Thomas R. Marshall
Thomas Riley Marshall (March 14, 1854 – June 1, 1925) was an American politician who served as the 28th vice president of the United States from 1913 to 1921 under President Woodrow Wilson. A prominent lawyer in Indiana, he became an active and well known member of the Democratic Party by stumping across the state for other candidates and organizing party rallies that later helped him win election as the 27th governor of Indiana. In office, he attempted to implement changes from his progressive agenda to the Constitution of Indiana, but his efforts proved controversial and were blocked by the Indiana Supreme Court.
This article is about the vice president of the United States. For the rugby player, see Thomas Roger Marshall.
Thomas Marshall
Marshall's popularity as Indiana governor, and the state's status as a critical swing state, helped him secure the Democratic vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Wilson in 1912 and win the subsequent general election. An ideological rift developed between the two men during their first term leading Wilson to limit Marshall's influence in the administration. Marshall's brand of humor caused Wilson to move his office away from the White House, further isolating him. Marshall was targeted in an assassination attempt in 1915 for supporting intervention in World War I.[b] During Marshall's second term he delivered morale-boosting speeches across the nation during the war and became the first U.S. vice president to hold cabinet meetings, which he did while Wilson was in Europe during peace negotiations. As he was president of the United States Senate, a small number of anti-war Senators kept it deadlocked by refusing to end debate. To enable critical wartime legislation to be passed, Marshall had the body adopt its first procedural rule allowing filibusters to be ended by a two-thirds majority vote—a variation of this rule remains in effect.
Marshall's vice presidency is most remembered for a leadership crisis following a stroke that incapacitated Wilson in October 1919. Because of their personal dislike for Marshall, Wilson's advisers and wife Edith sought to keep him uninformed about the president's condition to prevent him from assuming presidential powers and duties. Many people, including cabinet officials and congressional leaders, urged Marshall to become acting president, but he refused to forcibly assume Wilson's powers, not wanting to set a standard of doing so. Without strong leadership in the executive branch, the administration's opponents defeated the ratification of the League of Nations treaty and returned the United States to an isolationist foreign policy. Marshall ended his time in office as the first vice president since Daniel D. Tompkins, nearly a century earlier, to serve two full terms, and the first vice president re-elected, since John C. Calhoun.
Marshall was known for his wit and sense of humor. One of his most enduring jokes provoked widespread laughter from his Senate colleagues during a floor debate. Responding to Senator Joseph Bristow's catalog of the nation's needs, Marshall quipped that, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." After his terms as vice president, he opened an Indianapolis law practice where he authored several legal books and his memoir, Recollections. He continued to travel and speak publicly. Marshall died in 1925 after suffering a heart attack while on a trip to Washington, D.C.
Early life[edit]
Family and background[edit]
Thomas Marshall's paternal grandfather, Riley Marshall, immigrated to Indiana in 1817 and settled on a farm in present-day Whitley County.[c] He became wealthy when a moderate deposit of oil and natural gas was discovered on his farm; when he sold the property in 1827 it earned $25,000,[1] $523,750 in 2015 chained dollars. The money allowed him to purchase a modest estate and spend the rest of his life as an active member of the Indiana Democratic Party, serving as an Indiana State Senator, party chairman, and financial contributor. He was also able to send his only child, Daniel, to medical school.[1]
Marshall's mother, Martha Patterson, was orphaned at age thirteen while living in Ohio and moved to Indiana to live with her sister on a farm near the Marshalls' home. Martha was known for her wit and humor, as her son later would be.[d] Martha and Daniel met and married in 1848.[2]
Thomas Riley Marshall was born in North Manchester, Indiana, on March 14, 1854. Two years later, a sister was born, but she died in infancy. Martha had contracted tuberculosis, which Daniel believed to be the cause of their infant daughter's poor health.[2] While Marshall was still a young boy, his family moved several times searching a good climate for Daniel to attempt different "outdoor cures" on Martha.[3] They moved first to Quincy, Illinois in 1857. While the family was living in Illinois, Daniel Marshall, a supporter of the American Union and a staunch Democrat, took his four-year-old son, Thomas, to the Lincoln and Douglas debate in Freeport in 1858. Marshall later recalled that during the rally he sat on the laps of Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, alternating between the two candidates when they were not speaking, and remembered it as one of his earliest and most cherished memories.[4][5]
