and
deferential toward Bush, in much the same manner that Bush had served
Ronald Reagan. To maintain suspense about his choice, Bush kept his
decision secret from everyone. Not until they were flying to the
convention in New Orleans, did Bush whisper to his wife Barbara that he
had chosen Quayle for vice president, because he felt Quayle was
respected as a senator, was bright, and ``the right age.'' ¹⁸
Neither Bush nor Quayle anticipated the incredulity and negative
publicity that the selection would trigger. The press felt blindsided by
the choice of Quayle, and reporters scrambled to collect information
about him. As the first person named to a national ticket who had been
born after World War II and who had come of age during the Vietnam War,
Quayle found that his background was scrutinized differently than it had
been during his previous campaigns. Initial reports also distorted
Quayle's family finances and connections. The candidate himself had
trouble perceiving himself the way others did. What seemed to him a
normal, middle-class upbringing appeared more affluent to others. Dan
Coats, who served on his staff and succeeded him in the House and
Senate, observed: ``standing back and looking at the surface of his
life, almost everyone would say it was fairly sheltered, some would say
privileged. Plenty of opportunities to play golf; enough money in the
family to live a comfortable lifestyle.'' ¹⁹
Quayle blamed Bush's aides for not making available to the press
more background material about his record and for allowing a hostile
caricature to develop. With a sickening feeling, Quayle realized that
``the stories and the jokes and the contempt were going to keep
coming.'' Bush's aides blamed Quayle's inexperience in dealing with the
national press. He had a habit of not reading prepared texts that led
him to make offhand remarks, and the resulting incoherent expressions
and nonsequiturs fed the monologues of late-night television comedians.
Bush's staff took over Quayle's campaign and designed it to avoid
drawing any attention away from the presidential candidate. Quayle's
``handlers'' prevented him from talking directly to the press and
arranged his schedule to skirt major cities or other areas where the
ticket was in trouble.²⁰
The lowest point of the campaign occurred on October 6, 1988, during
his nationally televised vice-presidential debate with the Democratic
candidate, Lloyd Bentsen. Quayle had promised the debate would give
viewers ``a much better impression'' of him. Because the press painted
him as a juvenile, unseasoned for national office, he had often
responded that he had as much experience in Congress as Jack Kennedy had
when he sought the presidency. His advisers warned that a Kennedy
analogy could backfire, but during the debate a nervous Quayle fell back
on the line. When he did, Bentsen had a well-prepared response:
``Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy
was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.'' The audience
laughed and applauded, and the next day Michael Dukakis' campaign ran an
ad featuring pictures of Bentsen and Quayle, with the message: ``This is
the first presidential decision that George Bush and I had to make.
Judge us by how we made it and who we chose.'' But voters rarely cast a
ballot for or against a vice-presidential candidate. Despite bad
publicity and negative public opinion polls, Quayle was not enough of a
liability to prevent George Bush's election. On inauguration day, in
January 1989, it was Senator Quayle not Senator Bentsen who took the
oath of office as vice president.²¹

Inside the Bush Administration

Bush's staff described his White House as ``smaller, more
collegial--intimate even'' than it had been under Reagan. The informal
tone suited Vice President Quayle well, and he enjoyed regular access to
the president. Still, Quayle lacked the standing of such strong-minded
officials as Secretary of State James A. Baker, Office of Management and
Budget director Richard Darman, and White House Chief of Staff John
Sununu. The top staff preferred that Quayle keep occupied with ``the
traditional busywork of the No. 2 job.'' Marilyn Quayle, always her
husband's closest and most candid adviser, complained that the vice
president's overcrowded schedule prevented him from focusing on specific
issues. Quayle countered by forming a smart, young staff (six of whom
held Ph.D.s), headed by William Kristol, known as ``the Great Reaganite
Hope'' in the Bush White House for arguing for conservative positions
with Bush's more moderate advisers. His staff--larger than Mondale or
Bush's vice-presidential staffs--worked to carve an independent identity
for Quayle within the confines of the president's agenda.²²
Several former vice presidents offered Quayle solicitous advice.
Richard Nixon emphasized the need for loyalty to the president. Walter
Mondale counseled him not accept any ``line item authority,'' meaning
responsibility for particular programs, since the vice-presidency did
not provide the authority to carry out such tasks and he would only be
blocked by cabinet members and other centers of power within the
administration. George Bush, who had held the job for the previous eight
years, suggested that he travel a lot to get some seasoning. Bush also
encouraged Quayle to ``say some things that the President cannot say,''
particularly on ideological themes popular with conservative groups. The
president invited his vice president to attend all significant meetings
to become fully informed about every aspect of the
presidency.²³
Shortly after the election, Quayle asked: ``How am I going to spend
my day?'' He seriously considered taking a more activist role as
presiding officer of the Senate. ``The gavel is a very important
instrument,'' he insisted, ``. . . an instrument of power. An instrument
that establishes the agenda.'' The problem was that the Democrats
controlled the Senate, and the rules of the Senate, which allowed any
ruling of the chair to be overturned by a majority vote, made presiding
more a responsibility than a power. Quayle soon lapsed back into the
traditional legislative role of the vice-presidency. He visited Capitol
Hill weekly for the regular luncheon meetings of Republican senators and
stood ready when needed to break a tie vote (although he never had an
opportunity to do so). He argued the administration's case on
legislation and unsuccessfully tried to persuade senators to confirm
John Tower as secretary of defense. Steadily he felt himself becoming
more a part of the executive than the legislative branch. ``When I was
in the Senate, I thought it was disorganized but manageable,'' he mused.
``From the viewpoint of the Executive Branch, I found the Senate
disorganized and unmanageable.'' ²⁴
Marilyn Quayle faced similar problems in defining her new role. The
governor of Indiana asked if she would be interested in being appointed
to fill Dan's Senate seat. The Quayles briefly considered the office but
concluded that it would not work, since the press would pounce upon the
slightest disagreement between herself and the Bush administration. She
thought of resuming her law career, but concluded that it raised the
appearances of conflict of interest. She chose instead to play a more
traditional role as hostess and unofficial adviser. On the side, she and
her sister wrote and published Embrace the Serpent, a novel about
politics, intrigue and a vice president's wife.²⁵
The vice-presidency was, in Quayle's words, an ``awkward job,'' far
more confining than his years in the House and Senate when he could
determine for himself what he supported and what he would say. Not only
did the president set the program, but others in the administration held
jurisdiction for carrying it out and jealously guarded their territory.
Quayle, who met early each weekday morning with the president and his
national security adviser and lunched with the president weekly, felt
free to argue his positions in any meeting. Once a decision was made,
however, he loyally fell in behind, even if he had opposed it. ``Anyone
who thinks cheerleading for a policy you don't believe in amounts to
hypocrisy doesn't really understand the way government has to work,'' he
insisted.²⁶
Following the lead of his predecessors, Quayle traveled widely,
giving speeches for the administration, raising funds for the Republican
party, and introducing himself in foreign capitals. At the White House
he chaired the White House Council on Competitiveness, which aimed at
reducing burdensome regulations. Quayle received relatively little
publicity for his efforts on the council, in part because he thought
deregulation could be achieved more easily if the council worked behind
the scenes and avoided clashing with Congress. He received more press
attention for chairing the National Space Council, which coordinated
policy for the space program.²⁷
On Capitol Hill, the vice president played a liaison role with the
conservative wing of the Republican party. His services proved most
useful in 1990, when a ``budget summit'' with congressional Democrats
led Bush to break his ``no-new-taxes'' pledge. House Republicans
revolted and voted down the initial budget compromise. Georgia
Representative Newt Gingrich commented that for several days
conservatives in the House were no longer talking to budget director
Richard Darman or chief of staff John Sununu, leaving vice president
Quayle as ``the primary source of information between the most active
wing of the House Republican Party'' and the Bush administration.
``Oddly enough,'' Quayle concluded, ``I came out of the debacle somewhat
enhanced within the party and the West Wing.'' He did not talk down to
House Republicans in the manner of Darman and Sununu, and he
demonstrated that in private he could play a role as broker and
peacemaker. By contrast, his public position of blaming tax increases on
the Democrats drove his ratings down further in the opinion
polls.²⁸
A similar gap between Quayle's backstage activity and the public
perception of him developed in foreign policy matters. In late 1989,
when President Bush and Secretary of State Baker were flying to a
meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at Malta, an attempted coup took place in
the Philippines. Quayle presided over the White House Situation Room,
coordinating American efforts to ensure the survival of Philippine
President Corazon Aquino's government. When those in the Situation Room
had reached a consensus to provide air power to keep rebel planes from
taking off, rather than to bomb them as Aquino had requested, Quayle
called Air Force One and had Bush awakened to present their
recommendation. Quayle prided himself on his crisis management, but
since the activity took place away from public view, and since he could
not publicly brag about his role, only ``a small spate of welcome
stories'' appeared.²⁹
In other matters of foreign policy, George Bush remained very much
in command, leaving little room for his vice president other than to
attend the meetings and offer the president his support. In January
1991, just before ``Operation Desert Shield'' changed to ``Desert
Storm,'' Bush sent Quayle to the Middle East to meet with Saudi Arabian
leaders. On his own, Quayle determined to visit American troops. He
realized that the gesture might rekindle press ridicule of his National
Guard service but decided that he had no other choice. ``The fact is I
had to do it,'' he later explained. ``The essence of the vice-presidency
is preparedness, and if I ever had to take over from President Bush--
especially at a time like this--I would not be able to function if I
felt I couldn't visit the troops who would be under my command.''
³⁰

The ``Dump Quayle'' Movement

Victory in the Persian Gulf War lifted President Bush's standing in
the public opinion polls to unprecedented heights. As leading Democrats
took themselves out of contention, Bush seemed certain of reelection in
1992. Quayle's position on the ticket received a boost from a seven-part
series of respectful articles by the prominent journalists David Broder
and Bob Woodward that appeared in January 1992 on the front pages of the
Washington Post. These were later published as a book, The Man Who Would
Be President. Broder and Woodward argued that ``serious assessments of
Quayle have taken a back seat to jokes about him.'' After his ``gaffe-
ridden performance'' in 1988, he had been ``saddled with a reputation as
a lightweight and treated as a figure of fun.'' The press had focused on
the vice president only when he did something that lived down to their
expectations. But Broder and Woodward concluded that ``all jokes aside--
Dan Quayle has proved himself to be a skillful player of the political
game, with a competitive drive that has been underestimated repeatedly
by his rivals.'' ³¹
The election, however, turned out differently than expected. A
persistent recession held the economy stagnant, and the Bush
administration mustered none of the decisiveness on economic issues that
it had demonstrated in winning the Gulf War. The president's health also
revived worries about Quayle's ability to succeed him. While jogging in
May 1991, Bush suffered heart fibrillations, and plans were made for
Quayle to take over presidential powers if Bush needed to be
anesthetized to regulate his heart beat. This news inspired a tee-shirt
featuring the Edvard Munch painting of ``The Scream,'' with the caption:
President Quayle? ³²
The vice president still suffered from gaffes. To his dismay he
heard that even Republican members of Congress were telling Quayle
jokes, most of them apocryphal, such as his comment that his Latin
American travels made him wish he had studied Latin harder in school.
The conservative magazine American Spectator ran a cover story on ``Why
Danny Can't Read.'' In May 1992, Quayle delivered a speech on family
values in which he criticized the popular television program Murphy
Brown for ``mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child
alone.'' Although even his critics conceded that the rise of single-
parent families was a cause for alarm, the vice president's example of a
fictional television character seemed to trivialize his issue. The next
month brought an even more embarrassing flap when Quayle visited a
school in Trenton, New Jersey, for a ``little photo op,'' helping
students prepare for a spelling bee. The word was ``potato.'' The
student at the blackboard spelled it correctly, but the card Quayle had
been handed read ``potatoe.'' Television pictures of the vice president
coaxing the puzzled student to misspell ``potato'' confirmed everyone's
worst suspicions. ``Boy, I hope this doesn't hurt his credibility,''
mocked comedian Jay Leno.³³
During the summer of 1992, the Bush administration seemed
increasingly vulnerable, and nervous Republicans urged the president to
dump Quayle from the ticket. Public opinion polls showed him to be the
least popular vice president in forty years, scoring even lower than
Spiro Agnew. The televised Persian Gulf War had also raised public
awareness of other players in the Bush administration, among them
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Colin Powell, who began to be mentioned as replacements for
Quayle. However, the White House staff concluded that changing running
mates would be a sign of panic, would make Bush appear disloyal, and
would serve as an admission that his original choice had been a mistake.
Bush made it clear he would stick with Quayle, while Quayle in a
television interview said that he had Bush's complete confidence and
added, ``Believe me, if I thought I was hurting the ticket, I'd be
gone.'' ³⁴
Now four years older, slightly grayer, and more seasoned in the job,
Quayle hoped that the reelection race would cast him in a more favorable
light. This time his own staff ran his campaign. Having been the first
member of the postwar generation on a national ticket, Quayle this time
faced two more ``baby boomers,'' Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton for
president and Tennessee Senator Al Gore for vice president. Quayle and
Gore both had come to the House in 1977 and had played basketball
together in the House gym. The orderly announcement of the Democratic
vice-presidential selection caused Quayle some envy: ``It was hard for
me to watch Gore's unveiling without thinking back to the chaos of
Spanish Plaza in New Orleans and shaking my head.'' Most of all, he
anticipated that a debate with Gore could wipe the slate clean, erasing
his faltering performance against Bentsen four years earlier. It was a
scrappy debate, with neither vice-presidential candidate conceding any
points to the other. This time it was Admiral James Stockdale, running
mate of third-party candidate Ross Perot, who seemed clearly out of his
depth. Although critics declared the debate a draw, Quayle won by not
losing. Columnist Charles Krauthammer described his performance as
nervy: ``His party facing annihilation, his colleagues deserting, his
ammunition gone, Quayle seemed determined to go down fighting. It was a
display of frantic combativeness that verged on courage.'' ³⁵
Returning to Huntington, Indiana, to vote on election day, Quayle by
chance encountered Ed Roush, the man he had beaten for Congress in his
first race. The incident seemed a forewarning that his decade and a half
in politics ``was coming full circle.'' That night the Bush-Quayle
ticket lost with 38 percent of the vote to Clinton-Gore's 43 percent and
Perot-Stockdale's 19 percent. Dan Quayle retired from the vice-
presidency to write a popular memoir, Standing Firm, to appear in a
Frito-Lay potato chip commercial, and to contemplate his own race for
president in 1996. Although he moved back to Indiana, he made it clear
that he would not run for governor. ``If I ever run for public office
again,'' he promised, ``it will be for president.'' His every step
seemed to point to a return to the national political arena, but serious
illnesses, including blood clots in the lungs and a benign tumor on his
appendix, convinced him to withdraw from the race. He announced that he
planned to put his family first ``and to forgo the disruption to our
lives that a third straight national campaign would create.''
³⁶
``No Vice President took as many shots--unfair shots--as Dan
Quayle,'' declared Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole. ``And no Vice
President withstood those shots with as much grace, good humor, and
commitment to not back down.'' Barbara Bush similarly saluted Quayle for
being ``a superb vice president.'' He was loyal and smart, she insisted.
``There is no question that he had a perception problem, and it was
politically chic to kick Dan around. It was darned unfair.'' Admitting
that he had been bruised by the experience, the former vice president
kept his sense of humor. When asked about his handicap in golf, Quayle
quipped: ``My handicap is the same as it has been ever since I became
vice president: the news media.'' ³⁷
J. DANFORTH QUAYLE

NOTES

¹ Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir
(New York, 1994), pp. 3-9; Barbara Bush, Barbara Bush: A Memoir (New
York, 1994), p. 226.
² David S. Broder and Bob Woodward, The Man Who Would Be
President: Dan Quayle (New York, 1992), pp. 57, 62; Richard F. Fenno,
Jr., The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle (Washington, 1989), pp. vii-
viii; Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice Presidency
(New York, 1992), pp. 4-11.
³ Witcover, p. 343; Broder and Woodward, p. 65; New York
Times, August 17, 25, 1988.
⁴ Broder and Woodward, pp. 37, 84-87; Quayle, p. 43;
Maureen Dowd, ``The Education of Dan Quayle,'' New York Times Magazine,
(June 25, 1989), p. 20; Washington Post, October 2, 1988.
⁵ Quayle, pp. 30-41; New York Times, August 26, 1988.
⁶ Quayle, pp. 11-12; Fenno, pp. 3-4.
⁷ Quayle, pp. 12-14; Broder and Woodward, pp. 33-46.
⁸ Fenno, pp. 6-12, 30; Quayle, p. 14.
⁹ Quayle, pp. 14-15; Broder and Woodward, pp. 47-51;
Fenno, p. 13.
¹⁰ Fenno, pp. 21-22; Quayle, pp. 15-16; Washington Post,
August 18, 1988.
¹¹ Fenno, pp. 23-24, 35-36.
¹² Ibid., pp. 35-51, 61; Quayle, pp. 16-17.
¹³ Fenno, pp. 69-118.
¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 24-31; George P. Shultz, Turmoil and
Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York, 1993), pp. 1007,
1084-85.
¹⁵ Alan Ehrenhalt, Politics in America: Members of
Congress in Washington and at Home (Washington, 1985), p. 498; William
F. Hildenbrand, Secretary of the Senate, Oral History Interviews, 1985
(U.S. Senate Historical Office, Washington, DC), p. 331; Dan Quayle,
``The New Senate: Two Steps Backwards,'' Congressional Record, 100th
Cong., 1st sess., January 13, 1987, pp. 1215-17; Temporary Select
Committee to Study the Senate Committee System, Report Together with
Proposed Resolutions, 98th Cong., 2d sess., S. Prt. 98-254.
¹⁶ Quayle, Standing Firm, p. 18.
¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 18-19; Broder and Woodward, pp. 15-21.
¹⁸ Quayle, Standing Firm, p. 18; Bush, pp. 225-26; Bob
Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, The Acting President (New York, 1989),
pp. 365-67.
¹⁹ Broder and Woodward, p. 36.
²⁰ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 26-58; Schieffer and Gates,
p. 366.
²¹ Washington Post, October 2, 1988; Quayle, Standing
Firm, pp. 59-67; Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Whose Broad Stripes
and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency, 1988 (New York,
1989), pp. 435-44; Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait
(New York, 1989), p. 238.
²² John Podhoretz, Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White
House Follies, 1989-1993 (New York, 1993), pp. 165, 219; Broder and
Woodward, pp. 18-19, 120; Roll Call, September 17, 1992.
²³ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 74-76, 91-92; Dowd, p. 36;
Dan Quayle to Senator Mark O. Hatfield, June 1995, Senate Historical
Office files.
²⁴ Washington Post, December 3, 1988; Quayle to Hatfield,
June 1995.
²⁵ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 77-78; Broder and Woodward,
pp. 155-74; Marilyn T. Quayle and Nancy T. Northcott, Embrace the
Serpent (New York, 1992).
²⁶ Broder and Woodward, pp. 90-91; Quayle, Standing Firm,
p. 105.
²⁷ Broder and Woodward, pp. 91-92, 125-52; Quayle,
Standing Firm, pp. 177-90.
²⁸ Broder and Woodward, p. 101; Quayle, Standing Firm,
pp. 189-203.
²⁹ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 145-239; Bob Woodward, The
Commanders (New York, 1991), pp. 146-53.
³⁰ Quayle, Standing Firm, p. 219; see also Paul G.
Kengor, ``The Role of the Vice President During the Crisis in the
Persian Gulf,'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 24 (Fall 1994).
³¹ Broder and Woodward, p. 10.
³² Washington Post, May 6, 1991; Quayle, Standing Firm,
pp. 251-63.
³³ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 131-32, 315-36; Dan Quayle,
``Restoring Basic Values,'' Vital Speeches of the Day 58 (June 15,
1992), pp. 517-20.
³⁴ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 255-56; 337-46; Washington
Post, July 2, August 19, 1992.
³⁵ Quayle, Standing Firm, pp. 337-38, 351-53; Washington
Post, October 15, 1992.
³⁶ Quayle, Standing Firm, p. 356; Washington Post,
January 13, 1993, February 10, 1995.
³⁷ U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 103d
Cong., 1st sess., January 27, 1993, p. S771; Bush, p. 447.
APPENDIX

APPENDIX

Major Party Presidential and Vice-Presidential Candidates

Election Year Winners/Party Losers/Party
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1788 George Washington (Federalist) .......................................
John Adams

1792 George Washington (Federalist)
John Adams

1796 John Adams (Federalist) Thomas Jefferson (Republican) \1\
Thomas Jefferson

1800 Thomas Jefferson (Republican) John Adams (Federalist)
Aaron Burr \2\ Charles C. Pinckney

1804 Thomas Jefferson (Republican) Charles C. Pinckney (Federalist)
George Clinton Rufus King

1808 James Madison (Republican) Charles C. Pinckney (Federalist)
George Clinton Rufus King

1812 James Madison (Republican) DeWitt Clinton (Federalist)
Elbridge Gerry Jared Ingersoll

1816 James Monroe (Republican) Rufus King (Federalist)
Daniel Tompkins John E. Howard

1820 James Monroe (Republican) J. Q. Adams (Republican) \3\
Daniel Tompkins Richard Stockton

1824 J.Q. Adams (National Republican) \4\ Andrew Jackson (Republican)
John C. Calhoun John C. Calhoun

1828 Andrew Jackson (Democrat) \5\ J.Q. Adams (National Republican)
John C. Calhoun Richard Rush

1832 Andrew Jackson (Democrat) Henry Clay (National Republican)
Martin Van Buren John Sergeant

1836 Martin Van Buren (Democrat) W. H. Harrison/Daniel
Richard M. Johnson \6\ Webster/H.L. White (Whig--
....................................... regional candidates) \7\
....................................... Francis Granger/John Tyler

1840 W.H. Harrison (Whig) Martin Van Buren (Democrat)
John Tyler \8\ Richard M. Johnson \9\

1844 James K. Polk (Democrat) Henry Clay (Whig)
George M. Dallas Theodore Frelinghuysen

1848 Zachary Taylor (Whig) Lewis Cass (Democrat)
Millard Fillmore William O. Butler

1852 Franklin Pierce (Democrat) Winfield Scott (Whig)
William R. King William A. Graham

1856 James Buchanan (Democrat) John C. Fremont (Republican)
John C. Breckinridge William L. Dayton

1860 Abraham Lincoln (Republican) Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat) \10\
Hannibal Hamlin Herschel V. Johnson

1864 Abraham Lincoln (Republican) George B. McClellan (Democrat)
Andrew Johnson \11\ G. H. Pendleton

1868 Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) Horatio Seymour (Democrat)
Schuyler Colfax Francis P. Blair, Jr.

