Читать книгу How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency - Saladin M. Ambar - Страница 8

Chapter 1

Emerging Executives of the Second Republic, 1876–1912

I would go back as far as Hiram Johnson when he destroyed boss rule.

—Gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan, describing his party philosophy, 1966¹

In the end of course, there will be a revolution, but it will not come in my time.

—Hiram Johnson, 1920²

Introduction

Just months into his first campaign for the presidency, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to attend to some unfinished business in Albany. Despite his reluctance to assault his party or New York's political machine, FDR nonetheless confronted New York City's errant, albeit famously colorful mayor. For years, Jimmy Walker had provided ample ammunition to his political foes through his personal and political excesses. Over time, he had grown to personify graft and big city corruption. If Roosevelt were to win the Democratic nomination, he would have to satisfy the progressive elements of his party, who, since the time of Samuel J. Tilden, had come to expect the use of executive power as the chief means of protecting the people's trust. Moreover, as the historian Richard L. McCormick has noted, New York's increasingly powerful “governorship inevitably encouraged anyone who attained it to distance himself from the [Party] boss.”³ It was in this context that Roosevelt launched his late assault upon Walker, ultimately compelling the mayor's resignation.

The importance to late nineteenth-century politics of Roosevelt's row with Walker, which will be discussed more fully later, is its indebtedness to past executive practices. Here, the political legacy of New York's governors—and of Tilden specifically—figured into FDR's and the state's claims against Walker. It was Tilden who brought down Boss William Tweed some sixty years before Roosevelt's fight with Walker. That victory regained the power of removal for New York's governor—still a point of some contention in 1932.⁴ As Roosevelt's Seabury Commission argued to the state's attorney general at the time, “the justification for the position taken by [FDR] was actuated by the same considerations which served as guides for his illustrious predecessors, Governors Tilden, Cleveland and Hughes.”⁵

Yet, like so many of the early progressive governors at the fore of the transformation of executive power in America, Samuel J. Tilden remains an obscure figure. His place in history holds a spare vestige of importance—the losing subject of the tainted bargain that ended Reconstruction. Yet Tilden was hardly an irrelevant figure in his time. One New York Times feature on Woodrow Wilson in 1910, weeks before his election as governor of New Jersey, captured just how significant a figure the former New York governor remained: “Wilson— A Tilden, But a Tilden Up to Date,” ran the late September headline. The Times would go on to tout Wilson as “a man with all the Tilden characteristics and an appreciation of the fact that conditions have changed since Tilden's day.”⁶In New Jersey, Wilson would face tremendous opposition, but also great opportunity for support among progressives—provided he demonstrated credentials worthy of the Tilden legacy.⁷

Undoubtedly, the election of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction and the restoration of white home rule in the South, but it also heralded a new era of notoriety for state executives. The reform impetus sweeping the country at the time found its most vocal expression in the states, where governors led the way.⁸ Tilden's governorship reflected an early but growing movement by voters to grant greater power and voice to their executives. The shift from legislative to executive authority was purposeful, as governors were called upon to respond to the demand for specific policies that would fundamentally alter the relationship between the people, their government, and private enterprise in the states.

Besides serving as the immediate impetus ending Reconstruction, the election of 1876 has been seen as the beginning of an era of deep partisan divisions and hotly contested presidential elections. Few have seen it as the beginning of the end of America's “First Republic.”⁹ Formerly, American electoral politics had been typified by a Virginian philosophical approach to the presidency, buoyed by more limited conceptions of executive authority.¹⁰As the political scientist Rowland Egger noted, “The executive apparatus which emerged [from Virginia's 1776 Virginia Constitutional Convention] was weak in constitutional stature, confused in lines of authority, and wholly and irresponsibly subservient to the legislative will.”¹¹ While late nineteenth-century American politics was certainly defined by a reform impulse, it was also joined to new and provocative executive practices. One example of this was the virtual disappearance of legislative overrides of executive vetoes in the states, which fostered greater control over policy making by governors.¹²

In truth, James Madison's view of governors as “little more than ciphers” reflected an executive model steeped in stringent modesty. It was legislative-, not executive-centered, government that concerned Madison initially. “Experience had proved a tendency in our governments to throw all power into the Legislative vortex,”¹³ Madison wrote in his notes on the Constitutional Convention. Yet, with the convention debates behind him, and fresh examples of the misuse of presidential authority arising, Madison questioned, as Jack Rakove has suggested, “whether Hamilton was using the energy of the executive to attract support to the government, or the government to attract support to the executive.”¹⁴ Andrew Jackson's and Abraham Lincoln's muscular uses of executive authority serve as notable exceptions to the Virginian conceptualization of the presidency, and are reminders of the sharp turn in late nineteenth-century executive behavior.¹⁵ Governors were at the fore of this turn; they were the “kings of state progressivism,” as described by Robert H. Wiebe, who “expanded the discretionary power of the executive.”¹⁶

