The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In 1896, Platt offered Morton as New York’s favorite son for the party’s presidential nomination at age seventy-two. Platt hoped to derail the bid of Governor William McKinley of Ohio, fearing he might consider free-silver currency in his platform, threatening the entrenched gold standard worshipped in the eastern financial centers. But Platt as a strategist was no match for McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, who returned the Republicans to the White House.

  Upon the defeat, Morton rejoined the banking world, where he built the Morton Trust Company, and in 1909 he accepted a bid from J. P. Morgan to merge into what became the giant Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. After a successful career in politics that had brought him to Congress, the vice presidency, and the governorship of his state, Levi Morton retired from the banking world in his eighties and died on his ninety-sixth birthday, likely more revered and almost certainly more remembered for his private activities than for his government service.

  ADLAI E. STEVENSON

  OF ILLINOIS

  In the history of politics in Illinois, one of the most illustrious names is that of Adlai E. Stevenson. But it is the fate of the twenty-third vice president of the United States that the reference usually is not to him but to his namesake grandson, who twice ran for the presidency and twice lost. And while the grandson remains heralded in Democratic legend as the epitome of morality and integrity in politics, the grandfather’s niche is found in his strong and consistent partisanship and office peddling.

  The first Adlai Ewing Stevenson actually came from Kentucky, where he was born on the family farm of John Turner Stevenson and his wife, Eliza, on October 23, 1835. The family originally came from Presbyterian stock in Scotland and northern Ireland before immigrating to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and finally the small town of Blue Water, Kentucky. There young Adlai attended a one-room schoolhouse lorded over by a tyrannical schoolmaster long remembered thereafter.1 The family raised tobacco until 1852, when a severe frost destroyed the season’s crop. The father, an owner of slaves, freed them, packed up sixteen-year-old Adlai and the rest of the family, moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where some other relatives lived, and bought part ownership of a sawmill.2 They left behind not only relatives but also slavery, which was barred in Illinois, and country life for the then-booming town.

  Young Adlai worked in the sawmill, taught at a local school, and attended Illinois Wesleyan. Then, with his parents’ help he returned to Kentucky and enrolled at Centre College, in Danville, where political debates first whetted his interest. There he also met the daughter of headmaster Reverend Lewis Warner Green, Letitia, whom he would later marry. But first his father’s death obliged him to return to Bloomington to run the sawmill. When the Reverend Green died, Letitia moved near Bloomington, where she and Stevenson finally were wed in 1866. They had three daughters and one son, Lewis, who would later be the father of the second and more famous Adlai Stevenson.3

  In the course of starting up a practice in law, the first Adlai inevitably became enmeshed in politics, at a time when the Democratic and Whig Parties were being challenged by a number of new splinter groups over issues ranging from slavery and immigration to trade and tariffs, the most prominent of those groups being the Know-Nothings. He was admitted to the bar in 1858, the year of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates for a U.S. Senate seat. Hearing some of them and inspired, he ran for town council in Metamora but lost, although he was later elected a district attorney in 1864.

  With the Civil War raging, largely unexamined and unexplained until later was the able-bodied Stevenson’s absence of military service or uniform. In the summer of 1863, an assistant provost marshal came to Metamora to register all unmarried men between twenty and forty for the federal draft, and Stevenson’s name appeared on the list. Long thereafter, political foes alleged that Stevenson had bought his way out of military service. There was no record, however, that he had hired a substitute as was allowed, that he had paid what was called “blood money” of three hundred dollars to escape the draft, as his younger brother William had done, or that he was excused for medical reasons. Some speculated later that he may have qualified for exemption as a widow’s son who had taken on the responsibility of providing for the rest of the family, although he was not living with his mother at the time.

  Later also, Stevenson was accused of joining the Knights of the Golden Circle, a group said to support the Confederacy and to actively oppose the draft. As he became more prominent in Democratic politics, other allegations were aired, including one that he had sold pistols to draft dodgers.4 Unquestionably he was politically ambitious and perhaps felt—as a later vice president, Dick Cheney, asserted about his lack of service in the Vietnam War—that he had “other priorities.”

  In 1869, Adlai and Letitia Stevenson moved from Metamora back to Bloomington, where he joined a cousin, James S. Ewing, in forming the law firm of Stevenson and Ewing, later one of the state’s best known. His genial nature and reputation as a witty storyteller made for friendships that crossed party lines and encouraged him to reach higher in politics.

  In 1874, on a wave of resentment toward the Republican Party resulting from the economic panic of the previous year, Stevenson ran as a Democrat for the U.S. House of Representatives in the normally Republican Thirteenth Illinois Congressional District. His Republican opponent, a colonel of the Union’s Bloomington regiment in the Civil War, was no pushover. He used a pitch aimed at local Democrats and the new reformers that much later would be called “class warfare” politics. Stevenson in turn railed against the “Republican moneyed interests of this country and their conspiring bondholders,” who exploited “the overtaxed and impoverished people.”5 Stevenson, however, always tempered his assaults with storytelling, as in his tale of a convicted murderer sentenced to hang while a local politician appeared on the same gallows platform. The murderer, when asked what his last wish was, demanded that he be hanged before the politician was allowed to speak.