1872 Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) Horace Greeley (Democrat) \12\
Henry Wilson B. Gratz Brown

1876 Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) Samuel J. Tilden (Democrat)
William A. Wheeler Thomas Hendricks

1880 James Garfield (Republican) Winfield S. Hancock (Democrat)
Chester A. Arthur William H. English

1884 Grover Cleveland (Democrat) James G. Blaine (Republican)
Thomas A. Hendricks John A. Logan

1888 Benjamin Harrison (Republican) Grover Cleveland (Democrat)
Levi P. Morton Allen G. Thurman

1892 Grover Cleveland (Democrat) Benjamin Harrison (Republican)
Adlai E. Stevenson Whitelaw Reid

1896 William McKinley (Republican) William J. Bryan (Democrat)
Garret A. Hobart Arthur Sewall

1900 William McKinley (Republican) William J. Bryan (Democrat)
Theodore Roosevelt Adlai E. Stevenson

1904 Theodore Roosevelt (Republican) Alton B. Parker (Democrat)
Charles W. Fairbanks Henry G. Davis

1908 William H. Taft (Republican) William J. Bryan (Democrat)
James S. Sherman John W. Kern

1912 Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) \13\
Thomas R. Marshall Hiram W. Johnson

1916 Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) Charles E. Hughes (Republican)
Thomas R. Marshall Charles W. Fairbanks

1920 Warren G. Harding (Republican) James M. Cox (Democrat)
Calvin Coolidge Franklin D. Roosevelt

1924 Calvin Coolidge (Republican) John W. Davis (Democrat) \14\
Charles G. Dawes Charles W. Bryan

1928 Herbert C. Hoover (Republican) Alfred E. Smith (Democrat)
Charles Curtis Joseph T. Robinson

1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) Herbert C. Hoover (Republican)
John N. Garner Charles Curtis

1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) Alfred M. Landon (Republican)
John N. Garner Frank Knox

1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) Wendell L. Willkie (Republican)
Henry A. Wallace Charles L. McNary

1944 Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) Thomas E. Dewey (Republican)
Harry S. Truman John W. Bricker

1948 Harry S. Truman (Democrat) Thomas E. Dewey (Republican) \15\
Alben W. Barkley Earl Warren

1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower (Repub.) Adlai E. Stevenson (Democrat)
Richard M. Nixon John J. Sparkman

1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower (Repub.) Adlai E. Stevenson (Democrat)
Richard M. Nixon Estes Kefauver

1960 John F. Kennedy (Democrat) Richard M. Nixon (Republican)
Lyndon B. Johnson Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

1964 Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) Barry M. Goldwater (Republican)
Hubert H. Humphrey William E. Miller

1968 Richard M. Nixon (Republican) Hubert H. Humphrey (Democrat)
Spiro T. Agnew Edmund S. Muskie

1972 Richard M. Nixon (Republican) George S. McGovern (Democrat)
Spiro T. Agnew R. Sargent Shriver \16\

1976 Jimmy Carter (Democrat) Gerald R. Ford (Republican)
Walter F. Mondale Robert J. Dole

1980 Ronald Reagan (Republican) Jimmy Carter (Democrat)
George Bush Walter F. Mondale

1984 Ronald Reagan (Republican) Walter F. Mondale
George Bush Geraldine Ferraro

1988 George Bush (Republican) Michael S. Dukakis (Democrat)
Dan Quayle Lloyd Bentsen

1992 Bill Clinton (Democrat) George Bush (Republican)
Al Gore, Jr. Dan Quayle

NOTES

\1\ Jefferson ran against Adams for president. Since he received the
second highest electoral vote, he automatically became vice president
under the system that existed at the time. (See note 2.) ``Republican''
refers to two different parties widely separated in time: Jeffersonian
Republicans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and
the present Republican party, which was founded in the 1850s. The
election dates should make clear which of the two parties is intended.
\2\ In the nation's early years, electors did not differentiate
between their votes for president and vice president, and the runner-up
for president became vice president. In 1800 Jefferson and Burr each
received 73 electoral votes, thus sending the election to the House of
Representatives, which selected Jefferson as president. Burr
automatically became vice president. This stalemate led to ratification
of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution in 1804.
\3\ By 1820 the Federalist party was defunct, and a period of party
realignment began that continued until 1840 when the Whig and Democratic
parties became established. In the interim, party affiliations underwent
considerable flux. For much of that time, the split fell between the
supporters and opponents of Andrew Jackson. The pro-Jackson forces
evolved into the Democratic party, while those opposing Jackson
eventually coalesced into the Whig party.
\4\ All the presidential candidates in 1824 were Republicans--
although of varying persuasions--and Calhoun had support for the vice-
presidency from both the Adams and Jackson camps. As no presidential
candidate received the necessary majority of electoral votes, the House
of Representatives made the decision. Calhoun, however, received a clear
majority (182 of 260) of the vice-presidential electoral votes.
\5\ The Democratic party was not yet formally created during
Jackson's two terms as president but developed later from his
supporters. (See note 3.)
\6\ As no vice-presidential candidate received a majority of
electoral votes in 1836, the Senate for the only time in its history
selected the vice president.
\7\ For a discussion of the early origins of the Whig party in the
1836 election, see Chapter 9, ``Richard Mentor Johnson,'' p. 127, and
Chapter 10, ``John Tyler,'' p. 139.
\8\ Although Tyler ran on the Whig ticket, he remained a Democrat
throughout his life.
\9\ The Democratic party initially failed to nominate a vice-
presidential candidate in 1840 but ultimately backed Johnson. (See
Chapter 9, p. 130.)
\10\ John C. Breckinridge and Joseph Lane were the presidential and
vice-presidential nominees of the Southern Democratic party that year.
John Bell and Edward Everett ran on the Constitutional Union party
ticket.
\11\ Johnson was a War Democrat, who ran on a fusion ticket with
Republican President Abraham Lincoln. (See Chapter 16, p. 215.)
\12\ Also the candidates of the Liberal Republican party.
\13\ William Howard Taft and James S. Sherman were the Republican
presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
\14\ Robert M. La Follette and Burton K. Wheeler were the
presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the Progressive party
that year.
\15\ J. Strom Thurmond and Fielding L. Wright were the presidential
and vice-presidential nominees of the States' Rights Democratic party
that year.
\16\ Added to the ticket on August 8, 1972, after the resignation of
Thomas Eagleton.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

This selected bibliography includes general works dealing with
the history of the vice-presidency as well as studies and published
works of the individuals who have served as vice president from 1789 to
1993. ``Campaign biographies'' are not included, except for those vice
presidents who lack more scholarly biographies. Period histories are
omitted, but presidential histories likely to provide useful background
information are listed as appropriate. The voluminous literature dealing
with the Twenty-fifth Amendment is not included.

