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Introduction

The Hidden Prince: Unveiling the Presidency's Executive Narrative

Hence it appears that, except as to the concurrent authority of the President in the article of treaties, it would be difficult to determine whether that magistrate would, in the aggregate, possess more or less power than the Governor of New York.

—Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 69, 1788¹

It used to strike me, when I was trying to understand your history, that there had been a certain diminution at one time in the authority and power and influence of the State Governor.…I think it no less interesting to observe that of late years the tendency seems to have been for the power and influence and authority of the State Governor to increase and be revivified…your people seem to be looking more and more to your Governor as the representative of the consciousness and conscience of the people of the State.

—Ambassador James Bryce, 1910²

Prelude

In late summer of his first year as governor, Woodrow Wilson attended the fourth annual conference of governors, held in Spring Lake, New Jersey. The so-called “House of Governors,” instituted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908,³ was illustrative of the growing power of state executives during the Progressive Era, and a locus for debating just what direction that newly found power should take. As the conference's host governor, Wilson unexpectedly found himself in the middle of a heated exchange with another, less prominent, newly elected governor. The New York Times reported that discussion over executive powers turned “warm” when Alabama's Emmet O'Neal questioned the merits of the increasingly popular use by state legislatures of the initiative, referendum, and recall in the states.⁴ These innovations of progressivism were said to restore democracy to the people, giving ordinary citizens direct access to legislation, public policy, and their political leaders.⁵ Importantly, all three features had the tendency to weaken the strength of parties while bolstering the authority of executives.⁶

Governor O'Neal impugned these measures as catering to “every popular impulse and yielding to every wave of popular passion.”⁷ Wilson, for his part, stood firm: “The people of the United States want their Governors to be leaders in matters of legislation because they have serious suspicion as to the source of the legislation, and they have a serious distrust of their legislatures…what I would urge as against the views of Gov. O'Neal is that there is nothing inconsistent between the strengthening of the powers of the Executive and the direct power of the people.”⁸

O'Neal was unimpressed. “I would rather stand with Madison and Hamilton,” he began, and—in a direct shot at Wilson's infatuation with the British parliamentary system—then continued, “than to stand with some modern prophets and some of our Western statesmen.”⁹ However crafty and acerbic O'Neal may have been, his retort would recede into the mists of history's losing arguments. Indeed, Wilson's support for a more plebiscitary executive was hardly novel, as American governors had been making the case for expanded executive authority for over a generation. Because states were less constricted than the federal government in amending their constitutions, they often took the lead in recasting legislative-executive relations.¹⁰ The British ambassador and scholar James Bryce underscored this development in his visit to the Governor's Conference in 1910. Governors had so increased their visibility and power since Bryce's famous study of America twenty years earlier that he had, by the early twentieth century, become inclined to see them as fonts for the expression of popular sentiment.¹¹ “You are all,” Bryce said in his closing remarks to the assembly of governors meeting in Washington, “the servants of and desirous to be the exponents of public opinion.”¹²

At that same 1910 gathering, Wilson, now campaigning for governor, sounded his views on executive power in his keynote address: “Every Governor of a State is by the terms of the Constitution a part of the Legislature…. He has the right of initiative in legislation, too, though he has so far, singularly enough, made little use of it…. There is no executive usurpation in a Governor's undertaking to do that. He usurps nothing which does not belong to him of right…. He who cries usurpation against him is afraid of debate, wishes to keep legislation safe against scrutiny, behind closed doors and within the covert of partisan consultations.”¹³

Wilson's arguments, including his all but forgotten encounter with Governor O'Neal, were emblematic of the longstanding fight over the meaning of executive power in the United States. Importantly, these battles had been fought increasingly in the states. Indeed, the nation's governors were in many respects modeling emerging forms of executive leadership that would become common in the modern presidency. Much of the change in the nation's party dynamics and development of direct primaries was attributable to these “hustling candidates” who emerged in the states in the late nineteenth century. As John F. Reynolds writes, “Landing a [presidential] nomination after 1900 required travel to greet delegates and voters, oratorical skills, and even advertising. These new rituals of democracy were already in evidence when it came to local offices during the 1880s. Many of the more proactive gubernatorial aspirants had mastered the necessary political skills by running for lesser offices such as mayor.”¹⁴

