Video: 'America's WITTIEST Vice President??? Thomas Marshall's interesting legacy'

(Sunday, June 1, 1925, 9:30 a.m. EDT) — Thomas R. Marshall, the 28th vice president of the United States under President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), died suddenly this morning from a heart attack at his room at the Willard Hotel, while reading his Bible in bed during a trip to Washington, D.C. He was 71.

Marshall’s vice presidency is most remembered for a leadership crisis following a stroke that incapacitated Wilson in October 1919. Because of their personal dislike for Marshall, Wilson’s advisers and wife Edith sought to keep him uninformed about the president’s condition to prevent him from assuming presidential powers and duties.

Many people, including cabinet officials and congressional leaders, urged Marshall to become acting president, but he refused to forcibly assume Wilson’s powers, not wanting to set a standard of doing so.

Without strong leadership in the executive branch, the administration’s opponents defeated the ratification of the League of Nations treaty and returned the United States to an isolationist foreign policy.

Marshall ended his time in office as the first vice president since Daniel D. Tompkins, nearly a century earlier, to serve two full terms, and the first vice president re-elected, since John C. Calhoun.