Hail to the chiefs

When Joe Biden takes the oath of office as the nation’s 46th president next month, he’ll join a very select group of individuals.

As near as Lewiston historian Dick Riggs and the Lewiston Tribune archives can tell, fewer than a half-dozen current, former or future presidents have visited the Lewiston-Moscow region in any kind of official capacity.

Biden, who was the keynote speaker at a Lewis-Clark State College International Exchange Conference in March of 1986, will add his name to that august list once he’s sworn into office in January.

The presidency was already on the Delaware senator’s mind when he visited Lewiston 34 years ago. More than a year before he officially announced his candidacy in June of ’87, Biden told reporters he intended to seek the Democratic nomination in 1988.

He subsequently withdrew from the ’88 race amid allegations of plagiarism. Biden ran for president a second time in 2008, before withdrawing and becoming Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate. He finally grabbed the brass ring this year, prevailing over several Democratic rivals in the primaries and subsequently defeating President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 general election.

Other visits to the region by those who served as president — or vice president — include:

April 9-10, 1911

Former President Theodore Roosevelt spends the night in the Hotel Moscow, then has breakfast the next morning at the University of Idaho. After planting the first tree in what’s now the Presidential Grove outside the UI Administration Building, he gives a speech to an estimated 8,000 people from atop a platform made of wheat sacks.

Roosevelt was campaigning for president at the time. A year later, after losing the Republican presidential nomination to incumbent William Howard Taft, he forms the “Bull Moose” or national Progressive Party.

As perhaps the most successful third-party candidate in U.S. history, Roosevelt captures 27 percent of the popular vote and 99 electoral votes during the 1912 election, placing second and ensuring that Taft loses to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Oct. 7, 1911

President William Howard Taft visits Lewiston and Moscow and makes brief stops in Juliaetta-Kendrick and Garfield near the midway point on a 46-day, 13,000-mile “whistle stop” campaign tour across the nation.

“The president will seldom go more than 20 or 30 miles without stopping to say a word, either at some hall or from the rear platform of his (train) car,” noted a Sept. 6 Lewiston Tribune story.

Taft’s visit coincided with the opening of the Lewiston-Clarkston Interstate Fair, and causes a monthlong stir across the region. Near-daily newspaper stories discuss every aspect of the pending visit, from the president’s itinerary to who will ride in each car of the presidential motorcade during the drive from the Lewiston train depot to Pioneer Park. The weight of every member of the famously obese president’s equally bovine security detail is also gleefully reported.

“Such impressions as the president obtains of Idaho and its people must be most largely obtained at Lewiston,” noted one Tribune story. Consequently, the community “will endeavor to have every business house in gala attire for the big day.” When the president arrives, “he’ll find an oasis and busy little mart, with resources and commerce that are sure to prove an eye-opener, if we can organize ourselves kaleidoscopically, so to speak.”

At a time when a 50-mile road trip could be an all-day affair, people from surrounding areas start arriving in Lewiston days before the big event. Many are boarded in private homes, while others camp out at the fairgrounds.

An estimated 15,000 people greet Taft in Pioneer Park — more than double the population of the entire town. Clarkston is virtually deserted during the event. Another 3,500 to 4,000 people listen to his speech at the University of Idaho later that evening, after which he plants a tree next to Roosevelt’s in the Presidential Grove.

A major topic of both speeches is Taft’s support for two recent U.S. Supreme Court anti-trust rulings, which deemed Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company to be illegal monopolies.

Americans, Taft says, still favor individual ownership of businesses.

“They are still in favor of encouraging private business and allowing citizens to have free scope and do as he will under the law,” he maintains. “That is the result of these decisions.”

Taft also speaks about the need for the U.S. government to issue currency during times of tight money supply, to prevent Wall Street bankers from creating artificial cash famines to drive up prices. Two years later, Congress approves the Federal Reserve Act, allowing the government to do just that.

Taft, who served as a federal judge prior to being elected president, serves one term in office before losing his reelection bid to Woodrow Wilson in 1912. He later becomes chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Nov. 15-16, 1917

Seven months after the United States declares war on Germany in World War I, Vice President Thomas Marshall encourages Lewiston and Moscow residents to buy Liberty Bonds and “go without meat on Thursdays” to help out the war effort.

Marshall, who served as governor of Indiana prior to becoming Woodrow Wilson’s running mate, takes a motorcar from Pomeroy to Lewiston on Nov. 15, and gives a “stirring patriotic address” to about 5,000 people at the county fairgrounds during the Northwest Livestock Show.

He speaks to another large crowd in Moscow the next day, complimenting them on their Western spirit.

“Here, people do not think a man is a bad man simply because he doesn’t think as they do,” he says.

His tolerance for opposing viewpoints only goes so far, though. During the 80-minute speech, he also objects to teaching German in schools, saying “the man who doesn’t speak the English tongue on the street and in his home should not have the right to vote.”

And in a preview of President John F. Kennedy’s famous comment to “ask not what your country can do for you,” Marshall tells the audience it’s time for Americans to ask not “how much can I get from my country, but what can I do for my country.”

Oct. 12, 1932

Vice President Charles Curtis arrives from Spokane by car, has lunch at the Lewis-Clark Hotel and meets with students before giving a public address to about 2,600 people at Lewiston High School.

He also visits Pullman and Colfax during the trip.

Three years into the Great Depression — and less than a month before the 1932 presidential election — Curtis assures local farmers that they’re “safe in GOP hands.”

He speaks in support of protectionist trade practices to shelter American farmers from foreign agricultural imports, and favors emergency tariff relief.

“Our Democratic friends want a tariff for revenue, but I don’t think they know what they’re talking about,” he said. “But whatever it is, I’m against it. I’m against even competition by any foreign product in our domestic market.”