GENERAL REFERENCES

Bayh, Birch. One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession.
Indianapolis, 1968.
Cantor, Joseph E. ``The Vice Presidency and the Vice Presidents: A
Selected Annotated Bibliography.'' Congressional Research Service Report
No. 84-124 L, October 1, 1976. Revised July 31, 1984 by George H.
Walser.
David, Paul D. ``The Vice Presidency: Its Institutional Evolution and
Contemporary Status.'' Journal of Politics 29 (November 1967): 721-48.
Dorman, Michael. The Second Man: The Changing Role of the Vice
Presidency. New York, 1968.
Feerick, John. From Failing Hands. New York, 1965.
--------. ``The Problem of Presidential Inability--Will Congress Ever
Solve It.'' Fordham Law Review 32 (1963): 73-134.
--------. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment. New York, 1976.
Ferrell, Robert H. Ill Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust.
Columbia, MO, 1992.
Goldstein, Joel L. The Modern American Vice Presidency: The
Transformation of a Political Institution. Princeton, NJ, 1982.
Graf, Henry F. ``A Heartbeat Away.'' American Heritage 15 (August 1964).
Hatch, Louis C., and Shoup, Earl L. A History of the Vice-Presidency of
the United States. New York, 1934.
Kiser, George C. ``Presidential Primaries: Stepping-Stones to the Vice
Presidential Nomination?'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 22 (Summer
1992): 493-517.
Learned, Henry B. ``Casting Votes of the Vice Presidents, 1789-1915.''
American Historical Review 20 (April 1915): 571-76.
--------. ``Some Aspects of the Vice Presidency.'' American Political
Science Review 7 (February 1913 supp.): 162-77.
Medina, J. Michael. ``The American Vice President: Toward a More
Utilized Institution.'' George Mason University Law Review 13 (Fall
1990): 77-111.
Paullin, Charles O. ``The Vice President and the Cabinet.'' American
Historical Review 29 (April 1924): 496-500.
Tompkins, Dorothy C. The Office of Vice President: A Selected
Bibliography. Berkeley, CA, 1957.
Waugh, Edgar Wiggins. Second Consul: The Vice-Presidency: Our Greatest
Political Problem. Indianapolis, 1956.
Wilhelm, Stephen J. ``The Origins of the Office of the Vice
Presidency.'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 7 (Fall 1977): 208-14.
Williams, Irving G. The American Vice-Presidency: New Look. Garden City,
NY, 1954.
--------. ``Senators, Rules, and Vice-Presidents.'' Thought Patterns 5
(1957): 21-35.
--------. The Rise of the Vice Presidency. Washington, 1956.
Witcover, Jules. Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice-presidency. New
York, 1992.
Young, Donald. American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice
Presidency. New York, 1974.
Young, Klyde, and Lamar Middleton. Heirs Apparent: The Vice Presidents
of the United States. 1948. Reprint. Freeport, NY, 1969.
JOHN ADAMS (Chapter 1)
Adams, John. Diary and Autobiography. Edited by Lyman H. Butterfield. 4
vols. Cambridge, MA, 1961.
Adams, John. Papers of John Adams. Edited by Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo
Kline, Gregg L. Lint, et al. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA, 1977-1989.
Bowling, Kenneth R., and Veit, Helen E. The Diary of William Maclay and
Other Notes on Senate Debates. Documentary History of the First Federal
Congress, 1789-1791, vol. 9. Baltimore, 1988.
Dauer, Manning J. The Adams Federalists. 1953. Reprint. Baltimore, 1968.
Ellis, Joseph J. Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John
Adams. New York, 1993.
Ferling, John. John Adams: A Life. Knoxville, TN, 1992.
Guerrero, Linda Dudik. ``John Adams' Vice Presidency, 1789-1797: The
Neglected Man in the Forgotten Office.'' Ph.D. dissertation, University
of California, Santa Barbara, 1978.
Howe, John R., Jr. The Changing Political Thought of John Adams.
Princeton, NJ, 1966.
Hutson, James H. ``John Adams' Titles Campaign.'' New England Quarterly
41 (1968): 34-41.
Shaw, Peter. The Character of John Adams. Chapel Hill, NC, 1976.
Smith, Page. John Adams. 2 vols. 1962-1963. Reprint. Norwalk, CT, 1988.
THOMAS JEFFERSON (Chapter 2)
Brown, Ralph Adams. The Presidency of John Adams. Lawrence, KS, 1975.
Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of
Party Organization, 1789-1801. Chapel Hill, NC, 1957.
Gibbs, George. Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John
Adams. 2 vols. New York, 1846.
U.S. Congress. Senate. A Manual of Parliamentary Practice, by Thomas
Jefferson. 1801. Reprint. S. Doc., 103-8, 102d Cong., 2d sess., 1993.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson.
Edited, and with an introduction by Adrienne Koch and William Peden. New
York, 1944.
--------. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Paul Leicester
Ford. 10 vols. New York, 1892-1899.
Kurtz, Stephen G. The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of
Federalism, 1795-1800. Philadelphia, 1975.
Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty. Jefferson and His
Time, vol. 3. Boston, 1962.
Peterson, Merrill D. Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography.
1970. Reprint. Norwalk, CT, 1987.
AARON BURR (Chapter 3)
Abernethy, Thomas Perkins. The Burr Conspiracy. 1954. Reprint.
Gloucester, MA, 1968.
Alexander, Holmes Moss. Aaron Burr, the Proud Pretender. 1937. Reprint.
Westport, CT, 1973.
Burr, Aaron. Memoirs of Aaron Burr. 2 vols. 1836-1837. Reprint. New
York, 1971.
Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party
Operations, 1801-1809. Chapel Hill, NC, 1963.
--------. The Process of Government Under Jefferson. Princeton, NJ,
1978.
Harrison, Lowell. ``John Breckinridge and the Vice-Presidency, 1804: A
Poltical Episode.'' Filson Club History Quarterly 26 (April 1952): 155-
65.
Kline, Mary-Jo, and Joanne Wood Ryan, eds. Papers of Aaron Burr. Ann
Arbor, MI, 1978-1981. Microfilm, 27 reels and guide, 1 supplemental
reel.
--------. The Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr.
2 vols. Princeton, NJ, 1983.
Lomask, Milton. Aaron Burr. 2 vols. New York, 1979-1982.
Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805. Jefferson
and His Time, vol. 4. Boston, 1970.
Mitchill, Samuel Latham. ``Dr. Mitchill's Letters from Washington, 1801-
1813.'' Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (April 1879): 740-55.
Pancake, John S. ``Aaron Burr: Would-Be Usurper.'' William and Mary
Quarterly 8 (April 1951).
Parmet, Herbert S., and Marie B. Hecht. Aaron Burr: Portrait of An
Ambitious Man. New York, 1967.
Plumer, William. William Plumer's Memorandum of Proceedings in the
United States Senate, 1803-1807. Edited by Everett S. Brown. 1923.
Reprint. New York, 1969.
Reports of the Trials of Colonel Aaron Burr. David Robertson, Reporter.
1808. Reprint. New York, 1969.
Slaughter, Thomas P. ``Conspiratorial Politics: The Public Life of Aaron
Burr.'' New Jersey History 103 (Spring/Summer 1985): 69-81.
Thomas, Gordon L. ``Aaron Burr's Farewell Address.'' Quarterly Journal
of Speech 39 (1953).
GEORGE CLINTON (Chapter 4)
Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party
Operations, 1801-1809. Chapel Hill, NC, 1963.
--------. The Process of Government Under Jefferson. Princeton, NJ,
1978.
Kaminski, John P. George Clinton: Yeoman Politician of the New Republic.
Madison, WI, 1993.
Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809.
Jefferson and His Time, vol. 5. Boston, 1974.
Plumer, William. William Plumer's Memorandum of Proceedings in the
United States Senate,1803-1807. Edited by Everett S. Brown. 1923.
Reprint. New York, 1969.
Rutland, Robert Allen. The Presidency of James Madison. Lawrence, KS,
1990.
Spaulding, Ernest Wilder. His Excellency George Clinton, Critic of the
Constitution. 1938. Reprint. Port Washington, NY, 1964.
ELBRIDGE GERRY (Chapter 5)
Austin, James T. The Life of Elbridge Gerry. 2 vols. 1828-1829. Reprint.
New York, 1970.
Billias, George Athan. Elbridge Gerry, Founding Father and Republican
Statesman. New York, 1976.
Learned, Henry B. ``Gerry and the Presidential Succession in 1813.''
American Historical Review 22 (October, 1916): 94-97.
Rutland, Robert Allen. The Presidency of James Madison. Lawrence, KS,
1990.
DANIEL D. TOMPKINS (Chapter 6)
Ammon, Harry. James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity. 1971.
Reprint. Charlottesville, VA, 1990.
Irwin, Ray W. Daniel D. Tompkins: Governor of New York and Vice
President of the UnitedStates. New York, 1968.
Jenkins, John S. Lives of the Governors of New York. Auburn, NY, 1852.
Mooney, Chase C. William Crawford, 1772-1834. Lexington, KY, 1974.
Rayback, Joseph G. ``A Myth Re-examined: Martin Van Buren's Roles in the
Presidential Election of 1816.'' Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 124 (April 29, 1980): 106-18.
Remini, Robert V. ``New York and the Presidential Election of 1816.''
New York History 31 (1950).
Tompkins, Daniel D. Public Papers of Daniel D. Tompkins, Governor of New
York, 1807-1817. 3 vols. New York, 1898-1902.
JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN (Chapter 7)
Capers, Gerald M. John C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Re-Appraisal.
Gainesville, FL, 1960.
Coit, Margaret L. John C. Calhoun: American Portrait. 1950. Reprint,
with new introduction by Clyde N. Wilson. Columbia, SC, 1991.
Cole, Donald B. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson. Lawrence, KS, 1993.
Ewing, Gretchen Garst. ``Duff Green, John C. Calhoun, and the Election
of 1828.'' South Carolina Historical Magazine 79 (April 1978): 126-37.
Hay, Robert P. ``The Pillorying of Albert Gallatin: The Public Response
to His 1824 Vice-Presidential Nomination.'' Western Pennsylvania
Historical Magazine 65 (June 1982): 181-202.
Hay, Thomas R. ``John C. Calhoun and the Presidential Campaign of
1824.'' North Carolina Historical Review 12 (1935): 20-44.
Meriwether, Robert M., W. Edwin Hemphill, and Clyde N. Wilson, eds. The
Papers of John C. Calhoun. 22 vols. to date. Columbia, SC, 1987.
Niven, John. John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union. Baton Rouge, LA,
1988.
Peterson, Merrill D. The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay and Calhoun.
New York, 1987.
``Sketch of the Life of J.C. Calhoun, Vice-President of the United
States.'' The Casket 3 (March 1827): 81-82.
Stenberg, Richard R. ``The Jefferson Birthday Dinner, 1830.'' Journal of
Southern History 4 (1938): 334-46.
--------. ``A Note on the Jackson-Calhoun Breach of 1830-1831.'' Tyler's
Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 21 (1939): 480-96.
Wiltse, Charles M. John C. Calhoun. 3 vols. 1944-1951. Reprint. New
York, 1968.
MARTIN VAN BUREN (Chapter 8)
Cole, Donald B. Martin Van Buren and the American Political System.
Princeton, NJ, 1984.
--------. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson. Lawrence, KS, 1993.
Curtis, James C. ``In the Shadow of Old Hickory: The Political Travail
of Martin Van Buren.''Journal of the Early Republic 1 (Fall 1981): 249-
68.
Fitzpatrick, John C., ed. The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren. 2 vols.
1920. Reprint. New York, 1973. Originally published as American
Historical Association Annual Report for the Year 1918, vol. 2.
Gammon, Samuel Rhea, Jr. The Presidential Campaign of 1832. Baltimore,
1922.
Mintz, Max M. ``The Political Ideas of Martin Van Buren.'' New York
History 30 (October 1949): 422-48.
Moody, Robert D. ``The Influence of Martin Van Buren on the Career and
Acts of Andrew Jackson.'' Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science,
Arts and Letters 7 (1926): 225-40.
Niven, John. Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age in American Politics.
New York, 1983.
Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy,
1833-1845. New York, 1984.
--------. Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party. New
York, 1959.
RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON (Chapter 9)
Bolt, Robert. ``Vice-President Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky: Hero of
the Thames--or the Great Amalgamator?'' Register of the Kentucky
Historical Society 74 (July 1977): 191-203.
Brown, Thomas. ``The Miscegenation of Richard Mentor Johnson as an Issue
in the National Election Campaign of 1835-1836.'' Civil War History 29
(1993): 5-30.
Curtis, James C. The Fox at Bay: Martin Van Buren and the Presidency,
1837-1841. Lexington, KY, 1970.
Meyer, Leland Winfield. The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson
of Kentucky. 1932. Reprint. New York, 1967.
Niven, John. Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics.
New York, 1983.
Padgett, James A., ed. ``The Letters of Colonel Richard M. Johnson of
Kentucky.'' Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 38 (1940): 186-
201, 323-39; 39 (1941): 22-46, 172-88, 260-74, 358-67; 40 (1942): 69-91.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Jackson. Boston, 1945.
Sprague, Stuart S. ``The Death of Tecumseh and the Rise of Rumpsey
Dumpsey: The Making of a Vice President.'' Filson Club History Quarterly
59 (October 1985): 455-61.
Williams, Major L. The Presidency of Martin Van Buren. Lawrence, KS,
1984.
JOHN TYLER (Chapter 10)
Adams, John Quincy. The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794-1845: American
Diplomacy, and Political, Social and Intellectual Life from Washington
to Polk. Edited by Alan Nevins. 1928. Reprint of 1951 ed. New York,
1969.
Chitwood, Oliver P. John Tyler, Champion of the Old South. 1939.
Reprint. New York, 1964.
Leigh, Benjamin Watkins. ``John Tyler and the Vice Presidency.'' Tyler's
Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9 (July 1927).
Seager, Robert. And Tyler Too: A Biography of John & Julia Gardner
Tyler. New York, 1963.
Shelley, Fred, ed. ``The Vice President Receives Bad News in
Williamsburg: A Letter of James Lyons to John Tyler.'' Virginia Magazine
of History and Biography 76 (1968): 337-39.
Stathis, Stephen W. ``John Tyler's Presidential Succession: A
Reappraisal.'' Prologue 8 (Winter, 1976): 223-36.
Tyler, Lyon Gardner, ed. The Letters and Times of the Tylers. 3 vols.
1884-1886. Reprint. New York, 1970.
GEORGE MIFFLIN DALLAS (Chapter 11)
Ambacher, Bruce I. ``George M. Dallas: Leader of the 'Family' Party.''
Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, 1971.
--------. ``George M. Dallas and the Bank War.'' Pennsylvania History 42
(April 1975): 117-35.
Belohlavek, John M. George Mifflin Dallas: Jacksonian Patrician.
University Park, PA, 1977.
Bergeron, Paul H. The Presidency of James K. Polk. Lawrence, KS, 1987.
Burt, Struthers. ``George Mifflin Dallas [1792-1864]: The Other Vice-
President from Princeton.'' In The Lives of Eighteen from Princeton,
edited by Willard Thorp, pp. 178-91. 1946. Reprint. Freeport, NY, 1968.
Dallas, George Mifflin. Diary of George Mifflin Dallas, United States
Minister to Russia, 1837-1839. 1892. Reprint. New York, 1970.
Nichols, Roy, ed. ``The Library: The Mystery of the Dallas Papers.''
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 73: 349-92, 475-517.
MILLARD FILLMORE (Chapter 12)
Barre, W. L. The Life and Public Services of Millard Fillmore. 1856.
Reprint. New York, 1971.
Dix, Dorothea Lynde. The Lady and the President: The Letters of Dorothea
Dix & Millard Fillmore. Lexington, KY, 1975.
Fillmore, Millard. Millard Fillmore Papers. Edited by Frank Hayward
Severence. 2 vols. Buffalo, NY, 1907.
--------. Millard Fillmore Papers. Edited by Lester W. Smith. Buffalo,
NY, 1975. Microfilm. 68 reels and guide.
Rayback, Robert J. Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President. Buffalo,
NY, 1959.
WILLIAM RUFUS KING (Chapter 13)
Martin, John M. ``William R. King and the Vice Presidency.'' Alabama
Review 16 (January 1963): 35-54.
Martin, John M. ``William Rufus King: Southern Moderate.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1955.
--------. ``William R. King: Jacksonian Senator.'' Alabama Review 18
(October 1985).
U.S. Congress. Obituary Addresses. 33d Congress, 1st session, 1853-1854.
Washington, 1854.
JOHN CABELL BRECKINRIDGE (Chapter 14)
Davis, William C. Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol. Baton Rouge,
LA, 1974.
Harrison, Lowell H. ``John C. Breckinridge: Nationalist, Confederate,
Kentuckian.'' Filson Club History Quarterly 47 (April 1973): 125-44.
Heck, Frank H. ``John C. Breckinridge in the Crisis of 1860-1861.''
Journal of Southern History 21 (August 1955): 316-46.
--------. Proud Kentuckian, John C. Breckinridge, 1821-1875. Lexington,
KY, 1976.
O'Connor, John R. ``John Cabell Breckinridge's Personal Secession: A
Rhetorical Insight.'' Filson Club History Quarterly 43 (October 1969):
345-52.
Stillwell, Lucille. Born to Be a Statesman: John Cabell Breckinridge.
Caldwell, ID, 1936.
HANNIBAL HAMLIN (Chapter 15)
Fite, Emerson David. The Presidential Campaign of 1860. 1911. Reprint.
Port Washington, NY, 1967.
Hamlin, Charles Eugene. The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin. 2 vols.
1899. Reprint. Port Washington, NY, 1971.
Hunt, H. Draper. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine: Lincoln's First Vice-
President. Syracuse, NY, 1969.
--------. ``President Lincoln's First Vice President: Hannibal Hamlin of
Maine.'' Lincoln Herald 88 (Winter 1986): 137-44.
Luthin, Reinhard H. The First Lincoln Campaign. 1944. Reprint.
Gloucester, MA, 1964.
Scroggins, Mark. Hannibal: The Life of Abraham Lincoln's First Vice
President. Lanham, MD, 1993.
ANDREW JOHNSON (Chapter 16)
Benedict, Michael Les. The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson. New
York, 1972.
DeWitt, David M. ``Vice President Andrew Johnson.'' Publications of the
Southern History Association 8 (November 1904): 437-42; 9 (January
1905): 1-23, (March 1905): 71-86, (May 1905): 151-59, (July 1905): 213-
25.
Glonek, James F. ``Lincoln, Johnson, and the Baltimore Ticket.'' Abraham
Lincoln Quarterly 6 (March 1951): 255-71.
Graf, LeRoy P., Ralph W. Haskins, Paul H. Bergeron, eds. The Papers of
Andrew Johnson. 12 vols. to date. Knoxville, TN, 1967- .
Hardison, Edwin T. ``In the Toils of War: Andrew Johnson and the Federal
Occupation of Tennessee.'' Ph.D. dissertation, University of North
Carolina, 1981.
Harris, William C. ``Andrew Johnson's First 'Swing Around the Circle':
His Northern Campaign of 1863.'' Civil War History 35 (June 1989): 153-
71.
McCulloch, Hugh. Men and Measures of Half a Century: Sketches and
Comments. New York, 1888.
Trefousse, Hans L. Andrew Johnson: A Biography. New York, 1989.
SCHUYLER COLFAX (Chapter 17)
Hesseltine, William Best. Ulysses S. Grant, Politician. 1935. Reprint.
New York, 1957.
Hollister, Ovando J. Life of Schuyler Colfax. New York, 1886.
McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography. New York, 1981.
Smith, Willard H. Schuyler Colfax: The Changing Fortunes of a Political
Idol. Indianapolis, 1952.
HENRY WILSON (Chapter 18)
Abbott, Richard. Cobbler in Congress: The Life of Henry Wilson, 1812-
1875. Lexington, KY, 1972.
Hesseltine, William Best. Ulysses S. Grant, Politician. 1935. Reprint.
New York, 1957.
McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography. New York, 1981.
McKay, Ernest. Henry Wilson: Practical Radical; A Portrait of a
Politician. Port Washington, NY, 1971.
--------. ``Henry Wilson and the Coalition of 1851.'' New England
Quarterly 36 (1963): 338-57.
Nason, Elias, and Thomas Russell. The Life and Public Services of Henry
Wilson, Late Vice-President of the United States. 1876. Reprint. New
York, 1969.
U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses. 44th Congress, 1st session, 1875-
1876. Washington, 1876.
Wilson, Henry. History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in
America. 3 vols. 1872-1877. Reprint. New York, 1969.
WILLIAM ALMON WHEELER (Chapter 19)
Davison, Kenneth E. The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Westport, CT,
1972.
Hoogenboom, Ari Arthur. The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Lawrence,
KS, 1988.
Howells, William Dean. Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B.
Hayes: Also A Biographical Sketch of William A. Wheeler. 1876. Reprint.
Folcroft, PA, 1977.
Otten, James T. ``Grand Old Partyman: William A. Wheeler and the
Republican Party, 1850-1880.'' Ph.D. dissertation, University of South
Carolina, 1976.
CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR (Chapter 20)
Arthur, Chester Alan. Chester A. Arthur Papers. Microfilm. 3 reels.
Washington, 1959.
Doenecke, Justus D. The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A.
Arthur. Lawrence, KS, 1981.
Howe, George Frederick. Chester A. Arthur, A Quarter-Century of Machine
Politics. 1935. Reprint. New York, 1957.
Memorial Sketch of Lafayette S. Foster, United States Senator from
Connecticut, and Acting Vice-President of the United States. Boston,
1881.
Reeves, Thomas C. Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. New
York, 1975.
Schwartz, Sybil. ``In Defense of Chester Arthur.'' Wilson Quarterly 2
(Autumn 1978): 180-84.
THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS (Chapter 21)
Gray, Ralph D. ``Thomas A. Hendricks: Spokesman for the Democracy.'' In
Gentlemen from Indiana: National Party Candidates, 1836-1940, edited by
Ralph D. Gray, pp. 117-39. Indianapolis, 1977.
Hensel, William. ``A Biographical Sketch of Thomas A. Hendricks, Nominee
for the Vice-Presidency of the United States.'' In Life and Public
Services of Hon. Grover Cleveland, by William Dorshimer. Philadelphia,
1884.
Holcombe, John Walker, and Hubert Marshall Skinner. Life and Public
Services of Thomas A. Hendricks, With Selected Speeches and Writings.
Indianapolis, 1886.
U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses. 49th Congress, 1st session, 1885-
1886. Washington, 1886.
LEVI PARSONS MORTON (Chapter 22)
Harney, Gilbert L. The Lives of Benjamin Harrison and Levi P. Morton.
Providence, RI, 1888.
Katz, Irving. ``Investment Bankers in American Government and Politics:
The Political Activities of William C. Corcoran, August Belmont, Sr.,
Levi P. Morton, and Henry Lee Higginson.'' Ph.D. dissertation, New York
University, 1964.
McElroy, Robert McNutt. Levi Parsons Morton: Banker, Diplomat, and
Statesman. 1930. Reprint. New York, 1975.
Testimonial to Vice-President Levi P. Morton, Upon His Retirement from
Office on March 4, 1893. Concord, NH, 1893.
ADLAI EWING STEVENSON (Chapter 23)
Baker, Jean H. The Stevensons: A Biography of an American Family. New
York, 1996.
Schlup, Leonard. ``The Political Career of the First Adlai E.
Stevenson.'' Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, 1973.
--------. ``The Congressional Career of the First Adlai E. Stevenson.''
Illinois Quarterly 38 (Winter 1975): 5-19.
--------. ``Vilas, Stevenson, and Democratic Politics, 1883-1892.''
North Dakota Quarterly 44 (Winter 1976): 44-52.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson and the 1892 Campaign in Alabama.''
Alabama Review 29 (January 1976): 3-15.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson's Campaign Visits to West Virginia.''
West Virginia History 38 (January 1977): 126-35.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson and the Presidential Election of 1896.''
Social Science Journal 14 (April 1977): 117-28.
--------. ``Grover Cleveland and His 1892 Running Mate.'' Studies in
History and Society 2 (Fall 1977): 60-74.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson's Campaign Visits to Kentucky in 1892.''
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 75 (April 1977): 112-20.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson and the 1892 Campaign in Virginia.''
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (July 1978): 345-54.
--------. ``Democratic Talleyrand: Adlai E. Stevenson and Politics in
the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.'' South Atlantic Quarterly 78
(Spring 1979): 182-94.
--------. ``Presidential Disability: The Case of Cleveland and
Stevenson.'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 9 (Summer 1979): 303-10.
--------. ``Vice-President Stevenson and the Politics of
Accommodation.'' Journal of Political Science 7 (Fall 1979): 30-39.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson and the Southern Campaign of 1892.''
Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 17 (August 1977): 7-14.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson and Presidential Politics in the
Cleveland Era.'' International Review of History and Political Science
16 (August 1979): 1-10.
--------. ``Gilded Age Politician: Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois and
His Times.'' Illinois Historical Journal 82 (Winter 1989): 219-30.
--------. ``An American Chameleon: Adlai E. Stevenson and the Quest for
the Vice Presidency in Gilded Age Politics.'' Presidential Studies
Quarterly 21 (Summer 1991): 511-29.
--------. ``Adlai E. Stevenson and the 1892 Campaign in North Carolina:
A Bourbon Response to Southern Populism.'' Southern Studies, New ser. 2
(Summer 1991): 131-49.
Stevenson, Adlai E. Something of the Men I have Known: With Some Papers
of A General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective. Chicago,
1909.
GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART (Chapter 24)
Glynn, Martin H. In Memoriam. Garret A. Hobart, Vice-President of the
United States. Washington, 1900.
Hobart, Jennie Tuttle (Mrs. Garret A. Hobart). Memories. Patterson, NJ,
1930.
Magie, David. Life of Garret Augustus Hobart, Twenty-fourth Vice
President of the United States. New York, 1910.
Roosevelt, Theodore. ``The Three Vice-Presidential Candidates and What
They Represent.'' Review of Reviews 14 (September 1896): 289-97.
Russell, Henry Benajah. The Lives of William McKinley and Garret A.
Hobart, Republican Presidential Candidates of 1896. Hartford, CT, 1896.
U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses. 56th Congress, 1st session, 1899-
1900. Washington, 1900.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT (Chapter 25)
Blum, John Morton. The Republican Roosevelt. Cambridge, MA, 1954.
Chessman, G. Wallace. Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power.
Boston, 1969.
--------. ``Theodore Roosevelt's Campaign Against the Vice-Presidency.''
Historian 14 (Spring 1952).
Gould, Lewis L. ``Charles Warren Fairbanks and the Republican National
Convention of 1900.''Indiana Magazine of History 77 (December 1981):
358-72.
Grantham, Dewey W., comp. Theodore Roosevelt. Englewood Cliffs, NJ,
1971.
Harbaugh, William Henry. Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of
Theodore Roosevelt. New York, 1961.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, and Charles Redmond, eds. Selections from the
Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918. 2
vols. 1925. Reprint. New York, 1971.
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York, 1979.
Pringle, Henry F. Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. 1931. Revised ed. New
York, 1954.
Roosevelt, Theodore. The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. Edited by Elting
E. Morison and John Blum. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA, 1951-1954.
--------. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography. 1913. Reprint, with new
introduction by Elting Morison. New York, 1985.
--------. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. National ed. Edited by
Hermann Hagedorn. 20 vols. New York, 1927.
Schlup, Leonard. ``Theodore Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson: An
Examination of Differences in 1900.'' Theodore Roosevelt Association
Journal (Spring 1989): 2-7.
CHARLES WARREN FAIRBANKS (Chapter 26)
Gould, Lewis L. ``Charles Warren Fairbanks and the Republican National
Convention of 1900: A Memoir.'' Indiana Magazine of History 77 (December
1981): 358-72.
--------. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Lawrence, KS, 1991.
Madison, James H. ``Charles Warren Fairbanks and Indiana
Republicanism.'' In Gentlemen from Indiana: National Party Candidates,
1836-1940, edited by Ralph Gray. Indianapolis, 1977.
Rissler, Herbert J. ``Charles Warren Fairbanks: Conservative Hoosier.''
Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1961.
Shipp, Thomas R. ``Charles Warren Fairbanks, Republican Candidate for
Vice President.'' American Monthly Review of Reviews 30 (August 1904):
176-81.
Slaydon, Ellen Maury. Washington Wife: Journal of Ellen Maury Slaydon
from 1897-1919. New York, 1963.
Smith, William Henry. The Life and Speeches of Hon. Charles W.
Fairbanks, Republican Candidate for Vice-President. Indianapolis, 1904.
JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT SHERMAN (Chapter 27)
Coletta, Paolo E. The Presidency of William Howard Taft. Lawrence, KS,
1973.
Schlup, Leonard. ``The Pulse of Old Guard Politics: James S. Sherman and
the 1908 Republican Ticket.'' Social Science Quest 5 (Summer 1988): 9-
22.
U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses. 62d Congress, 3d session, 1912-1913.
Washington, 1913.
THOMAS RILEY MARSHALL (Chapter 28)
Brown, John R. ``Woodrow Wilson's Vice-President: Thomas R. Marshall and
the Wilson Administration, 1913-1921.'' Ph.D. dissertation, Ball State
University, 1970.
Canfield, Leon Hardy. The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson: Prelude to a
World in Crisis. Rutherford, NJ, 1966.
Lincoln, A. ``Theodore Roosevelt, Hiram Johnson, and the Vice
Presidential Nomination of 1912.'' Pacific Historical Review 28 (August
1959): 267-83.
Marshall, Thomas R. Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall, Vice-President
and Hoosier Philosopher: A Hoosier Salad. Indianapolis, 1925.
Smith, Gene. When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow
Wilson. 1964. Reprint with introduction by Allan Nevins. Alexandria, VA,
1982.
Thomas, Charles M. Thomas Riley Marshall: Hoosier Statesman. Oxford, OH,
1939.
CALVIN COOLIDGE (Chapter 29)
Bagby, Wesley M. The Road to Normalcy: The Presidential Campaign and
Election of 1920. Baltimore, 1962.
--------. ``The 'Smoke-Filled Room' and the Nomination of Warren G.
Harding.'' Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (March 1955).
Coolidge, Calvin. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. 1929. Reprint.
Rutland, VT, 1984.
--------. The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses. New York, 1924.
Fuess, Claude M. Calvin Coolidge, The Man From Vermont. 1940. Reprint of
1965 ed. Westport, CT, 1976.
Margulies, Herbert F. ``Senator Irvine Lenroot and the Republican Vice
Presidential Nomination of 1920.'' Wisconsin Magazine of History 61
(Autumn 1977): 21-31.
McCoy, Donald R. Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President. 1967. Reprint,
with new preface. Lawrence, KS, 1988.
White, William Allen. A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin
Coolidge. 1938. Reprint. Gloucester, MA, 1973.
CHARLES GATES DAWES (Chapter 30)
Ackerman, Carl W. Dawes--The Doer! New York, 1924.
Dawes, Charles G. A Journal of the McKinley Years. Chicago, 1950.
--------. Essays and Speeches. Boston, 1915.
--------. Notes as Vice President, 1928-1929. Boston, 1935.
Gilbert, Clinton Wallace. ``You Takes Your Choice.'' New York, 1924.
Leach, Paul Roscoe. That Man Dawes. Chicago, 1930.
Fixton, John E., Jr. ``The Early Career of Charles G. Dawes.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Chicago, 1953.
Timmons, Bascom N. Charles G. Dawes, Portrait of An American. New York,
1979.
CHARLES CURTIS (Chapter 31)
Ewy, Marvin. Charles Curtis of Kansas: Vice-President of the United
States, 1929-1933. Emporia, KS, 1961.
Fausold, Martin L. The Presidency of Herbert Hoover. Lawrence, KS, 1985.
Schlup, Leonard. ``Charles Curtis: The Vice-President from Kansas.''
Manuscripts 35 (Summer 1983): 183-201.
Unrau, William E. Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis
and the Quest for Indian Identity. Lawrence, KS, 1989.
JOHN NANCE GARNER (Chapter 32)
Fisher, Ovie C. Cactus Jack. Waco, TX, 1978.
Garner, John Nance. ``This Job of Mine.'' American Magazine 118 (July
1934): 23, 96.
James, Marquis. Mr. Garner of Texas. Indianapolis, 1939.
Patenaude, Lionel V. ``John Nance Gardner.'' In Profiles in Power:
Twentieth-Century Texans in Washington, edited by Kenneth E.
Hendrickson, Jr., and Michael L. Collins. Arlington Heights, IL, 1993.
Romano, Michael J. ``The Emergence of John Nance Garner as a Figure in
American National Politics, 1924-1941.'' Ph.D. dissertation, St. John's
University, 1974.
Timmons, Bascom N. Garner of Texas: A Personal History. New York, 1948.
HENRY AGARD WALLACE (Chapter 33)
Markowitz, Norman D. The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A.
Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948. New York, 1973.
Schapsmeier, Edward L., and Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Henry A. Wallace
of Iowa: the Agrarian Years, 1910-1940. Ames, IA, 1968.
--------. Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, 1940-
1965. Ames, IA, 1973.
Wallace, Henry Agard. Democracy Reborn. Selected from Public Papers and
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Russell Lord. 1944. Reprint.
New York, 1973.
--------. Henry A. Wallace Papers at the University of Iowa. Edited by
Earl M. Rogers. Iowa City, IA, 1974. Microfilm. 67 reels and guide.
--------. The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946.
Edited by John Morton Blum. Boston, 1973.
--------. The Reminiscences of Henry Agard Wallace. Columbia University
Oral History Program Collection, part 3, no. 40. Glen Rock, NJ, 1977.
Microfilm. 2 reels.
--------. Whose Constitution? An Inquiry into the General Welfare. 1936.
Reprint. Westport, CT, 1971.
HARRY S. TRUMAN (Chapter 34)
Asbell, Bernard. When F.D.R. Died. New York, 1961.
Bishop, Jim. FDR's Last Year: April 1944-April 1945. New York, 1974.
Daniels, Jonathan. The Man of Independence. 1950. Reprint. Port
Washington, NY, 1971.
Donovan, Robert J. Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S
Truman, 1945-1948. New York, 1977.
Ferrell, Robert H. Choosing Truman: The Democratic Convention of 1944.
Columbia, MO, 1994.
--------. Harry S. Truman: A Life. Columbia, MO, 1994.
--------, ed. The Autobiography of Harry S Truman. Boulder, CO, 1980.
Flynn, Edward J. You're the Boss. New York, 1947.
Goldman, Elliot. ``Justice William O. Douglas: The 1944 Vice
Presidential Nomination and His Relationship with Roosevelt, an
Historical Perspective.'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 12 (Summer
1982): 377-85.
Hamby, Alonzo L. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York,
1995.
Heaster, Brenda L. ``Who's on Second: The 1944 Democratic Presidential
Nomination.'' Missouri Historical Review (January 1986).
Helm, William P. Harry Truman, A Political Biography. New York, 1947.
Kirkendall, Richard S. ``Truman's Path to Power.'' Social Science 43
(1968): 67-73.
McClure, Arthur F., and Donna Costigan. ``The Truman Vice Presidency:
Constructive Apprenticeship or Brief Interlude?'' Missouri Historical
Review 65 (April 1971): 318-41.
McCullough, David G. `` `I Hardly Know Truman'.'' American Heritage 43
(July/August 1992): 46-64.
--------. Truman. New York, 1992.
Parker, Daniel F. ``The Political and Social Views of Harry S Truman.''
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1951.
Partin, John W. ``Roosevelt, Byrnes, and the 1944 Vice-Presidential
Nomination.'' Historian 42 (1979): 85-100.
Rovin, Fern R. ``Politics and the Presidential Election of 1944.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Indiana University, 1973.
Steinberg, Alfred. The Man from Missouri: The Life and Times of Harry S
Truman. New York, 1962.
Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. 2 vols., Garden City, NY, 1955-1956.
Tugwell, Rexford Guy. How They Became President: Thirty-five Ways to the
White House.New York, 1964.
ALBEN W. BARKLEY (Chapter 35)
Barkley, Alben W. That Reminds Me. Garden City, NY, 1954.
Barkley, Jane R. and Francis Spatz Leighton. I Married the Veep. New
York, 1958.
Claussen, E. Neal. ``Alben Barkley's Rhetorical Victory in 1948.''
Southern Speech Communications Journal 45 (1979): 79-92.
Davis, Polly Ann. Alben W. Barkley, Senate Majority Leader and Vice
President. New York, 1979.
--------. ``Alben W. Barkley: Vice President.'' Register of the Kentucky
Historical Society 76 (April 1978): 112-32.
Libbey, James K. Dear Alben. Mr. Barkley of Kentucky. Lexington, KY,
1979.
Wallace, H. Lew. ``Alben Barkley and the Democratic Convention of
1948.'' Filson Club History Quarterly 55 (July 1981): 231-52.
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON (Chapter 36)
Aitken, Jonathan. Nixon--A Life. Washington, 1993.
Ambrose, Stephen E. Nixon. 2 vols. to date. New York, 1987-1989.
Casper, Dale C. Richard M. Nixon: A Bibliographic Exploration. New York,
1988.
De Toledano, Ralph. Nixon. Rev. and expanded ed. New York, 1960.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1953-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University (London), 1978.
Mazo, Earl and Stephen Hess. Nixon: A Political Portrait. New York,
1968.
Nixon, Richard M. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York, 1978.
--------. Six Crises. 1962. Reprint, with new introduction. New York,
1990.
``Nixon's Own Story of Seven Years in the Vice-Presidency.'' U.S. News
and World Report 48 (May 16, 1960): 98-106.
Pach, Chester J., Jr., and Elmo Richardson. The Presidency of Dwight D.
Eisenhower. 1979. Rev. ed. Lawrence, KS, 1991.
Rovere, Robert H. ``Letter from Washington: National Security Council
and Cabinet Under Direction of Mr. Nixon.'' New Yorker 31 (October 8,
1955): 179-86.
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON (Chapter 37)
Baker, Leonard. The Johnson Eclipse: A President's Vice Presidency. New
York, 1966.
Caro, Robert A. The Years of Lyndon Johnson. 2 vols. to date. New York,
1982-.
Dalleck, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-
1960. 1 vol. to date. New York, 1991.
Evans, Rowland and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of
Power, A Political Biography. New York, 1966.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1953-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University (London), 1978.
Johnson, Lyndon B. The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency,
1963-1969. New York, 1971.
Kearns, Doris. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York, 1976.
Lester, Robert Leon. ``Developments in Presidential-Congressional
Relations: FDR-JFK.'' Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1969.
Light, Paul C. ``The Institutional Vice Presidency.'' Presidential
Studies Quarterly 13 (Spring 1983): 198-211.
Riccards, Michael P. ``Rare Counsel: Kennedy, Johnson and the Civil
Rights Bill of 1963.'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 395-98.
White, William S. The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson. Boston, 1964.
HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY (Chapter 38)
Broder, David. ``Triple H Brand of Vice Presidency.'' New York Times
Magazine (December 6, 1964).
Eisele, Albert. Almost to the Presidency: A Biography of Two American
Politicians. Blue Earth, MN, 1972.
Garrettson, Charles Lloyd, III. Hubert H. Humphrey: The Politics of Joy.
New Brunswick, NJ, 1993.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1963-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University (London), 1978.
Humphrey, Hubert H. ``Changes in the Vice Presidency.'' Current History
67 (August, 1974): 58-59, 89-90.
Humphrey, Hubert H. The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics.
Edited by Norman Sherman. 1976. New ed. Minneapolis, 1991.
Natoli, Marie D. ``The Humphrey Vice Presidency in Retrospect.''
Presidential Studies Quarterly 12 (Fall 1982): 603-9.
Pomper, Gerald. ``The Nomination of Hubert Humphrey for Vice-
President.'' Journal of Politics 28 (August 1966).
Ryskind, Allan H. Hubert: An Unauthorized Biography of the Vice
President. New York, 1968.
U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses. 95th Congress, 2d session, 1978.
Washington, 1978.
SPIRO THEODORE AGNEW (Chapter 39)
Agnew, Spiro T. Addresses and State Papers of Spiro T. Agnew, Governor
of Maryland, 1967-1969. Edited by Franklin L. Burdett. 2 vols.
Annapolis, MD, 1975.
Agnew, Spiro T. Collected Speeches of Spiro Agnew. New York, 1971.
--------. Go Quietly . . . Or Else. New York, 1980.
--------. The Canfield Decision. Chicago, 1976.
--------. Where He Stands. New York, 1968.
Aiken, George D. Aiken: Senate Diary, January 1972-January 1975.
Brattleboro, VT, 1976.
Albright, Joseph. What Makes Spiro Run: The Life and Times of Spiro
Agnew. New York, 1972.
Cohen, Richard M., and Jules Witcover. A Heartbeat Away: The
Investigation and Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. New
York, 1974.
Coyne, John R., Jr. The Impudent Snobs: Agnew vs. the Intellectual
Establishment. New Rochelle, NY, 1972.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1953-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University (London), 1978.
Witcover, Jules. White Knight: The Rise of Spiro Agnew. New York, 1972.
GERALD R. FORD (Chapter 40)
Firestone, Bernard, and Alexej Ugrinsky, eds. Gerald R. Ford and the
Politics of Post-Watergate America. 2 vols. Westport, CT, 1993.
Ford, Betty, with Chris Chase. The Times of My Life. New York, 1978.
Ford, Gerald R. A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford.
1979. Reprint. Norwalk, CT, 1987.
--------. Selected Speeches. Edited by Michael V. Doyle. Arlington, VA,
1973.
Ford, Gerald R., et al. ``On the Threshold of the White House.''
Atlantic Monthly 234 (July, 1974): 63-72.
``Gerald R. Ford: Close Scrutiny Before Confirmation.'' Congressional
Quarterly 31 (20 October 1973): 2759-72.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1953-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University, 1978.
``Michigan Congressman GOP Vice Presidential Possibility.''
Congresssional Quarterly 22 (10 July 1964): 1445-48.
Mollenhoff, Clark R. The Man Who Pardoned Nixon. New York, 1976.
Natoli, Marie D. ``The Vice Presidency: Gerald Ford as Healer?''
Presidential Studies Quarterly 10 (Fall 1980): 662-64.
Reeves, Richard. A Ford, Not a Lincoln. New York, 1975.
Schapsmeier, Edward L., and Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Gerald R. Ford's
Date With Destiny: A Political Biography. New York, 1989.
Syers, William A. ``The Political Beginnings of Gerald R. Ford: Anti-
Bossism, Internationalism, and the Congressional Campaign of 1948.''
Presidential Studies Quarterly 20 (Winter 1990): 127-42.
Sidey, Hugh. Portrait of a President. New York, 1975.
TerHorst, Jerald F. Gerald Ford and the Future of the Presidency. New
York, 1974.
U.S. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of Gerald
R. Ford to the Vice Presidency of the United States. Hearings, 93rd
Cong., 1st sess. November 15-26, 1973. Washington, 1973.
U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Rules and Administration. Nomination
of Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be Vice President of the United States.
Hearings, 93rd Cong., 1st sess. November 1-14, 1973. Washington, 1993.
U.S. Congress. Tributes to Honorable Gerald R. Ford, President of the
United States. 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977. Washington, 1977.
NELSON ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER (Chapter 41)
Bales, Peter Relyea. ``Nelson Rockefeller and His Quest for Inter-
American Unity.'' Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York,
Stony Brook, 1992.
Connery, Robert H., and Gerald Benjamin. Rockefeller of New York:
Executive Power in the Statehouse. Ithaca, NY, 1979.
Desmond, James. Rockefeller. New York, 1964.
Firestone, Bernard, and Alexej Ugrinsky, eds. Gerald R. Ford and the
Politics of Post-Watergate America. 2 vols. Westport, CT, 1993.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1953-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University (London), 1978.
Kramer, Michael S., and Sam Roberts. ``I Never Wanted to be Vice-
President of Anything'': An Investigative Biography of Nelson
Rockefeller. New York, 1976.
Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service. Analysis of the
Philosophy and Public Record of Nelson A. Rockefeller, Nominee for Vice
President of the United States. 93rd Cong., 2d sess. House. Committee
Print. Washington, 1974.
Light, Paul C. ``Vice-Presidential Influence Under Rockefeller and
Mondale.'' Political Science Quarterly 98 (Winter 1983-1984): 617-40.
--------. Vice-Presidential Power: Advice and Influence in the White
House. Baltimore, 1984.
Morris, Joe Alex. Nelson Rockefeller, A Biography. New York, 1960.
Persico, Joseph E. The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A.
Rockefeller. New York, 1982.
Rockefeller, Nelson A. The Future of Freedom: A Bicentennial Series of
Speeches. Washington, 1976.
Turner, Michael. The Vice President as Policy Maker: Rockefeller in the
Ford White House. Westport, CT, 1982.
Underwood, James E., and William J. Daniels. Governor Rockefeller in New
York: The Apex of Pragmatic Liberalism in the United States. Westport,
CT, 1982.
U.S. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of Nelson
A. Rockefeller to be Vice President of the United States. Hearings, 93rd
Cong., 2d sess. November 21-December 5, 1974. Washington, 1974.
--------. Selected Issues and the Positions of Nelson A. Rockefeller,
Nominee for Vice President of theUnited States: An Analysis. 93rd Cong.,
2d sess. Committee Print. Washington, 1974.
U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Rules and Administration. Nomination
of Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to be Vice President of the United
States. Hearings, 93rd Cong., 2d sess. September 23-November 18, 1974.
Washington, 1974.
U.S. Congress. Memorial Addresses. 96th Cong., 1st sess., 1979.
Washington, 1979.
WALTER F. MONDALE (Chapter 42)
Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York, 1982.
Eisele, Albert. Almost to the Presidency: A Biography of Two American
Politicians. Blue Earth, MN, 1972.
Gillon, Steven M. The Democrats' Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the
Liberal Legacy. New York, 1992.
Goldstein, Joel K. ``The American Vice-Presidency, 1953-1978.'' Ph.D.
dissertation, Oxford University (London), 1978.
Lewis, Finlay. Mondale: Portrait of An American Politician. New York,
1980.
Light, Paul C. ``Vice-Presidential Influence Under Rockefeller and
Mondale.'' Political Science Quarterly 98 (Winter 1983-1984): 617-40.
Mondale, Walter F. The Accountability of Power: Toward a Responsible
Presidency. New York, 1975.
--------. Vice-Presidential Power: Advice and Influence in the White
House. Baltimore, 1984.
Natoli, Marie D. ``The Vice Presidency: Walter Mondale in the Lion's
Den.'' Presidential Studies Quarterly 8 (Winter 1978): 100-102.
``Vice Presidential Campaign Debate: Mondale-Dole Meet in Houston.'' In
The Presidential Campaign 1976. Vol. 3, The Debates, pp. 154-79.
Washington, 1979.
GEORGE BUSH (Chapter 43)
Bush, George, with Victor Gold. Looking Forward. Garden City, NY, 1987.
Bush, George. The Wit & Wisdom of George Bush: With Some Reflections
from Dan Quayle. Edited by Ken Brady and Jeremy Solomon. New York, 1989.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Bush-Quayle: The Reagan Legacy. Irving, TX, 1989.
King, Nicholas. George Bush: A Biography. New York, 1980.
Kirschten, Dick. ``George Bush--Keeping His Profile Low So He Can Keep
His Influence High.''National Journal 13 (June 20, 1981): 1096-1100.
U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Armed Services. Nomination of George
Bush to be Director of Central Intelligence. Hearing, 94th Cong., 1st
sess. December 15-16, 1975. Washington, 1975.
J. DANFORTH QUAYLE (Chapter 44)
Broder, David S. The Man Who Would be President: Dan Quayle. New York,
1992.
Campbell, Colin S.J., and Bert A. Rockman, eds. The Bush Presidency:
First Appraisals. Chatham, NJ, 1991.
DeMoss, Dorothy. ``George Bush.'' In Profiles in Power: Twentieth-
Century Texans in Washington, edited by Kenneth E. Hendrickson, Jr., and
Michael L. Collins. Arlington Heights, IL, 1993.
Duffy, Michael, and Dan Goodgame. Marching in Place: The Status Quo
Presidency of George Bush. New York, 1992.
Fenno, Richard F., Jr. The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle. Washington,
1989.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Bush-Quayle: The Reagan Legacy. Irving, TX, 1989.
Mullins, Kerry, and Aaron Wildavsky. ``The Procedural Presidency of
George Bush.'' Political Science Quarterly 107 (Spring 1992): 31-62.
Quayle, Dan. Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir. New York, 1994.
CREDITS FOR ILLUSTRATIONS