Governors in the Age of Reform

Reform governors were of two minds regarding the types of changes they wanted to introduce into the political system. On the one hand, they generally favored process-oriented goals. These were tools to make democracy less of an abstract concept. Hoping to turn voters into demilegislators, both progressive theorists and politicians supported direct primaries over the old convention system. They also tended to support local initiatives and referenda over what they deemed to be the corrupt brokering over legislation all too common in American statehouses. While this orientation had its critics, even among progressives, the movement toward what Richard Hofstadter referred to as a kind of “mechanical” democracy came to represent a good deal of the reformist impulse around 1900.¹⁷

Next, reform governors sought more fundamental changes in public policy. In their efforts to upend a system weighted heavily in favor of private business and its interests, state executives implemented policies designed to limit the power of utilities, railroads, canal agencies, custom houses, and the “trusts,” which had come to embody the immoderation of the period. Whether it was a fight over “Canal Rings” as with Tilden, or a battle over the taxation of franchises as with TR, reform-minded governors sought personal power on behalf of the people. As Hofstadter outlined in The Age of Reform:

Somewhat more congenial to [reform] traditions was the idea that the evils against which the Progressives were fighting could be remedied by a reorganization of government in which responsibility and authority could be clearly located in an executive, whose acts would be open to public view. The power of the boss, they argued, like the overweening power of great corporations, was a consequence of the weakness of the political executive and the more general division of authority and impotence in government. Spokesmen of this view scoffed at the inherited popular suspicion of executive power as an outmoded holdover from the days of the early Republic when executive power was still identified with royal government and the royal governors.¹⁸

Ronald Reagan's curious conjuring of the great Progressive Era governor Hiram Johnson can only be fully understood in the context of such executiveled reform. What Johnson did in California fifty years before Reagan took office in Sacramento was part of this wider movement toward executive leadership and experimentation. In short, progressive governors reenvisioned the role of executives in the name of protecting “the interests of the people” (or “the individual” as Reagan put it to his “Meet the Press” host, Sander Vanocour).¹⁹ This idea—that the executive is uniquely responsible for guarding the public and its interests—lies at the heart of the modern presidency. The root of this form of governance, however, was planted during a period of comparatively weak presidential authority. It was state executives who first began to take the legislative initiative, often in contradistinction to their national counterparts. When Woodrow Wilson described the presidency as a “big governorship,” in Congressional Government, it was in many respects an admission of relative presidential weakness.²⁰ Today, as political scientists continue to question the true effectiveness or democratic quality of Progressive Era tools such as the initiative or recall, there is little debate about the centrality of executive power in American politics today.

In the early 1900s, there were few prominent examples of strong executives at the national level. Woodrow Wilson's admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, however grudging, is well known; however, his equally important regard for Grover Cleveland is little remembered today. Some of this is no doubt owed to the personal animosity noted by historians between the two men, focused upon a letter Cleveland penned in which he described Wilson as lacking “intellectual honesty.”²¹ Wilson's imbroglio with Cleveland—a Princeton trustee opposed to then Princeton President Wilson's graduate school plan—was part of a broader battle dating to before Wilson's time in public office. “[P]ractically all the darts are supplied by the Princetonians who hate me,” Wilson would write in early 1912.²² What has also no doubt been a contributing factor in underestimating Cleveland's influence on Wilson is the effect of the natural supplanting of one great party figure of the period for another—such was the case when Cleveland eclipsed Tilden.²³ And yet it was Cleveland who first helped shape Wilson's questioning of the nineteenth-century model of executive subservience to the legislature. And it was Wilson's perception of Cleveland's status as someone whom we would today describe as “outside the Beltway” that foreshadowed the role all governor-presidents would come to play—that of Washington outsider.

