How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency. Saladin M. Ambar

by Emile Durkheim and others, the preconditions for this authority could be found in social forces that were being altered by new and disturbing economic realities.³⁰ In the American political context, the result was to erect state and, later, national executives powerful enough to stand up to the twin machines of industrial capitalism and political bossism.

      The governors presented in this book are selected in part because they are the first actors in the regime of governors³¹ elected to the presidency directly from state offices. The governorships reflecting the antimachine predilection in this cohort include those of Hayes, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR. These cases best highlight the essential features of statehouse-to-White House executive distillation. One reason for the salience of this particular set of executives is that the Hudson corridor (New York and New Jersey) provided executives with a disproportionately powerful megaphone in the form of press coverage. While Ohio produced a significant number of presidents during the period, they were less reflective of the overriding trend toward executive-centered governance. Nevertheless, Hayes's governorship was more in line with the greater emergent executive narrative than some of his Ohio brethren, and is thus included to add further breadth of understanding to national executive trends.³²

      Not all of these governors would go on to attain the presidency. The often overlooked Tilden, for example, authored one of the defining executive legacies of the early and late Progressive Era. His electoral loss in 1876 was significant on a number of levels, not the least of which being that his national campaign exemplified the way Hudson figures would present themselves to the national electorate for decades to come. Beyond Tilden extends a field that includes the most influential Progressive Era figures and champions of executive authority in this period. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Hiram Johnson of California produced governorships whose respective contributions provided regional and ideological cohesion to the landscape of early twentieth-century attitudes toward executive power and presidential authority. La Follette's and Johnson's governorships provided object lessons for expanding executive latitude at the national level. Indeed, La Follette's executive style and policies were cribbed widely by TR, Wilson, and FDR alike. La Follette is perhaps the most inspirational figure of what can only be described as an evolving movement, led by governors, to present a new vision for executive behavior in the United States.

      Each of these executive stories revolves around the aforementioned variables that make up critical components of the modern presidency. These begin with leadership of the legislative branch—namely, the setting of legislative goals and the executive's direction of the legislative agenda. Second, modern presidents have come to be identified as leaders of their party. This represents a break with early republican notions of the president as party representative, or figurehead. As we shall see, it was governors who helped break this subordinate identification with party, as party leadership and, at times, defiance frequently came to be seen among voters as powerful and appealing qualities in their executives. The third element in the subnational origins of the modern presidency is the great emphasis placed on press and media relations by these governors and governor-presidents.³³ The changing dynamic of press coverage of governors, marked by the institutionalization of press relations within the executive office, foreshadowed a key innovation in presidential practices. Finally, as the administrative capacities of the states grew, new ideological arguments were presented by governors to both justify and sustain the changes occurring in their executive offices. The relationship between ideology and public policy became increasingly important in this era as state executives sought new powers for their progressive agendas. With these developments in mind, it is essential to reconsider the traditional understandings of the relevance of presidential background and prior public office. In doing so, this work will cast some light back on the institutional nature of American political development, and make the case for the significance, if not centrality, of the American governorship to the birth of the modern presidency.

       Why Presidential Background Matters

      The governorship is a political institution. It is not simply a touchstone for discourse within federalism. As a political institution, the governorship has meaning that crosses state and institutional boundaries, while also serving as a gateway for understanding the presidency. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, governors emerged as a sort of deus ex machina—heroic figures cast into a narrative gone awry—as increasingly powerful private interests consolidated undue authority in the political arena. Executive power shed its early image as an embarrassment of republicanism as it became an instrument of progressivism. Executives, not legislatures, were now seen as best able to confront the antidemocratic forces growing apparently beyond all scale. “I would trust a governor quicker than I would a legislature every week,”³⁴ remarked one member of the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1912. Such exhortations were no longer derided for their presumed monarchist character. It is no coincidence that governor-presidents account for 91 percent of all presidential vetoes in this period, an era in which a clear majority of presidential vetoes in American history occurred.³⁵ While presidents were just beginning to reconsider the relationship between formal and personal power, governors were instrumental figures in fusing the two. Central to this effort were their appeals to the public, which helped overturn traditional notions of what an executive could or could not do.³⁶

      In almost every way, governors began to cross the line in the early progressive period. They did so literally, as when Governor La Follette delivered his annual address in person to the Wisconsin legislature. They did so figuratively, as when Woodrow Wilson threatened to govern “unconstitutionally” in New Jersey. And they would frequently do so when at odds with their own party, as was the case when TR served as governor of New York. These early efforts in executive power-building have unfortunately been separated from the broader story of the growth of executive power in America. And where excellent institutional analysis of the American governorship can be found, it is seldom connected meaningfully to the larger question of executive behavior or the institutional development of the presidency. In short, presidential background, a subset of a subset of political science, has been addressed as part of a very limited approach to understanding the evolution of the presidency. And, when it has been invoked, it has been all too often through an ahistorical lens. Such approaches have tended toward character studies, biography, psychology, and personality studies. Institutionally based literature on presidential background is very limited, save for efforts at assessing prior office as a pathway to the White House. All too often, exceptions notwithstanding, the presumption has been that prior executive office among presidents is largely a personal or biographical affair, rather than an historic or institutional one. The executive as category, in short, is missing.

      Beyond the adoption of informal power, the modern presidency has also come to mean the institutionalization of the office of president. The growth of its bureaucracy, aura of personal and prerogative power, and overall importance as an agency for perpetual emergency management, mark today's presidency as decidedly different from what went before it. Richard E. Neustadt's mid-twentieth-century analysis of the political environment inhabited by presidents of that time has come to best represent this understanding of the distinction between moderns and others: “The weakening of party ties, the emphasis on personality, the close approach of world events, the changeability of public moods, and above all the ticket splitting, none of this was usual before the Second World War…. Nothing really comparable has been seen in this country since the 1880s. And the eighties were not troubled by emergencies in policy.”³⁷

      It is hard to refute the increasingly institutionalized nature of the presidency. But what has been absent from most discussions of what is modern about today's presidency is the idea that not only has the office been institutionalized, but so have all of its occupants, as presidents are unquestionably shaped by their prior political offices. By hearkening back to the 1880s, Neustadt indirectly (and unintentionally) linked today's presidency to an era whose political climate served as the incubator for new forms of executive power, and for the modern presidency. This was the period that launched the political careers of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and a host of dominant state executives, a period defined by new and radical interpretations of the nature of the executive role in republican government. Like most who subscribe to the idea of the modern presidency as a distinct pol itical phenomenon in American