The History Book Club discussion

*POTENTIAL SPOILERS*

This is the glossary for Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics. This is not a non spoiler thread so any urls and/or expansive discussion can take place here regarding this book. Additionally, this is the spot to add that additional information that may contain spoilers or any helpful urls, links, etc.

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by Michael Wolraich

Robert Marion LaFollette



Robert M. La Follette, in full Robert Marion La Follette (born June 14, 1855, Primrose, Wis., U.S.—died June 18, 1925, Washington, D.C.), U.S. leader of the Progressive Movement, who as governor of Wisconsin (1901–06) and U.S. senator (1906–25) was noted for his support of reform legislation. He was the unsuccessful presidential candidate of the League for Progressive Political Action (i.e., the Progressive party) in 1924, winning almost five million votes, or about one-sixth of the total cast.

Early life and career
As a boy growing up in moderately prosperous rural areas, as a student at the University of Wisconsin (1875–79), as a county district attorney (1880–84), and as a congressman from southwestern Wisconsin, La Follette developed the personality and style that made him a popular leader. He combined an unusually outgoing personality with an extraordinary flair for zealous oratory. As an eloquent spokesman for popular causes, La Follette exalted his constituents’ wishes—even when those wishes ran counter to the desires of party leaders. His principal concerns in his three terms as congressman were economical government and protection for his district’s farmers. He married his college sweetheart, Belle Case, on Dec. 31, 1881, after his first year as district attorney.

Defeated for reelection to Congress in a Democratic landslide of 1890, La Follette returned to Madison to practice law and develop the political organization that within 10 years would elect him governor and allow him to dominate Wisconsin politics until his death. His reputation as an enemy of political bosses began in 1891 when he announced that the state Republican boss, Sen. Philetus Sawyer, had offered him a bribe. For the next six years La Follette built a competing Republican faction on the support of other party members (Scandinavians, dairy farmers, young men, disgruntled politicians) with grievances against the dominant “stalwart” faction. His oratorical talents, combined with his natural charm, organizational skill, and driving ambition to become governor, made him the leader of his new group of Republicans.

Campaign for governor
In 1897 La Follette began to advocate programs that local-level progressives had popularized during the legislative session a few months earlier. Following their lead, he demanded tax reform, corporation regulation, and political democracy. In particular, he promoted steeper railroad taxes and a direct primary. Elected governor on this platform in 1900, he was reelected in 1902 and 1904.

As Wisconsin’s governor La Follette developed new political techniques, which he later took to the U.S. Senate. The first, which received national attention as the “Wisconsin Idea,” was the use of professors from the University of Wisconsin—57 at one point—to draft bills and administer the state regulatory apparatus created by the new laws. The second innovation was his public reading of the “roll call” in districts in which legislators had opposed his reform proposals.

With these new methods he secured the passage of several progressive laws. Believing that the railroads were the principal subverters of the political process, he persuaded the legislature to tax them on the basis of their property (1903) and to regulate them by commission (1905). The legislature enacted the direct primary in 1903 and state civil-service reform in 1905. His appointees to the Tax Commission, given new power by the legislature, equalized tax assessments. Wisconsin’s leadership in these areas gave La Follette his reputation as a pioneering progressive.

United States Senator
Resigning as governor in 1906, he was elected to the Senate at a time when that institution was widely believed to be a refuge for millionaires. La Follette acquired instant fame as a new type of senator, one who was not controlled by “the interests,” and in his first three years there La Follette achieved the passage of laws aimed against the freight rates, labour policies, and financing practices of the railroads.

These laws reflected an emerging ideology that dominated La Follette’s Senate activities thereafter. Politics, he believed, was a never-ending struggle between “the people,” all men and women in their common roles as consumers and taxpayers, and the “selfish interests” for control of government; law-given privileges allowed “selfish interests” to dominate all facets of American life. He supported labour legislation because unions were battling the same enemies that menaced consumers and because consumers benefited directly from improvements in working conditions. He believed, for example, that his most famous achievement, the La Follette Seaman’s Act of 1915, would increase the safety of passengers while it also improved working conditions for sailors. Beginning in 1908, with elaborate documentation during debate on the Aldrich-Vreeland Currency Act, La Follette argued that the nation’s entire economy was dominated by fewer than 100 men who were, in turn, controlled by the J.P. Morgan and Standard Oil investment banking groups. Thereafter, he shifted his concern from the power of railroads to the power of their “owners,” namely the large banks.

In 1909 La Follette founded La Follette’s Weekly, later a monthly, and much later called The Progressive. The high point of his national popularity came in 1909–11 when he emerged as the leader of newly elected and newly converted progressives in Congress. Having led Republican opposition to the tariff, conservation, and railroad policies of President William Howard Taft, La Follette was widely promoted for the presidency in 1912. Most progressives backed La Follette because their first choice, Theodore Roosevelt, had refused to run; later, when Roosevelt entered the race early in 1912, they deserted La Follette. The bitterness of La Follette’s attacks on Roosevelt cost him his reputation as a leader and left him an independent figure in the Senate. Although he had backed Woodrow Wilson in 1912 for the presidency, he was disgusted that the new president ignored the ideas of progressive Republicans and shaped most legislation in the Democratic caucus. While applauding the social justice laws, he believed that most of Wilson’s regulatory acts—particularly the Federal Reserve Board—constituted government sponsorship of big business.

Antiwar position
Foreign affairs catapulted La Follette back into a leadership position in 1917, this time of the antiwar movement. Since 1910 he had argued that U.S. interventions in the problems of foreign governments were intended to protect the investments of U.S. corporations and to smash revolutions. Now he believed that the United States entered World War I in 1917 because U.S. businessmen needed protection for their investments and because Wilson had become isolated from public opinion. Confident that the majority opposed U.S. involvement, La Follette led the campaign for a popular referendum on war in 1916–17. He led the 1917 Senate filibuster against arming U.S. merchant ships and voted against the war declaration. Once war was declared, he opposed the draft, defended the civil liberties of the war’s opponents, and insisted that wealthy individuals and corporations pay the costs of a war that mainly benefited them. Pro-war groups demanded his expulsion from the Senate for treason, but a Senate investigating committee exonerated him. As a martyr to the war hysteria, La Follette once again became a popular hero to millions of Americans.

Believing that the war had given large corporations nearly complete control over the federal government, La Follette concentrated on exposing the most flagrant corruption of the postwar years. His most significant contribution was his major role in publicizing the oil scandals of President Warren Harding’s administration.

As labour and farm groups despaired of the conservatism of Democrats and Republicans alike in the 1920s, La Follette was frequently mentioned as a presidential candidate for a third party. Declining the pleas of the Farmer-Labor convention that he run in 1920, La Follette accepted the nomination on the Progressive ticket in 1924. His 1924 candidacy was supported by several farm groups, by organized labour (particularly the railroad brotherhoods, La Follette’s oldest friends in the labour movement), by many old progressives, by the Socialist Party, and by the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. In the end La Follette carried only the state of Wisconsin, although he placed second in 11 states and polled about one-sixth of the national total. He died in office.

Both of La Follette’s sons carried on his work after his death. Robert M. La Follette, Jr. (1895–1953), was elected in 1925 to fill his father’s unexpired term in the Senate and was reelected three times thereafter, serving until 1947. He generally supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and he drafted the congressional reorganization bill of 1946 that streamlined the legislative process in Congress. That same year, though, he was defeated in the Republican senatorial primary by Joseph McCarthy.

Philip Fox La Follette (1897–1965) served as governor of Wisconsin in 1931–33 and 1935–39. In his first term he secured enactment of the first comprehensive unemployment compensation act in any U.S. state. He and his brother Robert organized a separate Progressive Party in Wisconsin in 1934, but it proved short-lived and returned to the Republican ranks in 1946.
(Source: http://www.britannica.com/biography/R...)

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(no image) Robert M. Lafollette by Unknown Author 84 (no photo)
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by Richard Hofstadter

Theodore Roosevelt



With the assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, not quite 43, became the youngest President in the Nation's history. He brought new excitement and power to the Presidency, as he vigorously led Congress and the American public toward progressive reforms and a strong foreign policy.

He took the view that the President as a "steward of the people" should take whatever action necessary for the public good unless expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution." I did not usurp power," he wrote, "but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power."

Roosevelt's youth differed sharply from that of the log cabin Presidents. He was born in New York City in 1858 into a wealthy family, but he too struggled--against ill health--and in his triumph became an advocate of the strenuous life.

In 1884 his first wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt, and his mother died on the same day. Roosevelt spent much of the next two years on his ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. There he mastered his sorrow as he lived in the saddle, driving cattle, hunting big game--he even captured an outlaw. On a visit to London, he married Edith Carow in December 1886.

During the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt was lieutenant colonel of the Rough Rider Regiment, which he led on a charge at the battle of San Juan. He was one of the most conspicuous heroes of the war.

Boss Tom Platt, needing a hero to draw attention away from scandals in New York State, accepted Roosevelt as the Republican candidate for Governor in 1898. Roosevelt won and served with distinction.

As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none.

Roosevelt emerged spectacularly as a "trust buster" by forcing the dissolution of a great railroad combination in the Northwest. Other antitrust suits under the Sherman Act followed.

Roosevelt steered the United States more actively into world politics. He liked to quote a favorite proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick. . . . "

Aware of the strategic need for a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific, Roosevelt ensured the construction of the Panama Canal. His corollary to the Monroe Doctrine prevented the establishment of foreign bases in the Caribbean and arrogated the sole right of intervention in Latin America to the United States.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War, reached a Gentleman's Agreement on immigration with Japan, and sent the Great White Fleet on a goodwill tour of the world.

Some of Theodore Roosevelt's most effective achievements were in conservation. He added enormously to the national forests in the West, reserved lands for public use, and fostered great irrigation projects.

He crusaded endlessly on matters big and small, exciting audiences with his high-pitched voice, jutting jaw, and pounding fist. "The life of strenuous endeavor" was a must for those around him, as he romped with his five younger children and led ambassadors on hikes through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.

Leaving the Presidency in 1909, Roosevelt went on an African safari, then jumped back into politics. In 1912 he ran for President on a Progressive ticket. To reporters he once remarked that he felt as fit as a bull moose, the name of his new party.

While campaigning in Milwaukee, he was shot in the chest by a fanatic. Roosevelt soon recovered, but his words at that time would have been applicable at the time of his death in 1919: "No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way."
(Source: The White House)

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by Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris
by Candice Millard
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
by Douglas G. Brinkley

Ulysses S. Grant



Late in the administration of Andrew Johnson, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant quarreled with the President and aligned himself with the Radical Republicans. He was, as the symbol of Union victory during the Civil War, their logical candidate for President in 1868.

When he was elected, the American people hoped for an end to turmoil. Grant provided neither vigor nor reform. Looking to Congress for direction, he seemed bewildered. One visitor to the White House noted "a puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms."

Born in 1822, Grant was the son of an Ohio tanner. He went to West Point rather against his will and graduated in the middle of his class. In the Mexican War he fought under Gen. Zachary Taylor.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Grant was working in his father's leather store in Galena, Illinois. He was appointed by the Governor to command an unruly volunteer regiment. Grant whipped it into shape and by September 1861 he had risen to the rank of brigadier general of volunteers.

He sought to win control of the Mississippi Valley. In February 1862 he took Fort Henry and attacked Fort Donelson. When the Confederate commander asked for terms, Grant replied, "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted." The Confederates surrendered, and President Lincoln promoted Grant to major general of volunteers.

At Shiloh in April, Grant fought one of the bloodiest battles in the West and came out less well. President Lincoln fended off demands for his removal by saying, "I can't spare this man--he fights."

For his next major objective, Grant maneuvered and fought skillfully to win Vicksburg, the key city on the Mississippi, and thus cut the Confederacy in two. Then he broke the Confederate hold on Chattanooga.

Lincoln appointed him General-in-Chief in March 1864. Grant directed Sherman to drive through the South while he himself, with the Army of the Potomac, pinned down Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

Finally, on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered. Grant wrote out magnanimous terms of surrender that would prevent treason trials.

As President, Grant presided over the Government much as he had run the Army. Indeed he brought part of his Army staff to the White House.

Although a man of scrupulous honesty, Grant as President accepted handsome presents from admirers. Worse, he allowed himself to be seen with two speculators, Jay Gould and James Fisk. When Grant realized their scheme to corner the market in gold, he authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to sell enough gold to wreck their plans, but the speculation had already wrought havoc with business.

During his campaign for re-election in 1872, Grant was attacked by Liberal Republican reformers. He called them "narrow-headed men," their eyes so close together that "they can look out of the same gimlet hole without winking." The General's friends in the Republican Party came to be known proudly as "the Old Guard."

Grant allowed Radical Reconstruction to run its course in the South, bolstering it at times with military force.

After retiring from the Presidency, Grant became a partner in a financial firm, which went bankrupt. About that time he learned that he had cancer of the throat. He started writing his recollections to pay off his debts and provide for his family, racing against death to produce a memoir that ultimately earned nearly $450,000. Soon after completing the last page, in 1885, he died.
(Source: The White House)

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by Ulysses S. Grant
by Geoffrey Perrett
by J.F.C. Fuller
by Owen Wister
by Jean Edward Smith

Half-Breed



The "Half-Breeds" were a political faction of the United States Republican Party in the late 19th century. The Half-Breeds were a moderate-wing group, and were the opponents of the Stalwarts, the other main faction of the Republican Party. The main issue that divided the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds was political patronage. The Stalwarts were in favor of political machines and spoils system-style patronage, while the Half-Breeds, led by Maine senator James G. Blaine, were in favor of civil service reform and a merit system. The epithet "Half-Breed" was invented in derision by the Stalwarts to denote those whom they perceived as being only half Republican.

In the 1880 Republican National Convention, the Stalwart candidate, former president Ulysses S. Grant, was pitted against Half-Breed James G. Blaine for the party nomination. Grant's campaign was led by Stalwart leader Roscoe Conkling of New York, the state with the biggest split between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds. Despite Conkling's attempts at imposing a unit-rule in the Republican National Convention by which a state's votes would be grouped together for only one candidate, a number of Stalwarts went against him by vocalizing their support for the Half-Breed Blaine. The Half-Breeds united to defeat the unit-rule in a vote, and elected Half-Breed George Frisbie Hoar to the position as temporary chairman of the convention.

