Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, With Still-Relevant Predictions of VP Duties)

“Aside fr’m the ar’joos duties iv looking afther the prisidint’s health, it is th’ business iv the vice-prisidint to preside over th’ deliberations iv th' Sinit….It is his jooty to rigorously enforce th' rules iv th' Sinit. There ar-re none. Th' Sinit is ruled by courtesy, like th’ longshoreman's union."—Irish-American newspaper columnist and political satirist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Dissertations by Mr. Dooley (1906)

Change those possessive adjectives from male to female, and this, more or less, is still what Joe Biden’s eagerly awaited VP pick should expect, if the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee wins this November.

With both major party nominees over 70 years old, “looking afther the prisidint’s health” is going to be a greater preoccupation than usual for their running mates….

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Birth of Wilson’s Funny-Sad No. 2)

March 15, 1854—Thomas Marshall, a longtime lawyer who parlayed his amiability into one term as governor of Indiana and two as Vice-President of the United States under the very, very serious Woodrow Wilson, was born in North Manchester in his home state to a country doctor and his sickly wife.

While his upbringing, involving constant movement because of his mother’s ill health, was uncomfortable, it was nowhere near as difficult as the months he spent at the close of his second term as veep, when—underestimated by virtually everyone in the capital—he refused to take personal advantage of the worst crisis of Presidential disability in American history.

Whenever witticisms of America’s Vice-Presidents are compiled, Marshall seems to account for half of the best. He was fully the equal of the far better-known Robert Dole, and he spoke without the Kansan’s sarcasm or gag writers.

The quip for which Marshall is best known—“What America needs is a really good five-cent cigar”—is probably a misattribution. It is characteristic of the Hoosier that the ones he did coin—ones that, in my opinion, are far more humorous—were uttered at his own expense and hopeless political situation.

For years, I have felt, no quote about the Vice-Presidency better illustrated the emasculating aspect of the office better than this routine by Marshall: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.” 

Unlike later Hoosier Dan Quayle (or, to be bipartisan, Joe Biden), Marshall was seldom the source of unintentional humor (though he was too good-natured not to enjoy a chuckle at his own expense). Like Quayle, he served a President who, by the end of his first term, was certain he had made a mistake in this selection—then, astonishingly, went on to repeat it.  

This extraordinarily winning personality labored under two handicaps. First, Marshall had little appetite for power, or even particular faith in his own ability. Second, the latter belief was shared by his boss, who scorned him, shut him out of virtually all important administration deliberations—and refused to resign in his favor when a devastating stroke left Wilson unable to perform the duties of his office in any meaningful way any longer. There was, in that sense, something sad, even pathetic, about Marshall’s plight.

Marshall possessed few qualities that would have made Wilson value his work. Like the President a Washington outsider, he could tell him nothing about the ways of the capital. Nor could he even remotely hope to match the President in intelligence, eloquence or determination. Even the one quality Marshall had in abundance worked against him, because it created an image of an unserious person: "An unfriendly fairy godmother presented him with a keen sense of humor," Wilson’s confidante, Col. Edward House, commented. "Nothing is more fatal in politics."

House was, in fact, a prime mover behind an effort to drop Marshall from the ticket before the 1916 reelection campaign, urging the President to replace the veep with Secretary of War Newton Baker. Wilson had as little use for the office as he did for Marshall, but he doubted that he could realign the position’s responsibilities enough to make it attractive to the likes of his able Cabinet officer. Needing to take his wife to a wedding that night, he wasn’t inclined to consider House's proposal seriously. In any case, like Abraham Lincoln, he failed to consider the possibility that his vice-president might be called upon in an emergency to step into his shoes.

It might seem unbelievable to us that someone like Marshall—who stopped attending Cabinet meetings after awhile when he sensed his irrelevance in the eyes of the President—could have ended up as Vice President in the first place. But the last Vice-President with energy and some ability, Aaron Burr, also proved to have such a formidable power base of his own that he nearly swiped the Presidency from the head of his ticket, Thomas Jefferson, when the election of 1800 ended up being unexpectedly thrown into the House of Representatives. Since then, the office had gone mostly to party figures well past their prime—or, in the case of Marshall, represented a constituency that had to be placated.

