"...unexcited for his return. Smith quipped to Wagner that "Hearst carries himself like Caesar returning from Gaul, but it seems to me like the Gauls had thrown Caesar back across the Alps." The William Randolph Hearst who exited his eighteen-month self-imposed political exile by appearing at the New York Democratic Convention at the Madison Square Garden was a curious figure; he was no longer the magnetic, epochal figure who had cast a long shadow over American politics and public life for well over a decade, but nor was he yet the colorful, affable and curious elder statesman of his California years holed up in Hearst Castle on ridge above the San Rafael Coast, greeting visitors from all over the world and from all walks of life (provided they were rich and important) like Ferdinand of Austria living out his sunset years at his Mazatlan mansion. [1] He was something in-between, wounded but not defanged, demanding of deference but struggling to still secure it. Hearst's policy instincts were often middling, but his political instincts were still sharp, and he was well aware that there were a great deal many Democrats who had taken it as gospel that they would have won the 1912 election had he not appeared on the ballot. [2]
Hearst had spent his exile first on tour in Europe and then campaigning for recruitment drives and war bonds upon his return at the start of the War, making sure to carefully avoid directly or personally criticizing his immediate successor while making it clear that he was unimpressed with the course of the war effort, and so his arrival at Madison Square Garden suggested to all in attendance that what he was really there to do was act not as elder statesman but begin plotting his return to the Presidency, ideally through either hand-picking the autumn slate or through being nominated to the Governorship himself. The 1914 convention was crucial because both the Governorship and Senate seat would be open races - George McClellan, who also desired the Presidency, was retiring and had indeed been absent from the Senate in order to volunteer on the front in a support role since the spring. Who would get which slot on the ticket, then, became an incredibly complicated dance for the various factions of the New York Democrats, further because the Liberals would not nominate their own slate until two weeks later.
Smith was upbeat at the convention, though, for no reason other than that he was highly confident that the three emergent factions - the Tammany Tigers, Hearst's cult of personality, and the equally revanchist but increasingly irrelevant Sulzer and Roosevelt - all hated each other so much that in the end there would be no choice but to find a compromise candidate. The Governorship, with its attendant patronage and the recent history of the office propelling men to the Presidency, was the top prize - ironic in hindsight, considering that a stronger Senate candidate likely would have held the seat for Democrats and could serve longer. Control over the New York Party was, however, mostly correctly seen as more important to a generation of men who had grown up with a much weaker federal government and who already could not count on much federal patronage what with President Hughes in office and Senator Colby soon to be the senior Senator, and Smith later rued the feeling that the Senate race had been punted.
Hearst pushed for Bird Sim Coler, his immediate successor in the period 1903-07, to serve a second term; Coler was a man who inspired zero passion from any corner of the party or electorate, and to Smith it seemed clear that Coler was simply a stalking horse for Hearst's putative triumphant return. The Sulzerites, with Roosevelts support, pushed for the reformist Marty Glynn, who had been Sulzer's running mate in 1910 and would have been the first Roman Catholic nominee were he to win appointment, which appealed to the Tigers but for the fact that he was a known opponent of theirs and supported the passage of a direct primary law, which Tammany simply could not abide by. Tammany's boss Charlie Murphy, in turn, was pushing for the nomination of their own Irish Catholic candidate - William F. Sheehan, a longtime figure in New York politics who brought the advantage of being from Buffalo, but the taint of Tammany was strong upon him even for the beating heart of the machine, especially once it was leaked to the New York Journal - Roosevelt's flagship tabloid - on the eve of the convention that Sheehan had written a letter to both the Mayor of Buffalo and to Murphy arranging for either the gubernatorial or Senate seat with promises of state patronage to both. [3] Young reformists in the party were appalled, but many of them were at war, particularly their ringleader Franklin Roosevelt - cousin to Theodore - who had resigned the legislature and was at sea with the US Navy. [4]
So it came that the contest for the Governor's seat was wide open, but all candidates were incredibly weak or designed specifically as stalking horses, and the convention was wide open for a curve-ball. It quickly became a two-man race between Glynn and Coler, with Sheehan crippled by his now-infamous letter, but also became obvious that neither man enjoyed sufficient support to earn the required three-fifths majority on the floor to secure the nomination, under the party's then-extant rules. Smith suspected what was to come next - Coler would graciously drop out and nominate Hearst as a "unity candidate" who knew how to win, and urge Glynn's nomination to the Senate position, thus potentially bringing the Sulzerites onboard, too. By the second day of the convention, this was starting to now look imminent, especially after Sheehan finally dropped out and called on his colleagues to find a "worthy compromise."