Curtis also praises his boss, President Herbert Hoover, saying “never was there a president who so took the public into his confidence, who worked so hard day and night for the nation.”

Hoover’s diligence failed to impress, however. In one of the biggest landslides in U.S. presidential history, he receives less than 40 percent of the popular vote and loses the 1932 election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Curtis, who served 28 years in Congress prior to becoming vice president, was an enrolled member of the Kaw Indian Nation in Kansas and remains the only person of Native American ancestry to serve in the nation’s second-highest elected office.

Oct. 13, 1950

Vice President Alben Barkley provides the keynote address at the Idaho Young Democrats state convention in Lewiston.

Barkley lauds Democratic economic policies, noting that the last time Republicans held the White House, in 1932, farmers were burning wheat because it was cheaper than fuel.

“Today, there is no unemployment in the country,” he maintains. “We have on our payroll the highest number of employed we’ve ever had — even higher than the peak boom of World War II.”

He also makes reference to the Korean War, which began four months before.

“We are in Korea to dignify and magnify the power of the United Nations, to give hope to all men who desire peace and freedom,” he says. “And through the UN there may come a day when war is no longer necessary.”

Barkley arrives here eight months after Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy stoked anti-Communist fears by claiming he had a list of names of “known Communists” who worked at the U.S. State Department.

The vice president assures reporters that any disloyal federal employees have since been “weeded out” of the government.

“I think the program set up by the president (Harry S. Truman) and (Secretary of State Dean Acheson), including the loyalty board, the indictments and the other phases of the loyalty program, have effectively eliminated any subversives in the state department,” Barkley says.

Feb. 11 and May 20, 1960

John F. Kennedy stops in Pullman and Lewiston while campaigning for president.

The Massachusetts senator, who just announced his candidacy in January, flies into the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport at about 1 a.m. and spends the remainder of the night at the Hilltop Motel before giving a speech that morning to about 1,600 students at Washington State University.

One of the main topics of conversation is whether Kennedy, as a Catholic, could honor the president’s oath to defend the Constitution of the United States.

The candidate notes that he took a similar oath to defend the Constitution upon joining the U.S. Naval Reserve and serving in World War II. He also says he doesn’t know “any Americans of any faith” who don’t support the separation of church and state.

Kennedy then blasts President Dwight D. Eisenhower for failing to invest in defense, education, science, agriculture or foreign trade, describing his administration as “eight gray years — years of drift, of falling behind, of postponing decisions and crises.”

Three months later, during a five-hour visit to Lewiston, Kennedy returns to the same theme, saying Eisenhower’s lack of leadership “threatens the safety of the nation and peace of the world.”

The image America presents to the world, he says, “should not be a harsh and unyielding one. It should be one of progress. We should show that it is we who are the revolutionaries (rather than the Soviet Union). It is we who have the revolutionary concept that men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.”

Kennedy spends much of his time here meeting individually with Idaho delegates to the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Two months later, he wins the party’s presidential nomination.

In November, Kennedy receives 49.72 percent of the popular vote, compared to 49.55 percent for Vice President Richard Nixon, and is elected the 35th president of the United States. Three years later he’s assassinated.

June 26, 1976

While locked in a tight race with President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan speaks at the Idaho Republican Party state convention in Moscow.

The former movie star and California governor hopes to make a clean sweep of Idaho’s 17 national delegates. He won 13 during the May primary — taking 74 percent of the vote, his largest margin in any state — but wants the other four at-large delegates, who are still up for grabs.

Speaking to about 1,000 convention delegates at the University of Idaho’s Kibbie Dome, Reagan casts himself as a Washington outsider, saying he’s better suited to reining in the federal government than Ford. He suggests welfare recipients should be required to work on community projects, and proposes using all federal forms and regulations to fuel a glorious “bicentennial bonfire.”

“It’s time for government to recognize that sometimes it does the best for us when it does nothing,” Reagan said.

He reportedly receives his biggest ovation when he says the government has a moral obligation to rebate any extra revenue to taxpayers.

“Government doesn’t have the right to take one penny more than it takes to run government,” he says. “And if there’s any left over at the end of the year, it should be given back.”

With about six weeks left before the Republican National Convention, Reagan trails Ford by a margin of 1,005 delegates to 932. A total of 1,130 are needed to secure the nomination.

On the Democratic side, Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter has nearly sewn up the nomination. He has 1,423 of the needed 1,505 delegates. Idaho Sen. Frank Church dropped out of the race after winning four states and 63 delegates.

Although Reagan picks up the last four Idaho delegates, he loses the Republican nomination to Ford on the first ballot. News reports at the time say conservatives are so disgusted, they’re threatening to withdraw and form a party of their own.

Then Ford loses the 1976 election to Carter, and the Republican conservative revival is on.

Jan. 11-12, 1978

Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale visits Pullman and Lewiston, while on a tour of seven western states.

Mondale arrives in Lewiston the evening of Jan. 11 and spends the night in Pullman. The next morning he has breakfast at Washington State University, gives a speech on campus and then meets with Pullman kindergarten students. He also talks with farmers and timber representatives in Lewiston, before flying to Nevada that evening.

Like the Carter administration itself, his visit fails to energize. One kindergarten student mistakes him for “Fritz the clown.” Mondale’s traveling companion — Interior Secretary and former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus — tells loggers “we didn’t bring a sack full of answers,” and a Lewiston Tribune headline the next day notes that farmers considered his speech to be “a waste of time.”

Perhaps in response, Mondale is the last sitting president or vice president to visit the region.

Spence may be contacted at bspence@lmtribune.com or (208)-791-9168.