A Legacy of Leadership

Governors and American History

Clayton McClure Brooks, Clayton McClure Brooks

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208993
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

In A Legacy of Leadership, top scholars and journalists create a new framework for understanding the contributions governors have made to defining democracy and shaping American history.Structured chronologically, A Legacy of Leadership places governors in contrast and comparison with one another as well as within the context of their times to show how a century of dramatic developments—war and peace, depression and prosperity—led governors to rethink and expand their positions of leadership. The nine chapters of compelling new scholarship presented here connect the experiences of dynamic individual governors and the evolution of the gubernatorial office to the broader challenges the United States has faced throughout the turbulent twentieth century. Taken together, they demonstrate how interstate cooperation became essential as governors increasingly embraced national and international perspectives to promote their own states' competitiveness.Published for the centennial of the National Governors Association, A Legacy of Leadership is an eloquent demonstration of how, to a great extent, we live in a country that governors created.

Chapter One

Challenges of a New Century

Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era

JOHN MILTON COOPER, JR.

The early years of the twentieth century before World War I were a glorious time for America’s governors. The challenges of the industrial revolution, particularly the rise of big business and its ties to political machines, were slow to be addressed by government at the national level, particularly after conservative forces won a decisive electoral victory in 1896 under President William McKinley and his pro-business wing of the Republican Party. McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, would be a different kind of Republican, and he would gradually begin to push a reform agenda in Washington. In the meantime, dynamic governors and state-level political movements forged ahead with new measures to regulate business and make government more responsive and accountable to the public. The pioneer in these new politics was an insurgent Republican, Robert M. La Follette, a short, dramatic man who earned the nicknames “Fighting Bob” and “Wisconsin’s Little Giant.” Starting in 1901, La Follette battled bosses, polarized state politics around himself and his following, and pushed through a program of railroad regulation and direct primaries for party nominations. His movement called itself “progressive” and thereby brandished a label that reformers elsewhere proudly adopted. These Wisconsin “progressives” made their state the center of national attention as a “laboratory of democracy.”

During the decade following La Follette’s debut, others went down the trail that he blazed. Republican insurgents in Iowa, led by Governor Albert Cummins, and in New York, led by Governor Charles Evans Hughes, likewise clashed with their party’s entrenched leaders and enacted laws to regulate business. Democratic governors Joseph Folk in Missouri and Hoke Smith in Georgia accomplished similar feats, while in Oregon a bipartisan reform movement without a gubernatorial leader pushed through such dramatic political reforms as the initiative, referendum, and recall. In all of this ferment, however, no one displayed as much boldness and pushed as far as La Follette, and as this decade wore on the “progressive” tide appeared to be ebbing at the state level, even in Wisconsin. That fallback was deceptive. In the 1910 elections, a fresh wave of “progressivism” broke over many states, with a new batch of reform governors emerging, most notably in Wisconsin again and in California. Yet the most impressive of these progressive triumphs came in an unlikely place—boss-ridden, politically somnolent New Jersey—and the boldest and most effective of the new reform governors was a long-jawed, bespectacled fifty-four-year-old political neophyte named Woodrow Wilson, who was a former professor of political science and president of Princeton University.

Woodrow Wilson’s success seemed even odder because in his long, distinguished career as an academic political scientist, he had seldom studied state politics and had rarely written about the office of governor. Likewise, except for speaking in the mid-1890s at one meeting for a municipal reform movement in Baltimore and another for a Democratic candidate for governor in New Jersey, he had never involved himself in local or state politics. In 1910, Wilson had lived in New Jersey for twenty years, but he had seen little of his adopted state. Speaking engagements as president of Princeton sometimes took him to Jersey City, Morristown, or Newark, but he visited few other places in the state, and he had never set foot inside the capitol in nearby Trenton. It might seem odd, then, even ironic, that Wilson first entered active politics by running for and winning the governorship of New Jersey in 1910. In fact, this turned out to be an ideal way for him to begin his political career. All the circumstances seemed to conspire to propel him on a meteoric rise in both state and national politics. He became a political star practically overnight and a hot prospect for his party’s presidential nomination almost as soon as the ballots were counted in New Jersey in November 1910.

