THOMAS R. MARSHALL
OF INDIANA
Perhaps no previous vice president was more poorly treated up to this time than Thomas Riley Marshall of Indiana. He came perilously close to the presidency as a result of the serious physical incapacity of President Woodrow Wilson in October 1919, yet was kept in the dark about it. To his credit, when he learned of Wilson’s perilous condition, Marshall intentionally eschewed any word or deed that might have cast him as an opportunistic usurper of the highest office.
His benign response to the tempting situation did not stem from a lack of political ambition. In the 1912 presidential election, Marshall, as governor of Indiana, had entertained thoughts of winning the Republican nomination in what might well have been a deadlocked convention. Instead he settled for the vice presidency, and although the shortcomings of the office were well understood by him, he had neither the hubris nor the unscrupulous nature even to attempt to exploit the situation that presented itself in the second of the two terms he served.
Born in Columbia City, Indiana, on March 14, 1854, Marshall was the only child of a country doctor and his wife. Young Tom attended schools in Warsaw and Fort Wayne and then Wabash College, joining the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and achieving admission to Phi Beta Kappa. The most notable episode at Wabash was a two hundred thousand dollar libel suit against him and other staff members of the college paper for an article writing that a woman had been “kicked out” for flirting under a table with boys at her boardinghouse. After jury selection the case was dismissed at the request of the woman and her husband. The college paper later retracted the story and issued an apology. Marshall spent much of his free time at the county courthouse, viewing and listening to trials, afterward talking trial tactics with the lawyers and whetting his ambition to follow their career course.1
Marshall returned to Columbia City in 1873 and joined a small local law firm there, becoming an attorney of the Whitley County Court at age twenty-one. A confirmed bachelor for the next twenty years, he lived with his mother there until her death in 1894. Less than a year later, he married Lois Kimsey, a clerk in the office of her father, the county clerk in neighboring Angola. Marshall at this time was a heavy drinker, conspicuously seen hungover in court, until his wife talked him into being a teetotaler for the rest of his life, even to the point of being an occasional lecturer on temperance.2
Marshall was a short man who seldom weighed more than 125 pounds and walked with a slight limp.3 He was an avid reader with a quick mind and retentive memory but limited objectives. “I had then as I now have the happy faculty of superficiality,” he wrote whimsically later. “It enabled me quickly to learn any subject to which I put my mind, and just as quickly to forget it when I no longer needed it.”4 He was regarded by friends to be intellectually lazy but had the fortune of having a law partner who handled the heavy lifting, and they made a winning and prosperous partnership.
Marshall’s beginnings in politics were predictable and inauspicious. His grandfather had been elected as a county clerk in the days when Andrew Jackson was organizing what became the Democratic Party. Both Marshall’s grandfather and father remained Democrats through the Civil War, giving up their Methodist church membership when their minister threatened to banish them unless they stopped voting Democratic. Marshall’s biographer cited the grandfather saying he was willing to take his chance on hell but never on the Republican Party.5
Young Tom Marshall worked in the party starting in his early twenties, became secretary of his county convention in 1876, but lost his first election for prosecuting attorney in 1880. Discouraged, he did not run for public office again for twenty-eight years, though continued to serve on the state party central committee and to speak for other Democratic candidates. In 1906, he was pressured to run for Congress but refused, happy with his small-town life and good income. In 1908, a local newspaperman launched the idea that Marshall be nominated for the governorship, apparently without Marshall’s knowledge. A pamphlet was printed and circulated, first in his congressional district and later around Indiana in general. Without campaigning he was nominated, and that fall he stumped tirelessly, delivering 169 speeches, or as his wife put it, the same speech 169 times.6
His campaign for governor was marked by seeming indifference to the outcome. He frequently told listeners he had a solid law practice back home and didn’t care whether he became governor or not. When the party organized a train tour of Democratic candidates across Indiana, and Marshall learned it was being financed by the state brewery industry, he refused to travel on it. He rode on day coaches, paying his own way, so if elected he would be unencumbered by political debts.7 On Election Night, Marshall was elected, but the Democrats lost all but two other state offices and control of the state Senate, giving him a mixed legislature in his first two gubernatorial years.
In 1912, with his governorship soon to end by the state’s term limits, he decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination as Indiana’s favorite son. With Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey short of a majority, the Indiana party chairman Tom Taggart bartered the state’s delegates in a deal that put Wilson over the top on the forty-sixth ballot and made Marshall his running mate. Wilson did not learn of the deal until the next morning and simply acceded, though confiding to an ally that he judged Marshall “a very small caliber man.”8 After all this, Marshall at first rejected the office on the grounds that the salary of twelve thousand dollars a year was too little, and he could live better as a lawyer back in Columbia City. But his tearful wife changed his mind.
In the fall campaign against the Republican nominee, President Taft, and former president Roosevelt in his newly formed Progressive or Bull Moose Party, Wilson carried a heavy share of the load, but Marshall pitched in. He set an unprecedented and remarkable condition; once again he paid for all expenses for himself and his wife, who accompanied him throughout the campaign.9 The Republican Party was so devastatingly split that the result was predictable and lopsided: Wilson and Marshall, 41.9 percent of the popular vote and 435 in the electoral college; Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson of California, 27.4 percent and 88 electoral votes; Taft and James Sherman of New York, 23.2 percent and 8 electoral votes.
