The People’s House

New York Governors and their Elaborate Home, 1875 - 1913: Part II

Last time we covered the history of New York’s Executive Mansion and its inhabitants in broad strokes, from the end of post-civil war reconstruction in the late 1870s to the 1890s. Referred to as the “gilded age”, it was time of economic growth, industrialization, societal unrest and political corruption.

We’ll be continuing our tour now, picking up where we left off as the United States experiences a new hopeful dawn called “the progressive era”— and ending in 1913, as the first whispers of what would become World War I slip into the national conversation.

I want to stress that, while major events and memorable national figures will inevitably come up, this is not an in-depth history of the state or the country. It is an overview, anchored by the governors of the time period, their life in the Executive Mansion, their associations and most notable achievements, as well as an account of the forgotten dealings behind New York’s state-wide gubernatorial elections.

Governor Flower’s Monument in Watertown, NY

Owning in part to the “Panic of 1893” and his own growing distain for his Tammany associates (who were in the midst of their usual crop of scandals) Governor Roswell Flower did not seek reelection in 1894. At the state Democratic convention that year, former governor David B. Hill returned to ram through his own nomination for the job— hoping to mount a personal comeback after his bungled attempt at the presidency the previous year. But he would fail to do so, defeated in the general election by Republican Levi P. Morton, ex- vice president under Benjamin Harrison.

Morton and his successor, Frank Black (who was nominated in 1896 due to Morton’s refusal to cooperate with the wishes of party boss, Thomas C. Platt) made little lasting impact on the Executive Mansion. Morton, arriving with a large team of staffers and servants, believed, like Hill, that it was too small. Black, conversely, couldn’t afford to house his family there. So he would travel back home to Troy between legislative sessions.

Governor Black’s successful opposition to a bill, supported by Thomas Platt, that would’ve banned newspaper cartoons critical of state officials, hurt him politically. But accusations of money squandering on an expansion of the Erie Canal were devastating, so once again the Republicans began looking elsewhere for a gubernatorial candidate in 1898.

On August 15th, a crowd of excited onlookers congregating at Montauk Point, Long Island cheered as Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and his “Rough Riders” disembarked the troop-ship Miami. It had been some time since his days as a state assemblymen. Since then, Roosevelt had lost his wife and mother on the same day in 1884, traveled west in despair— hoping to find himself again, served as Secretary of the Navy, remarried and become a hero in the Spanish-American War. Someone in the crowd shouted to him “Will you be our next Governor?” Roosevelt refused to comment.

A day earlier in Sheepshead Bay, on the other side of Long Island, now- Senator Platt had discussed with his men (state party chairman Benjamin Odell Jr. and Rep. Lemuel Quigg) this exact same question. Platt was only partially convinced it would be a good idea. He was fully aware of Roosevelt’s reputation as a reformer and feared he would cause problems for the party machine if he was given a chance. To this point, Roosevelt promised he would not “make war with Platt or anybody else if war could be avoided” when Quigg met with him on the 19th. Seeing no option other than an electoral loss if he didn’t, Platt gave his blessing to Roosevelt, who received the official nomination of the Republican Party a month later. The Democrats nominated an incredibly obscure but scandal-free judge Augustus van Wyck, as a compromise struck between ex- Governor Hill, Richard Crocker (the new leader of Tammany Hall) and Brooklyn power-broker Hugh McLaughlin. Van Wyck was the brother of incumbent mayor of NYC, Robert van Wyck. Roosevelt would defeat him by a margin of 17,794 votes.

Governor Roosevelt’s Portrait, 1899 - 1900

Roosevelt was not a fan of the Executive Mansion, referring to it as a “gloomy pile”. On his first night as governor, Roosevelt famously came home too late and found that his staff had locked him out, thinking he was in bed. He responded to this inconvenience by breaking a window and entering anyway, which biographer Edmund Morris used as a metaphor for his impact on state politics as a whole. Platt had requested Roosevelt consult him on every major appointment— and the latter complied occasionally. In turn, he was able to convince Platt to push a massive civil service reform bill through the legislature.