Irony abounded especially in the way that Wilson got the Democratic nomination for governor. This freshly minted progressive and future reformer at the state and national levels owed his start in politics to conservatives, machines, and bosses. The magazine editor and conservative Democrat George Harvey got the ball rolling. Harvey owned a seaside home in New Jersey, which gave him good connections in like-minded Democratic circles there, as well as at the national level. For several years, Harvey had been working to interest the main leader of the New Jersey Democrats in Wilson. This was James Smith of Newark, a wealthy one-time United States senator. Widely known as “Sugar Jim” because of his earlier senatorial services to the sugar refining industry, Smith fit the popular image of the political boss. He was a big, smooth-faced Irish American with expensive tastes and a hearty manner. Politics was a family business with him; his son-in-law, James Nugent, was the boss of Newark’s Democratic machine and his second-in-command in the state party. No two figures roused greater enmity among New Jersey’s fledgling progressive Democrats, who were spearheaded by Mayor Otto Wittpenn of Jersey City, Wilson’s friend and Princeton classmate Edwin Stevens of Hoboken, and Joseph P. Tumulty, a young Irish American state assemblyman, also from Jersey City. Yet it was Smith and, to a lesser extent, Nugent who made Wilson the Democrats’ choice for governor.¹

The Princeton president and the party bosses engaged in a lengthy and elaborate mating dance. In 1907, at Harvey’s behest, Smith had swung votes in the legislature to Wilson for the U.S. Senate seat. But with the Republicans firmly in control of both houses, that was no more than a gesture. More recently, Democratic organizers had invited Wilson to speak at a gathering in Plainfield, where he had delivered a strong progressive message. People had occasionally written to urge him to run for governor, and he had batted the idea around with his wife, Ellen. Matters finally began to come to a head early in 1910. It was starting to look like a good political year for Democrats at both the state and national levels. In Washington, the Republicans were teetering on the brink of civil war as progressives led by La Follette, who was now a senator from Wisconsin, openly rebelled against William Howard Taft’s administration over the recently passed Payne-Aldrich tariff and other issues. In Trenton, the Republicans were similarly suffering from internal strain, as local progressives also challenged that party’s conservative bosses. In these circumstances, New Jersey’s Democratic bosses liked the idea of having an attractive, respectable new face at the top of their ticket to enhance the party’s prospects.

Again, George Harvey, whose horn-rimmed glasses and slicked-down hair made him look like an owl, put Wilson’s name in play with Smith. In January 1910, the editor and the boss met twice for dinner at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York. Afterward Harvey assured Wilson, “The nomination for governor shall be tendered to you on a silver platter, without your turning a hand to obtain it”; to which Wilson reportedly replied, “If the nomination should come to me in that way I should regard it as my duty to give the matter very serious consideration.” Writing to Ellen from Bermuda the next month, Wilson joked that he might write an article for Harvey’s magazine: “I shall call it, I think, ‘Hide and Seek Politics.’ Is that not a pretty good account of myself?” Rumors about Wilson’s possible nomination began to circulate in the spring, and he talked about the idea with some of his supporters on the Princeton board of trustees.²

Curiously, however, the road to Wilson’s gubernatorial nomination really began in Chicago. Smith was there in June 1910 at a luncheon with the city’s Democratic boss, Roger Sullivan. At the luncheon, another Irish American, a successful banker and manufacturer named Edward Hurley, talked the Princeton president up to the New Jerseyan. The instigator behind this encounter was John Maynard Harlan, a Chicago lawyer, Princeton graduate, and friend of the trustee and Wilson’s classmate Cyrus McCormick. Hurley and Harlan continued to act as intermediaries, and their efforts, together with Harvey’s, bore fruit at a meeting between Wilson and party leaders in New York in the middle of July. He evidently impressed the bosses, although issues related to prohibition caused some problems. According to later accounts, Wilson said that he favored local option on liquor sales, which did not please Smith. The Princeton president struck some of the party men as unfamiliar with state issues, but he reportedly assured them that he would not try to interfere with the Democratic organization. Three days after that meeting, Wilson issued a public statement in which he asserted that if “it is the wish and hope of a decided majority of the thoughtful Democrats of the State that I should consent to accept the party’s nomination for the great office of Governor, I should deem it my duty, as well as an honor and a privilege, to do so.” In other words—to use a phrase soon to be made famous by Theodore Roosevelt, the man who would become Wilson’s greatest political rival—his hat was in the ring.³

