The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In November the Bryan-Stevenson ticket was badly beaten by McKinley and his new running mate, Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York, failing to carry even Stevenson’s home state of Illinois. Eight years later at age seventy-three, Stevenson ran for the governorship of Illinois and beat four other Democrats in the state primary, campaigning across the Land of Lincoln by horse and buggy and the new auto car. In the fall, he opposed the Republican incumbent, Charles Deneen, saying after all his years as a prime Democratic spoilsman that he stood as a nonpartisan. “If elected,” he promised, “I will represent the whole people and I will never run again.”22 He came close enough to call for a recount, within twenty-two thousand votes of more than a million cast, but he was turned down by the Republican state legislature. Four years later, he put himself before the Illinois voters again, this time for a U.S. Senate seat, but failed to win the Democratic nomination.

  On Christmas Day, 1913, Stevenson’s wife, Letitia, died at age seventy-one at home in Bloomington. Six months later, on June 14, 1914, the twenty-third vice president died at seventy-nine in a Chicago hospital after a nervous breakdown and complications. Among those who mourned his death after a long career at the highest levels of politics was his fourteen-year-old grandson, destined later to write an even more cherished page in the history of the Democratic Party. He succeeded where his grandfather had failed in becoming the governor of Illinois but twice later fell short of the higher goal of the presidency, seldom displaying the extreme partisanship of his less-acclaimed forebear.

  GARRET A. HOBART

  OF NEW JERSEY

  The twenty-fourth vice president of the United States was a man who considered himself a corporate lawyer and businessman first and foremost. He boasted, “I make politics my recreation,”1 and he had never held an elective office higher than that of state senator in New Jersey. But Garret Augustus Hobart proved to be such an astute operative in both worlds and was so regarded by President William McKinley, under whom he served, that he was utilized almost as the country’s assistant president.

  Not since Martin Van Buren had served in the second office under Andrew Jackson had any presidential running mate been brought so importantly into a national administration as “Gus” Hobart was in McKinley’s acceptance of him in 1896. With the single exception of Van Buren, none of the other vice presidents up to Hobart’s time had taken office with any truly significant role in the policies of the administration to which he was elected. After Van Buren’s service to Jackson as a key political and policy adviser to him during his climb to national power, Van Buren had continued in his own climb, culminating in his election to the presidency in 1836. In Jackson’s first term, Van Buren was the president’s secretary of state, and Jackson was expected to choose Van Buren for the second term.

  Hobart by contrast hardly knew the president with whom he was called upon to serve. He had risen in prominence in the world of finance rather than national politics. His family roots traced back to Puritan New England, where his ancestors were ministers who had first settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in the 1630s. Their descendants moved to New Hampshire and eventually to New Jersey in the 1840s. A grandfather helped found Queens College, later renamed Rutgers. His father, Addison Hobart, was a schoolteacher, and his mother was Sophia Vanderveer, of New Amsterdam Dutch stock.2 After their marriage in 1841 they settled in Long Branch, near the Atlantic shore, where the future vice president was born on June 3, 1844, the second of three boys.3

  Gus Hobart’s father built his own schoolhouse, attended by his sons, and young Gus progressed so rapidly that he was placed in a class with his older brother. Of military age when the Civil War began, Gus did not serve, focusing instead on preparations for a career in law. He graduated near the top of his class at Rutgers in 1863 and came under the tutelage of a friend of his father’s named Socrates Tuttle, a prominent lawyer in the town of Paterson. Although up to this time the Hobarts had been Democrats, Tuttle’s involvements in Passaic County Republican politics eventually converted young Hobart.4 In 1869, he married his tutor’s daughter Jenny and had two children with her.5

