Ohio presidents
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After the American Civil War and for the remainder of the 19th century, presidents of the United States came predominantly from the US state of Ohio. The period covered the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. The Ohio presidents were relatively weak as chief executives and ill-equipped to deal with the turbulent and chaotic times over which they presided.
Their weakness was part of their attraction: wealthy Ohioan industrialist Mark Hanna was not alone in that he "believed that government existed primarily to help business. He once told the Ohio attorney general, who sued to dissolve Standard Oil, to drop the suit. 'Come on,' Hanna pronounced, 'you've been in politics long enough to know that no man in public life owes the public anything.'"[1]
The Ohio presidents' terms coincided with the apogee of graft and corruption in US public life especially in the US Democratic and Republican parties, although all of the Ohio presidents were Republicans. Particularly scandalous were the Whiskey Ring, Credit Mobilier, the Tammany Hall bosses at this time and the Tweed Ring: these involved frauds on a gigantic scale in which millions of dollars of public money were misappropriated.
They also coincided with widespread abuse in the industrial and commercial sectors where smaller businesses were taken over or put out of business by monopolists such as John D. Rockefeller and thousands of poverty-stricken European immigrants and others were worked ruthlessly in mills and factories by magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, an advocate of high protective tariffs and low workers' wages and himself an immigrant.[2]
Violent strikes occurred notably at Carnegie's Homestead and at the Pullman plants. Muckraking journalism started to thrive at about this time.
Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81), James A. Garfield (1881), Benjamin Harrison (1889-93), and William McKinley (1897-1901) were all from Ohio. The Ohio pattern was only broken by the presidencies of Democrat Grover Cleveland and assassination (Garfield and McKinley).
So widespread was the legend of Ohio's skill in presidential races that at the turn of the 20th century Chauncey Depew (president of the New York Central Railroad and a Republican speaker) said that, "Some men have greatness thrust upon them, some are born great, some are born in Ohio."
Reformers such as Samuel J. Tilden, Democratic president Grover Cleveland and Republican president Theodore Roosevelt amongst others eventually ushered in the Progressive Era.
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Linking Rings: William W. Durbin and the Magic and Mystery of America, James D. Robenalt, Kent State University Press, Ohio, pp. 11-12
- ^ Noteworthy is Ida Tarbell who vividly accused the leaders of the Standard Oil Company of using unfair tactics to put her father and many small oil companies out of business.