Unpopular as the Hughes administration was becoming in New York, Smith was concerned about Hearst at the top of the ticket not just because of the fatigue voters had with the man after his dominant position in the state for two decades but also because he suspected that the Liberals were stronger than Murphy gave them credit for, particularly Upstate - after all, one did not win consecutive gubernatorial races in a state with a working-class urban population as large as New York's by luck, no matter how moderate and cooperative with state Democrats both Hughes and now Stimson had been. The Upstate had traditionally been the bedrock of Whig, then Republican, and now Liberal politics in the state, with a moral righteousness and passion borne over from its reputation as the religious "burned-over district" of a century earlier and acting as a counterweight to the long-Democratic Downstate, center primarily in Manhattan but now increasingly in the Bronx and the traditional Liberal-leaning borough of Brooklyn, too. [5] To Smith, the ideal candidate for Governor was a fresh face who would partner well with the legislature, was acceptable both to Tammany Hall and Hearst, and did not offend the sensibilities of voters, and to that end he shocked the convention, after conferring privately with Wagner, by placing into nomination the name of James Gerard, a state judge unfamilair to much of the public or even many convention goers.
Gerard on paper was a non-entity and curious choice, a former county party chairman and associate of Murphy's, but he made a certain amount of sense the longer delegates thought about it. He was not tied to the scandals of the Boss Croker era like Sheehan had been, and was not clearly a stalking horse for another big-name candidate like Hearst or the unlikely duo of Sulzer-Roosevelt, meaning that he could satisfy various factions of the state party while taking an independent line. He offended the young radicals who had been indignant at Sheehan, sure, but he was an Upstate man from the Finger Lakes who had spent a great deal of time both in the City but also in Albany, thus covering a great deal of the same geographic advantages Sheehan may have provided. Gerard surprised on the third day with a second-place showing behind Glynn, and the next surprise came when Coler stunned the convention in announcing he would withdraw and throw his support behind Gerard, not Hearst. The convention was stunned - could this really be happening? Had the former President just been outmaneuvered in his comeback bid by the Assembly's Majority Leader?
It turned out that he had - Smith had entrusted the operation to a young delegate from Rockland County, James Farley, who in four years time would rise to that county party's charimanship and be instrumental in Smith's second showdown with Hearst's operation at a party convention, this time attempting to take the mantle for himself. Farley had encouraged Gerard's nomination and also helped broker Glynn's position on the ticket as Gerard's running-mate to mollify Sulzer; for the Senate post, with Sheehan effectively out, the nomination went instead to Brooklyn Borough President Alfred Steers, who was unaffiliated with Tammany and had been elected on a fusion ticket of Democrats, Socialists and left-wing Liberals and was thus thought to have mass appeal.
Farley's other value to Smith was his deep understanding of Upstate New York politics, and he predicted correctly that the region was asserting itself not just as the state's but the country's pre-eminent swing area. It had swung against its traditional Liberal leanings starting in 1898 and especially in the 1902-06 timeframe, powering Hearst's monster urban margins in industrial cities like Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica and Schenectady while giving Democrats major margins in the House, and in 1910 and 1912 had provided the buffer that helped Liberals narrowly retake the House and provided the entirety of Hughes' spread in the state; a worse result in Upstate, and he would have lost New York and with it the Presidency. Upstate New York, a strange and alien land to Smith despite his time in Albany, was rapidly emerging as the place where elections in the United States were won, and its primacy flexed its muscles in the 1914 midterm - four of the six House seats Democrats picked up in the state were from north of the Bronx. As for statewide, it was surely not by accident that Gerard - an Upstater who spent a great deal of time in his native Finger Lakes every year - triumphed while the urbanite Steers fell a stunning two thousand voters short.