Wilson wrote of this phenomenon, which was fast becoming an integral part of the executive story of his age: the emergence of state executives as national leaders and reformers. “It has not often happened,” Wilson remarked, “that candidates for the presidency have been chosen from outside the ranks of those who have seen service in national politics.” Wilson empathized with Cleveland's status as an “‘outsider,’ a man without congressional sympathies and points of view.”²⁴ It was the outsiders who were best positioned to claim credit for breaking up the trusts, disrupting the “rings,” and, in the somewhat anachronistic language employed by Reagan, “destroying boss rule.” Likewise, these outsiders were prone to outright leadership of, if not an assault upon, political parties. The early paucity of governors on the national scene, as noted by Wilson, would become reversed in short order by a progressive line of governors who helped build a new executive model in America's Second Republic. As the historian Herbert Margulies has pointed out, “Much of progressivism's achievement occurred on the national level, where the movement is associated with men like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert M. La Follette. Yet it is a suggestive coincidence that each of these three served first as reform governor before moving to the White house or the Senate chambers. The fountainhead for the progressive movement was the state.”²⁵

Wilson would put it best himself: “The whole country…is clamoring for leadership,” he would say, “and a new role, which to many persons seems little less than unconstitutional is thrust upon our executives.”²⁶

Beyond the Election of 1876: Forging New Pathways

In some respects, the election of 1876 was the first national election. Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden of New York that June in St. Louis at the first convention ever held west of the Mississippi.²⁷ The use of telegraph technology, which in 1844 produced the first news transferred via wire (Henry Clay's Whig Party nomination!), had become commonplace by 1876. Tilden had in fact installed a telegraph line into the executive chamber in his governor's office in New York to monitor the news out of St. Louis.²⁸ One of the reasons governors became national figures was that rail and wire technology finally brought the hinterlands of America out of the periphery and into the core of the nation's political consciousness. Tilden's reputation as the man responsible for bringing down Boss Tweed spurred national calls for his nomination, including some from distant California.²⁹ Subsequently, Hayes would become the first president to visit the Pacific states, and it was his administration that saw the installation of the first telephone in the executive mansion.³⁰ In the period following its centennial year, the United States had truly become a national republic.

Nonetheless, it was Samuel Tilden's losing campaign that contributed genuinely significant innovations to modern electoral politics. Countering Hayes's efforts to wave “the bloody shirt” of the Civil War (“are you for the rebellion, or are you for the Union?”³¹), Tilden sought to extend his message in unconventional ways. The Tilden machine that fought Boss Tweed's was now churning out its own propaganda—establishing a literary bureau, a 750-page campaign text book, and a speakers' bureau that coordinated Tilden's far-flung appearances. It was dubbed the “perfect system.”³² As Tilden biographer Alexander Flick noted, Tilden was one of the first party leaders to employ publicity based on the psychology of advertising, in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, and circular letters.³³ Much of this political innovation dated from Tilden's earlier campaigns for governor, where his organizational skills were ahead of their time. As the reporter William C. Hudson noted years later in his reflections on Tilden, it was Tilden “who invented the exhaustive canvass of each town as a basis for campaign work.” Such practices had their rewards. “He once showed [me] a book containing the names of 50,000 Democrats,” said Hudson, “with whom he could directly communicate.”³⁴ In many respects, Tilden's were the first exhortations from the modern “war room.” His New York-based campaign ultimately devised a crude but innovative form of national polling as well. Using newspaper clippings and individually crafted reports delivered across the country by his aides, Tilden was able to assess regional strengths and weaknesses.

Critically, Tilden's electoral appeal was based on his reputation as a reformer. Referring to Washington, the New York World editorialized about Tilden, “Would to God that some Hercules might arise and cleanse that Augean stable as the city and state of [N]ew York are cleansing.”³⁵ The efforts to portray both Hayes and Tilden as “clean government” men were essential to the campaign of 1876, and all subsequent gubernatorial bids to the White House. From Credit Mobilier to Watergate, the regimes of governor-presidents have followed periods of grave popular doubt about federal corruption centered on the presidency.

The myriad scandals attached to the Grant administration, the economic panic of 1873, and widespread disaffection with Reconstruction, helped state executives immensely, if for no other reason than that they were spared by a press and citizenry obsessed with cabinet and senate-based scandals. Gilded Age politics bore little resemblance to the perceived halcyon days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. The caricatures of U.S. senators popularized in Puck were summed up in words by Henry Adams, when he described the United States in his 1880 novel Democracy as “a government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators.”³⁶ Such popular disaffection with Washington “insiders” would not be seen again until the post-Watergate era, which launched the second historic wave of governor-presidents that began with Jimmy Carter.

