Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1990).

  Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (J. B. Ford and Co., New York, 1868).

  William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (Harper & Bros., New York, 1950).

  Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York University Press, New York and London, 2006).

  SAMUEL J. TILDEN

  1876

  A presidential candidate who averted a second civil war would seem heroic, but Samuel J. Tilden was instead criticized for not forcefully claiming a presidency many believed was rightfully his. Our leaders, it seems, are valued more for their aggressiveness than their restraint.

  The 1876 election, held during the national Centennial, had the highest voter turnout rate in history at 82 percent. Tilden, then governor of New York, won 51 percent of the popular vote to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s 48 percent. But Tilden was denied the presidency when he lost the Electoral College by a single vote.

  Tilden had gone to bed election night certain that he was the next president. He had already won 184 of the 185 electoral votes he needed for victory. He had carried the South except for three states that had not yet reported their returns: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Winning any one of the three would ensure victory.

  Election Night, most Republican Party officials had gotten drunk to dull the pain of expected defeat when Dan Sickles, a former New York congressman and Union general once acquitted of murder, walked into Republican headquarters and grasped the opportunity at hand. Without any authority to do so, Sickles wired Republican election officials in the three outstanding states and demanded, “Hold your states!” Republican election officials announced the next day that Hayes had eked out razor-thin victories in all three places.

  State Democratic officials were outraged by this apparent fraud and submitted slates of rival electors pledged to Tilden. But if the Republicans committed fraud, they did so with a clear conscience. Tilden’s margin of victory in the South was due in considerable part to violence and intimidation by armed whites to keep freed blacks from voting.

  This infringement on the constitutional rights of African Americans did not trouble Democrats, South or North. To their mind, their candidate had been robbed. Mobs gathered across the country to chant “Tilden or blood!” President Grant fortified the nation’s capital with additional troops, and gunboats patrolled the Potomac. Armed clubs, called “Tilden Minutemen,” formed in a dozen states, ready to march on Washington whenever Tilden gave the word. But he never did.

  A bookish, sickly child, prone to hypochondria and never married, Tilden, it was said, had admirers, not friends. He had displayed great courage and ingenuity in bringing down Boss Tweed as part of a reform campaign in New York. But after the presidential election, Tilden went into seclusion, saying no more than to urge calm. He occupied his time by preparing a legal brief on the precedent for counting presidential ballots, certain he would win the presidency on the legal merits. Tilden’s “fatal flaw,” says a character in Gore Vidal’s novel about the election, 1876, was that he possessed the “curious notion that men can be compelled by good argument to be honest.”

  Tilden declined to sanction mass protests on his behalf, let alone armed insurrection. His “sphinx-like” behavior befuddled his supporters. A Southern Democrat complained Tilden was “a bag of mush.”

  The Constitution is silent on what happens when the Electoral College votes are in dispute. Congress’s solution in 1876 was the creation of an unprecedented election commission composed of members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The commission began politically balanced but lost its one allegedly independent member, Justice David Davis, when he suddenly accepted election by the Republican-controlled Illinois Legislature to the U.S. Senate. Another Republican jurist replaced Davis, and on a straight 8-7 party-line vote the commission gave all three outstanding states’ electors to Hayes.

  Yet, Southern Democrats no longer threatened renewed civil war, and it was clear a secret deal had been made when Hayes, shortly after assuming office, pulled federal troops out of the South and ended Reconstruction. Though he, too, believed that he had been defrauded, Tilden told supporters to “be of good cheer. The Republic will live.” He thought he would get another chance in 1880, but Democrats, disillusioned by Tilden’s lack of fight, chose General Winfield Scott Hancock instead.

  Tilden had made a fortune as a Wall Street attorney and he bequeathed the majority of it to help start the New York Public Library. When he died, he asked that his tombstone carry the inscription, “I Still Trust in The People.”

  Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper and Row, New York, 1988).

  Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2008).

  William H. Rehnquist, Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 (Vintage Books, New York, 2004).

  Gore Vidal, 1876: A Novel (Vintage International, New York, 2000).

  WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK

  1880

  Americans love bestowing nicknames, particularly on politicians. Those unfortunate enough to have been tagged “Tricky Dick” or “Slick Willie” would certainly envy Winfield Scott Hancock for being known as “The Superb.” George McClellan gave that handle to Hancock for his work at the relatively minor Battle of Williamsburg during McClellan’s Peninsula campaign in the second year of the Civil War. Few men could carry such a title without embarrassment or irony, but such was Hancock’s character that it seemed a natural and honest description of the man.

  He was a corps commander throughout the war without responsibility for devising strategy, but his performance and personal courage at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania won plaudits and the deep affection of his troops. Ulysses S. Grant claimed in his memoirs that Hancock never made a blunder in battle, while William T. Sherman called Hancock “one of the greatest soldiers in history.”

