Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,878

This is the grave of Adlai Stevenson, Sr.

Born in 1835 in Christian County, Kentucky, Stevenson grew up in a slaving family that grew tobacco. But Stevenson’s father was really quite uncomfortable with the fact that he owned humans, or at least he didn’t think it was worth the limited financial gains he was making off of it. So in 1852, with the tobacco farm not doing much, the family freed their slaves and left Kentucky for Illinois. The family did still have money and young Adlai attended college at Illinois Wesleyan and then Centre College. By this time, his father was running a sawmill. While Stevenson was at Centre, his father died and he returned home to run the mill.

But Stevenson did not want to spent his life working a sawmill. He began reading for the law. He met Abraham Lincoln. Evidently he already opposed Lincoln’s politics because when they met, Lincoln started to outwit him and made him look like a fool. So to say the least, Stevenson became a big Stephen Douglas guy in the 1858 Senate race and a lifelong Democrat. He also was deeply opposed to the Know-Nothings, which started to create a base for his future rise in politics among the Germans and Irish, who would soon make up a lot of the Illinois voting public.

For many years, Stevenson was just a locally important guy in the Democratic Party. He was an elector for George McClellan in the 1864 elections. He held local offices. He was state attorney for Woodford County for about a decade. He and his cousin James Ewing started their own law firm in 1869 that became among the most powerful in the state. Then in 1874, he ran for Congress. The only reason he won is that there was a splitter candidate among the Republicans and of course that always throws the election to the lesser of the two major parties (again folks, third parties are for idiots). But then he lost to a united Republican Party in 1876. He kept running and running for Congress. He won in 1878, having secured both the Democratic and Greenback tickets. Then he lost in 1880 and again in 1882, before realizing he was probably not going to win again.

Oh, and he also managed a coal company with his brothers. The company had a policy–if workers didn’t vote for Stevenson for Congress, they would be fired. There’s that Gilded Age we know and don’t love. So glad it’s coming back.

Stevenson was a rich guy but wasn’t really going anywhere meaningful politically. But he had a vacation home in Wisconsin and also up there was William Vilas, a more prominent Democratic insider considered one of the biggest party members in the Midwest. They became friends. That Vilas was also close to Grover Cleveland really mattered. Of course, Cleveland won in 1884 and Stevenson was very much supportive of that ticket. Vilas was paid off for his work by being named postmaster general. Vilas then proceeded to name Stevenson assistant postmaster general.

Now, if you really wanted to control patronage, you ran the post office. Every one of those workers were fired if a different political party won. So you controlled many thousands of jobs. Stevenson knew this and he set out to build himself some real power. Stevenson fired tens of the thousands of Republicans around the nation and replaced them all with Democrats. Remember how I keep talking about how we need to know more about the Gilded Age and quit obsessing about the Nazis. Yeah, see, this is one reason why. This is the vision of Trumpist government. Stevenson was a master of it. In exchange for all of this, Cleveland nominated Stevenson to the Supreme Court for the District of Columbia. But Republicans knew what he was up to and refused to vote on it and killed the nomination, as Benjamin Harrison was about to take the presidency and could fill it himself.

After four years in the wilderness, Stevenson found himself in an unlikely place. Grover Cleveland became the Democrats’ presidential candidate again in 1892. Now, understand that in the Gilded Age, if presidents were pretty much mediocrities, VP candidates were completely nobodys nominated because no one really hated them and for regional balance or to balance internal party squabbles over minor issues. Cleveland was from New York. The Democratic base was the white South, but it was still too controversial to pull a Confederate onto the national ticket. So the Midwest became the goal for a VP candidate. Carter Harrison, Jr., then mayor of Chicago, pushed Stevenson as a way that maybe Illinois would swing to Cleveland. Ol’ Grover himself basically didn’t care.

So there you have it–a complete corrupt hack as VP? Sure, why not. Stevenson was sent to the South during the campaign to make sure people didn’t vote for the Populists, though southern Democratic leaders were happy to just fix the election too and did in some states. Since Stevenson was happy to racebait, that worked too. Civil service reformers were horrified, realizing that their worst nightmare was now the VP. Stevenson almost became president. Cleveland was a big time smoker and developed cancer in 1893. Stevenson as president would have been….well, it’s hard to imagine him as really worse than Cleveland. But he certainly wouldn’t have been good. But Cleveland recovered from his surgery. Oh, also, at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, they have Cleveland’s cancerous tissue in a jar for you to look at. I broke the rules against taking pictures for that. C’mon, it’s Cleveland’s cancer! Oh also, Cleveland didn’t actually tell Stevenson that he had cancer. He just told him he was having dental surgery. As for their relations, they were almost nonexistent. Stevenson just didn’t matter. Cleveland felt he was a little too free silver friendly for his gold tastes.

Stevenson was mentioned as a presidential candidate in both 1896 and 1900, but the Populist-lites had taken over the party and William Jennings Bryan won instead. Also, Stevenson was such an unserious politician. But in 1900, Democrats brought Stevenson back as the VP candidate to try and unite the Bryan and Cleveland wings of the party! Bryan was not thrilled about this, but if Cleveland could ignore Stevenson, so could Bryan.

After this nonsense, Stevenson returned to Illinois and his law practice. He was an important Democrat in the state, but no one really took him that seriously. The party and nation had changed. The Progressive Era wasn’t that big of a break from the Gilded Age and the latter would return with a vengeance in the 1920s, but with a different generation of corrupt hacks. Stevenson was a man of the past and anyone with a brain couldn’t answer why he should be a party leader anyway.

However, Stevenson was the Democratic nominee for governor of Illinois in 1908. He lost. He died in 1914, at the age of 78. None of this is helping me understand why his son was the beloved only hope for a benchless mid-20th century Democratic Party, but we will explore the more known Adlai Stevenson later in this series.

Adlai Stevenson is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Bloomington, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other vice-presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Garret Hobart is in Paterson, New Jersey and the legendary William Wheeler, who I had literally never heard of before writing this post, is in Malone, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.