In the arc of political history marked by the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the New Deal, it should not be surprising that the nation's governors would emerge as the chief architects of a nascent presidential republic. These were the “modern prophets” most responsible for reinventing executive theory since the founding. While Alexander Hamilton, the most vigorous early supporter of presidential power, argued that the American president was altogether different from the British king, his early effort to compare the new chief magistrate to the nation's most powerful governor was instructive. The president was not a king, Hamilton reasoned in The Federalist; he was more like a governor. Hamilton may have been premature in his comparison, but by the early twentieth century the American president and the nation's governors had, in fact, started to resemble each other more and more. While governors were often overlooked as significant political actors throughout much of the nineteenth century—James Madison famously referred to them as “ciphers”—they were to become disproportionately responsible for theorizing and, at times, introducing some of the most basic features of modern presidential leadership.

Unfortunately, one of the glaring omissions in studies of the American presidency has been the limited attention paid to presidential background. The effect of this omission has been to diminish the significance of the contributions of governors, who were at the fore of the shift toward an executive-centered republic. Despite how well this period (1876-1932) has been covered by historians and political scientists alike, there are strikingly few analyses of the shared trajectories of the governorship and presidency during this time. The presidency is the ultimate executive office, yet not all presidents have had prior executive experience. Moreover, those presidents most often associated with the rise of the modern presidency were all once governors. These perspectives on American political history hold important implications when evaluating the origins, evolution, and democratic character of the modern presidency.

Governors and the Modern Presidency

What do we mean when we speak of the modern presidency? The scholarly distinction between modern and premodern has mostly concerned the movement of presidential behavior away from adherence to the more formal and expressed powers of the office to use of those informal and expanded powers claimed by later presidents. These informal powers are often extralegal and supraconstitutional. While a wide-ranging debate over the precise meaning of a modern presidential office persists,¹⁵ there is broad consensus that changes in presidential leadership beginning around 1900 were characterized by a number of important developments. These included a president more disposed to leading the legislative branch and the newly adopted role of the president as unqualified party leader.¹⁶ Critically, modern presidents have also been distinguished from their predecessors for their institutionalization (and exploitation) of press and media relations—phenomena especially peculiar to the modern age.¹⁷ In addition, modern executive behavior has been characterized by the emergence and expansion of the administrative state, a development occurring in both the American governorship and presidency at this time. Finally, modern presidents have led with a deep and abiding belief in executive-centered government—a theoretical view shared by self-professed conservatives and liberals alike. Taken together, these variables of legislative, party, media, administrative, and executive governing philosophy constitute the central purview of modern presidential leadership, and are the focus of the individual and institutional studies in this book.

While not all-encompassing, these aspects of the modern presidency represent the core features of a “new” presidential office. While there is no single moment by which the modern presidency can be said to have emerged, it is the broad departure by presidents in these areas of leadership that separates their practices from earlier chief executives.¹⁸ It was during this period (1876-1932) that the process of modernization involving these important variables underwent significant change. Yet, tellingly, before scholars began to identify these categories of authority with the modern presidency, they were first employed—experimentally and often peremptorily—by America's governors.

Some of the protagonists in this tale of the development of executive authority are familiar. They include Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR. But the cadre of state executives that helped redefine modern executive leadership includes significant, but more obscure, figures as well, such as Samuel J. Tilden, Robert M. La Follette, and Hiram Johnson. It is not customary to see the origins of modern executive power in the likes of such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century governors. Yet these governors purposefully contributed to the rise of America's Prince—a leader full of prerogative power, guile, and extraconstitutional authority. The construction of this singular power was achieved in the name of the people and progressivism, and this presentation gave it a hidden dimension that remains to be fully explored. Continuing to search for the roots of modern presidential power solely at the national level adds to the difficulty of the enterprise.

