Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and the Emergence of the President as Party Leader

During the late nineteenth century, partisan presidential power took on a new form; in becoming party leaders, presidents began to act like twentieth-century presidents. Discrediting barriers to presidential ambition erected by the Jacksonian party organization, they appealed to the partisan public in novel ways, and moved to dominate the conduct of party campaigns. Claiming the authority to define national party objectives in a relatively unilateral manner, they developed campaign methods that reached the party in the electorate directly, rather than being filtered through subnational party leaders (Key 1956). In doing so, they generated independent political support that enabled them to force their renomination on their party, and so enhanced their ability to shape national policy. This suggests that the increased rate of presidential renomination that began in the late nineteenth century signifies the foundational component of the modern presidency. Understanding the centrality of party leadership to modern presidential leadership requires analyzing the conditions under which late nineteenth-century presidents developed strategies to escape the restraints of the Jacksonian party organization. Although presidents long chafed under the parochial dominance of the convention system, it was not until the late nineteenth century that presidents turned from locally dominated national campaigns based on patronage to a strategy of shaping the terms of national election campaigns that effective strategies for presidential party leadership emerged. In this sense, the shift to more truly national campaigns, and thus a transformation of the two major party organizations, is an essential ingredient of modern presidential power. This article develops this argument by showing (1) that increased renomination and reelection rates beginning in the late nineteenth century are evidence of a trend that came to define a baseline for modern presidential leadership, (2) that this trend grew out of a resolution in the conflict between the president and the Jacksonian party organization that favored presidential dominance of party, and (3) that this trend was the result of successful strategic adaptation on the part of Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. There are two ways in which this story has been misrepresented (which will be addressed more thoroughly below). First, this development was not grounded in conflict with Congress--the structural conflict through which the modern presidency is traditionally said to emerge--but in intra-party conflict between the national and subnational components of the major party organizations. The constitutional balance of power set the stage for struggles between the president and Congress; the Jacksonian party organization continued to set the stage for congressional dominance in these struggles long after the age of Jackson had passed. It was not until presidents mastered this intra-party struggle that the presidency emerged as a reliably equal--or dominant--partner in intra-branch struggles, and took on the characteristic strength associated with the modern presidency. Second, this was a development in the capacity of the presidency to dominate party organizations, both in the definition of party policy and in the conduct of national campaigns, distinct from the later expansion of its administrative capacities and rhetorical appeals. Late nineteenth-century struggles for party leadership thus suggest the need to reevaluate the concept of the "modern presidency" as it is presently conceptualized, and especially as it is dominated by the rhetorical presidency and administrative presidency paradigms. These paradigms center on two dramatic periods of change: the rhetorical presidency argument focusing on the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (Tulis 1987), and the administrative presidency argument focusing on the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (Milkis 1993; Gould 2003 has recently extended this argument to that of McKinley). …