The American Vice Presidency (49 page)

But Dawes now had his eye on a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 1902 and told McKinley of his intention to step down as comptroller. McKinley himself, in the face of some urging that he seek a third term, issued a statement squelching the notion, which prompted Vice President Theodore Roosevelt to invite Dawes to spend the night with him at his Oyster Bay home to discuss the 1904 presidential nomination—for TR, of course. Dawes promised Roosevelt his support in Illinois. But then came the shooting of McKinley in Buffalo, from which at first the president showed signs of survival. Three days afterward, Dawes met Roosevelt for lunch again to discuss the 1904 campaign, apparently with an expectation of McKinley’s recovery and with his pledge not to seek a third term in mind.

But with the death of his friend the president, Dawes’s support for the Senate seat soon faded. He returned to his highly successful business and banking pursuits, writing “with joy of a man entering from a political atmosphere to one where promises are redeemed and faith is kept.”
⁹
In succeeding years, Dawes fought for stronger enforcement of anti-trust laws, tried to cope with closing banks in the mid-1900s, and later personally engaged himself in charitable works. Upon the sudden death of his only son, Rufus, at twenty-two, Dawes built and endowed a hotel home for unemployed men in Chicago, later ran bread wagons for the destitute during the city’s frigid winters, and only occasionally lent a hand to friends in Republican politics.

When the United States finally entered the war in Europe in April 1917, Dawes, at age fifty-one, called on his good friend Pershing, now a major
general and the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, to obtain a commission as a major in the Corps of Army Engineers, having once worked as a railroad surveyor. In taking the position, Dawes turned down an offer from Herbert Hoover, just named the U.S. food administrator in charge of controlling domestic grain prices.

After training with the Seventeenth Engineers Regiment and promotion to the rank of lieutenant colonel, Dawes and his unit were the first to reach France, landing at Le Havre on a cattle boat. Pershing made him head of the army’s General Purchasing Board over all supplies in Europe, and he eventually was put in charge of the Military Board of Allied Supply, often going to the front to assure himself that the most pressing needs were being met. To the war’s end, both he and Pershing favored fighting on to total victory, with Dawes writing in his diary on October 3, 1918: “This war must be fought to finish, not negotiated to one.”
¹⁰
Five weeks later, however, the armistice was declared.

While wrapping up his work on the Military Board, Dawes was called on by Hoover to take charge of a military commission to dispense relief to the German civilian population. But Pershing declined to release him. Finally, after receiving the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest civilian wartime honor, Dawes went home to Chicago. There a boomlet for his presidential candidacy in 1920 awaited him, with his old friend but Democratic political rival William Jennings Bryan in the forefront. He declined the candidacy, and after ten ballots at the Republican convention, the ticket of Harding and Coolidge was nominated and subsequently elected over the Democratic governor James M. Cox of Ohio and Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York.

Three months later, Dawes was summoned before the House Committee on War Expenditures as the American Expeditionary Forces’ chief purchasing agent and to his immense irritation was called on the carpet. “Is it not true that excessive prices were paid for some articles?” one inquisitional congressman asked. Dawes shot back, “When Congress declared war, did it expect us to beat Germany at twenty percent discount? Sure, we paid high prices. Men were standing at the front to be shot at. We had to get them food and ammunition. We didn’t stop to dicker. Why, man alive! We had a war to win! It was a man’s job!” The interrogator continued: “Is it not true that excessive prices were paid for mules?” Dawes erupted with
his favorite epithet: “Hell and Maria! I would have paid horse prices for sheep, if the sheep could have pulled artillery to the front!”
¹¹

For much of the seven hours he sat before the committee, Dawes gave the committee what for, peppering his testimony with the odd declamation from his old Nebraska days. In reporting the flamboyant episode, newspapers wrote it as “Hell’n Maria!” which was thereafter often associated with the otherwise proper Dawes.