The Cluster Phenomenon: The Case for Governors

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry made an intriguing yet unsuccessful appeal for electing the president. Gerry reasoned that executives—namely, governors—should be charged with electing the nation's chief executive. It was counterintuitive, he argued, for legislators, who knew little of the requirements of executive governance, to make such a critical choice. Meanwhile, James Madison recorded in his notes on the Constitutional Convention that part of the opposition to Gerry's plan was the argument that governors would never reduce themselves to “paltry shrubs” by supporting such a great national “Oak.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, Alexander Hamilton would pay Gerry's argument an indirect compliment when, as Publius in Federalist 69, he drew a connection between the presidency and the governorship. “Hence it appears,” Hamilton surmised late in his argument, “that except to the concurrent authority of the President in the article of treaties, it would be difficult to determine whether that Magistrate would in the aggregate, possess more or less power than the Governor of New York.”²⁰ Hamilton's carefully crafted illustration fortified his support for the new executive institution in several ways. To alleviate fears of a revived monarchy, he downplayed the significance of presidential power by comparing it to the then quite mild authority of the office of governor. And yet, by introducing the familiar example of his own New York State, Hamilton employed the strongest governorship of the period to make his case. The exceptional nature of New York gubernatorial authority helped provide the conceptual beginning for what would become an overly robust national executive.²¹ Perhaps this is not what he had in mind, but in minimizing the latent strength of New York's governor, Hamilton effectively veiled an American Prince, cloaking Machiavellian executive power in the modesty of federalism.²²

Hamilton's deftness went unrewarded for most of the nineteenth century. Despite episodic flourishes of prerogative power, the presidency was largely far removed from the vigorous authority Hamilton had tried to cultivate. The early insignificance of the governorship as a pathway to the presidency likewise underscored how relatively inconsequential the office of governor would be during a century dominated by legislatures.²³ Not a single president would be elected directly from a governorship until 1876. Yet, between 1876 and 1932, five presidents were so elected, and eight had prior experience as state executives.

The clustering of governor-presidents—American voters have interrupted the latest cycle dating from President Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush—raises questions beyond a governorship's proximate impact on a given president. In effect, America has had what may be categorized as two compact regimes of governor-presidents, a fact that illuminates the nature of voter preferences, and the ebb and flow of executive authority's acceptance and elevation in our politics. As we shall see, the simple dichotomy of executive and nonexecutive presidents (those lacking gubernatorial experience) enriches our understanding of presidential conduct and invites new perspectives on the changing values associated with executive behavior. Put simply, executive background and the clustering of governor-presidents are either epiphenomenal to the founding of the modern presidency or a central part of its narrative. The governorships presented in this book, and the broader analysis of presidential behavior over time, suggest the latter.

Hayes to FDR: A New Narrative for the Modern Presidency

In his lengthy study of the governorship and presidency, the political scientist Joseph E. Kallenbach reasoned that “prior public service, especially in an elective post, is practically an indispensable requirement for the presidency.”²⁴ Yet over 40 percent of all presidents have not held elective executive office of any kind. Kallenbach's particular attention to elective office is vital in that elections are the most illuminating democratic phenomena. They help reveal voter aspirations, larger political trends, and perceived candidate qualifications for leadership. The frequently worn path to the White House by vice-presidents and secretaries of state early in the Republic offers insights into the nature of nascent American political values and early popular conceptions of leadership. While there were a handful of governors who would go on to occupy the White House in the nation's early development, no sitting state executive was elected from the time of George Washington through Ulysses S. Grant.

Given the limited number of presidents in American history, some have argued that studies of the presidency of necessity devolve into biography. This criticism, while not without some merit, oversimplifies the breadth of research in the field of political science. Scholars such as Richard E. Neustadt, Sidney M. Milkis, Forrest McDonald, and Stephen Skowronek, for example, have engaged in more than mere biographical analysis.²⁵ In addition, excellent analyses of the institution have been introduced by Andrew Rudalevige, William Howell, and Kenneth Mayer.²⁶ Some have nevertheless argued that given the limited number of individuals involved, the so-called “problem of n” presents too high a statistical bar for drawing meaningful conclusions about the presidency. Every president is different, after all—what can we possibly know about what amounts to now forty-four different offices? This problem can be mitigated by considering presidential background. For instance, years of public service can be aggregated among presidents: during the period between Washington's and Grant's presidencies—some eighty-eight years—presidents served a combined 339 years in public office prior to their presidencies. Yet only thirty-four of these years—roughly 10 percent—were spent in prior elective executive office.²⁷

The transformation is therefore stunning when we consider that, in the period from Rutherford B. Hayes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, presidents were twice as likely as their nineteenth-century counterparts to have had prior elective executive experience.²⁸ In addition, these Gilded Age and Progressive Era presidents represented the first cadre of governor-presidents. Perhaps one explanation for this clustering is that the modern presidency was somehow responsible for enlivening the importance and overall dynamism of state executives. However, the evidence suggests the causal arrow worked largely in the other direction. Empowered, yet distant, state executives built a set of practices and theories that ultimately shaped presidential behavior and, indeed, made acceptable a broad executive-centered approach to governance in America. Modern executive power was being created in the states first—from the ground up.

