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Who’s Your Favorite Vice President?

American Polymath’s panel of experts thought about their favorite resident of Number One Observatory Circle. Most of these men never became commander-in-chief, often to the detriment of the Republic, according to their respective partisans on the panel of experts.

Henry Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace was an Iowan, an agrarian, a businessman, and eventually an Episcopalian. He was a friend of the farmer and the laborer, a champion of civil rights, an enemy of fascism and a partisan of peace through international law. Wallace foresaw the horrors of the Cold War. He wanted the era after the Second World War to be a “century for the common man,” not a “century of fear.”
-Clayton Trutor

Hubert Horatio Humphrey

Hubert H. Humphrey was a fairly remarkable vice president. Not only did he step into the office at a time of great uncertainty, he carried the torch for a Democratic party increasingly besieged by children of privilege claiming alienation from power. The baby boomers are probably the worst cadre of citizens America ever produced, and I'd like to recognize their first victim.

Humphrey was an old school Democrat, one who cared more about the amount of food on your plate and the digits on your paycheck than the public relations mythos that has encircled every post-Kennedy presidential candidate. His 1968 electoral loss demonstrates this point empirically, as the upper lip sweat of Dick Nixon was replaced by a re-imagined populist hero of the white working class. In terms of substance, Joe Biden seems to be the only post-Kennedy Democratic VP that approaches HHH in terms of genuine commitment to the party's core values. Humphrey's Minnesota Twin Mondale was fine, but he was largely a non-entity in the Carter presidency. This plays itself out in the embarassing 1984 election which demonstrated the party's lack of media savvy when facing down an actor, a CIA director, and a bottomless budget. Al Gore, though I love the guy, didn't become a complete human being until he grew the beard-- this is not unlike Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation. To be honest, I tend to like Senatorial presidents. Unlike the hippies, I think LBJ was a fantastic president. Forget Southeast Asia for a second, and focus on the fact that the whining brats shitting in their diapers on Haight-Ashbury have always had Medicaid to fall back on. Johnson's incomplete welfare revolution in America is on track to be finished, but we need a Humphrey to keep us honest, to keep us focused on getting reform on the books before bitching about the particulars.
-Dominic Desjardins

Aaron Burr

Every American school child is taught about Aaron Burr’s famous duel and the subsequent death of Alexander Hamilton. Before the duel and his fall from grace, Burr was widely considered a national hero for his bravery in the American Revolution. He was an early Feminist and earnestly believed women to be intellectually equal to men. He supported women’s voting rights long before there was any sort of national suffragist movement.

Burr’s contemporaries described him as kind and generous, intelligent, a fine orator and exceptionally even-handed in his dealings. Despite all of this, few of our nation’s founding fathers had any use for the man. Perhaps more interesting than the duel were Burr’s never-ending schemes to overthrow Spanish rule in Mexico. Some believe he intended to found his own “kingdom” from former Spanish territories. Juxtaposing his role as Veep, Burr often found himself on the wrong side of the law. He even changed his name and fled the country for a number of years. Dick Cheney could take a note.
-Denton Loving

Richard Milhous Nixon

Forget Watergate, the rise of Richard Nixon as vice president and his subsequent fall in the presidential race against Kennedy reveals one of the most interesting characters ever in American politics. Here's a guy with a steel-trap mind, a psychological darkness, and a Shakespearean drive for power. He has a prodigious rise in the ranks of the GOP, faces down financial scandal with his Checkers speech and, like Iago or Richard III, forces Eisenhower's hand and keeps his name on the 1956 ticket. Then, rather than fading off into obscurity, his crushing 1960 defeat served as a mere interlude. One thinks of Ulysses Grant working in a storefront in Galena, one thinks of Carter on a peanut farm or Reagan quietly biding his time. One also thinks of Prince Hal in the taverns with Falstaff or Hamlet acting mad in Denmark. Nixon will return, and he will trade his kingdom for a helicopter out of Washington, broken and disgraced, but in 1960, in his final moments as vice president, he is the stuff of myth.
-Jon Sealy

Spiro Agnew

The son of an immigrant (his father's name was Anagostopoulos) Spiro Agnew's tenure as vice-president represents the highest office ever held by a Greek-American. Noted Greek-American and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis was the nation's second ever Greek American governor, following Agnew's service as governor of Maryland. In this regard, Agnew provided the road-map for a political landscape frequently peopled by men of a certain homogeneous racial, ancestral, and religious background.