  When he died in 1886, the New York Evening Post, which had supported James Garfield over Hancock in the 1880 presidential election, said Hancock was the most beloved and admired commander on either side during the Civil War. The affection felt for Hancock in the South was due largely to his tour of duty as military commander of Louisiana and Texas during Reconstruction, where he announced, to the anger of Radical Republicans, his goal of restoring civil liberties and returning civil authority as quickly as possible back to reconstructed Confederates.

  Why Hancock had been named after a military hero is unclear, because when the local congressman nominated Hancock for West Point, his father, a devout Christian and Democrat, opposed the idea. He yielded when convinced that if the world needed soldiers, they should at least be Christian ones.

  Based on his service during the war and on the frontier, and because of his appeal in the South, Hancock was considered a strong presidential candidate who could neutralize the Republicans’ post-war campaign strategy of “waving the bloody shirt.” But he lost the nomination in 1868 and again in 1876. His turn finally came in 1880.

  Sensitive to his good reputation, Republicans acknowledged Hancock was a good soldier—but no more. Hancock did not hold complex political views. He once suggested the party platform should simply read, ”An honest man and the restoration of the Government.” During the 1880 campaign, Hancock was mocked by Republicans for asserting the issue of federal tariffs was primarily a local issue, which as one observer noted, either indicated no understanding or a very profound understanding of the issue, depending upon how it was interpreted.

  Generally, however, issues were secondary to political affiliation. This was a period of extraordinary parity between Republicans and Democrats. Hancock lost the popular vote to Garfield by less t
han ten thousand votes out of more than nine million cast, the closest popular vote in history. Awakened, his wife told him of his defeat. “That is all right. I can stand it,” said The Superb, and then, with the same coolness he had demonstrated when wounded while defending against Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, he went back to sleep.

  John W. Forney, Life and Military Career of Winfield Scott Hancock (H. N. Hinckley and Co., Chicago, 1880).

  David M. Jordan, Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier’s Life (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996).

  JAMES G. BLAINE

  1884

  Despite being the state’s only presidential nominee, James G. Blaine is not memorialized with a statue anywhere in Maine. But Blaine achieved literary immortality in two renowned works of fiction as the very model of the cynical and corrupt “Gilded Age” politician.

  He inspired the characters of Colonel Beriah Sellers in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age and Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe in Henry Adams’s Democracy. In the latter book, the heroine asks Senator Ratcliffe whether democracies are doomed to be corrupt. Ratcliffe’s pragmatic response is, “No representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify government.”

  There is no doubt that the sentiment was inspired by Blaine. He was the master political operator—often operating on the edge of propriety. Tall, commanding, and eloquent, Blaine was, with the exception of Ulysses S. Grant, the most popular Republican politician of the late nineteenth century. Yet, he was the first Republican nominee to lose the presidency after the Civil War, and while he served admirably as secretary of state twice, Blaine had few great achievements as a legislator. One of his biographers wrote, “No man in our annals has filled so large a space and left it so empty.”

  Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming president—his margin of loss in New York to Grover Cleveland in 1884. It was an ugly campaign that revolved around questions about each man’s character; Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock, and Blaine, while a faithful family man, was engulfed in personal financial scandals.

  A one-time schoolteacher, Blaine was a Maine congressman who rose swiftly to become Speaker of the House and later senator. He had been implicated but cleared in the infamous Crédit Mobilier scandal in 1872, but four years later, it came to light that he had used worthless bonds in a troubled Arkansas railroad to leverage a sixty-four-thousand-dollar “loan” from the Union Pacific Railroad that he never repaid.

  He defused that crisis in a dramatic speech before the House in which he selectively read from letters that purported to exonerate him, while leaving out such parts as his own admonition to his correspondents to “Burn this letter!” Blaine was so deft in rebuffing these assaults on his character that he was dubbed the “Plumed Knight,” but money and politics were more closely entwined than usual in this period, and Blaine was continually charged with some new malfeasance involving money and influence.

  Two events in 1884 are usually cited for Blaine’s defeat. Blaine had a Catholic mother and had, as secretary of state, pushed Great Britain for Irish home rule, but when a Protestant minister supporting Blaine proclaimed that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” Blaine lost much Catholic support.

  The day after that fiasco, and just a week before the election, Blaine provided political cartoonists of the day with irresistible fare when he attended a lavish dinner at the posh New York eatery Delmonico’s to solicit funds from black-tied and well-fed millionaires—while most of the nation was reeling from a deep economic recession.

  Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1933).

  Neil Rolde, Continental Liar from the State of Maine: James G. Blaine (Tilbury House, Gardiner, Maine, 2007).

  David Saville Muzzey, James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days (Dodd, Meade, and Company, New York, 1934).

  Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, New York, 1996).

  ALTON B. PARKER

  1904

  As a young schoolteacher, Alton B. Parker had signed a contract with a school in a small town in his native New York only to find out when he arrived home that his father had secured him a higher-paying job the same day. When Parker proposed to take the better-paying job, his father said he could not do that; he had signed a contract and must honor it. So began a record of impeccable public propriety.

  Never the subject of a biography, Parker may be the most obscure of all losing presidential candidates. He had the misfortune of being overshadowed by his larger-than-life opponent in 1904, Theodore Roosevelt. And while active in Democratic Party politics, except for one county-level position, the only elected office he held was as chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the highest judicial office in the state.

  Parker was plucked from the bench to be the Democratic nominee for president as a result of Democratic infighting in New York. William Jennings Bryan, having suffered two consecutive defeats, was (reluctantly) persuaded to step aside in 1904. Rushing to take up Bryan’s mantle was newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, whom the New York Times charged with “greater recklessness” than even the populist Bryan. To stop Hearst, prominent conservative New York Democrats rallied to Parker.

  While Parker’s nomination for president is usually described as a triumph of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party (mostly because Parker supported the gold standard), Parker had a moderately progressive record on the bench. His rulings upheld the right of unions to strike and of legislatures to outlaw child labor and to establish the eight-hour workday. He was actually a good match for Roosevelt. Fifty-two years old, six feet tall, and a robust two hundred pounds, Parker exuded the same vitality for which Roosevelt was known. He began every morning at his farm with a swim in the Hudson River followed by an hour’s ride on horseback. But Parker was reluctant to wage a vigorous campaign. When Democratic convention delegates demanded Parker express his positions on the issues of the day, he replied that as long as he was a sitting judge it was inappropriate for him to express political opinions. If that dissatisfied the delegates, Parker said, he was content to “let the nomination go.”

  Even though Bryan and TR had established a new tradition of candidates vigorously campaigning on their own behalf, Parker disappointed Democrats by sticking to the nineteenth-century tradition of staying home and saying little. He did strongly criticize mistreatment of local citizens during the American occupation of the Philippines, and charged Roosevelt and his campaign with shaking down big business for contributions even as TR campaigned as a “trust-buster.” Parker’s liberal record on the bench was downplayed so that he would seem a safe alternative to the “lunatic” Roosevelt. But TR was wildly popular, and Parker carried the South and nothing else.

  Parker returned to private practice, and some said his run for president derailed his dream of being appointed to the Supreme Court. That is probably not true. President Woodrow Wilson might have appointed him, but Parker had opposed Wilson’s nomination in 1912. Owing Parker no favors, Wilson passed him over on the three occasions when he made a court appointment. Parker died in 1926.

  Because there is no biography of Parker, material for this essay was derived from Irving Stone, They Also Ran, and Leslie H. Southwick, Presidential Also-Rans and Running Mates, 1788–1980.

  CHARLES EVANS HUGHES

  1916

  Charles Evans Hughes is the only U.S. Supreme Court justice to have resigned to run for president. Fourteen years after Hughes lost an extraordinarily close race to Woodrow Wilson in 1916, President Herbert Hoover reappointed him to the court as chief justice, when it was routine to appoint politicians to the Supreme Court—a practice that is now unusual.

  Hughes, the son of an abolitionist Baptist minister, never wanted to be a politician. His love wa
s the study, teaching, and practice of law. But his brilliance was obvious, and he was tapped to help the New York Legislature investigate reports of inflated utility rates. The legislature, now cognizant of Hughes’s remarkable ability to unravel financial intricacies, then asked him to lead a second investigation into fraud and manipulation within the insurance industry.

  Hughes uncovered a particularly cozy relationship between key leaders of his own Republican Party and big business, so GOP leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, pressed Hughes to run for governor as the party’s only hope as a reform candidate in 1906. Hughes defeated newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in a close and bitter race.

  His progressive record, which included implementing solutions to the scandals his investigations had uncovered, won Hughes national acclaim. In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes to the Supreme Court, where his legal reasoning on such complicated issues as railroad regulation was so sound that of the 150 majority opinions he wrote in his first six years on the Court, his fellow justices offered dissents to only nine.

  There was already talk of nominating Hughes for president in 1912 as a compromise candidate who could heal the rift within the GOP between Roosevelt and Taft, but Hughes said it was improper for a justice to become involved in politics. Then, having observed the split that did occur between Taft and Roosevelt in 1912, Hughes changed his mind and agreed to be a unifying nominee for the Republicans in 1916. His ambivalence was noticeable in a lackluster campaign that cost him the presidency. While Wilson won the popular vote, 49 to 46 percent, had Hughes won California, a state he lost by less than five thousand votes, he would have been elected president.