Hence, modern presidents did not so much transform executive behavior as state executives transformed the modern presidency. The paramount executives of this era, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, were pivotal in their drive toward executive leadership and presidential power. Given the specific advantages of their Hudson progressive pedigree, they were the preeminent protomodern executives of the age. But they were not alone. Other governors were critical to the invigortion of executive practices and frequently pushed the bounds of acceptable executive behavior. Wisconsin governor Robert M. La Follette and California's Hiram Johnson are just two of the larger personalities whose behavior extended well beyond their states to affect the most basic attitudes held by early twentieth-century presidents. As Alan Ware has demonstrated, Progressive Era reforms in the states were largely a response to the rapid changes in urbanization and industrialization taking place in the nation, compelling new policies and new party candidates.²⁹ Governors were most often the prime movers in these endeavors.

While this early progressive period represented the first meaningful break with prior trends with respect to presidential background, the presidential election of 1876 likewise introduced a new scenario in American politics. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York affirmed a different kind of presidential campaign and presentation to voters. As sitting governors, they were the first moderns to employ the now rote images of the “Washington Outsider” or “anti-establishment” candidate. Hayes's and Tilden's viability was built on the premise that both scandal and economic crisis were best addressed by those without vested interests in the nation's capital—men whose hands were clean of the antidemocratic excesses for which the legislative branch was increasingly excoriated in the popular press. The rapid and psychologically disconcerting industrialization taking place in America helped pave the way for a more popular form of countervailing executive power. As broadly presented by Emile Durkheim and others, the preconditions for this authority could be found in social forces that were being altered by new and disturbing economic realities.³⁰ In the American political context, the result was to erect state and, later, national executives powerful enough to stand up to the twin machines of industrial capitalism and political bossism.

The governors presented in this book are selected in part because they are the first actors in the regime of governors³¹ elected to the presidency directly from state offices. The governorships reflecting the antimachine predilection in this cohort include those of Hayes, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR. These cases best highlight the essential features of statehouse-to-White House executive distillation. One reason for the salience of this particular set of executives is that the Hudson corridor (New York and New Jersey) provided executives with a disproportionately powerful megaphone in the form of press coverage. While Ohio produced a significant number of presidents during the period, they were less reflective of the overriding trend toward executive-centered governance. Nevertheless, Hayes's governorship was more in line with the greater emergent executive narrative than some of his Ohio brethren, and is thus included to add further breadth of understanding to national executive trends.³²

Not all of these governors would go on to attain the presidency. The often overlooked Tilden, for example, authored one of the defining executive legacies of the early and late Progressive Era. His electoral loss in 1876 was significant on a number of levels, not the least of which being that his national campaign exemplified the way Hudson figures would present themselves to the national electorate for decades to come. Beyond Tilden extends a field that includes the most influential Progressive Era figures and champions of executive authority in this period. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Hiram Johnson of California produced governorships whose respective contributions provided regional and ideological cohesion to the landscape of early twentieth-century attitudes toward executive power and presidential authority. La Follette's and Johnson's governorships provided object lessons for expanding executive latitude at the national level. Indeed, La Follette's executive style and policies were cribbed widely by TR, Wilson, and FDR alike. La Follette is perhaps the most inspirational figure of what can only be described as an evolving movement, led by governors, to present a new vision for executive behavior in the United States.

Each of these executive stories revolves around the aforementioned variables that make up critical components of the modern presidency. These begin with leadership of the legislative branch—namely, the setting of legislative goals and the executive's direction of the legislative agenda. Second, modern presidents have come to be identified as leaders of their party. This represents a break with early republican notions of the president as party representative, or figurehead. As we shall see, it was governors who helped break this subordinate identification with party, as party leadership and, at times, defiance frequently came to be seen among voters as powerful and appealing qualities in their executives. The third element in the subnational origins of the modern presidency is the great emphasis placed on press and media relations by these governors and governor-presidents.³³ The changing dynamic of press coverage of governors, marked by the institutionalization of press relations within the executive office, foreshadowed a key innovation in presidential practices. Finally, as the administrative capacities of the states grew, new ideological arguments were presented by governors to both justify and sustain the changes occurring in their executive offices. The relationship between ideology and public policy became increasingly important in this era as state executives sought new powers for their progressive agendas. With these developments in mind, it is essential to reconsider the traditional understandings of the relevance of presidential background and prior public office. In doing so, this work will cast some light back on the institutional nature of American political development, and make the case for the significance, if not centrality, of the American governorship to the birth of the modern presidency.