  Some Republicans against Stevenson brought up the allegations of disloyalty during the Civil War. When one heckler yelled out during a speech, “You were a Confederate sympathizer and a Knight of the Golden Circle,” Stevenson shot back, “My friend, you are a liar. I want you to understand me. Anyone else who makes that statement is a willful and a deliberate liar.”6 His allegiance to the Union was clear in many ways, but the fact that he had not worn the uniform and had not been in combat hounded him thereafter.

  On Election Day, he was confronted at the polls by temperance crusaders demanding that he sign a pledge opposing the sale of liquor in Bloomington. Although he was a teetotaler, he refused, saying it was an individual choice. He won the House seat in a three-man race.

  Only two years later, when the Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio won the presidency in the controversial campaign against the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, more Republicans turned out, and Stevenson narrowly lost the House seat. He won it back in 1878 but lost it again in 1880 and in 1882. After that roller coaster ride, his political future looked grim. Of his congressional service, Stevenson told his friends, “I will pillow my head consoled by the thought that no act of mine has made the poor man’s burden heavier.”7

  Back in Bloomington, he worked for the election of the Democratic presidential nominee Grover Cleveland and in 1885 became his first assistant postmaster general, charged with overseeing fifty-five thousand fourth-class post offices across the country. Somewhat surprisingly but boldly, he expressed public disappointment with his own president’s slow pace in replacing Republican and independent federal officeholders with Democrats. When the New York World editorially scolded Cleveland, reminding him of “the obligations which an Administration elected by a great historical party owes to that party” after so many years of Republican control of the White House, Stevenson agreed.

  Soon he was doing his best to make up for the lost time. Local postmasters, often farmers whose post offices became the gathering places for community and political gossip, were ap
pointed at Stevenson’s pleasure and became a convenient recruitment tool for political allies and foot soldiers. The task sharpened his talent for the useful patronage giving that became a hallmark of his public service, even as civil service reforms broadened.

  He welcomed and often rewarded job seekers who became his political helpmates, having no hesitation about ousting Republicans and replacing them with Democrats, to the point of being known as “Adlai the Axeman.” The Republican New York Herald dubbed him “a man who uses the guillotine freely and is decapitating thousands.”8 Detractors had a field day, while approving Democrats shortened his job title to “General,” ironically giving some the impression that he had engaged in the high military service whose absence had brought the critics’ charges of disloyalty.

  In 1892, the New Yorker Cleveland sought to regain the presidency. He was easily nominated on the first ballot, and the Democrats looked for a mate from a midwestern state with a large electoral vote. Stevenson came from a large and by now well-known Illinois family, and his reputation as a congenial and accommodating “spoilsman” at the U.S. Post Office Department might also attract hopefuls for federal jobs.9 From the convention floor, an Illinois delegate offered Stevenson as “a man that is known by every woman, child and voter that ever licked a stamp, in every village and hamlet in the land.”10 He, like Cleveland, was nominated on the first ballot. The Republicans meanwhile renominated President Benjamin Harrison and took the New York publisher Whitelaw Reid as his running mate.

  In keeping with the still-prevailing custom, Cleveland eschewed virtually all personal campaigning, leaving the chore to Stevenson. The fame of “Uncle Adlai” as an arresting storyteller kept him in demand, and he was particularly effective in his native South. There he railed against the Republican force bill calling for federal monitoring of southern elections to protect the voting rights of former slaves, warning it would “disturb harmonious relations between blacks and whites and create the old race prejudice so bitter under carpetbagger regimes.”11

  On the currency issue, Stevenson tempered his pro-silver stance in deference to Cleveland’s support of gold, typically phrasing his endorsement for “a sound honest money and a safe circulating medium.” Critics accordingly labeled him a great straddler,12 but the Cleveland-Stevenson ticket won handily.

  With Cleveland a gold-standard man and Stevenson at best favoring a mixture of silver and gold in backing the nation’s currency, the new vice president kept his silence on the issue. Early in the new term Cleveland considered calling a special session of Congress to seek repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which in his view had already gone too far in threatening the dominance of gold reserves. One hard-money backer wrote Cleveland, apparently worried about the possibility of Stevenson suddenly succeeding him: “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.”13

  Late that spring, as the Stevensons were starting on a goodwill tour of the West, a bizarre episode occurred that if publicly known might have aroused similar concerns about what could happen if Cleveland were to die or become disabled and Stevenson the silverite become president, with a stock market panic already building. On May 5, the president, a longtime cigar smoker, noted a small growth on the roof of his mouth but thought nothing of it. But by mid-June it had enlarged to a painful and worrisome size. His wife, Frances, called the family physician, a prominent New York surgeon, who identified the growth as a malignant tumor that had to be removed. The surgeon recalled later that Cleveland would not agree to the operation unless it could be done in secret and would leave no telltale scar. Cleveland explained that public knowledge could shatter confidence on Republican Wall Street over a possible return to silver currency if the pro-silver vice president were to assume the Oval Office.