CREDITS FOR ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover illustration: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62- 116624

Frontispiece: AP/WideWorld Photo

John Adams: The Harvard University Art Museums, Acc. No. H073

Thomas Jefferson: Office of the Curator, The White House

Aaron Burr: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-
USZ62-16737

George Clinton: The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,
NPG 84.172

Elbridge Gerry: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-74104

Daniel D. Tompkins: Collection of the City of New York, City Hall

John C. Calhoun: The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,
NPG 78.64

Martin Van Buren: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-19608

Richard Mentor Johnson: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-1887

John Tyler: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-
USZ62-96919

George M. Dallas: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-10549

Millard Fillmore: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-13013

Willam R. King: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

John C. Breckinridge: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-9895

Hannibal Hamlin: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-BH82-3882

Andrew Johnson: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-B8184-10690

Schuyler Colfax: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-116494

Henry Wilson: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-
BH83-3701

William A. Wheeler: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-BH832-29130

Chester A. Arthur: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-13021

Thomas A. Hendricks: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress

Levi P. Morton: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-10566

Adlai E. Stevenson: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-108489

Garret Augustus Hobart: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-10553

Theodore Roosevelt: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-12095

Charles W. Fairbanks: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ61-445

James Schoolcraft Sherman: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-85213

Thomas R. Marshall: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-116554

Calvin Coolidge: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-B2-5253-4

Charles G. Dawes: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-08528

Charles Curtis: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-11655

John Nance Garner: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-116737

Henry A. Wallace: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USW3-6470-D

Harry S. Truman: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library

Alben W. Barkley: UPI/Corbis-Bettman

Richard M. Nixon: U.S. Senate Historical Office, SHP-5987

Lyndon B. Johnson: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-U9-5759-#5

Hubert H. Humphrey: U.S. Senate Historical Office, SHP-5987

Spiro T. Agnew: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-U9-26543-#24

Gerald R. Ford: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-U9-28835-#34

Nelson A. Rockefeller: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-U9-30000A-#13A

Walter F. Mondale: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-U9-32972-#30

George Bush: U.S. Senate Historical Office, SHP-5580

J. Danforth Quayle: U.S. Senate Historical Office, SHP-5987
INDEX

[This index generally includes individuals mentioned in the book
only if they play a sufficient role in the story or appear in more than
one chapter. But major party presidential and vice-presidential
candidates are included even if they are only mentioned in passing.
Wives of vice presidents are indexed but rarely parents.]