Politically moderate in nature, Agnew ascended so rapidly to the national political scene that "Spiro Who?" was a catch phrase of the 1968 Republican National Convention. Democrats sought to undermine the fitness of his candidacy by running advertisements with the message "President Spiro Agnew?" (a sentiment later echoed in the vice-presidential campaigns of Indiana Senator J. Danforth Quayle and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin). 

Agnew's vice-presidency was noteworthy, not only due to the fact that he was the son of an immigrant father, but also because he was only the second vice-president ever to resign the office. While Agnew's political success represents the zenith of Greek-American political achievement, its downfall stands as the nadir of corruption and crookedness within vice-presidential history. Although John C. Calhoun left the office in 1832, in order to fill a Senate seat for South Carolina, Agnew was the first to leave the position for legal reasons, with the criminal charges of tax-fraud, bribery, extortion and conspiracy being levied against him. In the historical context of Nixon's 'I am not a crook' line, Agnew clearly was.  
-Nicholas Farrell

Schuyler Colfax

Let's hear it for Schuyler Colfax, who might be the most underappreciated American politician in our history. Colfax was elected vice president in 1868, and served with Ulysses S. Grant to lead the nation through its reconstructive years. Though he left office under scandal (and failed in his vice presidency bid for 1872), Colfax has left a legacy of Main Streets and ghost towns across the Midwest. In 1885, while on the lecture circuit, he died of a heart attack, induced by a 3/4-mile walk in minus 30-degree weather from one train depot to another in Mankato, Minnesota. Though largely forgotten by history, Colfax's story is a heartrending account of the American dream, the way we are able to rise and fall and rise again before that last great fall which carries us away.
-Jonas Lye

Levi Morton

When I was a kid in Vermont, a historical marker was posted by the roadside north of Shoreham Village.  I knew it was a marker for a Vice President’s birthplace but I never remembered his name until this article.  The marker has been gone for 25 years or more.  I called the Shoreham Town Clerk and she told me that the people who bought the house were worried that folks would try to pull off 22A and have no place to park and that she thought the marker was stored in the town’s historical society.  They have pretty good parking there because it’s never open. 

Levi Morton was born in 1824, son of a preacher and left forever when he was eight years old.  Movers and shakers have a habit of doing that in Vermont. Levi went to Massachusetts and worked as a store clerk, went to New Hampshire and taught school, went to Boston and became a wholesale merchant, went to New York City and ran a lucrative business buying cotton from the South and selling them back finished goods. The Civil War put the kibosh on that so he became a banker, an international banker with strong connections in England. Morton proved instrumental in financing the Northern Army.  By 1870, he was one of the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in America. He ran in the same circles as John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan. It was time for politics. He got elected Congressman from New York and within two years was Minister to France. Levi had the honor of pounding the first rivet into the toe of Lady Liberty before it was moved to New York Harbor. In 1889 he was elected VP with Benjamin Harrison’s administration and went on to be Governor of New York. 

Levi made only one mistake, the best I can tell, during his life. He was asked by James Garfield to be his VP running mate in 1880. Levi refused the offer. Garfield was elected that November. Crazy Charley Guiteau shot Garfield less than a year later and Garfield’s second choice, Chester Arthur took Levi’s place. 

Shoreham’s Town Clerk Amy Douglas’s email is shorehamtown@shoreham.net if you want to give her a shout about getting Levi’s plaque back up. I’m gonna. 
-Barry Trutor