Thomas R. Marshall

Thomas Riley Marshall was the 28th vice president of the United States. He served from 1913 to 1921 under President Woodrow Wilson. He was known for his wit and sense of humor. He died while on a trip after suffering a heart attack in 1925.

About Thomas R. Marshall in brief

Summary Thomas R. MarshallThomas Riley Marshall was the 28th vice president of the United States. He served from 1913 to 1921 under President Woodrow Wilson. He was known for his wit and sense of humor. He died while on a trip after suffering a heart attack in 1925. Marshall’s paternal grandfather, Riley Marshall, immigrated to Indiana in 1817 and settled on a farm in present-day Whitley County. He became wealthy when a moderate deposit of oil and natural gas was discovered on his farm in 1827. The money allowed him to purchase a modest estate and spend the rest of his life as an active member of the Indiana Democratic Party. His only child, Daniel, was also able to send his only child to medical school. The family moved to Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1859, but the frontier violence caused them to move to Missouri in 1860. Daniel, a supporter of the American Union, took his four-year-old son, Thomas, to the Lincoln and Douglas debate in Freeport in 1858, alternating between the two candidates when they were not speaking, and remembered it as one of his earliest and most cherished memories. He also sat on the laps of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas and listened to them debate. He later became a prominent lawyer in Indiana, and served as the 27th governor of Indiana. He is the only known Vice President of the U.S. to have been exclusively targeted in an assassination attempt while in office. He was also the first Vice President since Daniel D. Tompkins, nearly a century earlier, to serve two full terms. He had a son, Daniel Marshall, who was also a prominent attorney and later served as an Indiana State Senator and a member of Indiana’s House of Representatives.

The Marshall family lived in North Manchester, Indiana, until his death in 1925, when he moved to Indiana to be with his wife, Martha Patterson, who had been orphaned at age 13 while living in Ohio. His son was also known for her wit and humor, as her son later would be. The Marshalls moved to Quincy, Illinois, while the family was living in 1857, and Daniel was a staunch Democrat. He went on to marry Martha Patterson in 1864. He and his wife had a daughter, Martha, who died in infancy in 1874. He then went on a career as a lawyer and became a well-known lawyer and politician in Indiana. His popularity as Indiana governor, and the state’s status as a critical swing state, helped him secure the Democratic vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Wilson in 1912 and win the subsequent general election. During Marshall’s second term he delivered morale-boosting speeches across the nation during World War I and became the first U. S. vice president to hold cabinet meetings, which he did while Wilson was in Europe. During his first term as vice president, he proposed controversial changes to the Constitution of Indiana; the state courts blocked his attempts. In office, he had the body adopt its first procedural rule allowing filibusters to be ended by a two-thirds majority vote—a variation of this rule remains in effect.