  Admitted to the bar in 1866, Hobart served in succession as the county grand jury clerk and, after Tuttle became mayor of Paterson in 1871, as his father-in-law’s city counsel. His local political climb was swift after that; he was elected to the New Jersey Assembly in 1872, elected as Speaker in 1874 at age thirty, elected to the state Senate two years later, and five years after that as the Senate president.6 Meanwhile, he had plunged into Republican affairs, attending every national convention starting in 1876, and at the same time conducted a hugely successful legal practice representing industrial enterprises, all of which made him the consummate Gilded Age political-and-business operative. Seldom appearing in a courtroom, he served on a host of corporate boards as an adviser on matters of law and finance. As a court-appointed receiver, he paid particular attention to rescuing railroads in bankruptcy or other trouble, while also investing in some of them.7

  In 1895, Hobart was so highly regarded in the railroad field that he was appointed to the critical three-man Joint Traffic Association, arbitrating disputes concerning rates of thirty-two railroads with tracks running between New York and Chicago. His legal and business work also dealt with supplying water to such growing cities as New York, Newark, and Jersey City. Hobart’s involvement in such lucrative public utilities eventually raised major ethical questions about his dual role, including allegations of corruption.8

  Also in 1895, when he was credited with the election of his friend John Griggs as the governor of New Jersey and with making it a Republican state, he began to emerge as a likely easterner to bring strength to a national ticket headed by the Ohioan McKinley.9 In April 1896, the Republican Party of New Jersey endorsed him for the vice presidency, a move he did not openly encourage, although indicated his availability.10

  But even at this point Hobart was best known as a shrewd representative of water and railroad interests in his state and the neighboring New York and Pennsylvania, and it was in his pursuit of these interests that he had become a powerful Republican figure in New Jersey. He had turned down chances to run for the governorship, preferring to concentrate on enriching himself monetarily as well as increasing his political influence, which he would continue even in his vice presidency. It was Hobart who convinced McKinley to back the gold standard in the party platform after considering a mixed silver and gold currency.11

  Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist and political kingmaker usually credited with McKinley’s political rise and success, was impressed with Hobart’s business credentials and knowledge of politics in the East. Within a large pool of former cabinet and other officeholders available to be McKinley’s running mate, Hobart not only agreed with him on gold over silver but also fit comfortably into the profile of a desired and inoffensive Republican ticket partner. McKinley actually had wanted his old friend House Speaker Thomas R. Reed to run with him, but Reed wanted the presidential nomination or nothing. McKinley quickly found Hobart to be both congenial and politically astute and was willing to have Hobart at his side at the Republican convention.12

  On leaving for St. Louis, Hobart told his wife, “It is a nice thing friends want my nomination but really I do not want it, and do not know what to do about it. If I have enough votes to make my candidacy respectable, it will be all I want.”13 As the convention approached, he wrote to her, “I am heart-sick over my own prospects. It looks to me I will be nominated for Vice-President whether I want it or not, and as I get nearer to the point where I may, I am dismayed at the thought.… If I want a nomination, everything is going my way. But when I realize all that it means in work, worry, and loss of home and bliss, I am overcome, so overcome I am simply miserable.”14

  But neither was he indifferent. When Senator Matthew Quayle, the boss of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, asked Hobart to release him from a pledge to vote for him, he told Quayle, “Certainly, but I tell you, Quayle, I will be nominat
ed without the act of your [Pennsylvania] delegation,” which in the end voted for him anyway.15

  Hobart was correct, and after McKinley’s presidential nomination he won the second place on the ticket on the first ballot. Together with McKinley and Hanna, he concocted the strategy for the fall election campaign. McKinley had planned to base it on his well-established espousal of high protective tariffs in legislation bearing his name. But Hobart, as an eastern financier, encouraged him, and Hanna, to focus more on a spirited defense of the gold standard in behalf of banking and financial interests, about which he was so well informed.

