The American Vice Presidency (42 page)

In a coal strike in May 1902, which might have paralyzed the nation, Roosevelt threatened to nationalize the railroads and run them with federal troops, forcing arbitration. And in foreign relations, he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1910 for mediation efforts in the Russo-Japanese War. After a second White House term with a vice president of his own, Roosevelt retired from public life but only for a time, soon to resume his political career, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter.

CHARLES W. FAIRBANKS

OF INDIANA

I
nto the twentieth century, an axiom of presidential ticket making held that it was wisest to provide geographical balance to the party’s slate, choosing a running mate for the presidential nominee from a section of the country other than his own. In 1904, the Republican Party adhered to this counsel by selecting as President Theodore Roosevelt’s partner Senator Charles Warren Fairbanks, a native of Ohio resettled in Indiana.

Fairbanks was not the choice of Roosevelt, who had shown only mild interest in the identity of a running mate. Mentioning the matter to his eldest son, Ted, however, he said of Congressman Robert B. Hitt of Illinois, a prominent member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “He would be an excellent candidate, and if I should be elected, he would be of all men the pleasantest to work with.”
¹
The observation at least hinted of some possibility of making use of his vice president.

But many Old Guard Republican leaders preferred Fairbanks as a trustworthy conservative more in the McKinley mode, and Fairbanks, like Hitt, also came from the Midwest and would provide geographical balance to the ticket. At the nominating convention in Chicago, however, Hitt asked that his name be withdrawn, so Fairbanks was nominated by voice vote. It fell to him, as with Roosevelt in 1900, to carry the brunt of the fall campaign while Roosevelt mainly stayed in Washington running the country. But more than anything Fairbanks said or did on the campaign trail, Roosevelt’s
huge popularity and force of personality were what carried the day over the lackluster Democratic presidential nominee, Judge Alton B. Parker of New York, and his running mate, Henry Gassaway Davis, a wealthy eighty-two-year-old West Virginian. The choice of Davis obviously was not made with his longevity in mind.

Although Roosevelt himself had endured the customary underutilization during his own brief vice presidency, he was not inspired any more than most previous chief executives to put the second officer to work in any significant role in his administration. He had functioned without a vice president through his abbreviated first term, and at any rate Fairbanks was too orthodox a conservative to fit in with Roosevelt’s increasingly reformist and progressive style and ideas.

Notably, in 1896 Roosevelt had written in regard to choosing a vice president, “It would be an unhealthy thing to have the Vice-President and President represented by principles so far apart that the succession of one to the place of the other means change as radical as any party overturn” by election. But when it came to making the choice for his prospective administration, Roosevelt disregarded his own advice and went along with the party leaders’ desire.
²

Charles Fairbanks was a the ninth-generation descendant of Jonathan Fayerancke, an English Puritan who had settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1636. Fairbanks was born on a farm in Union County, Ohio, on May 11, 1852, the son of Loriston Monroe Fairbanks, a farmer, and Mary Adelaide Smith Fairbanks, also of Union County. He was an industrious and studious boy obliged to help work the farm. A somewhat daring youth who loved to hunt and ride, he once broke an arm while successfully breaking a colt resisting his mount. Soon after, still wearing a sling, he caught and stopped a runaway team of horses.

By age fifteen he had earned enough money to enter nearby Ohio Wesleyan University, where he was elected one of three editors of the college newspaper. Upon Fairbanks’s graduation, an uncle, a general manager of the Western Associated Press, got him a job as a reporter, first in Pittsburgh and then in Cleveland, where he went to law school for one term and was admitted to the Ohio bar. At age twenty-two, he moved to Indianapolis, where he married Cornelia Cole, a former fellow student at Ohio Wesleyan. Hired as a lawyer with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, his law practice
soon thrived, focusing on corporate and transportation affairs in cases before the federal courts in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.
³

Fairbanks’s opposition to strikers in a railroad labor dispute in Indianapolis in 1877 drew the attention of Republican leaders in Indiana. Through the next decade and beyond he worked for various party candidates, and after another Hoosier Republican, President Benjamin Harrison, lost the White House in 1892, Fairbanks undertook rebuilding the party in disarray. In 1896 he became chairman of the party’s national convention in St. Louis and delivered the keynote address, the Indiana delegation, and the state for William McKinley in his victory over the Democrat William Jennings Bryan.
⁴

Fairbanks’s railroad connections enhanced his standing in the party as he parceled out largesse in the form of railway passes to political associates. He became a majority owner of the state’s largest newspaper, the
Indianapolis News
, and its chief rival, the
Indianapolis Journal
, increasing his political clout in behalf of the Republican Party in the state. He held no elective office but became an important voice in presidential politics, because Indiana often was the source of nominees for the national ticket, mostly for the vice presidency.

In 1896 also, the Republicans took control of the Indiana state legislature, and grateful party members elected Fairbanks to the U.S. Senate. There he became a loyal and helpful McKinley ally as chairman of committees limiting immigration and imposing literacy tests for entry. He originally questioned going to war against Spain in 1898 but supported McKinley when war was declared. In a dispute with Canada over the border with Alaska, the president appointed Fairbanks to the Joint High Commission considering the issue. He endeared himself to Alaskans by declaring that he opposed the “yielding of an inch of United States territory,” and later the city of Fairbanks was named for him. One of his most advanced positions was his backing the demand of black soldiers fighting in Cuba to be led by black officers.
⁵

After the war, with McKinley seeking reelection in a rematch against Bryan in 1900, his chief political adviser, Mark Hanna, hoped to block the vice presidential nomination of Theodore Roosevelt with the candidacy of Senator Fairbanks. But Fairbanks declined being a sacrificial lamb, hoping to make his own bid for the presidency after McKinley was reelected and
finished his second term. Fate decisively intervened with the president’s assassination in 1901 and the ascendancy of Roosevelt to the White House.