Hayes, Tilden, and the Political Geography of 1876

In highly contested late nineteenth-century presidential elections, the critical but frequently unpredictable states of Ohio and New York proved instrumental to breeding national candidates for the office. In the first twenty-five elections held after the Civil War, New Yorkers or Ohioans won the White House seventeen times.³⁷ Nine of these victories belonged to governor-presidents who articulated an antimachine and executive-leaning politics. As the most populous state in the union, with thirty-five electoral votes, New York was a frequent king-maker in presidential politics. After Pennsylvania, Ohio followed with twenty-two electoral votes, and its growing immigrant population and sizable Irish community made it a battleground state for years to come. New York's Horatio Seymour advised Tilden to portray Hayes as anti-Irish, eschewing more genteel self-promotion, such as “Tilden and Reform.” “The word ‘reform’ is not popular with the workingmen,” Seymour insisted.³⁸ Tilden nearly pulled out Ohio, losing by just 6,636 votes.³⁹

Hayes would have his own difficulties. Even as governor, representing the incumbent party, with its association with Washington's scandals, proved daunting. To make matters worse, Hayes had only marginal support from New York's highly influential Republican party boss Roscoe Conkling, who was denied the nomination at the Republican convention in Cincinnati.⁴⁰ Conkling's power came from Republican control over New York's most coveted patronage bonanza, the Custom House. As early as 1828, the Custom House's duties were paying all federal expenses apart from interest on the debt.⁴¹ By 1876, it was the largest federal office in the United States and was responsible for 70 percent of all customs revenue.⁴² As President, Hayes would ultimately direct some token reform efforts regarding the Custom House, such as naming Theodore Roosevelt senior collector of customs to the Port of New York (over Conkling's objections). Agitated, Conkling used his senate committee power to delay the appointment, catching Roosevelt in the crosshairs of a titanic political battle, one that may have debilitated, if not killed, him outright. The seeds of TR's reformist bent were in part attributed to his father's physical demise and the Custom House battle with Conkling.⁴³ The possibility that Hayes would lay down the law to Conkling once president proved too great a risk; Conkling effectively sat on his hands during the national campaign, greatly hurting Hayes's chances.

Indeed, after Hayes's electoral victory, his administration did in fact go after Conkling, in many respects exercising an extraordinary amount of executive and federal authority. Hayes's attack on the New York Custom House also proved highly symbolic. It served notice to other cities similarly victimized by petty, machine-based corruption.⁴⁴ Hayes's efforts against Conkling should be seen in light of his overall executive-centered leanings, which, in the words of the historian H. Wayne Morgan, ultimately “sustained Executive rights” while helping to “restore presidential authority.”⁴⁵

Tilden, for his part, turned down the position of collector offered to him by President Polk over thirty years before his presidential bid.⁴⁶ Nearly every politician of ambition coveted this plum of the New York political machine. Tilden was among the few to spurn the office. In time, Tilden's Jeffersonian aversion to centralization made him an opponent of what would become a more robust executive approach forwarded by TR, Wilson, and, ultimately, FDR. Nonetheless, this “conservative” aspect of Tilden's philosophy made him equally opposed to centralization of municipal authority that violated the public interest. As the issue of municipal corruption increased in prominence nationally, Americans became fearful the nation was moving away from its founding principles. David McCulloch captured the sentiment well: “For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities.…The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years, learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed.”⁴⁷ Tilden interpreted his executive role as requiring him to serve as a buffer between the public and New York's political machine. Like so many antimachine governors who would follow during the Progressive Era, he launched an attack on municipal corruption, including that of Tweed. It was a struggle that forced reconsideration of the governor's power of removal, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Along these reformist lines, Tilden's inaugural address targeted the Canal Ring of private interests that had abused governmental outlays to the state's canals, and he likewise targeted the corruptibility of the famed Custom House itself.

Such shots across the bow were intended not only for New Yorkers, but also “our sister States” who stood to benefit from “an improved polity, wise legislation, and good administration.”⁴⁸ Despite losing his presidential bid, Tilden's gubernatorial administration stood as an early symbol of reform, one not forgotten by later progressives. The immodest but always revealing Theodore Roosevelt knew the parameters that defined his executive legacy. “I think I have been the best Governor of my time,” he claimed, “better either than Cleveland or Tilden.”⁴⁹ Roosevelt would eschew the Jeffersonian plot line of early reformers, favoring a national politics and more overt forms of executive power. But it was Tilden who destroyed Tweed, first with a bold, if not unglamorous, affidavit, followed by targeted legislation during his governorship. Tweed's end was indeed ignominious, spiraling downward amid his flight to California, then Spain, and, ultimately, a return to New York in handcuffs. He would die in prison in 1878. “I guess Tilden and [Democratic party regular Charles S.] Fairchild have killed me at last. I hope they will be satisfied now,” he said.⁵⁰

Rise of the Hudson Progressives

Why were Hudson progressives so successful? First, Tilden and later New York governors had far more authority in New York than did Hayes and his counterparts in Ohio. While both men came to their governorships at a time when New York and Ohio lacked as much as an executive mansion, Tilden at least held the nation's most powerful executive state office.⁵¹ Here, early American executive institutional development, like much of what can be explained about American political life, is attributable to geography. By and large, New York and New Jersey escaped the more conservative executive constitutional realities confronting states south of Pennsylvania.⁵²

