The American Vice Presidency (44 page)

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 nomination. 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.

THOMAS R. MARSHALL

OF INDIANA

P
erhaps 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.
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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.
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Marshall was a short man who seldom weighed more than 125 pounds and walked with a slight limp.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 thaw the icy demeanor of Edith Wilson, or change her thinly disguised disdain for Marshall and his wife,”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”