  It was, he argued, the way to defeat his Democratic foe, William Jennings Bryan, who had rocketed to his party’s presidential nomination by ranting against mankind’s political crucifixion “upon a cross of gold.” Hobart told Hanna, “The silver heresy is the only issue upon which we have a chance of winning. We can stir the country with the menace of a change in the money standard that will reduce the purchasing power of the dollar to half a dollar.”16 In a speech in Paterson, he took the lead in challenging Bryan’s silver policy, saying, “Such a debasement of our currency would inevitably produce incalculable loss, appalling disaster and national dishonor.”17

  In Hobart’s letter of acceptance, he won wide praise for saying clearly what McKinley could not bring himself to utter: “An honest dollar, worth one hundred cents anywhere, cannot be carved out of fifty-three cents of silver plus a legislative fiat.”18 The New York Sun was prompted to observe, “This is a debate that should have come from the lips of Major McKinley months ago.”19

  In the tradition of the day, McKinley in Canton, Ohio, and Hobart in Long Branch, New Jersey, conducted front-porch campaigns, greeting those who called at their homes, defending the gold standard, and doing little speech making, although Hobart did attend some local rallies in his home state. Meanwhile, Bryan traveled tirelessly around the country, hawking the support of free silver and reprising his famous assault on gold, which resonated strongly with farmers and in rural America generally. He covered some eighteen thousand miles whistle-stopping by train and making more than six hundred speeches in a gargantuan one-man effort to match the much larger campaign treasury amassed by Hanna with Hobart’s assistance.20 They tapped millions from railroad and other corporate interests, which financed heavy mailings and surrogate speakers while McKinley stayed home, talking gold and high tariffs from his rocking chair.

  John Hay, soon to become McKinley’s secretary of state, observed during the fall that Bryan was “begging for the presidency as a tramp might beg for a pie.”21 McKinley, while actually sympathetic to a policy of bimetallism, was persuaded by Hobart to pivot sharply to upholding the gold standard to reinforce his backing in the business and banking community. The strategy worked; on Election Night the McKinley-Hobart ticket soundly defeated Bryan and running mate Arthur Sewall of Maine, a banker opposed to the gold standard. Bryan’s popular total was larger than any previous winner, but he was stymied in the industrial Northeast, where big business reigned over populism.22

  Before the inauguration, Hobart wound up much of his business affairs but not all. He resigned from official positions in companies that did heavy business with federal agencies, but he declined to divest himself from every corporate board on which he served. “It would be highly ridiculous for me,” he proclaimed, “to resign from the different companies in which I am officer and a stockholder whose interests are not in the least affected, or likely to be, by my position as Vice President. I have no intention of resigning all the offices that I hold.”23

  Notably, one he refused to relinquish was his post as a rate arbiter on the Joint Traffic Commission, which clearly was involved in business before the Interstate Commerce Commission and railroad legislation before Congress. Indeed, the Supreme Court would soon declare unconstitutional a midwestern forerunner of the Joint Traffic Commission, and a month after Hobart’s inauguration he took part in ruling on a rate increase involving the Erie Railroad, to which he had ties.

  Upon his election, the Chicago Daily News prophesied, “Garret A. Hobart will not be seen or heard until, after four years, he emerges from the impenetrable vacuum of the Vice Presidency.”24 But in his inaugural remarks, Hobart served notice that, unlike his predecessor Adlai Stevenson, as president of the Senate he would not be reluctant to assume a greater role in expediting Senate business in the face of what some might see as dilatory practices. He had no intention of being a mere ornament in the Senate or in the new administration for that matter.

  Two weeks after taking office, Hobart took it upon himself to drop in at the Treasury Department for a chat with the new secretary, Lyman George. When an aide, not recognizing him, told him the secretary was too busy to see him, Hobart simply left his calling card, asking the aide to give it to George “when he is disengaged,” obliging the embarrassed aide to apologize later.25 On another occasion, however, the new vice president insisted on deference. When the British ambassador, Sir Julian Pauncefote, declined to call on Hobart before the vice president first made a courtesy visit to him, Hobart refused and held fast, until the British Foreign Office ordered the ambassador to back down. The diplomatic controversy made news, and telegrams to Hobart congratulated him for holding his ground.26