Not all Hudson governors were uniformly “progressive,” of course. Nevertheless, the recurrence of progressive executive leadership and its popular support gave the New York and New Jersey variety of progressivism a geopolitical legacy with enduring national importance. As well detailed by the political historian Charles Thach, New York's constitutional oddity was in granting the state's executive exceptional authority. One of the rationales could not have been more unpredictable, as New York invigorated its governor in the aftermath of the so-called “Doctors' Riots.” These were a series of citizen attacks against the city's physicians, caught, of all things, digging up graves for cadavers to be dissected for medical research. Once it was discovered that “respectable” citizens' bodies were part of this project (where “strangers” and “negroes” had been used formerly), New Yorkers took matters into their own hands.⁵³ As the former editor of the New York Tribune Joel Tyler Headley recounted in his short history of the riots, “The Mayor and the Governor seemed to have an unaccountable repugnance to the use of force.”⁵⁴ In his classic study of the American presidency, Thach credits the riots against the doctors with compelling New York to strengthen its executive, forwarding a “body of constitutional interpretation, in which, indeed, may be found some of the most important of American constitutional principles.”⁵⁵ More than that of any other state, New York's constitution played a profound role in shaping the framers' arguments for a strong “energetic” presidency.⁵⁶ Coupled with a disproportionately influential press and a growing popular antagonism to the region's large political machines and bosses, Hudson politics would evolve to favor executive-centered solutions.

Despite somewhat weaker constitutional grants of power, other governors found ways to test the limits of their executive authority. Hayes, for example, was hardly docile in his efforts to exert executive influence in Ohio. Unlike New York's governor, Ohio's chief executive was far closer to one of Madison's “ciphers.” First, Ohio's governor lacked veto power. The governor also lacked authority over the state budget and held very limited appointive powers. Yet Hayes used the appointments he had at his discretion in unprecedented ways. As was increasingly common, Hayes sought to use his stature as governor to project an image of himself as being above party. He did this most effectively through his appointment of a fair number of Democrats to state offices, a rarity for most governors at the time. “I was assailed as untrue to my party,” Hayes recalled, “but the advantages of minority representation were soon apparent, and the experiment became successful.”⁵⁷

Hayes took honor to extremes, however, when he pledged in his acceptance letter to seek only one term if elected president in 1876. Hayes thus peremptorily made himself a lame-duck.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the reform issue was effectively muted by Hayes's nomination—a preview of sorts for when New Jersey's progressive Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson, effectively divided the progressive vote to his advantage in the 1912 presidential election. As Roy Morris, Jr. writes, “Hayes's many years of honest service as governor of Ohio, far from the quicksands of Washington,” made him a formidable counter, if not equal, to Tilden's reputation as the outsider standard-bearer of reform.⁵⁹

While Tilden's leadership of New York's Democratic legislature made his veto power largely unnecessary, Hayes employed his limited executive authority in Ohio and later as president in more confrontational ways.⁶⁰ As governor, he wielded power on behalf of conservative interests during the 1876 Ohio coal strike, ordering the Ohio militia “to protect the coal operators’ property and the strikebreakers’ ‘right to work.’”⁶¹ Hayes would take similar action as president, putting down the Great Strike of 1877. In this instance, he responded to governors' calls for aid, as some 100,000 railroad workers engaged in a mass work stoppage—the largest in the nation's history. Hayes's action was unprecedented, as he employed federal troops for the first time in a dispute between labor and private industry.⁶² “The strikes have been put down by force,” Hayes would say, “but now for the real remedy. Can't something be done by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil?”⁶³ The tendency to overemphasize Hayes's use of executive power toward conservative ends, as is often the case with Cleveland, obscures the larger story of how the expansion of presidential authority owes its beginnings, humble as they were, to a period well before the presidency of FDR. The use of power in the name of conservative policies still tends to increase power. This has been especially true of presidential power.