At the Democratic convention of 1912, the only reason why Wilson did not lose the nomination was that the frontrunner, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, though holding a majority of delegates, did not possess the two-thirds needed according to the rules then in effect. It required a ferocious amount of behind-closed-doors horsetrading to secure the New Jersey governor and former Princeton president his party’s nod. Indiana would be a swing state in the fall, and the state’s political kingpin, Thomas Taggart, desiring to kick the not-always-pliable Marshall upstairs, threw the state delegation behind Wilson at a crucial point in the proceedings, helping to push him over the top.

The Washington establishment came to regard Marshall as provincial, just one more in a line of vice-presidential nonentities. When it came time to write their 1932 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical satire of Presidential politics, Of Thee I Sing, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind created the ultimate caricature of a century of such lackluster holders of the Vice-Presidency: Alexander Throttlebottom, an innocuous but inept officeholder who has managed to leave so little impression that the party elders can’t even remember who he is.

Marshall shared enough aspects of this stereotype that Time Magazine several years ago labeled him one of America’s “Worst Vice Presidents.” Paradoxically, however, in the intentional fog and confusion created by Wilson’s wife Edith and physician Cary Grayson after his disabling stroke, Marshall turned out to be, in the words of the President’s biographer John Milton Cooper, the closest thing to “an unsung, unlikely hero” in the whole mess. (See my prior post on the elaborate concealment perpetrated by the First Lady and the President's doctor.)

Early on, Marshall had been apprised through an intermediary of the President’s dire condition. As the months dragged on with the President not being seen, he was approached several times—by his secretary, by a pair of Republicans, even, reportedly, by his own state’s two Democratic senators—to take over Presidency.

But the very quality that made so many in Washington despise Marshall—his diffidence—made him reluctant to seize control now. He would only agree to succeed the President at this point if Congress passed a resolution declaring the office vacant—and, more crucially, if Mrs. Wilson and Grayson committed to it in writing. The latter possibility was not forthcoming, and without it Marshall would not risk the chance of a civil war and certain constitutional crisis. (It would take another half-century, the deaths of three more Presidents in office, and heart trouble involving another before the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, stipulating the conditions for Presidential succession.)

Like those who preceded and followed him in the office, Marshall accomplished almost nothing as Vice President, with the one possible exception being a Cabinet meeting over which he presided in his second term—the first time in American history that a veep did so. But his tenure in office had led to one of the more interesting episodes of “alternate history”—i.e., the train of happenings that would have occurred if an initial event turned out differently.

In this case, the precipitating event would have been Wilson’s death from the stroke, rather than his survival in diminished condition and through ambiguity and sleight of hand. Wilson’s death while stumping for the League of Nations would have made the President a martyr, and would have given Marshall a strong hand in carrying out what would be, in effect, a memorial to the departed leader. It would have been similar to what Chester A. Arthur did in pushing through the Pendleton Act after James Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker, or as Lyndon Johnson did when he cajoled, wheedled, threatened, and pushed through stalled civil-rights legislation after John F. Kennedy’s murder.

Moreover, though Marshall lacked Wilson’s self-confidence, he also did not possess the President’s inflexibility. He had already signaled that he would compromise concerning at least some reservations that Senate Republicans had about the League. Thus, had Marshall stepped into the Oval Office, GOP leader Henry Cabot Lodge would never have been able to depict the President as obstructionist in his pursuit of his dream, and the United States would not have stood on the sidelines in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Europe fractured in the face of economic disruption and the rise of Fascism.

When he departed Washington at the end of his term, Marshall extended his sympathies to his successor, Calvin Coolidge. As usual, the veep was, comparatively, luckless—Harding’s death gave Coolidge the clear chance at the use of power that Marshall never enjoyed.