Wilson was not yet home free for the nomination. Smith’s son-in-law Nugent wanted a different candidate: the party’s nominee in the last gubernatorial election, Frank Katzenbach, another Princeton graduate, who came from a wealthy family and was mayor of Trenton. “Of course,” Nugent reportedly told a newspaper editor, referring to his father-in-law, “I will do whatever the Big Fellow wants.” In August, Wilson drafted a set of suggestions for the New Jersey Democrats’ platform, expressing progressive ideas. He also made some public pronouncements to cover divergent political bases. In a letter to the editor of a labor publication, Wilson insisted, “I have always been the warm friend of organized labor,” and he thought unions were necessary in order “to secure justice from organized Capital.” Conversely, in a speech to the American Bar Association he praised the corporation “as indispensable to modern business enterprise,” saying, “I am not jealous of its size or might.”⁴

Coming out in the open as an aspiring politician gave Wilson mixed feelings. “I feel very queer adventuring upon the sea of politics,” he told a Princeton friend, “and my voyage may be brief; but after what I have been preaching to my classes all these years about the duty of educated men to accept every legitimate opportunity for political service, I did not see what else I could do.” Katzenbach’s candidacy bothered him, especially because Mercer County, where both of them lived, backed Wilson’s rival. Wilson also chafed under an injunction from the bosses not to talk to reporters, although he acknowledged that it allowed him to duck the liquor question. “I hate timidity,” he told Harvey, “but I do not wish to make a blunder, and feel myself inexperienced.” In these circumstances, he confided to Mary Peck, his friend and frequent correspondent, that he felt oddly disengaged: “It interests and amuses me but does not seem to touch me.”⁵

Wilson did not have to put up with enforced silence for long. The Democratic state convention opened in Trenton on September 14. Smith arrived, accompanied by Harvey, and ensconced himself in Room 100 of the Trenton House, the place where party bosses customarily resided. From there, he and Nugent worked through the night to round up the votes needed to nominate Wilson. “It was the busiest night of Jim Smith’s political life,” one observer later recalled. The party’s progressives were furious at having a political unknown shoved down their throats by the bosses, but Wilson was duly nominated. Harvey telephoned him with the news and suggested that he come and speak to the convention. In fact, Wilson had already prepared an acceptance speech, and a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on September 15, 1910, he strode into the auditorium where the delegates were meeting. Many of the progressives sat in sullen silence while machine supporters and Princeton students shouted and cheered. Few of those present knew what to expect from their new nominee for governor, and few had ever seen or heard him. “God, look at that jaw!” one man reportedly exclaimed.⁶

What Wilson said impressed the delegates even more than his appearance. “As you know,” he began, “I did not seek this nomination.” Therefore, if he was elected governor, there would be “absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent [him] from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.” On the major issues, Wilson declared, “I take the three great questions before us to be reorganization and economy in [government] administration, the equalization of taxation and the control of corporations.” Other important issues included employers’ liability for workplace injuries, corrupt practices in elections, and conservation of natural resources. Wilson sounded a conservative note when he asserted, “We shall not act either justly or wisely if we attack established interests as public enemies.” But he also called for establishment of a public service commission to regulate rates for utilities and transportation, to be modeled on “the admirable commission so long in successful operation in Wisconsin.” In closing, Wilson proclaimed, “We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit, a re-awakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people, the beginning of an age of thoughtful reconstruction that makes our thought hark back to the great age in which Democracy was set up in America. With the new age we shall show a new spirit.”⁷

At that point, Wilson offered to stop, noting that the delegates must be tired after so many hours of work. Cries arose from the floor: “Go on!” “You’re all right.” He then repeated his promise to serve only the people and his demand for a public service commission. He declared that the state needed to control corporations and asked the delegates, “Will you control them?” Wilson again called for reconstruction “by thoughtful processes” of economic and political life: “This reconstruction will be bigger than anything in American history.” Appealing to the “ideal” of America “as an haven of equal justice,” he observed that the white and red stripes of the flag stood for “parchment and blood … parchment on which was written the rights of man, and blood spilled to make these rights real. Let us devote the Democratic party to the recovery of these rights.”⁸

