like so many of the early progressive governors at the fore of the transformation of executive power in America, Samuel J. Tilden remains an obscure figure. His place in history holds a spare vestige of importance—the losing subject of the tainted bargain that ended Reconstruction. Yet Tilden was hardly an irrelevant figure in his time. One New York Times feature on Woodrow Wilson in 1910, weeks before his election as governor of New Jersey, captured just how significant a figure the former New York governor remained: “Wilson— A Tilden, But a Tilden Up to Date,” ran the late September headline. The Times would go on to tout Wilson as “a man with all the Tilden characteristics and an appreciation of the fact that conditions have changed since Tilden's day.”6In New Jersey, Wilson would face tremendous opposition, but also great opportunity for support among progressives—provided he demonstrated credentials worthy of the Tilden legacy.7
Undoubtedly, the election of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction and the restoration of white home rule in the South, but it also heralded a new era of notoriety for state executives. The reform impetus sweeping the country at the time found its most vocal expression in the states, where governors led the way.8 Tilden's governorship reflected an early but growing movement by voters to grant greater power and voice to their executives. The shift from legislative to executive authority was purposeful, as governors were called upon to respond to the demand for specific policies that would fundamentally alter the relationship between the people, their government, and private enterprise in the states.
Besides serving as the immediate impetus ending Reconstruction, the election of 1876 has been seen as the beginning of an era of deep partisan divisions and hotly contested presidential elections. Few have seen it as the beginning of the end of America's “First Republic.”9 Formerly, American electoral politics had been typified by a Virginian philosophical approach to the presidency, buoyed by more limited conceptions of executive authority.10As the political scientist Rowland Egger noted, “The executive apparatus which emerged [from Virginia's 1776 Virginia Constitutional Convention] was weak in constitutional stature, confused in lines of authority, and wholly and irresponsibly subservient to the legislative will.”11 While late nineteenth-century American politics was certainly defined by a reform impulse, it was also joined to new and provocative executive practices. One example of this was the virtual disappearance of legislative overrides of executive vetoes in the states, which fostered greater control over policy making by governors.12
In truth, James Madison's view of governors as “little more than ciphers” reflected an executive model steeped in stringent modesty. It was legislative-, not executive-centered, government that concerned Madison initially. “Experience had proved a tendency in our governments to throw all power into the Legislative vortex,”13 Madison wrote in his notes on the Constitutional Convention. Yet, with the convention debates behind him, and fresh examples of the misuse of presidential authority arising, Madison questioned, as Jack Rakove has suggested, “whether Hamilton was using the energy of the executive to attract support to the government, or the government to attract support to the executive.”14 Andrew Jackson's and Abraham Lincoln's muscular uses of executive authority serve as notable exceptions to the Virginian conceptualization of the presidency, and are reminders of the sharp turn in late nineteenth-century executive behavior.15 Governors were at the fore of this turn; they were the “kings of state progressivism,” as described by Robert H. Wiebe, who “expanded the discretionary power of the executive.”16
Governors in the Age of Reform
Reform governors were of two minds regarding the types of changes they wanted to introduce into the political system. On the one hand, they generally favored process-oriented goals. These were tools to make democracy less of an abstract concept. Hoping to turn voters into demilegislators, both progressive theorists and politicians supported direct primaries over the old convention system. They also tended to support local initiatives and referenda over what they deemed to be the corrupt brokering over legislation all too common in American statehouses. While this orientation had its critics, even among progressives, the movement toward what Richard Hofstadter referred to as a kind of “mechanical” democracy came to represent a good deal of the reformist impulse around 1900.17
Next, reform governors sought more fundamental changes in public policy. In their efforts to upend a system weighted heavily in favor of private business and its interests, state executives implemented policies designed to limit the power of utilities, railroads, canal agencies, custom houses, and the “trusts,” which had come to embody the immoderation of the period. Whether it was a fight over “Canal Rings” as with Tilden, or a battle over the taxation of franchises as with TR, reform-minded governors sought personal power on behalf of the people. As Hofstadter outlined in The Age of Reform:
Somewhat more congenial to [reform] traditions was the idea that the evils against which the Progressives were fighting could be remedied by a reorganization of government in which responsibility and authority could be clearly located in an executive, whose acts would be open to public view. The power of the boss, they argued, like the overweening power of great corporations, was a consequence of the weakness of the political executive and the more general division of authority and impotence in government. Spokesmen of this view scoffed at the inherited popular suspicion of executive power as an outmoded holdover from the days of the early Republic when executive power was still identified with royal government and the royal governors.18
Ronald Reagan's curious conjuring of the great Progressive Era governor Hiram Johnson can only be fully understood in the context of such executiveled reform. What Johnson did in California fifty years before Reagan took office in Sacramento was part of this wider movement toward executive leadership and experimentation. In short, progressive governors reenvisioned the role of executives in the name of protecting “the interests of the people” (or “the individual” as Reagan put it to his “Meet the Press” host, Sander Vanocour).19 This idea—that the executive is uniquely responsible for guarding the public and its interests—lies at the heart of the modern presidency. The root of this form of governance, however, was planted during a period of comparatively weak presidential authority. It was state executives who first began to take the legislative initiative, often in contradistinction to their national counterparts. When Woodrow Wilson described the presidency as a “big governorship,” in Congressional Government, it was in many respects an admission of relative presidential weakness.20 Today, as political scientists continue to question the true effectiveness or democratic quality of Progressive Era tools such as the initiative or recall, there is little debate about the centrality of executive power in American politics today.
In the early 1900s, there were few prominent examples of strong executives at the national level. Woodrow Wilson's admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, however grudging, is well known; however, his equally important regard for Grover Cleveland is little remembered today. Some of this is no doubt owed to the personal animosity noted by historians between the two men, focused upon a letter Cleveland penned in which he described Wilson as lacking “intellectual honesty.”21 Wilson's imbroglio with Cleveland—a Princeton trustee opposed to then Princeton President Wilson's graduate school plan—was part of a broader battle dating to before Wilson's time in public office. “[P]ractically all the darts are supplied by the Princetonians who hate me,” Wilson would write in early 1912.22 What has also no doubt been a contributing factor in underestimating Cleveland's influence on Wilson is the effect of the natural supplanting of one great party figure of the period for another—such was the case when Cleveland eclipsed Tilden.23 And yet it was Cleveland who first helped shape Wilson's questioning of the nineteenth-century model of executive subservience to the legislature. And it was Wilson's perception of Cleveland's status as someone whom we would today describe as “outside the Beltway” that foreshadowed the role all governor-presidents would come to play—that of Washington outsider.
Wilson wrote of this phenomenon, which was fast becoming an integral part of the executive