Both sides knew there was no chance of victory for either candidate, and the Half-Breeds chose James Garfield as a compromise candidate. Garfield won the party's nomination on the thirty-sixth ballot, and won the 1880 presidential election. Blaine was chosen as Garfield's Secretary of State, and carried heavy influence over the political appointments Garfield issued for congressional approval. After Garfield was assassinated by Charles J. Guiteau, a Stalwart, who proclaimed, "I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts and Arthur will be President", the new Stalwart president Chester A. Arthur surprised those in his own faction by promoting civil service reform and issuing government jobs based on a merit system.

The Half-Breeds put through Congress the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (authored by Democrat George H. Pendleton), and Arthur signed the bill into law on January 16, 1883. The act put an end to the spoils system, at least symbolically, placing a significant number of federal employees under the merit system and putting the government on the road to true reform. The act also set up the United States Civil Service Commission, banished political tests, denied jobs to alcoholics and created competitive measures for some federal positions.

The Half-Breed and Stalwart factions both dissociated towards the end of the 1880s.
(Source: Everything Explained Today)

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by Sidney M. Milkis (no photo)
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Nicholas Murray Butler



Nicholas Murray Butler (April 2, 1862-December 7, 1947) was an educator and university president; an adviser to seven presidents and friend of statesmen in foreign nations; recipient of decorations from fifteen foreign governments and of honorary degrees from thirty-seven colleges and universities; a member of more than fifty learned societies and twenty clubs; the author of a small library of books, pamphlets, reports, and speeches; an international traveler who crossed the Atlantic at least a hundred times; a national leader of the Republican Party; an advocate of peace and the embodiment of the «international mind» that he frequently spoke about. He was called Nicholas Miraculous Butler by his good friend Theodore Roosevelt; the epithet was so perfect that, once uttered, it could not be forgotten.

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, this son of Henry L. Butler, a manufacturer, and Mary Murray Butler, daughter of Nicholas Murray, a clergyman and author, began his career with a brilliant record as a student. In 1882, at the age of twenty, he received his bachelor's degree, in 1883, a master's degree, in 1884, a doctorate - all from Columbia College; in 1885 he studied in Paris and in Berlin where he began a lifelong friendship with Elihu Root, who was also destined to become a Nobel peace laureate. In the fall of 1885, he accepted an appointment on the staff of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia College, which in 1896 became Columbia University. And so began a professional association that was to last for sixty years.

From the first, Butler distinguished himself as an educational administrator. Within four years he gave administrative form to his philosophical theory of pedagogy by establishing an institute which, later affiliated with Columbia, became known as Teachers College. He founded the Educational Review and edited it for thirty years, wrote reports on state and local educational systems, served as a member of the New Jersey Board of Education from 1887 to 1895, participated in the formation of the College Entrance Examination Board. He was named acting president of Columbia University in 1901 and president in 1902, retaining that position until retirement in October, 1945.

Under his presidency, Columbia University made phenomenal growth. It became a major university. All graduate studies were enormously expanded; the scope of professional training was enlarged to include new schools such as those of journalism and dentistry; the student body was increased from 4,000 to 34,000 and the faculty by a like ratio; the plant was enlarged by a construction program that averaged a new building each year, and the endowment kept pace; the professorial salaries were increased enough to attract many of the world's leading scholars to the teaching and research staff.

Butler moved in the realm of politics as easily as he did in that of education. He was a delegate to the Republican convention for the first time in 1888 and for the last in 1936. Butler, Root, William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt constituted a powerful political quartet in the early years of the century. Breaking with the others in 1912, Roosevelt ran for the presidency as the candidate of the Progressive Party, which drew most of its strength from Republicans, against the nominees of the constituted party: Taft for the presidency and Butler for the vice-presidency. By splitting the national vote, they permitted the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to win the election. In 1916 Butler failed in his attempt to secure the Republican presidential nomination for Root and in 1920 and 1928 failed to secure it for himself

Meanwhile, Butler sought to unite the world of education and that of politics in a struggle to achieve world peace through international cooperation. He was chairman of the Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration, which met periodically from 1907 to 1912, and was appointed president of the American branch of International Conciliation, an organization founded by another Nobel peace laureate, d'Estournelles de Constant. His association with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was a fruitful one of thirty-five years. Influential in persuading Andrew Carnegie to establish the Endowment in 1910 with a gift of $ 10,000,000, he served as head of the Endowment's section on international education and communication, founded the European branch of the Endowment, with headquarters in Paris, and held the presidency of the parent Endowment from 1925 to 1945.

Butler married twice. His first wife, whom he married in 1887 and by whom he had one daughter, died in 1903; he remarried in 1907. When Butler became almost totally blind in 1945 at the age of eighty-three, he resigned the demanding posts he still held. He died two years later.

In 1940, Butler completed his autobiography with the publication of the second volume of Across the Busy Years. Both in size and in title it is peculiarly appropriate.
(Source: Nobelprize.org)

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by Nicholas Murray Butler

Northern Securities Company



In 1901, the Northern Securities Company was formed as a holding company in the business-friendly state of New Jersey. The new venture brought together the talents and wealth of J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill on one side and E.H. Harriman on the other. Hill controlled the Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railways, Harriman the Union Pacific. Harriman's efforts to gain an entry to Chicago by acquiring the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy led to an epic battle that led to the Northern Pacific Panic of 1901 and threatened the financial stability of the country.

Deciding that accommodation was preferable to a fight to the death, the erstwhile competitors merged their holdings in the Northern Securities Company. Noting that traffic between Chicago and the Northwest was monopolized, Roosevelt in 1902 ordered Attorney General Philander C. Knox to bring suit, alleging restraint of trade. Morgan and Mark Hanna pleaded personally with the president to halt the action, but to no avail.

In court, Northern Securities attorneys argued that the company did not really engage in interstate commerce, but simply was a stockholder. They further argued that the by allowing the government's position to hold, the Sherman Act's prohibitions would preempt powers reserved reserved under the Constitution to the states.

By the narrowest of margins, five to four, the Supreme Court in 1904 sided with the government and ordered the NSC's breakup. This decision was notable for the following reasons:

The Supreme Court reversed a position taken previously in the E.C. Knight case.

The giant push of E.H. Harriman to consolidate the nation’s railroads was halted.

Enthusiasm for creating holding companies was dampened.

Roosevelt’s popularity skyrocketed among the masses.
(Source: United States History)

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by Gary Krist (no photo)
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William McKinley



At the 1896 Republican Convention, in time of depression, the wealthy Cleveland businessman Marcus Alonzo Hanna ensured the nomination of his friend William McKinley as "the advance agent of prosperity." The Democrats, advocating the "free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold"--which would have mildly inflated the currency--nominated William Jennings Bryan.

While Hanna used large contributions from eastern Republicans frightened by Bryan's views on silver, McKinley met delegations on his front porch in Canton, Ohio. He won by the largest majority of popular votes since 1872.

Born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843, McKinley briefly attended Allegheny College, and was teaching in a country school when the Civil War broke out. Enlisting as a private in the Union Army, he was mustered out at the end of the war as a brevet major of volunteers. He studied law, opened an office in Canton, Ohio, and married Ida Saxton, daughter of a local banker.

At 34, McKinley won a seat in Congress. His attractive personality, exemplary character, and quick intelligence enabled him to rise rapidly. He was appointed to the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Robert M. La Follette, Sr., who served with him, recalled that he generally "represented the newer view," and "on the great new questions .. was generally on the side of the public and against private interests."

During his 14 years in the House, he became the leading Republican tariff expert, giving his name to the measure enacted in 1890. The next year he was elected Governor of Ohio, serving two terms.

When McKinley became President, the depression of 1893 had almost run its course and with it the extreme agitation over silver. Deferring action on the money question, he called Congress into special session to enact the highest tariff in history.

In the friendly atmosphere of the McKinley Administration, industrial combinations developed at an unprecedented pace. Newspapers caricatured McKinley as a little boy led around by "Nursie" Hanna, the representative of the trusts. However, McKinley was not dominated by Hanna; he condemned the trusts as "dangerous conspiracies against the public good."

Not prosperity, but foreign policy, dominated McKinley's Administration. Reporting the stalemate between Spanish forces and revolutionaries in Cuba, newspapers screamed that a quarter of the population was dead and the rest suffering acutely. Public indignation brought pressure upon the President for war. Unable to restrain Congress or the American people, McKinley delivered his message of neutral intervention in April 1898. Congress thereupon voted three resolutions tantamount to a declaration of war for the liberation and independence of Cuba.

In the 100-day war, the United States destroyed the Spanish fleet outside Santiago harbor in Cuba, seized Manila in the Philippines, and occupied Puerto Rico.

"Uncle Joe" Cannon, later Speaker of the House, once said that McKinley kept his ear so close to the ground that it was full of grasshoppers. When McKinley was undecided what to do about Spanish possessions other than Cuba, he toured the country and detected an imperialist sentiment. Thus the United States annexed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

In 1900, McKinley again campaigned against Bryan. While Bryan inveighed against imperialism, McKinley quietly stood for "the full dinner pail."

His second term, which had begun auspiciously, came to a tragic end in September 1901. He was standing in a receiving line at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition when a deranged anarchist shot him twice. He died eight days later.(Source:https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presi...)

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by Karl Rove
by Janet Riehecky
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Senator La Follette and the Progressive Movement

Michael Stevens talked about the role Senator Bob La Follette, Sr. played in building the Progressive Movement during the early part of the 20th century. He also talked about La Follette’s political career, and showed some of his papers, which are housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. 

Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette was a U.S. Representative, Governor, Senator, and Presidential Candidate from Wisconsin. 

La Follette is known as a proponent of the Progressive Movement, and has been named one of five outstanding Senators in American history. 

C-SPAN’s Local Content Vehicles (LCVs) made a stop in their “2014 LCV Cities Tour” in Madison, Wisconsin, from September 19-23 to feature the history and literary life of the community. Working with the Charter cable local affiliate, they visited literary and historic sites where local historians, authors, and civic leaders were interviewed. 

PEOPLE IN THIS VIDEO
Michael E. Stevens
State Historian Emeritus
Wisconsin

Link: http://www.c-span.org/video/?322370-1...

Ray Stannard Baker



Ray Stannard Baker was born in Michigan in 1870. He joined McClure's Magazine, where he worked with Lincoln Steffens and Ira Tarbell in the kind of investigative journalism that became known as muckraking. Baker himself was involved in exposing railroad and financial corruption. This included an attack on some of Roosevelt's political allies and he responded with a speech where he compared the investigative journalist with the muckraker in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: "the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth on the floor."

In February 1905 he wrote an article on lynching for the McClure's Magazine: "On Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to twenty - a pronounced feature of every mob - with a wide fringe of more respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly... A sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers who are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to obey it - or who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it or obey it?... So the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail with a railroad rail. This jail is said to be the strongest in Ohio, and having seen it, I can well believe that the report is true. But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right. They murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots."

In 1906 Baker joined with Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and William A. White to establish the radical American Magazine. Steffens's biographer, Justin Kaplan, the author of Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), has argued: "That summer he and his partners celebrated their freedom from McClure's house of bondage, as they now saw it. There was a spirit of picnic and honeymoon about the enterprise; affections, loyalties, professional comradeship had never seemed quite so strong before and never would again. They dealt with each other as equals." Steffens later commented: "We were all to edit a writers' magazine." It soon established itself as one of America's leading investigative magazines. However, its opponents accused the magazine of muckraking journalism.

President Theodore Roosevelt responded to investigative journalism by initiating legislation that would help tackle some of the problems illustrated by these journalist. This included persuading Congress to pass reforms such as the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906) and the Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906).

President Theodore Roosevelt was seen to be on the side of these investigative journalists until David Graham Phillips began a series of articles in Cosmopolitan entitled The Treason in the Senate. This included an attack on some of Roosevelt's political allies and he responded with a speech where he compared the investigative journalist with the muckraker in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: "the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth on the floor."

Investigative journalists like Baker objected to being described as muckrakers. They felt betrayed as they felt they had helped President Theodore Roosevelt to get elected. Lincoln Steffens was furious with Roosevelt and the day after the speech told him: "Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you." Baker argued: "In the beginning I thought, and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods. They are moral and economic questions. Latterly I believe Roosevelt did a disservice to the country in seizing upon a movement that ought to have been built up slowly and solidly from the bottom with much solid thought and experimentation, and hitching it to the cart of his own political ambitions. He thus short-circuited a fine and vigorous current of aroused public opinion into a futile partisan movement."

In 1908 Baker produced a series of five articles on the plight of the African Americans. In this pioneering work in the study of race relations in the United States, Baker dealt with issues such as political leadership, Jim Crow laws, lynching and poverty. These articles were eventually turned into the book, Following the Color Line (1908).

In May 1912 Baker covered the Lawrence Textile Strike: "It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men together. There was in it a peculiar, intense, vital spirit if you will, that I have never felt before in any strike. At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence."

Other books written by Baker include Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement (1922), Adventures in Understanding (1925) and Adventures in Solitude (1931).

Ray Stannard Baker died on 12th July 1946.
(Source:http://spartacus-educational.com/Jbak...)

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(no image) The President and His Biographer: Woodrow Wilson and Ray Stannard Baker by Merrill D. Peterson (no photo)
(no image) Ray Stannard Baker: A Quest for Democracy in Modern America, 1870-1918 by John E. Semonche (no photo)
by Ray Stannard Baker (no photo)
by Robert C. Bannister (no photo)
by Ray Stannard Baker (no photo)
by Ray Stannard Baker (no photo)
by John Bunyan

Lincoln Steffens



Lincoln Steffens, in full Joseph Lincoln Steffens (April 6, 1866, San Francisco, California, U.S.— August 9, 1936, Carmel), American journalist, lecturer, and political philosopher, a leading figure among the writers whom U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt called muckrakers.

After attending the University of California, Steffens studied psychology with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, which confirmed his basic positivist orientation. During nine years of New York City newspaper work ending in 1901, Steffens discovered abundant evidence of the corruption of politicians by businessmen seeking special privileges. In 1901 after he became managing editor of McClure’s Magazine, he began to publish the influential articles later collected as The Shame of the Cities (1906), a work closer to a documented sociological case study than to a sensational journalistic exposé.