Marshall came into the vice presidency with no legislative experience and the confidence to match, but he took to his lot with good cheer and wit. After his first day presiding over the U.S. Senate, he remarked that his place in the chamber didn’t differ much from a monkey cage, quipping, “Except that the visitors do not offer me any peanuts.”10 He wrote later, “I soon ascertained that I 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 … to acknowledge the insignificance of the office, to take it in a good-natured way; to be friendly … to deal justly with those over whom I was merely nominally presiding.”11
On certain issues such as women’s suffrage and prohibition, however, he expressed his personal opposition, saying of the former only, “I never talk about it; Mrs. Marshall is opposed to it. That settles me on the question.” On the latter, he told the Virginia Bar Association, “I do not use liquor, never serve it at my table, and I wish to God that no one else did. But I object to the way prohibition has been imposed, though again I insist, now that it is here, it must be enforced.”12
In March 1914, around the second anniversary of the elections of Wilson and Marshall, Wilson’s wife, Ellen, suffered a fall, after which she was diagnosed with Bright’s disease. She died five months later, sending the president into a period of deep grief and depression. About a year later, when Marshall was on a trip to the Far West, he learned that Wilson was about to marry a second wife, Edith Galt. He sent her a folksy congratulatory letter, along with a native wool blanket woven by an American Indian woman for a Navajo chief, saying he hoped it was “worthy to be trodden underfoot by the great White Chief.” In reporting on the warm note from Marshall, biographer Daniel J. Bennett noted, “It would, however, do little to t
haw the icy demeanor of Edith Wilson, or change her thinly disguised disdain for Marshall and his wife,”13 as future events would confirm.
After the sinking of the British liner Lusitania in May 1915, with the loss of many Americans, Marshall argued that Americans who boarded such ships were in effect setting foot onto British soil and should expect to bear the consequences, and criticism mounted. The New York Times editorially observed that Marshall “should have sense enough not to embarrass the President by utterances at odds with his settled policy, and should not spatter flippant epigrams on an international tragedy.… If Indiana cannot raise men of presidential calibre, she should at least try to train mediocre men in some of the negative virtues. She should train them to keep silence when they have nothing to say.”14 But if Marshall’s occasional observations shocked and rankled many, they also won him some public respect as a man who spoke his mind.
Despite Marshall’s frequent squabblings with senators, usually Republicans, over some of his parliamentary rulings, he mixed firmness with humor and eventually was regarded as one of the better Senate presidents up to that time. Eventually, the same Times editorial board declared him “an American patriot, and the words he speaks have a sense and sanity that are urgently needed.… Some of the things he says may be regarded as platitudinous, but they can only be so regarded by men who do not know Thomas Riley Marshall.… Nobody has yet appeared as well qualified as the Vice President to state in plausible terms the longing of a great many American citizens to get back to where they used to be.”15
For all of Marshall’s substantive observations, however, his best-remembered utterance came as a whispered aside from the Senate president’s chair as one Senator Joe Bristow of Kansas droned on one day about what the country needed: “What this country needs,” Marshall offered, “is a really good five-cent cigar.”16 But the origins of the quote were later disputed. In any event, Marshall’s sense of humor was a hit in the Senate, and he often served it up for the more sober and intellectual Wilson. Shortly after their first nomination, he gave the president a book on Indiana humor inscribed: “From your only Vice, Thomas R. Marshall.”
But Marshall’s standing in the White House was sometimes shaky. In the course of one general discussion with Wilson over party and political matters, his close adviser Colonel Edward House suddenly raised the question of whether Marshall should be dumped from the ticket in 1916 in favor of Newton Baker, the former mayor of Cleveland and Wilson’s secretary of war.
House reported later what Wilson said in a commentary on how the vice presidency was then perceived: “He felt that Baker was too good a man to be sacrificed. I disagreed with him. I did not think that any man was too good to be considered for Vice President of the United States. I thought if the right man took it, a man who has his confidence as Baker has, a new office could be created out of it. He might become Vice President in fact as well as in name, and be a co-worker and co-helper of the President. He [Wilson] was interested in this argument but was unconvinced that Baker should be, as he termed it, sacrificed.”17
House recollected that his suggestion to Wilson reflected the thoughts of other party leaders, and he puzzled at the indifference of the intellectual Wilson to the notion. Wilson’s biographer John Milton Cooper Jr., of the University of Wisconsin, observed, “The idea of a vice president who might serve as a co-president should have appealed to Wilson. Having spent so much of life studying political systems and institutions, he was better equipped than anyone else to grasp the merits of this idea. Having an able and trusted vice president such as Baker at his side during his second term could have made a big difference in management and policy, particularly when it became a wartime presidency.”18
Apparently Wilson made no comment on a second term for Marshall at the time. As early as October 1915, however, with Marshall’s candor and witticisms drawing increasing comment and some criticism, Wilson had been reported as commenting, “It would be unlucky to run the same team twice.” Wilson denied having said it, but rumors continued, and one close Wilson friend, the former ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, also began to boost Newton Baker. But Baker squelched the talk, saying he was not a candidate. Many years later he said he had been informed that Wilson really did want him as his 1916 running mate, but when the president himself said nothing to him about it, he figured it wasn’t so.19
Meanwhile, a group of professional politicians moved to squelch any anti-Marshall talk. When Governor H. R. Fielder of New Jersey asked Wilson for his view on the matter, the president quickly sent back a note saying it was not his place to state a preference but also that Marshall had been “loyal and generous to the extreme,” adding, “He has given me every reason to admire and trust him.”20 And when the Democratic senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona pointedly asked Wilson whether he wanted Marshall as his running mate again, the answer was: “I have a very high regard for Vice President Marshall and I wish you would tell him so.” Well, did he support him for renomination? “Why, yes,” Wilson replied, and Marshall was routinely nominated by acclamation.21
In the fall campaign, Marshall continued speech making, focusing on the far western states, while Wilson only reluctantly got involved in the late stages. But only a few weeks before the 1916 election, Wilson and his closest political advisers now realized the election would be very close and that Hughes might edge him out.