Nevertheless, it is hard to act condescendingly to a man with such a healthy disregard for his own perquisites or position. How can one not like a man, facing the unenviable occasional task of presiding over the Senate and its ego, who could pronounce that chamber “The Cave of Winds”? And how can one not like a man who, after leaving Washington, could speak so truthfully on what the office he had once occupied really amounted to: “I don’t want to work. I don’t propose to work. I wouldn’t mind being Vice President again.”

Flashback, March 1853: King, Unusual VP, Takes Oath in Unusual Place

William Rufus King is not an instantly recognizable name, but in his extremely short tenure as Vice-President under Franklin Pierce, he still recorded some firsts.

For one thing, he became the first—and, to date, still the only—Veep to take the oath of office outside the U.S., and on a date different from his running mate. Second, he assumed office when he, and just about anyone else with any knowledge of the situation, was aware that he was gravely ill. In fact, it required an act of Congress that his swearing-in occur not March 4—the way all Presidents and Vice-Presidents had done (and would do) from Washington’s second inaugural to FDR’s first—but March 24. Third, it is very possible that he was the first homosexual to achieve the Vice-Presidency—and his purported lover may have been the first homosexual President of the U.S.

Several years ago, a controversy flared up over C.A. Tripp’s claim that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Not only was the explanation highly speculative, but the supporting “evidence” was threadbare. As it turned out, many gay-rights advocates might have ignored a considerably more likely prospect: Honest Abe’s predecessor, James Buchanan.

Tripp made much of the 16^th President’s closeness to the friend of his young manhood, Joshua Speed. But they stopped being on easy terms with one another after Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd. Lincoln would go on to father three sons. Even during his time in office, when enemies seized on any remotely plausible rumor to cast doubt on his personality and policies, nobody thought to throw this particular rumor about intimate relations with men at him.

Nevertheless, who can blame gays for claiming the Great Emancipator as an Executive Branch role model? Certainly, you wouldn't want Buchanan, nor the good friend of his listed by Time magazine as among the 10 worst U.S. Vice-Presidents. (This ranking, by the way, was patently unfair: King had only three weeks to live after his inaugural oath, so he did not have time to cause mischief, as, for instance, Spiro Agnew and Dick Cheney did. By rights, Time should have given him no more than an incomplete.)

But it is important to recall this about King's short tenure: the Vice-Presidency—a position only the proverbial heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the nation—would be occupied by a man who himself was already dying of tuberculosis.

In a couple of ways, it seems inconceivable today to anoint for such a job an old party warhorse such as King:

*The fear that the President might die in office has been so frequently justified by events that parties are loath to nominate someone who is not physically vigorous—or, at least, who is not constantly monitored by physicians (e.g., cardiac patient Cheney). King was the same age at the time of his election as Joe Biden, but modern medical, nutritional and exercise knowledge enable Obama’s Veep to endure the stress of a campaign and office better than the running mate of Pierce. (Screening has allowed doctors to test whether additional problems are surfacing from Biden’s two aneurysms from 25 years ago.)

*Parties and Presidential candidates no longer fear running mates with their own independent sources of power, as Aaron Burr had when he vied with his ostensible boss, Thomas Jefferson, for the Presidency in the House of Representatives, in the disputed election of 1800.

*Vice-Presidential candidates are no longer content to sit at home, awaiting the verdict of voters, but instead are expected to barnstorm across the country, appearing in all media, all the time.

And yet, in another sense, our age can identify all too readily with King. Those living in a bitter era when a Congressman can leap to his feet and shout “Liar!” at the President during a State of the Union message can begin to understand an antebellum Congress in which duels were not uncommon and a U.S. Senator (Charles Sumner of Massachusetts) could be nearly caned to death right on the floor of the chamber over the slavery issue. King himself almost became involved in two duels, and he was considered one of the more even-tempered men of the Senate.

In fact, King was thought of as one of the above-average members of that body. He was certainly not intellectual, nor oratorical, so he, by default, could not be considered in the same breath as the “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. But, for all his sympathies as a slaveholder, he continually tried to tamp down secessionist fervor in the South (even joining in the desperate effort to craft the Compromise of 1850). Furthermore, even though he insisted on wearing powdered wigs long after they had gone out of fashion, his bearing was consistently acclaimed as handsome.

