The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  But the presence of Fairbank on the ticket was irrelevant. Roosevelt’s own force of personality swept the pair to victory on Election Night. Late that night, the victorious Roosevelt dictated a surprise announcement to reporters in the White House that had to be an encouragement to the ambitious Fairbanks: “On the fourth of March next I shall have served three and a half years, and this three and a half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”10 The declaration gave Fairbanks considerable basis for seeing himself as the next president. Once in the vice presidency, though, he found himself treated much the same as nearly all of his predecessors, the revered and the forgotten as well.

  In 1896, when Roosevelt was the New York City police commissioner, he had written an article in the American Monthly Review of Reviews arguing for much wider involvement by the vice president in his administration, including attending cabinet meetings with the president and being allowed to vote in the Senate rather than simply presiding and breaking ties.11 In the presidency, however, he showed no such interest in having Fairbanks looking over his shoulder, although the vice president did lend what help he could provide toward passing legislation sought by Roosevelt—and blocking bills the White House did not want.

  At the same time, Fairbanks, as a former senator, was not favorably disposed toward some of Roosevelt’s efforts to expand executive powers at the expense of the legislative process. In the president’s campaign against some of the most powerful corporate trusts, he preferred to rely on powers within his executive mandate rather than having to cope with the long and circuitous legislative route and political opponents on Capitol Hill. In intraparty rows on issues, Fairbanks often sided with the senators rather than with his own president.

  Roosevelt in turn had little regard for Fairbanks’s abilities, a view widely shared in the press. When Roosevelt told Finley Peter Dunne he was considering going underwater in a submarine, the author of the “Mr. Dooley” sketches replied, “You really shouldn’t do it—unless you take Fairbanks with you.”12 Roosevelt indeed did join one of the early dives of the USS Plunger, one of the first American submarines, but there was no record that he took Fairbanks with him then or on other such adventures.

  By December 1907, Roosevelt seemed to be having qualms about his impetuous announcement that he wouldn’t run again. He wrote a friend, “I hate for personal reasons to get out of the fight here,” and “I have the uncomfortable feeling that I may possibly be shirking a duty.”13 But he had given his word, and so he turned to his secretary of war and close friend, William Howard Taft of Ohio, to run. Taft preferred being named to the Supreme Court but agreed, with Roosevelt’s strong support. Roosevelt by now had little but contempt for the persevering Fairbanks, ignoring him and being more concerned about the challenge to Taft from the New York governor Charles Evans Hughes.

  Before the 1908 Republican National Convention in Chicago, however, reports of support not only for Hughes but also for Fairbanks baffled Roosevelt. He told a Hughes supporter, “Do you know who we have the most trouble in beating? Not Hughes—but Fairbanks! Think of it—Charlie 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 states that is hard to break. How and why is beyond me. It is easier to win delegates away from Hughes right in New York than to win them away from Fairbanks in those states.”14

  By the time the convention opened, however, the only real challenge to Taft was from Roosevelt supporters in the hall. They responded to a mention of the president by the permanent chairman Lodge with nearly an hour-long demonstration peppered by shouts of “Four More Years!” and “We Want Teddy!”15 Later in the day, Taft was easily nominated and, in November, beat the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, running and losing for a third time.

  After completion of his vice presidential term, Fairbanks returned to Indiana and resumed involvement in Republican Party politics there. After a serious split in the ranks, he lent himself to efforts to restore unity in Indiana and as a result briefly prolonged his career in national politics, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter.

  JAMES S. SHERMAN

  OF NEW YORK

  Most presidents-elect up to this time had been quite content to adhere to the tradition that their running mates elected with them essentially go their own way, which was to the Senate to preside in leisure, free of any serious involvement in the administration. But that was not to be the case in 1909, when William Howard Taft of Ohio had as his vice president elect James Schoolcraft Sherman, a journeyman House of Representative leader from New York, whom he had handpicked to be his successor as president.

  Taft, who was naturally regarded as a progressive of the Roosevelt school, anticipated he was going to have his hands full dealing with the Old Guard reactionary Speaker of the House, “Uncle Joe” Cannon. So he called in Sherman, known as “Sunny Jim” for his smiles, his easy-going disposition, and his talent for persuasion, and told him, “I am going to rely on you, Jim, to take care of Cannon for me. Whatever I have to do there [in the House] will be done through you.” But Sherman, who as vice president was elected on his own, replied, “Not through me. 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 of the Vice President.”1

  This was hardly an auspicious beginning of an official relationship or a personal one for that matter. Sherman may have felt he had nothing to lose, because a president has no constitutional power to fire the vice president. In any event this initial brush-up did not bar the two men and their families from sharing the box of honor at the inaugural ball. Thereafter, in fact, Taft and Sherman worked closely together on legislative matters while the vice president remained outside the Taft administration inner circle. The moderate Sherman had been tapped as Taft’s running mate to accommodate the Old Guard in a split Republican Party after nearly eight years of Roosevelt’s progressivism. His personal style helped soften conservative concerns that Taft would stick to the same progressive course.

