The Rise of Sunbelt Governors: Conservative Outsiders in the White House

In memory of Alan Rosenthal In How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency (Ambar 2012), I argued that progressive-era governors from the industrial Northeast played a critical role in transforming the character of the presidency. But my research and thesis were largely restricted to examining how the innovative features of state executive behavior were transferred to the White House in the early 1900s. Now, in thinking beyond that time frame and argument, my conclusions about the presidency have opened a new window into understanding how the American republic has changed over the last 100 years. In this article, I argue that the two major shifts in twentieth-century American politics--toward and then away from big government--were both driven by former governors in the White House. As outsiders, governor-presidents were poised to alter the direction of the national government in ways that Washington insiders were not. Indeed, understanding the two dominant and opposing forces in our national politics since 1900 requires understanding not only how governors built the modern presidency; it also requires understanding how they were the key actors in building first the progressive state and then, in turn, its conservative successor. In the brief space of an article, I can only focus on a few elements of what is a very big and complex story about the second of these transformations. The progressive thinker and editor Herbert Croly came the closest to grasping the implications of the first wave of gubernatorial leadership in both the states and in the White House. "Wherever public opinion has been vigorously demanding the adoption of a progressive state policy, the agent to which it has turned for carrying out that policy has been a candidate for governor." Croly wrote those words nearly 100 years ago in Progressive Democracy after having witnessed a series of powerful governors administering progressive reforms. By 1914, he had seen a number of important, but little-remarked-upon political firsts concerning governors and presidential politics. As I noted in How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency, 1876 marked the first time former governors opposed one another in a presidential election (Ambar 2012). Twenty years later, a governor was elected to succeed another governor-president in the White House--another first in U.S. political history. By 1914, Croly was writing about the rise and importance of governors in national politics like few of his contemporaries. Presidents Rutherford Hayes, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt (TR)--and then Woodrow Wilson--were all part of an unprecedented line of former governors pushing varying degrees of reform as presidents in Washington. And each did so, it seemed to Croly, with an increasing indifference to traditional strictures against the abuse of executive power. "At the present time a Democratic President [Wilson] and a Democratic Governor [the progressive Martin H. Glynn] of the most populous American state are frankly assuming the political leadership of their respective constituencies," he observed, "without having incurred up to date any effective resistance or any particular obliquy" (Croly 1914, 296). It was a welcome sign to Croly that governors were at the heart of administering progressive change in both Washington and in the states. But Croly was also astute in noticing the regional character of this change in citing the New York governorship as an example of active, reform-oriented governance. From as far back as Samuel J. Tilden's governorship, New Yorkers (and later New Jerseyans for a time) had developed a Hudson brand of progressivism marked by challenges to legislative authority, innovations in executive-press relations, and administrative expansion. (Ambar 2012) Croly's hope was that western states, such as Oregon (Croly 1914, 297), might advance the Hudson mix of popular executive leadership with progressive reform. …