when I was trying to understand your history, that there had been a certain diminution at one time in the authority and power and influence of the State Governor.…I think it no less interesting to observe that of late years the tendency seems to have been for the power and influence and authority of the State Governor to increase and be revivified…your people seem to be looking more and more to your Governor as the representative of the consciousness and conscience of the people of the State.
—Ambassador James Bryce, 19102
Prelude
In late summer of his first year as governor, Woodrow Wilson attended the fourth annual conference of governors, held in Spring Lake, New Jersey. The so-called “House of Governors,” instituted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908,3 was illustrative of the growing power of state executives during the Progressive Era, and a locus for debating just what direction that newly found power should take. As the conference's host governor, Wilson unexpectedly found himself in the middle of a heated exchange with another, less prominent, newly elected governor. The New York Times reported that discussion over executive powers turned “warm” when Alabama's Emmet O'Neal questioned the merits of the increasingly popular use by state legislatures of the initiative, referendum, and recall in the states.4 These innovations of progressivism were said to restore democracy to the people, giving ordinary citizens direct access to legislation, public policy, and their political leaders.5 Importantly, all three features had the tendency to weaken the strength of parties while bolstering the authority of executives.6
Governor O'Neal impugned these measures as catering to “every popular impulse and yielding to every wave of popular passion.”7 Wilson, for his part, stood firm: “The people of the United States want their Governors to be leaders in matters of legislation because they have serious suspicion as to the source of the legislation, and they have a serious distrust of their legislatures…what I would urge as against the views of Gov. O'Neal is that there is nothing inconsistent between the strengthening of the powers of the Executive and the direct power of the people.”8
O'Neal was unimpressed. “I would rather stand with Madison and Hamilton,” he began, and—in a direct shot at Wilson's infatuation with the British parliamentary system—then continued, “than to stand with some modern prophets and some of our Western statesmen.”9 However crafty and acerbic O'Neal may have been, his retort would recede into the mists of history's losing arguments. Indeed, Wilson's support for a more plebiscitary executive was hardly novel, as American governors had been making the case for expanded executive authority for over a generation. Because states were less constricted than the federal government in amending their constitutions, they often took the lead in recasting legislative-executive relations.10 The British ambassador and scholar James Bryce underscored this development in his visit to the Governor's Conference in 1910. Governors had so increased their visibility and power since Bryce's famous study of America twenty years earlier that he had, by the early twentieth century, become inclined to see them as fonts for the expression of popular sentiment.11 “You are all,” Bryce said in his closing remarks to the assembly of governors meeting in Washington, “the servants of and desirous to be the exponents of public opinion.”12
At that same 1910 gathering, Wilson, now campaigning for governor, sounded his views on executive power in his keynote address: “Every Governor of a State is by the terms of the Constitution a part of the Legislature…. He has the right of initiative in legislation, too, though he has so far, singularly enough, made little use of it…. There is no executive usurpation in a Governor's undertaking to do that. He usurps nothing which does not belong to him of right…. He who cries usurpation against him is afraid of debate, wishes to keep legislation safe against scrutiny, behind closed doors and within the covert of partisan consultations.”13
Wilson's arguments, including his all but forgotten encounter with Governor O'Neal, were emblematic of the longstanding fight over the meaning of executive power in the United States. Importantly, these battles had been fought increasingly in the states. Indeed, the nation's governors were in many respects modeling emerging forms of executive leadership that would become common in the modern presidency. Much of the change in the nation's party dynamics and development of direct primaries was attributable to these “hustling candidates” who emerged in the states in the late nineteenth century. As John F. Reynolds writes, “Landing a [presidential] nomination after 1900 required travel to greet delegates and voters, oratorical skills, and even advertising. These new rituals of democracy were already in evidence when it came to local offices during the 1880s. Many of the more proactive gubernatorial aspirants had mastered the necessary political skills by running for lesser offices such as mayor.”14
In the arc of political history marked by the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the New Deal, it should not be surprising that the nation's governors would emerge as the chief architects of a nascent presidential republic. These were the “modern prophets” most responsible for reinventing executive theory since the founding. While Alexander Hamilton, the most vigorous early supporter of presidential power, argued that the American president was altogether different from the British king, his early effort to compare the new chief magistrate to the nation's most powerful governor was instructive. The president was not a king, Hamilton reasoned in The Federalist; he was more like a governor. Hamilton may have been premature in his comparison, but by the early twentieth century the American president and the nation's governors had, in fact, started to resemble each other more and more. While governors were often overlooked as significant political actors throughout much of the nineteenth century—James Madison famously referred to them as “ciphers”—they were to become disproportionately responsible for theorizing and, at times, introducing some of the most basic features of modern presidential leadership.
Unfortunately, one of the glaring omissions in studies of the American presidency has been the limited attention paid to presidential background. The effect of this omission has been to diminish the significance of the contributions of governors, who were at the fore of the shift toward an executive-centered republic. Despite how well this period (1876-1932) has been covered by historians and political scientists alike, there are strikingly few analyses of the shared trajectories of the governorship and presidency during this time. The presidency is the ultimate executive office, yet not all presidents have had prior executive experience. Moreover, those presidents most often associated with the rise of the modern presidency were all once governors. These perspectives on American political history hold important implications when evaluating the origins, evolution, and democratic character of the modern presidency.
Governors and the Modern Presidency
What do we mean when we speak of the modern presidency? The scholarly distinction between modern and premodern has mostly concerned the movement of presidential behavior away from adherence to the more formal and expressed powers of the office to use of those informal and expanded powers claimed by later presidents. These informal powers are often extralegal and supraconstitutional. While a wide-ranging debate over the precise meaning of a modern presidential office persists,15 there is broad consensus that changes in presidential leadership beginning around 1900 were characterized by a number of important developments. These included a president more disposed to leading the legislative branch and the newly adopted role of the president as unqualified party leader.16 Critically, modern presidents have also been distinguished from their predecessors for their institutionalization (and exploitation) of press and media relations—phenomena especially peculiar to the modern age.17 In addition, modern executive behavior has been characterized by the emergence and expansion of the administrative state, a development occurring in both the American governorship and presidency at this time. Finally, modern presidents have led with a deep and abiding belief in executive-centered government—a theoretical view shared by self-professed conservatives and liberals alike. Taken together, these variables of legislative, party, media, administrative, and executive governing philosophy constitute the central
