By Edwin Cooney
Since the “Year of our Lord 1900,” Democrats and Republicans
have nominated a total of 44 men and two women to serve as the vice president
of the United States of America.
That includes 25 Democrats and twenty-one Republicans. Two defeated vice presidential
candidates—Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920 and Earl Warren in 1948 (one from each
party) have gone on to great presidential and judiciary glory. FDR would be elected president four
times between 1932 and 1944, and Earl Warren would serve as Chief Justice of
the United States from 1953 to 1969.
Exactly why each of these candidates was chosen and what value they ultimately
were is largely a matter of pure historical and political speculation.
So daunting for the Democrats was the task of defeating
Teddy Roosevelt for election in 1904 that they chose two of the most obscure
possible candidates to run for president and vice president. Their presidential candidate was Judge
Alton B. Parker, Chief Judge of New York State’s Appellate Court. The real shocker however was their vice
presidential candidate—he was eighty-one year old West Virginia entrepreneur
and former U.S. Senator Henry Gassaway Davis. Parker seems to have had little to say about his running
mate. Back then, the vice
presidency was largely up to the bosses in both parties. So, why did the leadership of the Democratic
Party choose such an old man to run for the second highest office in the
land—an office he was unlikely to ever achieve? The answer is simple—money! Some say Davis contributed about $120,000 (which would be
about 3 million in today’s dollars) to the campaign.
The year 1920 was an open year for both parties. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, although both
old and crippled due to his October 1919 stroke, actually wanted a third term.
The war weary party and nation longed for youth and glamour. The GOP nominated on the tenth ballot
of its Chicago convention the handsome and gregarious Senator Warren Gamaliel
Harding of Ohio. As for Harding’s
running mate, Harding and the Republican Party leadership wanted to nominate
Wisconsin’s progressive Senator Irvine Luther Lenroot. However, the bosses took Saturday
night, June 12th, 1920 off and the conservative core of the
convention selected Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who’d broken the
1919 Boston Police strike, in his place.
Thus, Calvin Coolidge and not Irvine L. Lenroot became our 30th
president when Harding died on August 2nd, 1923.
In 1920, Democrats, meeting in San Francisco, chose former
Ohio Governor James Middleton Cox as their presidential
nominee even though he’d been divorced.
For his running mate, Democrats nominated the handsome and athletic
Assistant Secretary of the Navy 38-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Prior to the convening of the 1920
Democratic convention there was a movement to nominate the man who had served
as Woodrow Wilson’s Food Administrator during World War I, Herbert Clark
Hoover. No one knew at that time
that Mr. Hoover was a Republican.
Hence, there was a distinct possibility that the 1920 Democratic ticket
could have been Herbert Hoover for president and Franklin D. Roosevelt for vice
president. Roosevelt’s major
appeal wasn’t his glamour, but his last name. It was the same as his Republican fifth cousin’s, (Teddy)
Roosevelt.
The 1924 Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden
lasted 10 days and 104 ballots before it finally nominated John William
Davis of West Virginia for president.
As the Democratic vice presidential candidate that year the exhausted
party nominated Nebraska Governor Charles Wayland Bryan. The reason for Bryan’s vice
presidential nomination was largely because he was the brother of William
Jennings Bryan, the party’s three time presidential nominee and former
Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.
Calvin Coolidge slaughtered them at the polls that November.
In 1932, FDR’s political captain James A. Farley arranged
his boss’s nomination by agreeing to put House Speaker John Nance Garner of
Texas on the ticket. It was a
close call for Roosevelt as back then it took a two-thirds vote of Democratic
Party delegates to secure the party’s presidential nomination. That rule had been in existence since
the days of Andrew Jackson, thereby giving southern and western delegations
equal or greater power than delegations from the larger states. By 1936, the Democratic Party rescinded
the two-thirds for the simple majority rule for nominating presidents and vice
presidents it has today.
Ironically, in 1940, when FDR was seeking an unprecedented third term in
office, he was powerful enough to force Democrats meeting in Chicago to
nominate Henry Agard Wallace, his Agricultural Secretary,
as his running mate. Had the party
balked he was ready to threaten not to run. By 1944, however, the party more or less forced FDR to drop
Wallace ultimately in favor of Senator Harry S Truman -- labor’s favorite
candidate.
Vice Presidents Harry S Truman, Richard Milhous
Nixon, Spiro Theodore Agnew, Walter Frederick (Fritz)
Mondale, and George Herbert Walker Bush won nomination because they brought
either a geographical or an ideological balance to the party’s national ticket.
One may reasonably assert that the fastest path to permanent
political obscurity would be to be the losing vice presidential candidate on a
major party ticket. Names such as Adlai
Ewing Stevenson I -- William Jennings Bryan’s vice presidential candidate in
1900; Henry Gassaway Davis -- 1904; John Worth Kern of
Indiana -- Bryan’s final vice presidential running mate in 1908; Arkansas
Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson -- Al Smith’s VP candidate
in 1928; Senator Charles Linza McNary of
Oregon -- Wendell Lewis Willkie’s Republican Party VP candidate in 1940;
Senator John William Bricker of Ohio -- Thomas Edmund Dewey’s 1944 running mate; Senator John Jackson Sparkman
of Alabama -- Adlai Ewing Stevenson II’s VP candidate in 1952: and, of course,
Congressman William Edward Miller of Lockport, New York -- Barry Morris
Goldwater’s 1964 running mate -- have few groupies political or otherwise.
