dorky-Thomas Marshall, Vice-President of the United States March 4, 1913-March 4, 1921
The office of Vice President of the United States is the second highest public office created by the United States Constitution. The Vice President, along with the President of the United States, is elected by the people through the Electoral College to a four-year term of office. He (or someday she) is the first person in the presidential line of succession, and ascends to the Presidency upon the death, resignation, or removal of the President. Under the Constitution, the Vice President is also the President of the United States Senate. He votes in the Senate when necessary to break a tie. The Vice President also presides over the joint session of Congress when it convenes to count the vote of the Electoral College.
And yet with all of this awesome responsibility, the office is sometime maligned and mocked. The first man to hold the office, John Adams, said of the Vice Presidency: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." John Nance Garner described the office as being "not worth a bucket of warm piss."
The office can't be that insignificant. Thirteen Vice-Presidents have become President; some (like John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Chester Alan Arthur) upon the death of a president, some (like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush) by election, some (like Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson) by both, and one (Gerald Ford) by the resignation of a president. Others have been selected as their party's nominee for president (like Aaron Burr, John C. Breckinridge, Henry Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore.)
In September, the theme of
potus_geeks will be Vice-Presidents. Each day one of the lesser known Vice Presidents will be profiled in this community. I won't include those who have been elected president or those who have been profiled in this year's earlier series on Also-Rans. Many of these men have various quirks in their background, while many have interesting and impressive resumes on their own. Some made valuable contributions to their administrations while in office, while others used up their usefulness once their ticket was elected. I'm looking forward to learning which were which and I hope you are too.