The American Vice Presidency (37 page)

Platt backed Morton for the Senate in 1885 and again in 1887 to no avail, as the New York Republicans were badly split. In 1888, James Blaine, in declining health, chose not to seek the presidential nomination again, and Platt put New York behind the Indiana senator Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of President William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. Blaine, vacationing in Italy, wrote Morton, “The tendency I
think is toward a Western candidate for President. If this is so, you will have a splendid opening for V.P. if you desire it and set your New York friends to work.”
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Morton did so and was nominated. He admittedly was not much of a public speaker and left that aspect of the campaign to the articulate Harrison, concentrating instead on organization, fund-raising, and his broad contacts in the business and banking world. The Republican ticket lost the popular vote by ninety thousand ballots but won in the electoral college over the Democrats Grover Cleveland, the president seeking reelection, and his running mate, Allan G. Thurman of Ohio. In demeanor, Harrison and Morton offered the country a cameo of solid Republicanism of conservative and religious values.

As president of the Senate, Morton chaired a body heavily populated with successful businessmen and bankers like himself, of which he was among the most prominent. But his business acumen was of little help to Harrison on critical political matters. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts at one point sought to bring to the floor a so-called force bill that would have obliged the southern states to permit black men to vote in protection of their civil rights. The rigorously even-handed Morton declined to interfere with a Democratic filibuster, and the force bill finally was moved aside without action.
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By 1892, Morton’s independence as president of the Senate had cooled Harrison toward him, and he was dropped from the Republican ticket, replaced by an old New York friend and publisher, Whitelaw Reid. Blaine resigned as Harrison’s secretary of state to run again for president himself, and old party bosses like Platt and Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania signed on with Blaine. Platt meanwhile, foreseeing a likely Harrison defeat at the hand of Cleveland seeking to regain the presidency, persuaded Morton to run for the governorship of New York in 1894. Cashing in on his great popularity in his home state, Morton won easily, providing a steady and reliable hand in business and banking experience to the state.

In 1896, Platt offered Morton as New York’s favorite son for the party’s presidential nomination at age seventy-two. Platt hoped to derail the bid of Governor William McKinley of Ohio, fearing he might consider free-silver currency in his platform, threatening the entrenched gold standard worshipped in the eastern financial centers. But Platt as a strategist was no
match for McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, who returned the Republicans to the White House.

Upon the defeat, Morton rejoined the banking world, where he built the Morton Trust Company, and in 1909 he accepted a bid from J. P. Morgan to merge into what became the giant Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. After a successful career in politics that had brought him to Congress, the vice presidency, and the governorship of his state, Levi Morton retired from the banking world in his eighties and died on his ninety-sixth birthday, likely more revered and almost certainly more remembered for his private activities than for his government service.

ADLAI E. STEVENSON

OF ILLINOIS

I
n the history of politics in Illinois, one of the most illustrious names is that of Adlai E. Stevenson. But it is the fate of the twenty-third vice president of the United States that the reference usually is not to him but to his namesake grandson, who twice ran for the presidency and twice lost. And while the grandson remains heralded in Democratic legend as the epitome of morality and integrity in politics, the grandfather’s niche is found in his strong and consistent partisanship and office peddling.

The first Adlai Ewing Stevenson actually came from Kentucky, where he was born on the family farm of John Turner Stevenson and his wife, Eliza, on October 23, 1835. The family originally came from Presbyterian stock in Scotland and northern Ireland before immigrating to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and finally the small town of Blue Water, Kentucky. There young Adlai attended a one-room schoolhouse lorded over by a tyrannical schoolmaster long remembered thereafter.
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The family raised tobacco until 1852, when a severe frost destroyed the season’s crop. The father, an owner of slaves, freed them, packed up sixteen-year-old Adlai and the rest of the family, moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where some other relatives lived, and bought part ownership of a sawmill.
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They left behind not only relatives but also slavery, which was barred in Illinois, and country life for the then-booming town.

Young Adlai worked in the sawmill, taught at a local school, and attended
Illinois Wesleyan. Then, with his parents’ help he returned to Kentucky and enrolled at Centre College, in Danville, where political debates first whetted his interest. There he also met the daughter of headmaster Reverend Lewis Warner Green, Letitia, whom he would later marry. But first his father’s death obliged him to return to Bloomington to run the sawmill. When the Reverend Green died, Letitia moved near Bloomington, where she and Stevenson finally were wed in 1866. They had three daughters and one son, Lewis, who would later be the father of the second and more famous Adlai Stevenson.
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In the course of starting up a practice in law, the first Adlai inevitably became enmeshed in politics, at a time when the Democratic and Whig Parties were being challenged by a number of new splinter groups over issues ranging from slavery and immigration to trade and tariffs, the most prominent of those groups being the Know-Nothings. He was admitted to the bar in 1858, the year of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates for a U.S. Senate seat. Hearing some of them and inspired, he ran for town council in Metamora but lost, although he was later elected a district attorney in 1864.

With the Civil War raging, largely unexamined and unexplained until later was the able-bodied Stevenson’s absence of military service or uniform. In the summer of 1863, an assistant provost marshal came to Metamora to register all unmarried men between twenty and forty for the federal draft, and Stevenson’s name appeared on the list. Long thereafter, political foes alleged that Stevenson had bought his way out of military service. There was no record, however, that he had hired a substitute as was allowed, that he had paid what was called “blood money” of three hundred dollars to escape the draft, as his younger brother William had done, or that he was excused for medical reasons. Some speculated later that he may have qualified for exemption as a widow’s son who had taken on the responsibility of providing for the rest of the family, although he was not living with his mother at the time.

