authority.”45
Tilden, for his part, turned down the position of collector offered to him by President Polk over thirty years before his presidential bid.46 Nearly every politician of ambition coveted this plum of the New York political machine. Tilden was among the few to spurn the office. In time, Tilden's Jeffersonian aversion to centralization made him an opponent of what would become a more robust executive approach forwarded by TR, Wilson, and, ultimately, FDR. Nonetheless, this “conservative” aspect of Tilden's philosophy made him equally opposed to centralization of municipal authority that violated the public interest. As the issue of municipal corruption increased in prominence nationally, Americans became fearful the nation was moving away from its founding principles. David McCulloch captured the sentiment well: “For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities.…The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years, learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed.”47 Tilden interpreted his executive role as requiring him to serve as a buffer between the public and New York's political machine. Like so many antimachine governors who would follow during the Progressive Era, he launched an attack on municipal corruption, including that of Tweed. It was a struggle that forced reconsideration of the governor's power of removal, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Along these reformist lines, Tilden's inaugural address targeted the Canal Ring of private interests that had abused governmental outlays to the state's canals, and he likewise targeted the corruptibility of the famed Custom House itself.
Such shots across the bow were intended not only for New Yorkers, but also “our sister States” who stood to benefit from “an improved polity, wise legislation, and good administration.”48 Despite losing his presidential bid, Tilden's gubernatorial administration stood as an early symbol of reform, one not forgotten by later progressives. The immodest but always revealing Theodore Roosevelt knew the parameters that defined his executive legacy. “I think I have been the best Governor of my time,” he claimed, “better either than Cleveland or Tilden.”49 Roosevelt would eschew the Jeffersonian plot line of early reformers, favoring a national politics and more overt forms of executive power. But it was Tilden who destroyed Tweed, first with a bold, if not unglamorous, affidavit, followed by targeted legislation during his governorship. Tweed's end was indeed ignominious, spiraling downward amid his flight to California, then Spain, and, ultimately, a return to New York in handcuffs. He would die in prison in 1878. “I guess Tilden and [Democratic party regular Charles S.] Fairchild have killed me at last. I hope they will be satisfied now,” he said.50
Rise of the Hudson Progressives
Why were Hudson progressives so successful? First, Tilden and later New York governors had far more authority in New York than did Hayes and his counterparts in Ohio. While both men came to their governorships at a time when New York and Ohio lacked as much as an executive mansion, Tilden at least held the nation's most powerful executive state office.51 Here, early American executive institutional development, like much of what can be explained about American political life, is attributable to geography. By and large, New York and New Jersey escaped the more conservative executive constitutional realities confronting states south of Pennsylvania.52
Not all Hudson governors were uniformly “progressive,” of course. Nevertheless, the recurrence of progressive executive leadership and its popular support gave the New York and New Jersey variety of progressivism a geopolitical legacy with enduring national importance. As well detailed by the political historian Charles Thach, New York's constitutional oddity was in granting the state's executive exceptional authority. One of the rationales could not have been more unpredictable, as New York invigorated its governor in the aftermath of the so-called “Doctors' Riots.” These were a series of citizen attacks against the city's physicians, caught, of all things, digging up graves for cadavers to be dissected for medical research. Once it was discovered that “respectable” citizens' bodies were part of this project (where “strangers” and “negroes” had been used formerly), New Yorkers took matters into their own hands.53 As the former editor of the New York Tribune Joel Tyler Headley recounted in his short history of the riots, “The Mayor and the Governor seemed to have an unaccountable repugnance to the use of force.”54 In his classic study of the American presidency, Thach credits the riots against the doctors with compelling New York to strengthen its executive, forwarding a “body of constitutional interpretation, in which, indeed, may be found some of the most important of American constitutional principles.”55 More than that of any other state, New York's constitution played a profound role in shaping the framers' arguments for a strong “energetic” presidency.56 Coupled with a disproportionately influential press and a growing popular antagonism to the region's large political machines and bosses, Hudson politics would evolve to favor executive-centered solutions.
Despite somewhat weaker constitutional grants of power, other governors found ways to test the limits of their executive authority. Hayes, for example, was hardly docile in his efforts to exert executive influence in Ohio. Unlike New York's governor, Ohio's chief executive was far closer to one of Madison's “ciphers.” First, Ohio's governor lacked veto power. The governor also lacked authority over the state budget and held very limited appointive powers. Yet Hayes used the appointments he had at his discretion in unprecedented ways. As was increasingly common, Hayes sought to use his stature as governor to project an image of himself as being above party. He did this most effectively through his appointment of a fair number of Democrats to state offices, a rarity for most governors at the time. “I was assailed as untrue to my party,” Hayes recalled, “but the advantages of minority representation were soon apparent, and the experiment became successful.”57
Hayes took honor to extremes, however, when he pledged in his acceptance letter to seek only one term if elected president in 1876. Hayes thus peremptorily made himself a lame-duck.58 Nevertheless, the reform issue was effectively muted by Hayes's nomination—a preview of sorts for when New Jersey's progressive Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson, effectively divided the progressive vote to his advantage in the 1912 presidential election. As Roy Morris, Jr. writes, “Hayes's many years of honest service as governor of Ohio, far from the quicksands of Washington,” made him a formidable counter, if not equal, to Tilden's reputation as the outsider standard-bearer of reform.59
While Tilden's leadership of New York's Democratic legislature made his veto power largely unnecessary, Hayes employed his limited executive authority in Ohio and later as president in more confrontational ways.60 As governor, he wielded power on behalf of conservative interests during the 1876 Ohio coal strike, ordering the Ohio militia “to protect the coal operators’ property and the strikebreakers’ ‘right to work.’”61 Hayes would take similar action as president, putting down the Great Strike of 1877. In this instance, he responded to governors' calls for aid, as some 100,000 railroad workers engaged in a mass work stoppage—the largest in the nation's history. Hayes's action was unprecedented, as he employed federal troops for the first time in a dispute between labor and private industry.62 “The strikes have been put down by force,” Hayes would say, “but now for the real remedy. Can't something be done by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil?”63 The tendency to overemphasize Hayes's use of executive power toward conservative ends, as is often the case with Cleveland, obscures the larger story of how the expansion of presidential authority owes its beginnings, humble as they were, to a period well before the presidency of FDR. The use of power in the name of conservative policies still tends to increase power. This has been especially true of presidential power.
In addition to intervening in the Great Strike, Hayes took bold executive action elsewhere. He vetoed a widely popular bill excluding Chinese immigrants. He struck a blow against senatorial courtesy by calling for Chester A. Arthur's resignation from the Port of New York Custom House, initiating
