How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency. Saladin M. Ambar
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it was Samuel Tilden's losing campaign that contributed genuinely significant innovations to modern electoral politics. Countering Hayes's efforts to wave “the bloody shirt” of the Civil War (“are you for the rebellion, or are you for the Union?”31), Tilden sought to extend his message in unconventional ways. The Tilden machine that fought Boss Tweed's was now churning out its own propaganda—establishing a literary bureau, a 750-page campaign text book, and a speakers' bureau that coordinated Tilden's far-flung appearances. It was dubbed the “perfect system.”32 As Tilden biographer Alexander Flick noted, Tilden was one of the first party leaders to employ publicity based on the psychology of advertising, in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, and circular letters.33 Much of this political innovation dated from Tilden's earlier campaigns for governor, where his organizational skills were ahead of their time. As the reporter William C. Hudson noted years later in his reflections on Tilden, it was Tilden “who invented the exhaustive canvass of each town as a basis for campaign work.” Such practices had their rewards. “He once showed [me] a book containing the names of 50,000 Democrats,” said Hudson, “with whom he could directly communicate.”34 In many respects, Tilden's were the first exhortations from the modern “war room.” His New York-based campaign ultimately devised a crude but innovative form of national polling as well. Using newspaper clippings and individually crafted reports delivered across the country by his aides, Tilden was able to assess regional strengths and weaknesses.
Critically, Tilden's electoral appeal was based on his reputation as a reformer. Referring to Washington, the New York World editorialized about Tilden, “Would to God that some Hercules might arise and cleanse that Augean stable as the city and state of [N]ew York are cleansing.”35 The efforts to portray both Hayes and Tilden as “clean government” men were essential to the campaign of 1876, and all subsequent gubernatorial bids to the White House. From Credit Mobilier to Watergate, the regimes of governor-presidents have followed periods of grave popular doubt about federal corruption centered on the presidency.
The myriad scandals attached to the Grant administration, the economic panic of 1873, and widespread disaffection with Reconstruction, helped state executives immensely, if for no other reason than that they were spared by a press and citizenry obsessed with cabinet and senate-based scandals. Gilded Age politics bore little resemblance to the perceived halcyon days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. The caricatures of U.S. senators popularized in Puck were summed up in words by Henry Adams, when he described the United States in his 1880 novel Democracy as “a government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators.”36 Such popular disaffection with Washington “insiders” would not be seen again until the post-Watergate era, which launched the second historic wave of governor-presidents that began with Jimmy Carter.
Hayes, Tilden, and the Political Geography of 1876
In highly contested late nineteenth-century presidential elections, the critical but frequently unpredictable states of Ohio and New York proved instrumental to breeding national candidates for the office. In the first twenty-five elections held after the Civil War, New Yorkers or Ohioans won the White House seventeen times.37 Nine of these victories belonged to governor-presidents who articulated an antimachine and executive-leaning politics. As the most populous state in the union, with thirty-five electoral votes, New York was a frequent king-maker in presidential politics. After Pennsylvania, Ohio followed with twenty-two electoral votes, and its growing immigrant population and sizable Irish community made it a battleground state for years to come. New York's Horatio Seymour advised Tilden to portray Hayes as anti-Irish, eschewing more genteel self-promotion, such as “Tilden and Reform.” “The word ‘reform’ is not popular with the workingmen,” Seymour insisted.38 Tilden nearly pulled out Ohio, losing by just 6,636 votes.39
Hayes would have his own difficulties. Even as governor, representing the incumbent party, with its association with Washington's scandals, proved daunting. To make matters worse, Hayes had only marginal support from New York's highly influential Republican party boss Roscoe Conkling, who was denied the nomination at the Republican convention in Cincinnati.40 Conkling's power came from Republican control over New York's most coveted patronage bonanza, the Custom House. As early as 1828, the Custom House's duties were paying all federal expenses apart from interest on the debt.41 By 1876, it was the largest federal office in the United States and was responsible for 70 percent of all customs revenue.42 As President, Hayes would ultimately direct some token reform efforts regarding the Custom House, such as naming Theodore Roosevelt senior collector of customs to the Port of New York (over Conkling's objections). Agitated, Conkling used his senate committee power to delay the appointment, catching Roosevelt in the crosshairs of a titanic political battle, one that may have debilitated, if not killed, him outright. The seeds of TR's reformist bent were in part attributed to his father's physical demise and the Custom House battle with Conkling.43 The possibility that Hayes would lay down the law to Conkling once president proved too great a risk; Conkling effectively sat on his hands during the national campaign, greatly hurting Hayes's chances.
Indeed, after Hayes's electoral victory, his administration did in fact go after Conkling, in many respects exercising an extraordinary amount of executive and federal authority. Hayes's attack on the New York Custom House also proved highly symbolic. It served notice to other cities similarly victimized by petty, machine-based corruption.44 Hayes's efforts against Conkling should be seen in light of his overall executive-centered leanings, which, in the words of the historian H. Wayne Morgan, ultimately “sustained Executive rights” while helping to “restore presidential authority.”45
Tilden, for his part, turned down the position of collector offered to him by President Polk over thirty years before his presidential bid.46 Nearly every politician of ambition coveted this plum of the New York political machine. Tilden was among the few to spurn the office. In time, Tilden's Jeffersonian aversion to centralization made him an opponent of what would become a more robust executive approach forwarded by TR, Wilson, and, ultimately, FDR. Nonetheless, this “conservative” aspect of Tilden's philosophy made him equally opposed to centralization of municipal authority that violated the public interest. As the issue of municipal corruption increased in prominence nationally, Americans became fearful the nation was moving away from its founding principles. David McCulloch captured the sentiment well: “For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities.…The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years, learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed.”47 Tilden interpreted his executive role as requiring him to serve as a buffer between the public and New York's political machine. Like so many antimachine governors who would follow during the Progressive Era, he launched an attack on municipal corruption, including that of Tweed. It was a struggle that forced reconsideration of the governor's power of removal, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Along these reformist lines, Tilden's inaugural address targeted the Canal Ring of private interests that had abused governmental outlays to the state's canals, and he likewise targeted the corruptibility of the famed Custom House itself.
Such shots across the bow were intended not only for New Yorkers, but also “our sister States” who stood to benefit from “an improved polity, wise legislation, and good administration.”48 Despite losing his presidential bid, Tilden's gubernatorial administration stood as an early symbol of reform, one not forgotten by later progressives. The immodest but always revealing Theodore Roosevelt knew the parameters that defined his executive legacy. “I think I have been the best Governor of my time,” he claimed, “better either than Cleveland or Tilden.”49 Roosevelt would eschew the Jeffersonian plot line of early reformers, favoring a national politics and more overt forms of executive power. But it was Tilden who destroyed Tweed, first with a bold, if not unglamorous, affidavit, followed by targeted legislation during his governorship. Tweed's end was indeed ignominious, spiraling downward amid his flight to California, then Spain, and, ultimately, a return to New York in handcuffs. He would die in prison in 1878. “I guess Tilden and [Democratic party regular Charles S.] Fairchild