Many nationwide lecture tours won Steffens recognition. He raised rather than answered questions, jolting his audience into awareness of the ethical paradox of private interest in public affairs by comic irony rather than by moral indignation. He revealed the shortcomings of the popular dogmas that connected economic success with moral worth, and national progress with individual self-interest.

The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the Russian Revolution of 1917 turned Steffens’s attention from reform to revolution. After a trip to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1919, he wrote a friend, “I have seen the future; and it works.” His unorthodoxy lost him his American audience during the 1920s; he continued to study revolutionary politics in Europe and became something of a legendary character for younger expatriates.

After the great success of his Autobiography (1931), he supported many communist activities but refused identification with any party or doctrine.
(Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

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(no image) The Struggle for Self-Government by Joseph Lincoln Steffens (no photo)
by Peter Hartshorn (no photo)
by Justin Kaplan (no photo)
(no image) Upbuilders, , all by Lincoln Steffens

Ida M. Tarbell



Ida M. Tarbell, in full Ida Minerva Tarbell (Nov. 5, 1857, Erie county, Pa., U.S.— Jan. 6, 1944, Bridgeport, Conn.), investigative journalist, lecturer, and chronicler of American industry, best known for her classic The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904).

Tarbell was educated at Allegheny College (Meadville, Pennsylvania) and taught briefly before becoming an editor for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (1883–91). In 1891 she took her savings and went to Paris, where she enrolled in the Sorbonne and supported herself by writing articles for American magazines. S.S. McClure, founder of McClure’s Magazine, hired her in 1894. The History of the Standard Oil Company, originally a serial that ran in McClure’s, is one of the most thorough accounts of the rise of a business monopoly and its use of unfair practices. The articles also helped to define a growing trend to investigation, exposé, and crusading in liberal journals of the day, a technique that in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt would label muckraking.

Tarbell’s association with McClure’s lasted until 1906. She wrote for American Magazine, which she also co-owned and coedited, from 1906 to 1915, the year the magazine was sold. She lectured for a time on the chautauqua circuit and wrote several popular biographies, including eight books on Abraham Lincoln. Later she served as a member of various government conferences and committees concerned with defense, industry, unemployment, and other issues. Her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work, was published in 1939. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

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by Robert C. Kochersberger Jr. (no photo)
by Kathleen Brady (no photo)
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, , all by Ida Minerva Tarbell

Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904



On April 30, 1904, Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company President David R. Francis officially opened the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—also known as the 1904 World’s Fair—with the call, “Open ye gates. Swing wide, ye portals.” A magnificent spectacle greeted the opening day crowd of 200,000—a dazzling city stood on what had been a woodland park. Fair organizers had erected nearly 1,500 buildings—including several grand “palaces”—across 1,200 acres of a newly redesigned Forest Park. That magnificent fairground equated America’s expansion westward since the Louisiana Purchase with the nation’s cultural and economic progress. As one exuberant writer noted in the World’s Fair Bulletin, the Exposition’s official journal:

“The heroes of Homer’s Iliad were engaged in petty achievements when compared with the work of the men who wrestled a vast wilderness from savages and wild beasts and made it the seat of twenty great commonwealths in a single century.”

For the next seven months, St. Louisans and travelers from across the globe experienced the latest achievements in technology, fine arts, manufacturing, science, civics, foreign policy and education. The Fair boasted extravagant exhibits from fifty foreign countries and forty-three of the then forty-five states. Festival Hall, in the center of the Colonnade of States overlooking the Grand Basin, had a seating capacity of 3,500. Eight principal palaces surrounded Festival Hall.

Of course, the 1904 World’s Fair offered more than lofty, noble ideas; fair-goers had ample opportunity to indulge in popular culture and entertainment on the mile-long arcade known as the Pike. Considered the carnival side of the Fair, Pike visitors could enjoy fifty different amusements, including contortionists, reenactments of the Boer War, babies in incubators, the Dancing Girls of Madrid, Jim Key the Educated Horse, and Hagenbeck’s Zoological Paradise and Animal Circus—which featured an elephant water slide. Although not on the Pike, the most spectacular concession was the Observation Wheel; from the top of the wheel—265 feet above the Fair—riders enjoyed the best aerial view of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

By the time the Fair closed on December 1, 1904, an estimated 20 million people had reveled in the wonders of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In 1904, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition thrust St. Louis into the global spotlight; since then, the 1904 World’s Fair has been forever ingrained in our regional identity. It has become a powerful symbol of our city, a barometer by which we measure subsequent civic progress, and a source of tremendous pride.



The Forest Park

he story behind the construction of the 1904 World’s Fair is one of human perseverance—a testimony to the energy, investment, and commitment of St. Louis’s citizens. The Fair was a highly orchestrated event, with its designers joining ranks with civic planners and an army of more than 10,000 laborers to transform over 1,200 acres of thickets and swamps in Forest Park and Clayton into a grand landscape filled with classically inspired buildings, waterways, gardens, and avenues. The opening of the 1904 World’s Fair followed several years of preparation that included the development of surrounding neighborhoods, improvements to the city’s water supply, and the clearing of parkland.

When the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company’s Executive Committee selected Forest Park in late June 1901, many St. Louisans were dismayed at the prospect of destroying the scenic beauty of Forest Park for the coming Fair. The Exposition’s publicity staffers were quick to defuse these concerns with promises that the natural, rugged park would be “reborn” into a more civilized space.

The process of organizing, planning, constructing, and running the Louisiana Purchase Exposition changed St. Louis. The transformation of Forest Park from a wilderness of trees and thickets into a showcase of the latest thinking in urban design required an army of 10,000 workers who used cranes, tractors, horse teams, survey kits, blasting equipment, and freight trains to sculpt the land, lay sewer pipes and reroute the River Des Peres.

The Department of Works straightened the meandering River Des Peres and built a new covered wooden channel under the main avenue of the Exposition to keep polluted water originating north of Lindell Avenue away from the World’s Fair site. Also constructed were new sewer lines under the park, which were connected to St. Louis’s expanding sewer system.

George Kessler served as the chief landscape architect for the Exposition. He worked in concert with his on-site supervisor, D. W. C. Perry, to direct teams of surveyors who produced topographical maps, coding the land with numbered wooden stakes placed at 50-foot intervals. From these codes, Kessler directed the immediate clearance of 200 acres of selected trees and underbrush, mostly elms and sycamores, whose stumps had to be blasted out with dynamite. His staff marked hundreds more trees for transplantation and use on the Fair site and constructed extensive greenhouses and horticultural beds on the Tesson Tract to supply Kessler’s sculptural vision.
(Source: Missouri history museum)

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(no image) The Universal Exposition of 1904, Volume 1 by David Rowland Francis (no photo)
(no image) Indescribably Grand: Diaries and Letters from the 1904 World's Fair by Martha R. Clevenger (no photo)
by Susan Brownell (no photo)
by Tim Fox (no photo)
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President William Henry Harrison



William Henry Harrison, an American military officer and politician, was the ninth President of the United States (1841), the oldest President to be elected at the time. On his 32nd day, he became the first to die in office, serving the shortest tenure in U.S. Presidential history.

"Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it," a Democratic newspaper foolishly gibed, "he will sit ... by the side of a 'sea coal' fire, and study moral philosophy. " The Whigs, seizing on this political misstep, in 1840 presented their candidate William Henry Harrison as a simple frontier Indian fighter, living in a log cabin and drinking cider, in sharp contrast to an aristocratic champagne-sipping Van Buren.

Harrison was in fact a scion of the Virginia planter aristocracy. He was born at Berkeley in 1773. He studied classics and history at Hampden-Sydney College, then began the study of medicine in Richmond.

Suddenly, that same year, 1791, Harrison switched interests. He obtained a commission as ensign in the First Infantry of the Regular Army, and headed to the Northwest, where he spent much of his life.

In the campaign against the Indians, Harrison served as aide-de-camp to General "Mad Anthony" Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, which opened most of the Ohio area to settlement. After resigning from the Army in 1798, he became Secretary of the Northwest Territory, was its first delegate to Congress, and helped obtain legislation dividing the Territory into the Northwest and Indiana Territories. In 1801 he became Governor of the Indiana Territory, serving 12 years.

His prime task as governor was to obtain title to Indian lands so settlers could press forward into the wilderness. When the Indians retaliated, Harrison was responsible for defending the settlements.

The threat against settlers became serious in 1809. An eloquent and energetic chieftain, Tecumseh, with his religious brother, the Prophet, began to strengthen an Indian confederation to prevent further encroachment. In 1811 Harrison received permission to attack the confederacy.

While Tecumseh was away seeking more allies, Harrison led about a thousand men toward the Prophet's town. Suddenly, before dawn on November 7, the Indians attacked his camp on Tippecanoe River. After heavy fighting, Harrison repulsed them, but suffered 190 dead and wounded.

The Battle of Tippecanoe, upon which Harrison's fame was to rest, disrupted Tecumseh's confederacy but failed to diminish Indian raids. By the spring of 1812, they were again terrorizing the frontier.

In the War of 1812 Harrison won more military laurels when he was given the command of the Army in the Northwest with the rank of brigadier general. At the Battle of the Thames, north of Lake Erie, on October 5, 1813, he defeated the combined British and Indian forces, and killed Tecumseh. The Indians scattered, never again to offer serious resistance in what was then called the Northwest.

Thereafter Harrison returned to civilian life; the Whigs, in need of a national hero, nominated him for President in 1840. He won by a majority of less than 150,000, but swept the Electoral College, 234 to 60.

When he arrived in Washington in February 1841, Harrison let Daniel Webster edit his Inaugural Address, ornate with classical allusions. Webster obtained some deletions, boasting in a jolly fashion that he had killed "seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts, every one of them."

Webster had reason to be pleased, for while Harrison was nationalistic in his outlook, he emphasized in his Inaugural that he would be obedient to the will of the people as expressed through Congress.

But before he had been in office a month, he caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. On April 4, 1841, he died -- the first President to die in office -- and with him died the Whig program.

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association. (Source: The White House)

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Senator Philetus Sawyer



SAWYER, Philetus, a Representative and a Senator from Wisconsin; born in Whiting, Rutland County, Vt., September 22, 1816; moved with his parents to Crown Point, N.Y., in 1817; attended the common schools; moved to Fond du Lac County, Wis., in 1847 and engaged in the lumber business; member, Wisconsin assembly 1857, 1861; mayor of Oshkosh 1863-1864; elected as a Republican to the Thirty-ninth and to the four succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1865-March 3, 1875); declined to be a candidate for renomination in 1874; chairman, Committee on Public Expenditures (Forty-second Congress), Committee on Pacific Railroads (Forty-third Congress); elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1881; reelected in 1887 and served from March 4, 1881, to March 3, 1893; was not a candidate for reelection; chairman, Committee on Railroads (Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Congresses), Committee on Post Office and Post Roads (Fiftieth through Fifty-second Congresses); resumed his former business pursuits; died in Oshkosh, Winnebago County, Wis., March 29, 1900; interment in the family vault at Riverside, Oshkosh, Wis.
(Source: Biographical directory of the United States Congress)

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Philetus Sawyer : a business man in politics by Ellis Evans (not listed in Goodread's database)
(no image) Portraits of United States Senators: With a Biographical Sketch of Each by Kenney Company Tracy (no photo)
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From a book review of a bio of TR

to read a biography of Theodore Roosevelt during the presidency of George W Bush is not a task for the easily depressed

Which one (TR biography) are you talking about Peter. I was worried during the entire presidency of George W - Cheney worried me more.

And of course TR had his share of misfortune.

The Stalwarts



The "Stalwarts" were a faction of the history of the United States Republican Party that existed briefly during 1870s in the Gilded Age.

Led by U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling--also known as "Lord Roscoe"--Stalwarts were sometimes called Conklingites. Other notable Stalwarts include Chester A. Arthur and Thomas C. Platt, who were in favor of Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth President of the United States (1869–1877), running for a third term. They were the "traditional" Republicans who opposed Rutherford B. Hayes's civil service reform. They were pitted against the "Half-Breeds" (moderates) for control of the Republican Party. The only real issue between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds was patronage. The Half-Breeds worked to get civil service reform, and finally created the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This was signed by Arthur, who became President after the assassination of James A. Garfield, a Half-Breed. Stalwarts favored traditional machine politics.

Characteristics
The group of Republican politicians known as the Stalwarts are mostly identifiable through their support of the presidency and reelection of Ulysses S. Grant. Of the Stalwarts present at the 1880 Republican national convention, the event in which the group participated the most prominently, most were from former Confederate states, with others being from New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, home to prominent Republican leaders. Along with being mostly Southern, the Stalwarts have been profiled as being more urban and less educated than non-Stalwart Republicans, placing them demographically closer to Democrats. Due to these similarities to Democrats, the Stalwarts often had to challenge the policies of Democrats within the Democrats's base, working to prevent a rise in the popularity of the Democrats. They were therefore more cautious in political policy than their fellow Republicans, preferring to maintain tradition rather than to assist in the creation of more precarious policies on social issues that were popular with other Republicans, such as tariff. This tendency towards political caution led the Stalwarts to support the reelection of Grant, a popular figure of the Republican party who had already held office, during the 1880 Republican national convention.

1880 Republican National Convention
During the Republican national convention in 1880, the Half-Breeds advocated the candidacy of James Blaine of Maine for President. The Stalwarts, in a bid for power within their own party in spite of their loss of power due to the rise in popularity of the Democratic party, stubbornly supported the nomination of Ulysses S. Grant, who, if elected, would be serving his third term. A stalemate ensued between the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts, so a compromise was struck by the Half-Breeds and supporters of John Sherman to nominate James Garfield, with Chester Arthur, former Collector for the Port of New York, as his running mate, to satisfy the Stalwarts and thereby ensure their support for the general election.