Why Presidential Background Matters

The governorship is a political institution. It is not simply a touchstone for discourse within federalism. As a political institution, the governorship has meaning that crosses state and institutional boundaries, while also serving as a gateway for understanding the presidency. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, governors emerged as a sort of deus ex machina—heroic figures cast into a narrative gone awry—as increasingly powerful private interests consolidated undue authority in the political arena. Executive power shed its early image as an embarrassment of republicanism as it became an instrument of progressivism. Executives, not legislatures, were now seen as best able to confront the antidemocratic forces growing apparently beyond all scale. “I would trust a governor quicker than I would a legislature every week,”³⁴ remarked one member of the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1912. Such exhortations were no longer derided for their presumed monarchist character. It is no coincidence that governor-presidents account for 91 percent of all presidential vetoes in this period, an era in which a clear majority of presidential vetoes in American history occurred.³⁵ While presidents were just beginning to reconsider the relationship between formal and personal power, governors were instrumental figures in fusing the two. Central to this effort were their appeals to the public, which helped overturn traditional notions of what an executive could or could not do.³⁶

In almost every way, governors began to cross the line in the early progressive period. They did so literally, as when Governor La Follette delivered his annual address in person to the Wisconsin legislature. They did so figuratively, as when Woodrow Wilson threatened to govern “unconstitutionally” in New Jersey. And they would frequently do so when at odds with their own party, as was the case when TR served as governor of New York. These early efforts in executive power-building have unfortunately been separated from the broader story of the growth of executive power in America. And where excellent institutional analysis of the American governorship can be found, it is seldom connected meaningfully to the larger question of executive behavior or the institutional development of the presidency. In short, presidential background, a subset of a subset of political science, has been addressed as part of a very limited approach to understanding the evolution of the presidency. And, when it has been invoked, it has been all too often through an ahistorical lens. Such approaches have tended toward character studies, biography, psychology, and personality studies. Institutionally based literature on presidential background is very limited, save for efforts at assessing prior office as a pathway to the White House. All too often, exceptions notwithstanding, the presumption has been that prior executive office among presidents is largely a personal or biographical affair, rather than an historic or institutional one. The executive as category, in short, is missing.

Beyond the adoption of informal power, the modern presidency has also come to mean the institutionalization of the office of president. The growth of its bureaucracy, aura of personal and prerogative power, and overall importance as an agency for perpetual emergency management, mark today's presidency as decidedly different from what went before it. Richard E. Neustadt's mid-twentieth-century analysis of the political environment inhabited by presidents of that time has come to best represent this understanding of the distinction between moderns and others: “The weakening of party ties, the emphasis on personality, the close approach of world events, the changeability of public moods, and above all the ticket splitting, none of this was usual before the Second World War…. Nothing really comparable has been seen in this country since the 1880s. And the eighties were not troubled by emergencies in policy.”³⁷

It is hard to refute the increasingly institutionalized nature of the presidency. But what has been absent from most discussions of what is modern about today's presidency is the idea that not only has the office been institutionalized, but so have all of its occupants, as presidents are unquestionably shaped by their prior political offices. By hearkening back to the 1880s, Neustadt indirectly (and unintentionally) linked today's presidency to an era whose political climate served as the incubator for new forms of executive power, and for the modern presidency. This was the period that launched the political careers of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and a host of dominant state executives, a period defined by new and radical interpretations of the nature of the executive role in republican government. Like most who subscribe to the idea of the modern presidency as a distinct pol itical phenomenon in American pol itical development, Neustadt drew from critical experiences before FDR. As such, both Wood-row Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt have been seen as crucial precursors to the invigoration of the presidency. And while Neustadt did not make the case explicitly in his discussion of the 1880s, it is worth considering just how comparable and informative the politics of that period were to those encountered by modern executives.

