# Michael DiSalle

Michael Vincent DiSalle (January 6, 1908 – September 16, 1981) was the 60th governor of Ohio, serving from 1959 to 1963. A Democrat, he was a member of the Toledo City Council and served as the 46th mayor of Toledo from 1948 to 1950.

## Early life

DiSalle was born on January 6, 1908, in New York City, to Italian-American immigrant parents, Anthony and Assunta DiSalle. His family moved to Toledo, Ohio, when he was three years old. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in 1931. He married Myrtle E. England; the couple had four daughters and one son.
DiSalle was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1932. In 1949, the University of Notre Dame conferred him an honorary doctorate of law.

## Political career

In 1936, DiSalle was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives; he served one term and lost an election for the Ohio Senate in 1938.
Following the loss, DiSalle held a series of offices in the city government of Toledo, Ohio. He was assistant law director from 1939 to 1941. In 1941, he was elected to the Toledo City Council; the council selected him as vice-mayor in 1943 and 1945.
In 1946, DiSalle ran in the U.S. House election in the Toledo-based 9th district, but he lost narrowly to the Republican incumbent, Homer A. Ramey.
DiSalle was elected as mayor of Toledo in 1947 and re-elected in 1949, and served from 1948 until his resignation on November 30, 1950, to accept a federal appointment. During his mayoralty, Toledo fully re-paid its debts.
In 1950, he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. He lost to then-state auditor Joseph T. Ferguson, who in turn lost the general election to the Republican incumbent, Robert A. Taft. In December 1950, President Harry S. Truman appointed DiSalle as director of the Office of Price Stabilization, a sub-agency of the Korean War-era Economic Stabilization Agency which established and enforced war-time price controls. DiSalle resigned as director on January 23, 1952, in order to run again for U.S. Senate. He won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election to the Republican incumbent, John W. Bricker.
In December 1952, President Truman (now a lame duck) appointed DiSalle as director of the Economic Stabilization Agency, replacing Roger Putnam. The appointment lasted less than one month, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower abolished the agency on April 30, 1953.
In 1956, DiSalle was the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, losing to then-state attorney general C. William O'Neill. In their 1958 re-match, DiSalle defeated O'Neill. The gubernatorial term had in 1954 been lengthened from two years to four years, starting with the 1958 election; so DiSalle served as governor from 1959 to 1963.
In July 1959, DiSalle signed a bill designating "with God, all things are possible" as the official motto of the State of Ohio. The motto is derived from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19, verse 26.
DiSalle was a favorite son candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 1960. He ran only in the Ohio primary, which he won with 60.25% of the vote against Albert S. Porter, who had run against him in the gubernatorial primary in 1958. Of the total popular vote in the primaries, DiSalle placed sixth behind eventual nominee Sen. John F. Kennedy, as well as Gov. Pat Brown, perennial candidate George H. McLain, Sen. Hubert Humphrey, and Sen. George Smathers.
In 1962, DiSalle lost re-election as governor to then-state auditor Jim Rhodes, after voters disapproved of several aspects of his administration, including his opposition to capital punishment, a tax increase, and a policy which billed wards of state for living necessities.

### Opposition to capital punishment

DiSalle was an opponent of death penalty and commuted a number of sentences as governor. He allowed six of the 12 death sentences he reviewed as governor to proceed. DiSalle stated that despite being "totally opposed to the death penalty", he could not use his power of executive clemency without mitigating circumstances or evidence of miscarriage of justice. To do so would be to personally repeal the law providing for capital punishment in Ohio, and he might have been impeached for violating his oath of office, DiSalle wrote.
DiSalle personally investigated all cases of people scheduled to be executed by electric chair and even personally met with some of them. He agreed with Clinton Duffy, who said that murderers are more likely to be rehabilitated than other criminals. "To demonstrate his faith in rehabilitation, [DiSalle] made it a point to hire convicted murderers to serve on his household staff" at the Ohio Governor's Mansion.
One of DiSalle's primary concerns regarding the death penalty was that poorer defendants did not have the same access to counsel as rich defendants, and therefore would suffer the death penalty disproportionately. He recalled: "I found that the men in death row had one thing in common: they were penniless". They were defended in court by court-appointed attorneys, some without criminal legal experience. Professional criminals "did not have to depend on volunteers", DiSalle wrote. "Nor were they ever, in my experience, executed".
DiSalle believed that penology should be improved. Ronald Fenton, among the 12 cases he reviewed, had raped and murdered a baby. The governor believed that such acts had proved his insanity, but psychiatrists had found him sane. Although he believed that the M'Naghten Rule was flawed, because of the finding—and expecting that had he been commuted to life imprisonment "his prisonmates would have made his life unbearable"—DiSalle allowed the execution. He cited the case as an example of how the justice system had failed to study the behavior of a minor criminal to prevent him from committing murder.
After leaving the governorship, DiSalle co-founded and served as a chairman of the National Committee to Abolish Federal Death Penalty. His 1965 book, The Power of Life or Death, discusses this issue and chronicles his difficult experiences as the man charged with making the final decision regarding a sentence commutation. He is quoted in the book Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution as saying, "No one who has never watched the hands of a clock marking the last minutes of a condemned man's existence, knowing that he alone has the temporary Godlike power to stop the clock, can realize the agony of deciding an appeal for executive clemency".

### Electoral history

Michael DiSalle electoral history :
U.S. House election (Ohio's 9th district), 1946 :
| Party | Party | Candidate | Votes | % |
| | Republican | Homer A. Ramey (incumbent) | 59,394 | 50.14% |
| | Democratic | Michael DiSalle | 59,057 | 49.86% |
| Total votes | Total votes | Total votes | 118,451 | 100.00% |
| | Republican hold | Republican hold | Republican hold | Republican hold |
U.S. Senate primary election (Ohio, Class 3), 1950 :
| Party | Party | Candidate | Votes | % |
| | Democratic | Joseph T. Ferguson | 159,191 | 39.38% |
| | Democratic | Michael DiSalle | 105,601 | 26.12% |
| | Democratic | Henry M. Busch | 53,048 | 13.12% |
| | Democratic | William L. White | 27,863 | 6.89% |
| | Democratic | Walter A. Kelley | 22,814 | 5.64% |
| | Democratic | John Martin | 22,802 | 5.64% |
| | Democratic | Edward Welsh | 12,960 | 3.21% |
| Total votes | Total votes | Total votes | 404,279 | 100.00% |

## Later life

In 1966, he joined the Washington, D.C., law firm of Chapman, Duff, and Paul. In 1979, he co-founded the Washington, D.C., law firm of DiSalle & Staudinger.
The same year, DiSalle also authored the book Second Choice, a history of the U.S. vice presidency.
DiSalle led a draft movement for a potential 1968 presidential campaign by Sen. Ted Kennedy. He served as the honorary chairman of Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign.
DiSalle died on September 16, 1981, of a heart attack while vacationing in Pescara, Italy.

## Legacy

DiSalle has two current structures in Ohio named for him:
* Toledo – Michael DiSalle Government Center housing federal, state, county, and city governmental offices.
* Toledo – Michael V. DiSalle Bridge carrying I-75 across the Maumee River.
Also, the DiSalle Center (no longer standing) at the Ohio Expo Center and the Ohio State Fair in Columbus, Ohio, was named in honor of DiSalle.