Decline
After the Republican victory in November 1880, Garfield and Conkling fought bitterly and publicly over patronage in Conkling's New York state. Garfield, with assistance and advice from Blaine, won the battle, and Conkling and Platt resigned from the Senate, convinced that they would be re-elected by the New York Legislature. However, Garfield was shot by a self-proclaimed "Stalwart of the Stalwarts", Charles J. Guiteau, on July 2, 1881, and Arthur became President of the United States upon Garfield's death on September 19, 1881. The shock of the assassination broke the power of both Conkling's and the Stalwarts, and his former protege Arthur helped to create civil service reforms in his term, in part because he felt that he had to follow up on and finish Garfield's work.
(Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalwar...)

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(no image) Proceedings of the Republican National Convention: Held at Chicago, Illinois, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday, June 2D, 3D, 4th, 5th, 7th and 8th, 1880, Resulting in the Following Nominations by James a Garfield (no photo)
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John Coit Spooner



John Coit Spooner (January 6, 1843 – June 11, 1919) was a politician and lawyer from Wisconsin. He served in the United States Senate from 1885 to 1891 and from 1897 to 1907. A Republican, by the 1890s he was one of the "Big Four" key Republicans who largely controlled the major decisions of the Senate, along with William B. Allison of Iowa, Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, and Thomas C. Platt of New York. He chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Spooner moved with his parents to Madison, Wisconsin in 1859. He attended the common schools and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1864. During the Civil War, he enlisted as a private in the Union Army and at the close of the war was brevetted major. He served as private and military secretary to the Governor of Wisconsin, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1867, then serving as assistant attorney general of Wisconsin until 1870.

Spooner moved to Hudson, Wisconsin and practiced law there from 1870 to 1884. He was a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1872 and was a member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. He was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1884 and served from 1885 to 1891, being defeated for reelection by William F. Vilas. He served as chairman of the Committee on Claims from 1886 to 1891. Afterwards, he was an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Wisconsin in 1892 and moved back to Madison in 1893. He was elected to the U.S. Senate again in 1897, was reelected in 1903, and served from 1897 until his resignation in 1907. He served as chairman of the Committee on Canadian Relations from 1897 to 1899 and of the Committee on Rules from 1899 to 1907. As a Senator, he sponsored the Spooner Act, which directed President Theodore Roosevelt to purchase the Panama Canal Zone.

A popular figure in Republican politics, he turned down three cabinet posts during his political career: Secretary of the Interior in President William McKinley's administration in 1898, Attorney General under President McKinley in 1901, and Secretary of State in President William Howard Taft's administration in 1909.

Spooner and fellow Wisconsin Senator, Robert M. La Follette, were known to be bitter rivals. Spooner disagreed with La Follette's progressive policies, which were opposed to his own conservative policies. Spooner was also one of the early opponents of direct primary elections. At the time, party nominees were selected by the party officials, sometimes by party bosses. Although the system left much to be desired, Spooner had this to say in description of political campaigns after the reform of direct primary elections:

"Direct primaries would destroy the party machinery... and would build up a lot of personal machines, and would make every man a self-seeker, and would degrade politics by turning candidacies into bitter personal wrangles."

After his retirement from the Senate, he practiced law in New York City at the firm of Spooner & Cotton until his death.

He died on June 11, 1919 in Manhattan, New York City. He was interred in Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Co...)

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(no image) John Coit Spooner, defender of Presidents by Dorothy Ganfield Fowler (no photo)
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Henry Clay Frick



American industrialist and financier, Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) played leading roles in expanding the Carnegie Steel Company into the largest such enterprise in the world and in forming the United States Steel Company.

Born to a farming family in western Pennsylvania, Henry Clay Frick was the grandson of a wealthy miller and distiller. Although Frick received little formal education, he early showed an aptitude for business and at 19 became bookkeeper for his grandfather's businesses.

Frick was aware of the potential value of coking coal deposits for the burgeoning steel industry, and with financial backing from relatives and the Pittsburgh banker Thomas Mellon he began buying coal lands in the Connellsville region and constructing coke ovens. The enterprise brought handsome returns. Plowing all profits into acquiring more coal land and building more ovens, Frick and Company eventually controlled 80 percent of the output of this region.
Partnership with Carnegie

Meanwhile Andrew Carnegie, aware of Frick's abilities as financier and industrial manager and anxious to have a continuing supply of coke for his great steel company, took Frick in as a partner in 1882 and allowed him to purchase an 11 percent stock interest. At the same time, Carnegie purchased a controlling interest in the Frick Coke Company, though Frick continued as president.

Frick was one of the managing partners of the Carnegie Company until 1889, when Carnegie retired from active management and Frick was elected chairman. At this time the firm consisted of five or six mills and furnaces around Pittsburgh. There was no integration of production and no centralized management except the informal guidance supplied by the managing partners (a group of perhaps 6 out of about 25 owners of the business). In 1892, in accordance with a plan worked out by Frick, the productive units were reorganized as the Carnegie Steel Company, Ltd., capitalized at $25 million and, although not incorporated, probably the largest steel company in the world. Frick then introduced centralized management procedures which greatly increased the firm's efficiency.

Homestead Strike
In 1892 occurred the Homestead strike, one of the most bitter labor conflicts of the decade; it cast a shadow over the rest of Frick's career, cooled his relationship with Carnegie, and almost cost Frick his life. In response to depressed business conditions and to compensate for expensive new machinery that greatly increased worker productivity, Frick proposed to lower the piecework wage rate. In response, the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers Union struck the Homestead plant. Frick recruited 300 strikebreakers through the Pinkerton Detective Agency, bringing them in armed barges down the Monongahela River. When the strikebreakers attempted to land, a day-long battle ensued. Ten men were killed and 60 wounded; order was restored only when the governor placed Homestead under martial law. Frick was widely denounced throughout the country for provoking the violence, but this criticism was soon followed by acclaim for his courage, when, with the help of a secretary, he subdued an assassin who shot him twice and stabbed him several times. Despite his wounds and loss of blood, Frick finished his day's work.

During the late 1890s the company prospered greatly. Between 1889 and 1899 annual production of steel rose from 332,111 to 2,663,412 tons, and profits advanced from about $2 million to $40 million in 1900. To secure a continuing supply of ore, Frick, in partnership with a Pittsburgh industrialist, acquired extensive ore properties in the newly opened Mesabi Range near Lake Superior, and Carnegie, at Frick's urging, leased other lands in an area belonging to John D. Rockefeller.

Formation of United States Steel
Although the company was extremely prosperous, its existence as a partnership was terminated in 1899 largely as a result of a quarrel between Frick and Carnegie. When Carnegie, acting on what he believed to be a binding agreement with Frick, set a price for coke from the Frick Coke Company that was considerably below the market price, Frick suspended deliveries, and the Carnegie Company faced a shutdown. Carnegie, as majority stockholder in both the coke and steel companies, forced Frick's resignation from both firms. By the terms of the "ironclad" partnership agreement of 1887 the Carnegie Company was obligated to purchase Frick's stock upon his resignation, but Carnegie refused to pay more than the valuation set by the "ironclad," although by 1899 the stock was worth three times that figure. Frick sued in equity to have the agreement set aside. Because of Frick's damaging revelations of the company's apparently exorbitant profits, Carnegie settled the suit by allowing the company to be incorporated at a figure which gave a value of $15 million to Frick's stock. Both men retired from management, and the two never spoke to each other again. In 1901, with the active participation of Frick, the Carnegie Corporation was merged into the United States Steel Company.

Until his death in 1919 Frick participated as a director in the affairs of many large corporations. He also formed a magnificent art collection, today housed in the Frick Museum in New York City. A large, handsome man with a powerful physique, Frick was hardworking, quiet, and reserved—the antithesis of the ebullient Andrew Carnegie. Frick left a fortune of about $50 million, five-sixths of it donated for public and philanthropic purposes.
(Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Hen...)

More:
http://www.frick.org/collection/histo...
http://www.netstate.com/states/peop/p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_C...
http://www.pittsburghquarterly.com/in...
http://www.nndb.com/people/944/000166...
by Martha Frick Symington Sanger (no photo)
by George Harvey (no photo)
by Quentin R. Skrabec Jr. (no photo)
by F.L. Light (no photo)
by Kenneth Warren (no photo)

Here is a link to a video clip of Senator Bob Lafollette speaking on August 11, 1924 in Washington, DC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5plf...

And here is some clips of footage of the Senator campaigning, but no audio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6JzT...

Thanks John - it is great watching LaFollette and seeing him as if he was speaking to us.

It's cool being able to see them "live" as it were and have that image as we read.

Yes I agree - he had quite the head of hair too and was very passionate - reading about it and actually seeing it are two different things. The visual image is so memorable and powerful.

President Grover Cleveland



Grover Cleveland, born March 18, 1837, was a tough opponent of political corruption who fiercely guarded the integrity of the offices in which he served. He lost a second term as incumbent but won back the presidency four years later. He earned the nickname ”guardian president” for his record-breaking use of veto power and strengthened the executive branch, ushering in the modern presidential era.

Early Life
Stephen Grover Cleveland was born on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey, the fifth of nine children born to Ann Neal and Richard Falley Cleveland, a Presbyterian minister. The family moved several times around central New York State for his father’s posts, but the reverend died when Grover was only 16, and the teen had to forgo finishing his education to go to work to support the family. Cleveland worked with his older brother at the New York Institute for Special Education, which would become an abiding concern, and then as a clerk and part-time law student while in Buffalo. The knowledge he gained from these experiences helped him pass the bar exam in 1858 without any structured formal study.

Political Life
Grover Cleveland—he dropped his first name as an adult, perhaps because he had been called "Big Steve” by friends, due to his girth, at over 250 pounds—basically went with the flow of his career rather than hold any specific ambitions. He did evade military service in the Civil War by paying a substitute $300, which was not an uncommon practice at the time. Passing the bar exam led to a position as district attorney for Erie County, then sheriff, mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York from 1882 to 1884, when he became known “Uncle Jumbo.”

In his first term as president, 1885-89, Cleveland was uncomfortable in the White House, especially as a bachelor. He married his ward, the daughter of his deceased Buffalo law partner, making Frances Folsom America’s youngest first lady at 21. It was the first and only White House wedding of a president. The couple’s 27-year age difference was summarily lampooned. Children began arriving between his two terms, and three were born in the White house. The Clevelands had five children in all.

In his first term Cleveland also presided over the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, and saw Geronimo surrender, thus ending the Apache wars.

Cleveland’s presidencies bracketed one-term President Benjamin Harrison. He was not in favor of overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy, which had been set in motion during Harrison’s time in office, but despite his opposition, Hawaii was annexed. Cleveland wrote: “I am ashamed of the whole affair.”

In general, he was not in favor of imperialistic moves and even declared a war on London when a boundary dispute arose between Britain and Venezuela. This revived use of the Monroe Doctrine, which had languished.

He was also against subsidies and special interests, which is how his record-breaking use of the veto came about. Cleveland believed that hardship built character. Being less a presser of his own agenda than a monitor of Congress earned him yet another nickname: “guardian president.” He exercised his veto power 584 times—more than double the number cast by all previous presidents, and the highest number of any president except FDR, who had three terms.

Overall, Cleveland’s second term, 1893-97, was more fraught, and saw him dealing with the Pullman strike and other outcroppings of the most severe depression the country had seen thus far. His hard line lost him the support of his party. After leaving office on March 4, 1897, he continued to weigh in on political issues, occasionally consulting with Theodore Roosevelt, but unlike TR, he was opposed to women’s suffrage, believing that sensible women didn’t want the vote.

Death and Legacy
Cleveland died of a heart attack on June 24, 1908, at the age of 71, at the family’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. The children were all away at the family country home in New Hampshire, but his wife Frances was at his bedside. Cleveland had been ill since the previous autumn, suffering from a weak heart and other ailments.

He was a hard worker, and idealistic, once saying, “I have tried so hard to do right.” Cleveland had an excellent memory, presenting his legal arguments extemporaneously. He was the only president to deliver his inaugural addresses without notes up to that point. He said, “Some day I will be better remembered,” but he is one of our lesser-known presidents.
(Source: http://www.biography.com/people/grove...)

More:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0166479/bio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_...
http://www.history.com/topics/us-pres...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presi...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/G...
by John M. Pafford (no photo)
by Alyn Brodsky (no photo)
by Rita J. Markel (no photo)
by H. Paul Jeffers (no photo)
by Charles Lachman

William Jennings Bryan



Born in Illinois, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) became a Nebraska congressman in 1890. He starred at the 1896 Democratic convention with his Cross of Gold speech that favored free silver, but was defeated in his bid to become U.S. president by William McKinley. Bryan lost his subsequent bids for the presidency in 1900 and 1908, using the years between to run a newspaper and tour as a public speaker. After helping Woodrow Wilson secure the Democratic presidential nomination for 1912, he served as Wilson’s secretary of state until 1914. In his later years, Bryan campaigned for peace, prohibition and suffrage, and increasingly criticized the teaching of evolution.

Born in Illinois, Bryan inherited from his parents an intense commitment to the Democratic party and a fervent Protestant faith. After graduating from Illinois College and Union Law School, he married and, seeing no political future in Illinois, moved to Nebraska in 1887. In 1890, when the new Populist party disrupted Nebraska politics, Bryan won election to Congress; he was reelected in 1892. In Congress, he earned respect for his oratory and became a leader among free-silver Democrats. In 1894 he led Nebraska’s Democrats to support the state Populist party.

Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his stirring Cross of Gold speech favoring free silver and thereby captured the presidential nomination. Also nominated by the Populists, Bryan agreed with their view that government should protect individuals and the democratic process against monopolistic corporations. ‘The Boy Orator of the Platte’ traveled eighteen thousand miles and spoke to thousands of voters, but lost; William McKinley’s victory initiated a generation of Republican dominance in national politics. Bryan’s 1896 campaign, however, marked a long-term shift within the Democratic party from a Jacksonian commitment to minimal government toward a positive view of government.

During the Spanish-American War, Bryan served as a colonel in a Nebraska regiment, but after the war, he condemned McKinley’s Philippine policy as imperialism. Nominated again by the Democrats in 1900, Bryan hoped to make the election a referendum on imperialism, but other issues intervened, including his own insistence on free silver and attacks on monopolies. McKinley won again.

After his defeat, Bryan launched a newspaper, the Commoner (based on his nickname ‘the Great Commoner’) and made frequent speaking tours. Although he was a superb orator, he was neither a deep nor an original thinker. He used the Commoner and the lecture circuit to affirm equality, to advocate greater popular participation in governmental decision making, to oppose monopolies, and to proclaim the importance of faith in God. ‘Shall the People Rule?’ became the watchword of his third campaign for president, in 1908, when he lost to William Howard Taft.