The speech was a triumph. The bosses’ progressive foe Joseph Tumulty later recalled that many delegates stood with tears running down their cheeks and left the auditorium filled with crusading zeal. One progressive yelled, “I am sixty-five years old, and still a damn fool!” In the many tales that he would later tell about Wilson, Joe Tumulty would show a penchant for sentimental exaggeration, but this time his recollection was on the mark. Four days after the convention, Dan Fellows Platt, Wilson’s former student at Princeton and an active Democrat, reported to Wilson that after the speech Tumulty “threw his arms about me & said ‘Dan—this is one of the happiest days of my life—the Wisconsin R. R. law! —the best in the country—if Wilson stands for legislation of that caliber, Jim Smith will find that he has a “lemon.”’” Tumulty, who instantly became one of Wilson’s most ardent backers, went on to be his right-hand man as governor and president. It was the beginning of a beautiful political friendship.⁹

Wilson’s speech and the progressives’ response evidently did not bother the party bosses, who assumed they could control their hand-picked nominee. Four days after the convention, a group of them visited him at Prospect, the Princeton president’s official residence. Standing on the portico and gazing at the tree-lined campus, Smith asked James Kerney, the editor of the Trenton Evening Times, “Jim, can you imagine anyone being damn fool enough to give this up for the heartaches of politics?” Inside, as Wilson’s daughter Nell later recalled, the politicians seemed ill at ease in the president’s book-lined study. “Do you read all these books, Professor?” Smith reportedly asked. “Not every day,” Wilson answered. His jocularity broke the ice, and, he told Nell, “they treated me like a school boy once they got over the professorial atmosphere.” The politicians spent three hours instructing their pupil about campaign plans, and Kerney recalled that he impressed them with his familiarity with local affairs and people. “We were charmed by the reception he had given us,” Kerney wrote later. “When he unbent he could be the most urbane and delightful of companions.”¹⁰

At the same time, Wilson was making no secret of his progressive views. In newspaper interviews right after the convention he hotly denied “that I am the Wall Street candidate for Governor of New Jersey,” and he blamed the high cost of living on “the Republican party, with its Payne-Aldrich tariff and its trust connections.” Writing to a progressive New York newspaper editor, he protested against the notion that “I was out of sympathy with the point of view of the plain people, that I put conventional property rights above human rights.” He also stated, “I am not a preponderant state rights man.” At opening ceremonies for the campaign on September 28, Wilson lauded the Democrats as both the party of “the great body of the plain people” and a “conservative party,” but he added, “I do not mean a party which tries to hold men back, because nothing is so conservative as progress.” In the two other speeches he gave in September, Wilson again stressed the need for a strong public service commission, and he endorsed a constitutional amendment to require popular election of senators.¹¹

By that time he was in the thick of the campaign. Some observers later recalled that Wilson seemed a bit stiff and formal in his first speeches, more like a professor than a politician. That may have been the case, since W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction Governing the Twentieth Century: Building a History of the Modern Governorship
• Governing the 1910s
• 1. Challenges of a New Century: Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era
• Governing the 1920s and 1930s
• 2. Huey Long and the Great Depression: Rise of a Populist Demagogue
• Governing the 1940s
• 3. The Gangbuster as Governor: Thomas E. Dewey and the Republican New Deal
• Governing the 1950s
• 4. Connecting the United States: Governors and the Building of the Interstate System
• Governing the 1960s
• 5. Governors in the Civil Rights Era: The Wallace Factor
• Governing the 1970s
• 6. Preparing for the Presidency: The Political Education of Ronald Reagan
• Governing the 1980s
• 7. Devolution in American Federalism in the Twentieth Century
• Governing the 1990s
• 8. The Case of Ann Richards: Women in the Gubernatorial Office
• Conclusion The Evolution of the Gubernatorial Office: United States Governors over the Twentieth Century
• Afterword: Governing the Twenty-First Century
• Timeline of Governors and States in the Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Further Resources
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations