The American Vice Presidency (38 page)

On the currency issue, Stevenson tempered his pro-silver stance in deference to Cleveland’s support of gold, typically phrasing his endorsement for “a sound honest money and a safe circulating medium.” Critics accordingly labeled him a great straddler,
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but the Cleveland-Stevenson ticket won handily.

With Cleveland a gold-standard man and Stevenson at best favoring a mixture of silver and gold in backing the nation’s currency, the new vice president kept his silence on the issue. Early in the new term Cleveland considered calling a special session of Congress to seek repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which in his view had already gone too far in threatening the dominance of gold reserves. One hard-money backer wrote Cleveland, apparently worried about the possibility of Stevenson suddenly succeeding him: “I wish you had Congress in session now. You may not be alive in September. It would make a vast difference to the United States if you were not.”
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Late that spring, as the Stevensons were starting on a goodwill tour of the West, a bizarre episode occurred that if publicly known might have aroused similar concerns about what could happen if Cleveland were to die or become disabled and Stevenson the silverite become president, with a stock market panic already building. On May 5, the president, a longtime cigar smoker, noted a small growth on the roof of his mouth but thought nothing of it. But by mid-June it had enlarged to a painful and worrisome size. His wife, Frances, called the family physician, a prominent New York surgeon, who identified the growth as a malignant tumor that had to be removed. The surgeon recalled later that Cleveland would not agree to the
operation unless it could be done in secret and would leave no telltale scar. Cleveland explained that public knowledge could shatter confidence on Republican Wall Street over a possible return to silver currency if the pro-silver vice president were to assume the Oval Office.

Neither Stevenson nor any cabinet member was told, although under the presidential succession act then in force, executive power would have been placed in his hands if the president was physically unable to carry out his duties.
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It was decided the operation could not be performed in the White House nor at the Cleveland summer retreat at Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, where snooping reporters were likely to find out. The president himself came up with the solution. A close wealthy friend owned a luxury yacht, the
Oneida
, on which Cleveland often had gone fishing in Long Island Sound and off the coast of Cape Cod. No suspicions would be aroused if he was aboard for several days. A small team of surgical experts was assembled along with a prominent New York orthodontist assigned to construct an artificial jaw that, when installed, would in time enable Cleveland to speak normally.
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Shortly after the unknowing Stevensons had embarked on their western trip, Cleveland took a private Pullman train to Jersey City, having a few cigars and whiskeys en route. Then he boarded a ferry to Manhattan and spent the night on the
Oneida
for what was advertised as a fishing cruise in the waters of Long Island Sound. In the morning the president’s huge frame was strapped to an oversized wicker chair in the yacht’s saloon as he underwent the surgery under anesthesia. In all, five teeth, a part of his palate, and his whole upper jaw were removed in the nearly ninety-minute operation. The jaw was replaced with a vulcanized rubber device, and to masquerade the truth, aides spread the word that Cleveland was having difficulty with his dentures.
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Important to him, his large moustache remained intact through it all. Two days later on the night of Independence Day, he was up and about on the
Oneida
, anchored off the coast of Sag Harbor, at the eastern end of Long Island, with the world none the wiser.
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The next night the president arrived late at Gray Gables, his summer retreat, where a United Press reporter collared the chief surgeon on the porch of the house and asked him about an account that a cancer had been found and removed. The surgeon dodged, but by the next morning, the wire story had been picked up by newspapers around the country. Stevenson was in
Chicago attending Fourth of July festivities at the World’s Fair, and when he heard the reports he left for Cape Cod to find out for himself what was going on. But Cleveland swiftly had a telegram sent to the vice president, assuring him all was well and asking him to go the West Coast for a series of meetings with party officials, guaranteeing he was kept in the dark. Soon Cleveland was back on his feet, his artificial jaw in place and working like a charm. When a second suspicious-looking growth was found, it was back aboard the
Oneida
for more surgery that proved to be minor.

Meanwhile, the state of the economy had grown worse, with more banks and manufacturing plants closing. Cleveland by now had called for that special session of Congress to consider repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, hoping it would stabilize the economy. Stevenson, as president of the Senate, found his muted neutrality sorely tested while a filibuster against a repeal droned on. Claiming he had no power to stop it, he was accused by repeal advocates of “lacking the courage to refuse dilatory motions.” In any event, with no tie vote materializing, which would have enabled Stevenson to weigh in, the silver act was repealed after a compromise on the gradual reduction of silver purchases, which only enraged many silverites.
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With the Democrats so divided on the currency question, Cleveland came to see Stevenson and his silver allies as so detrimental to the economy that at one point he jokingly observed, “The logical thing for me to do … was to resign and hand the Executive Branch to Mr. Stevenson.”
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Stevenson throughout his vice presidency remained popular on the social circuit for his humorous storytelling, but he never broke into Cleveland’s inner circle. Yet by now, his name was being mentioned as a possible Democratic presidential nominee once Cleveland finished his second term. But when the 1896 national party convention met, again in Chicago, Stevenson was accorded only alternate delegate status and waited in Bloomington for a call that never came. Although he had a long record as a silverite, his accommodating posture toward Cleveland on the currency issue reinforced the view that after all he was a straddler. The
New York Times
observed editorially, “The Vice President says nothing but immaterial pleasantries. He could be readily adjusted to a sound money plank or a declaration for free silver. He would feel quite as much at home with one position or the other.”
²⁰

On the other hand, the man who carried the message for silver at the
convention, the thirty-five-year-old Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan, was anything but tongue-tied on the issue. His historic and defiant oration against the gold standard electrified the convention and brought him the nomination on the fifth ballot. Stevenson was left with a few scattered votes on each roll call.