In 1912, Bryan worked to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson, and when Wilson won, he named Bryan secretary of state. As secretary, Bryan promoted conciliation, or cooling-off, treaties, in which the parties agreed that, if they could not resolve a dispute, they would wait a year before going to war and would seek outside fact-finding. Thirty such treaties were drafted.

When the European war broke out in 1914, Bryan, like Wilson, was committed to neutrality. But he went beyond Wilson in advocating restrictions on American citizens and companies to prevent them from drawing the nation into war. When Wilson strongly protested Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania, Bryan resigned rather than approve a message he feared would lead to war.

Thereafter, Bryan worked for peace, prohibition, and woman suffrage, and he increasingly criticized the teaching of evolution. In 1925, he joined the prosecution in the trial of John Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher charged with violating state law by teaching evolution. In a famous exchange, Clarence Darrow, defending Scopes, put Bryan on the witness stand and revealed his shallowness and ignorance of science and archaeology. Bryan died soon after the trial ended.
(Source: http://www.history.com/topics/william...)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...
http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/bryan...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/W...
https://history.state.gov/departmenth...
http://www.agribusinesscouncil.org/br...
by Michael Kazin (no photo)
by Robert W. Cherny (no photo)
by Gerald Leinwand (no photo)
by Robert A. Allen (no photo)
by William Jennings Bryan

J. Pierpont Morgan



Note: This photograph of Morgan, taken by Edward Steichen caused great controversy as it appears that Morgan is holding a knife in his hand. In reality it is light reflecting from the arm of the chair but it was thought representative of Morgan's business dealings.

John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan was born in Hartford, Connecticut on April 17, 1837. His father, Junius Spencer Morgan, was a prosperous financier, with holdings in America and Europe, who taught his son from an early age how to manage the family assets that he (J.P.) would someday inherit.

J.P. was a willing student. J.P. was educated at Boston's English High School, and then he enrolled in Germany's prestigious University of Gottingen. By the time he was 15, J.P. had traveled throughout much of Europe, and had already begun collecting art, which would remain a passion throughout his life. When he was 20, he graduated from Gottingen, and returned to New York to begin his career in finance. He started as an accountant for Duncan, Sherman & Co. in New York City. This position provided a good base for J.P. Morgan's introduction into the world of banking and finance, especially because of its ties to the powerful London firm of George Peabody & Co.

As the Civil War broke out, Morgan joined his father's financial ventures, and operated out of both New York and London, all the time increasing his personal holdings. From 1864 to 1871 he was an increasingly influential member of the firm Dabney, Morgan & Co., and in 1871 he became a partner in Drexel, Morgan & Co. In 1895, this firm became J.P. Morgan & Co., and was recognized here and abroad as one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.

As J.P. Morgan's fortune grew, he continued to make investments and acquisitions. He funded Thomas Edison throughout the 1870's and 1880's, and laid the financial foundation for Edison Electric Company. When many small companies and railroads ran into tough times after the Civil War, Morgan saw opportunities and acquired those with potential. By the mid 1880's, he had significant railroad holdings, and owned some 5,000 miles of rail by 1900. He consolidated and restructured many of his rail companies, bringing his own regulations and standards to an industry that the government had failed to regulate. Morgan's rail holdings included the New York Central, New Haven and Hartford, Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Reading, Erie, Southern, Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Northern Pacific systems. The rails and trains, of course, required huge quantities of steel. Knowing this, Morgan founded and acquired huge steel-making operations, in effect owning the steel operations that supplied his rail companies with their steel. In 1901 he established the U.S. Steel Company by merging Carnegie Steel Works and several other steel companies into the dominant steel producer in the country.

Morgan's realm expanded into many other areas in the financial and industrial worlds. He acquired and/or financed shipping interests, coal mines, insurance, and communications industries, and he provided financial backing for the U.S. government itself. He backed an 1895 government bond issue of $62 million dollars, and in 1901 he secured a $50 million dollar American issue for the British war loan. In the early 1900's he provided backing that assisted the U.S. Treasury in stemming a stock market panic. And, of course, anyone with as much power and influence as J.P. Morgan is bound to attract his share of detractors. He was investigated by the U.S. House of Representatives, and he testified in his own defense, denying charges of undue influence in his control of the country's industries and financial institutions. In spite of the allegations of reform-minded crusaders and muckrakers, J.P. Morgan continued to be America's foremost financier throughout his life.

Morgan's personal wealth was enormous, and during his life he used substantial portions of his wealth in philanthropic endeavors. He donated to charities, churches, hospitals, and schools. He also accumulated a huge collection of art. When he died in 1913, much of his collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(Source: http://www.netstate.com/states/peop/p...)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._M...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/J...
http://www.ushistory.org/us/36d.asp
http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org...
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/...

by Michael Burgan (no photo)
by Carl Hovey (no photo)
by Daniel Alef (no photo)
by Andrew Sinclair
by Louis Auchincloss

Philander Chase Knox



Philander Chase Knox was a corporate attorney, industrialist, and two-time U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. He served as U.S. attorney general under President William mMcKinley from 1901 to 1904, and as U.S. secretary of state under President William Howard Taft from 1909 to 1913.

Knox was born to privilege on May 6, 1853, in Brownsville, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. His banker father, David S. Knox, financed commercial activities in the region around Pittsburgh. His mother, Rebekah Page Knox, was involved in numerous philanthropic and social organizations, and she encouraged her children in community service pursuits.

Knox's early education was in local private schools with the children of other prominent Pennsylvania families. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Mount Union College, in Alliance, Ohio, in 1872. While in college Knox began a lifelong friendship with future president McKinley, who was then district attorney of Stark County, Ohio. McKinley encouraged the young man's interest in the law, and arranged for him to read law in the office of Attorney H. B. Swope, of Pittsburgh.

After spending three years with Swope, Knox was admitted to Pennsylvania's Allegheny County bar in 1875. Shortly thereafter he was appointed assistant U.S. district attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Two years later he formed a law partnership with James H. Reed, of Pittsburgh, that would last more than twenty years. In 1880 he formed an equally lasting marital partnership with Lillie Smith, daughter of Pittsburgh businessman Andrew D. Smith.

Knox's professional skills and personal style were well suited to the business climate of his day. He was intimately involved in the industrial development of the Pittsburgh region as well as the organization and direction of the companies forging that development. His efforts made him one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania.

Knox, along with many of his business and social peers, was a charter member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, on Lake Conemaugh, near Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The club erected a dam to create its private lake retreat. When the dam failed on May 31, 1889, an ensuing flood killed more than two thousand people and destroyed countless homes and businesses in its path. Author David McCullough noted in his history No money was ever collected from the club or its members through damage suits. But Knox's family contributed to the relief efforts, and Knox and other businessmen used their resources to help rebuild many of the companies and restore many of the jobs lost in the cataclysm.

By 1897 Knox had sufficiently redeemed himself to be elected president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association. In 1899 his longtime friend President McKinley offered him the position of attorney general of the United States. Knox declined McKinley's initial offer because he was heavily involved in the formation and organization of the Carnegie Steel Company, so the position went to John W. Griggs.

When Griggs resigned in 1901, McKinley again offered the position to Knox. This time Knox accepted. He began his term on April 9, 1901. Within the year he brought an antitrust action against the Northern Securities Company, through which James J. Hill, John Pierpont Morgan, and others had attempted to merge the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads. Knox guided the litigation through several appeals and made the winning argument before the U.S. Supreme Court (Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 24 S. Ct. 436, 48 L. Ed. 679 [1904]).

Later in 1901 he ruled against executive authority—and his own preferences—when he advised that game refuges in the national forests could be established only through legislation. He told President McKinley that he regretted having to make that decision: "I would be glad to find authority for the intervention by the Secretary [of Interior] for the preservation of what is left of the game … but it would seem that whatever is done in that direction must be done by Congress, which alone has the power".

Knox stayed on as attorney general under President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1902 he traveled to Paris to examine the title to a canal concession across the Isthmus of Panama. Knox validated a French company's questionable title (in a three hundred-page opinion) and opened the way for the United States to purchase the company's interests. The incident is often cited as an example of the law being manipulated by presidential prerogative. Knox reportedly said afterward that Roosevelt's plan to acquire the canal concession was not marred by the slightest taint of legality.

His service as attorney general ended June 10, 1904, when Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker, of Pennsylvania, appointed him to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Matthew S. Quay. Knox took Quay's seat in the U.S. Senate July 1, 1904, and was subsequently elected to a full six-year term. During his term he was active and influential, especially in railroad rate legislation. He served on the Judiciary Committee, took a prominent part in a debate over tolls for the Panama Canal, and for a time was chairman of the Senate committee on rules.

He resigned his Senate seat March 4, 1909, to accept President Taft's appointment as secretary of state. Under Taft the focus of foreign policy was the encouragement and protection of U.S. investments abroad. Taft's approach, often called dollar diplomacy, was first applied in 1909, in a failed attempt to help China assume ownership of the Manchurian railways. Tangible proof of Knox's efforts in this attempt can be seen today in Washington, D.C.: the Chinese government gave him two thousand cherry trees that still blossom each spring. More successful attempts at dollar diplomacy were eventually made in Nicaragua and the Caribbean.

In March 1913 Knox returned to the practice of law. He did not last long. Just three years later, he announced his intention to seek a second term in the U.S. Senate. He was elected November 6, 1916. He was an outspoken opponent of the league of nations, and he took a leading role in the successful fight against the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles at the close of World War i because, he said, it imposed "obligations upon the United States which under our Constitution cannot be imposed by the treaty-making power."

On October 12, 1921, Knox collapsed and died outside his Senate chamber in Washington, D.C. He was sixty-eight years old. He was buried near his home at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania
(Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Phi...)

More:
https://history.state.gov/departmenth...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.p...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/P...
http://home.nps.gov/jofl/learn/histor...
(no image) A History Of The Northern Securities Case by Balthasar Henry Meyer (no photo)
(no image) Dollar Diplomacy: United States Economic Assistance to Latin America by Francis Adams
by Philander C Knox (no photo)
by Cyrus Veeser (no photo)
by Ellen D. Tillman (no photo)
by David McCullough

When Teddy Roosevelt was re-elected, on November 8th, 1904, his words to his wife Edith were: 'My dear, I am no longer a political accident'. -



Excerpt:

"In a letter to his son Kermit on the eve of the poll, characteristically arming himself against disappointment, Roosevelt wrote: ‘If things go wrong remember that we are very, very fortunate to have had three years in the White House, and that I have had a chance to accomplish work such as comes to very, very few men in any generation.’ He need not have worried. Carrying every state in the North, he beat Parker by 336 electoral votes to 140, with 7.6 million popular votes to 5.1 million. ‘My dear,’ he said to his wife Edith, ‘I am no longer a political accident’. Speaking to the press in the White House that evening he announced that as he had already served most of what was effectively his first term, it would be wrong for him to seek another. ‘Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.’ It was an undertaking he would come to regret.

True to his word, Roosevelt did not run in 1908, when the election was won for the Republicans by William Howard Taft. Denied the Republican nomination in 1912, Roosevelt ran as the candidate of his own Progressive Party and got 4.1 million popular votes to 3.5 million for Taft, but they both lost to Woodrow Wilson, who had 6.3 million. He failed to get the Republican nomination in 1916 and died in his sleep in 1919 at the age of sixty.

Link to remainder of article:
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-c...

Source: history.com

More:
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/T...
https://www.nps.gov/thri/theodoreroos...

Also this is an excerpt from the Miller Center:

The Campaign and Election of 1912

Before he left office in 1909, Roosevelt hand-picked William Howard Taft as his successor and worked to get him elected. Taft had served in the Roosevelt administration as governor of the Philippines and secretary of war. During the election, Taft vowed to run the country just as Roosevelt had. But the new administration was off to a rocky start with the outgoing President. After apparently indicating that he would retain most of the existing cabinet members, Taft soon discovered that he would be better served by his own hand-picked secretaries.

Roosevelt was miffed at having his cabinet members dismissed and at not being consulted on the new appointments. After Taft's inauguration, Roosevelt traveled in Africa and Europe for more than a year. He went on safari with his son Kermit, where he acquired more than 3,000 animal trophies, including eight elephants, seven hippos, nine lions, and thirteen rhinos. He then met up with Edith in Egypt, and the two of them journeyed throughout Europe, encountering constant demands to meet and greet royalty and politicians.

When the Roosevelt's returned to New York in June 1910, they were greeted by one of the largest mass receptions ever given in New York City. When he first arrived back in the United States, Roosevelt remained noncommittal on the Taft presidency. He wanted time to assess Taft's performance before making any judgments. However, some of his old friends had already brought him negative reports. Gifford Pinchot was so angry with Taft regarding conservation that he had earlier traveled to Italy to meet Roosevelt and discuss the situation.

Once TR returned home, he was frequently visited by old friends who decried Taft's supposed efforts to undo his work. During this period, progressivism was gradually rising from the local and state level to the national level. Increasing numbers of people across the nation supported expanding the role of the federal government to ensure the welfare of the people.

Pressured by the progressive wing of the Republican Party to challenge Taft in 1912, Roosevelt weighed his options. Eventually he decided to throw "his hat into the ring" and run against his former protege.

The Republicans met in Chicago in June 1912, hopelessly split between the Roosevelt progressives and the supporters of President Taft.

Roosevelt came to the convention having won a series of preferential primaries that put him ahead of the President in the race for party delegates. Taft, however, controlled the convention floor, and his backers managed to exclude most of the Roosevelt delegates by not recognizing their credentials.

These tactics enraged TR, who then refused to allow himself to be nominated, paving the way for Taft to win on the first ballot.

Roosevelt and his supporters abandoned the G.O.P. and reconvened in Chicago two weeks later to form the Progressive Party. They then nominated TR as their presidential candidate with Governor Hiram Johnson of California as his running mate. Roosevelt electrified the convention with a dramatic speech in which he announced that "we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord."