About a month before the inauguration, Harding offered Dawes the post of secretary of the treasury. He turned it down, telling the presidentelect that as a member of the cabinet he would have no authority over the others to do what he considered necessary to put the economy in order. According to Dawes’s biographer, he told Harding, “But, as your assistant secretary or assistant President or whatever you might call it, I could, if I could sit by your side and issue executive orders. Just because the United States Government is the biggest business in the world, there is no reason why it should be the worst run. But only one man can make it run right, and that is the President of the United States.”
¹²

Here again was another high-level proposal similar to that of Colonel House’s to Woodrow Wilson to create an executive position as first assistant to the president. Dawes made no mention of enhancing the role of the vice president, and in any event Harding still insisted that Dawes was the right man to bring the national budget into balance and should undertake it as head of the treasury. Again Dawes declined but told Harding the only job that would tempt him was director of the budget. Some months later, that offer was made and accepted. Before the conversation ended, Harding told Dawes he regretted running for president, was happier in the Senate, and after four years in the White House he intended to step down. “I’d like to see you nominated and elected president in 1924,” Harding told him. “I will do what I can to help you.”

In 1923, when Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, according to his own later memoir, urged Harding to seek a second term rather than leave the presidential nomination to Coolidge, Harding replied, “Charlie, you are not worried about that little fellow in Massachusetts, are you?” Harding put his hand on Curtis’s shoulder and added, “Charlie Dawes is the man who is going to succeed me!” A month later, however, Harding was dead, and Vice President Coolidge was president.
¹³

In his first year as head of the Budget Bureau, Dawes saved 1.75 billion dollars and reduced the federal debt by 1 billion, even as taxes were lowered, and the surplus continued in succeeding years. In 1923, with Germany in shreds after its defeat in the Great War, Harding appointed Dawes to head the Committee of Experts of the Allied Reparations Committee. Its task was to put Germany’s economy on its feet so that the battered country could pay the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Through the injection of two hundred million dollars in American and other Allied loans, the plan stabilized the German currency, established the Reichsbank, restructured the nation’s railroads, and raised reparations funds by issuing rail and industrial bonds, with a one-year moratorium on payments. But critics later argued that it also opened the door to Hitler’s takeover of power. Nevertheless, Dawes was awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work,
¹⁴
and he returned to Chicago to much public acclaim.

With the acclaim came a groundswell of speculation that he would be chosen as Coolidge’s running mate as the Republican nominee for vice president in 1924.
¹⁵
The frontrunner was the Illinois governor Lowden, and although nominated on the second ballot, he declined. Next, the party national chairman William Butler sought out Hoover, but his setting of farm prices during the war was judged likely to lose many farm states for the ticket. Coolidge next sounded out Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, who as previously noted asked, “At which end?”
¹⁶
Finally the convention turned to Dawes, and he was nominated on the third ballot.

The president, however, made a point afterward to read and edit Dawes’s acceptance message, an indication that he had no intention, if elected, of giving Dawes much deference in his administration. In the campaign, Coolidge’s participation was severely curtailed in July by the sudden death of his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., as a result of a seemingly inconsequential stubbing of his toe while playing tennis, causing blood poisoning. Coolidge was distraught, and his normal disinclination to campaign was compounded by the family tragedy. He eschewed the front-porch tactic and made few speeches, all of them low key, obliging Dawes to take up the slack against the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis of West Virginia.

Dawes focused on the principal threat to Coolidge, the Progressive entry, Robert W. LaFollette of Wisconsin, attacking him as a proponent of “red radicalism” and shouting “Hell’n Maria!” to the crowds’ delight. Davis,
frustrated by LaFollette’s appeal to Democratic liberals and Coolidge’s reticent appeal to conservatives, was stymied. The scandals of the Harding years seemed not to rub off on the staid and proper Coolidge. Davis lamented later, “I did my best … to make Coolidge say something. I was running out of anything to talk about. What I wanted was for Coolidge to say something. I didn’t care what it was, just so I had someone to debate with. He never opened his mouth.”
¹⁷

So Coolidge left the heavy lifting to Dawes, who in four months traveled fifteen hundred miles and delivered more than a hundred speeches. Repeatedly he asked the crowd to reject LaFollette’s call for congressional override of labor-backed judicial decisions, demanding, “Where do you stand? With President Coolidge on the Constitution and the flag, or on the sinking sands of socialism?”
¹⁸
The three-way race split the opposition to Coolidge and Dawes, and they won by a landslide.