In addition to intervening in the Great Strike, Hayes took bold executive action elsewhere. He vetoed a widely popular bill excluding Chinese immigrants. He struck a blow against senatorial courtesy by calling for Chester A. Arthur's resignation from the Port of New York Custom House, initiating his battle with Conkling and appointing John Jay's grandson to investigate New York's corruption (along with commissioners for Philadelphia's, New Orleans's, and San Francisco's custom houses).⁶⁴ His so-called “popular baths” were public addresses delivered outside of Washington to support his legislative agenda, earning him the moniker “Rutherford the Rover.”⁶⁵ In fact, Hayes has been credited with delivering more speeches on tour while president than his six immediate predecessors combined.⁶⁶ Ari Hoogenboom has summarized Hayes's contributions to the executive turn away from First Republic principles of executive leadership well: “Despite his small staff, Hayes strengthened the office of the presidency. His concept of his office differed from that of his immediate predecessors, who had either embraced or enhanced the Whig approach to the presidency.…Although he had been a Whig and was hoping to revive and realign southern Whigs, he moved away from the Whig ideal of a weak president who was subservient to Congress and deferential to his cabinet.”⁶⁷

Despite Hayes's limited constitutional authority, his Ohio tenure included innovations that would become common among the state's progressive class to come. He established Ohio's modern university (which would become Ohio State University); he pushed the legislature to ratify the fifteenth amendment and reforms aimed at protecting the mentally ill and the incarcerated—areas where he did have a degree of executive authority as governor. Likewise, he was an early advocate of civil service reform and railroad regulation in Ohio.⁶⁸ He was, as one historian described him, “an early progressive.”⁶⁹ In many respects, this aspect of Hayes's legacy is lost in the fallout of what the election of 1876 has come to represent in the popular imagination. This is understandable, but it should not obscure the layered object lesson from the election of 1876. Tilden and Hayes helped spawn a new thinking in executive leadership, positioning the American governorship as a popular and characteristically “honest” executive institution for democratic reform. While the transition to a modern presidential republic was still at least a quarter century away, its contours could be seen in the shadows of Reconstruction's demise.

The Cleveland Connection: Beyond Bourbon Leadership

Grover Cleveland is said to have come out of the conservative business wing of late nineteenth-century Democratic politics. His tariff and hard money policies spoke to a so-called Bourbon interest in preventing “control of the government by farmers, wage earners and inefficient, irresponsible officeholders.”⁷⁰ Henry F. Graff has explained the Bourbon movement well: “Bourbon Democracy was a name inspired not by the Kentucky whiskey but by the backward-looking restored monarchy in France, of which Talleyrand, the irrepressible French diplomat, had quipped that its people had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It was a form of Jeffersonianism dedicated to small, mostly inert government, aimed more at protecting business than promoting the substantial needs of a larger population.”⁷¹

Taken at face value, there is much to commend in this view of Cleveland's presidency. Indeed, Horace Samuel Merrill's summation of Cleveland as a “narrow legalist” is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.⁷² Cleveland's governorship and presidency—particularly his first term—demonstrate a stronger affinity for executive leadership and power than he is often given credit (or damnation) for. It was Cleveland, as governor-president, who contributed mightily to the governing philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And it was Cleveland's Democratic interregnum that presaged the preemptive politics of late twentieth-century presidencies such as Bill Clinton's.⁷³ Most importantly, Cleveland's use of executive authority helped strengthen the presidency and reinforce the idea of the president as both national and legislative leader. FDR would look to Cleveland's presidency on occasion for insights, without provocation, and certainly without a Bourbon agenda in mind.⁷⁴

It was during Cleveland's first term that he invoked “executive privilege,” employing this still somewhat exotic constitutional concept more forcefully than any president to that point during peacetime. Alyn Brodsky has called it “Cleveland's greatest achievement: retrieving for the executive branch many of the prerogatives that had fallen to the legislative branch through a succession of presidential mediocrities.”⁷⁵ The impetus for Cleveland's claim was the Tenure of Office Act. Congress had passed this piece of legislation in its effort to derail the Democratic presidency of Andrew Johnson; the act effectively turned over all removal authority to the United States Senate, detaching it from the president's appointive powers. As David A. Crockett has recounted:

In February, 1886, the Senate began asking the administration for information regarding executive branch suspensions. Citing the advice-and-consent clause, Cleveland sent only information on appointments, while retaining confidential letters and documents. The president himself would be the judge of whether such things could be released to the Senate. The Senate replied saying it would block all future appointments, and the stage was set for a showdown. Cleveland then sent a public message to the Senate, arguing that the Senate had no constitutional authority over dismissals and suspensions, and that sending confidential documents about appointments would embarrass and injure the president and his advisors, who would be unable to offer frank advice.⁷⁶

Cleveland delivered a response to the Senate essentially declaring the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional, arguing he was “not responsible to the Senate” concerning dismissals.⁷⁷ Cleveland ultimately prevailed, signing the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act in March of 1887 and restoring balance to executive-legislative relations.⁷⁸ In true progressive fashion, Cleveland would later claim he helped free “the presidency from the Senate's claim of tutelage,” making the office “again the independent agent of the people.”⁷⁹ While Cleveland's act was restorative, it was also, in a sense, precedent-setting. As one Hayes biographer concluded, “The modern presidency does not begin with Grover Cleveland, but Cleveland made a necessary contribution to its development when he contested the claims of the Republican Senate and thereby helped to right the balance between the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government.”⁸⁰

