The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In a private letter to a friend, Roosevelt declared of the prospect, “I like life very much. I have always led a joyous life. I like thought and I like action, and it will be very bitter to leave my wife and children; and while I think I could face death with dignity, I have no desire before my time has come to go out into the everlasting darkness. So I shall not go into a war with any undue exhilaration of spirit or in a frame of mind in any way approaching recklessness or levity.”17

  When the war came, Roosevelt was given the rank of lieutenant colonel in a cavalry regiment under the command of Colonel Leonard Wood, a greatly admired friend. Quickly trained in San Antonio and shipped via Tampa to Cuba, the volunteers were a mix of western cowboys and Indians and eastern playboy horsemen, soon dubbed the “Rough Riders.”18 They subsequently took part in the famous charge up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt on horseback in the lead, and press reports of his daring and heroism soon made him a national hero.

  When the short and victorious war ended in August, the Republican Party in New York, seeking a candidate for governor in the fall of 1898, cast a sharp eye on the returning Roosevelt. But the state party boss, Tom Platt, was not at all certain he wanted this reform-minded dynamo in the seat of power in Albany and a prospective challenger to his party leadership. Platt finally agreed to back Roosevelt on the promise that he would be consulted on key appointment and policy decisions.

  In the fall campaign against the Democratic judge Augustus Van Wyck, Roosevelt whistle-stopped across upstate New York with uniformed Rough Riders prominently in view, regaling large crowds. He won the election on sheer personal magnetism, and it was not long until Platt began to think of getting him out of Albany by running him for vice president in 1900. Roosevelt’s closest political friend, Lodge, liked the idea. “I do not pretend to say that the office in itself is suited to you and to your habits,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “but for the future it is, in my judgment, 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.”19

  When Vice President Garret Hobart died in November 1899, Roosevelt’s name was increasingly heard as McKinley’s next running mate. But he told Lodge of the prospect, “I am a comparatively young man yet and I like to work. I do not like to be a figurehead. It would not entertain me to preside over the Senate.”20

  In early February 1900, Roosevelt informed reporters, “Under no circumstances could I or would I accept the nomination for the vice-presidency.” At one point he told Platt, “The more I have thought it over the more I have felt that I would a great deal rather be anything, say a professor of history, than vice president.” Platt, to such observations, reflected, “Roosevelt might as well stand under Niagara Falls and try to spit the water back as to stop his nomination.”21

  Soon, however, Roosevelt was saying, “I believe that I would be looked upon as rather a coward if I didn’t go,” in reference to the nominating convention, and by late spring he wrote to Lodge, “I did not say that I would not under any circumstances accept the vice presidency.” While still denying interest, he went to the convention and called on several state delegations wearing an old army cap, which skeptics came to call “an acceptance hat.”22

  Hanna by now had become dead-set against having the free-spirited and freewheeling Roosevelt on the ticket. As a stampede for him began to mount, Hanna was in despair, asking other convention delegates of the prospect of Roosevelt becoming vice president, “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between that madman and the presidency?”23

  To the satisfaction of New York boss Platt, the ticket of McKinley and Roosevelt was nominated unanimously, shunting the unmanageable Rough Rider off the New York stage and more than ever into the national spotlight. Roosevelt readily and enthusiastically took up the role of active campaigner, telling Hanna, “I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit,” which the campaign manager did.24

  Roosevelt made 573 speeches in 567 towns in 24 states crisscrossing the country for more that 21,000 miles. He repeatedly identified the Democratic presidential nominee, Bryan, as his opponent, taking him on in defense of American expansionism and the war with Spain. He campaigned defending gold in the Northeast and imperialism across the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains, where his rugged outdoorsman role played particularly well. At first he resisted the barnstorming, arguing, “It does not seem to me that a canvass from the rear end of a railway train, as a kind of rival to Bryan, is dignified, and therefore a wise thing for me.”25 But Hanna insisted, and the trip proved to be an excellent vehicle for the former cowboy, lashing out repeatedly against Bryan and silver as he flashed his fierce, toothy glare at mesmerized audiences. On Election Day, the Republican ticket coasted to victory. Hanna, still depressed about Roosevelt now a heartbeat from the presidency, wrote to McKinley, “Your duty to the country is to live for four years from next March.”26

  After their inaugurations, Roosevelt’s reservations about having to preside over the Senate proved to be unwarranted. The usual winter special session lasted only four days and adjourned until the following December. But McKinley seldom consulted Roosevelt on policy and appointments, instead generally looking upon him with a certain wariness toward his combustible nature.

  At the end of summer, he and McKinley each undertook a tour, the president visiting the Pan-American Exposition, at Buffalo, on September 6, and Roosevelt visiting Lake Champlain, in Vermont. After a leisurely lunch, Roosevelt was summoned to the telephone. It was Buffalo calling, to tell him that President McKinley had just been shot in the chest and stomach by a young anarchist, later identified as Leon Czolcosz, and was undergoing surgery. Roosevelt left at once for Buffalo, not knowing whether McKinley would survive, and on arrival he maintained a bedside vigil.