Coolidge, however, gave little indication of gratitude to Dawes for stepping in on the campaign trail as he had done. Unlike Harding, who had invited Coolidge to sit in at cabinet meetings, Coolidge made no such offer to Dawes. A few weeks after their election, having not heard from the president on the matter, Dawes, possibly to save face, wrote to him saying he did not want to attend, saying doing so “would set a precedent that would sometimes prove a very injurious thing to the country.” He offered, “Suppose in the future some President with the precedent fixed must face the determination of inviting a loquacious publicity-seeker into his private councils or affront him in the public eye by denying him what had come to be considered his right—how embarrassing it would be.”
¹⁹

In this, Dawes seemed to protest a bit much, considering all his experience as a presidential adviser in several fields. Coolidge’s own position seemed puzzling, given that as vice president he had seen how helpful sitting in on cabinet meetings had been to him when he moved into the presidency. Soon after, in advance of their inauguration, Dawes wrote again suggesting to Coolidge, “In view of my unfamiliarity with Senate procedures, I think it best to get to Washington in time to be posted a little.” But Coolidge ignored “posting” him, a slight that later might have saved Dawes much embarrassment and Coolidge much disappointment in having a cabinet appointment rejected by the Senate over which Dawes presided.
²⁰

In taking the vice presidential oath in March, Dawes ignored the notion that the occupant of the second office should be seen and not heard. He surprisingly seized the spotlight to harangue members of the Senate for wasting their time engaging in filibusters and other excesses. Of the Senate Rule 22, requiring a two-thirds vote to close down debate, Dawes loudly lectured that it “at times enables senators to consume in oratory those last precious minutes of a session needed for momentous decisions [and] places in the hands of one or a minority of senators a greater power than the veto power exercised under the Constitution by the President of the United States, which is limited in effectiveness by an affirmative two-thirds vote.”
²¹

Dawes’s lecture to the senators was hardly a message to assure a smooth beginning to his role as presiding officer of their proud body. Worse, it took the play in news coverage from Coolidge, whose face was said to stiffen, but he made no open rebuke of the haughty Dawes. Nevertheless, a coolness clearly set in between the two men, diminishing the contribution Dawes might have made to the administration. Later, Dawes also took his case against the Senate filibuster to the stump, proclaiming that unless the issue went “to the people the fundamental institutions of the country [would] suffer.”
²²
But the matter remained for the Senate to decide, and so the filibuster survived.

Subsequently, Dawes committed an even more memorable faux pas during a lengthy debate on the Senate floor over the confirmation of Charles Warren, a controversial member of the Sugar Trust whom Coolidge wanted as his attorney general. Dawes, told by the majority and minority leaders there would be no vote that day because six senators had indicated they wanted to speak, asked a senator to preside and headed back his Willard Hotel apartment for a nap. Unexpectedly, five of those senators decided not to take the floor. Majority Leader Charles Curtis called for the vote on the nomination, and fearing the possibility of a tie requiring the vice president to break, Curtis sent word to Dawes to return to the Senate at once. He dressed quickly, raced down to the Willard lobby, and hailed a cab to the Capitol. But before he arrived, the vote did produce a tie. One Democrat who had voted for Warren switched his vote, thereby defeating Coolidge’s choice. Had Dawes been present, he could have broken the tie in Warren’s favor.

Coolidge, obviously chagrined, resubmitted Warren’s name, but this time it failed by seven votes.
²³
This was the first time in nearly sixty years
that the Senate had denied a president a cabinet nomination. Later, some speculated that Dawes might have snoozed intentionally, because at the 1924 Republican convention in Cleveland, Warren had cast the sole vote in the Michigan delegation against Dawes.
²⁴