Abolitionists, Van Buren and, 114

Acheson, Dean, Nixon on, 439
Adams, Abigail, 4, 7, 8
Adams, John, 3-13, 17, illus. 2
in 1788 election, 5-6, 52
in 1796 election, 10, 19
in 1800 election, 11, 35
addressing the Senate, 7, 8, 10-11
Alien and Sedition Acts and, 23
announcing electoral vote count, xiii, 20
appointment of Gerry, 65
breaking tie votes, 3, 8, 10
in Continental congresses, 4
death of, 11, 25
elected president, xv, 10, 19, 53
elected vice president, 6, 52
on Gerry, 64
inauguration as president, 20
Jefferson and, 21, 25
in legislature, 4
patronage and, 6, 37, 38
presiding over the Senate, 7-8, 24
reelected vice president, 9, 52
on removal of cabinet officers, 8
Revolutionary War activities, 4-5
on role of vice president, 7
signing legislative documents, 7
in state constitutional convention, 5
on titles, 7-8
as vice president, xv, 6-10
writings of, 4, 9
youth, 3
Adams, John Quincy
in 1824 election, 83, 86-87, 107
in 1828 election, 93, 108
on Clinton, 54-56
elected president, 87, 107, 125
Fillmore and, 169
franking privilege for Burr and, 42
as president, 88-89
on Tyler, 142
Agnew, Elinor Isabel ``Judy'' Judefind, 481
Agnew, Spiro T., 481-88, illus. 480
appearance of, 482
bribery scandal and, 486-87
bust of, 488
characteristics of, 486
death of, 488
Ford and, 496
foreign travel by, 485
as governor, 482
Nixon on, 483-85, 488
presiding over the Senate, 482-83
resignation of, 487, 496, 508
as vice president, 482-87
youth, 481
Alabama, vice president from, 181-87
Alabama Claims, Morton and, 270
Albert, Carl
Agnew and, 486
Ford and, 497
Rockefeller and, 508
Aldrich, Nelson W.
1908 election and, 328
Curtis and, 376-77
Fairbanks and, 316, 318, 329
Rockefeller and, 505
Aldrich-Vreeland Emergency Currency Act (1908), 317-18
Alger, Russell A., Hobart and, 292-93
Alien Act (1798), 23
Alien and Sedition Acts, 23-24
Burr opposition to, 34
Alston, Aaron Burr, 39, 44
Alston, Joseph, 39
Alston, Theodosia Burr, 31, 33, 39, 44
Ames, Oakes
Colfax and, 227-29
Wheeler and, 244
Anticommunism
Humphrey and, 470-71
Nixon and, 434-35, 439
Antifederalists
in 1788 election, 5
Clinton and, 51-52
in Second Congress, 9
Arms control, 467, 471
Armstrong, John, Jr., Clinton and, 55
Antislavery movement
Colfax and, 224
Wilson and, 234-35
Arthur, Chester A., 251-56, illus. 250
appearance of, 253
breaking tie votes, 253
Conkling and, 251-55
death of, 256
elected vice president, 247, 253
Garfield and, 254
Hayes and, 252
Morton and, 271
New York customhouse and, 251-52
patronage and, 253-55
presiding over the Senate, 253-54
as president, 254-56
succeeding to presidency, 254, 272
as vice president, 253-54
as vice-presidential candidate, 271
youth, 252
Arthur, Ellen L.H., 252, 253
Ashurst, Henry F., on Coolidge, 353
Assassinations
of president, 216-17, 254, 272, 305, 315, 461
plot against vice president, 216-17
Atwater, Lee, Bush and, 536-38
Atzerodt, George, A. Johnson and, 216-17

Baker, Bobby

L.B. Johnson and, 454, 456
scandal and, 460
Baker, Edward D., Breckinridge and, 198
Baker, James A., III, Bush and, 535-36, 538
Ball, George, Humphrey and, 472-73
Bank of the U.S.
First, 57
proposal in 1840s, 145
Second, 109-11, 112-13, 123, 124, 139, 152, 153, 183
Barkley, Alben W., 423-29, illus. 422
in 1948 election, 425-26
as campaigner, 428
as candidate for vice president, 411, 414
death of, 429
on Garner, 426
in House, 424
as majority leader, 391, 424-25
nomination of Wallace and, 416
presiding over the Senate, 427-28
resignation as majority leader, 425
rulings overturned, 427-28
in Senate, 424-25, 429
Truman and, 418, 425-27
on vice-presidency, 426-27, 429
as vice president, 426-29
youth, 423
Bassett, Richard, Adams and, 8
Bayard, James A., Burr and, 36
Bayh, Birch, Quayle and, 545
Beckley, John, Clinton and, 54
Bell, John, in 1860 election, 197
Benton, Thomas Hart
on Calhoun, 99
on Calhoun and Van Buren, 96
on constitutional amendment, 89
Dallas and, 156
on debt imprisonment, 124
Foote and, 160, 175
King and, 183
on Panama Congress, 88
on Van Buren inauguration, 128
Bentsen, Lloyd M.
in 1988 election, 537, 548
Bush and, 532
Beveridge, Albert J., Fairbanks and, 315, 316
Biffle, Leslie, Truman and, 413, 417
Blaine, James G.
in 1876 election, 245
in 1884 election, 256, 272
in 1892 election, 273
Arthur and, 255
Conkling and, 252, 253, 256, 270
on Hamlin, 205
Morton and, 272
T. Roosevelt and, 298
as secretary of state, 271
Wheeler and, 244, 246
Blair, Francis P., 184
Breckinridge and, 198-99
R.M. Johnson and, 126
Blount, William, Jefferson and, 22
Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), 401-2
Bonus march, Curtis and, 381
Booth, John Wilkes, 216-17
Borah, William E.
in 1924 election, 362
on Curtis, 378
Boston massacre, 4
Boston police strike, 349
Boutwell, George, on H. Wilson, 235
Boynton, Henry Van Ness, H. Wilson and, 238
Branch, John, and Panama Congress, 89
Breckinridge, John
Judiciary Act and, 38
Kentucky Resolutions and, 23
Breckinridge, John C., 193-99, illus. 192
addressing Senate, 196
appearance of, 193
as Confederate leader, 198-99
characteristics of, 194, 197
death of, 199
elected vice president, 196
expelled from Senate, 193, 198
in House, 194-95
A. Johnson and, 214
as presidential candidate, 197-98
presiding over the Senate, 196-97
as vice president, 196-97
as vice-presidential candidate, 195
youth, 193
Breckinridge, Mary C. Burch, 193
Bricker amendment, Nixon and, 438
Bricker, John W., Nixon and, 438
Bright, Jesse D., Hendricks and, 262
Bristow, Joseph L., Curtis and, 376, 377
Bryan, William Jennings
in 1896 election, 282, 314
in 1900 election, 283, 303
in 1908 election, 328
1912 election and, 339
Dawes and, 360
Buchanan, James
in 1856 election, 195
Breckinridge and, 193, 196, 198
Dallas and, 153, 155, 159, 161
Hendricks and, 262
King and, 184, 185
veto of homestead bill, 214
Buchanan, Patrick J., Agnew and, 484
Bull Moose party, in 1912 election, 306, 330
Bull Run, Battle of, H. Wilson and, 235-36
Burr, Aaron, 31-46, illus. 30
in 1796 election, 10, 19
in 1800 election, xii, 11, 34-36
addressing Senate, 36, 43
announcing electoral vote count, 42
breaking tie votes, 37-38
as campaigner, 35
as candidate for governor, 39, 40
conspiracy by, 43-44
death of, 44
duel with Hamilton, 39
elected to Senate, 33
elected vice president, 11, 36
in New York legislature, 33
patronage and, 37, 53
presiding at impeachment trials, 40-42
proposal to give franking privilege on retirement, 42
retirement from vice-presidency, 39
in Revolutionary War, 32
sworn in as vice president, 36
treason trial, 44
as vice president, xvi, 36-43, 49
as vice-presidential candidate, 33-35, 53
youth, 32
Burr, Theodosia Bartow Prevost, 33
Burr, Theodosia. See Alston, Theodosia Burr
Bush, Barbara Pierce, 530, 535-36, 538, 552
Bush, Dorothy Walker, 529
Bush, George H.W., 529-38, illus. 528
in 1980 election, 533
characteristics of, 530, 534
in China, 533-35
as CIA director, 533
deciding whether to keep Quayle on ticket, 551
Ford and, 508
foreign travel by, 535
in House, 531-32
Iran-Contra scandal and, 536-37
as president, 538, 548-52
as presidential candidate, 536-38
Quayle and, 537-38
at Republican National Committee, 532-33
as Texas businessman, 531
as UN ambassador, 532
as vice president, 535-37
in World War II, 530
youth, 529
Bush, Prescott S., 529, 531
Butler, Nicholas, in 1912 election, 331
Butler, Pierce, Dallas and, 158
Butler, William O., in 1848 election, 159, 187
Byrd, Robert C.
cloture and, 510
Mondale and, 523
Byrnes, James F.
as candidate for vice president, 405, 411, 414-15
Garner and, 390
on Garner, 386
Wallace and, 405

Cabinet, resignation of

Jackson's, 95, 109
Taylor's, 176
Tyler's, 145
Cabinet meetings
secretary of state presiding in president's illness, 342, 343, 352
vice president attending, 337, 352, 379, 427, 439, 445
vice president declining to attend, 364
vice president presiding in president's absence, 342, 443, 446
Calhoun, Floride Colhoun, 85, 86, 95, 108
Calhoun, John C., 81-101, illus. 82
in 1824 election, 86, 107
abolitionists and, 114
appointing Senate committees and chairmen, 88-89
breaking tie votes, 96, 109
Compromise of 1850 and, 98, 174
Dallas and, 156
death of, 99
Eaton affair and, 95, 108
election of J.Q. Adams and, 87
elected vice president, 87, 93
in House, 85
investigation of, 93
Jackson and, 94-95
King and, 182, 183, 184
nullification and, 94-96, 97, 109
opposition to Jackson, 111
as presidential candidate, 86, 96, 107
presiding over Senate, 87-92, 94, 96, 174
resignation as vice president, 97, 109
as secretary of state, 98
as secretary of war, 85-86, 123-24
in Senate, 97-99, 173
on Senate rules, 91
Van Buren and, 96, 108-9
as vice president, xvi-xvii, 87-97, 107
Webster-Hayne debate and, 94
writings of, 92, 93-94, 95, 96
youth, 84
California, vice president from, 433-47
Callaway, Howard ``Bo,'' Rockefeller and, 511
Cannon, Joseph G.
Fairbanks and, 317
Sherman and, 326-27
Taft and, 328
Capitol, U.S.
burning of, 68
telegraph at, 154
vice president lying in state in, 58, 239
vice president's death in, 239
Vice President's Room in, 239, 291, 365, 427
Carter, James Earl ``Jimmy''
in 1976 election, 500, 517, 521, 533
Mondale and, 521-24
Cass, Lewis
in 1844 election, 154
in 1848 election, 159, 173, 187
Breckinridge and, 198
Censure of president, 112-13
Central Intelligence Agency, 511
Chamber, House, Ford swearing in, 498
Chamber, Senate
assaults in, 175
funeral in, 239
Rockefeller swearing in, 505, 509
Chambers, Whittaker, Nixon and, 434
Chandler, Zachariah
1876 election and, 246
on A. Johnson, 213
Chase, Samuel, 40-42
Cheetham, James, Burr and, 37, 43
China
Bush in, 533
Wallace and, 403
Chinn, Julia, and R.M. Johnson, 125
Church, Frank F.
Mondale and, 521
Rockefeller and, 511
Civil liberties, Jefferson and, 24
Civil rights legislation
Barkley and, 428
Humphrey and, 466, 467
H. Wilson and, 236-37
Civil Rights Act (1957)
L.B. Johnson and, 456-57
Nixon and, 443
Civil Service Commission, creation of, 255
Civil War
Arthur and, 252
Breckinridge in, 198-99
Colfax and, 225
Hamlin and, 206-7, 208
Hendricks and, 262
A. Johnson and, 214-15, 216
H. Wilson and, 235-36
Clark, Bennett Champ, on Truman, 413
Clark, James B. (Champ)
in 1912 election, 339
on Sherman, 328
Clay, Henry
in 1824 election, 83, 87, 107
in 1832 election, 110
1840 election and, 140
in 1844 election, 155, 169-70
in 1848 election, 170
censure of Jackson and, 112-13
Clinton and, 57-58
Compromise of 1850 and, 98, 174-75, 185
dueling and, 39, 90, 184
duel with Randolph, 90
investigation of Calhoun and, 93
R.M. Johnson and, 123, 124, 125, 131
King and, 182, 183-84
opposition to Jackson, 111-13
opposition to Van Buren, 96
as presidential candidate, 87
as secretary of state, 89, 90
in Senate, 173
as Speaker of the House, 66, 67, 77, 85
tariff and, 97
Tyler and, 139, 144-45, 146
Cleveland, Grover
elected president, 256, 280-81
health of, 281
Hendricks and, 264-65
as presidential candidate, 264
Sherman and, 326
Stevenson and, 280-82
Clifford, Clark, Humphrey and, 473
Clinton, Cornelia Tappan, 50
Clinton, De Witt
in 1812 election, 66
Burr and, 37, 53
George Clinton and, 56
patronage and, 37
Tompkins and, 74, 76
Twelfth Amendment and, 36
Van Buren and, 106
Clinton, George, 49-60, illus. 48
in 1788 election, 5, 52
in 1792 election, 9, 52
and 1800 election, 34
in 1804 election, 39
addressing Senate, 57
appearance of, 50
breaking tie votes, 55, 57
Burr and, 33
as candidate for vice president, 51-53
characteristics of, 49
Constitution and, 51
in Continental Congress, 50
death of, 58, 63, 66
elected vice president, 42
as governor, 51, 53
in legislature, 50
patronage and, 37, 53
as presidential candidate, 55-57
presiding over the Senate, 54-55, 57
reelected vice president, 57
residence as vice president, 54
retired as governor, 52
in Revolution, 50-51
sworn in as vice president, 43, 49
as vice president, 53-58
youth, 50
Clinton, William J., 538, 551-52
Colbath, Jeremiah Jones. See Wilson, Henry
Colfax, Ellen Wade, 227
Colfax, Evelyn Clark, 224, 225
Colfax, Schuyler, 223-29, illus. 222
appearance of, 224
characteristics of, 223, 227
Credit Mobilier scandal and, 227-28
death of, 229
elected vice president, 227
Hamlin and, 206
in House, 224
as lecturer on Lincoln, 229
presiding over the Senate, 227
press and, 225, 227, 228
retirement of, 227-28, 237-38
as Speaker, 225-26
as vice-presidential candidate, 226-27
youth, 223
Colhoun, John Ewing, 38, 85
Collier, John, Fillmore and, 169-72
Committees, Senate, appointment of, 87, 90-91, 111-12, 128, 156
Compensation Act (1816), 121, 123
Compromise of 1850, 98, 174-76, 185
Confederate States of America, 198-99
Confederation Congress, 18
Congress
First, 8
Second, 8
Conkling, Roscoe
in 1876 election, 245
Arthur and, 251-55
Blaine and, 252-53, 256, 271
Morton and, 253, 270-71
resignation of, 247, 254, 272
Wheeler and, 243, 244, 247
Connally, John
on L.B. Johnson, 455
Nixon and, 485, 487, 493, 497
Constitution, U.S.
amendments proposed, 89
Article I, section 3, xiii, 65
Article II, section 1, xii, xiii, 6, 35
Burr on, 33
Clinton opposition to, 51
Gerry and, xv, 65
Constitution, U.S., Amendments
Twelfth, xii, xiv, 36, 52, 121
Thirteenth, 236-37
Fourteenth, 236-37
Fifteenth, 236-37
Seventeenth, 377
Nineteenth, 377
Twenty-second, 428
Twenty-fifth, xii, 342, 443, 485, 487-88, 493, 497, 508
Constitutional Convention, Gerry at, 64-65
Continental Congress
Adams in, 4
Clinton in, 50
Jefferson and, 17-18
Coolidge, Calvin, 347-54, illus. 346
in 1920 election, 343, 350
in 1924 election, 359, 362-63
appearance of, 353
attending cabinet meetings, 352
Boston police strike and, 349
characteristics of, 347, 351-53
Curtis and, 378
Dawes and, 359, 364-67
death of, 354
as governor, 349-50
as president, 353-54, 364-65
presiding over the Senate, 350-51
residence as vice president, 350
on Senate rules, 350
succeeding to presidency, 352-53
vetoes by, 354, 378
as vice president, 350-53
youth, 347
Coolidge, Grace Goodhue, 350-52
Corrupt bargain, 83, 93, 107
Cox, James M., 343, 350
Crawford, William H.
in 1824 election, 83, 87, 107
Bank of the U.S. and, 57
as president pro tempore, 58
as treasury secretary, 86, 123
Credit Mobilier scandal, 228-29, 238, 244
Crockett, David, on Van Buren, 114
Curtis, Anna Baird, 375, 378
Curtis, Charles, 373-81, illus. 372
in 1928 election, 367
appearance of, 375
breaking tie votes, 379
characteristics of, 375-76, 378, 380
Coolidge and, 351
Dawes and, 364
death of, 381
elected vice president, 379
in House, 375-76
on Indian Affairs Committee, 376
as presidential candidate, 378-79
presiding over the Senate, 380
as Republican whip, 377
in Senate, 377-79
as Senate majority leader, 377-79
on Sherman, 332
as vice president, 379-81
as vice-presidential candidate, 379
youth, 373-75
Curtis, Dolly. See Gann, Dolly Curtis
Cushing, Caleb, nomination rejected, 145
Cutler, Manasseh, on Burr, 40-41
Cutting, Francis B., Breckinridge and, 194-95
Czolgosz, Leon, 305