However critical the TR and Wilson presidential narratives are for understanding the modern presidency, though, they do not go far enough. This approach suggests somehow that Roosevelt and Wilson either invented, or sublimely fell into, a new language of American executive power, one with no discernible or meaningful antecedents. To extend the linguistics metaphor, American governors best represent the most proximate Linear B of the modern presidency. It was they who developed the institutional roots of discourse, practices, and theories that ultimately grew into modern executive parlance in the United States. All classical periods have their founders; the modern presidency's was most closely tied to late nineteenth-century executives and to governors in particular. There may have been a share of clerks (to use Neustadt's term) in the White House before the iconic FDR, but not all executives were worthy (or unworthy, as it were) of this appellation.

So where are the key indicators of the birth of the modern presidency to be found? For the political scientist Jeffrey Tulis, little has been more critically suggestive of the rise of the modern presidency than the dramatic increase in rhetoric among twentieth-century presidents. Tulis sees the willful use of popular rhetoric as a reflection of new forms of democratic politics and changing values within the polity. As he explains, “Rhetorical practice [among presidents] is not merely a variable, it is also amplification or vulgarization of the ideas that produce it.”³⁸ In Tulis's model, there is ample evidence to suggest that prior executive office played a role in altering the rhetorical dispositions of American presidents, while also serving as a fundamental variable in the creation of the modern presidency. As others have rightly noted, however, Tulis's conclusions are contingent upon a more restricted sense of what constitutes “rhetoric.”³⁹ Whether or not one accepts a more limited definition of rhetoric, such as confining it to speechmaking only, we are left to ponder where the earliest and most significant rhetorical strategies were employed among American executives.

In considering the value of the rhetorical presidency as a portent of the modern executive office, it is worth remembering that the genetic coding of American presidents has changed considerably over time. To start, the political DNA of chief executives has trended toward prior executive experience to a much greater extent in the second half of American political development than in the first. In Tulis's model, for example, Andrew Johnson is the great statistical outlier of his time, having “violated virtually all of the nineteenth-century norms encompassed by the doctrine.”⁴⁰

But what if Johnson's break with prior presidential norms reflects a greater willingness among former governors to defy the traditional encumbrances upon public utterances? What if the subsequent transformation of presidential rhetoric can be traced to the parallel rise in prior executive experience? Interestingly, Johnson was the first former governor to occupy white House since the administration of James K. Polk over twenty years earlier. Governors, after all, were the earliest executives to perfect the art of public appeals; they were, more than any other institutional constituency in America, predisposed to prerogative power and the denigration of legislative authority. Can it be mere coincidence that those presidents with prior elective executive experience in Tulis's study average close to twice as many speeches per year as their nonexecutive counterparts?⁴¹ It would seem the rhetorical presidency may well have been presaged, if not begun, by the popular rhetorical governorship. To be certain, hostility toward “up-start” executives in the early 1900s was not restricted to presidents alone. As John F. Reynolds points out, “Complaints of ‘executive usurpation' found expression in legislatures in New Jersey, Colorado and elsewhere, manifesting a more activist executive branch at the state as well as the national levels.”⁴²

Looking at the tables provided below, we can see that those presidents most often linked to the turn in rhetorical practices associated with the modern presidency were those with disproportionate backgrounds in executive office and as governors. The examples of Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William McKinley, along with their more prolific successors Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, serve to remind us that the modern presidency is very much linked to this corresponding rise in executive experience. Tables 1 and 2 show the political experience of American presidents as it relates to the number of years spent in prior executive administration and elective executive office. The capital “X” denotes a sitting governor or one elected directly to the White House; the lowercase “x” reflects a conventional governorship. “Y” represents a governorship under the Articles of Confederation, and “T” represents a territorial governorship.

As Mel Laracey and others argue, Tulis does not capture the totality of rhetorical practices among nineteenth-century presidents in his The Rhetorical Presidency. Granted, even if Tulis mostly discusses presidential speech-making (albeit with clear policy preferences), he nevertheless demonstrates an important dynamic of new presidential behavior. That there was such willingness to openly convey personal political views in this new manner by presidents—especially by those who were former governors—is but another reason to explore the relationship between the modern presidency and governorship.

