The Triple Switch: How the Missouri Plan Came to Kansas
| Publication year | 2004 |
| Pages | 28-37 |
| Citation | Vol. 73 No. 1 Pg. 28-37 |
73 J. Kan. Bar Assn. 1, 28-37 (2004). The Triple Switch: How the Missouri Plan Came to Kansas
73 J. Kan. Bar Assn. 1, 28-37 (2004)
I. Introduction
For almost a century, Kansans chose their judges through the process of popular election, despite evidence that other states had modernized their selection procedures in the 20th century. The dramatis personae of this episode included Gov. Fred Hall, the controversial leader of the "modern" wing of the Kansas Republican Party; William A. Smith, an active and unabashed partisan Republican chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court; and John Berridge McCuish, an amiable small town newspaper editor who served as Gov. Hall's lieutenant governor. Then in the 1950s, a bizarre political episode caused the state to adopt a more democratic method of judicial selection that surrounding states already had experimented with successfully.
The story begins in late 1956 when William Amos Smith, chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, became seriously ill. The normally hale and hearty 68-year-old shrugged off his symptoms until that December when he collapsed and was hospitalized with a high fever and abdominal pain. Doctors diagnosed uremic poisoning caused by a kidney stone, and they operated immediately. In this stricken condition, Smith made the important decision to retire from the bench, precipitating the "Triple Switch of 1957," which involved the sudden resignations of three state officials.
Had Smith been operated on earlier, he might have recovered sufficiently by Christmas 1956 and been able to complete his term in office through 1958. Had his surgery been a week later, there would have been no time to plan the switch. The timing was crucial because, either way, it would have precluded the "Triple Jump."(fn1)
During this period Kansas judges ran for office on a partisan ticket, and some judges continued their partisan political activity while on the bench. In fact, the system encouraged this intrigue in many ways. Justice Smith was notorious for his extensive actions in politics and was disliked by many party regulars. Among other incursions into politics, he supported his friend C. Wesley Roberts, Republican national chairman, when Roberts received an $11,000 commission for facilitating the sale of the Ancient Order of United Workers (AOUW) hospital at Norton. The hospital had been built on state property and soon would have reverted to the state without cost. A legislative committee exposed the episode, resulting in serious embarrassment for Republicans, statewide and nationally, and especially for Gov. Edward Arn's conservative faction of the party. President Eisenhower, who had just campaigned for office on the slogan to "clean up the mess in Washington," accepted Roberts' resignation as Republican national chairman. Former governor and elder statesman Alf Landon, an opponent of Roberts, decried the arrangement as "peddling his political influence in a raid on the public treasury of Kansas," adding that Roberts' explanation of his role "does not satisfy the people of Kansas by a long shot."(fn2)
The Roberts episode, and other issues regarding the entrenched officials in the Republican Party in Kansas, led young Republican Frederick Lee Hall to press for cleaning up the "mess in Topeka." Hall would later be elected governor, and his controversial term further exacerbated this split in party ranks. Yet Smith, whose son Don was a member of Hall's law firm, supported the liberal Hall in his battles with the party and the Legislature, primarily because Smith liked winners. On March 1, 1956, seniority allowed Smith to replace W.W. Harvey as chief justice when Harvey retired. Smith planned to serve out the remaining two years of his term before mandatory retirement; however, kidney stones altered his plans.(fn3)
Hall, the second protagonist, had a tempestuous political career. Born July 24, 1916, in Dodge City, Hall received his education in that city's public schools. His ability as a high school debater won him a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he received an undergraduate degree in 1938 and a law degree in 1941. He returned to Dodge City to practice but was unknown in Kansas politics, except for prior work in the Young Republicans organization. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1950, one of nine candidates, and won the election. This splitting of the Republican vote allowed Hall, the candidate "west of 81," to win because he was strong in western Kansas.(fn4)
