The Veepstakes – An Irishman’s Diary on Indiana, cradle of US vice-presidents

Governor Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running-mate in the US presidential election, is the eighth man from Indiana to have been nominated for vice-president in the 200 years since that state was admitted to the union. Of the eight, five were elected.

No state other than New York has provided more vice-presidents than Indiana. That prompted the best known of Indiana’s vice-presidents, Thomas Marshall, to call his home state “the mother of vice-presidents”. He served under Woodrow Wilson for two terms, 1913-1921. He was the fourth vice-president from Indiana, and the second of only two Democrats from Indiana to become vice-president. He had previously been governor of Indiana.

In the period from the 1860s until the early 20th century, Indiana was a vital “swing state” – and a vice-presidential candidate was often chosen simply to help the presidential candidate win the state. Marshall, however, said that Indiana produced so many vice-presidents because it is the “home of more second-class men than any other state”. He also claimed that the only duty of a vice-president was to check each day on the president’s health.

Ill-health

Ironically, President Wilson’s ill-health in the last 18 months of his presidency presented Marshall with his biggest challenge. Wilson should have resigned, but his wife and his secretary, Joseph P Tumulty, conspired to cover up his incapacity. Mrs Wilson guided the ship of state during this period. In the absence of the president’s resignation, there was no effective mechanism to remove him – and so Marshall was denied the succession. Marshall made no attempt to seize the presidency, which would undoubtedly have thrown the country into constitutional turmoil.

While Marshall thus avoided a constitutional crisis, there was one major and regrettable consequence. During the period of Wilson’s incapacity, his cherished plans for American participation in the League of Nations were defeated in the US Senate.

Had Marshall become president in late 1919, it is likely that he would have been more flexible in his dealings with the Senate than the Wilson administration. Wilson’s illness paralysed the administration and made compromise impossible.

The first Hoosier – the name by which people from Indiana are generally known, for reasons that are unclear – to become vice-president had a much less distinguished record than Marshall. He was Schuyler Colfax, a Republican, who was Ulysses S Grant’s vice-president during his first term as president, 1869-1873. Grant’s administration was notoriously corrupt – and, while Colfax was by no means the worst of the malefactors, his integrity was compromised by his acceptance of money and stock from the Union Pacific Railroad while in office.

Before becoming vice-president, Colfax had been a popular Speaker of the House of Representatives. His genial disposition earned him the sobriquet “Smiler” Colfax, which was a pun on his exotic first name; he had been named after his maternal grandmother, whose surname was Schuyler.

There were ten presidential elections between Colfax’s term as vice-president and Marshall’s term, and in five of these a candidate for vice-president was nominated from Indiana. They were Thomas Hendricks (Democrat) in 1876, defeated; William English (Democrat) in 1880, defeated; Hendricks again in 1884, elected; Charles W Fairbanks (Republican) in 1904, elected; and John W Kern (Democrat) in 1908, defeated.

Hendricks, who served under Grover Cleveland, has the distinction of being the vice-president with the shortest period in office. He died in November 1885, after just nine months. He had been governor of Indiana in the 1870s. Fairbanks, formerly a senator, was vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt – though completely out of sympathy with Roosevelt’s reform agenda and crusading tendencies. He was again nominated for vice-president in 1916, but the Republican ticket of Charles Evans Hughes and Fairbanks was narrowly defeated by Wilson and Marshall.

Both Hendricks and Fairbanks were undoubtedly “second-class men”, to quote Thomas Marshall’s self-deprecating quip. So too was the last Hoosier vice-president, Dan Quayle – as was cruelly demonstrated in a televised debate with his rival vice-presidential candidate in 1988, Lloyd Bentsen. Quayle drew a parallel between himself and the youthful John F Kennedy, but that backfired when Bentsen scoffed in reply, “You’re no Jack Kennedy”. A Republican, Quayle served under the first President Bush, 1989-1993. Like Fairbanks, he had previously been a senator.

Indiana has produced only one US president, Benjamin Harrison, a Republican – elected in 1888. Another Hoosier, Wendell Wilkie, was the Republican candidate for president in 1940, but was emphatically defeated by Franklin Roosevelt.