The American Vice Presidency by Jules Witcover

Author:Jules Witcover [Witcover, Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-472-4
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHARLES G. DAWES

OF ILLINOIS

One of the most accomplished of all American vice presidents joined the second presidential term of the accidental president Calvin Coolidge in 1925. But his outspokenness and gruffness in contrast with the mild-mannered Silent Cal produced one of the most unusual odd couples to share the two highest offices in the land up to that time. Charles G. Dawes came to the vice presidency after a heralded career that included his becoming the first director of the Bureau of the Budget, then comptroller of the currency, and supply czar for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I. Thereafter he was credited with putting Europe’s economy back on its feet and overseeing reparations sought from the defeated Germany, which won him a share of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize.

Dawes was of aristocratic stock from colonial days, whose family traced its roots back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, when William Dawes arrived from England. Another William Dawes rode with Paul Revere from Charlestown to Lexington on April 18, 1775.1 And another relative was a senior partner in a mercantile firm named Dawes and Coolidge, coincidentally bringing together forebears of men who, nearly three hundred years later, would become in reverse order the Republican president and vice president of the United States.

Charles Gates Dawes was born in Marietta, Ohio, on August 27, 1865. His father, Rufus R. Dawes, ultimately a brigadier general in the Union army, volunteered in April 1861 upon President Lincoln’s call and recruited a hundred others to serve under him at Antietam and in subsequent Civil War battles. In 1864 during a furlough he married Mary Beman of Marietta, daughter of a railroad builder and banker. Dawes became an official of the Marietta Iron Works and soon branched out into oil and gas exploration in southeastern Ohio, adding to his growing wealth. The panic of 1873 broke him, obliging him to start anew in the wholesale lumber business, where he eventually prospered again and served a single term in Congress.2

Upon his graduation from Marietta College and the Cincinnati Law School, young Charles moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he became a prominent anti-monopoly attorney for the Lincoln Board Trade and other clients. There he met and became close friends of William Jennings Bryan and John J. Pershing, later the commander of American forces in the Great War. Dawes and Bryan were members of an informal discussion group called the Lincoln Round Table, in which they debated key issues of the day, including the currency controversy that Bryan later glamorized with his famous “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention. Pershing was not a member of the group but joined them in a similar group, dubbed Debates at the Square Table, at a local restaurant.3

Dawes won statewide attention as a witness before a Senate committee on railroad affairs and another before the Nebraska Board of Transportation. In the latter, when the state auditor chided him about his criticisms of a host

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.