In short, he looked and acted like a Senator. His colleagues thought so well of him that, between 1836 and 1850, King won a record 11 elections to the post of Senate president pro tempore, the constitutionally recognized officer of the Senate who presides over the chamber in the absence of the vice president.

One Washington figure to whom he especially endeared himself was Buchanan. King met the future president in 1834, began rooming with him two years later, and continued to do so (except for King’s break for a diplomatic posting to France) until his final illness.

By itself, men sharing the same house, even the same bed, was not unusual in 19^th century Washington, since lack of ready transportation forced Congressmen into unusual arrangements. Some historians have pointed to a broken-off engagement that ended tragically with his fiancee’s early death as the reason why Buchanan never married, rather than any repressed homosexual leanings. Moreover, imposing post-Freudian understanding of relations between men up through the 19th century can be an anachronistic exercise, as expressions of friendship tended to be more effusive in those days.

But the relationship between Buchanan and King was close enough to set off more gossiping than normal, marked by the following:

* The two men were nicknamed “the Siamese Twins”;

* Andrew Jackson (whose lead King followed on Capitol Hill) dubbed the Alabaman "Miss Nancy," and

* Buchanan and King were lifelong bachelors, without children.

In other words, even much contemporary comment took note of them. 

One incident in particular fueled speculation about King. The origins of his near-duel with Clay are well-known (recorded in Congressional remarks), but not what lay behind an incident involving Major Michael Kenan back in Cahaba, Alabama. The major’s insult led King to withdraw a dagger from his cane and pass it across Kenan’s chest. Kenan then sent a challenge to King, which the senator refused to accept because of the nature of the insult. Kenan then induced a neighbor to challenge King, and this duel was only averted when the neighbor, after due consideration, decided it wasn’t worth engaging in an affair of honor when he was totally unaware of what it was really about.

One of my college professors, taking note of Buchanan’s childless status, suggested that lack of potency (wink, wink!) also underlay the president’s ineffectual attempts to head off secession. Nowadays, that kind of insinuation would have landed my professor before an academic committee, where he would have been fortunate to emerge unscathed. (In any event, his assumption is simply not historical: under the same reasoning, two reputed homosexuals or bisexuals, Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great--legendary masters of the battlefield--would have to be regarded as ineffective. The idea is preposterous on its face.)

Absent documentary evidence, any conclusions about the sexuality of King and Buchanan, like that of Revolutionary War general Baron von Steuben (discussed in a prior post of mine), can only rest on speculation. What is not speculation is that, when Buchanan’s bid for the presidential nomination at the 1852 Democratic Convention foundered, King was offered the consolation prize—the Vice-Presidency—to placate his close friend and allies in the Southern wing of the party, who had pushed his candidacy for the office for the last dozen years.

Shortly after he and running mate Franklin Pierce won the subsequent election, King fell ill. With doctors diagnosing tuberculosis, King journeyed to a sugar plantation in Cuba in the hope that a warm climate would help. Eventually, he notified Congress that he was too sick to make it back to Washington in time for the inauguration, so his former colleagues passed an act enabling him to take his oath outside the U.S. 

King was so frail when the oath was finally administered that he had to be lifted to his feet by two soldiers, the better to see the brown mountain peaks in the distance. With his condition deteriorating rapidly, he determined to leave Cuba so he could die at home. He was back at his Alabama plantation, Chestnut Hill, for only one day when he passed away on April 18, 1853, less than a month after perhaps the most unusual Vice-Presidential inauguration in American history.

In the end, it matters less whether Buchanan was literally intimate with King than that the future President— whose Mennonite, Quaker, and even many Democrat neighbors in the free state of Pennsylvania regarded slavery with horror—was metaphorically involved with the slaveholding class served by King—a group that gave Buchanan crucial support in his successful election in 1856, before undercutting him in the run-up to the Civil War. How King might have reacted to this turn of events regarding his very close friend rests on the same kind of speculation that has accrued ever since on the real nature of their relationship.

(The perhaps somewhat idealized image of King accompanying this post, taken from around 1840, comes from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)