As for the two female vice presidential candidate losers,
Democratic Congresswoman Geraldine Anne Ferraro -- Walter Mondale’s 1984
running mate -- and Alaska Governor Sarah Louise Palin -- John Sidney McCain
III’s 2008 VP hopeful -- obscurity has to be somewhat balanced by
notoriety. After all, to be under
consideration for the second highest executive office in the modern world has
to be not only an honor, but a significant lifetime achievement in anybody’s
career.
Five losing vice presidential candidates, Carey Estes
Keefauver of Tennessee -- Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 VP candidate; Henry Cabot
Lodge Jr. -- Richard Nixon’s 1960 nominee; Robert Joseph Dole -- Gerald Ford’s
1976 running mate; Lloyd Millard Bentsen, Jr. -- Massachusetts Governor Michael
Stanley Dukakis’s 1988 running mate; and Jack French Kemp -- Robert Dole’s VP
partner in 1996, were chosen, in part, for their national prominence.
Estes Keefauver had led a Senate investigation of organized
crime in the early 1950s. Henry
Cabot Lodge had been a prominent United States Senator from Massachusetts and
Ike’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1953 to 1960. (Lodge’s grandfather
Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr led the successful fight against Woodrow Wilson’s League
of Nations in 1919 and 1920.)
Robert Dole had served as Republican Party national chairman in the
early 1970s and as GOP Minority Whip at the time of his selection for the 1976
GOP ticket. Lloyd Bentsen was
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and had beaten George H. W. Bush for
the U.S. Senate seat from Texas in 1970.
Jack Kemp, in addition to his public service in the House of
Representatives and in GHWB’s cabinet, had been a star quarterback for the
American Football League’s Buffalo Bills in the late 1960s.
Paul Davis Ryan’s prominence is new while Joseph Robinette
Biden’s prominence is extensive.
Should Ryan be the losing vice presidential candidate in 2012 his future
will depend on how valuable to the ticket his candidacy is assessed as having
been. If he’s rated as having been
valuable, like Edmund Sixtus Muskie of Maine (Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr.’s
1968 running mate), Ryan could be a rising star in the Republican Party. Should Joe Biden be the losing
candidate in 2012, even with his extensive experience, it’s likely that his
public career will come to an end.
There are a dozen vice presidential candidates whose
significance is hard to evaluate: James Schoolcraft Sherman -- William Howard
Taft’s vice president who had the temerity to die during the 1912 campaign in
which he was running for re-election; Vice President Charles Warren Fairbanks
who served under Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt between 1905 and 1909 and who was
the unsuccessful GOP VP candidate in 1916 under Charles Evans Hughes; Vice
President Charles (Hell-and-Maria) Dawes, a banker and a songwriter who served
as Coolidge’s vice president from 1925 to 1929; Charles Curtis, (who was nearly
half Native American) who was Herbert Hoover’s Vice President from 1929 to 1933;
William Franklin "Frank" Knox who was Governor Alfred Mossman
Landon’s running mate against FDR’s bid for a second term; Vice President Alben
William Barkley (who was called “the Vip”), a marvelous Kentucky politician and
gentleman who served under Harry Truman from 1949 to 1953; Thomas Francis
Eagleton and Robert Sergeant Shriver who both ran with the late Senator George
Stanley McGovern in 1972; Vice President James Danforth Quayle, 1989-1992; Vice
President Albert Arnold Gore, 1993-2000; Joseph Isadore Lieberman, the
Democratic vice presidential nominee under Gore in 2000; and Johnny Reid “John”
Edwards, Senator John Forbes Kerry’s 2004 unsuccessful vice presidential
running mate.
The names of two men must have special acknowledgment
here. Ironically, neither of them
was nominated by one of the two major parties for vice president, but they both
achieved that office. The names
are, and you know them well, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. and Nelson Aldrich
Rockefeller. Both dedicated a
large part of their lives to public service and deserve to be well remembered
and highly regarded.
If I had to grant an award to the most valuable vice
presidential candidate of the last one hundred and twelve years, it would go to
Lyndon Baines Johnson whose 1960 vice presidential candidacy probably insured
John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s victory.
Perhaps the grandest vice presidential candidate and actual
vice president was Thomas Riley Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president
between 1913 and 1921. Marshall
knew what the nation needed most and told wonderful stories. “What this nation really needs,” he
once observed, “is a good five cent cigar.” Marshall, who was from Indiana -- a state considered
critical to political success during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries -- used to tell the story of the couple who had two sons. One of them went to sea and the other
son became vice president of the United States. The sad part of the story is that neither son was ever heard
from again!
Someone once observed that a major political party’s vice
presidential nomination is like the last cookie on the plate—-nobody wants it,
but somebody always takes it. All
I can say in response to that observation is that for four men -- Theodore Roosevelt,
1900; Calvin Coolidge, 1920; Harry Truman, 1944; and Lyndon Johnson, 1960 -- it
must have been a fortune cookie!
Inside each of those four cookies there must have been a ticket to the
White House!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
No comments:
Post a Comment