The family moved to Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1859, but the frontier violence caused them to move to Missouri in 1860.[6] Eventually, Daniel succeeded in curing Martha's disease.[6] As the American Civil War neared, violence spread into Missouri during the Bleeding Kansas incidents. In October 1860 several men led by Duff Green demanded that Daniel Marshall provide medical assistance to the pro-slavery faction,[4] but he refused, and the men left. When the Marshalls' neighbors warned that Green was planning to return and murder them, the family quickly packed their belongings and escaped by steamboat to Illinois. The Marshalls remained in Illinois only briefly, before relocating to Indiana, which was even farther from the volatile border region.[5][7]
Governorship (1909–1913)[edit]
Campaign[edit]
In 1906, Marshall declined his party's nomination to run for Congress. He hinted, however, to state party leaders that he would be interested in running for Indiana governor in the 1908 election.[30] He soon gained the support of several key labor unions, and was endorsed by Louis Ludlow, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star. Despite this support, Marshall was a dark horse candidate at the state convention.[31] Initially, Thomas Taggart, Indiana Democratic Party boss, did not support him because of Marshall's support of prohibition.[32] Taggart wanted the party to nominate anti-prohibitionist Samuel Ralston, but the prohibitionist and anti-Taggart factions united with Marshall's supporters. To oppose L. Ert Slack, a temperance candidate, Taggart persuaded Ralston's delegates to support Marshall and give him the votes he needed to win the nomination.[33][34][35]
Humor[edit]
Marshall was known for his quick wit and good sense of humor. On hearing of his nomination as vice president, he announced that he was not surprised, as "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state".[122] One of his favorite jokes, which he delivered in a speech before his departure for Washington, D.C., to become vice president, recounted a story of a man with two sons. One of the sons went to sea and drowned and the other was elected vice president; neither son was ever heard from again.[123] On his election as vice president, he sent Woodrow Wilson a book, inscribed "From your only Vice".[122]
Marshall's humor caused him trouble during his time in Washington. He was known to greet citizens walking by his office on the White House tour by saying to them, "If you look on me as a wild animal, be kind enough to throw peanuts at me."[80] This prompted Wilson to move Marshall's office to the Senate Office building, where the Vice President would not be disturbed by visitors.[122] In response to Alexander Graham Bell's proposal to the board of the Smithsonian Institution to send a team to excavate for ruins in Guatemala, Marshall suggested that the team instead excavate around Washington. When asked why, he replied that, judging by the looks of the people walking on the street, they should be able to find buried cave-men no more than six feet down. The joke was not well received, and he was shut out of board meetings for nearly a year.[65]
Marshall's wit is best remembered for a phrase he introduced to the American lexicon. While presiding over a Senate session in 1914, Marshall responded to earlier comments from Senator Joseph L. Bristow that provided a long list of what he felt the country needed. Marshall reportedly leaned over and muttered to one of his clerks, "What this country needs is more of this; what this country needs is more of that" and quipped loudly enough for others to overhear, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."[g][71][74][124] Marshall's remark was popularized and widely circulated among a network of newspapers. Other accounts later embellished the story, including the exact situation that prompted his comment.[h] In 1922 Marshall explained that the five-cent cigar was a metaphor for simpler times and "buckling down to thrift and work."[125]
Legacy[edit]
The situation that arose after the incapacity of Wilson, for which Marshall's vice-presidency is most remembered, revived the national debate on the process of presidential succession.[74] The topic was already being discussed when Wilson left for Europe, which influenced him to allow Marshall to conduct cabinet meetings in his absence. Wilson's incapacity during 1919 and the lack of action by Marshall made it a major issue. The lack of a clear process for presidential succession had first become an issue when President William Henry Harrison died in office in 1841, but little progress had been made passing a constitutional amendment to remedy the problem.[126] Nearly fifty years later, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, allowing the vice president to assume the presidential powers and duties any time the president was rendered incapable of carrying out the powers and duties of the office.[127]
Historians have varied interpretations of Marshall's vice presidency. Claire Suddath rated Marshall as one of the worst vice presidents in American history in a 2008 Time magazine article.[67] Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that had Marshall carried out his constitutional duties, assumed the presidential powers and duties, and made the concessions necessary for the passage of the League of Nations treaty in late 1920, the United States would have been much more involved in European affairs and could have helped prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler, which began in the following year. Morison and a number of other historians claim that Marshall's decision was an indirect cause of the Second World War.[128] Charles Thomas, one of Marshall's biographers, wrote that although Marshall's assumption of presidential powers and duties would have made World War II much less likely, modern hypothetical speculation on the subject was unfair to Marshall, who made the correct decision in not forcibly removing Wilson from his duties, even temporarily.[119]