The results were more complicated than simply Upstate vs. Downstate, of course - Democrats had expected Wadsworth, the Lieutenant Governor, to seek Stimson's job, but after the Democratic convention he shrewdly jumped over to the Senate race, correctly deducing that Steers was the weaker opponent. Wadsworth's weaknesses as a statewide candidate - his public opposition to the institution of women's suffrage earlier in the year, his poor relationship with the legislature and the progressive Hughes/Stimson wing of the Liberal machine, the greater focus on the Governor's race from Democrats frustrated after being locked out of the mansion for eight years - were less acute in running for federal office, where his unusual profile as a "wet" Liberal allowed him to avoid what was otherwise a very effective attack by primarily-wet Democrats against the opposition and his promises to block a federal Prohibition amendment, while his status as the scion of Liberal political royalty - his father was a longtime Congressman from Upstate (curiously, both Wadsworth and Gerard were born and raised in Geneseo, a town that had a very good election in 1914 in seeing two of its favorite sons elected to statewide office), his grandfather a decorated general in the War of Secession, and his wife a daughter of the slain President John Hay - opened pocketbooks for him and found him outside support streaming into the state. Gerard's opponent, meanwhile, was Attorney General Charles Whitman, arguably the stronger candidate by virtue of his office and as a close associate and confidant of Hughes. Ironically, it was Whitman who was thus easier to attack - fatigue with the Hughes/Stimson regime backfired on Whitman, and the President's declining to campaign for down-ticket candidates as was traditional due to the war left him largely on his own, without the same kinds of powerful allies that Wadsworth was able to bring in for him. While Wadsworth scraped over the line by the skin of his teeth, Gerard won surprisingly decisively, as did the rest of the ticket - the difference, in the end, was once more found in Upstate, where Gerard considerably outran Speers and Wadsworth did the same compared to Whitman. The region's importance was not lost on anyone - any City candidate in the future would need to balance their appeal north of West Point with their connection to urban voters who were not quite enough to power a statewide win, a state of affairs Smith - as a Lower East Side Irish-Italian Catholic - was acutely aware of and would spend the next four years carefully working to address.
With larger legislative majorities now, too, the 1914 elections proved a huge boon for Smith and Wagner, already having made a name for themselves with the Triangle Shirtwaist investigation and the women's suffrage amendment, proving that they were just as much kingmakers and players of "the game" in New York politics as Murphy, whom their relations with remained cordial. Gerard was in many ways dependent on Smith now, too, which boosted the ambitious Speaker's influence over legislation and patronage alike, and the shocking results of 1914 had essentially ended the direct influence of Sulzer on the state's politics a mere four years after he had thought he was headed to a triumphant pre-Presidential coronation as Governor while badly damaging both Hearst and Roosevelt, though they would limp on to the next contest. Smith's only frustration was that Wadsworth had scraped by - a frustration that would be compounded by the circumstances of his budding Liberal rival's improbable survival in the 1920 Democratic landslide when Liberal colleagues left and right were being ousted by outraged voters - but the deck had seemingly been cleared on a generation of New York politics with a new generation inaugurated. The future of the New York Democrats had arrived, and it looked and sounded a great deal like Alfred E. Smith..." [6][7]
- The Happy Warrior
[1] Spoiiiiilerrrrr
[2] I agree with this pov to an extent, for what it's worth - Kern or Marshall would have had a much easier time beating Hughes, though not guaranteed.
[3] This is all loosely based on a real sequence of events in 1911 that saw OTL's FDR make his mark on NYS politics for the first time
[4] More on this to come
[5] Through most of the 19th century, recall, Brookyln and New York were separate cities with entirely different party and governmental structures and cultures
[6] There's a lot going on in this update beyond the usual fun convention horse-trading shenanigans. The big takeaways here are the evolution of Smith's rise in New York politics, his introduction to Jim Farley, and the major chit he now enjoys thanks to his influence over Gerard and realization that he needs to speak to the Upstate voters to win (which is where Farley comes into play, as he did for Smith OTL). There's a generational shift here, which is what I really want to focus on - Sulzer, Hearst, TR, all these guys are beginning to fade, and we should view the 1914 elections as a big piece of that. I would also argue that there's a more sophisticated Democratic operation emerging, or at least that's what I intended to convey, with the Machine thinking a little more tactically, learning from its mistakes, and not just plowing cronies into offices like it might have done in the past.
(Author's Note: And with that we also wrap up our 1914 midterm coverage. It's a weird election, with three very divergent results depending on if you look at the Senate, House and state level, but an important one as it sets up a lot of players we'll be following more closely either starting now (Smith, Norris) or in the 1920s and even 1930s)
