Alton B. Parker

Alton B. Parker
Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals
In office 1898–1904
Preceded by	Charles Andrews
Succeeded by	Edgar M. Cullen
Personal details
Born	Alton Brooks Parker (1852-05-14)May 14, 1852 Cortland, New York
Died	May 10, 1926(1926-05-10) (aged 73) New York City
Political party	Democratic Party
Spouse(s)	Mary L. Schoonmaker Parker
Alma mater	Albany Law School
Profession	Lawyer

Alton Brooks Parker (May 14, 1852 – May 10, 1926) was an American judge, best known as the Conservative Democrat who lost the presidential election of 1904 to incumbent Theodore Roosevelt in a landslide.

A native of upstate electoral votes to 140, carrying only the traditionally Democratic Solid South. He then returned to practicing law. He managed John A. Dix's successful 1910 campaign for Governor of New York and served as prosecution counsel for the 1913 impeachment of Dix's successor, Governor William Sulzer.

Early life

Parker was born in Cortland, New York, to John Brooks Parker, a farmer, and Harriet F. Stratton. Both of his parents were well educated and encouraged his reading from an early age. At the age of 12 or 13, Parker watched his father serve as a juror and was so fascinated by the proceedings that he resolved to become a lawyer.^[1] However, he trained initially as a teacher and taught in Binghamton. There he became engaged to Mary Louise Schoonmaker, the daughter of a man who owned property near his school. Parker married Schoonmaker in 1872 and became a clerk at Schoonmaker & Hardenburgh, a legal firm at which one of her relatives was the senior partner.^[1] He then enrolled at Albany Law School. After graduating with an LL.B. degree in 1873, he practiced law in Kingston until 1878 as the senior partner of the firm Parker & Kenyon.^[2][3]

Parker also became active with the Democratic Party and was an early supporter of future New York governor and US President Grover Cleveland. He served as a delegate to the 1884 Democratic National Convention, at which Cleveland was named the party's presidential nominee; Cleveland went on to narrowly defeat Republican James G. Blaine in the fall election.^[2] During this time, Parker also became a protege of David B. Hill, managing Hill's 1884 gubernatorial campaign; Hill won in a landslide.^[4]

Judicial career

After his election, Hill appointed Parker to fill an 1885 vacancy on the New York Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Theodore R. Westbrook.^[1] In 1886, Parker was elected to his own fourteen-year term in the seat. Three years later, Parker became an appellate judge when Hill appointed him to the newly formed Second Department of the Appellate Division. In November 1897, Parker successfully ran for the post of Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, defeating Republican William James Wallace.^[2]

As a judge, Parker was notable for independently researching each case that he heard. He was generally considered to be pro-labor and was an active supporter of social reform legislation, for example upholding a maximum-hours law as constitutional. In the 1902 decision Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co, Parker found against a woman whose face had been used in advertisements without her permission, ruling that this use did not violate her common law privacy rights. The decision was unpopular in the press and led to the passage of a privacy law by the New York State Legislature the following year. In the same year, Parker upheld the death sentence given to convicted murderer Martha Place, who became the first woman to be executed by electric chair.

During his time as Chief Judge, Parker and his wife sold their Kingston home and bought an estate in Esopus on the Hudson River, calling the house "Rosemount".^[1] The couple had one daughter and one son, the latter of whom died young of tetanus.^[2]

Presidential nomination

Parker/Davis campaign poster

As the 1904 presidential election approached, the Democrats began to search for a nominee to oppose popular incumbent Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, and Parker's name arose as a possible candidate. Roosevelt's Secretary of War Elihu Root said of Parker that he "has never opened his mouth on any national question",^[5] but Roosevelt feared that the man's neutrality would prove a political advantage, writing that "the neutral-tinted individual is very apt to win against the man of pronounced views and active life".^[4]

The 1904 Democratic National Convention was held in July in Senator from Delaware. Other delegates spoke of nominating Cleveland, who had already served two nonconsecutive terms, but Cleveland was no longer popular outside the party or even within it, due to his rift with Bryan.^[8]

Parker's long service on the bench proved to be an advantage in his nomination, as he had avoided taking stands on issues that divided the party, particularly that of currency standards. Hill and other Parker supporters remained deliberately silent on their candidate's beliefs. By the time the convention cast their votes, it was clear that no candidate but Parker could unify the party, and he was selected on the first ballot.^[8] Henry G. Davis, an elderly West Virginia millionaire and former senator, was selected as the vice presidential candidate in the hope that he would partially finance Parker's campaign.^[9][10]

