When Charles Evans Hughes defeated William Randolph Hearst for the governorship of New York in 1906, the New York State Republican Party was split between the remnants of the rural, conservative Platt political machine in Albany and the forces loyal to the progressive, energetic President and former New York Governor, Teddy Roosevelt. Although Hughes owed his nomination largely to Roosevelt's desire to weaken conservative influences, the aloof and independent governor's moral idealism and legal experience led him to positions more liberal and unyielding than even Roosevelt could endorse.In this thorough study of Hughes's two terms as governor, Robert F. Wesser depicts the tensions of conservativism and liberalism, corruption and moral indignation, which rent the state government under his administration. Making use of unpublished manuscript collections, both personal and organizational, and other primary sources, Wesser evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Hughes as a political leader and reformer. He shows that despite opposition from his own party, Hughes's governorship produced important reform legislation in three areas: improvement of the machinery and processes of government; extension of the state's regulatory authority over businesses engaged in public services; and expansion of governmental police and welfare functions.These legislative achievements were supplemented by Hughes's relentless dedication to administrative efficiency, which helped shift the focus of New York politics from the legislature and party organization to the office of the governor. But not all Governor Hughes's efforts were successful, and Wesser carefully analyzes his failures as well as his triumphs-including the humiliating defeat at the hands of his own party's bosses in his quest to pass a direct primary voting bill-providing a complete portrait of a significant turning point in the history of New York and of the man who undermined some of the very foundations of the old political order. First published in 1967, Charles Evans Hughes remains an import work of scholarship on the history of New York and of the Progressive Era more broadly.

Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905–1910

Biographies & Memoirs

Wesser, Robert F.

Historical

Fall Creek Books

A Response to Progressivism: The Democratic Party and New York Politics, 1902-1918

To many reformers of the early twentieth century, “Tammany Hall” came to symbolize all that was baleful and corrupt in American politics. A Response to Progressivism vigorously challenges this view as it applies to “Boss” Charlie Murphy's own "czardom," the city, and, for a time, the state of New York. More than that, the study offers an analysis of the New York Democratic party against a background of profound economic and social change and a truly complex political environment—a political culture, broadly speaking—that embraced a competitive two-party system; a polity divided along sectional and ethnocultural lines; and a fickle, skeptical electorate.Key figures such as Murphy and his youthful lieutenants, Alfred E. Smith and Robert F. Wagner, often battled fellow Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas Mott Osborne as much as the Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressives, and the emergent Socialist party in their continuing efforts to accommodate the currents of reform then sweeping across the state. The author concludes the book with the election of Al Smith as governor in 1918, a momentous event not only in the transformation of the Democratic party in New York as the main vehicle for political, economic, and social change, but also in the development of modern American liberalism itself.Besides reassessing the role of "bossism" and the political machine in the early twentieth century, A Response to Progressivism also documents the political history of the era. It will therefore have substantial appeal not only to historians of New York but also to political historians, political scientists, and to readers interested in the history of reform.

History

NYU Press

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Books by Wesser, Robert F.