The prospect led Colonel House to suggest a bizarre scheme whereby Wilson, before the results were in, would get his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, and Vice President Marshall to resign and then appoint Hughes to replace Lansing. Wilson himself presumably would then resign before the completion of his term in March. “The course I have in mind,” House wrote in his diary, published much later, “is dependent upon the consent and cooperation of the Vice President.”22 Under the presidential succession then in place, with the vice president resigned and then the president as well, Hughes would become president and thus avoid the awkward and perilous four-month interregnum that then existed between the election and the inauguration of the new president.
House approached Lansing and Wilson with the idea. Lansing was willing, but Wilson was noncommittal. Two days before the election, however, Wilson wrote a letter in shorthand, then typed it, and sealed it with wax in an envelope and had it hand-delivered to Lansing. In it, he advocated the idea, citing the wartime conditions and writing, “No such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever before existed,” adding that he had “no right to risk the peace of the nation by remaining in office after I had lost my authority.”23 As for Marshall’s possible acquiescence in the plan, constitutionally he had been separately elected, and Wilson had no legal power simply to fire him, but it would have been hard for Marshall not to go along had Wilson pressed him.
Later some disputed whether Wilson had actually asked Marshall to step aside, although the vice president in a September 1916 campaign speech in Terre Haute did say, “If I believed the European war would last during the remainder of the present administration, and there was a likelihood of a calamity befalling President Wilson that would shift the burden of responsibilities to my shoulders, I would resign my office.”24
The observation drew a fierce condemnation from one of Marshall’s home-state newspapers, the Fort Wayne Sentinel, saying outsiders who didn’t know him would “wonder what sort of a wild and woolly fool he is … lacking in backbone, nerve and manhood.” The editorial concluded, “If he feels that way about his office he should never have accepted a renomination and … it is not yet too late for him to retire.”25
Much later, after Marshall’s ultimate retirement, he reportedly told a close friend, J. C. Sanders, that Wilson had indeed asked him to resign but that he had refused because he had been elected to serve a full four-year term, and he intended to serve it out.26
In any event, Wilson took no action on Colonel House’s idea, and the outcome of the election eradicated the cause for concern. In a night-long nail-biter, wi
th Wilson going to bed believing he had lost the election, the Wilson-Marshall ticket narrowly prevailed over Hughes and Fairbanks when California went to the Democrats by fewer than four thousand votes, giving the Democrats 277 in the electoral college compared with 254 for the Republicans.
When Wilson took the country into the war in 1917, Marshall threw himself into making speeches to raise funds for Liberty Loan Bonds. But until then, he had adhered to the president’s neutrality proclamation while being outspoken about the drift to war. In 1915, he had said the United States had no right to tell any European country what kind of government it should have and that American businessmen should not make loans to England and France if true neutrality was to be observed.
When Wilson submitted war preparedness bills to Congress, Marshall guardedly told him the country would support “reasonable” steps and that the country “endorsed his efforts to maintain peace with honor.”27 After the United States became a combatant with the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, however, he apologized for his earlier mild position. He now questioned how “a God-fearing man in the twentieth century of civilization could have dreamed that any nation, any people or any man could be neutral when right was fighting wrong.”28
In advance of the 1918 congressional elections, Marshall somewhat naively proposed to Wilson that he, Marshall, make a speech “announcing that the only question before the American people was winning the war and standing behind the president.” He said he asked Wilson, “Should I not propose that both Democrats and Republicans nominate men pledged to these two objects and let the people make a choice?… I also suggested proposing to the Republican party to close up all political headquarters and to expend money saved thereby in Red Cross and other war activities.”
Wilson rejected the notion, Marshall said, telling him he “expected to issue a call shortly before the election for a Democratic Congress, and had no doubt that the people would give it to him because they had refused him nothing so far.”29 So with misgivings Marshall followed the partisan course and instead inflamed rival party resentment of the sort that would later poison Wilson’s efforts to win Senate ratification of the peace treaty with Germany.
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