Almost President (46 page)

Sensitive to his good reputation, Republicans acknowledged Hancock was a good soldier—but no more. Hancock did not hold complex political views. He once suggested the party platform should simply read, ”An honest man and the restoration of the Government.” During the 1880 campaign, Hancock was mocked by Republicans for asserting the issue of federal tariffs was primarily a local issue, which as one observer noted, either indicated no understanding or a very profound understanding of the issue, depending upon how it was interpreted.

Generally, however, issues were secondary to political affiliation. This was a period of extraordinary parity between Republicans and Democrats. Hancock lost the popular vote to Garfield by less than ten thousand votes out of more than nine million cast, the closest popular vote in history. Awakened, his wife told him of his defeat. “That is all right. I can stand it,” said The Superb, and then, with the same coolness he had demonstrated when wounded while defending against Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, he went back to sleep.

John W. Forney,
Life and Military Career of Winfield Scott Hancock
(H. N. Hinckley and Co., Chicago, 1880).

David M. Jordan,
Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier's Life
(Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996).

JAMES G. BLAINE

1884

Despite being the state's only presidential nominee, James G. Blaine is not memorialized with a statue anywhere in Maine. But Blaine achieved literary immortality in two renowned works of fiction as the very model of the cynical and corrupt “Gilded Age” politician.

He inspired the characters of Colonel Beriah Sellers in Mark Twain's
The Gilded Age
and Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe in Henry Adams's
Democracy.
In the latter book, the heroine asks Senator Ratcliffe whether democracies are doomed to be corrupt. Ratcliffe's pragmatic response is, “No representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify government.”

There is no doubt that the sentiment was inspired by Blaine. He was the master political operator—often operating on the edge of propriety. Tall, commanding, and eloquent, Blaine was, with the exception of Ulysses S. Grant, the most popular Republican politician of the late nineteenth century. Yet, he was the first Republican nominee to lose the presidency after the Civil War, and while he served admirably as secretary of state twice, Blaine had few great achievements as a legislator. One of his biographers wrote, “No man in our annals has filled so large a space and left it so empty.”

Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming president—his margin of loss in New York to Grover Cleveland in 1884. It was an ugly campaign that revolved around questions about each man's character; Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock, and Blaine, while a faithful family man, was engulfed in personal financial scandals.

A one-time schoolteacher, Blaine was a Maine congressman who rose swiftly to become Speaker of the House and later senator. He had been implicated but cleared in the infamous Crédit Mobilier scandal in 1872, but four years later, it came to light that he had used worthless bonds in a troubled Arkansas railroad to leverage a sixty-four-thousand-dollar “loan” from the Union Pacific Railroad that he never repaid.

He defused that crisis in a dramatic speech before the House in which he selectively read from letters that purported to exonerate him, while leaving out such parts as his own admonition to his correspondents to “Burn this letter!” Blaine was so deft in rebuffing these assaults on his character that he was dubbed the “Plumed Knight,” but money and politics were more closely entwined than usual in this period, and Blaine was continually charged with some new malfeasance involving money and influence.

Two events in 1884 are usually cited for Blaine's defeat. Blaine had a Catholic mother and had, as secretary of state, pushed Great Britain for Irish home rule, but when a Protestant minister supporting Blaine proclaimed that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” Blaine lost much Catholic support.

The day after that fiasco, and just a week before the election, Blaine provided political cartoonists of the day with irresistible fare when he attended a lavish dinner at the posh New York eatery Delmonico's to solicit funds from black-tied and well-fed millionaires—while most of the nation was reeling from a deep economic recession.

Henry Adams,
Democracy: An American Novel
(Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1933).

Neil Rolde,
Continental Liar from the State of Maine: James G. Blaine
(Tilbury House, Gardiner, Maine, 2007).

David Saville Muzzey,
James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days
(Dodd, Meade, and Company, New York, 1934).

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner,
The Gilded Age
(Oxford University Press, New York, 1996).

ALTON B. PARKER

1904

As a young schoolteacher, Alton B. Parker had signed a contract with a school in a small town in his native New York only to find out when he arrived home that his father had secured him a higher-paying job the same day. When Parker proposed to take the better-paying job, his father said he could not do that; he had signed a contract and must honor it. So began a record of impeccable public propriety.

Never the subject of a biography, Parker may be the most obscure of all losing presidential candidates. He had the misfortune of being overshadowed by his larger-than-life opponent in 1904, Theodore Roosevelt. And while active in Democratic Party politics, except for one county-level position, the only elected office he held was as chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the highest judicial office in the state.

