A Warm Bucket of Spit—The Tale of the American Vice Presidency— Part II Post Civil War into the 20th Century

The popular humor magazine Puck mocked Chester A. Arthur, the accidental President, for snubbing his former boss and sponsor Senator Roscoe Conklin.  

Note—We pick up the story of the American Vice Presidency today with a non-entity that surprised himself by discovering never suspected integrity.

With Reconstruction in force across the South, the Republicans were now in power and essentially unbeatable for the foreseeable future when Ulysses S. Grant was elected in 1868.  While personally honest, his administration was marked by corruption and repeated scandals.  He was followed by a parade of bearded former generals, most of them men of modest talents.  The possible exception was Ohioan James Garfield, an outspoken reformer, advocate for continued Federal protection for Blacks in the South, and friend of labor in a party increasingly dominated by and beholden to Robber Barons. But Garfield was gunned down by a disappointed office seeker who shouted “I am the Stalwart of Stalwarts!  Now Arthur is President!”

That would be Chester Allan Arthur, the former Collector of the Port of New York, a patronage rich plum.  He had been forced on Garfield at the Republican convention by Arthur’s political sponsor and benefactor, New York Senator Roscoe Conklin, leader of the Stalwart faction which stood by the patronage spoils system and adamantly opposed civil service reform.  

Once in office, however, Arthur seemed to have a conversion experience.  He curtly refused to honor Conklin’s list of proposed appointments to Cabinet posts, lucrative collectorships, judgeships, postmasters, and diplomatic posts.   He also began the work toward Civil Service Reform that would be completed by his successors.  Not surprisingly, Arthur was not nominated by his party for a full term.  He was replaced by former Secretary of State James G. Blaine of Maine.  The Plumed Knight, however, promptly lost to conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland of New York.

Cleveland was out four years later replaced by Benjamin Harrison, grandson of the first President to die in office but returned in 1892 with Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, founder of a multi generation political dynasty, as his Vice President. 

By 1896 the Republicans had run out of Civil War Generals and were down to a lowly Major, William McKinley of Ohio, the political creation of Senator Marc Hanna’s national political machine and the architect of enshrining big business as the principal pillar of the GOP.  After McKinley’s first Vice President Garret Hobart of New Jersey died in office during his first term, Hanna and other party bosses tapped the reform governor of New York and popular Spanish American War hero Theodore Roosevelt to run in 1900.  They hoped that they could safely isolate the hyperactive do-gooder in the dead end backwater of the Vice Presidency where many a political career had gone to die.

The ticket of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt got the cigar box label salute.

Unfortunately for them, another assassin’s bullet elevated “that damned cowboy” to the White House, which he hit like a whirlwind. The advocate for the strenuous life transformed the modern presidency from rather passive administration to an activist shaper of national goals and policies.  He busted trusts, created National Parks and Monuments among other conservation achievements, modernized and rebuilt the Navy, settled a war between Russia and Japan, and started a revolution so he could build the Panama Canal. 

With the experience of Arthur and Roosevelt in mind, party bosses started vetting Vice Presidential candidates more carefully to prevent any more run away trains.  Candidates tended to mainstream and safe and chosen among pools of like prospects based on their capacity to boost the ticket by geographic balance or special appeal to a swing constituency.

The next test of the Vice Presidency came under Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who picked folksy progressive Indiana Governor Thomas R. Marshall as his running mate.  But the staid and reserved Wilson found Marshall’s humor and storytelling so irksome that he moved the Vice President’s office out of the White House.  By the way, it is unclear which Vice President first got office space in the Mansion.  They also had a fall out over policy.  But Marshall was popular enough to keep on the ticket for a second term.  He was also an effective President of the Senate and helped formulate the first rules that allowed a closure vote to end filibusters during war time.  After World War I he became the first Vice President to convene and preside over Cabinet meetings while Wilson was in France for Peace Talks.

When Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke it was his wife Edith who secretly took on the powers of the Presidency not Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. 

After Wilson’s debilitating stroke during his intense campaign for public support for the League of Nations, Marshall refused Cabinet pleas to assume the duties of the Presidency during Wilson’s recovery.  The Constitution never explicitly identified the circumstances under which this could be done or whether power could be returned to the President after a recovery.  Marshall declined to intervene fearing that he could establish a precedent that might be used in the future as a cover for a coup d’état. Instead, Wilson’s wife Edith was said to have become the de facto President.

The next Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, was picked after a dead-locked convention finally settled on Ohio’s Warren G. Harding as the least offensive candidate to all party factions.  Silent Cal had gained fame as the Massachusetts Governor who smashed the 1919 Boston Police Strike by firing the whole force and banning them from any public employment for life.  That kind of anti-labor toughness was music to the ears of Republican business backers.  When the scandal plagued Harding died on a west coast tour in 1923 Coolidge became President.  He presided over the Jazz Age boom years as a hyper conservative who advocated minimal government action on all fronts.

After being notified of the death of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge famously took the Oath of Office of the Presidency by the light of a kerosene  lamp in his father's Plymouth Notch, Vermont  parlor at 2 am August 3, 1923.  His father, a notary public administered the oath.

When Coolidge declined to run for a second full term of his own, Herbert Hoover picked the only person of non-European decent until then to be Vice President.  Charles Curtis of Kansas, the former Majority Leader of the Senate, was half Native American and an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation.

The Great Depression ended a nearly 70 year run of Republican domination of the White House interrupted only by the terms of Cleveland and Wilson.  Franklin D. Roosevelt had a mini-parade of Vice Presidents in his unprecedented four elected terms.   The first, John Nance Gardner—Cactus Jack—to his admirers was Texan and former Speaker of the House who was brought on as a Southerner and staunch conservative to balance the ticket.  Things were fine as long as FDR adhered to his campaign rhetoric of balancing budget.  But in the midst of bank failures and staggering unemployment, Roosevelt turned to spending money of direct relief and trying anything that would stick to turn the economy around.  That experimentation quickly became the New Deal and a host of Federal programs that Nance did not approve of.  

FDR and Vice President John Nance Garner together before the bloom was off the rose.  Garner's quip that the Vice Presidency was not worth "a warm bucket of spit." is his main legacy today.

None the less, the men ran again together in 1936.  But Garner was opposed to the administration’s support of unionization particularly after the wave of sit-down strikes in 1937.  He also recoiled including equal benefits to Blacks and Mexican-Americans in programs, the high priority for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  The final breech came when Gardner actively worked to kill Roosevelt's Court packing scheme in 1937.  The two men barely spoke after that and Gardner was effectively the enemy of the New Deal from his chair as Senate President.  Perhaps that is why Gardner came up with the pithy quote most identified with his office—“The Vice Presidency is not worth a warm bucket of spit”—although the original remark evidently referred to a fluid drained from lower parts of the anatomy.

Naturally, Roosevelt dumped him in 1940 when he decided to run for an unprecedented third term.  His new Vice President was agronomist and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, one of the most liberal and outspoken of the New Dealers.  When war took over center stage, however, FDR and his right hand man Harry Hopkins began to look at Wallace’s brand of New Dealers as an impediment to the war effort.

Tomorrow—The job evolves in a post-war world.