Later also, Stevenson was accused of joining the Knights of the Golden Circle, a group said to support the Confederacy and to actively oppose the draft. As he became more prominent in Democratic politics, other allegations were aired, including one that he had sold pistols to draft dodgers.
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Unquestionably he was politically ambitious and perhaps felt—as a later
vice president, Dick Cheney, asserted about his lack of service in the Vietnam War—that he had “other priorities.”

In 1869, Adlai and Letitia Stevenson moved from Metamora back to Bloomington, where he joined a cousin, James S. Ewing, in forming the law firm of Stevenson and Ewing, later one of the state’s best known. His genial nature and reputation as a witty storyteller made for friendships that crossed party lines and encouraged him to reach higher in politics.

In 1874, on a wave of resentment toward the Republican Party resulting from the economic panic of the previous year, Stevenson ran as a Democrat for the U.S. House of Representatives in the normally Republican Thirteenth Illinois Congressional District. His Republican opponent, a colonel of the Union’s Bloomington regiment in the Civil War, was no pushover. He used a pitch aimed at local Democrats and the new reformers that much later would be called “class warfare” politics. Stevenson in turn railed against the “Republican moneyed interests of this country and their conspiring bondholders,” who exploited “the overtaxed and impoverished people.”
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Stevenson, however, always tempered his assaults with storytelling, as in his tale of a convicted murderer sentenced to hang while a local politician appeared on the same gallows platform. The murderer, when asked what his last wish was, demanded that he be hanged before the politician was allowed to speak.

Some Republicans against Stevenson brought up the allegations of disloyalty during the Civil War. When one heckler yelled out during a speech, “You were a Confederate sympathizer and a Knight of the Golden Circle,” Stevenson shot back, “My friend, you are a liar. I want you to understand me. Anyone else who makes that statement is a willful and a deliberate liar.”
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His allegiance to the Union was clear in many ways, but the fact that he had not worn the uniform and had not been in combat hounded him thereafter.

On Election Day, he was confronted at the polls by temperance crusaders demanding that he sign a pledge opposing the sale of liquor in Bloomington. Although he was a teetotaler, he refused, saying it was an individual choice. He won the House seat in a three-man race.

Only two years later, when the Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio won the presidency in the controversial campaign against the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, more Republicans turned out, and Stevenson narrowly lost the House seat. He won it back in 1878 but lost it
again in 1880 and in 1882. After that roller coaster ride, his political future looked grim. Of his congressional service, Stevenson told his friends, “I will pillow my head consoled by the thought that no act of mine has made the poor man’s burden heavier.”
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Back in Bloomington, he worked for the election of the Democratic presidential nominee Grover Cleveland and in 1885 became his first assistant postmaster general, charged with overseeing fifty-five thousand fourth-class post offices across the country. Somewhat surprisingly but boldly, he expressed public disappointment with his own president’s slow pace in replacing Republican and independent federal officeholders with Democrats. When the
New York World
editorially scolded Cleveland, reminding him of “the obligations which an Administration elected by a great historical party owes to that party” after so many years of Republican control of the White House, Stevenson agreed.

Soon he was doing his best to make up for the lost time. Local postmasters, often farmers whose post offices became the gathering places for community and political gossip, were appointed at Stevenson’s pleasure and became a convenient recruitment tool for political allies and foot soldiers. The task sharpened his talent for the useful patronage giving that became a hallmark of his public service, even as civil service reforms broadened.

He welcomed and often rewarded job seekers who became his political helpmates, having no hesitation about ousting Republicans and replacing them with Democrats, to the point of being known as “Adlai the Axeman.” The Republican
New York Herald
dubbed him “a man who uses the guillotine freely and is decapitating thousands.”
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Detractors had a field day, while approving Democrats shortened his job title to “General,” ironically giving some the impression that he had engaged in the high military service whose absence had brought the critics’ charges of disloyalty.

In 1892, the New Yorker Cleveland sought to regain the presidency. He was easily nominated on the first ballot, and the Democrats looked for a mate from a midwestern state with a large electoral vote. Stevenson came from a large and by now well-known Illinois family, and his reputation as a congenial and accommodating “spoilsman” at the U.S. Post Office Department might also attract hopefuls for federal jobs.
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From the convention floor, an Illinois delegate offered Stevenson as “a man that is known by every woman, child and voter that ever licked a stamp, in every village and
hamlet in the land.”
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He, like Cleveland, was nominated on the first ballot. The Republicans meanwhile renominated President Benjamin Harrison and took the New York publisher Whitelaw Reid as his running mate.

In keeping with the still-prevailing custom, Cleveland eschewed virtually all personal campaigning, leaving the chore to Stevenson. The fame of “Uncle Adlai” as an arresting storyteller kept him in demand, and he was particularly effective in his native South. There he railed against the Republican force bill calling for federal monitoring of southern elections to protect the voting rights of former slaves, warning it would “disturb harmonious relations between blacks and whites and create the old race prejudice so bitter under carpetbagger regimes.”
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