Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,770

This is the grave of Charles Fairbanks.

Born in 1852 in Centerville, Ohio, Fairbanks grew up in a reform family. His father was a wagonmaker, but more importantly, the house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. His mother especially was a big temperance person in the Buckeye State. Fairbanks went to the county schools and got into Ohio Wesleyan University, where he graduated in 1872. He went into journalism and got a job for the Associated Press in Pittsburgh. He studied law for awhile there too and then moved to Cleveland, where he continued working for the AP while working toward the bar, which he passed in 1874. He also went back to Ohio Wesleyan for a master’s degree, which he got in 1875.

Like a lot of this reformer class of Republicans, Fairbanks was all in on corrupt capitalism. His family had gotten rich on the railroads and now that he had passed the bar, he could participate too. His uncle got him a $5,000 a year job managing the bankrupt Indianapolis, Bloomington, and Western Railroad. Working with that uncle, he moved up in the railroad world and became a close associate of a lovely man named Jay Gould. Naturally, Fairbanks became a big time insider in the Indiana Republican Party too. Indiana judge Walter Q. Gresham really wanted to be president in 1888 and Fairbanks took on the role of leading that charge. It didn’t work, but fellow Indiana Republican Benjamin Harrison did win the nomination and Fairbanks did the work to help him too, including traveling around making campaign speeches. He was pretty good at this and he got the attention of national Republicans that maybe he had a future in office himself. He continued his hard work for the party in Indiana and was credited with organizing the campaign that delivered the state legislature to the Republicans in 1894.

All this meant that when Republicans did retake the Indiana legislature, they were going to have control of the next senator from Indiana. In 1896, the term of Daniel Voorhees was up. Voorhees was basically a traitor in defense of slavery thirty years earlier and had not repudiated those politics at all. So there was no way Republicans were going to send him back to Washington. They sent Fairbanks instead. The thing about Fairbanks is that he was very typical of the Gilded Age Republican. The shorter version of this is that the more you supported abolitionism before the war and civil rights after the war, the more likely it was that you were on the take for yourself and for big corporations, especially the railroads. I don’t know that Fairbanks was personally corrupt really, though he certainly had gotten rich, but he was a huge hack for corporate America and would help his buddy Gould for any reason.

Fairbanks was a pretty powerful senator from the get go. He was close to William McKinley and Mark Hanna and was highly supportive of American imperialism. So when the nation lied about the reasons for the explosion of the USS Maine, Fairbanks was right there to support invading Cuba. He was a foreign policy in the Senate generally and was on the United States and British Joint High Commission that settled boundary claims in Alaska. In fact, the city of Fairbanks, Alaska is named for him. Hanna wanted Fairbanks as McKinley’s VP in 1900, but it went to Theodore Roosevelt instead, much to the kingmaker’s horror when McKinley was assassinated the next year.

In 1904, TR needed a VP. So the Republicans chose Fairbanks. It wasn’t that Roosevelt really chose him. They were definitely not close. But the Gilded Age hacks needed a stake in the ticket so TR lived with it. Fairbanks did next to nothing in those four years. He wasn’t even the most important person from Indiana for the Republican Party. That was Albert Beveridge, who was one of TR’s Progressive allies in the Senate. Roosevelt in fact had called Fairbanks a “reactionary machine politician,” which was absolutely true. They shared absolutely nothing in common. Said one political reporter in 1904, it was a ticket of “the hot tamale and the Indiana icicle.” Fairbanks wasn’t even allowed to attend Cabinet meetings.

After his four years as VP, Fairbanks most certainly wanted the top job, but Roosevelt had zero interest in that and supported William Howard Taft. Fairbanks went back to Indiana and the practice of law. Don’t feel too bad–as a well-connected corporate Republican, he made plenty of money. But he was ambitious. He wanted the top job in 1912 too. The Republican Party was split, opening the door for Democrats, but no one really took Fairbanks’ candidate that seriously. In that divided year, Fairbanks was 100% behind Taft over Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party.

Still, Fairbanks was an important Republican insider. In 1916, as in 1912, the Progressive impulse had to be respected. For a guy like Fairbanks, it was sad. 1896 was so great for America. All these changes, so awful. But still, the corporate hacks wanted to get back as much control of the party as possible. Fairbanks was right there with them and in fact was in charge of the Republican platform that year. Once again, he wanted the presidential nomination and once again, he had no real chance. To nominate a reactionary like Fairbanks would have handed Woodrow Wilson an easy win. So instead Republicans nominated the moderate Charles Evans Hughes, who could speak to both sides of the party. But Fairbanks got the VP nod again. Had Hughes won, Fairbanks would have been the only VP to serve non-consecutive terms. What a trivia question that would have been. However, Wilson was able to use his combination of not involving the nation in World War I yet with the Progressive ideas going around the U.S. to win a tough election and have a second term.

After this, Fairbanks went back to Indiana and the law again. I am sure he would have loved 1920 and the return to normalcy, but his health began to decline and he died of nephritis in 1918. He was 66 years old.

Charles Fairbanks is in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, Indiana.

If you would like this series to visit other vice-presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Nance Garner is in Uvalde, Texas and Alben Barkley is in Paducah, Kentucky. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.