  As a supporter of high tariffs, Sherman was believed to be persuasive in nudging Taft in that direction, to the chagrin of a principal administration critic in the party, progressive leader Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Taft later credited Sherman’s “charm of speech and manner, and his spirit of conciliation and compromise” for good relations on Capitol Hill. But he took note as well of “a stubborn adherence” to his principles, observing, “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.”2

  Sherman’s independence emerged fairly early in his life. Born on October 24, 1855, in Utica, New York, where his father, Richard Sherman, published a Democratic newspaper and ran a food canning plant, he followed a path that led him into the Republican Party. After graduating from nearby Hamilton College in 1878 and its law school a year later, he was admitted to the state bar in 1880 and set up a law practice with a brother-in-law. In 1881 he married Carrie Hancock, who gave him three sons. In Utica, Sherman joined several fraternal clubs and at age twenty-nine was elected as mayor as a Republican. Two years later, he was elected to Congress and, with the exception of one short break, served in public office at the national level for the rest of his life. His only loss came in 1890, when his support for the unpopular high McKinley Tariff cost him his House seat, but he won it back in the next election.

  With his congenial disposition and party fealty, Sherman became the center of a band of younger House Republicans from New York, showing no conspicuous interest in any leadership post and deferential to the advancement of his colleagues. He also emerged as an effective parliamentarian and through the years wa
s called upon by whichever House Speaker was in the chair to sit in for him when the House met as the Committee of the Whole. The designation permitted freer debate and the amendment of bills; in fact, Henry Cabot Lodge said 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.”3

  In 1900, with the retirement of Speaker Thomas B. Reed, Sherman ran for the office but lost to David B. Henderson of Iowa. Sherman then became Henderson’s chief lieutenant, a role he continued with Henderson’s famed successor, “Uncle Joe” Cannon. As chairman of the Committee of the Whole in 1896, Sherman presided over the House debate on tariff legislation that rejected the lower rates advanced by the Democratic president Cleveland and raised them in keeping with the Republican president McKinley’s objectives.

  When the assassination of McKinley in 1901 ushered in a more progressive and reformist administration under Theodore Roosevelt, Sherman stood staunchly with the Republican Old Guard. He had by now inherited his father’s food canning business and opposed legislation calling for more precise labels reporting the weights and measures of various canned items. A crusader for greater accuracy proposed that “Sunny Jim” Sherman be renamed “Short-weight Jim.”4

  While Sherman was denied an official leadership position in the House, within Republican Party ranks his popularity and fund-raising abilities in the business community brought him the chairmanship of the Republican State Conventions in New York in 1895, 1900, and 1908 and the chairmanship of the GOP Congressional Campaign Committee in 1906. At the 1908 state convention, with President Roosevelt having announced he would not run again and having proposed William Howard Taft as his successor, the New Yorkers backed their governor, Charles Evans Hughes, for president and Sherman for vice president.

  Upon Taft’s nomination, he hoped for a more progressive running mate. But Speaker Cannon and other House Republican leaders pushed for their genial friend “Sunny Jim,” arguing that a western presidential nominee needed a New Yorker on the ticket. According to Congressman Chauncey Depew in a later memoir, Taft’s political managers had already shopped around the second spot to several other Republicans from key states and then had to let them down easily. The device, Depew reported, was to call each of them, ask whether they would accept the vice presidential nomination, and before they could say yes, to take any hesitation as a no and hang up. That way, Depew wrote, the recipients of the call could say later they had been asked but had turned it down.5

  Others were romanced with the possibility of being Taft’s running mate, but all did indeed reject it. Speaker Cannon rose and made a fiery appeal for Sherman that sealed the deal, somewhat placating the disappointment of the Old Guard still wary of Taft as a progressive ally of the retiring Roosevelt. William Allen White wrote at the time that sticking Taft with Sherman marked “the revolt of the conservative Republican Party against … liberal leadership.”6 In the general election, Sherman dutifully campaigned for Taft, who won easily over the perennial loser Bryan, though it was doubted that with Sherman’s low national profile he affected the outcome.

  Although Sherman as the new vice president had at the outset rejected Taft’s efforts to have him “handle” Speaker Cannon, he later stepped in to help the president in other ways. When the 1910 congressional elections rolled around, Sherman carried out presidential assignments designed to strengthen the administration’s influence. But when Taft sent him into Wisconsin to try to prevent the Senate renomination of La Follette, he had no success.

  Taft also dispatched Sherman to his home state of New York to try to referee a party split that put the vice president into a struggle with former president Roosevelt over the election for governor. The Republican incumbent, Hughes, had just been appointed by Taft to the U.S. Supreme Court but was not to take the seat until mid-October, to enable him to complete some of his most-sought objectives in the state. One was legislation providing direct primary elections for public office rather than legislative selection, and Hughes had called a special session in June to consider it. Hughes had asked Roosevelt to endorse the progressive idea, and he had agreed. Taft also favored it, and Roosevelt saw the opportunity to demonstrate some unity on the reform and hence shore up the party in New York.

