1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Thomas R. Marshall

Thomas R. Marshall Quotes

Thomas Riley Marshall was an American politician who served as the 28th vice president of the United States from 1913 to 1921 under President Woodrow Wilson. A prominent lawyer in Indiana, he became an active and well known member of the Democratic Party by stumping across the state for other candidates and organizing party rallies that later helped him win election as the 27th governor of Indiana. In office, he proposed a controversial progressive change to the Constitution of Indiana; the Republican Party used the state courts to block the constitutional reform attempt.

Marshall's popularity as Indiana governor, and the state's status as a critical swing state, helped him secure the Democratic vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Wilson in 1912 and win the subsequent general election. An ideological rift developed between the two men during their first term, leading Wilson to limit Marshall's influence in the administration, and his brand of humor caused Wilson to move Marshall's office away from the White House. During Marshall's second term he delivered morale-boosting speeches across the nation during World War I and became the first U.S. vice president to hold cabinet meetings, which he did while Wilson was in Europe. As he was president of the United States Senate, a small number of anti-war Senators kept it deadlocked by refusing to end debate. To enable critical wartime legislation to be passed, Marshall had the body adopt its first procedural rule allowing filibusters to be ended by a two-thirds majority vote—a variation of this rule remains in effect.

Marshall's vice presidency is most remembered for a leadership crisis following a stroke that incapacitated Wilson in October 1919. Because of their personal dislike for Marshall, Wilson's advisers and wife Edith sought to keep him uninformed about the president's condition to prevent him from assuming presidential powers and duties. Many people, including cabinet officials and Congressional leaders, urged Marshall to become acting president, but he refused to forcibly assume Wilson's powers and duties for fear of setting a precedent. Without strong leadership in the executive branch, the administration's opponents defeated the ratification of the League of Nations treaty and effectively returned the United States to an isolationist foreign policy. Marshall is also the only known Vice President of the United States to have been exclusively targeted in an assassination attempt while in office. Marshall was the first Vice President since Daniel D. Tompkins, nearly a century earlier, to serve two full terms.

Marshall was known for his wit and sense of humor; one of his most enduring jokes, which provoked widespread laughter from his colleagues, came during a Senate debate in which, in response to Senator Joseph Bristow's catalog of the nation's needs, Marshall quipped the often-repeated phrase, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." After his terms as vice president, he opened an Indianapolis law practice, where he authored several legal books and his memoir, Recollections. He continued to travel and speak publicly. Marshall died while on a trip after suffering a heart attack in 1925. Wikipedia  

✵ 14. March 1854 – 1. June 1925
Thomas R. Marshall photo
Thomas R. Marshall: 11   quotes 0   likes

Famous Thomas R. Marshall Quotes

“The labor unions of Indiana proceeded to meet and resolve. They resolved in such violent and vicious language that no partisan press could be found willing to print the resolutions. Long afterward I learned that I was shadowed for six months by Secret Service men in the fear that I might be assaulted by some over-zealous union man. Of this I was not aware at the time, or I should have taken steps to have prevented it. Whether I am a Presbyterian or a fatalist I do not know, but I do know that if I am to be shot, I will never be hanged.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter XIV

“An unfriendly fairy godmother presented him with a keen sense of humor. Nothing is more fatal in politics. --Colonel Edward M. House, adviser to President Woodrow Wilson.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Charles M. Thomas, Thomas Riley Marshall, Hoosier Statesman (Oxford, OH:1939), p. 153.

“There was not one of my blood, in or out of the Union Army who was not either serving and sacrificing at home or suffering and dying among the hills and valleys of the southland for the preservation of the Union. And yet, so bitter was the politics of the time that they had to undergo the suspicion of being disloyal to their country because they did not vote the Republican ticket. My grandfather and my father were notified by the Methodist preacher whose church they attended that he would have to strike their names off the roll if they continued to vote the Democratic ticket. My grandfather, as a fiery Virginian, announced that he was willing to take his chance on Hell but never on the Republican party.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter VI

“Money will accomplish much in business, love and war but it isn't worth a cent in nature. You could plant all the doubloons lost in the Spanish Main on a New England farm and you would not raise a single ear of corn the more therefor. You could take the golden eagles of America and put them in the alfalfa fields of Indiana and you would not get a single blade more of grass. The moral is that nature has her own way of fixing valuation; and her valuation is the way of return made from the soil. She does not care the least what men may say, by way of trade and barter, that she is worth. Her worth in her own scales consists in her ability to produce something that will minister to the needs, the comforts and even to the luxuries of her children.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter V

