PARKER, ALTON BROOKS 1852-1926

Judge presidential candidate

Candidacy

Alto n Parker's nomination for president in 1904 shows how the political process worked. Party nominees were chosen by party leaders. Candidates generally would not seek office by asking voters for support. Instead, a candidate or his political allies would make connections with party bosses in different states to secure their support. In Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Oregon insurgents were trying to break the control of party bosses by having primary elections to nominate candidates for state office; but for president the choice would still be made in party caucuses, which were easily manipulated by the bosses. Among the Democrats there was great fear as the election of 1904 loomed. The party was divided into two wings: its last president, Grover Cleveland, represented the probusiness, conservative party. Its most recent presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, who had twice lost the election to William McKinley, was a westerner, allied with the more radical populists of the prairies, the South, and the far West. As the party prepared for the 1904 election, the eastern leaders organized to wrest control from the more radical westerners. Once they resumed their control of the party, all they needed was a candidate. The choice fell on Alton B. Parker, chief justice of New York's Court of Appeals.

Background

Alton Parker, like Charles Evans Hughes, was born in upstate New York. The son of a farmer, Parker could not afford college and so at the age of sixteen began teaching school in his hometown of Cortland. In his spare time he studied law in a local law office before he had enough money to go to the Albany Law School, from which he graduated in 1873. Opening a practice in the Hudson River city of Kingston, he came to public attention for an assessment case he handled on behalf of Ulster County against the city. He was elected to county surrogate in 1877 and reelected in 1883, and both times he was the only Democrat to win a county office. This brought him to the attention of state leaders, who sent him as a delegate to the national convention in 1884. President Cleveland offered Parker the post of assistant postmaster general, which was an important position for distributing patronage. Parker declined, though he did consent to serve as state party chairman. He was a loyal party worker and organizer and was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat on the third district of New York's Supreme Court. He moved up in 1889 to the second division of New York's Court of Appeals. Then in 1897, when New York's Democrats were on the verge of complete defeat, he was elected chief justice of the state's Court of Appeals, the highest judgeship in the state. He was the only Democrat to win statewide office in New York that year.

Liberal Judge

Parker was a rare judge for his time. Most American judges were not friends of labor. Parker, however, upheld the right of unions to strike and their right to a closed shop: unions could make union membership a requirement for employment. The prevailing judicial wisdom was that this violated freedom of contract, but Parker upheld the rights of workers to negotiate such contracts. In an 1896 antitrust case Parker ruled that the "reasonableness" of a combination was irrelevant: under common law no person or corporation had the right to restrain trade at all. Perhaps his most famous case was in People v. Lochner, though it would not have been notable in 1904. He upheld the conviction of Joseph Lochner, owner of a Utica bakery, for requiring his employees to work more than sixty hours in a week. The next year the Supreme Court ruled that New York's law forbidding bakers to work sixty hours was unconstitutional, as it infringed on bakers' liberty of contract. Parker simply upheld the law as a valid exercise of the state's police power, its power to protect the health and safety of its citizens. Like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parker did not believe judges should dictate what the legislature could do.

Candidate Parker

Parker's judicial record was of little importance to the Democratic leaders who nominated him for president. What mattered was that he had been loyal to the party, that he was from New York, that he had not been involved in any scandals, and that he was not William Jennings Bryan, nor was he the other possible candidate, publisher William Randolph Hearst, who frightened the party's conservative wing even more than did Bryan. The fact that Parker was unknown to most Americans, and probably to many New Yorkers, counted less than the fact that he was acceptable to the Democratic leadership. He conducted his campaign in the traditional way, by staying at home and issuing addresses to visiting delegations. These addresses, then printed in newspapers throughout the country, did impress those who read them with Parker's sincere honesty, but they roused little enthusiasm for the man. This could have been deliberate: the Democrats presented Parker as an alternative to President Roosevelt, and part of his appeal as an alternative may have been his inability to stir public interest. Though Parker had a solid record as a liberal judge, the Democrats presented him as a conservative friend of business, unlike the increasingly progressive Roosevelt. Toward the end of the campaign Parker ventured out onto a campaign trip, in which he discarded the role the party tried to write for him. Parker charged that the large corporations, far from being against Roosevelt, were in fact contributing large amounts to his campaign. After the election, Parker charged, Roosevelt would deliver favors to these trusts and special interests. When the Republicans demanded proof of Parker's charges, he could produce none. Roosevelt was elected with a higher percentage of the popular vote (56.4 percent) than any president up to that point in history, and with Parker the Democrats received the lowest percentage of votes in their history (37.6 percent).

After the Election

After the election, it turned out that Parker had been right. The insurance investigation conducted by Charles Evans Hughes showed large corporate contributions to Roosevelt. Parker's defeat weakened the Democratic leaders who had pushed his nomination, and in 1908 William Jennings Bryan was once again the nominee. After Bryan's loss, the party sought out a progressive leader who could unite both factions of the party and found him in New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. Alton Parker went back to the practice of law. In 1907 he represented American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers in the contempt case brought against him for the Buck's Stove and Range Company strike, and in 1915 he represented the Danbury hatters before a U.S. congressional investigation. In 1912 he was temporary chair of the Democratic National Convention, where he opposed Woodrow Wilson's nomination. He died on 10 May 1926.

Source:

Irving Stone, They Also Ran: The Story of the Men Who Were Defeated for the Presidency (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949).

Alton Brooks Parker 1852–1926, American jurist, U.S. presidential candidate (1904), b. Cortland, N.Y. He practiced law in Kingston, N.Y., and was (1877–85) surrogate of Ulster co., N.Y. He became important in state Democratic politics and successfully managed (1885) the campaign of David B. Hill for governor of New York. Parker served as justice of the New York supreme court (1885–89) and of the old general term of the supreme court (1892–94) before (upon the general term's abolition) he moved to the New York court of appeals, finally serving as chief judge of the court of appeals (1897–1904). As a jurist he became noted for his liberal decisions in labor cases. He resigned as chief judge after receiving (1904) the Democratic party nomination for the U.S. presidency. Division within the party over the currency issue and the popularity of Theodore Roosevelt helped make Parker's defeat overwhelming. Returning to law practice, he defended the American Federation of Labor in the Danbury Hatters' Case and served as counsel for the prosecution in the impeachment of Gov. William Sulzer.