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

Figure 1. Governors of New York and New York Times citations, 1851-1932

      In looking to New York and New Jersey, this book explores a particular variety of progressive political development—namely, a Hudson strain linked to executive-led reform, disproportionate press and media influence, and a peculiar mix of large-scale, private, antidemocratic institutions and patronage opportunities. Coupled with enduring and expansive executive constitutional authority, these elements made the case of the Hudson Progressives unique. It was this combination of factors that gave the region's executives a superior platform to innovate at the state level, while playing the lead in invigorating the warrants of executive authority. They did this primarily and initially at the state level, while, in the process, accruing the greater share of presidential possibilities for themselves. It is therefore essential to examine these protagonists as some of the earliest exemplars of what would become modern presidential authority.

       Conclusion

      Given the rising importance of the governorship as part of the overall elevation in executive power in the United States, it is insufficient to consider modern executive authority to be solely a function of presidential practices. For instance, Wilson's threat to govern unconstitutionally and his appeals to the public were both innovations developed during his governorship (and patterned after other governors such as La Follette). The same can be said for TR's strengths as party leader, and, on occasion, party challenger. Nearly all the chief builders associated with the birth of modern presidential power were once governors whose policies and theories of governance were largely replicated later on the presidential stage. In turn, these governor-presidents influenced the practices of their gubernatorial counterparts, producing an intriguing dialectic in American executive politics. Moreover, as I will later describe, the bases of modern presidential leadership and practices were informed by other state executives as well. The shifting tectonic plates of executive authority converged around the nation's governors and its early modern presidents at the turn of the last century. To miss this is to overlook one of the important stories of American political development and the rise of American executive power.

      Thus far, I have avoided making any normative arguments about the nature of this transformation in executive background as it applies to the modern presidency. I will take up this argument more directly in the conclusion of the book. In short, the relationship between prior executive office and the birth of the modern presidency begs new approaches to understanding the broad set of political, sociological, and economic factors driving the popular appeal of both state and national executives. The anomie of modern industrial society had its consequences for both individuals and the nature of the state. One of these consequences was the elevation of executive power as a counterweight to the large, faceless institutions that were increasingly prevalent in society. In the American context, this elevation of the executive grew primarily among Progressive Era governors who gained a host of new institutional powers and tools to stoke popular sentiment in their favor. This was a mutually induced process, as voters sought antimachine and often antiparty leaders often with extralegal (and at times anticonstitutional) perspectives on executive governance. While the rise of modern industrial capitalism in America brought its own staggering implications for the reshaping of republican values, so too did the emergence of the outsized executive. This is one of the great ironies of progressivism in America: it extolled the virtue of popular ends, but, in its untethering of executive power, simultaneously extolled the virtue of personalist leadership. We are still trying to untangle the benefits and costs of this transformation in American politics.

      Chapter 1

      Emerging Executives of the Second Republic, 1876–1912

      I would go back as far as Hiram Johnson when he destroyed boss rule.

      —Gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan, describing his party philosophy, 1966¹

      In the end of course, there will be a revolution, but it will not come in my time.

      —Hiram Johnson, 1920²

       Introduction

      Just months into his first campaign for the presidency, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to attend to some unfinished business in Albany. Despite his reluctance to assault his party or New York's political machine, FDR nonetheless confronted New York City's errant, albeit famously colorful mayor. For years, Jimmy Walker had provided ample ammunition to his political foes through his personal and political excesses. Over time, he had grown to personify graft and big city corruption. If Roosevelt were to win the Democratic nomination, he would have to satisfy the progressive elements of his party, who, since the time of Samuel J. Tilden, had come to expect the use of executive power as the chief means of protecting the people's trust. Moreover, as the historian Richard L. McCormick has noted, New York's increasingly powerful “governorship inevitably encouraged anyone who attained it to distance himself from the [Party] boss.”³ It was in this context that Roosevelt launched his late assault upon Walker, ultimately compelling the mayor's resignation.

      The importance to late nineteenth-century politics of Roosevelt's row with Walker, which will be discussed more fully later, is its indebtedness to past executive practices. Here, the political legacy of New York's governors—and of Tilden specifically—figured into FDR's and the state's claims against Walker. It was Tilden who brought down Boss William Tweed some sixty years before Roosevelt's fight with Walker. That victory regained the power of removal for New York's governor—still a point of some contention in 1932.⁴ As Roosevelt's Seabury Commission argued to the state's attorney general at the time, “the justification for the position taken by [FDR] was actuated by the same considerations which served as guides for his illustrious predecessors, Governors Tilden, Cleveland and Hughes.”⁵

      Yet, like so many of the early progressive governors at the fore of the transformation of executive power in America, Samuel J. Tilden remains an obscure figure. His place in history holds a spare vestige of importance—the losing subject of the tainted bargain that ended Reconstruction. Yet Tilden was hardly an irrelevant figure in his time. One New York Times feature on Woodrow Wilson in 1910, weeks before his election as governor of New Jersey, captured just how significant a figure the former New York governor remained: “Wilson— A Tilden, But a Tilden Up to Date,” ran the late September headline. The Times would go on to tout Wilson as “a man with all the Tilden characteristics and an appreciation of the fact that conditions have changed since Tilden's day.”⁶In New Jersey, Wilson would face tremendous opposition, but also great opportunity for support among progressives—provided he demonstrated credentials worthy of the Tilden legacy.⁷

      Undoubtedly, the election of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction and the restoration of white home rule in the South, but it also heralded a new era of notoriety for state executives. The reform impetus sweeping the country at the time found its most vocal expression in the states, where governors led the way.⁸ Tilden's governorship reflected an early but growing movement by voters to grant greater power and voice to their executives. The shift from legislative to executive authority was purposeful, as governors were called upon to respond to the demand for specific policies that would fundamentally alter the relationship between the people, their government, and private enterprise in the states.

      Besides serving as the immediate impetus ending Reconstruction, the election of 1876 has been seen as the beginning of an era of deep partisan divisions and hotly contested presidential elections. Few have seen it as the beginning of the end of America's “First Republic.”⁹ Formerly, American electoral politics had been typified by a Virginian philosophical approach to the presidency, buoyed by more limited conceptions of executive authority.¹⁰As the political scientist Rowland Egger noted, “The executive apparatus which emerged [from Virginia's 1776 Virginia Constitutional Convention] was weak in constitutional stature, confused in lines of authority, and wholly and irresponsibly subservient to the legislative will.”¹¹ While late nineteenth-century American politics was certainly