As scholars continue to debate the origins, meaning, and very existence of the modern presidency, there will hopefully be more space to consider the relevance of prior political experience in assessments of the American presidency's development. The growth of elective executive office in presidential background is unmistakable. Consider the two halves of American political history. During the tenures of the last twenty-one presidents from Grover Cleveland to George W. Bush, presidents have been over three times as likely to have had prior experience as elected executives as their twenty-one counterparts from George Washington to Chester Arthur. Further, the period from FDR to George W. Bush represents a near quadrupling of years served in some executive capacity compared to those in the first half of the nation's history. By whatever means one considers the presidency, it is clear that, over time, executive experience no longer proved embarrassing or prohibitive of political advancement. And governors were “ciphers” no more.

Table 1. Years of Public Service for U.S. Presidents

Table 2. Years of Public Service for U.S. Presidents

Why Hudson Progressives?

The modern presidency was built upon a demonstrable intensification of and emphasis on executive background, coupled with a sudden and related proliferation of governor-presidents. These were clustered as a group during late state development in the United States. New York's governors were particularly crucial figures in this era, and, as such, they began to be featured prominently in the national press. Their status as iconoclasts went as far back as Tilden, and the ensuing increase in press coverage from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through FDR demonstrates just how important New York's (and, to a lesser degree, New Jersey's) governors were in redefining the stature of state executives. As can be seen in the following chart, the significant contributions of Tilden, Cleveland, TR, and ultimately FDR are revealed in the increased press attention they garnered. The New York Times's increased coverage of New York's governors since the paper's inception through the governorship of FDR reveals the elevated status of this crucial cadre of state executives in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and beyond (see Figure 1).

A similar pattern of coverage for governors can be seen in other national papers as well, including the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. This broader look at the Hudson executive influence will be taken up in Chapters 3 and 4.

Figure 1. Governors of New York and New York Times citations, 1851-1932

In looking to New York and New Jersey, this book explores a particular variety of progressive political development—namely, a Hudson strain linked to executive-led reform, disproportionate press and media influence, and a peculiar mix of large-scale, private, antidemocratic institutions and patronage opportunities. Coupled with enduring and expansive executive constitutional authority, these elements made the case of the Hudson Progressives unique. It was this combination of factors that gave the region's executives a superior platform to innovate at the state level, while playing the lead in invigorating the warrants of executive authority. They did this primarily and initially at the state level, while, in the process, accruing the greater share of presidential possibilities for themselves. It is therefore essential to examine these protagonists as some of the earliest exemplars of what would become modern presidential authority.

Conclusion

Given the rising importance of the governorship as part of the overall elevation in executive power in the United States, it is insufficient to consider modern executive authority to be solely a function of presidential practices. For instance, Wilson's threat to govern unconstitutionally and his appeals to the public were both innovations developed during his governorship (and patterned after other governors such as La Follette). The same can be said for TR's strengths as party leader, and, on occasion, party challenger. Nearly all the chief builders associated with the birth of modern presidential power were once governors whose policies and theories of governance were largely replicated later on the presidential stage. In turn, these governor-presidents influenced the practices of their gubernatorial counterparts, producing an intriguing dialectic in American executive politics. Moreover, as I will later describe, the bases of modern presidential leadership and practices were informed by other state executives as well. The shifting tectonic plates of executive authority converged around the nation's governors and its early modern presidents at the turn of the last century. To miss this is to overlook one of the important stories of American political development and the rise of American executive power.

Thus far, I have avoided making any normative arguments about the nature of this transformation in executive background as it applies to the modern presidency. I will take up this argument more directly in the conclusion of the book. In short, the relationship between prior executive office and the birth of the modern presidency begs new approaches to understanding the broad set of political, sociological, and economic factors driving the popular appeal of both state and national executives. The anomie of modern industrial society had its consequences for both individuals and the nature of the state. One of these consequences was the elevation of executive power as a counterweight to the large, faceless institutions that were increasingly prevalent in society. In the American context, this elevation of the executive grew primarily among Progressive Era governors who gained a host of new institutional powers and tools to stoke popular sentiment in their favor. This was a mutually induced process, as voters sought antimachine and often antiparty leaders often with extralegal (and at times anticonstitutional) perspectives on executive governance. While the rise of modern industrial capitalism in America brought its own staggering implications for the reshaping of republican values, so too did the emergence of the outsized executive. This is one of the great ironies of progressivism in America: it extolled the virtue of popular ends, but, in its untethering of executive power, simultaneously extolled the virtue of personalist leadership. We are still trying to untangle the benefits and costs of this transformation in American politics.