The Fatal Cocktail: Charles W. Fairbanks and Theodore Roosevelt

Everything seemed perfect at the Indianapolis home of Vice President Charles Warren Fairbanks on Memorial Day in May 1907. Fairbanks’ palatial Meridian Street residence had been decorated for a visit from the Rough Rider himself, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in the city to help dedicate a statue at the Marion County Courthouse honoring Hoosier General Henry W. Lawton.

  

A luncheon on the president’s behalf, featuring a menu that included planked whitefish and broiled spring chicken, was nearly ready to start when Mrs. John N. Carey, busy helping Fairbanks’ wife, Cornelia, with the preparations, notice that something was missing—the cocktails. According to an account in the Indianapolis News, Carey, a friend of the Fairbanks family, “immediately telephoned to the Columbia Club for forty of the necessary dinner openers.” Indianapolis mayor Charles A. Bookwalter volunteered the use of his automobile, and the drinks, described by the reporter covering the event as “amber Manhattans,” arrived in time for the guests to enjoy.

  

A teetotaler and Methodist, Fairbanks may not have drunk any liquor himself at the meal, but he bore the brunt of nationwide newspaper attacks on his character when they learned of the cocktail incident. The “cocktail affair,” and Roosevelt’s cool feelings toward his one-time running mate, combined to work against Fairbanks in his attempt to capture the 1908 GOP presidential nomination. Nicknamed Buttermilk Charlie for his advocacy of buttermilk instead of hard liquor, Fairbanks had a brand-new moniker after the Roosevelt affair—Cocktail Charlie. The tall, stern, conservative Hoosier politician, said one high Methodist official, had been “crucified by a cocktail.”

  

Like his early political opponent Benjamin Harrison, Fairbanks was an Ohio native, born in that state on May 11, 1852. Fairbanks was one of the few politicians who could say truthfully say that he had been born in a log cabin, a house owned by his farmer father. A graduate of the Cleveland Law College, Fairbanks became a successful attorney, establishing a practice in Indianapolis and earning a fortune representing a number of railroads. He also became a powerful force in the Indiana Republican Party, winning election by the Indiana General Assembly to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

  

In 1904 Fairbanks received the GOP nomination as vice president, running with the progressive-minded Roosevelt on the national ticket. Although the two men were never friends—Roosevelt even called Fairbanks a “reactionary machine politician”—their coolness toward one another did not damage their chances at the polls. The Republican ticket swamped Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker by more than 2.5 million votes. Hearing about the overwhelming GOP election returns, a pleased Roosevelt exclaimed, “How they are voting for me! How they are voting for me!”

  

After the excitement of a landslide election victory, Fairbanks settled down into the drudgery of being vice president. Although Roosevelt had once advocated increasing the office’s power and responsibility, he made no such changes. During his four years in office, Fairbanks played little or no role in the Roosevelt administration. On one occasion Roosevelt, irritated by the tinkling sound made by a White House chandelier, turned to his butler and said: “Take it to the vice president. He needs something to keep him awake.”

  

The tension between the two Republicans was put aside for the moment when Roosevelt agreed to travel to Indianapolis to help dedicate a statue honoring Hoosier hero Lawton, a Spanish-American War general later killed fighting insurgents opposed to America’s control of the Philippines. Arriving at Union State shortly before 11:00 a.m. on Memorial Day, the president journeyed to the Fairbanks home at 1522 North Meridian Street to be the guest of honor at what he called “a big political lunch.” The guest list for the occasion included such prominent names as James Whitcomb Riley, Meredith Nicholson, William Dudley Foulke, and Albert Beveridge.

  

The forty guests were divided into two parties, one hosted by Fairbanks in the dining room, and the second, headed by U.S. Senator James Hemenway, in the library. In describing the sumptuous affair to its readers, the Indianapolis News included a last-minute item that received nationwide attention. It read: “Just a few minutes before time to open the dining-room doors a panic resulted from the discovery that the cocktails had been overlooked, the caterer having failed to provide them.” With Carey and Bookwalter’s aid, the drinks were secured from the Columbia Club and when the guests “filed into the dining room the amber Manhattans stood in long rows, one before each plate.”

  

The nation’s media turned Fairbanks’s serving of cocktails to his guests into a major controversy. The incident was first brought up as an issue by the Patriot Phalanx, a weekly Indianapolis prohibitionist newspaper. The Phalanx interviewed several reporters who witnessed the lunch and claimed that along with the Manhattans, wine also graced the table. One reporter claimed that the “waiters did not allow any of the glasses to remain empty, but kept filling them up from the bottles.” The article on the luncheon received additional coverage in such newspapers as the New York World and Indianapolis Sun. Many newspapers used the incident to make fun of Fairbanks.

  

The president expressed surprise about the uproar caused by the incident. In his memoirs, Indiana politician James Watson told about a visit he made to see Roosevelt during the controversy. Watson, a Methodist himself, quoted the president as saying: “You Methodists out in Indiana are a great lot. I drank a cocktail out at Vice-President Fairbanks’s home, whereupon all the members of your church landed on that gentleman and almost rode him out of the organization. That treatment was so uncalled for that, if it were not altogether ludicrous and preposterous, I would say it was simply outrageous.”

  

Although the negative publicity he received from the “cocktail affair” did not in itself cost Fairbanks the Republic nomination for president in 1908, the added strain the incident put on his already shaky relations with Roosevelt did not help his campaign. Instead of his vice president, Roosevelt supported the candidacy of William Howard Taft, who had served as his secretary of war.

    

Fairbanks’ failure to capture the 1908 GOP presidential nomination did not end his political career. In 1916 he was again the Republican’s choice as vice president. Fairbanks and Charles Evans Hughes, however, lost the race to incumbent President Woodrow Wilson and his Hoosier running mate, Thomas Marshall. After his death on June 4, 1918, Fairbanks’s name would probably have been left in history’s dustbin were it not for a central Alaska town’s decision to name itself after the vice president.

  

Even when Fairbanks is remembered it is often not for his political stature, but rather for his physical stature. Naming Fairbanks one of Indiana’s two greatest senators in 1957 for a selection committee choosing the U.S. Senate’s five most distinguished senators of all time, former President Harry Truman could only give this rationale for the honor bestowed on Fairbanks: “It is said that the mirror in the Vice President’s office, which once belonged to Dolly Madison, is placed at its present height so that Vice President Fairbanks could see to comb his hair.”