“As in his public affairs, so in his private life the American rarely prepares himself for the future. He is wholly unwilling to have anything transmitted to him by water that he can get by rail. It irks him to wait the slow process of freighting when there is an express car coming to his town, and if somebody will soon discover how to deliver by aeroplane, that is the way he will obtain what he wants. He never wants it until he wants it, and when he wants it, he wants it at once. The farmer does not look over his machinery in the winter time to ascertain what it needs in the way of repair; but waits until a week or ten days before he needs it and then telegraphs for the repair parts to be sent by express.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter XXI

“No, there is no world-wide standard for the determination of provincialism. There is only one standard by which to judge men and women, and that standard is not so much one of brains and education as it is of culture and heart. Kindness seems to be the one golden metewand by which to measure how really civilized and catholic one may be.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter VI

Thomas R. Marshall Quotes

“Bristow hasn't hit it yet. What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Reported comment made to a Senate clerk while Senator Joseph Bristow of Kansas was making a speech in which he repeatedly used the phrase, "What this country needs...." Although Marshall may have spoken the words, the remark, however, appears well before 1905. The Yale Book of Quotations cites the Hartford Courant of September 22, 1875: "What this country really needs is a good five cent cigar - New York Mail. Marshall was a fan of contemporary newspaper cartoonist Kin Hubbard who had his "Abe Martin" character say them.
John E. Brown, Woodrow Wilson's Vice President: Thomas R. Marshall and the Wilson Administration, 1913-1921, (PhD. dissertation, Ball State University, 1970), p. 216.
Jeffrey Graf, What This Country Needs is a Really Good 5-Cent Cigar,Herman B Wells Library Indiana University Bloomington
Misattributed
Source: http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/internet/extra/cigar.html What This Country Needs is a Really Good 5-Cent Cigar

Country

“Death had to take him in his sleep, for if he was awake there'd have been a fight.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Upon hearing the death of President Teddy Roosevelt, as quoted in F.D.R. : 1905-1928‎ (1947) by Elliott Roosevelt, p. 449.

Death , Sleep , Fight

“The Vice-President's Chamber is adjacent to the Senate Chamber, and so small that to survive it is necessary to keep the door open in order to obtain the necessary cubic feet of air. When the vice-president is in the room [the Capitol Guides] go by with their guests, stop and point him out, as though he were a curiosity.I stood this for about as long as I could, and then went to the door one day, and said: "If you look on me as a wild animal, be kind enough to throw peanuts at me; but if you are really desirous of seeing me, come in and shake hands." In that way I think I restored myself to the position I have always desired to occupy; that of an American, who looks up to nobody, looks down upon nobody, but tries to keep a conscience clean enough that he can look everybody in the face.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter XVII

Way , Thinking , Animals

“I make no pretense to accuracy. I shall be quite content if the sensibilities of no one are wounded by anything I may reduce to type.”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter XVI

“In the city of Denver, while I was vice-president, a big husky policeman kept following me around until I asked him what he was doing. He said he was guarding my person. I said: "Your labor is in vain. Nobody was ever crazy enough to shoot at a vice-president. If you will go away and find somebody to shoot at me, I'll go down in history as the first vice-president who ever attracted enough attention even to have a crank shoot at him."”

Thomas R. Marshall

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter XIV

History , Personality

Similar authors

Theodore Roosevelt photo
Theodore Roosevelt 445
American politician, 26th president of the United States
Abraham Lincoln photo
Abraham Lincoln 618
16th President of the United States
William James photo
William James 246
American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist
Simón Bolívar photo
Simón Bolívar 17
Venezuelan military and political leader, South American li…
Josh Billings photo
Josh Billings 91
American humorist
François-René de Chateaubriand photo
François-René de Chateaubriand 28
French writer, politician, diplomat and historian
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Benjamin Disraeli 306
British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Pri…
Andrew Carnegie photo
Andrew Carnegie 34
American businessman and philanthropist
Matthew Arnold photo
Matthew Arnold 166
English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector…
Pierre Joseph Proudhon photo
Pierre Joseph Proudhon 40
French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and so…