  The chest wound was not serious but the other was. The next morning, however, the president seemed to be doing better, and after the weekend Roosevelt was told he need not stay, and for public consumption it would be better that he not. Thereupon, expecting McKinley’s recovery, Roosevelt departed to a cabin in the Adirondacks for a short stay with his awaiting family. Six days after the shooting, with McKinley seemingly on the mend, the Roosevelts began a hiking party. But early the next afternoon a telegraph messenger found the hikers and brought Roosevelt the news: McKinley had died. Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States, even before the formal taking of the oath of office.

  Some years earlier, he had written that a 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.”27

  But Roosevelt, reformer at heart and with aggressive foreign policy notions, was not McKinley. He had no intention of being a mere caretaker of his predecessor’s agenda, and his personal flare for leadership produced considerable reforms in politics, including trust-busting and federal regulation of the railroads. On his first day as president, he told reporters at the White House, “I want you to understand at the start—I feel just as much a constituently elected President … as McKinley was. I was voted for as Vice-President, it is true, but the Constitution provides that in the case of the death or inability of the President, the Vice-President shall serve as President. And, therefore, due to the act of a madman, I am President and shall act in every word and deed precisely as if I and not McKinley had been the candidate for whom the electors cast the vote for President. That should be understood.”28

  Once again, a man who had accepted running for the vice presidency without enthusiasm had found that decision to be the most critical of his political career. He embarked on one of the most colorful presidencies in the nation’s annals
. In December 1901, with Roosevelt in only his second month as president, the Senate approved the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, in which the British agreed to allow the United States on its own to build and fortify a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Then, in November 1903, Roosevelt encouraged an insurrection that produced the independence of the Republic of Panama and paved the way for the start of construction of the Panama Canal across the Central American isthmus, perhaps Roosevelt’s greatest foreign policy initiative.29

  In a coal strike in May 1902, which might have paralyzed the nation, Roosevelt threatened to nationalize the railroads and run them with federal troops, forcing arbitration. And in foreign relations, he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1910 for mediation efforts in the Russo-Japanese War. After a second White House term with a vice president of his own, Roosevelt retired from public life but only for a time, soon to resume his political career, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter.

  CHARLES W. FAIRBANKS

  OF INDIANA

  Into the twentieth century, an axiom of presidential ticket making held that it was wisest to provide geographical balance to the party’s slate, choosing a running mate for the presidential nominee from a section of the country other than his own. In 1904, the Republican Party adhered to this counsel by selecting as President Theodore Roosevelt’s partner Senator Charles Warren Fairbanks, a native of Ohio resettled in Indiana.

  Fairbanks was not the choice of Roosevelt, who had shown only mild interest in the identity of a running mate. Mentioning the matter to his eldest son, Ted, however, he said of Congressman Robert B. Hitt of Illinois, a prominent member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “He would be an excellent candidate, and if I should be elected, he would be of all men the pleasantest to work with.”1 The observation at least hinted of some possibility of making use of his vice president.

  But many Old Guard Republican leaders preferred Fairbanks as a trustworthy conservative more in the McKinley mode, and Fairbanks, like Hitt, also came from the Midwest and would provide geographical balance to the ticket. At the nominating convention in Chicago, however, Hitt asked that his name be withdrawn, so Fairbanks was nominated by voice vote. It fell to him, as with Roosevelt in 1900, to carry the brunt of the fall campaign while Roosevelt mainly stayed in Washington running the country. But more than anything Fairbanks said or did on the campaign trail, Roosevelt’s huge popularity and force of personality were what carried the day over the lackluster Democratic presidential nominee, Judge Alton B. Parker of New York, and his running mate, Henry Gassaway Davis, a wealthy eighty-two-year-old West Virginian. The choice of Davis obviously was not made with his longevity in mind.

  Although Roosevelt himself had endured the customary underutilization during his own brief vice presidency, he was not inspired any more than most previous chief executives to put the second officer to work in any significant role in his administration. He had functioned without a vice president through his abbreviated first term, and at any rate Fairbanks was too orthodox a conservative to fit in with Roosevelt’s increasingly reformist and progressive style and ideas.

  Notably, in 1896 Roosevelt had written in regard to choosing a vice president, “It would be an unhealthy thing to have the Vice-President and President represented by principles so far apart that the succession of one to the place of the other means change as radical as any party overturn” by election. But when it came to making the choice for his prospective administration, Roosevelt disregarded his own advice and went along with the party leaders’ desire.2

  Charles Fairbanks was a the ninth-generation descendant of Jonathan Fayerancke, an English Puritan who had settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1636. Fairbanks was born on a farm in Union County, Ohio, on May 11, 1852, the son of Loriston Monroe Fairbanks, a farmer, and Mary Adelaide Smith Fairbanks, also of Union County. He was an industrious and studious boy obliged to help work the farm. A somewhat daring youth who loved to hunt and ride, he once broke an arm while successfully breaking a colt resisting his mount. Soon after, still wearing a sling, he caught and stopped a runaway team of horses.

