The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Meanwhile, William M. Butler, the president’s prospective campaign manager for 1924, got busy lining up the delegates needed for the presidential nomination. Expected challenges from Pinchot and Detroit auto magnate Henry Ford fizzled, and thus the stage was set for the party’s convention, at which the only substantive business would be the selection of Coolidge’s running mate. A story was afoot that Coolidge wanted Senator William E. Borah of Utah on the ticket and that when the president proposed it to him, Borah asked, “Well, at which end?”36

  But the second office remained so low in esteem that when the convention opened in Cleveland in June, it seemed the job once again would have to be shopped around. After other rejections, the party finally decided on a running mate for Coolidge whose brilliance, outgoing nature, and fiery and commanding independence would offer a promise of lifting the much-maligned vice presidency out of the shadows.

  CHARLES G. DAWES

  OF ILLINOIS

  One of the most accomplished of all American vice presidents joined the second presidential term of the accidental president Calvin Coolidge in 1925. But his outspokenness and gruffness in contrast with the mild-mannered Silent Cal produced one of the most unusual odd couples to share the two highest offices in the land up to that time. Charles G. Dawes came to the vice presidency after a heralded career that included his becoming the first director of the Bureau of the Budget, then comptroller of the currency, and supply czar for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I. Thereafter he was credited with putting Europe’s economy back on its feet and overseeing reparations sought from the defeated Germany, which won him a share of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize.

  Dawes was of aristocratic stock from colonial days, whose family traced its roots back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, when William Dawes arrived from England. Another William Dawes rode with Paul Revere from Charlestown to Lexington on April 18, 1775.1 And another relative was a senior partner in a mercantile firm named Dawes and Coolidge, coincidentally bringing together forebears of men who, nearly three hundred years later, would become in reverse order the Republican president and vice president of the United States.

  Charles Gates Dawes was born in Marietta, Ohio, on August 27, 1865. His father, Rufus R. Dawes, ultimately a brigadier general in the Union army, volunteered in April 1861 upon President Lincoln’s call and recruited a hundred others to serve under him at Antietam and in subsequent Civil War battles. In 1864 during a furlough he married Mary Beman of Marietta, daughter of a railroad builder and banker. Dawes became an official of the Marietta Iron Works and soon branched out into oil and gas exploration in southeastern Ohio, adding to his growing wealth. The panic of 1873 broke him, obliging him to start anew in the wholesale lumber business, where he eventually prospered again and served a single term in Congress.2

  Upon his graduation from Marietta College and the Cincinnati Law School, young Charles moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he became a prominent anti-monopoly attorney for the Lincoln Board Trade and other clients. There he met and became close friends of William Jennings Bryan and John J. Pershing, later the commander of American forces in the Great War. Dawes and Bryan were members of an informal discussion group called the Lincoln Round Table, in which they debated key issues of the day, including the currency controversy that Bryan later glamorized with his famous “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention. Pershing was not a member of the group but joined them in a similar group, dubbed Debates at the Square Table, at a local restaurant.3

  Dawes won statewide attention as a witness before a Senate committee on railroad affairs and another before the Nebraska Board of Transportation. In the latter, when the state auditor chided him about his criticisms of a host of discriminatory rates, Dawes responded by accusing the man of “riding in special cars at the expense of the railroads.” When the auditor shot back, “I guess you would ride, too, if you had the chance,” Dawes replied, “Not if I were drawing a salary and was paid by the people to stay home and protect their interest and do my duty.”4

  By 1893, as Dawes’s law practice grew, he became a bank director and formed the Dawes Block Company, owning and managing major office buildings in downtown Lincoln. His friend Pershing, also a lawyer, meanwhile was teaching military science and tactics and commanding enrolled cadets at the University of Nebraska as a second lieutenant. When he approached Dawes about joining him as a partner, Dawes advised him, “Better lawyers than either you or I can ever hope to be are starving in Nebraska. I’d try the Army for a while yet. Your pay may be small, but it comes very regularly.”5 So Pershing remained on that fateful course.

  Dawes survived the panic of 1893 and afterward acquired a power company in Wisconsin and another in Evanston, Illinois. In 1895 he moved to Chicago, where he made his home for the rest of his life. The previous year, he had met Governor William McKinley of Ohio, and McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, enlisted him to oversee the Ohioan’s presidential bid in Illinois. Dawes’s first major political undertaking came at the Republican state convention of 1896, where at the age of thirty he delivered the Illinois delegation to the Ohio governor, who was later nominated by a landside over Speaker Tom Reed of Maine at the national convention in St. Louis.

  Sitting in the press gallery not far from where Dawes watched the proceedings was Bryan, his old colleague and debater at the Lincoln Round Table, now a reporter for the Omaha World Herald. Two weeks later in Chicago, Bryan unexpectedly set the Democratic convention afire with his memorable harangue against the gold standard. Dawes, in attendance, sent a telegram to McKinley: “Went to the Democratic Convention. Sat on the platform. Heard my old friend, William J. Bryan, make his speech on the platform’s silver plank. His oratory was magnificent, his logic pitifully weak. I could not but have a feeling of pride for the brilliant young man whose life, for so many years, lay parallel to mine, and with whom the future may yet bring me into conflict, as in the past.”6

  Six days later Dawes joined Hanna and other Republican leaders at McKinley’s home in Canton, where the presidential nominee declared he would not compete with the silver-tongued and silver-driven Bryan on the stump but would campaign from his front porch. “I am going to stay here and do what campaigning there is to be done,” McKinley told Dawes. “If I took a whole train, Bryan would take a sleeper; if I took a sleeper, Bryan would take a chair car; if I took a chair car, he would ride a freight train. I can’t outdo him, and I am not going to try.”7

  In Chicago, Dawes handled the dispensing of campaign funds out of the McKinley national headquarters campaign while Hanna traveled the country raising them, and hordes of McKinley supporters went to Canton as Bryan stumped feverishly across the land. On Election Night, McKinley beat Bryan by more than half a million popular votes and by nearly one hundred in the electoral college.

  Dawes immediately became the subject of speculation about a cabinet post in the McKinley administration but pointedly asked supporters not to address the new president on the matter. After the election, according to Dawes’s diary, McKinley said he often thought he owed his nomination to Dawes in light of Dawes’s vital campaign work in Illinois. Dawes continued, “He … was anxious to know whether his failure to give me a Cabinet appointment would, in any way, alter our intimate and constant friendship.”8 Then McKinley offered Dawes the post of comptroller of the currency, an independent position reporting to Congress, which he cheerfully accepted and carried out without political interference. Dawes often lunched and dined with the president and was a constant confidant as McKinley wrestled with the aftermath of the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor, which led to the brief war with Spain.

  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