The convention was riven by debate over whether to include a free silver plank in the campaign's platform, opposing the gold standard and calling for the government to mint large numbers of silver dollars. The "free silver" movement, a key plank for the party in 1896 and 1900, was popular among indebted Western farmers who felt that inflation would help them repay their debts. Business interests, in contrast, supported the lower inflation of the gold standard. Bryan, famous for his 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech opposing the gold standard, fought bitterly to avoid the inclusion of the gold standard in the party platform in 1904. Ultimately the convention agreed not to include a plank on the subject.^[11]

However, seeking to win the support of the Eastern "sound money" faction, Parker sent a telegram to the convention immediately upon hearing news of his nomination that he considered the gold standard "firmly and irrevocably established" and would decline the nomination if he could not state this in his campaign.^[12] The telegram sparked a new debate and fresh opposition from Bryan, but the convention eventually replied to Parker that he was free to speak on the issue as he liked.^[9] National support for Parker began to rise, and Roosevelt praised his opponent's telegram in private as "bold and skillful"^[10] and "most adroit".^[9]

Campaign

A Parker 1904 button attacking Republicans as tied to big business ("trusts").

After receiving the nomination, Parker resigned from the bench. On August 10, he was formally visited at Rosemount by a delegation of party elders to inform him of his nomination. Parker then delivered a speech criticizing Roosevelt for his administration's involvement in Turkish and Moroccan affairs and having failed to give a date on which the Philippines would become independent of American control; the speech was considered even by supporters to be impersonal and uninspiring.^[13][14] Historian Lewis L. Gould described the speech as a "fiasco" for Parker from which the candidate did not recover.^[15] After this initial speech, Parker retreated into a strategy of silence again, avoiding comment on all major issues.^[16]

Parker's campaign soon proved to be poorly run as well.^[14] Parker and his advisors opted for a

• Address by Alton B. Parker, in memoriam David Bennett Hill; delivered at the joint meeting of the Senate and Assembly in the capitol at Albany, July 6, 1911
• ; a 1922 address by Judge ParkerAmerican Constitutional Government

External links

• Cunniff, M.G. (June 1904). "Alton Brooks Parker: The Probable Democratic Candidate for President".  

Further reading

• Dalton, Kathleen (8 October 2002). Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.  
• Gould, Lewis L. (1991). The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. University Press of Kansas.  
• Morris, Edmund Morris (24 November 2010). Theodore Rex. Random House Digital, Inc.  

Bibliography

Citations

Notes

References

Parker's wife Mary died in 1917. He remarried in 1923 to Amelia Day Campbell. On May 10, 1926, only a few days after recovering from bronchial pneumonia, Parker died from a heart attack while riding in his car through New York City's Central Park.^[27] He was buried in Wiltwyck Cemetery in Kingston.^[1]

Parker later re-entered politics, managing John A. Dix's successful 1910 gubernatorial campaign and delivering the keynote address of the 1912 Democratic National Convention, which nominated Woodrow Wilson for President.^[1] In 1913, he was counsel for the managers of the trial leading to the impeachment of Dix's successor as governor, William Sulzer.^[26]

After the election, Parker resumed practicing law and served as the president of the Loewe v. Lawlor, popularly known as the "Danbury Hatters' case". In the case, the fur hat manufacturer D. E. Loewe & Company had attempted to enforce an open shop policy; when unions had subsequently boycotted the company, it sued the United Hatters of North America for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The United States Supreme Court found for Loewe, ruling that the union had been acting in restraint of interstate commerce.^[1]

Later life

In Irving Stone's 1943 book They Also Ran about defeated presidential candidates, the author stated that Parker was the only defeated presidential candidate in history never to have a biography written about him. Stone theorized that Parker would have been an effective president and the 1904 election was one of a few in American history in which voters had two first-rate candidates to choose from. Stone professed that Americans liked Roosevelt more because of his colorful style.^[25]

Parker's attacks came too late to turn the election, however. On November 8, Roosevelt won in a landslide of 7,630,457 votes to Parker's 5,083,880. Roosevelt carried every northern and western state, including Missouri, for a total of 336 electoral votes; Parker carried only the traditionally Democratic Solid South, accumulating 140 electoral votes.^[22][3][1] Parker telegraphed his congratulations to Roosevelt that night and returned to private life.^[24]

A month before the election, Parker became aware of the large amount of corporate donations Cortelyou had solicited for the Roosevelt campaign, and made "Cortelyouism" a theme of his speeches, accusing the president of being insincere in previous trust busting efforts.^[19] In late October, he also went on a speaking tour in the key states of New York and New Jersey, in which he reiterated the president's "shameless exhibition of a willingness to make compromise with dignity".^[20] Roosevelt, enraged, released a statement calling Parker's criticisms "monstrous" and "slanderous".^[21]

^[18], calling it "the most absurd political campaign of our time".Henry Adams John Hay, Roosevelt's Secretary of State, wrote of Parker's poor showing to [17]