Similarly, Cleveland's Bourbonism must be qualified when examining another aspect of his executive performance. Cleveland was anything but conservative in his use of the presidential veto, exercising it more than any other president but FDR, who governed nearly twice as long.⁸¹ Prior to the presidency, Cleveland was known first as the “Veto Mayor” of Buffalo and then as New York's “Veto Governor.” His willingness to favor strong executive government countered his self-proclaimed Whiggish sentiments.⁸² His 301 first-term vetoes were a record, and his combined total of 584 dwarfed the combined bills vetoed prior to his terms in office (132). Cleveland's most controversial veto while governor was employed to defend legalistic and high-minded purposes. His veto of the five-cent fare bill drew in a young assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, forging an early bipartisan alliance with the “twenty-five year old rising star of the Republican Party and a leader of its reform wing.”⁸³

Cleveland's deep and studious analysis of the bill convinced him that, while a boon to a public desperate for affordable public services, it was nevertheless unconstitutional; if passed, it would negate a contract between the state and the wealthy Jay Gould, who owned the elevated line in question. Gould stood to benefit greatly by keeping the fare at ten cents. “The State must not only be strictly just, but scrupulously fair,” Cleveland said in his speech to the assembly.⁸⁴ Cleveland's principled stand earned him great respect and admiration for his political courage, not the least of which from Roosevelt. Both Cleveland and TR benefited from their early reform alliance, with the two future presidents depicted by one cartoonist as presiding over the demise of the Tammany Hall “tiger.”⁸⁵ While Cleveland's Bourbon democracy may be critiqued for its establishment biases, Cleveland's liberal use of the veto became a hallmark of modern executive leadership, the modern presidency, and a singular contribution of later governor-presidents.⁸⁶ Such a prolific use of the veto necessarily tempers the one-dimensional view of Cleveland as legislatively neutral or weak. FDR, for one, took evident pride in being linked with Cleveland—both as president and as New York governor—through their shared proclivity to veto. “It is to me tremendously interesting,” noted Roosevelt in a letter to Cleveland's widow in 1941, “that President Cleveland and I seem to have a veto record not even approached by anyone else in the White House.” Mindful of their similarly high veto tallies in Albany, Roosevelt concluded, “I am very happy in the association which this record brings out.”⁸⁷

Of the top quartile of vetoes given between 1829 and 2000, governorpresidents account for 70 percent.⁸⁸ And though governor-presidents make up less than 40 percent of all presidents, they account for a surprising 64 percent of all presidential vetoes. The following chart puts the Cleveland veto record in perspective. While a preeminent vetoer, Cleveland was part of a cadre of governor-presidents whose use of the veto was unparalleled in American history.

Even when controlling for Cleveland's and FDR's vetoes, governorpresidents still veto disproportionately, accounting for over half of all presidential vetoes. More to the point, however, is the fact that Cleveland's executive background was hardly incidental to his behavior as president. Cleveland's deep executive experience is emblematic of the influential role executive background has played in presidential behavior. As Cleveland biographer H. Paul Jeffers recounts:

[Buffalo's City Council] crowned Grover Cleveland with a halo of political courage and enshrined his street-cleaning veto as the beginning of the most astonishing and rapid ascent from political obscurity to the pinnacle of governmental power in the annals of the United States. American historians and Cleveland biographers agree that if the Buffalo Common council had overridden the veto of the street-cleaning contract, Grover Cleveland could not that very year [1882], have become governor of New York, and only two years after that, have been elected the twenty-second President of the United States.⁸⁹

Purely quantitative analyses of presidential vetoes tell only part of the story of the modern presidency. At a minimum, the veto record of former governors in the White House begs a reconsideration of the role of executive background in presidential politics. Certainly, behind Cleveland's use of the veto was the belief that it was the executive's responsibility to provide honest and efficient government to the people. Theda Skocpol is also correct in pointing out that Cleveland's presidential veto record was strongly tied to his antagonism toward the costs of veterans' pensions.⁹⁰ But Cleveland's veto record before the presidency clearly aligns with his later use of the veto as part of a broader executive philosophy, one increasingly shared by state executives at the time. This emergent theory of executive power was matched by shifting constitutional dynamics in the states as the executive veto grew in strength and popularity.⁹¹ Cleveland himself saw an inherently popular role in the executive function, and this sentiment guided his attacks on Tammany Hall and the New York Democratic political boss of the time, John Kelley. As H. Wayne Morgan has pointed out about Cleveland's governorship, “Every ringing veto enlarged his public aura of honesty and independence from bread-and-butter Democrats.”⁹² To be sure, the use of the veto among presidents since Eisenhower has less to do with executive philosophy than with divided government. But this was not true during the rise of the modern presidency, when the warrants to veto were far more restricted, and, when challenged, were disproportionately so by former governors well versed in the practice.