Dallas, Alexander, 40

Dallas, George M., 151-61, illus. 150
addressing Senate, 156, 158, 160
appearance of, 152, 161
banning liquor in Senate, 160
breaking tie votes, 158
characteristics of, 152
death of, 161
elected vice president, 155
Fillmore and, 172
nominated for vice president, 154
patronage and, 155
presiding over Senate, 156-61
residence as vice president, 157
in Senate, 153
travel expenses and, 157
as vice president, 156-61
youth, 151-52
Dallas, Sophia Nicklin, 152, 153
Dalton, Tristram, Adams and, 8
Daniels, Josephus, on Marshall, 342
Davis, David, 253
Davis, Henry G., in 1904 election, 316
Davis, Jefferson
Breckinridge and, 197, 199
Hamlin and, 204
A. Johnson and, 214
Davis, John W., in 1924 election, 363
Dawes, Caro Blymyer, 361, 366-67
Dawes, Charles G., 359-68, illus. 358
addressing Senate, 363, 367
appearance of, 362
attack on Senate rules, 363-65, 367
at Bureau of the Budget, 362
characteristics of, 368
Curtis and, 379
death of, 368
declining to attend cabinet meetings, 352, 364
elected vice president, 363
filibusters and, 363-67
financial problems of, 368
intervening on legislation, 366
missing tie vote, 364-65
presiding over the Senate, 364-67
testimony on wartime procurement, 361-62
on vice-presidency, 368, 426
as vice president, 363-67
as vice-presidential candidate, 363
winning Nobel Peace Prize, 362
in World War I, 361
writings of, 360
youth, 359
Dawes Plan for German currency, 362
Dayton, Jonathan, Burr and, 38
Debt imprisonment, 124
Declaration of Independence
Adams and, 4
Jefferson and, 17-18
Democratic party
in 1832 election, 110
in 1836 election, 114
in 1850s, 203
in 1950s Senate, 455
in 1968 election, 474
Calhoun and, 97-98
caucus making committee assignments, 156
formation of, 124
Hamlin and, 204
leaders and choice of vice president in 1944, 404, 414-15
nomination rules change in 1932, 390
in Pennsylvania, 153
Depew, Chauncey, on Sherman, 326-27, 329, 331
Dewey, Thomas E.
in 1948 election, 405-6, 425-26
Nixon and, 435-36, 440
Dickerson, Mahlon, Calhoun and, 89, 91
Dickins, Asbury
Senate election of R.M. Johnson and, 127
on travel expenses, 157
Disarmament. See Arms control
Dole, Robert J.
in 1976 election, 500, 512, 521, 533
in 1988 election, 537
Ford and, 495, 500
on Quayle, 552
Douglas, Helen Gahagan, Nixon and, 434-35
Douglas, Paul H., on LBJ, 461
Douglas, Stephen A.
in 1856 election, 195
in 1860 election, 197
Breckinridge and, 194
Buchanan and, 196
Hamlin and, 205
Hendricks and, 262
Stevenson and, 279
Douglas, William O.
as candidate for vice president, 411, 415
Ford and, 496
Truman and, 426
Drug smuggling, control of, Bush and, 536
Duels
Burr vs. Hamilton, 39
Clay vs. Randolph, 90
threatened, 184, 194-95
Dukakis, Michael, 537, 548
Dulles, John Foster
Humphrey and, 471
Nixon and, 439, 443-44

Eaton, John, Calhoun and, 95, 108

Eaton, Peggy, 95, 108
Ehrlichman, John
Agnew and, 483-84
resignation of, 486
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
in 1952 election, 435
deciding whether to keep Nixon on ticket, 444
health of, 443
Nixon and, 433, 436, 438-40, 443-47
Rockefeller and, 506
on vice-presidency, 437
Elections, presidential
1788, 5-6, 52
1792, 9, 52
1796, 10, 19-20, 53
1800, xii, 11, 25, 34-36, 53
1804, 39, 53-54
1808, 55-57
1812, 66
1816, 74
1820, 77
1824, 83, 86-87, 107, 125
1828, 92-93, 107-8, 183
1832, 110, 125
1836, 114-15, 121, 126, 139
1840, 115, 121, 129, 140-41
1844, 98, 116, 131, 154-55, 169, 184-85
1848, 116, 159, 170-71, 187, 235
1852, 176, 187
1856, 176, 195, 203, 205
1860, 197, 205, 225
1864, 215-16
1868, 219, 226, 237, 263
1872, 228, 238, 263
1876, 243, 245, 246, 263
1880, 247, 252-53, 263, 271
1884, 255-56, 264, 272
1888, 265, 272
1892, 273, 281
1896, 274, 282, 290, 314, 360
1900, 283, 300, 302-3
1904, 316
1908, 319-20, 327
1912, 306, 330-31, 338-39
1916, 320, 341
1920, 343, 349, 361, 377
1924, 353, 362-63
1928, 367, 378-79
1932, 381, 387-88, 400
1936, 390
1940, 392, 399, 400
1944, 399, 404-5, 411, 414-15
1948, 405-6, 425-26
1952, 435-37, 439
1956, 440, 444
1960, 444-45, 457-58, 467, 506
1964, 468, 471-72, 507
1968, 445, 474, 482, 496, 507, 520
1972, 446, 475, 486, 496, 508, 520
1976, 500, 511, 517, 521, 533
1980, 524, 533-35
1984, 524, 536
1988, 537-38, 547-48
1992, 538, 551-52
contested, 246, 263
Electoral college
in 1788 election, 6, 52
in 1796 election, 10, 19, 20
in 1876 election, 263
efforts to abolish, 89
Embargo Act (1807), 55
Everett, Edward, on King, 182
Expulsion from Senate, 193, 198, 262

Fairbanks, Charles W., 313-21, illus. 312

in 1916 election, 320, 341
addressing Senate, 318
appearance of, 315
characteristics of, 316
death of, 320
as presidential candidate, 318-20
presiding over the Senate, 316-18
railroads and, 314
in Senate, 314-15
as vice president, 316-20
as vice-presidential candidate, 315-16, 341
youth, 313
Fairbanks, Cornelia Cole, 313, 316
Farley, James
Garner and, 388
on Garner, 388-89, 392
Federal deregulation
Bush and, 536
Quayle and, 550
Federalist party
in 1790s, 9, 10, 11, 18, 21-22, 65-66
in 1796 election, 10, 19
in 1800 election, 35-36
in 1808 election, 56
Burr and, 37, 39
control of judges, 40, 41
Gallatin case and, 33
Jefferson on, 22
Federalists, in 1788 election, 5-6, 52
Ferraro, Geraldine, in 1984 election, 524-25, 536
Filibusters
Dawes and, 363, 365-67
Fairbanks and, 317-18
Mondale and, 523
Stevenson and, 281
Fillmore, Abigail Powers, 168, 176
Fillmore, Caroline McIntosh, 176
Fillmore, Millard, 167-76, illus. 166
in 1848 election, 159
in 1852 election, 176
in 1856 election, 176, 195
addressing Senate, 172, 174
appearance of, 168, 172
Dallas and, 160
death of, 176
in House, 168-69
patronage and, 171, 172
as president, 176
presiding over Senate, 168, 173-75
succeeding to presidency, 167, 176, 186
as vice president, 171-75
as vice-presidential candidate, 169
youth, 168
Foote, Henry S., Benton and, 160, 175
Ford, Elizabeth ``Betty'' Bloomer Warren, 494, 496
Ford, Gerald R., 493-500, illus. 492
in 1976 election, 500, 511-12, 533
1980 election and, 534-35
appointed vice president, 487, 493, 497, 508
appointing vice president, 508
Bush and, 531, 533
characteristics of, 498
in House, 495-96
on L.B. Johnson, 455
Nixon and, 487-88, 495-99
pardon of Nixon, 499
as president, 499-500, 508-12
Rockefeller and, 508-12
succeeding to presidency, 499
sworn in as vice president, 497-98
on vice-presidency, xiv
in World War II, 494
youth, 494
Foreign policy
in 1790s, 9-10, 22
Jefferson and, 22, 55
vice president involved in, 403, 441, 550
Forney, John W.
on Breckinridge, 194
Hamlin and, 208
on A. Johnson, 215, 218
on vice-presidential swearing in, 216
France
Gerry as envoy to, 65
Jefferson and, 18, 55
King and, 185
Revolution, 9
U.S. relations with
in 1790s, 10, 22, 34, 65
in 1830s, 111
Franklin, Benjamin, 18
Free Soil party
in 1848 election, 116, 171, 173, 235
in 1850s, 203
Hamlin and, 204
Freedmen's Bureau, veto of, 218
Freedom of the press, 24
Freeman, Orville, 517-19
Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 155, 169
Fremont, John C., 195
Fulbright, J. William, L.B. Johnson and, 458

Gaillard, John, 68, 88

Gallatin, Albert
Burr and, 33, 36, 39, 40
Clinton and, 53, 57
Dallas and, 152
on Gerry, 66
as Jefferson adviser, 54
as treasury secretary, 67, 74, 123
Gallinger, Jacob, Fairbanks and, 317
Gann, Dolly Curtis, 375, 380-81
Garfield, James A.
in 1880 election, 253
Arthur and, 254
death of, 254, 272
elected president, 247, 253, 271
Morton and, 271
as president, 253-54, 271-72
Garner, Ettie Rheiner, 386
Garner, John N., 385-93, illus. 384
in 1932 election, 381
1940 election and, 400
breaking tie votes, 389
characteristics of, 392
death of, 393
elected vice president, 388
in House, 386-88
influence of, 386, 389, 393, 426
intervening on legislation, 390
as presidential candidate, 392
presiding over the Senate, 389-90
as Speaker, 386-88
Supreme Court packing plan and, 390-91
Truman and, 413
on vice-presidency, 388
as vice president, 388-93
youth, 385-86
Genet, Edmond, 10
Clinton and, 52, 56
Gerry, Ann Thompson, 65
Gerry, Elbridge, 63-69, illus. 62
in 1812 election, 66
addressing the Senate, 66
in Constitutional Convention, 64-65
in Continental Congress, 63-64
death of, 68
elected vice president, 66
as envoy to France, 65
``Gerrymander'' and, 66
as governor, 66
in House of Representatives, 65
Jefferson and, 21
in legislature, 63
on legislative responsibilities of vice president, 65
presiding over the Senate, 66-68
during Revolution, 63-64
social life as vice president, 67
sworn in as vice president, 66
as vice president, 66-68
youth, 63
Giles, William Branch
as candidate for president pro tempore, 67
Clinton and, 57
Goldwater, Barry M.
in 1964 election, 472
Ford and, 499
Rockefeller and, 506-7, 510
Gore, Albert A., Jr., xviii, 525, 551-52
Gore, Thomas P., 317-18
Gorman, Arthur P., 282
Governor becoming vice president, 216, 303, 339, 347, 350, 482
Granger, Francis, in 1836 election, 127
Grant, Ulysses S.
in 1868 election, 219, 226-27, 237
in 1872 election, 238
in 1880 election, 22/5
Arthur and, 252
Colfax and, 223, 226-28
elected president, 227, 237
Great Britain
Burr on Jay Treaty, 33
Jay Treaty and, 21
Jefferson and, 55
U.S. relations with, 10, 66, 68, 123, 152, 159, 182, 270
Van Buren appointment to, 96
Greeley, Horace
in 1872 election, 237, 263
Colfax and, 224-25, 228
Grundy, Felix, 111, 127

Haig, Alexander M., Jr.

Agnew and, 487
on Bush, 532, 536
Ford and, 497-99
Haldeman, H.R.
Agnew and, 483-86
resignation of, 486
``Half-breeds''
in 1876 election, 245
in 1880 election, 253
in 1884 election, 256
Blaine and, 270
Conkling and, 254
Hamilton, Alexander, 9
1788 election and, 6
1796 election and, 10, 19
1800 election and, 11, 35-36
on assumption of state debts, 9, 65
as Burr ally, 33, 34
Burr gubernatorial campaign and, 39
Clinton and, 51, 52
foreign policy and, 10
Jefferson and, 18
killed by Burr, 39
Hamlin, Ellen, 205
Hamlin, Hannibal, 203-9, illus. 202
appearance of, 204, 206, 209
banning liquor from Senate, 207
characteristics of, 205, 209
in Coast Guard, 208
death of, 209
dropped from ticket for second term, 208, 215
elected vice president, 198, 206
in House, 204
A. Johnson and, 213, 219
in Senate, 204-5, 209
temperance and, 204
patronage and, 207
presiding over the Senate, 207
as vice-presidential candidate, 206
youth, 203
Hamlin, Sarah Jane, 205
Hancock, John, Adams and, 4, 5
Hanna, Marcus A.
Dawes and, 360
Fairbanks and, 315
Hobart and, 290, 293
T. Roosevelt and, 302, 306
Hannegan, Robert
Truman and, 414-15
Wallace and, 404
Hanson, John, 51
Harding, Warren G.
in 1920 election, 343, 349-50, 361
Curtis and, 377
Dawes and, 362
death of, 352
as president, 352
on vice-presidency, 352
Harper, Robert Goodloe
Burr and, 35-36
Pickering impeachment trial and, 40
Harrison, Benjamin
elected president, 265, 272
as president, 272-74, 280
Harrison, Byron P. ``Pat,'' Barkley and, 424
Harrison, William H.
in 1836 election, 127
in 1840 election, 115, 121, 130, 140-41
death of, 142
elected president, 115, 130, 141
presidential inauguration, 141-42
in Senate, 88
in War of 1812, 123
Hartmann, Robert, 498-99
Rockefeller and, 508
Hatfield, Mark O.
Ford and, 498
Quayle and, 546
Hay, John, 292, 306
Hayes, Rutherford B.
in 1876 election, 243, 245, 246
Arthur and, 252
elected president, 246, 263
Wheeler and, 246-47
Hayne, Robert Y., 94
Hearst, William Randolph, on Garner, 387
Henderson, David, Sherman and, 326
Hendricks, Eliza Morgan, 261
Hendricks, Thomas A., 261-65, illus. 260
in 1876 election, 245, 263
appearance of, 264
characteristics of, 264
death of, 265
elected vice president, 264
as governor, 263
health of, 263-64
in House, 261-62
patronage and, 265
in Senate, 262
as vice president, 264-65
youth, 261
Hildenbrand, William F., on Quayle, 547
Hillhouse, James, 36, 42
Hiss, Alger, Nixon and, 434
Hoar, George F.
on Morton, 273
presidential succession and, 265
Wheeler and, 245
on H. Wilson, 237
Hobart, Garret A., 289-93, illus. 288
addressing the Senate, 291
breaking tie votes, 292
characteristics of, 289, 291
death of, 293
elected vice president, 290
in legislature, 289-90
McKinley and, 290-93
presiding over the Senate, 291-92
as vice president, 290-93
youth, 289
Hobart, Jennie Tuttle, 289, 291
Hoover, Herbert
1924 election and, 363
in 1928 election, 378-79
bonus march and, 381
Coolidge and, 354
Curtis and, 373, 379
Dawes and, 361, 367
Garner and, 387
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 435
House of Representatives
in 1800 election, xii, 25, 35, 53
in 1824 election, 83, 87, 107, 125
confirming vice president, 497, 508-9
investigation of Calhoun and, 93
on presidential succession, 143
Speaker, becoming vice president, 223, 227, 388
Hughes, Charles Evans
in 1908 election, 320
in 1916 election, 320, 341
Sherman and, 327, 330
Hughes, Sarah T., L.B. Johnson and, 458, 461
Hull, Cordell, 401-2
Humphrey, Hubert H., 465-76, illus. 464
in 1968 election, 474-75, 482, 507, 520
in 1972 election, 475
arms control and, 467, 471
back in Senate, 475-76
campaigning, 470
characteristics of, 465-67, 476
death of, 476
foreign travel by, 470, 472-73
L.B. Johnson and, 459, 466-67
legislative achievements of, 467-68
Mondale and, 517-18
on Mondale, 519-20
oratory of, 465
as presidential candidate, 467, 474-75
in Senate, 466-68
on vice-presidency, 521
as vice president, 468-74
as vice-presidential candidate, 468
Vietnam and, 471-74
youth, 465-66
Hunter, Robert M.T., 181

Illinois, vice presidents from, 279-84, 359-68

Impeachment
of Blount, 22
of A. Johnson, 218-19, 226, 237
of Pickering, 40
of Samuel Chase, 40, 41-42
Independent treasury bill, 115, 129
Indian Affairs Committee, 376
Indiana
machine politics in, 338-39
vice presidents from, 223-29, 261-65, 313-21, 337-43, 543-52
Ingersoll, Jared, 66
Ingersoll, Robert G., A. Johnson and, 215
Iowa, vice president from, 399-406
Iran-Contra scandal, 536-37
Irving, Washington, 74

Jackson, Andrew

in 1824 election, 83, 87, 107
in 1828 election, 92-93, 107-8
in 1832 election, 110
1836 election and, 114, 126
Calhoun and, 92-93, 94-96
censure of, 112-13
dueling and, 39
elected president, 93, 108
on R.M. Johnson, 130, 131
R.M. Johnson and, 124-25
King and, 183
nullification and, 97
as presidential candidate, 87
Second Bank of the U.S. and, 109-10, 153, 183
in Senate, 88
Tyler and, 138
Van Buren and, 108-9, 110
on Van Buren, 116
Jackson, Rachel, 93, 95
Jay, John
Burr and, 33
as candidate for governor, 52
Jay Treaty, 10, 21
Burr and, 33
Jefferson, Martha, 18
Jefferson, Thomas, 17-28, illus. 16
in 1796 election, 10, 19
in 1800 election, xii, 11, 34-36
Adams and, 21, 25
addressing the Senate, 20, 25, 53
Alien and Sedition Acts and, 23-24
appearance of, 19, 20
Burr and, 40
on Burr, 34
on civil liberties, 24
Clinton and, 52, 53-54, 55, 56
death of, 25
Declaration of Independence and, 4, 18
elected president, xv, 25, 35, 42
elected vice president, 10, 19, 34
foreign policy and, 10, 55
as governor, 18
inauguration as president, 25, 36-37, 49
R.M. Johnson and, 122
Kentucky Resolutions and, 23-24
Manual of Parliamentary Practice, xvi, 24-25, 26, 87, 175
patronage and, 38
on presidency, 20
as president, 25, 49
presiding over the Senate, 24-25
reelected president, 42
on role of vice-president, 21
as secretary of state, 9, 18-19, 52
on state governments, 24
sworn in as vice president, 20
as vice president, xv-xvi, 20-25
writings of, 18, 21
youth, 17
Jobs Training Partnership Act of 1982, 546
Johnson, Andrew, 213-19, illus. 212
addressing Senate, 213
appearance of, 214
assassination plot against, 216-17
characteristics of, 214
death of, 219
elected vice president, 216
Hamlin and, 204, 205, 208, 209
homestead bill and, 214
in House, 214
impeachment of, 218-19, 226, 237
inauguration as vice president, 208, 213
pardons by, 199
patronage and, 218
as president, 217-19
Reconstruction and, 226
in Senate, 219
succeeding to presidency, 217
veto by, 218
as vice president, 216-17
as vice-presidential candidate, 208, 215
as war governor, 214-15
H. Wilson and, 236
youth, 213-14
Johnson, Claudia Alta ``Lady Bird'' Taylor, 454, 458
Johnson, Eliza McCardle, 214
Johnson, Hiram, 306, 349
Johnson, James, 122, 124
Johnson, Lyndon B., 453-62, illus. 452
1957 civil rights bill and, 456-57
in 1964 election, 468
Bobby Baker and, 454, 456
Bush and, 532
characteristics of, 455
death of, 461
as Democratic floor leader, 455-57
Ford and, 495
foreign travel by, 459
in House, 454
Humphrey and, 468-74
on Humphrey, 465
Mondale and, 519
post-convention Senate session and, 458
as president, 461
as presidential candidate, 457
presiding over the Senate, 459
Rockefeller and, 507
rules change and, 443
in Senate, 454-57
succeeding to presidency, 461
as vice president, 458-61
as vice-presidential candidate, 458
in World War II, 454
youth, 453
Johnson, Richard Mentor, 121-34, illus. 120
in 1828 election, 125
in 1836 election, 114-15, 121, 126-27
in 1840 election, 121, 129, 141
addressing Senate, 128, 129, 131
appearance of, 122, 129
breaking tie votes, 128
characteristics of, 131
death of, 131
debt imprisonment and, 124
in House, 122-24, 125-26
patronage and, 128
as presidential candidate, 126
presiding over Senate, 128
in Senate, 124-25
Sunday mail delivery and, 124
as vice president, xvii, 127-30
as vice-presidential candidate, 125-26
vice-presidential clerk and, 167
youth, 121-22
Jones, Jesse, Wallace and, 401-2, 405
Jordan, Leonard B., Agnew and, 483
Judiciary Act of 1801, 38

Kansas, vice president from, 373-81

Kansas-Nebraska Act, 205
Breckinridge and, 194-95
Hendricks and, 262
Kellogg, William P., Wheeler and, 244, 247
Kendall, Amos, 110, 126
Kennedy, Edward M.
in 1980 election, 524
Quayle and, 546
Kennedy, John F.
in 1960 election, 445, 453, 457
death of, 461
L.B. Johnson and, 453, 459-60
as president, 459-60, 467
as presidential candidate, 457-58
Kennedy, Robert F.
death of, 474
Humphrey and, 473
L.B. Johnson and, 457-58, 460
Kentucky Resolutions, 23-24
Kentucky, vice presidents from, 121-31, 193-99, 423-29
Kern, John Worth
Marshall and, 341
on Sherman, 332
Sherman and, 328
Key, Philip Barton, Burr and, 42
Khrushchev, Nikita, Nixon and, 441
King, Leslie L., Jr. See Ford, Gerald R.
King, Rufus, 67
Tompkins and, 75, 77, 78-79
King, William R., 181-87, illus. 180
in 1852 election, 187
addressing Senate, 186
appearance of, 182-83
Calhoun and, 91
characteristics of, 181, 183
Clay and, 182-84
Compromise of 1850 and, 185-86
death of, 187
in House, 182
as president pro tempore, 127, 128, 141, 160, 181
presiding over the Senate, 186
sworn in as vice president, 187
as vice-presidential candidate, 184-86
youth, 182
Kissinger, Henry
Ford and, 499
Rockefeller and, 507-8
Knowland, William F.
L.B. Johnson and, 456
Nixon and, 435
Know-Nothing party
in 1850s, 176, 195, 203
Colfax and, 224
Hendricks and, 262
Stevenson and, 279
H. Wilson and, 235
Knox, Henry, 6

La Follette, Robert M.