  Neither Stevenson nor any cabinet member was told, although under the presidential succession act then in force, executive power would have been placed in his hands if the president was physically unable to carry out his duties.14 It was decided the operation could not be performed in the White House nor at the Cleveland summer retreat at Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, where snooping reporters were likely to find out. The president himself came up with the solution. A close wealthy friend owned a luxury yacht, the Oneida, on which Cleveland often had gone fishing in Long Island Sound and off the coast of Cape Cod. No suspicions would be aroused if he was aboard for several days. A small team of surgical experts was assembled along with a prominent New York orthodontist assigned to construct an artificial jaw that, when installed, would in time enable Cleveland to speak normally.15

  Shortly after the unknowing Stevensons had embarked on their western trip, Cleveland took a private Pullman train to Jersey City, having a few cigars and whiskeys en route. Then he boarded a ferry to Manhattan and spent the night on the Oneida for what was advertised as a fishing cruise in the waters of Long Island Sound. In the morning the president’s huge frame was strapped to an oversized wicker chair in the yacht’s saloon as he underwent the surgery under anesthesia. In all, five teeth, a part of his palate, and his whole upper jaw were removed in the nearly ninety-minute operation. The jaw was replaced with a vulcanized rubber device, and to masquerade the truth, aides spread the word that Cleveland was having difficulty with his dentures.16 Important to him, his large moustache remained intact through it all. Two days later on the night of Independence Day, he was up and about on the Oneida, anchored off the coast of Sag Harbor, at the eastern end of Long Island, with the world none the wiser.17

  The next night the president arrived late at Gray Gables, his summer retreat, where a United Press reporter collared the chief surgeon on the porch of the house and asked him about an account that a cancer had been found and removed. The surgeon dodged, but by the next morning, the wire story had been picked up by newspapers around the country. Stevenson was in Chicago attending Fourth of July festivities at the World’s Fair, and when he heard the reports he left for Cape Cod to find out for himself what was going on. But Cleveland swiftly had a telegram sent to the vice president, assuring him all was well and asking him to go the West Coast for a series of meetings with party officials, guaranteeing he was kept in the dark. Soon Cleveland was back on his feet, his artificial jaw in place and working like a charm. When a second suspicious-looking growth was found, it was back aboard the Oneida for more surgery that proved to be minor.

  Meanwhile, the state of the economy had grown worse, with more banks and manufacturing plants closing. Cleveland by now had called for that special session of Congress to consider repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, hoping it would stabilize the economy. Stevenson, as president of the Senate, found his muted neutrality sorely tested while a filibuster against a repeal droned on. Claiming he had no power to stop it, he was accused by repeal advocates of “lacking the courage to refuse dilatory motions.” In any event, with no tie vote materializing, which would have enabled Stevenson to weigh in, the silver act was repealed after a compromise on the gradual reduction of silver purchases, which only enraged many silverites.18 With the Democrats so divided on the currency question, Cleveland came to see Stevenson and his silver allies as so detrimental to the economy that at one point he jokingly observed, “The logical thing for me to do … was to resign and hand the Executive Branch to Mr. Stevenson.”19

  Stevenson throughout his vice presidency remained popular on the social circuit for his humorous storytelling, but he never broke into Cleveland’s inner circle. Yet by now, his name was being mentioned as a possible Democratic presidential nominee once Cleveland finished his second term. But when the 1896 national party convention met, again in Chicago, Stevenson was accorded only alternate delegate status and waited in Bloomington for a call that never came. Although he had a long record as a silverite, his accommodating posture toward Cleveland on the currency issue reinforced the view that after all he was a straddler. The New York Times observed editorially, “The Vice Pres
ident says nothing but immaterial pleasantries. He could be readily adjusted to a sound money plank or a declaration for free silver. He would feel quite as much at home with one position or the other.”20

  On the other hand, the man who carried the message for silver at the convention, the thirty-five-year-old Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan, was anything but tongue-tied on the issue. His historic and defiant oration against the gold standard electrified the convention and brought him the nomination on the fifth ballot. Stevenson was left with a few scattered votes on each roll call.

  When Bryan spoke in Bloomington in the fall, Stevenson introduced him, and upon Bryan’s loss to McKinley of Ohio, he returned to his home town. Four years later, when the center of Bloomington was destroyed by fire, Stevenson joined in a campaign to rebuild it. In 1900, he was surprised to learn he had been nominated for another vice presidential term as Bryan’s running mate in his second bid for the presidency, as an old silverite.

  In the campaign, Stevenson largely left debating the currency question to Bryan, “the Boy Orator of the Platte,” and focused on foreign policy. He took on making the case against American imperialism in his view of its manifestation not only in the Spanish-American War but also in the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He called for abandonment of the latter occupation, arguing, “Sixty thousand [American] soldiers are now in the Philippine Islands. How much more will be the sacrifice of treasure and life before the conquest is completed? And when completed, what next?”21