From progressive to 'potato': Here are all the vice presidents from Indiana

EVANSVILLE – Indiana won’t be getting its seventh vice-president.

Two days after a bullet grazed his ear in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump announced Monday that Ohio senator / Appalachian memoirist / venture capitalist J.D. Vance will serve as his running mate for the 2024 election.

It makes official what was obvious already: Mike Pence – who had to be protected by the Secret Service after resisting Trump’s call to overturn the 2020 election – wouldn’t be rejoining the ticket. Vance, who criticized Trump in 2016, has since said he wouldn't have certified the 2020 results.

The decision also means Indiana won’t field yet another vice-presidential candidate. The state has seen six take office in the last three centuries. They range from accused fraudsters to progressive politicians to men who struggled to spell “potato.”

Here’s a rundown of all of them.

Schuyler Colfax

Mostly known for his virulent opposition to slavery, Colfax moved to New Castle, Indiana from New York when he was about 13 years old.

He began his career as a newspaper reporter, but soon transitioned to politics. He landed in Congress in 1855 and eventually rose to Speaker of the House. That gig – and his constant opposition to then-President Andrew Jackson – led Ulysses S. Grant to pick him as his running mate in 1868. The pair went on to win easily.

But Colfax got dumped from the ticket in 1872 after he got snagged in the Credit Mobilier scandal. The scheme, helmed by a Union Pacific Railroad executive, pumped millions of dollars in construction profits into a fake company. The executive then sold shares of that company to a slew of high-profile investors in Washington – including the vice president himself.

The uproar drove Colfax out of politics, and he spent the rest of his career as a lecturer.

Thomas A. Hendricks

Hendricks took office in 1885 alongside President Grover Cleveland. Two-hundred-and-sixty-six days later, he was dead.

The former Indiana governor had reportedly struggled with his health for years, and on Nov. 25, 1885, during a visit to Indianapolis the day before Thanksgiving, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

“The close relations that have existed between Thomas A. Hendricks and the people of Indiana, ever since as a 2-year-old infant he was brought by his parents into the state, makes his death almost a private bereavement in every household within our borders,” the Evansville Daily Journal wrote hours after his death.

Charles W. Fairbanks

President Theodore Roosevelt and his vice president, Charles W. Fairbanks, both had incredible mustaches. That was about the only thing they had in common.

“The two were unalike in so many ways that in 1904, one political commentator famously dubbed them ‘the hot tamale and the Indiana icicle,’” the Roosevelt Center wrote on its website. “They lacked a shared vision; Roosevelt was more in tune with the progressive views of Indiana’s newest senator, Albert J. Beveridge.”

As a result, Roosevelt basically spent four years ignoring Fairbanks. It wasn’t much different from his first term, when he didn’t have a vice president at all.

But despite his reputation as a conservative, Fairbanks did support women’s suffrage – perhaps thanks to his wife, Cornelia, who pushed hard for the right to the vote during her husband’s time in office.  

Fairbanks was nominated for VP again in 1916, this time under Republican Charles Hughes. But they lost to incumbent Woodrow Wilson – and the next man on this list.

Thomas R. Marshall

Marshall viewed the vice-presidency as kind of a joke.

According to PBS, he likened his eight-year stint as the second most powerful man in the world to being a “spare tire – used only in case of emergency.”

“I don't want to work. I don’t propose to work,” he reportedly said after leaving office in 1921. “I wouldn't mind being vice president again.”

But despite his refusal to take himself seriously, Marshall worked hard to promote progressive causes. The first vice president to actually be born in Indiana spent his term advocating for child labor restrictions and laws limiting corruption.

And unlike a lot of Indiana politicians of his time, he also publicly denounced the Ku Klux Klan.

“I have no respect for a man who sleeps on a mattress so as to use his sheet to express his opinions with,” he reportedly said during a 1924 speech.

Dan Quayle

Indiana would wait almost 70 years to get its next vice president.

J. Danforth "Dan" Quayle, an Indianapolis native who grew up in Phoenix, served a little more than one term in the U.S. Senate before George H.W. Bush – a former vice president himself – selected him as his running mate in 1988. Quayle would stay in the job for one term before Bill Clinton ousted Bush from office after the '92 election.

Sadly for Quayle, he’s now mostly remembered now for misspelling a common household vegetable.

During a campaign visit to a Trenton, New Jersey elementary school in June 1992, Quayle conducted a sort of impromptu spelling bee and called a kid to the blackboard to spell the word “potato.” When the child polished off the final letter, Quayle incorrectly instructed him to add an “e” on the end.

Mike Pence

Mike Pence was in trouble when Donald Trump came calling in 2016.

The Indiana governor and far-right religious conservative had spent a year beset by the disastrous Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law he supported that opponents said would basically enshrine LGBTQ discrimination into law.

Multiple corporations vowed to stop doing business in Indiana if the law wasn’t amended or overturned. And in the aftermath, the Indianapolis Star published a front-page editorial with a stark message: Fix This Now.

That fallout and other issues left Pence essentially tied with Democrat John Gregg in his bid reelection. But on July 14, Trump selected Pence as his running mate, alleviating that burden and bringing a whole new set of burdens to come.

Pence spent four years defending his boss. That finally stopped on Jan. 6, 2021, when he resisted Trump’s false claims of election fraud and instead certified the results of the 2020 vote. Rioters charged into the U.S. Capitol, forcing the Secret Service to evacuate Pence from the Senate chambers and hide him somewhere in the building. They reportedly got as close as 40 feet away.

“Make no mistake, the vice-president’s life was in danger,” California Congressman Pete Aguilar said during committee hearings a year later.

Pence briefly mounted a presidential campaign this go-around, but dropped out last year.

Additional information from the Courier & Press archives.