  Hobart’s firmness paid dividends for a successor vice president two administrations later, when Theodore Roosevelt’s standby, Charles Fairbanks, and his wife were invited to a senator’s dinner in honor of the French ambassador and his wife. The hostess asked Mrs. Fairbanks whether she would mind giving precedence to them. The Second Lady replied, “But that matter was settled once and for always by Vice President Hobart and Mrs. Hobart, was it not?” The chastised hostess raced back to the dining room and changed the seating place cards accordingly.27

  McKinley and Hobart quickly became close friends and governing partners. Although the vice president was not invited to cabinet meetings, the president and his cabinet members frequently consulted with him on matters dealing with their departments. Arthur Wallace Dunn, a Washington correspondent who covered the White House from the presidency of Benjamin Harrison to that of Warren Harding, later observed, “For the first time in my recollection, and the last for that matter, the Vice President was recognized as somebody, as a part of the administration, and as a part of the body over which he presided.”28

  In June 1897, however, his continued role as a railroad rate arbiter triggered allegations from the chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission that he had violated anti-trust laws. “Mr. Hobart must have known the way the pool [of railroad interests] would be viewed by the public,” William C. Morrison declared, “but he contented himself with taking the stand of Eastern capitalists that a pool is a legitimate railroad aid.” The Supreme Court later ruled the arbitration arrangement unconstitutional, and Hobart resigned from the post in November, escaping further legal action.29

  With the president’s wife, Ida, suffering from epilepsy, Hobart’s wife, Jennie, became a constant presence in the White House, helping with social obligations there, to the president’s great relief and sense of appreciation. She wrote later in her memoir, “Many a time he sent for me at the eleventh hour to come to some White House dinner. My presence, he said, gave him confidence. A request from the President is in reality a command. It meant I must cancel any previous engagement and come, however inconvenient.”30 When a woman reporter inquired about her “duties at the White House,” she replied, “I have no duties there.” The reporter persisted: “But since Mrs. McKinley is an invalid, all Washington understands that you are virtually First Lady.” Mrs. Hobart told her, “Anything I do at the White House is only at the request of President and Mrs. McKinley. I have neither desire nor intention to assume any prerogatives of the Mistress of the White House, but I am happy to help when requested.”31

  But the relationship was more than that. The foursome became particularly close, both in Washington and on vacations they shared at Lake Champlain. The wealthy Hobarts lea
sed a mansion on Lafayette Square directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, where they held many dinners for senators and foreign dignitaries at what came to be called “the Cream White House.” One such guest was Prince Albert of Belgium. And both McKinley and Hanna frequently crossed Pennsylvania Avenue for breakfast with the vice president or after hours to play cards and talk.

  Jennie Hobart later remembered the president spending “long evenings, over boxes of perfectos, in consultation with the Vice-President on perplexing problems of state.” McKinley also counseled with Hobart on business and investment matters, to the point of turning over his own presidential salary to Hobart to invest for him. In the winter of 1898 the New York Times reported, “Mr. Hobart is already a tower of strength to the administration.… [The Hobarts] are themselves in great demand at all the most exclusive entertainments in Washington, and are quite unspoiled by the unusual attentions they are receiving.”32

  As presiding officer of the Senate as well, Hobart proved to be conscientious and attentive in the chair, having earlier served in the same capacity as president of the New Jersey Senate. The Washington Post observed, “The Senate has been more businesslike than at any time during many years past,” and on the only occasion Hobart was called up to break a tie vote, he opposed a bill proposing self-government for the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War.33

  After the sinking of the American warship Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898, Hobart took McKinley aside and advised him that the Senate was in near revolt over the president’s resistance to declaring war on Spain. McKinley finally asked for and obtained a declaration in April. In casting his one tie vote, Hobart made possible the American retention of the Philippines after the brief and successful war, though he himself was leery of the United States embarking on any imperial course. As for the notion of self-government for the Filipinos, McKinley declared as pockets of resistance continued, “It is not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.”34