[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
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