Declaring that he felt "as strong as a Bull Moose," Roosevelt gave the new party its popular name—the Bull Moose Party—and described its party platform as "New Nationalism." Its tenets included political justice and economic opportunity, and it sought a minimum wage for women; an eight-hour workday; a social security system; a national health service; a federal securities commission; and direct election of U.S. senators. The platform also supported the initiative, referendum, and recall as means for the people to exert more direct control over government.

TR worried about the power of the minority—often politicians—over the majority and thought these changes would make government more accountable to the people.

The Democrats nominated the reform governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, for President and Thomas R. Marshall, the governor of Indiana, as vice president.

Wilson's platform, known as "New Freedom," called for limits on campaign contributions by corporations, tariff reductions, new and stronger antitrust laws, banking and currency reform, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, and a single-term presidency.

Although Roosevelt and Wilson were both progressives, they differed over the means and extent to which government should intervene or regulate the states and the economy. Differences between New Nationalism and New Freedom over trusts and the tariff became a central issue of the campaign. Roosevelt believed the federal government should act as a "trustee" for the American people, controlling and supervising the economy in the public interest. Wilson had greater reservations about a large federal government and sought a return to a more decentralized republic.

He argued that if big business were deprived of artificial advantages, such as the protective tariff and monopolies, the natural forces of competition would assure everyone an equal chance at success—thus minimizing the role of government.

Whereas Roosevelt differentiated between "good" and "bad" trusts, Wilson suggested that all monopolies were harmful to the nation. Roosevelt's colorful personality helped him overcome the disadvantage of running as a third-party candidate, and he and Wilson contended fiercely for the support of voters interested in reform. Near the end of the campaign, TR dramatized his vitality by insisting on finishing a campaign speech even with an assailant's bullet lodged in his chest. Fortunately, the bullet had been slowed down by the pages of a thick speech he had in his coat pocket, but Roosevelt's courageous—perhaps foolhardy—act reminded Americans of what they loved about him.

Wilson captured 41.9 percent of the vote to Roosevelt's 27.4 percent and Taft's 23.1 percent. Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs won 6 percent of the vote. Despite the divided popular vote, Wilson compiled 435 electoral votes compared to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8. Roosevelt won in six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington. Despite its loss, the strong showing of the Progressive Party signaled the emergence of a significant force in U.S. political history. It also reflected a rising progressive spirit in the United States.

Together with Wilson and Debs, Roosevelt had challenged the conservative wing of the Republican Party and left it discredited. In addition, although TR lost the election, much of his New Nationalism program was enacted during Wilson's presidency.

Source and remainder of article here: http://millercenter.org/president/roo...

Under Campaigns and Elections

The phrase "root hog or die": - An Appalachian Saying

Root, hog, or die = to survive; to fend for yourself; to make it through tough circumstances by working hard.

A healthy hog, even a very young one, won't let themselves die until they've rooted up and turned every inch of dirt within their pen or range.



Source: The Blind Pig and the Acorn - link: http://www.blindpigandtheacorn.com/bl...

The phrase "let every tub stand on its own bottom": - Early American Saying

Example from Free Dictionary -

Every tub must stand on its own bottom, and Let every tub stand on its own bottom.

Proverb

People should be independent.

Example: Emily did not want to join the other students, who were helping each other study for the exam. "Every tub must stand on its own bottom," she said. Don't ask me for help. Let every tub stand on its own bottom.

Source: Free Dictionary

Jim that is a great article - can you place that also in the glossary - so it does not get lost. I think everybody should read it.

What is funny is that one of the things that they had against LaFollette was that "he kept his promises" - what a novel concept (smile).

This is a little write-up about McClure's magazine which began as more of a "muckraking" publication and ended up being revamped into a ladies magazine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McClure...



More:
Another interesting write-up from the Allegheny College site: (Ida Tarbell, McClure's, progressivism - all discussed)
http://sites.allegheny.edu/tarbell/mc...
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG00/reka...
http://sites.allegheny.edu/tarbell/mc...

There is also an edition on the History of Standard Oil (Ida Tarbell) which I am adding here:
https://thepowerofthefrontcover.wordp...

by Steve Weinberg (no image)


McClure's Magazine cover (November 1902). At the top we can read: ‘History of the Standard Oil, by Ida Tarbell’. The mini headline had nothing in common with the illustration, although it is curious that they put angels to talk about the "mischiefs" of Rockefeller.

The article written by Lincoln Steffen for McClure's Magazine can be found as a primary document at:

Article

Thank you Jim

Theodore Roosevelt's State of the Union Address - December 5th, 1905

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pi...

Source: The American Presidency Project

TR's Inaugural Ceremony 1905

https://www.loc.gov/item/mp76000336

Theodore Roosevelt with Rough Rider friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNCMm...

Teddy Roosevelt Speech (Audio) - probably 1916 - later than this chapter of course

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhlzd...

Theodore Roosevelt's wife Edith Roosevelt Speaking, earliest First Lady's voice recorded
https://youtu.be/7AwuWv4wRsg

Theodore Roosevelt Inauguration Re-enactment - (fairly good but these are actors remember - begins with McKinley)

https://youtu.be/ww_RcEAfT1o

Theodore Roosevelt, Captured on Spinning Wax

https://youtu.be/gRbA88DGPwg

Source: Library Of Congress and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site as well as Youtube

Judge Alton Brooks Parker



Alton Brooks Parker (May 14, 1852 – May 10, 1926) was an American judge, best known as the Conservative Democrat who lost the presidential election of 1904 to incumbent Theodore Roosevelt in a landslide.

A native of upstate New York, Parker practiced law in Kingston, New York, before being appointed to the New York Supreme Court and elected to the New York Court of Appeals; he served as Chief Judge of the latter from 1898 to 1904, when he resigned to run for president. In 1904, he defeated liberal publisher William Randolph Hearst for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. In the general election, Parker opposed popular incumbent Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. After a disorganized and ineffective campaign, Parker was defeated by 336 electoral votes to 140, carrying only the traditionally Democratic Solid South. He then returned to practicing law.

Early life
Parker was born in Cortland, New York, to John Brooks Parker, a farmer, and Harriet F. Stratton. Both of his parents were well educated and encouraged his reading from an early age. At the age of 12 or 13, Parker watched his father serve as a juror and was so fascinated by the proceedings that he resolved to become a lawyer. He enrolled at Albany Law School. After graduating with an LL.B. degree in 1873, he practiced law in Kingston until 1878 as the senior partner of the firm Parker & Kenyon.

Parker also became active with the Democratic Party and was an early supporter of future New York governor and US President Grover Cleveland. He served as a delegate to the 1884 Democratic National Convention, at which Cleveland was named the party's presidential nominee.

Judicial career
As a judge, Parker was notable for independently researching each case that he heard. He was generally considered to be pro-labor and was an active supporter of social reform legislation, for example upholding a maximum-hours law as constitutional. In the 1902 decision Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co, Parker found against a woman whose face had been used in advertisements without her permission, ruling that this use did not violate her common law privacy rights. The decision was unpopular in the press and led to the passage of a privacy law by the New York State Legislature the following year. In the same year, Parker upheld the death sentence given to convicted murderer Martha Place, who became the first woman to be executed by electric chair.

Presidential nomination
As the 1904 presidential election approached, the Democrats began to search for a nominee to oppose popular incumbent Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, and Parker's name arose as a possible candidate. Roosevelt's Secretary of War Elihu Root said of Parker that he "has never opened his mouth on any national question", but Roosevelt feared that the man's neutrality would prove a political advantage, writing that "the neutral-tinted individual is very apt to win against the man of pronounced views and active life".

The 1904 Democratic National Convention was held in July in St. Louis, Missouri, then also hosting the 1904 World's Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics. Parker's mentor David B. Hill—having attempted and failed to capture the nomination himself at the 1892 convention—now led the campaign for his protege's nomination. William Jennings Bryan, who had been nominated but defeated by William McKinley in both 1896 and 1900, was no longer considered by delegates to be a viable alternative. Radicals in the party supported publisher William Randolph Hearst but lacked sufficient numbers to secure the nomination due to opposition from Bryan and Tammany Hall, a powerful New York political machine. Small clusters of delegates pledged support to other candidates, including Missouri Senator Francis Cockrell; Richard Olney, Grover Cleveland's Secretary of State; Edward C. Wall, a former Wisconsin State Representative; and George Gray, a former Senator from Delaware. Other delegates spoke of nominating Cleveland, who had already served two nonconsecutive terms, but Cleveland was no longer popular outside the party or even within it, due to his rift with Bryan.

Parker's long service on the bench proved to be an advantage in his nomination, as he had avoided taking stands on issues that divided the party, particularly that of currency standards. Hill and other Parker supporters remained deliberately silent on their candidate's beliefs. By the time the convention cast their votes, it was clear that no candidate but Parker could unify the party, and he was selected on the first ballot. Henry G. Davis, an elderly West Virginia millionaire and former senator, was selected as the vice presidential candidate in the hope that he would partially finance Parker's campaign.

The convention was riven by debate over whether to include a free silver plank in the campaign's platform, opposing the gold standard and calling for the government to mint large numbers of silver dollars. The "free silver" movement, a key plank for the party in 1896 and 1900, was popular among indebted Western farmers who felt that inflation would help them repay their debts. Business interests, in contrast, supported the lower inflation of the gold standard. Bryan, famous for his 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech opposing the gold standard, fought bitterly to avoid the inclusion of the gold standard in the party platform in 1904. Ultimately the convention agreed not to include a plank on the subject.

However, seeking to win the support of the Eastern "sound money" faction, Parker sent a telegram to the convention immediately upon hearing news of his nomination that he considered the gold standard "firmly and irrevocably established" and would decline the nomination if he could not state this in his campaign. The telegram sparked a new debate and fresh opposition from Bryan, but the convention eventually replied to Parker that he was free to speak on the issue as he liked. National support for Parker began to rise, and Roosevelt praised his opponent's telegram in private as "bold and skillful" and "most adroit".

Campaign
After receiving the nomination, Parker resigned from the bench. On August 10, he was formally visited at Rosemount by a delegation of party elders to inform him of his nomination. Parker then delivered a speech criticizing Roosevelt for his administration's involvement in Turkish and Moroccan affairs and having failed to give a date on which the Philippines would become independent of American control; the speech was considered even by supporters to be impersonal and uninspiring. Historian Lewis L. Gould described the speech as a "fiasco" for Parker from which the candidate did not recover. After this initial speech, Parker retreated into a strategy of silence again, avoiding comment on all major issues.

Parker's campaign soon proved to be poorly run as well. Parker and his advisors opted for a front porch campaign, in which delegations would be brought to Rosemount to see Parker speak on the model of McKinley's successful 1896 campaign. However, due to Esopus' remote location and the campaign's inefficient use of funds to bring in delegates, Parker received few visitors. Rather than introducing issues that would differentiate the two parties, the Democrats preferred to emphasize Roosevelt's character, portraying him as dangerously unstable. Parker's campaign also failed to reach out to traditional Democratic voting blocs such as Irish Catholic immigrants. In contrast, Roosevelt's campaign, headed by George Cortelyou, organized committees to appeal specifically to demographics including Jewish, black, and German-American voters. John Hay, Roosevelt's Secretary of State, wrote of Parker's poor showing to Henry Adams, calling it "the most absurd political campaign of our time".

A month before the election, Parker became aware of the large amount of corporate donations Cortelyou had solicited for the Roosevelt campaign, and made "Cortelyouism" a theme of his speeches, accusing the president of being insincere in previous trust busting efforts. In late October, he also went on a speaking tour in the key states of New York and New Jersey, in which he reiterated the president's "shameless exhibition of a willingness to make compromise with dignity". Roosevelt, enraged, released a statement calling Parker's criticisms "monstrous" and "slanderous".

Parker's attacks came too late to turn the election, however. On November 8, Roosevelt won in a landslide of 7,630,457 votes to Parker's 5,083,880. Roosevelt carried every northern and western state, including Missouri, for a total of 336 electoral votes; Parker carried only the traditionally Democratic Solid South, accumulating 140 electoral votes. Parker telegraphed his congratulations to Roosevelt that night and returned to private life.

Later life
After the election, Parker resumed practicing law and served as the president of the American Bar Association from 1906 to 1907. He represented organized labor in several cases, most notably in Loewe v. Lawlor, popularly known as the "Danbury Hatters' case". In the case, the fur hat manufacturer D. E. Loewe & Company had attempted to enforce an open shop policy; when unions had subsequently boycotted the company, it sued the United Hatters of North America for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The conservative US Supreme Court found for Loewe by ruling that the union had been acting in restraint of interstate commerce.

Parker later re-entered politics, managing John Alden Dix's successful 1910 gubernatorial campaign and delivering the keynote address of the 1912 Democratic National Convention, which nominated Woodrow Wilson for President.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alton_B...)

More:
http://www.nycourts.gov/history/legal...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/A...
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg....
http://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/35...
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h832...
(no image) Address by Alton B. Parker, in memoriam David Bennett Hill; delivered at the joint meeting of the Senate and Assembly in the capitol at Albany, July 6, 1911 by Alton Brooks Parker (no photo)
by Thomas Riley Marshall (no photo)
by Charles Elliott Fitch (no photo)
by Kathleen Dalton (no photo)
by Lewis L. Gould (no photo)

Sagamore Hill - Inside the home of Theodore Roosevelt

https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view....

Source: The National Park Service

Theodore Roosevelt at his home in Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1912 - Part 1 of 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_WPh...

Theodore Roosevelt at his home in Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1912 - Part 2 of 2

https://youtu.be/3tBF0tVYbsY

Source: Youtube

Sagamore Hill Tour part one

https://youtu.be/pmm5I-5vynw

Sagamore Hill Tour Part two of three

https://youtu.be/Gf_r6VEtMBQ

Sagamore Hill Tour part three.

https://youtu.be/A1MIfKeJnyc

Source: Youtube

A POST FROM THE MAIN SITE DISCUSSING CITIZENS' UNITED AND CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

I would like to go back to the Preface and pull out some quotes and ideas that we should bring with us and that we should remember while reading this book and moving into next week's discussion. Please feel free to discuss the pros or cons of any of these. At the History Book Club we can discuss both sides of an argument or position with civil discourse.