1912 election and, 330
in 1924 election, 363
filibuster and, 317-18, 363
on Sherman, 331
Sherman and, 330
tariff and, 329
La Follette, Robert M., Jr., 366
Ladd, Edwin, on Coolidge, 351
Lane, Joseph, 197
Lansing, Robert, 342-43, 352
Lenroot, Irvine, 349-50
Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963), 467, 471
Lincoln, Abraham
in 1860 election, 197, 205-6
assassination of, 209, 216-17, 226
Breckinridge and, 194
Colfax and, 223, 225, 226
elected president, 198
Hamlin and, 203, 204, 206-8
Hendricks and, 262-63
in House, 214
inauguration of, 213
A. Johnson and, 214, 215
Reconstruction and, 216
Stevenson and, 279
H. Wilson and, 236
Lincoln, Mary Todd, 217
Breckinridge and, 193, 194, 198
Liquor
in Senate, 160, 204-5, 207, 402
use by vice president, 78, 208, 213
Lloyd, James, and Calhoun, 91
Lodge, Henry Cabot
Curtis and, 377
on Hobart, 291
T. Roosevelt and, 300-302
on Sherman, 326
Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr.
Humphrey and, 472
Nixon and, 435, 437
Long, Chester, Curtis and, 376
Long, Huey P.
Garner and, 389-90
Truman and, 413
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 304, 380
Longworth, Nicholas, 304
Garner and, 386
Louisiana
in 1876 election, 246
Wheeler and, 244
Lowden, Frank
in 1920 election, 349, 361, 377
in 1924 election, 362
in 1928 election, 367
Lucas, Scott W., 427-28

Machine politics, 251, 270, 299, 301-2, 338, 412-13

Maclay, William
Adams and, 5, 7, 8
on Jefferson, 19
on removal of cabinet officers, 8
Macon, Nathaniel, 88, 93
Madison, Dolley, 67
Madison, James, 21
in 1790s, 19
1792 election and, 52
on 1800 election, 35
Burr and, 40
Clinton and, 53, 57
on Clinton, 52
Dallas and, 152
elected president, 57, 66
foreign policy of, 63, 66
on Gerry, 65
as heir apparent to Jefferson, 49, 53
inauguration of, 57
Jefferson and, 20, 54
as president, 57-58, 63, 67, 74
as presidential candidate, 55-57
Virginia Resolutions and, 23-24
Mahone, William, 253
Maine, vice president from, 203-9
Mangum, Willie P., 144, 167
Mansfield, Michael J.
Agnew and, 483
Bobby Baker and, 460
Ford and, 497
Humphrey and, 467, 469, 473
L.B. Johnson and, 456, 459, 460
Nixon and, 487
Rockefeller and, 508, 510
Marshall, John
Burr and, 37, 44
swearing in Jefferson and Clinton, 49
Marshall, Lois Kimsey, 338-39
Marshall, Thomas R., 337-43, illus. 336
in 1916 election, 320, 341
appearance of, 339
characteristics of, 337-38, 341
death of, 343
elected vice president, 339
as governor, 338
offices of, 340
presiding over the Senate, 339-41, 343
residence as vp, 350
as vice president, 339-43
Wilson's illness and, 342-43
youth, 338
Martineau, Harriett, on R.M. Johnson, 129, 130
Maryland, vice president from, 481-88
Mason, James, Calhoun and, 98
Massachusetts, vice presidents from, 3-11, 63-68, 233-39, 347-54
Mathers, James, Burr and, 41-42
Maysville Road, 125
McCarthy, Eugene J., 474
McCarthy, Joseph R.
Humphrey and, 471
Nixon and, 438
McClellan, George, H. Wilson and, 236
McFarland, Ernest W.
Barkley and, 428
L.B. Johnson and, 455
McGovern, George S., 475, 520
McKellar, Kenneth, Wallace and, 403
McKinley, Ida, 291, 360
McKinley, William
in 1900 election, 300, 302-3
Dawes and, 360
death of, 305, 315
elected president, 282-83, 290
Fairbanks and, 314-15
Hobart and, 290-93
as president, 289, 291-93, 300-302, 304
Sherman and, 326
McNary, Charles, 401
McPherson, Harry
L.B. Johnson and, 460
on L.B. Johnson, 456, 460
Mexican War, 159
Breckinridge in, 194
Michigan, vice president from, 493-500
Miller, William E., 472
Minnesota, vice presidents from, 465-76, 517-25
Missouri
machine politics in, 412-13
vice president from, 411-18
Missouri Compromise, 77
Mitchell, John, 507
Agnew and, 486
Mitchill, Samuel L.
on Burr, 40, 42, 43, 49
on Clinton, 55-56
Mondale, Joan Adams, 518, 522, 525
Mondale, Walter F., 517-25, illus. 516
in 1976 election, 500
in 1980 election, 524
in 1984 election, 524, 536
as ambassador to Japan, 525
appointed to Senate, 519
Carter and, 521-24
characteristics of, 519
cloture and, 510
as presidential candidate, 520-21
presiding over the Senate, 523
Quayle and, 549
in Senate, 519-21
on vice-presidency, 522, 549
as vice president, 522-24
as vice-presidential candidate, 521
writings of, 520, 522
youth, 517
Monroe, James
1792 election and, 52
Calhoun and, 85-86
on Clinton, 52
elected president, 75
Jackson and, 95
R.M. Johnson and, 123
reelected president, 77-78
as secretary of state, 67, 85
Tompkins and, 77, 78
on vice-presidency, 33
Morris, Gouverneur, on Clinton, 58
Morris, Robert, Adams and, 8
Morse, Samuel F.B., 154
Morse, Wayne L.
as Democrat, 455
as Independent, 442
Morton, Anna L.R. Street, 270, 273
Morton, Levi P., 269-74, illus. 268
appearance of, 271
banking and, 269-70
breaking tie votes, 273
characteristics of, 270-71
Conkling and, 251, 253
death of, 274
elected vice president, 272
as governor, 274
in House, 270-71
as minister to France, 271
not renominated, 273-74
as vice president, 273
youth, 269
Morton, Lucy K., 269, 270

National Defense Program, Special Committee to Investigate the, 414

National Republicans
in 1824 election, 83
in 1828 election, 93
in 1832 election, 110
Calhoun and, 86
Fillmore and, 168
opposition to Jackson, 111
Native American ancestry of vice president, 373-74, 380
Naturalization Act (1798), 23
New Jersey
indictment of Burr, 39
vice president from, 289-93
New York
customhouse in, 251-52, 271
east-west rivalry in, 170
in selection of vice president, xvi, 167
indictment of Burr, 39
machine politics in, 251, 270, 299, 301-2, 304
vice presidents from, xvi, 31-46, 47-60, 71-80, 103-18, 167-76, 243-
47, 251-56, 269-74, 297-307, 325-32, 505-12
News media. See Press
Nixon, Richard M., 433-37, illus. 432
in 1952 election, 435-37
in 1956 election, 440
in 1960 election, 444-45, 458
in 1968 election, 445 474-75, 482, 496, 507, 520
in 1972 election, 446, 475, 486
Agnew and, 481, 483-87
on Agnew, 483, 484, 485, 488
appointing vice president, 487-88, 493, 497-98, 508
breaking tie votes, 442
Bush and, 531-33
as campaigner, 439-40
California governor's race and, 445
``Checkers'' speech, 436-37
death of, 446
Eisenhower and, 433, 436, 443-47
on filling vice-presidential vacancies, 493
Ford and, 495-99
on Ford, 496, 499
foreign travel by, 441-42
in House, 434
pardon of, 499
as president, 445-46, 475, 482-87, 496-99
presiding over the Senate, 442-43
Quayle and, 549
resignation of, 446, 488, 499
Rockefeller and, 497, 506-8
secret fund and, 436
in Senate, 435
in South America, 441
in Soviet Union, 441
on vice-presidency, 446, 549
as vice president, 437-46
in World War II, 433-34
youth, 433
Nixon, Thelma ``Pat'' Ryan, 433, 442
Nobel Peace Prize, Dawes and, 362
Nominations rejected by Senate, 145, 364-65
Norris, George
Coolidge and, 351
on Curtis, 378
on Dawes, 364-65
filibusters and, 363-64
Nullification
Calhoun and, 94-96, 97, 108-9
in 1799 Kentucky resolutions, 24

Oregon boundary, 159

Otis, Samuel A., Adams and, 6

Panama Congress, 88-89, 107

Panic of 1837, 115, 129
Panic of 1873, 263
Panic of 1893, Dawes and, 360
Parker, Alton B., 316, 338
Parliamentarian, Senate, 366, 482-83, 510
Barkley and, 427
Parties, political
in 1850s, 203
development of, 9, 18
first caucuses, 156
first transfer of presidential power between, 25
president and vice president of different, 17, 19-20
Patronage, 272
Adams and, 6
Arthur and, 255
Burr and, 37
Clinton and, 53
Conkling and, 251-55
Dallas and, 155
Fairbanks and, 315
Fillmore and, 171-72
Hamlin and, 207
Hendricks and, 265
Morton and, 270-71
A. Johnson and, 218
R.M. Johnson and, 128
Sherman and, 329
Stevenson and, 280-81
Tompkins and, 74
Wheeler and, 247
Payne, Sereno, 328-29
Payne-Aldrich Tariff
Curtis and, 377
Sherman and, 329
Pendergast, Thomas, 412-13, 417
Pendleton, George H., 255
Pennsylvania, vice president from, 151-61
Pepper, George W.
on Curtis, 378
on Dawes, 366
Perot, Ross, 538, 551
Pickering, John, Burr and, 40
Pierce, Franklin
in 1852 election, 187
in 1856 election, 195
Breckinridge and, 194, 198
Dallas and, 161
elected president, 176
Hendricks and, 262
Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 35, 57
Pinckney, Thomas, 10, 19
Pinkney, William, King and, 182
Platt, Thomas C.
1884 election and, 256
on Arthur, 255
on Conkling, 251
Conkling and, 251, 253, 254
Morton and, 271, 274
on Morton, 274
resignation of, 247, 254, 272
T. Roosevelt and, 297, 299-302
Plumer, William
on Burr, 37, 39-40, 41
on Clinton, 49, 54-55
on Tompkins, 78
Political campaigns, changes in, 303
Polk, James K.
in 1840 election, 130
in 1844 election, 116, 154, 184
Calhoun and, 98
Dallas and, 159
elected president, 116, 155
Fillmore and, 170
Great Britain and, 159
on Hamlin, 204
Postmasters, patronage and, 280
President of the Senate
absence from the Senate, 77, 78, 207, 238
addressing the Senate, 7-8, 10-11, 20, 25, 36, 43, 53, 57, 66, 128-
29, 131, 141-42, 156, 158, 160, 172, 174, 196-97, 213,
291-92, 318, 363, 367
announcing electoral vote count, xiii, 20, 42, 130, 160, 198
appointing committees, 87-88, 128, 156
breaking tie votes, xiii, 3, 8, 10, 37-38, 55, 57, 96, 109, 114,
128, 158, 247, 253, 273, 292, 379, 389, 403, 416, 442
Democratic Conference and, 459
influence on legislation, xix, 55, 128, 366, 390, 426, 438, 460,
468-69, 473, 483, 549
last to preside regularly over the Senate, 423, 427
missing tie vote, 364-65
as party liaison, 550
powers of, xvi, 87, 90-92, 173-75
presiding over impeachment trials, 22, 40-42
presiding over the Senate, xvii
Adams, 7-9
Agnew, 482-83
Arthur, 253-54
Barkley, 423, 427-28
Breckinridge, 196-198
Burr, 37-38
Calhoun, 87-92, 94, 96, 174
Clinton, 54-55, 56-57
Colfax, 227-28
Coolidge, 351-52
Curtis, 380
Dallas, 156-61
Dawes, 364-67
Fairbanks, 316-18
Fillmore, 167, 173-75
Garner, 389-90
Gerry, 66-68
Hamlin, 207
Hobart, 291-92
Jefferson, 22, 24-25
L.B. Johnson, 459
R.M. Johnson, 128
Marshall, 339-40, 343
Mondale, 523
Morton, 273
Nixon, 442-43
Quayle, 549
Rockefeller, 510-11
Roosevelt, 303-4
Sherman, 329
Stevenson, 281-82
Tompkins, 76, 78, 79
Truman, 416-17
Van Buren, 87-92, 111-14
Wallace, 402-3
Wheeler, 247
Wilson, 238
relations with majority leader, 428
rulings by, 91, 366, 428, 442-43, 510, 523
ruling overturned by Senate, 427-28
signing legislative documents, 7
See also Vice President of the U.S.
President of the U.S.
appointing vice president, 487-88, 493, 497, 508
assassination of, 216-17, 254, 272, 305, 315, 460-61
censure of, 112-13, 138, 183
choosing vice-presidential nominee, 390, 400, 415, 425-26, 444, 468
considering whether to replace vice president, 444, 460, 485-86,
511, 551
death of, 142, 167, 175, 186, 209, 216-17, 226, 254, 272, 305, 315,
405, 417, 38/20
first not elected, 499
first not seeking second term, 146
health of
Bush, 551
Cleveland, 281
Eisenhower, 443
F.D. Roosevelt, 415, 416
Wilson, 342-43
incapacity of, 443
lobbying Congress, 340
relations with vice president
Adams, 21
J.Q. Adams, 88-89, 92-93
Buchanan, 196
Bush, 548, 550-52
Carter, 522-24
Cleveland, 264-65, 281-82
Coolidge, 359, 363-67
Eisenhower, 433, 437-40, 443-47
Ford, 509-12
Garfield, 254
Grant, 227
Harding, 352
B. Harrison, 273-74
Hayes, 246-47
Hoover, 373, 379-80
Jackson, 94-96, 110-11
Jefferson, 37, 39, 40, 49, 54, 55, 56
L.B. Johnson, 469, 470-74
Lincoln, 206-8
Kennedy, 459-60
Madison, 57, 63
McKinley, 289-93, 304-5
Monroe, 75, 77, 78
Nixon, 483-87, 498
Polk, 155, 159
Reagan, 535-37
F.D. Roosevelt, 388-92, 401-4, 416-17
T. Roosevelt, 316, 320
Taft, 328-30
Taylor, 172-73
Truman, 426, 428
Van Buren, 128
Washington, 3, 6-7, 10
W. Wilson, 337, 340-42
resignation of, 446, 488, 499
vetoes by, 146, 218, 354, 378, 425
Presidential candidate, choosing vice president, 482, 521, 524, 534-35,
537-38, 547-48
Presidential succession, xii-xiii, 143-44, 265, 342-43
Presidential Succession Act (1792), xii, 265
President pro tempore
addressing the Senate, 186
announcing electoral votes, 127
appointing committees and chairmen, 88, 111, 128, 144
in line of succession to presidency, xii-xiii, 145
most often elected, 181
practice of appointing at end of a Congress, 25, 67-68, 160
presiding over the Senate, 58, 186
swearing in vice president, 20, 128, 141
in vice-presidential vacancy, xiii, 144, 186
Press
Agnew and, 484
Bush and, 537
Coolidge and, 353
Curtis and, 378, 381
Fairbanks and, 314
Ford and, 498
Garner and, 392
L.B. Johnson and, 459-60
Quayle and, 543, 548, 550
Rockefeller and, 508
T. Roosevelt and, 306
Press corps, Washington
Colfax and, 225, 227-28
L.B. Johnson and, 459-60
Prevost, Theodosia Bartow, 33
Public lands, 183

Quay, Matthew, 302

Quayle, J. Danforth, 543-52, illus. 542
in 1988 election, 537-38, 547-48
in 1992 election, 551-52
Bush and, 537-38, 548, 550-52
characteristics of, 544-45
foreign travel by, 549
in House, 545
job training and, 546
presiding over the Senate, 549
in Senate, 545-47
on vice-presidency, 549
as vice president, 548-52
writings of, 552
youth, 544
Quayle, Marilyn Tucker, 543-46, 549

Radical Republicans

Colfax and, 226
A. Johnson and, 216, 217-18
H. Wilson and, 235-36, 237
Randolph, John
Calhoun and, 89-91
Chase impeachment and, 41
Clinton and, 55
duel with Clay, 90
Rayburn, Sam T.
Barkley and, 425
Garner and, 388
on Garner, 387
L.B. Johnson and, 454, 457-58
Truman and, 417-18
Reagan, Ronald
in 1976 election, 511, 533
in 1980 election, 524-25, 534-35
Bush and, 535-36
Iran-Contra scandal and, 536-37
Nixon and, 497
Quayle and, 546-47
Reconstruction
1876 election and, 246
Colfax and, 226
Hendricks and, 262-63
A. Johnson and, 216, 217-18
Wheeler and, 244
H. Wilson and, 236-37
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), 387, 402, 405
Reed, James A.
Coolidge and, 350
Dawes and, 364
Reed, Thomas B.
Curtis and, 375
Sherman and, 326
Reid, Whitelaw, 270, 273
Republican floor leader, Senate, first, 377-78
Republican party (1)
in 1790s, 10, 19, 21-22, 65-66
in 1808 election, 55, 57
in 1824 election, 83
in 1828 election, 107
Alien and Sedition Acts and, 23
attack on Federalist judges, 40
Burr and, 33-34, 37, 40
formation of, 9, 18
Jefferson and, 21
Tompkins and, 73, 74
Van Buren and, 106
Republican party (2)
first Senate floor leader, 377
formation of, 203, 205, 224-25
in Indiana, 314
machine politics in, 251, 270-72
Old Guard in, 313, 315-16, 326, 328, 330, 435-38
in Reconstruction, 226, 245
split in, 328, 330, 348
whip, 377
H. Wilson and, 235, 239
Republican party leadership, Nixon and, 437-38
Resignation of vice president, 97, 109, 487, 497, 508
Riddick, Floyd M.
Agnew and, 482-83
on Barkley, 427
Rockefeller and, 510
Rives, William C., 126, 139
Robertson, William H., 252-55, 271-72
Robinson, Joseph T.
in 1928 election, 379
Barkley and, 424
on Dawes, 364
Supreme Court packing plan and, 391
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 505
Rockefeller, John D., Sr., 505
Rockefeller, Margaretta (Happy) Fitler Murphy, 507-9
Rockefeller, Mary Todhunter Clark, 506
Rockefeller, Nelson A., 505-12, illus. 504
in 1960 election, 444, 506
in 1964 election, 507
in 1968 election, 482, 507
Agnew and, 482
characteristics of, 510
family background of, 505
Ford and, 508-12
as governor, 506-7
Nixon and, 497, 507-8
not seeking renomination, 511
presiding over the Senate, 510-11
on vice-presidency, 512
as vice president, 509-11
World War II and, 506
youth, 505-6
Rolvaag, Karl, Mondale and, 517-19
Roosevelt, Alice. See Longworth, Alice Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Alice Lee, 298
Roosevelt, Edith Carow, 304
Roosevelt, Eleanor, Truman and, 415, 417
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
in 1920 election, 343, 350
in 1932 election, 381, 387-88
Barkley and, 424-25
choice of vice president and, 400-401, 414-15
death of, 405, 417
Garner and, 388-93
L.B. Johnson and, 454
on Marshall, 339-40
Rockefeller and, 506
third term and, 392, 399-400
Truman and, 413-17
on vice-presidency, 385
Wallace and, 399-405
Roosevelt, Theodore, 297-307, illus. 296
1884 election and, 298
in 1904 election, 316
in 1912 election, 306, 331
Curtis and, 376-77
Dawes and, 360
death of, 306
deciding whether to run for vice president, 300-302
elected vice president, 283, 297, 303
Fairbanks and, 313, 315-16, 318-20
as governor, 299-302
as president, 305-6, 315-16
presiding over the Senate, 303-4
Sherman and, 326, 330
in Spanish-American War, 299
succeeding to presidency, 305, 315
on vice-presidency, 297, 301, 305
as vice president, xviii, 303-5
as vice-presidential candidate, 302-3
World War I and, 306
writings of, 297-98
youth, 297
Root, Elihu
T. Roosevelt and, 301, 305-6
on Sherman, 331
Sherman and, 327
Roush, J. Edward, 544-45, 551
Rules, Senate
call to order, 91-92, 96, 174-75
change at beginning of a Congress, 443, 510
cloture, 427-28, 442-43, 510, 521
Dawes and, 363-65
filibuster, 363-65, 367
point of order, 317, 428, 510, 523
rulings by presiding officer, xiv, 91, 318, 366, 428, 442-43, 510,
523
Rumsfeld, Donald, 509, 511-12
Rush, Benjamin, 5, 9, 20
Rush, Richard, 93
Russell, Richard B.
Barkley and, 427-28
L.B. Johnson and, 454-58
Russia, 182. See also Soviet Union