  But Roosevelt didn’t take into account the opposition of the Old Guard to the legislation, which would reduce its powers. And some wondered whether Roosevelt might be gearing up to get control of the party again in New York preparatory to another presidential run. Sherman as a status-quo regular warned, “We must stand up and hold matters together or the party is busted.”7

  In the end, the Direct-Elections Bill was defeated, and the regulars gloated at giving Roosevelt a political black eye. One leader of the anti-Roosevelt effort crowed, “Teddy is licked to a frazzle. We no longer worship the gods, we laugh at them.”8 But the progressives, in hoping to nominate one of their own for governor, persuaded the old Rough Rider to run for temporary chairman against Sherman, chosen by the Old Guard for the post. When Sherman called Taft and informed him of Roosevelt’s seeking the temporary chairmanship, the president said he had no objection. Sherman sounded an alarm to Taft: “Why, don’t you know that he will make a speech against you and the administration, and will carry the convention … and take the machinery out of the hands of your friends?” Taft told Sherman, “You must understand distinctly that you cannot involve me in a fight with Mr. Roosevelt over such a question.”9

  By this time relations between Taft and the former president who had chosen him as his successor were shredding, and the regulars pressed on, endorsing Sherman. When Taft read of the vote in the afternoon newspaper, he reportedly observed, “They have defeated Theodore,” and laughed.10 But that was not the end of the story.

  Roosevelt, upset over Taft’s seeming preference for Sherman over himself in this local wrangle, pressed Taft through an intermediary to issue a denial. The president, who remained so deferential to Roosevelt that he still referred to him as “the president” while owning the title himself, cravenly provided it. He wrote that he had done all he could to prevent the Sherman-Roosevelt contest. But the former president observed, “I am sorry that the Old Guard have put themselves in such shape that I shall have to go in and try to smash them,” twenty years after he had first struggled for control of the state organization.11

  At the state convention, however, Roosevelt was elected as temporary chairman after all, and his candidate for governor, Henry L. Stimson, was duly nominated but lost the election in a year the Republicans dropped twenty-five other governorships, eight U.S. Senate seats, and control of the House of Representatives.

  Taft’s breach with Sherman only got deeper when Taft appointed Stimson as his secretary of war, apparently as a gesture toward Roosevelt. As Old Guard concerns rose, talk began of running Sherman against Taft in 1912, and the vice president focused on strengthening his support in New York. But Taft told associates he believed Sherman was more interested in using the state as leverage to retain the vice presidency for a second term. By this time, in 1911, Taft and Roosevelt had come to agree that Sherman was bad business. Once, when the vice president at a church affair began to quote from the Bible, Roosevelt was said to have whispered to Taft, “When Jim Sherman quotes scripture, the devil must shake all hell with his laughter.”12

  Taft for his part began to think about dumping Sherman in 1912 for Governor Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri, in the hope of picking up some border and southern states. But Hadley was now committed to the possibility that Roosevelt might change his mind and run for president again. When an exhausted Robert La Follette had a physical breakdown in February of the election year, removing him from presidential contention, Roosevelt, despite his vow not to seek the presidency, did indeed jump into the race for the Republican nomination.

  The former president demonstrated his continuing popular appeal in several state primaries, but Taft managed to hold on to enough state organizations to claim the nominati
on. Sherman, rallying for Taft, helped carry the New York delegation for him. An outraged Roosevelt bolted the party convention and formed his own, known as the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, making it a three-way race, which in effect handed the presidency to the Democratic nominee, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey.

  In the meantime, the disheveled Republicans renominated Sherman as Taft’s running mate, making him the first sitting vice president so chosen to run again since John C. Calhoun, eighty years earlier. Sherman never made it across the finish line. He accepted the renomination, but Bright’s disease, a major kidney illness, prevented him from campaigning in the fall, and a few days before the election he died at age fifty-seven. Taft had to decide whether to name a replacement, but party leaders decided doing so would not be appropriate, so Taft ran alone and finished a poor third behind the winner, Wilson, as well as Roosevelt. For the purpose of recording the electoral count, the Republican National Committee chose Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, to complete the party’s ticket.

  As for Roosevelt, he returned to private life in 1913, championed American entry into World War I on the Allied side, and sharply criticized the American neutrality that continued until U.S. entry in 1917. Thereupon he sought to lead a volunteer unit, a latter-day version of the Rough Riders, to fight in France but was denied a commission. At only age sixty, he died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, only two months after the end of the war, having experienced one of the most vigorous and colorful lives of any American political figure in war and peace. Originally disdainful of the vice presidency as a political dead end that he preferred to avoid, he nevertheless gained greater national power and international influence from it than any previous “accidental” president.