In 1899, Vice President Garret Hobart died and Sen. Platt, tiring of Roosevelt’s crusades, attempted to banish him to political oblivion by nominating him as a running-mate for President William McKinley at the national convention in June 1900. The length of a gubernatorial term had been shortened once again by the constitutional convention of 1894, so someone would have to be nominated for that year’s simultaneous state-wide election as well. Platt selected state chairman Odell for the job. His opponent was John Stanchfield, a former assemblyman who lost with 45% of the vote.

Odell arrived to meet Vice President-elect Roosevelt in Albany on December 31st, 1900. His father, his wife Linda, their children and his brothers arrived the same day and were taken to the Executive Mansion. His family’s old horse, Duke, was meant to be left behind during the move but due to the insistence of his eight-year-old daughter Estelle Odell— the governor-elect allowed the horse to make the journey with them. He was sworn in as the first governor of the 20th century on January 2nd, 1901.

From 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. the mansion was packed with visitors once again. The corridors were decorated with flowers, palms and other rare plants from the greenhouses on the property and multiple fire places warmed the smaller reception rooms. Odell and his wife were assisted by the wives of various state officials throughout the day.  Linda hosted her first “at home”, an informal party, on January 16th, where guests listened to speeches from the State Bar Association. Ambassador of the Qing Empire to the U.S. Wu Ting-Fang, who lectured widely on Chinese culture, was in attendance. On the 24th of the month, the Odell’s held a dinner for the Justices of the Supreme Court, and held another even bigger reception six days later. Later still, at the end of the summer, President McKinley traveled to a fair in Buffalo where he was shot by anarchist sympathizer Leon Czolgosz. For several days he stayed at the home of lawyer John Milburn and appeared to be recovering, but ultimately died on September 14th. Vice President Roosevelt would then assume the presidency— Senator Platt’s worst nightmare.

Governor Odell won a tight race for reelection against former state comptroller Bird Sim Coler in 1902. After this, his intention to wrestle party control away from the nearly seventy-year-old Platt became clear. In 1904, Odell’s handpicked successor Lt. Governor Frank Higgins defeated Platt’s candidate former Lt. Governor Timothy L. Woodruff’s bid for the Republican nomination. Higgins was successfully elected in the general, and inhabited the governor’s mansion for a single term.

In the interim between the gubernatorial elections of 1904 and 1906, bombastic newspaper publisher and U.S. representative, William Randolph Hearst, had made several failed attempts at higher office including a bid for the presidency (he lost the Democratic nomination to Judge Alton Parker, who lost to Roosevelt) and mayor of NYC. In the latter attempt, Hearst had run as a third party candidate due to friction with Tammany Hall stemming from his time in congress. However, he was able to gain the Democratic nomination for governor the following year by threatening to run as a third party “spoiler” again. He defeated U.S. Rep. William Sulzer and businessman John A. Dix in the process.

The Republicans, particularly President Roosevelt, were not fond of Hearst who they saw as a destabilizing and uncontrollable force. In October, a month after the candidates for both parties had been chosen, Roosevelt sent a letter to a British journalist conveying “It is a little difficult for me to give you an exact historic judgement about a man whom I so throughly dislike and despise as I do Hearst.”

Meanwhile, despite his hand-picked successor’s victory, Odell’s influence over state Republicans had been in question since before he even handed Higgins the keys to the Executive Mansion. After the election of 1904, Sen. Chauncey Depew, a friend of Sen. Thomas Platt, was up for reelection and Odell wanted him replaced by his own man, former governor Frank Black. Instead of throwing his weight behind Odell’s choice, Governor-elect Higgins supported Depew, embarrassing Odell. He then appointed former mayor of Olean, Nicholas Franchot, as Superintendent of Public Works, refusing to reinstate Odell’s friend from college, Charles Boyd. This was a clear message. The person in charge of public works not only had control over canal contracts but also thousands of patronage jobs and earned $6,000 annually. Higgins had incited another inter-party war.