1. During the time period discussed - at the dawn of the twentieth century - "Despite widespread discontent, congressional paralysis prevented the government from meeting the nation's challenges. Republican obstructionists maintained a chokehold on the House and Senate, blocking all but the most meager reform bills. The Democrats, weak and divided, had no hope of breaking their grip. Both parties catered to large corporations that lavished them with funding.

a) Do you think that this quote represents how things are today in Congress? Did it take "unreasonable men" to break up the log jam?
Are corporations too powerful today? Should more be done about campaign financing (although the Supreme Court gutted the McCain/Feingold bill) - and campaign finance reform.

b) The case was Citizens United v FEC and the only provision that the case did not involve was the federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties, which remains illegal in races for federal office. However, it did do damage to other safeguards in place. In fact, it might explain the ugliness of this primary season to a certain extent. Of course not all of it.

Of the $1 billion spent in federal elections by super PACs since 2010, nearly 60 percent of the money came from just 195 individuals and their spouses, according to the Brennan Center report. Thanks to Citizens United, supporters can make the maximum $5,200 donation directly to a candidate, then make unlimited contributions to single-candidate super PACs.

Effects of Citizens United
An explosion in independent political spending ensued in the decision’s aftermath, as this chart from the Center for Responsive Politics illustrates:



"Spending was on the rise even before Citizens United, but the post-decision increase was dramatic. The 2012 presidential election was the first following Citizens United, with more than twice the political spending as any previous election. Independent political spending of the kind Citizens United allows accounted for all of that increase.
Is this new spending determining the winners of elections? Most analysis suggests it’s not (at least not much), but by no means is the spending benign,....... (see http://reclaimdemocracy.org/who-are-c...)

Read more about Citizens United here:

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen...
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/who-are-c...
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/...
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2...
https://youtu.be/CykwVD_f2sc (Sanders)
https://youtu.be/68wHngd9nYc (Oliver - humorous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6FA8...)
https://youtu.be/kcnkgDHU9I8 - not bad for basic info fast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp_b4... - Brown University
https://youtu.be/4Aqp2s27kXg - NYU School of Law
https://youtu.be/wmjPLTz5RV8 - Duke
https://youtu.be/gjCQXRDiuN0 - University of California
https://youtu.be/fiWJAdFTIxQ - University of Chicago Law School

Representative Champ Clark of Missouri



James Beauchamp "Champ" Clark (March 7, 1850 – March 2, 1921) was a prominent American politician in the Democratic Party from the 1890s until his death. A Representative of Missouri from 1893 to 1895 and from 1897 to 1921, he served as the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1911 to 1919. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 1912.

Early life
Clark was born in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, to John Hampton Clark and Aletha Beauchamp. Through his mother, he was the first cousin twice removed of the famous lawyer-turned-murderer Jereboam O. Beauchamp. He is also directly descended from the famous John Beauchamp (Plymouth Company) through his mother. He graduated from Bethany College (West Virginia) where he was initiated into Delta Tau Delta Fraternity, and Cincinnati Law School and moved to Missouri in 1875, and opened a law practice the following year. He eventually settled in Bowling Green, Missouri, the county seat of Pike County.

Career
Clark was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1892. After a surprise loss in 1894 to William M. Treloar, he regained the seat in 1896, and remained in the House until his death, the day before he was to leave office.

Clark ran for House Minority Leader in 1903 but was defeated by John Sharp Williams of Mississippi. After Williams ran for the Senate in 1908, Clark ran again for the position and won. When the Democrats won control of the House in 1911, Clark became Speaker. In 1911, Clark give a speech that helped to decide the election in Canada. On the floor of the House, Clark argued for the recent Canadian–American Reciprocity Treaty and declared: "I look forward to the time when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America up to the North Pole".

Clark went on to suggest in his speech that the treaty was the first step towards the end of Canada, a speech that was greeted with "prolonged applause" according to the Congressional Record. The Washington Post reported, "Evidently, then, the Democrats generally approved of Mr. Clark's annexation sentiments and voted for the reciprocity bill because, among other things, it improves the prospect of annexation." The Chicago Tribunal condemned Clark in an editorial, warning that Clark's speech might have fatally damaged the treaty in Canada; "He lets his imagination run wild like a Missouri mule on a rampage. Remarks about the absorption of one country by another grate harshly on the ears of the smaller." The Conservative Party of Canada, which opposed the treaty, won the Canadian election in large part because of Clark's speech.

In 1912, Clark was the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, coming into the convention with a majority of delegates pledged to him, but he failed to receive the necessary two-thirds of the vote on the first several ballots. After lengthy negotiation, clever management by supporters of New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, with widespread allegations of influence by special interests, delivered the nomination instead to Wilson.

Clark's Speakership was notable for two things. Clark's skill from 1910 to 1914 in maintaining party unity to block William Howard Taft's legislation and then pass Wilson's. Also, Clark split the party in 1917 and 1918, when he opposed Wilson's decision to bring the United States into World War I.

In addition, Clark opposed the Federal Reserve Act, which concentrated financial power in the hands of eastern banks (mostly centered in New York City). Clark's opposition to the Federal Reserve Act is said to be the reason that Missouri is the only state granted two Federal Reserve Banks (one in St. Louis and one in Kansas City).

Clark was defeated in the Republican landslide of 1920 and died shortly thereafter in his home in Washington, DC.

Personal life
Clark married to Genevieve Bennett Clark on December 14, 1881. Together, they had two children, Joel Bennett Clark and Genevieve Clark Thomson. Bennet served as a United States Senator from Missouri from 1933 to 1945. Genevieve was as suffragette and a candidate for the House of Representatives for Louisiana.
(Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champ_C...)

More:
http://shsmo.org/historicmissourians/...
http://history.house.gov/Historical-H...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://www.champclark.org/
http://www.britannica.com/biography/C...
(no image) American Political Leaders (American Biographies) by Richard L. Wilson (no photo)
by William Webb (no photo)
by Lawrence Christensen (no photo)
by Missouri General Assembly House (no photo)
by Carla Waal (no photo)

John D. Rockefeller



American industrialist John D. Rockefeller was born July 8, 1839, in Richford, New York. He built his first oil refinery near Cleveland and in 1870 incorporated the Standard Oil Company. By 1882 he had a near-monopoly of the oil business in the U.S., but his business practices led to the passing of antitrust laws. Late in life, Rockefeller devoted himself to philanthropy. He died in 1937.

Early Years
Born in Richford, New York, on July 8, 1839, John Davison Rockefeller moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, at the age of 14. Unafraid of hard work, he embarked on a number of small-business ventures as a teenager, landing his first real office job at age 16, as an assistant bookkeeper with Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers.

By the age of 20, Rockefeller, who'd thrived at his job, ventured out on his own with a business partner, working as a commission merchant in hay, meats, grains and other goods. At the close of the company's first year in business, it had grossed $450,000.

A careful and studious businessman who refrained from taking unnecessary risks, Rockefeller sensed an opportunity in the oil business in the early 1860s. With oil production ramping up in western Pennsylvania, Rockefeller decided that establishing an oil refinery near Cleveland, a short distance from Pittsburgh, would be a good business move. In 1863, he opened his first refinery, and within two years it was the largest in the area. It didn't take much further success to convince Rockefeller to turn his attention full-time to the oil business.

Standard Oil
In 1870, Rockefeller and his associates incorporated the Standard Oil Company, which immediately prospered, thanks to favorable economic/industry conditions and Rockefeller’s drive to streamline the company’s operations and keep margins high. With success came acquisitions, as Standard began buying out its competitors.

Standard’s moves were so quick and sweeping that it controlled the majority of refineries in the Cleveland area within two years. Standard then used its size and ubiquity in the region to make favorable deals with railroads to ship its oil. At the same time, Standard got into the business itself with the purchase of pipelines and terminals, setting up a system of transport for its own products. Controlling (or owning) almost every aspect the business, Standard’s grip on the industry tightened, and it even bought thousands of acres of forest for lumber and drilling and to block competitors from running their own pipelines.

Standard’s footprint got bigger as well, and it bought up competitors in other regions, soon pursuing ambitions of being an industry player both coast-to-coast in the U.S. and abroad. In just over a decade since Standard Oil was incorporated, it had a near monopoly of the oil business in the U.S. and consolidated each division under one giant corporate umbrella, with Rockefeller overseeing all of it. Everything Rockefeller had done to this point had led to the first American monopoly, or “trust,” and it would serve as a guiding light for others in big business following behind him.

Antitrust Issues
With such an aggressive push into the industry, the public and the U.S. Congress took notice of Standard and its seemingly unstoppable march. Monopolistic behavior was not kindly regarded, and Standard soon became the epitome of a company grown too big and too dominant, for the public good. Congress jumped into the fray with both feet in 1890 with the Sherman Antitrust Act, and two years later the Ohio Supreme Court deemed Standard Oil a monopoly that stood in violation of Ohio law. Always eager to be a step ahead, Rockefeller dissolved the corporation and allowed each property under the Standard banner to be run by others. The overall hierarchy remained chiefly in place, though, and Standard’s board maintained control of the web of spun-off companies.

Just nine years after the company broke itself into pieces in the face of antitrust legislation, those pieces were again reassembled in a holding company. In 1911, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the new entity in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and illegal, and it was again forced to dissolve.

Later Years and Legacy
Rockefeller was a devout Baptist, and once retired from the daily operations of running one of the world’s largest businesses (in 1895, at age 56), he kept himself busy with charitable endeavors, becoming one of the more respected philanthropists in history. His money helped pay for the creation of the University of Chicago (1892), to which he gave more than $80 million before his death. He also helped found the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later named Rockefeller University) in New York and the Rockefeller Foundation. In total he gave away more than $530 million to various causes.

With his wife, Laura, Rockefeller had five children, including a daughter, Alice, who died in infancy.

Rockefeller passed away on May 23, 1937, in Ormond Beach, Florida. His legacy, however, lives on: Rockefeller is considered one of America's leading businessmen and is credited for helping to shape the U.S. into what it is today.

His only son, also named John, served by his father’s side as a philanthropist while the elder Rockefeller was still alive and would continue his father’s legacy of giving. During World War II he helped establish the United Service Organizations (USO), and after the war he donated land for the United Nations New York City headquarters. He also donated $5 million for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, helped in the restoration of colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, and provided funding for the Museum of Modern Art.
(Source:http://www.biography.com/people/john-...)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D....
http://www.history.com/topics/john-d-...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/J...
http://www.rockarch.org/bio/jdrsr.php
by John D. Rockefeller (no photo)
by Ellen Greenman Coffey (no photo)
by Steve Weinberg (no photo)
by Charles R. Morris (no photo)
by Ron Chernow

The Declaration of Independence was referenced here - this is the complete text:

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
www.archives.gov April 17, 2016

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton

Alice posted the following:

Hi, I am Alice and I live in New Jersey. I am one of those Rockefeller Republicans or liberal Republicans, a group that hasn't existed for decades. I loved "Unreasonable Men" as it opened for me a new side of Teddy Roosevelt, as President and mediator. I only recall him as the trust-buster and leader of the Rough Riders. It also opened for me knowledge of Bob Lafollette. That this book really dealt with Progressive politics( meaning power went back to the average man) was an eye-opener to me as I knew of the Molly McGuires, the Triangle fire, and how life changed for the "common" man back then. Now, I understand the work that went into these changes. Politics today scares me and I used to wish that someone of Teddy Roosevelt's character was running for President. Now I understand how he tried to accommodate all sides. Just wish he'd run for President in 1908.

Hello Alice - I had to move your post because you posted elements of the book that went beyond the Preface and Chapter One and you posted this on a non spoiler thread.

I am sorry that politics scares you nowadays - I think the intrusion into one's life and the digging up of any indiscretion that these so called journalists can find - also scare good people from running. Everybody probably has some skeleton in their closet that they would prefer that the whole world did not know about. And they worry about their families being hurt. I think your posts are alluding to the entire book rather than simply what we are reading about. Try to be mindful of this and only post on the non spoiler threads what ideas and events specifically deals with the pages at hand. Or you can post in the glossary thread and I will respond.

Also if you have any questions for the author - you can post these questions on the author's Q&A thread and that is a spoiler thread so you can post any question about any aspect of the book without worrying.

I am glad that you like the book.

Abraham Lincoln



Abraham Lincoln became the United States' 16th President in 1861, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy in 1863.

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... "

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died. (Source: WhiteHouse.gov - Presidents)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham...
http://www.history.com/topics/us-pres...
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/e...
http://www.historynet.com/abraham-lin...
http://www.civilwar.org/education/his...
by Henry Ketcham (no photo)
by Benjamin Platt Thomas (no photo)
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
by Stephen B. Oates
by Eric Foner
both by James M. McPherson

Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois



On this date, Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois was born in Guilford, North Carolina. “Uncle Joe” Cannon’s career in Congress spanned almost five decades. During that time, Cannon served as chairman of three committees: Expenditures in the Post Office Department, Rules, and Appropriations.

From the 58th Congress through the 61st Congress (1903–1911), he simultaneously chaired the Rules Committee and served as Speaker of the House. As chair of the Rules Committee, Cannon managed the floor schedule for legislation and, as Speaker, he controlled the debate on the floor.

During Cannon’s reign, he usurped power from the committee chairs and ruled the Congress with an iron fist, earning him the nickname “Czar Cannon.” He once said, “Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.” (Source: History.House.gov - Historical Highlights)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://www.thecaucusblog.com/2013/08/...
http://history.house.gov/People/Listi...
http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.or...
(no image) Tyrant from Illinois: Uncle Joe Cannon's Experiment with Personal Power by Blair Bolles (no photo)
(no image) Speech of Hon.: Joseph G. Cannon Before the Middlesex Club, Boston, Saturday, April 30, 1910 by Joseph Gurney Cannon (no photo)
(no image) Speech of Hon. J.G. Cannon, delivered at Kansas City, Mo., Friday night, November 26, 1909 .. by Joseph Gurney Cannon (no photo)
(no image) Joseph Gurney Cannon. Proceedings in the House of Representatives on the Eightieth Anniversary of His Birth. Saturday, May 6, 1916 by 1st Sessio United States 64th Congress (no photo)
by 1st Sessio United States 64th Congress (no photo)
by L. White Busbey (no photo)
by Joseph Gurney Cannon (no photo)

Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio



Mark Hanna (1837-1904) was a Cleveland industrialist who made his fortune in coal and iron. Convinced that the welfare of big business depended on the success of the Republican Party, in the 1880s Hanna began to organize financial support for promising Republican candidates.