Fairbanks’s hopes for a future presidency now seemed dimmer than ever. Hanna himself was being pushed by Old Guard Republicans for the 1904 presidential nomination against the despised Roosevelt. But in February of the election year, Hanna died, leaving Fairbanks as the closest Republican left with any connection to the departed McKinley. Roosevelt, however, had by this time cemented his hold on the party, and his nomination for a presidential term in his own right was assured. To assuage and accommodate the Old Guard, party leaders decided that it would be prudent to bestow the vice presidential nomination on the loyal old Charlie Fairbanks.

But Indiana’s senior senator insisted he had no interest in the vice presidency and wanted to remain in the Senate. As the pressure mounted from Republicans in Indiana and nearby states, however, Fairbanks agreed to be offered to the convention. Of his eventual selection, Roosevelt was said to remark, “Who in the name of heaven else is there?”
⁶

After Roosevelt had been duly nominated for another term, he quietly acquiesced despite his earlier declarations of preferring an ideological soul mate in the job. Senator Chauncey M. Depew of New York seconded the Fairbanks nomination, rather incongruously reminding the delegates of some of the great men in the nation’s history who had held the office, whose company Fairbanks seemed hardly destined to join.

“It seems to me,” Depew said, “that we have not given enough importance to the office of the Vice-President of the United States. It was not so among the fathers. Then of the two highest potential Presidential possibilities, one took the Presidency, the other the Vice-Presidency. But in the last forty years, ridicule and caricature have placed the office almost in contempt. Let us remember that Thomas Jefferson, let us remember that old John Adams, let us remember that John C. Calhoun and George Clinton and Martin Van Buren were vice presidents of the United States. Eighty millions of people want for vice president a presidential figure of full size.”
⁷
With this rather amusing bit of hyperbole, Indiana’s favorite son was unanimously nominated as Roosevelt’s running mate.

In the ensuing campaign, Fairbanks took to the campaign trail but with neither the fire nor the charisma of the hero of San Juan Hill. He tried to make up for those shortcomings with thoroughness and diligence. But
Fairbanks’s cold and stilted manner earned him the nickname “the Icicle” and prompted Peter Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley to pen: “Th’ republican convintion labored, too, like a cash register. It listened to three canned speeches, adopted a predigested platform, nominated a cold storage vice president, gave three especially cheers and wint home. The convintion’s mind all made f’r it met.”
⁸

Fairbanks boasted about his own abstemiousness, talking about his preference for wholesome buttermilk. But when a reporter covering a lawn party that Fairbanks hosted in honor of Roosevelt learned that Manhattans had been served, he was widely ridiculed as “Cocktail Charlie” to the taunting of prohibitionists.
⁹

But the presence of Fairbank on the ticket was irrelevant. Roosevelt’s own force of personality swept the pair to victory on Election Night. Late that night, the victorious Roosevelt dictated a surprise announcement to reporters in the White House that had to be an encouragement to the ambitious Fairbanks: “On the fourth of March next I shall have served three and a half years, and this three and a half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”
¹⁰
The declaration gave Fairbanks considerable basis for seeing himself as the next president. Once in the vice presidency, though, he found himself treated much the same as nearly all of his predecessors, the revered and the forgotten as well.

In 1896, when Roosevelt was the New York City police commissioner, he had written an article in the
American Monthly Review of Reviews
arguing for much wider involvement by the vice president in his administration, including attending cabinet meetings with the president and being allowed to vote in the Senate rather than simply presiding and breaking ties.
¹¹
In the presidency, however, he showed no such interest in having Fairbanks looking over his shoulder, although the vice president did lend what help he could provide toward passing legislation sought by Roosevelt—and blocking bills the White House did not want.

At the same time, Fairbanks, as a former senator, was not favorably disposed toward some of Roosevelt’s efforts to expand executive powers at the expense of the legislative process. In the president’s campaign against some of the most powerful corporate trusts, he preferred to rely on powers
within his executive mandate rather than having to cope with the long and circuitous legislative route and political opponents on Capitol Hill. In intraparty rows on issues, Fairbanks often sided with the senators rather than with his own president.

Roosevelt in turn had little regard for Fairbanks’s abilities, a view widely shared in the press. When Roosevelt told Finley Peter Dunne he was considering going underwater in a submarine, the author of the “Mr. Dooley” sketches replied, “You really shouldn’t do it—unless you take Fairbanks with you.”
¹²
Roosevelt indeed did join one of the early dives of the USS
Plunger
, one of the first American submarines, but there was no record that he took Fairbanks with him then or on other such adventures.

By December 1907, Roosevelt seemed to be having qualms about his impetuous announcement that he wouldn’t run again. He wrote a friend, “I hate for personal reasons to get out of the fight here,” and “I have the uncomfortable feeling that I may possibly be shirking a duty.”
¹³
But he had given his word, and so he turned to his secretary of war and close friend, William Howard Taft of Ohio, to run. Taft preferred being named to the Supreme Court but agreed, with Roosevelt’s strong support. Roosevelt by now had little but contempt for the persevering Fairbanks, ignoring him and being more concerned about the challenge to Taft from the New York governor Charles Evans Hughes.