The governor and the chairman continued to squabble right up until the state convention two years later. Odell wanted Black to get the gubernatorial nod and brought 350 delegates. Higgins wanted Lt. Gov. Matthew Bruce to get it, and arrived with a substantial majority that had been originally pledged to Higgins himself, before he backed out of the contest. A third man, New York County boss Herbert Parsons showed up with 188 delegates for his own candidate, insurance investigator Charles Evan Hughes, but only 110 of them were actually pledged— the rest were undecided. Concerned that Odell could scoop them up and swing the convention in his favor— nominating the unpopular Black— and risk a win for Hearst in November, Roosevelt broke with tradition and interfered by negotiating a deal. Charles Evan Hughes would receive the nomination. Forced to run without the help of Tammany, who still harbored a grudge against him, Hearst then lost to Hughes in the fall.

Governor Charles Evan Hughes, 1907 - 1910

Hughes’s time as governor was substantial for those in favor of reform. He had campaigned against child labor and once he was able to do so, banned minors from working certain dangerous jobs and limited them to a 48-hour workweek. He also expanded the civil service, successfully pushed for a limit on political donations, and forced candidates to keep track of their receipts and expenditures.

Hughes was the son of Reverend David C. Hughes, who had arrived in the United States in 1885 and immediately began preaching in churches across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Frantically religious by all definitions, he was known for knocking pipes and cigarettes out of people’s mouths because he believed smoking was an immoral offense. On December 15th, 1909 he became the first recorded death to occur in the Executive Mansion, passing after a “recent stroke of apoplexy.” His funeral services were held in the same building he had died in, officiated by Reverend Thomas Anderson two days later. Fascinatingly, Governor Hughes’s term also featured a notable birth at the residence. His daughter, Elizabeth Hughes, was born there in 1907. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1918, at the age of eleven, and was one of the first people treated with insulin injections. She received 42,000 shots over the course of her life, which ended in 1981.

Governor Hughes resigned on October 6th, 1910 after hosting a luncheon for Lt. Gov. Horace White who took the oath of office following the former’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Taft. White was the nephew of Cornell University’s first president Andrew Dickson White, and he lived at the Executive Mansion until January 1st of the following year, at which point he and his wife Jane departed to make room for Governor-elect John A. Dix.

Dix, in a departure from tradition that was only seen previously with Governor Hill, was sworn in at a private ceremony in his former home on State Street, apparently due to infighting within the state Democratic Party. He and his wife, Ellen, hosted a pre-inauguration ceremony regardless, undertaken with difficulty due to a lack of staff. Although Dix was able to turn the state deficit of $1,500,000 into a surplus of $4,000,000- the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the calls for workplace safety reforms that broke out in it’s wake overshadowed his success. 146 garment workers died in the incident, many of them teenage girls of Italian and Jewish decent.

Governor Dix attempted renomination at the state convention in 1912 but withdrew after the failing to gain a majority on the first three ballots. In his place, U.S. Rep. William “Plain Bill” Sulzer was nominated, and won the general election later that year against Job Elmer Hedges, a Republican activist, and the Roosevelt affiliated Bull-Moose Party’s nominee: Commerce and Labor Secretary under the former president, Oscar Straus.

Sulzer’s road to the Executive Mansion was a long one. He’d previously attempted to capture the nomination in every gubernatorial election since 1896. On the campaign trail, he promised to stand up to “the invisible government”. Tammany’s boss during this era, Charles Murphy, allowed this rhetoric to fly because he thought it was good campaigning, although Tammany (among other groups like it) were clearly the subjects to which Sulzer had been referring too. On inauguration day, he found out how misguided a notion this was when the governor opened the event by proclaiming his availability to reporters, and then renamed the Executive Mansion “The People’s House”. At his traditional reception that afternoon, Sulzer permitted anybody who wanted to see him to come into the mansion and do so, just as reformist governor Grover Cleveland had done years prior.

The next day, the governor announced he would begin investigating corruption in the state government and that he would hold press briefings twice a day. When Tammany Hall’s historic control over public officials in the Democratic party such as himself was brought up by one of the reporters in the room, he declared on the record that he was the “Democratic leader in the state of New York”. The press tried, but could not get a response from Charles Murphy.

Certainly, he had taken note— but did not yet act.

