without political parties are a virtual impossibility. The original structure of the selection process resulted in the first of many pairs of presidents and vice presidents that worked, not together, but at cross-purposes.
When the second American president, John Adams of Massachusetts, was elected, the second-place finisher, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, became vice president. Not only did the two men come from the two most powerful and most different states in the new country (one agrarian and slaveholding, the other commercial and nonslaveholding), they were also from different political parties—the only time in American history that has happened. Jefferson quickly defined the role of vice president as a legislative function, refusing to assist President Adams in his job. Furthermore, he was the first, but not the last, vice president who spent his time in office actively working to undermine his president and build up his own political fortunes.
Jefferson ran against President John Adams in 1800 and won. By then it was evident that having the president and vice president be from different political parties was not a very good idea. And so Congress passed the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President . . . ,” meaning, in practice, that the president and vice president would form a ticket and that both men would be from the same political party.
But adoption of the Twelfth Amendment did not end hostility between presidents and their vice presidents. As political parties formed, the nomination of the presidential candidate moved from the congressional caucus to national conventions of party leaders elected in state conventions. The first national convention was held in 1831 by the Anti-Masonic party, followed by the National Republicans in 1832 and then later the Democratic Republicans in 1832. We have held national conventions to nominate presidential candidates ever since. But the dynamics of those conventions have changed greatly in the years since 1972. Unless a popular incumbent president was running for renomination, in the old days delegates arrived at the conventions having some idea of who the leading candidates for president were but needing days of intense bargaining before they could decide on a candidate. Multiple ballots were often needed to come to a consensus on a nominee. As part of the complex bargaining the vice-presidential candidate was the most important bargaining chip and was often chosen to placate the region of the country or the faction of the party that did not win the presidential nomination. Hence “balancing the ticket” became the dominant strategic imperative for choosing the vice president.
Not surprisingly, the balancing model continued to produce pairs of presidents and vice presidents who disliked and distrusted each other. Presidents tried, as much as possible, to ignore their vice presidents. They did not include them in the decisions of government, let alone assign them important responsibilities.
The most common balancing was geographic. According to political scientist Jody C. Baumgartner, in the years between 1804 and 1896 only five presidential tickets were not regionally balanced.3 Balance can be ideological as well as geographic. Geographic balance, especially between North and South, has been synonymous with ideological balance for much of American history. For instance, in the elections leading up to the Civil War, winning tickets included a southerner and a northerner. When the Whig Party convention nominated Senator William Henry Harrison from Ohio to be their presidential nominee, they looked to fill the vice-presidential slot with someone from a slave state. Thus John Tyler, a Senator from Virginia, was nominated. (Harrison died in office after only thirty-two days and Tyler became president.)
Given that the geographically balanced ticket was often also ideologically balanced, it is not surprising that when the ticket won it proved to be highly dysfunctional in government.
Perhaps one of the most disastrous balanced tickets ever was the result of Abraham Lincoln’s decision to dump his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and to replace him with Andrew Johnson. Lincoln was afraid of losing the election of 1864 and thus the chance to reconstruct the Union. So instead of directing the delegates to renominate Hamlin, a former Senator from Maine who was staunchly antislavery, Lincoln, without Hamlin’s knowledge, directed the delegates to nominate Senator Andrew Johnson from Tennessee. Johnson was a supporter of slavery but the only Senator from a slave state who voted against seceding from the Union.4 Perhaps had Lincoln lived, the inclusion of a southerner and former Democrat in the government may have helped to create a smooth Reconstruction period. As we know from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s famous book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals, Lincoln believed he could manage disagreement in government.5
As president, Johnson proved to be a lopsided supporter of the former Confederates and a firm opponent of rights for freed slaves. His positions so enraged the Republican Party that he was impeached and missed being convicted by only one vote. Johnson was not renominated by the Republican Party nor did he win the nomination of the Democratic Party, whose positions he espoused.
An especially dysfunctional pair was formed at the turn of the century in the case of “the Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle”—one wit’s description of the Republican presidential ticket of 1904. In order to please the Republican Party’s conservative wing, which was not at all happy with the radical reformist politics of Teddy Roosevelt, that year’s convention forced Senator Charles Fairbanks (R-Ind.) upon him as his running mate. Fairbanks was as different from Roosevelt as possible: He was cold and distant, in marked contrast to Roosevelt’s famous ebullience; he was heir to the old-guard McKinley faction within the Republican Party, in contrast to Roosevelt’s more modern aspirations for his party; and he was from the Midwest, whereas Roosevelt hailed from New York City. Roosevelt’s true love was a Congressman named Robert R. Hitt of Illinois. But getting Hitt on the ticket would have meant a fight between Roosevelt and the convention bosses. In the end, the vice presidency was not significant enough for Roosevelt to fight over and he accepted Fairbanks.6
Hence one of many loveless matches. Fairbanks was relegated to obscurity almost immediately, perhaps because he publicly opposed many of Roosevelt’s more progressive programs, such as the Square Deal. Fairbanks was so out of the loop that when Roosevelt left town important tasks were given to William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War and anointed successor. Having nothing to do in the executive branch, Fairbanks took seriously his job of presiding over the Senate, where he occupied himself by leading convoluted schemes against Roosevelt’s initiatives. Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Fairbanks spent much of his vice presidency running for president—but unlike Jefferson, he did not succeed. Roosevelt threw his popularity behind Taft when his term ended. Taft beat Fairbanks at the 1908 Republican convention by a comfortable margin.
It is well known that Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin, had a less-than-passionate marriage to his wife Eleanor. So too with Franklin’s first vice president, who was chosen as the result of a political deal. This “arranged” vice presidency ended up being his second loveless marriage.
Speaker of the House John Nance Garner from Texas ran for president against Roosevelt in 1932. On the first ballot at the Chicago convention Nance came in third with a mere 90 votes to Roosevelt’s 666 votes. But in those days, it took winning two-thirds of the votes cast at the convention to choose a nominee. In spite of Roosevelt’s impressive first ballot showing, the expected stampede to Roosevelt was so slow to materialize that it caused panic among his floor leaders. Finally, after much bargaining, Texas moved to Roosevelt and the nomination was his, but at a cost—in the deal, Garner was placed on the ticket as vice president.
The convention deal was the beginning of this ultimately failed relationship. While Garner started out as a loyal member of the team, by the second term he came to disagree with just about everything Roosevelt did, especially his plans to pack the courts and his policies toward labor. Moreover, he let people know it. The official Senate history of Garner includes the following anecdote around the plans to pack the courts:
While never issuing a public statement against the bill, Garner demonstrated his disapproval with two symbolic gestures. First, he held his nose and gave an emphatic “thumbs-down” sign
