How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency. Saladin M. Ambar
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of the Hudson Progressives
Why were Hudson progressives so successful? First, Tilden and later New York governors had far more authority in New York than did Hayes and his counterparts in Ohio. While both men came to their governorships at a time when New York and Ohio lacked as much as an executive mansion, Tilden at least held the nation's most powerful executive state office.51 Here, early American executive institutional development, like much of what can be explained about American political life, is attributable to geography. By and large, New York and New Jersey escaped the more conservative executive constitutional realities confronting states south of Pennsylvania.52
Not all Hudson governors were uniformly “progressive,” of course. Nevertheless, the recurrence of progressive executive leadership and its popular support gave the New York and New Jersey variety of progressivism a geopolitical legacy with enduring national importance. As well detailed by the political historian Charles Thach, New York's constitutional oddity was in granting the state's executive exceptional authority. One of the rationales could not have been more unpredictable, as New York invigorated its governor in the aftermath of the so-called “Doctors' Riots.” These were a series of citizen attacks against the city's physicians, caught, of all things, digging up graves for cadavers to be dissected for medical research. Once it was discovered that “respectable” citizens' bodies were part of this project (where “strangers” and “negroes” had been used formerly), New Yorkers took matters into their own hands.53 As the former editor of the New York Tribune Joel Tyler Headley recounted in his short history of the riots, “The Mayor and the Governor seemed to have an unaccountable repugnance to the use of force.”54 In his classic study of the American presidency, Thach credits the riots against the doctors with compelling New York to strengthen its executive, forwarding a “body of constitutional interpretation, in which, indeed, may be found some of the most important of American constitutional principles.”55 More than that of any other state, New York's constitution played a profound role in shaping the framers' arguments for a strong “energetic” presidency.56 Coupled with a disproportionately influential press and a growing popular antagonism to the region's large political machines and bosses, Hudson politics would evolve to favor executive-centered solutions.
Despite somewhat weaker constitutional grants of power, other governors found ways to test the limits of their executive authority. Hayes, for example, was hardly docile in his efforts to exert executive influence in Ohio. Unlike New York's governor, Ohio's chief executive was far closer to one of Madison's “ciphers.” First, Ohio's governor lacked veto power. The governor also lacked authority over the state budget and held very limited appointive powers. Yet Hayes used the appointments he had at his discretion in unprecedented ways. As was increasingly common, Hayes sought to use his stature as governor to project an image of himself as being above party. He did this most effectively through his appointment of a fair number of Democrats to state offices, a rarity for most governors at the time. “I was assailed as untrue to my party,” Hayes recalled, “but the advantages of minority representation were soon apparent, and the experiment became successful.”57
Hayes took honor to extremes, however, when he pledged in his acceptance letter to seek only one term if elected president in 1876. Hayes thus peremptorily made himself a lame-duck.58 Nevertheless, the reform issue was effectively muted by Hayes's nomination—a preview of sorts for when New Jersey's progressive Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson, effectively divided the progressive vote to his advantage in the 1912 presidential election. As Roy Morris, Jr. writes, “Hayes's many years of honest service as governor of Ohio, far from the quicksands of Washington,” made him a formidable counter, if not equal, to Tilden's reputation as the outsider standard-bearer of reform.59
While Tilden's leadership of New York's Democratic legislature made his veto power largely unnecessary, Hayes employed his limited executive authority in Ohio and later as president in more confrontational ways.60 As governor, he wielded power on behalf of conservative interests during the 1876 Ohio coal strike, ordering the Ohio militia “to protect the coal operators’ property and the strikebreakers’ ‘right to work.’”61 Hayes would take similar action as president, putting down the Great Strike of 1877. In this instance, he responded to governors' calls for aid, as some 100,000 railroad workers engaged in a mass work stoppage—the largest in the nation's history. Hayes's action was unprecedented, as he employed federal troops for the first time in a dispute between labor and private industry.62 “The strikes have been put down by force,” Hayes would say, “but now for the real remedy. Can't something be done by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil?”63 The tendency to overemphasize Hayes's use of executive power toward conservative ends, as is often the case with Cleveland, obscures the larger story of how the expansion of presidential authority owes its beginnings, humble as they were, to a period well before the presidency of FDR. The use of power in the name of conservative policies still tends to increase power. This has been especially true of presidential power.
In addition to intervening in the Great Strike, Hayes took bold executive action elsewhere. He vetoed a widely popular bill excluding Chinese immigrants. He struck a blow against senatorial courtesy by calling for Chester A. Arthur's resignation from the Port of New York Custom House, initiating his battle with Conkling and appointing John Jay's grandson to investigate New York's corruption (along with commissioners for Philadelphia's, New Orleans's, and San Francisco's custom houses).64 His so-called “popular baths” were public addresses delivered outside of Washington to support his legislative agenda, earning him the moniker “Rutherford the Rover.”65 In fact, Hayes has been credited with delivering more speeches on tour while president than his six immediate predecessors combined.66 Ari Hoogenboom has summarized Hayes's contributions to the executive turn away from First Republic principles of executive leadership well: “Despite his small staff, Hayes strengthened the office of the presidency. His concept of his office differed from that of his immediate predecessors, who had either embraced or enhanced the Whig approach to the presidency.…Although he had been a Whig and was hoping to revive and realign southern Whigs, he moved away from the Whig ideal of a weak president who was subservient to Congress and deferential to his cabinet.”67
Despite Hayes's limited constitutional authority, his Ohio tenure included innovations that would become common among the state's progressive class to come. He established Ohio's modern university (which would become Ohio State University); he pushed the legislature to ratify the fifteenth amendment and reforms aimed at protecting the mentally ill and the incarcerated—areas where he did have a degree of executive authority as governor. Likewise, he was an early advocate of civil service reform and railroad regulation in Ohio.68 He was, as one historian described him, “an early progressive.”69 In many respects, this aspect of Hayes's legacy is lost in the fallout of what the election of 1876 has come to represent in the popular imagination. This is understandable, but it should not obscure the layered object lesson from the election of 1876. Tilden and Hayes helped spawn a new thinking in executive leadership, positioning the American governorship as a popular and characteristically “honest” executive institution for democratic reform. While the transition to a modern presidential republic was still at least a quarter century away, its contours could be seen in the shadows of Reconstruction's demise.
The Cleveland Connection: Beyond Bourbon Leadership
Grover Cleveland is said to have come out of the conservative business wing of late nineteenth-century Democratic politics. His tariff and hard money policies spoke to a so-called Bourbon interest in preventing “control of the government by farmers, wage earners and inefficient, irresponsible officeholders.”70 Henry F. Graff has explained the Bourbon movement well: “Bourbon Democracy was a name inspired not by the Kentucky whiskey but by the backward-looking restored monarchy in France, of which Talleyrand, the irrepressible French diplomat, had quipped that its people had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It was a form of Jeffersonianism dedicated to small, mostly inert government, aimed more at protecting business than promoting the substantial needs of a larger population.”71
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