This changed when Gov. Sulzer rejected Murphy’s pick for State Highway Commissioner, James E. Gaffney, later that year. By May, State Senate Majority Leader Robert Wagner, a known Tammany loyalist, formed a joint committee to investigate the “financial conduct of state institutions”. That summer, Sulzer was accused by the committee of using campaign contributions to procure stocks for himself. Sulzer and his progressive supporters claimed Tammany had ordered that the charges be brought up, but there were too few of them to stop the proceedings. At the last minute, in a desperate attempt to stall an inevitable impeachment, Sulzer’s wife Clara claimed that she had actually been that one that had stolen the campaign funds.

All night long, the governor and his advisor, John Hennessy, sat on one of the porches outside the Executive Mansion, anxiously smoking cigars and waiting for news about their decision. His lawyer and close friend, Samuel Bell Thomas, had been living with him while the issue made its way through both chambers of the legislature. The Assembly, like the Senate, was controlled by Tammany through Speaker Al Smith. Thomas ran back and forth, catching Sulzer and Hennessy up to date and then delivering their responses to their men in the Capitol Building. In the early hours of the morning, August 13th 1913, the vote went through 79 to 45. The governor was then served with a summons to appear in court and Lt. Gov. Martin Glynn was empowered to act as executive until the trial was over.

Clara Sulzer was so devastated that the governor found it necessary to phone a nerve specialist. Dr. Abrams of NYC would arrive at the mansion the next morning to check on her. Sulzer meanwhile, refused to relinquish the power of his office to Martin Glynn or move out of the mansion. As a result, the latter began signing official documents as “acting governor” and camped out in the Executive Chamber of the Capitol Building.

William Sulzer, 1913 - 1913

The affair carried on until October 16th, when the court convicted Sulzer on three Articles of Impeachment and removed him from office the following day.

In the pouring rain, about one hundred supporters according to the New York Times and 10,000 according to Samuel Bell Thomas, marched over to “The People’s House” on Eagle Street. They saw that the doors had been left open when they arrived, so they filtered in. Sulzer and his wife were found at the end of the hall. They approached, and handed the defamed politician a silver cup wrapped in manilla paper.

One side said: “Our Bill; He Dared to do Right”. On the other, “William Sulzer, Victim of Corrupt Bossism”.

He declared that the group was a “collection of the rarest political crackpots I’ve ever seen.” He then made a speech, once again stating his innocence and asserting that everything that had happened was a scheme of Tammany Hall. He shook their hands. One man offered him $50,000 for fifty lectures on his side of the story. Another shouted “Hurrah for the next President of the United States!”

That same day, Martin Glynn asked the legislature for an appropriation of $71,020 for the Executive Department. This was $70,497 less than Sulzer had asked for and $31,934 less than Governor Dix. Essentially, this meant there would be no redecorating or refurbishing the Executive Mansion for at least, the foreseeable future.

The next morning, “Plain Bill” and Clara left Albany for Cooperstown, where they planned to stay for three or four days in a hotel owned by a friend of his. In total, the impeachment cost the state $87,000. A supplemental supply bill would need to be passed to cover it. Keeping up the pressure, Tammany Hall conducted an investigation later in the month involving telephone and telegraph expenses from the Executive Mansion between August and October, alleging that as much as $500 to $600 was spent per day during that time. Their reasoning was, many of the calls were apparently placed to “remote parts of the country” and it was their belief that Sulzer may have had secret money deposited in several banks and that his real name may not have been “Sulzer” at all.

Regardless, just a few weeks later, William Sulzer returned to the Capitol as an assemblyman for New York City, his former district, the denizens of which had sent him back by a massive majority. In that same election, the Democratic majority in the State Assembly and the State Senate was lost. Most of those who were defeated in their bids for reelection were Tammany associates. They lost the mayor’s office in New York too. Governor Glynn however, was not on the ballot.

He would have another year before he would have to plead his own case to the bitter electorate of the Empire State. And it would not go well, at least not for him.

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I appreciate the support of everyone who’s taken the time to look into my work this year. It’s been quite an extraordinary one as far as years go, and I hope more of you will tune in for my next project, which should hopefully be released in January or February.

Thank you again, Merry Christmas, Happy holidays and Happy New Year!