  By age fifteen he had earned enough money to enter nearby Ohio Wesleyan University, where he was elected one of three editors of the college newspaper. Upon Fairbanks’s graduation, an uncle, a general manager of the Western Associated Press, got him a job as a reporter, first in Pittsburgh and then in Cleveland, where he went to law school for one term and was admitted to the Ohio bar. At age twenty-two, he moved to Indianapolis, where he married Cornelia Cole, a former fellow student at Ohio Wesleyan. Hired as a lawyer with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, his law practice soon thrived, focusing on corporate and transportation affairs in cases before the federal courts in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.3

  Fairbanks’s opposition to strikers in a railroad labor dispute in Indianapolis in 1877 drew the attention of Republican leaders in Indiana. Through the next decade and beyond he worked for various party candidates, and after another Hoosier Republican, President Benjamin Harrison, lost the White House in 1892, Fairbanks undertook rebuilding the party in disarray. In 1896 he became chairman of the party’s national convention in St. Louis and delivered the keynote address, the Indiana delegation, and the state for William McKinley in his victory over the Democrat William Jennings Bryan.4

  Fairbanks’s railroad connections enhanced his standing in the party as he parceled out largesse in the form of railway passes to political associates. He became a majority owner of the state’s largest newspaper, the Indianapolis News, and its chief rival, the Indianapolis Journal, increasing his political clout in behalf of the Republican Party in the state. He held no elective office but became an important voice in presidential politics, because Indiana often was the source of nominees for the national ticket, mostly for the vice presidency.

  In 1896 also, the Republicans took control of the Indiana state legislature, and grateful party members elected Fairbanks to the U.S. Senate. There he became a loyal and helpful McKinley ally as chairman of committees limiting immigration and imposing literacy tests for entry. He originally questioned going to war against Spain in 1898 but supported McKinley when war was declared. In a dispute with Canada over the border with Alaska, the president appointed Fairbanks to the Joint High Commission considering the issue. He endeared himself to Alaskans by declaring that he opposed the “yielding of an inch of United States territory,” and later the city of Fairbanks was named for him. One of his most advanced positions was his backing the demand of black soldiers fighting in Cuba to be led by black officers.5

  After the war, with McKinley seeking reelection in a rematch against Bryan in 1900, his chief political adviser, Mark Hanna, hoped to block the vice presidential nomination of Theodore Roosevelt with the candidacy of Senator Fairbanks. But Fairbanks declined being a sacrificial lamb, hoping to make his own bid for the presidency after McKinley was reelected and finished his second term. Fate decisively intervened with the president’s assassination in 1901 and the ascendancy of Roosevelt to the White House.

  Fairbanks’s hopes for a future presidency now seemed dimmer than ever. Hanna himself was being pushed by Old Guard Republicans for the 1904 presidential nomination against the despised Roosevelt. But in February of the election year, Hanna died, leaving Fairbanks as the closest Republican left with any connection to the departed McKinley. Roosevelt, however, had by this time cemented his hold on the party, and his nomination for a presidential term in his own right was assured. To assuage and accommodate the Old Guard, party leaders decided that it would be prudent to bestow the vice presidential nomination on the loyal old Charlie Fairbanks.

  But Indiana’s senior senator insisted he had no interest in the vice presidency and wanted to remain in the Senate. As the pressure mounted from Republicans in Indiana and nearby states, however, Fairbanks agreed to be offered to the convention. Of his eventual selection, Roosevelt was said to remark, “Who in the name of heaven else is there?”6

  After Roosevelt had been duly nomi
nated for another term, he quietly acquiesced despite his earlier declarations of preferring an ideological soul mate in the job. Senator Chauncey M. Depew of New York seconded the Fairbanks nomination, rather incongruously reminding the delegates of some of the great men in the nation’s history who had held the office, whose company Fairbanks seemed hardly destined to join.

  “It seems to me,” Depew said, “that we have not given enough importance to the office of the Vice-President of the United States. It was not so among the fathers. Then of the two highest potential Presidential possibilities, one took the Presidency, the other the Vice-Presidency. But in the last forty years, ridicule and caricature have placed the office almost in contempt. Let us remember that Thomas Jefferson, let us remember that old John Adams, let us remember that John C. Calhoun and George Clinton and Martin Van Buren were vice presidents of the United States. Eighty millions of people want for vice president a presidential figure of full size.”7 With this rather amusing bit of hyperbole, Indiana’s favorite son was unanimously nominated as Roosevelt’s running mate.

  In the ensuing campaign, Fairbanks took to the campaign trail but with neither the fire nor the charisma of the hero of San Juan Hill. He tried to make up for those shortcomings with thoroughness and diligence. But Fairbanks’s cold and stilted manner earned him the nickname “the Icicle” and prompted Peter Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley to pen: “Th’ republican convintion labored, too, like a cash register. It listened to three canned speeches, adopted a predigested platform, nominated a cold storage vice president, gave three especially cheers and wint home. The convintion’s mind all made f’r it met.”8

  Fairbanks boasted about his own abstemiousness, talking about his preference for wholesome buttermilk. But when a reporter covering a lawn party that Fairbanks hosted in honor of Roosevelt learned that Manhattans had been served, he was widely ridiculed as “Cocktail Charlie” to the taunting of prohibitionists.9