He helped William McKinley win the Ohio governor's race in 1892 and saw him nominated as the Republican presidential candidate in 1896. Hanna raised an election fund for McKinley from wealthy individuals and corporations and orchestrated the most expensive campaign ever seen at that time, undermining opponent William Jennings Bryan's grassroots campaign with hired orators and a flood of literature, all promising continued prosperity under McKinley.

After McKinley won the presidency, one of his cabinet appointments created a vacancy in the U.S. Senate to which Hanna was elected in 1897.

Theodore Roosevelt feared that Hanna might oppose him for the Republican presidential nomination in 1904, but Hanna died suddenly in the early part of that year. (Source: PBS - American Experience)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hanna
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/h...
http://www.britannica.com/biography/M...
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/M...
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Mar...
(no image) Mark Hanna's Moral Cranks - Scholar's Choice Edition by William H Muldoon (no photo)
by Herbert David Croly (no photo)
by Marcus Alonzo Hanna (no photo)
by Joe Mitchell Chapple (no photo)
William Horner (no photo)
by Solon Lauer

Walter Wellman of the Chicago Record - Herald



Walter E. Wellman (November 3, 1858 - January 31, 1934) was an American journalist, explorer, and aëronaut, born at Mentor, Ohio, and educated in the public schools.

Biographical background
Walter Wellman was born in Mentor, Ohio, in 1858. He was the sixth son of Alonzo Wellman and the fourth by his second wife Minerva Sibilla (Graves) Wellman. Walter was a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Puritan Thomas Wellman. Walter's father, Alonzo, served three years in the American Civil War while Walter was young. He was initially with Company D of the 105th Ohio Infantry before becoming a ship-carpenter with the Mississippi River Squadron. When he returned from the war, he took his family west from Ohio to become pioneer settlers of York County, Nebraska.

At age 14 Walter established a weekly newspaper in Sutton, Nebraska. At age 21 Walter returned to Ohio to establish the Cincinnati Evening Post and married Laura McCann in Canton, Ohio on 24 December 1879. They had five daughters. In 1884 he became political and Washington DC correspondent for the Chicago Herald and Record-Herald.

Early exploration
In 1892 Walter marked with a monument the presumed landing place of Christopher Columbus on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. In 1894 he led a polar expedition east of Svalbard to latitude 81° N. He led another expedition to latitude 82° N through Franz Josef Land in 1898 and 1899.

Airships
On December 31, 1905, Wellman announced he would make an attempt to reach the North Pole, but this time with an airship. His newspaper provided funds of USD 250,000, and he had an airship built in Paris for the Wellman Chicago Record-Herald Polar Expedition. Wellman established expedition headquarters on Dane's Island, Svalbard, in the summer of 1906. The hangar was not completed until August 1906, and the airship’s engines self-destructed when tested. Wellman rebuilt the airship in Paris that winter and attempted an aerial voyage to the North Pole in September, 1907. He made a second attempt without financial assistance in 1909, but mechanical failures forced him to turn back 60 miles (100 km.) north of Svalbard.

In the northern autumn of 1910, Wellman expanded his airship America to 345,000 cubic feet (9,760 cubic metres) and launched from Atlantic City, New Jersey on 15 October 1910. The engineer Melvin Vaniman sent one of the first aerial radio transmissions when he urged the launch boat to "come and get this goddam cat!" - the cat Kiddo who was (at first) not happy about being airborne. After 38 hours the engine failed and the airship drifted until they were rescued by the Royal Mail steamship Trent not far from Bermuda. A second airship, the Akron, was built the next year. It exploded during its first test flight. Killed were the crew of five, including its captain, aerial photographer Melvin Vaniman, a survivor of the America. Almost a century later its submerged remains were located. These fragments, along with the airship's lifeboat, which Goodyear Tire and Rubber had stored since 1912, were then donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

Legacy
In 1902, Wellman wrote A Tragedy of the Far North published in The White World. Wellman's book The Aerial Age; A Thousand Miles by Airship over the Atlantic Ocean was published in 1911. The German Republic, Imaginary Political History After the European War was published in 1916. He spent his final years in New York City, where he died of liver cancer in 1934. The Liberty ship Walter Wellman was launched 29 September 1944 from Todd Houston Shipbuilding Corporation of Houston, Texas. (Source: Wikipedia)

More:
http://www.airships.net/first-attempt...
http://www.blimpinfo.com/wp-content/u...
http://www.south-pole.com/aspp008.htm
https://av8rblog.wordpress.com/2013/0...
http://www.unis.no/wp-content/uploads...
(no image) The Force Supreme by Walter Wellman (no photo)
(no image) The German Republic by Walter Wellman (no photo)
by Walter Wellman (no photo)
by Walter Wellman (no photo)
by Edmund Morris

Postmaster General Henry C. Payne



Born on September 23, 1843, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, Henry Clay Payne was unable to fight for the Union during the Civil War because of poor health. He settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked as a cashier before achieving success in the insurance business. Entering politics, Payne formed a Young Men's Republicans Club in 1872 to support the reelection of President Ulysses S. Grant, who rewarded Payne by appointing him postmaster general of Milwaukee.

Payne would also invest in public utilities such as railways, the telephone service, and electric lighting. Aside from becoming vice president of the Wisconsin Telephone Company, Payne's potentially greatest private accomplishment was the establishment of the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company. He was a member of the Republican National Committee between 1880 until his death, becoming vice chairman and, ultimately, chairman of the Republican Party.

In that post, Payne was instrumental in convincing Theodore Roosevelt to run alongside William McKinley in the presidential election of 1900. Later, President Roosevelt would name Payne, his benefactor and friend, postmaster general in 1901 despite Payne's poor health. A scandal left over from previous administrations would break during Payne's tenure, however, hurting his effectiveness. He died while still a member of the cabinet, with the President by his side, on October 4, 1904, in Washington, D.C. (Source: The Miller Center)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_C...
http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/Bro...
http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/too...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
http://cabinet-members.insidegov.com/...
by John A. Garraty (no photo)
by Francis Leupp (no photo)
by Keith L. Justice (no photo)
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
by Edmund Morris

Tuesday April 19th broadcast of Here and Now's interview "How Today’s Republicans Differ From Teddy Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller" discussing New York politics, Teddy Roosevelt, and evolution in the Republican party.

Listen here!

Thank you Jordan

Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana



My name must not be considered for Vice President and if it is presented, I wish it withdrawn. Please withdraw it.
—Charles Warren Fairbanks

In the summer of 1904 Senator Charles Warren Fairbanks wanted to be president of the United States. Many in 1900 had seen him as the natural successor to his good friend President William McKinley. Now, however, it was not the fallen McKinley who occupied the White House, but Theodore Roosevelt, and the president appeared on his way to easy renomination at the 1904 Republican convention. When members of the Republican Old Guard suggested Fairbanks for vice president, the senator saw an opportunity for advancement. After all, the second spot had led to the presidency for Roosevelt, it might do the same for him.

The vice-presidency might prove a good place from which to maneuver for the 1908 convention, and anything could happen with the impetuous Roosevelt in the White House. As Finley Peter Dunne's fictional character Mr. Dooley speculated, "Th' way they got Sinitor Fairbanks to accipt was by showin' him a pitcher iv our gr-reat an' noble prisidint thryin to jump a horse over a six-foot fence."

Most of all, Roosevelt's prodigious shadow seemed a natural place for a man described by friends as "a safe and popular politician" to wait for his turn in the White House. If ever a man seemed destined to remain in the political shadows, it was Charles Warren Fairbanks.

Leader of the Indiana Republicans
In 1884, Indiana's Republicans split in their support of presidential candidates, some favoring Walter Q. Gresham and others preferring Benjamin Harrison. The election of Harrison in 1888 seemingly jeopardized Fairbanks' prospects, since he had been active on behalf of the Gresham faction. Harrison's lackluster performance in the White House, however, followed by impressive Democratic victories in 1892, gave Fairbanks the opportunity to return to prominence in the state by helping to rebuild the party.
The campaign of 1892 also brought him into contact with the governor of Ohio, William McKinley. The two men formed a friendship that lasted until McKinley's untimely death in 1901 and proved extremely beneficial to the careers of both men.

Even though he held no office, Fairbanks managed to gain control of the Indiana Republican party, primarily because of his wealth. He spent freely on campaigns and consistently urged party unity behind candidates at all levels. Persistent letter writing and encouragement endeared him to GOP officeholders throughout the state, and he used his connections with the railroads to obtain passes for political allies. Perhaps most importantly, he secretly owned a majority interest in the state's largest newspaper, The Indianapolis News. By 1901, he had also purchased the major opposition daily, The Indianapolis Journal. Fairbanks' control of the press significantly promoted the Republican cause in Indiana.

As leader of his state's Republican party, Fairbanks stood in an excellent position to command the attention of the national party. With the parties almost evenly balanced in the late nineteenth century, a small shift in the voting patterns of one of the more densely populated industrial states could win or lose a presidential election. Indiana was one of these vital states. In the thirteen presidential elections from 1868 to 1916, eleven of the national tickets boasted a Hoosier candidate, usually running for vice president. Charles Fairbanks thus became an important man in Republican electoral considerations.

When William McKinley ran for president in 1896, he made his friend Fairbanks a key player in his campaign strategy. Fairbanks ran McKinley's campaign in Indiana and delivered a united Hoosier delegation for McKinley at the Republican National Convention in St. Louis. As temporary chairman of that convention, Fairbanks uncharacteristically delivered a stirring keynote address, in which he lambasted the Democrats and advocated the gold standard for currency. McKinley won the Republican nomination handily, then defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the general election. Indiana, which he won by only about 18,000 votes, proved instrumental to his victory.

On the state level, the Republicans also did well enough to regain control of the Indiana legislature, guaranteeing that they would determine that body's choice of a United States senator. Speculation naturally turned to Charles Fairbanks. The wealthy lawyer had assisted many of the Republican legislators during their campaigns; now they could return the favor. With a little help from President McKinley, Fairbanks easily won election to his first political office.

A Senator with Presidential Ambitions
Fairbanks' Senate career proved competent if unspectacular. He stuck to the party line and was well respected among his colleagues. As chairman of the Immigration Committee, he favored restricting immigration and requiring a literacy test before entry into the United States—both popular positions. When the Immigration Committee proved too contentious for his liking, Fairbanks moved to the chairmanship of the more agreeable Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds. Although he had originally opposed the pressure for war with Spain in 1898, he faithfully followed President McKinley's lead when war came. The president appointed him to the Joint-High Commission to decide the U.S.-Canadian boundary in Alaska. No settlement was reached, but Fairbanks helped his own popularity by declaring, "I am opposed to the yielding of an inch of United States territory." The people of Alaska showed their appreciation by naming the city of Fairbanks in his honor. Perhaps Fairbanks' only controversial stand in the Senate was his support for the demands of black soldiers fighting in Cuba that they be commanded by black officers. Thanks to the senator's intervention, Indiana became the first state to accept this position as general policy for its militia units.

Fairbanks' calm demeanor and "safe" Republican views made him very popular in the Senate. As a senator from a pivotal state and a consistent defender of the McKinley administration, Fairbanks emerged as a natural successor to McKinley. He certainly looked like a president: tall (approximately six feet, four inches), dignified, always clad in a proper Prince Albert coat. In 1900 some conservatives, most notably Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, tried to maneuver Fairbanks into a vice-presidential nomination. The conservative attempt to block the nomination of New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt ended in failure, but the mention of Fairbanks for vice president fueled the senator's already growing ambition. The Indianan turned down Hanna's offer for practical reasons and because he had set his sights higher. As one journalist put it, "[Fairbanks] had dreams of the White House. He preferred to remain in the Senate until the real call came."

Charles Fairbanks' political fortunes changed dramatically on September 6, 1901, when President McKinley was assassinated while visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He lost not only a friend, but also a political patron. Although McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, promised to continue the fallen president's policies, Fairbanks' close connection to the White House was severed. Beyond these personal considerations, the nation's political environment was about to change—partly in response to Roosevelt—in ways that would leave Fairbanks in the shadows. President Roosevelt brought a new glamour to the presidency. He dominated the news and shifted the national debate to new issues. None of these changes proved helpful to Fairbanks' presidential ambitions.

Conditions were also changing in Indiana. In 1899 the state legislature had elected a young firebrand named Albert J. Beveridge to the Senate. The new junior senator from Indiana was a powerful orator who shot to prominence by advocating a policy of overseas expansion for the United States. His growing power in Indiana represented a challenge to Fairbanks. The threat became increasingly severe as Beveridge gradually broke away from the party's Old Guard and began siding with the insurgents in calling for greater regulation of railroads and business trusts. No longer merely over party power, the battle had come also to concern policies. To make matters worse for Fairbanks, President Roosevelt quite obviously preferred the counsel of Senator Beveridge.

This smoldering conflict erupted in 1901 when a federal judgeship became available in Indiana. Beveridge recommended an old friend, Francis Baker, whom Fairbanks adamantly refused to endorse. The squabble became public and was widely seen as a test of prestige within the state. Because this type of patronage could crucially affect a politician's ability to accumulate and wield power, the dispute had serious repercussions for Fairbanks. When Roosevelt nominated Baker, apparently without much concern for the prerogatives of the senior senator, there was little question which of Indiana's senators had the favor of the White House. (Source: The United States Senate - Senate History)

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...
http://www.biography.com/people/charl...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://millercenter.org/president/ess...
http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profil...
(no image) Address by Charles W. Fairbanks, one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Monmouth, Freehold, N.J., June 27, 1903 by Charles W. Fairbanks (no photo)
(no image) The Indebtedness of the West to New England by Charles W. Fairbanks (no photo)
(no image) Official Proceedings of the Thirteenth Republican National Convention: Held in the City of Chicago, June 21, 22, 23, 1904; Resulting in the Nomination of Theodore Roosevelt, of New York, for President and the Nomination of Charles W. Fairbanks, of Indiana by M W Blumenberg (no photo)
by Anonymous (no photo)
by Arthur M. Melzer (no photo)