Salaries, Senate, 157

Saulsbury, Willard, Hamlin and, 207
Scott, Winfield, 176
Seaton, Mrs. William A., 77
Secession
Breckinridge and, 197, 198
Calhoun and, 96
Secretary of Agriculture, Wallace, 400, 416
Secretary of Commerce, Wallace, 401-2, 405
Secretary of state
assassination plot against, 216-17
Buchanan, 155
Byrnes, 405
Clay appointed as, 87
Hull, 401-2
Jefferson, 10, 18-19
presiding over cabinet meetings in president's illness, 342, 343,
352
resignation of, 109, 111
Van Buren, 108-9
Webster, 142-43
Secretary of the Senate
on dates vice presidents sworn in, 216
election of R.M. Johnson and, 127
first, 6
on Quayle, 547
on travel expenses, 157
Truman and, 417
on vice presidency, 208
Secretary of the treasury
Crawford, 86, 123
Hamilton, 18
Taney, 111
Walker, 157-58
Secretary of war, 85-86, 123-24
Secret Service protection for vice president, first, 417
Sedition Act (1798), 23-24
Senate chamber
disorder in, 292
funeral in, 239
Rockefeller swearing in, 505, 509
Senate majority leader becoming vice president, 379, 425-26, 457-58
Senate, U.S.
choosing vice president, xviii, 115, 121, 127, 139
confirming vice president, 497, 508-9
even party division in, 253
expulsion from, 193, 198, 262
in impeachment trials, 40-42, 218-19
organizational matters, 90-91, 111, 156, 157
presidential succession and, 144
procedure, review of, 547
Senator becoming vice president, 186, 206, 238, 316, 379, 415, 425-26,
436-37, 457-58, 468, 521-22, 547-48
Senatorial courtesy, 254
Senators, compensation of, 157
Seniority system, beginning of, 156
Sergeant at arms, Senate, 367
banning liquor in Senate, 160
impeachment trials and, 41
maintaining order, 207
Sergeant, John, in 1832 election, 110
Seward, William H.
1852 election and, 176
in 1860 election, 205-6
Arthur and, 252
Burr and, 44
Compromise of 1850 and, 174
Fillmore and, 169, 170-72
Hamlin and, 206
A. Johnson and, 215
Lincoln assassination and, 216-17
Seymour, Horatio, 219, 227, 263
Sherman, Carrie Babcock, 325
Sherman, James S., 325-32, illus. 324
characteristics of, 328-29, 331-32
Committee of the Whole and, 326
death of, 331
elected vice president, 320, 328
health of, 331
in House, 325-27
presiding over the Senate, 329
as vice president, 328-31
as vice-presidential candidate, 328
youth, 325
Sherman Silver Purchase Act, 281
Shively, Benjamin, Marshall and, 341
Slavery
Breckinridge on, 194
Hamlin and, 205
Hendricks and, 263
in the territories, 173, 185-86, 194-95, 197, 204
Tyler on, 138
Whigs and, 169-70, 171
Wilson and, 234-35, 236
Smathers, George A., 455-56, 459, 461
Smith, Alfred
in 1928 election, 379
Garner and, 387
Smith, Margaret Bayard, 122
Smith, Samuel
Clinton and, 55, 57
committee chairman, 88
Smithsonian Institution, Marshall and, 337
Smoot, Reed, Dawes on, 365
South Carolina, vice president from, 83-99
Southard, Samuel, 144
Soviet Union, 403-5
Spain
relations with in 1898, 292
Burr conspiracy and, 44
Spanish-American War, 292, 299
Sprague, Kate Chase, 251, 255
Sprague, William, 251
``Stalwarts,'' 251, 254
in 1876 election, 245
in 1880 election, 271
in 1884 election, 256
Morton and, 270
Stanton, Edwin, 226
Stevens, Thaddeus
Colfax and, 225
impeachment of A. Johnson and, 218-19
H. Wilson and, 236
Stevenson, Adlai E. (1835-1914), 279-84, illus. 278
in 1900 election, 283, 303
appearance of, 282
death of, 283
elected vice president, 281
in House, 280
patronage and, 265, 280
presiding over the Senate, 281-82
as vice president, 281-82
youth, 279
Stevenson, Adlai E. (1900-1965), 283-84
in 1952 election, 437, 439
in 1956 election, 440
Stevenson, Letitia Green, 279, 283
Stone, William, 317-18
Sumner, Charles
Grant and, 237-38
Morton and, 270
H. Wilson and, 235, 236, 237
Supreme Court
appointments to, 38
chief justice on presidential succession, 143
F.D. Roosevelt and, 390-91, 424

Taft, Robert A.

in 1952 election, 435
death of, 442
nomination of Wallace and, 416
Taft, William Howard
in 1908 election, 319-20, 327-28
in 1912 election, 306, 330-31
as president, 328-30
Taggart, Thomas, Marshall and, 338-39
Tammany Society, 73
Taney, Roger B.
as chief justice, 172
on presidential succession, 143
as treasury secretary, 111
Tariffs
1832, 97, 109-10
1842, 146, 169
of Abominations, 93, 108
Dallas and, 158-59
Payne-Aldrich, 329, 377
Taylor, Zachary
in 1848 election, 159, 170-71
death of, 167, 175, 186
elected president, 116, 171
Fillmore and, 172-73
inauguration of, 172
slavery and, 173
Teapot Dome scandal, 352
Tecumseh, 121, 123
Telegraph at U.S. Capitol, 154
Tennessee, vice president from, xviii, 211-19
Tenure of Office Act (1867), 218, 226
Texas
annexation of,
Calhoun and, 98
Van Buren and, 154, 185
vice presidents from, 385-93, 453-61, 529-38
Thomson, Charles, on Gerry, 64
Thurman, Allen G., 265
Thurmond, Strom, 405
Tilden, Samuel J.
in 1876 election, 243, 246, 263
Hendricks and, 263-64
Tompkins, Daniel D., 73-80, illus., 72
absence from Senate, 77, 78, 88
appearance of, 73
death of, 79
elected vice president, 75
financial problems, 76, 78-79
as governor, 74-75
patronage and, 74
presiding over the Senate, 76-77, 78-79
reelected vice president, 77-78
Van Buren and, 106
as vice president, 75-79
youth, 73
Tompkins, Hannah Minthorne, 73
Tower, John G.
Quayle and, 549
Rockefeller and, 511
Travel expenses, Senate, 157
Treason charges against Burr, 44
Treaty of Versailles, 343
Truman, Elizabeth (Bess) Wallace, 411-12, 415
Truman, Harry S., 411-18, illus. 410
in 1944 election, 405, 414-15
in 1948 election, 406, 425-26
appearance of, 414
Barkley and, 425-28
breaking tie votes, 416
characteristics of, 414, 418
death of, 418
on Humphrey, 465
legislation and, 427
as president, 417-18, 427-28
presiding over the Senate, 416-17
Rockefeller and, 506
in Senate, 413-15
succeeding to presidency, 405, 417
on vice-presidency, 415-17, 426
as vice president, 416-17
as vice-presidential candidate, 405, 414-15
in World War I, 412
youth, 411
Truman Committee, 414
Trumbull, John, Adams and, 8
Tyler, John, 137-46, illus. 136
in 1836 election, 127, 139
in 1840 election, 130, 140-41
addressing the Senate, 141-42
appearance of, 142-43
appointment of Calhoun, 98
candidate for vice president, 130, 139, 141
death of, 146
elected vice president, 130
Fillmore and, 169
in House, 138
nominations rejected, 145
as president, 144-46
resignation from Senate, 139
in Senate, 138-39
on slavery, 138
succeeding to presidency, 137, 143-44
sworn in as president, 143
vetoes by, 145-46
as vice president, 141-42
youth, 137
Tyler, Julia Gardiner, 146
Tyler, Letitia Christian, 138

Updike, John

on Ford, 494
on King, 182

Van Buren, Hannah Hoes, 106

Van Buren, Martin, 103-18, illus. 104
1824 election and, 87, 107
1828 election and, 107-8
in 1832 election, 110, 125
in 1836 election, 115, 121, 126, 139
in 1840 election, 115, 129-30, 140-41
in 1844 election, 116, 154, 184
in 1848 election, 116, 159, 171, 173
appearance of, 114, 116
appointed minister to England, 95, 96, 109
breaking tie votes, 114
Calhoun and, 88-89, 90-91, 93, 94-95, 96
censure of Jackson and, 112-13
committee chairman, 88
death of, 116
elected president, 115, 127
inauguration of, 128
as Jackson adviser, 95, 108-9
R.M. Johnson and, 124, 128, 129
King and, 184-85
in legislature, 106
as president, 97, 115, 129
presiding over Senate, 111-14
resignation as secretary of state, 109
as secretary of state, 108-9
in Senate, 78, 107-8
as vice president, 110-14
youth, 105-6
Vandenberg, Arthur H., 494
Garner and, 390
Truman and, 417
Veterans. See Bonus march
Vetoes, presidential
by Coolidge, 354, 378
by A. Johnson, 218
by F.D. Roosevelt, 425
by Tyler, 146
Vice-presidency
Adams on, 7
constitutional origins of, xi-xiii, 6
duties of, xiii-xiv
Jefferson on, 20-21
vacancy in, xii-xiii
Vice president of the U.S.
age of, xv, 195, 423, 425-26
appointed by president, 487-88, 497, 508
assassination plot against, 216-17
attending cabinet meetings, xix, 337, 352, 427, 439, 445
attending presidential meetings, 522, 549
banker as, 272-73
busts of, xix-xx, 239, 325
campaigning for congressional candidates, 428, 439-40, 470
chairing executive councils, 470, 483, 549-50
challenging president for nomination, 392
chosen by Senate, 127
cities and towns named for, 151, 314
clerk for, 167
confirmed by Congress, 497, 508-9
conflict with cabinet officers, 401-2
consulted by president
Adams, 6-7, 10
Bush, 535-36
Garner, 388-89
Hamlin, 206
Hobart, 291
Humphrey, 469
Jefferson, 21
Mondale, 522-23
Nixon, 437, 439
Quayle, 549
Sherman, 330
Van Buren, 110-11
declining to attend cabinet meetings, 364
died in office, 58, 68, 187, 239, 265, 293, 331
elected president, xv, xvii-xviii, 10, 20, 25, 115, 529
elected by Senate, xvii, 115
foreign travel by, 403-4, 441-42, 459, 470, 472-73, 485, 535, 550
influence of, 401, 406, 437, 460
involved in foreign policy, 550
as link to party leadership, 437-38, 550
maintaining law practice, 158
not consulted by president
Adams, 6
Agnew, 485
Breckinridge, 196
Burr, 37,
Bush, 537
Clinton, 54
Curtis, 373, 379
Dallas, 155, 159
Fairbanks, 316, 320
Fillmore, 172-73
Hamlin, 207
Humphrey, 470, 472
Jefferson, 21
L.B. Johnson, 459
R.M. Johnson, 128
Marshall, 340-41
Rockefeller, 509-10
Roosevelt, 305
Stevenson, 382
Truman. 416-17
Wheeler, 247
not renominated, xv, 208, 214, 228, 273-74, 405, 411, 414, 511
not seeking reelection, 392
offices of, 340, 350, 365, 416, 423, 427, 459, 469, 482, 522
oldest, xv, 423
perquisites of, 340, 350
presidential illness and, 342-43
presiding over cabinet meetings in president's absence, 342
presiding over cabinet meetings during president's illness, 443, 446
previous political experience of, xiv, xv
qualifications for, xvi, xviii
reasons for choosing, 487, 497, 508
reelected, 57, 93, 341, 390, 444, 536
renominated, 93, 130, 331, 341, 381, 433, 444, 486, 536, 551
residence of, official, 380, 509, 522, 535
residence of, private, 54, 350, 416, 442
resignation of, 97, 109, 487, 497, 508
role of, xiii-xiv, xvii, xix, 385, 393, 399, 401, 446, 470, 483,
549-50
seal, coat of arms, and flag, 428, 510
Secret Service and, 417
serving under two presidents, xiv, 57, 87, 93
song by, 360
staff of, xix, 350, 522, 549
succeeding to presidency, xv, xvii, 137, 143-44, 167, 176, 217, 254,
305, 352-53, 417, 461, 499
swearing in of
in House chamber, 498
outside United States, 187
youngest, xv, 195
See also President of the Senate
Vice President's Room
Barkley and, 427
Dawes and, 365
Hobart and, 291
plaque to Wilson in, 239
Vice-presidential candidates
announcement of, 543, 548
chosen by president, 390, 400
deceased, 331
qualifications of, 543
reasons for choosing, xviii
Agnew, 482, 486
Arthur, 253
Barkley, 425-26
Breckinridge, 195
Bush, 534-35
Calhoun, 87, 92-93
Clinton, 53, 57
Colfax, 226-27
Coolidge, 349-50
Curtis, 379
Dallas, 154
Dawes, 359, 362-63
Fairbanks, 315-16
Fillmore, 167, 170
Ford, 40/9,
Garner, 388, 390
Gerry, 66,
Hamlin, 203, 206
Hendricks, 264
Hobart, 290
Humphrey, 468
A. Johnson, 215, 208
L.B. Johnson, 453, 457-58, 460
R.M. Johnson, 126, 130
King, 184, 187
Marshall, 338-39
Mondale, 521
Morton, 271-72
Nixon, 435-36, 444
Quayle, 537-38, 547-48, 551
Roosevelt, 300, 302
Sherman, 327-28
Stevenson, 281, 283
Tompkins, 75
Truman, 404-5, 414-15
Tyler, 140-41
Van Buren, 109
Wallace, 393, 399-401
Wilson, 237-38
Wheeler, 245
Vice-presidential succession, xii
Vietnam War
Humphrey and, 471-74
Mondale and, 520
Nixon and, 483-84
Virginia Resolutions, 23-24
Virginia, vice presidents from, 17-26, 137-46
Voorhees, Daniel
filibuster and, 281
on Hendricks, 263-64
Voorhis, Jerry, Nixon and, 434

Wade, Benjamin F.

as candidate for vice president, 226-27, 237
Hamlin and, 206
A. Johnson and, 217
H. Wilson and, 236-37
Walker, Frank, Wallace and, 404
Walker, Robert J., Dallas and, 155, 157-58
Wallace, Henry A., 399-406, illus. 398
in 1940 election, 400-401
in 1948 election, 405-6
appearance of, 399
Barkley and, 425
breaking tie votes, 403
characteristics of, 399, 402
as commerce secretary, 405
influence of, 399, 401, 406, 426
not renominated, 411, 414-15
presiding over the Senate, 402-3
religious views of, 401, 404
as secretary of agriculture, 400-401
Truman and, 416
as vice president, 401-5
writings of, 400, 403-4
youth, 399-400
War of 1812, 66, 68, 123
Warhawks, 85, 123, 182
Warren, Charles, nomination of, 364-65
Warren, Earl, in 1952 election, 435
Warren, Francis E.
Dawes and, 365
Fairbanks and, 317
Warren, Mercy Otis, on Gerry, 63
Washington, George, 3, 19
in 1788 election, 5-6, 52
Adams and, 7, 9
elected president, 5-6
neutrality of, 9, 10
in Revolution, 32, 51
in second term, 9-10
Watergate scandal, 486, 497-98
Bush and, 532-33
Watkins, Charles
Barkley and, 427
Dawes and, 366
Watson, James E., on Dawes, 366
Webster, Daniel
in 1824 election, 87
in 1836 election, 127
1852 election and, 176
as secretary of state, 142, 143
Compromise of 1850 and, 98, 174
Dallas and, 158
opposition to Jackson, 111, 113
in Senate, 173
on Tompkins, 78
Van Buren and, 96, 112
in Webster-Hayne debate, 94
Weed, Thurlow
1840 election and, 140
Arthur and, 252
Fillmore and, 168-70, 171, 172-73
Westmoreland, William, 472-73
Wheeler, Burton K., Truman and, 413
Wheeler, Mary King, 243
Wheeler, William A., 243-47, illus. 242
in 1876 election, 246
breaking tie votes, 247
characteristics of, 243-44
death of, 247
health of, 243, 246
in House, 244-45
Louisiana contested election and, 244
patronage and, 247
as vice president, 246-47
as vice-presidential candidate, 245
youth, 243
Whig party
in 1836 election, 114, 127, 139,
in 1840 election, 115, 130, 140
in 1844 election, 169-70
in 1848 election, 170-71
in 1850s, 203
after 1850, 176
abolitionists and, 169-70
caucus making committee assignments, 156
Colfax and, 224
Fillmore and, 168-69
formation of, 111
H. Wilson and, 234
White, Hugh Lawson, 111, 113, 126-27
Willkie, Wendell, 401
Wilmot Proviso, 173, 204
Calhoun and, 98
Wilson, Harriet Howe, 234, 237
Wilson, Henry, 233-39, illus. 232
characteristics of, 233, 237
Credit Mobilier and, 228-29
death of, 239
elected vice president, 238
on Grant presidency, 238
health of, 238-39
A. Johnson and, 219
plaque in Capitol, 239
in Senate, 235-37
as shoemaker, 234
as vice president, 238-39
as vice-presidential candidate, 226, 228, 237
youth, 233-34
Wilson, Woodrow
in 1912 election, 306, 330-31, 339
in 1916 election, 341
Barkley and, 424
elected president, 331
illness of, 342-43
lobbying Congress, 340
Marshall and, 340-41
on Marshall, 337
T. Roosevelt and, 306
on vice-presidency, 340
World War I
Dawes in, 361
Marshall and, 341-42
Truman in, 412
World War II
Bush in, 530
L.B. Johnson in, 454
Nixon in, 433-34
Rockefeller and, 506
Wallace and, 401-2
Wright, Silas
1844 election and, 154
elected governor of New York, 170
R.M. Johnson and, 126, 128
liquor and, 204
panic of 1837 and, 129
tariff and, 93
Van Buren and, 113, 116
Wythe, George, 17, 24

X,Y,Z Affair, 22, 34

Yarborough, Ralph, 531-32

Yates, Richard, 33
Yellowstone expedition, 123-24