A candidate tests his party’s appetite for reform

Before Glens Falls native Charles Evans Hughes entered the race for New York governor in 1906, Republicans from Warren and Washington counties were lining up behind an early candidate from Saratoga County: state Sen. Edgar Truman Brackett.

“Senator Brackett would make an ideal candidate for governor,” said Addison B. Colvin, a former state treasurer who was a newspaper publisher, businessman and GOP power broker in Glens Falls, according to a report in The Argus of Albany on Jan. 30, 1906.

Colvin said Brackett was a reformer cut from the same cloth as Gov. Joseph “Holy Joe” Wingate Folk of Missouri, Mayor John Weaver of Philadelphia and Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who became a leader of the Progressive movement as Wisconsin’s governor and U.S. senator.

“In a recent campaign speech by a prominent Democrat labor leader, he declared that Senator Brackett was the best real friend that the cause of labor ever had in the Legislature,” Colvin said. “He has courageously fought the domination of boss rule.”

Brackett’s “boom” for governor had been ignited the previous evening at a dinner at the Glens Falls Club, an exclusive social club that was on the upper floors of the building at the intersection of Glen and Ridge streets, where Northeastern Fine Jewelers now occupies the ground floor.
Brackett was scheduled to respond to a toast, “Politics as a Pastime,” which turned out to be a campaign endorsement.

The Argus reported on Jan. 31: “Senator Edgar T. Brackett, who has been accused of having designs on the fat type which will decorate the head of the next Republican state ticket, sat back in his chair at the Glens Falls Club held in that village on Monday night and listened with what appeared to be satisfaction to the echo of the boom for governor, which was started by the toastmaster, Edward M. Angell,” a Glens Falls area lawyer.

Brackett’s prospective campaign gained momentum as the dinner continued, with “about 200 pair of lungs” touting Brackett for governor as the boom “left the foothills of the Adirondacks,” headed for Albany, New York City and the western part of the state.

Brackett picked up more regional support when Isaac V. Baker, a prominent Washington County Republican, endorsed his candidacy, The Argus reported on March 13.
Brackett formally launched his campaign for governor in Saratoga Springs on the afternoon of March 19.

“He was commended to the state as the Moses to lead the Republican Party out of the wilderness of graft in which it finds itself,” The Argus reported the next morning.

On the evening of March 19, Brackett, looking to bolster his reputation as a reformer and gain support from some 25,000 barbers across the state, pushed legislation through the Senate to abolish the state Board of Barber Examiners, a reportedly corrupt bureaucratic agency.
The GOP “Moses” at this point discounted the potential candidacy of reformer “Charles the Baptist,” as Hughes would later be called.

“In some quarters we note a sentiment that Mr. Charles E. Hughes, over and above his considerable legal fees which the state owes him for his patriotic services as counsel, has acquired a vested right to the governorship, such as it will be quite useless to contest,” The Argus wrote on March 21. “Senator Brackett’s constituents, full of spring water, enthusiasm and buoyancy, repudiate the Hughes proscriptive claim.”

The comment about Hughes’ legal fees referred to his service as the lead lawyer in 1905 and 1906 in the state’s investigations of corruption in the utility and life insurance industries.

 

Anti-corruption campaign
Brackett, a lawyer and businessman, was born in Wilton in 1853, and spent many of his childhood and teen years in Iowa. He returned to Saratoga County in 1872 to open a law practice in Saratoga Springs. He founded Adirondack Trust Co. in 1901 and served in the state Senate from 1896 to 1906.

“In his early manhood he shared an aptitude for politics, and his ability as a politician soon brought him to the front ranks of the Republican Party in Saratoga County and the state,” the Ballston Spa Journal reported on Feb. 28, 1924, the day after Brackett’s death.

Brackett had a reputation as a long-winded but compelling speaker with boundless energy.
“He was perhaps more largely quoted in the newspapers for years than any other public man,” The Glens Falls Times reported after his death.

His tendency to speak at length was noted in the 1906 campaign.
“It would be interesting to know how many hundred thousand words Senator Edward J. Brackett uttered yesterday,” The Argus wrote on March 8 of that year. “Not only did he deliver a long speech in the Senate on the bank inquiry, when most senators were sparring for wind and the majority leader was dozing at a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, the Saratogian was making an argument before the Court of Appeals.”

Brackett had just one problem: His reform efforts did not exclude the Republican Party.
Because of this, even before he entered the race for governor, some predicted that although he would have strong popular support, “it would be impossible for him to secure a sufficient number of delegates at the convention next fall to secure his nomination,” The Argus explained on Jan. 30.

In that era, party leaders controlled the nomination process. Nominees were chosen at a state party convention, rather than through a primary election.

Just weeks before his gubernatorial campaign began to take shape, Brackett had alienated Republican bosses when he introduced a resolution calling for U.S. Sen. Chauncey M. Depew to resign after the Hughes life insurance industry investigation revealed that Depew had held a business interest in the Equitable Life Insurance Co. for years.

Brackett claimed Depew was guilty of “legislative corruption.”

But a state Senate resolution urging Depew to resign failed by a vote of 34 to 1, with Brackett casting the only vote in favor. Fourteen Democrats abstained from voting, asserting that it was the Republican majority that had elected Depew and that it was up to them to decide his fate. (At the time, U.S. senators were elected by the legislative bodies of their respective states, rather than by a direct vote of the public.)

“Senator Brackett alone spoke for the resolution, and his speech, which lasted almost an hour and a half, was listened to by one of the largest audiences that has yet thronged the Senate chamber,” The Argus reported on Jan. 17.

“The action of the Saratogian was revolutionary,” The Glens Falls Times recalled in 1924 in a piece about Brackett. “It was customary in those days to treat very lightly the sins of those who held high office.”

Brackett still held aspirations for governor, but when the state Republican Party convention opened in September, President Theodore Roosevelt, working behind the scenes, prevented Brackett’s name from even being placed in nomination, The Glens Falls Times reported in 1924.
The party machine then turned its attention to removing Brackett from the state Senate.

At the Senate district Republican nominating convention on Oct. 3, delegates from Schenectady County, after being deadlocked on multiple ballots, convinced two Saratoga County delegates to switch to their side and prevent Brackett from being nominated for re-election.

“It was charged at the time [that] orders to defeat Senator Brackett came direct from the state organization,” The Glens Falls Times reported.

In 1908, Brackett, seemingly back in favor with the party machine, or at least forgiven, received the Republican nomination and returned to the state Senate for two more two-year terms before he chose not to seek re-election in 1912.

 

Maury Thompson was a reporter for The Post-Star of Glens Falls for 21 years before retiring in 2017. He now is a freelance writer focusing on the history of politics, labor and media in the region.