Arn was a conservative who resigned as attorney general to accept a seat on the Supreme Court. He soon vacated that position to run for governor and won. He and Lt. Gov. Hall immediately began squabbling. Arn was part of the Old Guard faction in Kansas, and Pageant magazine described him as one of the five "worst" governors at the time. Gov. Arn and the liberal Hall proved to be incompatible from the start. Hall had a law degree from outside Kansas and had worked in Washington for the War Production Board during World War II. Hall had no military experience, however, because of a minor physical problem, and many believed he had a disagreeable personality, which were fatal flaws for success in the Republican Party in the period immediately after the war. In addition, Hall was aggressive and pugnacious and, as a result, Arn supporters determined to purge him from party politics. They ran Wayne Ryan, a veteran state senator and close personal friend of the governor, against Hall in the 1952 primary. The maverick Hall campaigned on the issue that the party leadership was trying to "purge" him. Hall's narrow victory earned him a statewide following among young, liberal Republicans because he was fighting the "machine," always a popular cause for youthful voters. During this term, the Arn faction could only curtail Hall's powers in presiding over the Senate, or as the Topeka Daily Capital expressed it, they "dehorned" him.(fn5)
Despite this "dehorning," Hall continued his crusade against the Old Guard. Their opposition to the "outsider" lieutenant governor won him additional support that year from the younger Republicans, especially in the legislative chamber. Hall played a key role in the exposure of the Roberts episode, which also increased the number of his enemies. He was continually at odds with Paul Wunsch, president of the Senate and the most powerful figure in the Legislature. Because of Hall's continual criticism of "government by crony" and the "mess in Topeka," the party leaders - Arn, Kansas City businessman and National Committeeman Harry Darby, U.S. senators Frank Carlson and Andrew Schoeppel, and Congressman Ed Reese (known as the "Arn, Darby, Carlson faction") - were determined to eliminate Hall from Kansas politics.
When Hall announced in January 1954 that he would run for governor, the Old Guard supported George Templar, who resigned as U.S. Attorney to run in the primary. Hall, campaigning on the issue of "the restoration of faith and dignity in Topeka," narrowly won with 52 percent of the vote. His theme in the general election was "Let's Clean Up Topeka as President Eisenhower Cleaned Up Washington." He easily dispatched democratic newcomer George Docking of Lawrence with a 40,000 vote majority, "the biggest majority that Kansas had ever given a state candidate." He thus replaced the dominant faction in control of the state government and, as he bragged to the people in his inaugural speech, "I am under obligation to no one but you. I have no master but you."(fn6)
Hall's strong support in the House of Representatives permitted his candidate to defeat the Republican leadership's "anointed" candidate for speaker, Warren Shaw, in a party caucus. The governor went on to press for extensive state aid to high schools and an increase in the state budget, issues that the conservative faction opposed. His veto of a "Right-to-Work" bill won him praise from Eisenhower's secretary of labor, James P. Mitchell, but this action, plus his attempts to clean out the Statehouse in Topeka, cemented his fate with the Old Guard. Although Republican state chairman Lloyd H. Ruppenthal was a Hall supporter and, in fact, had been his campaign manager in the recent election, he broke with Hall, especially over the firing of Purchasing Director Eugene W. Hiatt and over financing for Republican candidates. Ruppenthal believed that, as party chairman, he was not the governor's agent and should allocate party finances on the basis of the good of the party, not to promote Hall. In addition, Hall wanted state patronage to go to county workers who supported him while Ruppenthal supported the tradition that the county party chairmen controlled this patronage.
Hall needed friends in the party machinery. To gain support, Hall asked Old Guard stalwart Wilbur G. Leonard to head the Revenue and Tax Commission. The patronage post became available when the incumbent, Ruppenthal, found he could not devote full time to his state job and also hold the position of executive secretary of the Republican Party, a newly created post to which he had been named. Leonard had experience with the Alcoholic Beverage Commission, and the governor hoped he could use this expertise to straighten out the administrative problems in the Tax Commission and to serve as a foil to Ruppenthal and the conservatives who controlled the state party machinery. Leonard soon joined forces with Ruppenthal, however, when Hall demanded Leonard purge the Tax Commission of old time employees as part of his "clean out...
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