Figure 2. Pocket and regular vetoes by president

Following in the footsteps of Tilden, Cleveland sought a leadership role independent of party bosses, thereby enhancing his national stature. Cleveland's early progressive support for smaller government in the interests of efficiency did not necessarily translate into a smaller executive; indeed, only the executive was powerful enough to stand up to the “interests.” And there was no executive in the nation—short of the president—greater equipped than New York's governor to draw attention to the need for reform. Tilden's 1876 campaign demonstrated that Democrats could win, and that reform executives, especially Hudson progressives, could parlay their independence into national prominence. As Henry Graff has argued, “The governorship of New York was regarded as second in importance only to the presidency itself, because of the state's central location, its growing population, and its economic primacy.”⁹³ Stephen Skowronek likewise has observed that in Cleveland's meteoric rise, “Success in a new kind of [reform] politics seemed to herald a new kind of government.” To go one step further, a new kind of executive was essential to this new politics.⁹⁴

If the use of the veto marked Cleveland's first presidential term, his second was shaped by the use of force in domestic disputes. The economic depression of 1893 enhanced the hand of executives nationally and Cleveland's use of presidential prerogative was part of a “Search for Order.” “Inevitably this new value system, consciously in conflict with that of nineteenth-century America, led the new middle class to see ‘the need for a government of continuous involvement' and to emphasize executive administration,” wrote Robert H. Wiebe in his classic work on the period.⁹⁵ There is perhaps no better example of such active executive behavior from this time than when, in 1894, Cleveland put down the march on Washington of unemployed laborers known as “Coxey's Army” and the Pullman Strike in Chicago. Where Hayes had acted with the support of local officials, Cleveland did so over their opposition.⁹⁶

Such intervention was atypical; it involved executive interference in state disputes deemed of a national character, and was unsolicited by state authorities.⁹⁷ Cleveland later used his emergency powers in an effort to grab hold of the economic situation responsible for the uprisings, lobbying to repeal the Silver Act of 1890. This was seen as “an unprecedented invasion of Congressional prerogative,” with powerful implications for the presidency.⁹⁸ Cleveland was clearly breaking new ground in federal-state relations. Illinois's Democratic governor John P. Altgeld, for one, protested Cleveland's willingness to use force against the states, arguing that Cleveland was in violation of the law.⁹⁹ Nevertheless, Cleveland remained unshaken in his belief that he was acting in the public's best interest. The highly mixed record of Cleveland's presidential terms, particularly his second, should not detract from Cleveland's clear role in establishing a more powerful presidency.

If the modern presidency is measured by administrative expansion, centralization, White House staffing, and the dissemination of daily mail, there may well be little to see in Cleveland's presidency that speaks to a fundamentally altered national executive.¹⁰⁰ Yet if we look to executive prerogative, the assertion of executive authority in legislative matters, and the distinction of executive privilege, Cleveland offers as open a window as any into the beginnings of modern presidential leadership. Unfortunately, Cleveland's contributions to the presidency are buried in an obscurity defined by the oddity of his nonsuccessive terms, his physical size, and his purported support for “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”¹⁰¹ Also, public fascination with Cleveland's personal scandal persists.¹⁰² Finally, FDR's mammoth historic presidency has cast a shadow over the once highly regarded Cleveland (and nearly every other president since). Cleveland and FDR are perhaps now more popularly linked anecdotally, as it was Cleveland who once wished away any presidential ambitions for the then five-year-old Roosevelt upon first meeting him.¹⁰³

In truth, none of the early progressive state executives demonstrated in toto the features of modern executive leadership best exemplified by FDR. But taken together, they do reflect the composite elements that TR, Wilson, and FDR would employ in turn and that ultimately demarcated new ground in the presidency. Equally significant is this group's executive connection to later presidential practice. To paraphrase Justice Louis Brandeis, legislatures may well have been the “laboratories of democracy,” but it was late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century statehouses that became the laboratories of modern executive leadership.¹⁰⁴ As we shall see, no governorships were more prolific in this regard than the executive administrations of Hiram Johnson of California and Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin.

Progressive Fury: La Follette's and Johnson's Executive Leadership