Thomas R. Marshall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Thomas Riley Marshall
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| In office March 4, 1913 – March 4, 1921 |
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| President | Woodrow Wilson |
| Preceded by | James S. Sherman |
| Succeeded by | Calvin Coolidge |
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27th Governor of Indiana
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| In office January 11, 1909 – January 13, 1913 |
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| Lieutenant | Frank J. Hall |
| Preceded by | Frank Hanly |
| Succeeded by | Samuel M. Ralston |
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| Born | March 14, 1854 North Manchester, Indiana |
| Died | June 1, 1925 (aged 71) Washington, D.C. |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse | Lois Irene Kimsey Marshall |
| Alma mater | Wabash College |
| Signature |  |
Thomas Riley Marshall (March 14, 1854—June 1, 1925) was an American politician who served as the 28th Vice President of the United States of America under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921. His historical role is often discussed in debates about presidential incapacity and the 25th Amendment because of Woodrow Wilson's condition after an incapacitating stroke in 1919.
A prominent lawyer in Indiana, he gained popularity in the state because of his involvement in numerous organizations and because of several high profile cases. He served as Governor of Indiana where he attempted to have a new controversial progressive state constitution adopted. The Republican minority blocked the attempt in the state courts, resulting in an appeal to the United States Supreme Court which declined to accept the case.
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[edit] Early life
[edit] Family and education
Thomas R. Marshall was born in North Manchester, Indiana on March 14, 1854, the son of Daniel and Martha Patterson Marshall, their only child. His father was a country doctor, and his mother suffered from tuberculosis. As a child, the family spent several years moving, first to Illinois, then to Kansas, and later to Missouri as his father attempted different cures to help his mother and eventually suceeded. Marshall studied law at Wabash College. Marshall's father was an a unionist and often voiced his opinions. As the American Civil War neared, his life was threatened by Confederate sympathizers on the frontier, causing him to return with his family to Indiana during the autumn of 1860.[1]
Upon settling in Princeton, Indiana, Marshall was enrolled in public school. After two years of elementary school, the family moved again, and he attended high school in Fort Wayne and graduated in 1869. His family was Presbyterian and staunch Democrats. At age fifteen, they enrolled him in the Wabash College, a Presbyterian school in Crawfordsville. There he took a classical eduction, and did not take his fathers advice to study medicine or to become a minister. Instead he became interested in law and determined to become a lawyer.[2]
In college, Marshall joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and participated in literary and debating societies. He secured a position on the staff of the school newspaper and began writing political columns defending Democrat policies. In 1872 he wrote an unfavorable column about a female lecturer at the school. She filed a suit against Marshall demanding $20,000 for libel. Marshall sought the help of future United States President Benjamin Harrison, then a prominent lawyer in the area. Harrison was able to get the suit dropped, charged Marshall no fee, but gave him a lecture on ethics.[3]
[edit] Lawyer
Marshall was elected to Phi Beta Kappa during his final year in the school before graduating in June of 1873. As a result of his libel case, Marshall had became increasingly interested in law, and began seeking someone to tutor him. His uncle Woodson Marshall first began to teach him, but soon moved away from the area. Marshall returned to live with his parents now in Columbia City were he took up law study again in the office of Walter Olds, a future member of the Indiana Supreme Court. He studied in the office for over a year and was admitted to the bar on April 26, 1875.[3]
Marshall opened a law practice in Columbia City with William F. McNagny the following year. McNagny would work out their legal arguments and Marshall would argue the cases and work the juries. After trying numerous cases before the circuit court his firm became well-known in the region and in 1880 Marshall ran for public office for the first time. As a Democrat candidate for the prosecuting attorney of his district, he was defeated as most of the district was Republican. Although he lost, he remained active in the party and began delivering speeches around the state, stumping for candidates, and helping to organize party rallies. His involvement led him to became well known in the state party and popular in the state.[3]
Marshall was involved in many other private organizations. He was active in the Presbyterian church and taught Sunday school. He served on the county fair board, and contributed to many area charities. An active Mason, he rose to the grade of the Scottish Rite of the thirty-third degree by 1898. Despite his active life, Marshall became an alcoholic which began causing him trouble in his busy life. When he married to Lois Kimsey in 1895, his wife helped him to overcome the problem and he gave up liqour. Afterwards he became active in temperance organizations and delivered several speeches about the dangers of liquor. Although he overcame the drinking problem, it was later raised during his gubernatorial election campaign.[4]
[edit] Governor
[edit] Campaign
In 1906, Marshall was nominated to run for Congress, but he declined the offer. He did hint to party leaders that he would be interested in running for governor in the upcoming 1908 election. He soon gained the support of several key labor unions, and was endorsed by a reporter of the Indianapolis Star. At the state convention, party boss Thomas Taggart attempted to prevent him from winning the nomination because of Marshall's support of prohibition. Taggart wanted the party to nominate Samuel Ralston, but in the voting the prohibitionist and anti-Taggart factions united and helped Marshall to win the nomination for governor.[4]
Marshall's oponent in the election was Republican James E. Watson and the campaign focused predominantly on temperance and prohibition. The Republican controlled state government passed a local-option law allowing counties to ban the sale of liquor during the campaign. The Democrats proposed that the local option be switched to the city and town level, rather than county. This drew the support of the anti-prohibition men in the state, while retaining their own prohibition supporters. The Republican party was split along progressive and conservative lines, and that proved to be the deciding factor in the election, giving Marshall a narrow victory.[5]
[edit] Progressive agenda
He served as Governor of Indiana from 1909 to 1913. Marshall tried to avoid becoming directly involved in the state's patronage system by granting offices to the different factions of the party and appointing very few of his own choices, letting Taggart instead pick candidates. Marshall was also an advocate of making United States Senators elected by popular election which was ratified by the legislature during his term. He also overhauled the state auditing agencies and claimed to have saved the government millions of dollars.[6] He was a strong opponent of Indiana's recently-passed eugenics and sterilization laws, ordering state institutions not to follow them. He was one of the earliest and most prominent opponents of such laws, and he carried his opposition into the Vice-Presidency. His governorship is also noted as the first in which no state executions took place in Indiana due to his opposition to capital punishment and his pardoning and commuting sentances of people condemed to execution.[7][8]
He focused primarily on advancing the progressive agenda. During his term he saw a child labor law and some anti-corruption legislation passed but was not successful in passing much of his progressive platform through the state legislature or in raising a convention to rewrite the state constitution to give the government wider powers in regulating businesses. He regularly attacked corporations and used the recently passed anti-trust laws to try and break several up. Rewriting the state constitution was his greatest goal during his term. He and Jacob Piatt Dunn wrote a new constitution that granted the state a large increase in regulatory powers, set minimum wage standards, grant consitutional protections to unions, and other items that were part of the Eugene V. Debb's socialist platform.[9] The state government was also partially reorganized to allow for direct-democracy initiatives and referendums to be held. He presented it to the General Assembly in 1911 and recommended they submit it to voters in the next election for acceptance. The Democrat controlled assembly agreed to the request and put the measure on the ballot.[9]
Republicans attacked the proposed constitution, and were infuriated that a constitution could be adopted without calling a constitutional convention. They took the issue to court and an injunction was placed by a circuit court removing the constitution from the 1912 ballot. The Indiana Supreme Court upheld the decision in a judgment where it stated that the Constitution of Indiana could not be replaced in total without the calling of a constitutional convention. Marshall was angry with the decision and attacked the court claiming it overstepped its constitutional authority. He appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, but left office in January 1913 while the review was still pending. They declined to accept the case the later that year, stating the issue was within the jurisdiction of the state courts. Subsequent historians have noted the the method for adopting the constitution and the document itself were "hopelessly flawed", and would have likely had large parts ruled unconstitutional by the federal courts if it had passed. Opponents believed that the direct-democracy portions were a violation of the United States Constitution that required states to operate republican forms of government.[10]
[edit] Vice Presidency
[edit] First term
At the 1912 Democratic convention in Baltimore, Marshall's name was put in as Indiana's choice for President. For a time it looked as if Marshall might actually end up as a compromise nominee, but ultimately William Jennings Bryan agreed to endorse Woodrow Wilson; Indiana's delegates successfully lobbied to have Marshall named the vice presidential candidate. Marshall initially turned down the nomination, assuming the job would be boring given its limited role in national affairs, but accepted after assurances from Wilson that he would be given plenty to do. He was elected on the Wilson ticket in 1912, was reelected in 1916 and served as Vice President until 1921. Marshall is currently the last governor to serve two full terms as Vice President.[11]
Marshall was not particularly fond of Wilson as Wilson was considerably more of a progressive than Marhsall. Though Wilson invited Marshall to cabinet meetings, Marshall's ideas were rarely considered. In 1913 Wilson took the then unheard-of step of meeting personally with members of the Senate in the Capitol building. Before this, Presidents had made a habit of using the Vice President (who serves as President of the Senate) as a go-between with the Senate; Wilson took advantage of the opportunity to show that he had no intention of trusting Marshall with delicate business. Since that time, presidents have rarely relied on their vice presidents in dealing with the Senate until the term of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.[12]