Parker was plucked from the bench to be the Democratic nominee for president as a result of Democratic infighting in New York. William Jennings Bryan, having suffered two consecutive defeats, was (reluctantly) persuaded to step aside in 1904. Rushing to take up Bryan's mantle was newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, whom the
New York Times
charged with “greater recklessness” than even the populist Bryan. To stop Hearst, prominent conservative New York Democrats rallied to Parker.

While Parker's nomination for president is usually described as a triumph of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party (mostly because Parker supported the gold standard), Parker had a moderately progressive record on the bench. His rulings upheld the right of unions to strike and of legislatures to outlaw child labor and to establish the eight-hour workday. He was actually a good match for Roosevelt. Fifty-two years old, six feet tall, and a robust two hundred pounds, Parker exuded the same vitality for which Roosevelt was known. He began every morning at his farm with a swim in the Hudson River followed by an hour's ride on horseback. But Parker was reluctant to wage a vigorous campaign. When Democratic convention delegates demanded Parker express his positions on the issues of the day, he replied that as long as he was a sitting judge it was inappropriate for him to express political opinions. If that dissatisfied the delegates, Parker said, he was content to “let the nomination go.”

Even though Bryan and TR had established a new tradition of candidates vigorously campaigning on their own behalf, Parker disappointed Democrats by sticking to the nineteenth-century tradition of staying home and saying little. He did strongly criticize mistreatment of local citizens during the American occupation of the Philippines, and charged Roosevelt and his campaign with shaking down big business for contributions even as TR campaigned as a “trust-buster.” Parker's liberal record on the bench was downplayed so that he would seem a safe alternative to the “lunatic” Roosevelt. But TR was wildly popular, and Parker carried the South and nothing else.

Parker returned to private practice, and some said his run for president derailed his dream of being appointed to the Supreme Court. That is probably not true. President Woodrow Wilson might have appointed him, but Parker had opposed Wilson's nomination in 1912. Owing Parker no favors, Wilson passed him over on the three occasions when he made a court appointment. Parker died in 1926.

Because there is no biography of Parker, material for this essay was derived from Irving Stone,
They Also Ran,
and Leslie H. Southwick,
Presidential Also-Rans and Running Mates, 1788–1980.

CHARLES EVANS HUGHES

1916

Charles Evans Hughes is the only U.S. Supreme Court justice to have resigned to run for president. Fourteen years after Hughes lost an extraordinarily close race to Woodrow Wilson in 1916, President Herbert Hoover reappointed him to the court as chief justice, when it was routine to appoint politicians to the Supreme Court—a practice that is now unusual.

Hughes, the son of an abolitionist Baptist minister, never wanted to be a politician. His love was the study, teaching, and practice of law. But his brilliance was obvious, and he was tapped to help the New York Legislature investigate reports of inflated utility rates. The legislature, now cognizant of Hughes's remarkable ability to unravel financial intricacies, then asked him to lead a second investigation into fraud and manipulation within the insurance industry.

Hughes uncovered a particularly cozy relationship between key leaders of his own Republican Party and big business, so GOP leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, pressed Hughes to run for governor as the party's only hope as a reform candidate in 1906. Hughes defeated newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in a close and bitter race.

His progressive record, which included implementing solutions to the scandals his investigations had uncovered, won Hughes national acclaim. In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes to the Supreme Court, where his legal reasoning on such complicated issues as railroad regulation was so sound that of the 150 majority opinions he wrote in his first six years on the Court, his fellow justices offered dissents to only nine.

There was already talk of nominating Hughes for president in 1912 as a compromise candidate who could heal the rift within the GOP between Roosevelt and Taft, but Hughes said it was improper for a justice to become involved in politics. Then, having observed the split that did occur between Taft and Roosevelt in 1912, Hughes changed his mind and agreed to be a unifying nominee for the Republicans in 1916. His ambivalence was noticeable in a lackluster campaign that cost him the presidency. While Wilson won the popular vote, 49 to 46 percent, had Hughes won California, a state he lost by less than five thousand votes, he would have been elected president.

After his loss, Hughes served as secretary of state under Harding and Coolidge before being named chief justice in 1930. A strong record on civil liberties distinguished his eleven years as chief justice, and he led the court as it reviewed various legal challenges to the New Deal. The Hughes court upheld many key portions of the New Deal, but rulings striking down such initiatives as farm price controls led Franklin Roosevelt to try his foolish and unsuccessful “court packing” plan in 1938.