When Bryan spoke in Bloomington in the fall, Stevenson introduced him, and upon Bryan’s loss to McKinley of Ohio, he returned to his home town. Four years later, when the center of Bloomington was destroyed by fire, Stevenson joined in a campaign to rebuild it. In 1900, he was surprised to learn he had been nominated for another vice presidential term as Bryan’s running mate in his second bid for the presidency, as an old silverite.

In the campaign, Stevenson largely left debating the currency question to Bryan, “the Boy Orator of the Platte,” and focused on foreign policy. He took on making the case against American imperialism in his view of its manifestation not only in the Spanish-American War but also in the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He called for abandonment of the latter occupation, arguing, “Sixty thousand [American] soldiers are now in the Philippine Islands. How much more will be the sacrifice of treasure and life before the conquest is completed? And when completed, what next?”
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In November the Bryan-Stevenson ticket was badly beaten by McKinley and his new running mate, Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York, failing to carry even Stevenson’s home state of Illinois. Eight years later at age seventy-three, Stevenson ran for the governorship of Illinois and beat four other Democrats in the state primary, campaigning across the Land of Lincoln by horse and buggy and the new auto car. In the fall, he opposed the Republican incumbent, Charles Deneen, saying after all his years as a prime Democratic spoilsman that he stood as a nonpartisan. “If elected,” he promised, “I will represent the whole people and I will never run again.”
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He came close enough to call for a recount, within twenty-two thousand votes of more than a million cast, but he was turned down by the Republican state legislature. Four years later, he put himself before the Illinois voters again, this time for a U.S. Senate seat, but failed to win the Democratic nomination.

On Christmas Day, 1913, Stevenson’s wife, Letitia, died at age seventy-one at home in Bloomington. Six months later, on June 14, 1914, the
twenty-third vice president died at seventy-nine in a Chicago hospital after a nervous breakdown and complications. Among those who mourned his death after a long career at the highest levels of politics was his fourteen-year-old grandson, destined later to write an even more cherished page in the history of the Democratic Party. He succeeded where his grandfather had failed in becoming the governor of Illinois but twice later fell short of the higher goal of the presidency, seldom displaying the extreme partisanship of his less-acclaimed forebear.

GARRET A. HOBART

OF NEW JERSEY

T
he twenty-fourth vice president of the United States was a man who considered himself a corporate lawyer and businessman first and foremost. He boasted, “I make politics my recreation,”
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and he had never held an elective office higher than that of state senator in New Jersey. But Garret Augustus Hobart proved to be such an astute operative in both worlds and was so regarded by President William McKinley, under whom he served, that he was utilized almost as the country’s assistant president.

Not since Martin Van Buren had served in the second office under Andrew Jackson had any presidential running mate been brought so importantly into a national administration as “Gus” Hobart was in McKinley’s acceptance of him in 1896. With the single exception of Van Buren, none of the other vice presidents up to Hobart’s time had taken office with any truly significant role in the policies of the administration to which he was elected. After Van Buren’s service to Jackson as a key political and policy adviser to him during his climb to national power, Van Buren had continued in his own climb, culminating in his election to the presidency in 1836. In Jackson’s first term, Van Buren was the president’s secretary of state, and Jackson was expected to choose Van Buren for the second term.

Hobart by contrast hardly knew the president with whom he was called upon to serve. He had risen in prominence in the world of finance rather than national politics. His family roots traced back to Puritan New England,
where his ancestors were ministers who had first settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in the 1630s. Their descendants moved to New Hampshire and eventually to New Jersey in the 1840s. A grandfather helped found Queens College, later renamed Rutgers. His father, Addison Hobart, was a schoolteacher, and his mother was Sophia Vanderveer, of New Amsterdam Dutch stock.
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After their marriage in 1841 they settled in Long Branch, near the Atlantic shore, where the future vice president was born on June 3, 1844, the second of three boys.
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Gus Hobart’s father built his own schoolhouse, attended by his sons, and young Gus progressed so rapidly that he was placed in a class with his older brother. Of military age when the Civil War began, Gus did not serve, focusing instead on preparations for a career in law. He graduated near the top of his class at Rutgers in 1863 and came under the tutelage of a friend of his father’s named Socrates Tuttle, a prominent lawyer in the town of Paterson. Although up to this time the Hobarts had been Democrats, Tuttle’s involvements in Passaic County Republican politics eventually converted young Hobart.
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In 1869, he married his tutor’s daughter Jenny and had two children with her.
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Admitted to the bar in 1866, Hobart served in succession as the county grand jury clerk and, after Tuttle became mayor of Paterson in 1871, as his father-in-law’s city counsel. His local political climb was swift after that; he was elected to the New Jersey Assembly in 1872, elected as Speaker in 1874 at age thirty, elected to the state Senate two years later, and five years after that as the Senate president.
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Meanwhile, he had plunged into Republican affairs, attending every national convention starting in 1876, and at the same time conducted a hugely successful legal practice representing industrial enterprises, all of which made him the consummate Gilded Age political-and-business operative. Seldom appearing in a courtroom, he served on a host of corporate boards as an adviser on matters of law and finance. As a court-appointed receiver, he paid particular attention to rescuing railroads in bankruptcy or other trouble, while also investing in some of them.
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