As Marshall made little news and was viewed as something of a comic in Washington, a number of Democratic party insiders wanted him removed from the 1916 ticket. Wilson, after deliberating, ultimately decided that it would demonstrate party unity if he kept Marshall on; thus in 1916 Marshall became the first Vice President re-elected since John C. Calhoun in 1828 and Wilson and Marshall became the first President and Vice President team to be re-elected since Monroe and Tompkins in 1820. It was also the first presidential election ever in which the incumbent vice president won all the states won by the incumbent president, something that has since become the norm when a president seeks reelection.[citation needed]
[edit] Second term
During his second term, Marshall saw the United States enter World War I. Wilson sent him out on the road, speaking across the country to encourage Americans to buy war bonds and support the war effort. This was a job to which Marshall was well suited; he had been earning extra money as a public speaker while Vice President. Also in his second term, Marshall became the first Vice President to conduct cabinet meetings; Wilson left him with this responsibility while traveling in Europe to sign the Versailles treaty and gather support for his League of Nations idea.[11]
After suffering a more mild one the previous month, on October 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralyzed and almost certainly incapacitated. Though Marshall was advised that the President had suffered an infirmity and despite the requests of many to do so, Marshall did not attempt to become the first Acting President of the United States. The process for declaring a President incapacitated was at that time unclear, and Marshall was fearful of the precedent that might be set in establishing one, and prefered that the President should voluntarily allow the powers to devolve on him. While Marshall performed ceremonial functions for the remainder of Wilson's term, with First Lady Edith Wilson performing most of the routine duties and details of government, he did not have opportunity to meet with Wilson to ascertain his true condition until their final day in office. It remains uncertain who was making the decisions in the executive branch during this period.[11]
[edit] Death and legacy
Marshall returned to Indianapolis after his term as Vice President and resumed his law practice. He also wrote a number of books on the law as well as his Recollections, a memoir. In 1922–23 he served as chair of the Federal Coal Commission. Marshall died of a heart attack on a visit to Washington, D.C. on June 1,1925 and is interred in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, Indiana next to the grave of his adopted son Morrison.[13] He had no children of his own. Incidentally, Crown Hill Cemetery also holds the remains of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President of the United States and two other United States Vice-Presidents: Charles W. Fairbanks and Thomas A. Hendricks.
Marshall is best known for a phrase he introduced to the American lexicon. During a Senate debate in 1917, a particularly bellicose Senator catalogued what he felt the country needed: "What this country needs is more of this; what this country needs is more of that." Marshall leaned over to a clerk and quipped, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."
The story may be apocryphal, but Marshall was known for having a quick wit. Upon his election as vice president, Marshall sent President-elect Woodrow Wilson a book, inscribed "From your only Vice." He was known to greet citizens walking by his office on the White House tour by asking them “If you look on me as a wild animal, be kind enough to throw peanuts at me.” Upon hearing of his nomination as Vice President (he was not present at the convention), Marshall quipped that he was not surprised, as "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents, home of more second-class men than any other state."
One of his favorite jokes was about a woman with two sons, one of whom ran away and went to sea and one of whom was elected Vice President of the United States. Neither was ever heard of again. Marshall opted not to seek the presidential nomination in 1920. Instead, the Democratic Party nominated James M. Cox as president and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as vice president; the Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge won at the election that year.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
Notes
- ^ Gugin. p. 232
- ^ Gugin, p.234
- ^ a b c Gugin, p. 234
- ^ a b Gugin, p. 235
- ^ Gugin, p. 236
- ^ Gugin, p. 237
- ^ Indiana's Five
- ^ http://users.bestweb.net/~rg/execution/INDIANA.htm
- ^ a b Gugin, p. 238
- ^ Gugin, p. 239
- ^ a b c Gugin, p. 240
- ^ Ben Pershing, Cheney Still a Player: On Hill, His Role Is Undiminished, Dec. 14, 2005
- ^ Gugin, p. 241
Bibliography
- Bennett, David J.He Almost Changed the World: The Life And Times Of Thomas Riley Marshall, Freeman & Costello, ISBN 978-1425965624
- Bodenhamer, David J (1994). The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253312221.
- Gray, Ralph D (1994). Indiana History: A Book of Readings. Indiana University Press. ISBN 025332629X.
- Gugin, Linda C. & St. Clair, James E, ed (2006). The Governors of Indiana. Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana Historical Society Press. ISBN 0871951967.
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Thomas R. Marshall |
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by J. Frank Hanly |
Governor of Indiana 1909-1913 |
Succeeded by Samuel M. Ralston |
| Vacant
Title last held by
James S. Sherman |
Vice President of the United States March 4, 1913 – March 4, 1921 |
Succeeded by Calvin Coolidge |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by John W. Kern |
Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate 1912 (won), 1916 (won) |
Succeeded by Franklin D. Roosevelt |
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