(along with commissioners for Philadelphia's, New Orleans's, and San Francisco's custom houses).64 His so-called “popular baths” were public addresses delivered outside of Washington to support his legislative agenda, earning him the moniker “Rutherford the Rover.”65 In fact, Hayes has been credited with delivering more speeches on tour while president than his six immediate predecessors combined.66 Ari Hoogenboom has summarized Hayes's contributions to the executive turn away from First Republic principles of executive leadership well: “Despite his small staff, Hayes strengthened the office of the presidency. His concept of his office differed from that of his immediate predecessors, who had either embraced or enhanced the Whig approach to the presidency.…Although he had been a Whig and was hoping to revive and realign southern Whigs, he moved away from the Whig ideal of a weak president who was subservient to Congress and deferential to his cabinet.”67
Despite Hayes's limited constitutional authority, his Ohio tenure included innovations that would become common among the state's progressive class to come. He established Ohio's modern university (which would become Ohio State University); he pushed the legislature to ratify the fifteenth amendment and reforms aimed at protecting the mentally ill and the incarcerated—areas where he did have a degree of executive authority as governor. Likewise, he was an early advocate of civil service reform and railroad regulation in Ohio.68 He was, as one historian described him, “an early progressive.”69 In many respects, this aspect of Hayes's legacy is lost in the fallout of what the election of 1876 has come to represent in the popular imagination. This is understandable, but it should not obscure the layered object lesson from the election of 1876. Tilden and Hayes helped spawn a new thinking in executive leadership, positioning the American governorship as a popular and characteristically “honest” executive institution for democratic reform. While the transition to a modern presidential republic was still at least a quarter century away, its contours could be seen in the shadows of Reconstruction's demise.
The Cleveland Connection: Beyond Bourbon Leadership
Grover Cleveland is said to have come out of the conservative business wing of late nineteenth-century Democratic politics. His tariff and hard money policies spoke to a so-called Bourbon interest in preventing “control of the government by farmers, wage earners and inefficient, irresponsible officeholders.”70 Henry F. Graff has explained the Bourbon movement well: “Bourbon Democracy was a name inspired not by the Kentucky whiskey but by the backward-looking restored monarchy in France, of which Talleyrand, the irrepressible French diplomat, had quipped that its people had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It was a form of Jeffersonianism dedicated to small, mostly inert government, aimed more at protecting business than promoting the substantial needs of a larger population.”71
Taken at face value, there is much to commend in this view of Cleveland's presidency. Indeed, Horace Samuel Merrill's summation of Cleveland as a “narrow legalist” is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.72 Cleveland's governorship and presidency—particularly his first term—demonstrate a stronger affinity for executive leadership and power than he is often given credit (or damnation) for. It was Cleveland, as governor-president, who contributed mightily to the governing philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And it was Cleveland's Democratic interregnum that presaged the preemptive politics of late twentieth-century presidencies such as Bill Clinton's.73 Most importantly, Cleveland's use of executive authority helped strengthen the presidency and reinforce the idea of the president as both national and legislative leader. FDR would look to Cleveland's presidency on occasion for insights, without provocation, and certainly without a Bourbon agenda in mind.74
It was during Cleveland's first term that he invoked “executive privilege,” employing this still somewhat exotic constitutional concept more forcefully than any president to that point during peacetime. Alyn Brodsky has called it “Cleveland's greatest achievement: retrieving for the executive branch many of the prerogatives that had fallen to the legislative branch through a succession of presidential mediocrities.”75 The impetus for Cleveland's claim was the Tenure of Office Act. Congress had passed this piece of legislation in its effort to derail the Democratic presidency of Andrew Johnson; the act effectively turned over all removal authority to the United States Senate, detaching it from the president's appointive powers. As David A. Crockett has recounted:
In February, 1886, the Senate began asking the administration for information regarding executive branch suspensions. Citing the advice-and-consent clause, Cleveland sent only information on appointments, while retaining confidential letters and documents. The president himself would be the judge of whether such things could be released to the Senate. The Senate replied saying it would block all future appointments, and the stage was set for a showdown. Cleveland then sent a public message to the Senate, arguing that the Senate had no constitutional authority over dismissals and suspensions, and that sending confidential documents about appointments would embarrass and injure the president and his advisors, who would be unable to offer frank advice.76
Cleveland delivered a response to the Senate essentially declaring the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional, arguing he was “not responsible to the Senate” concerning dismissals.77 Cleveland ultimately prevailed, signing the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act in March of 1887 and restoring balance to executive-legislative relations.78 In true progressive fashion, Cleveland would later claim he helped free “the presidency from the Senate's claim of tutelage,” making the office “again the independent agent of the people.”79 While Cleveland's act was restorative, it was also, in a sense, precedent-setting. As one Hayes biographer concluded, “The modern presidency does not begin with Grover Cleveland, but Cleveland made a necessary contribution to its development when he contested the claims of the Republican Senate and thereby helped to right the balance between the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government.”80
Similarly, Cleveland's Bourbonism must be qualified when examining another aspect of his executive performance. Cleveland was anything but conservative in his use of the presidential veto, exercising it more than any other president but FDR, who governed nearly twice as long.81 Prior to the presidency, Cleveland was known first as the “Veto Mayor” of Buffalo and then as New York's “Veto Governor.” His willingness to favor strong executive government countered his self-proclaimed Whiggish sentiments.82 His 301 first-term vetoes were a record, and his combined total of 584 dwarfed the combined bills vetoed prior to his terms in office (132). Cleveland's most controversial veto while governor was employed to defend legalistic and high-minded purposes. His veto of the five-cent fare bill drew in a young assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, forging an early bipartisan alliance with the “twenty-five year old rising star of the Republican Party and a leader of its reform wing.”83
Cleveland's deep and studious analysis of the bill convinced him that, while a boon to a public desperate for affordable public services, it was nevertheless unconstitutional; if passed, it would negate a contract between the state and the wealthy Jay Gould, who owned the elevated line in question. Gould stood to benefit greatly by keeping the fare at ten cents. “The State must not only be strictly just, but scrupulously fair,” Cleveland said in his speech to the assembly.84 Cleveland's principled stand earned him great respect and admiration for his political courage, not the least of which from Roosevelt. Both Cleveland and TR benefited from their early reform alliance, with the two future presidents depicted by one cartoonist as presiding over the demise of the Tammany Hall “tiger.”85 While Cleveland's Bourbon democracy may be critiqued for its establishment biases, Cleveland's liberal use of the veto became a hallmark of modern executive leadership, the modern presidency, and a singular contribution of later governor-presidents.86 Such a prolific use of the veto necessarily tempers the one-dimensional view of Cleveland as legislatively neutral or weak. FDR, for one, took evident pride in being linked with Cleveland—both as president and as New York governor—through their shared proclivity to veto. “It is to me tremendously interesting,” noted Roosevelt in a letter to
