Edwin Jaeckle

Early life

Jaeckle was born in Buffalo of pioneer stock to Jacob Jaeckle and Mary Marx Jaeckle, who themselves were born in Buffalo in the 1850s. His grandparents were Germans who had arrived in Buffalo during the great migration of the 1840s. His father was a carpenter who eventually became a general building contractor. Among other projects, Jaeckle's father literally built the family church, St. Peter's United Evangelical, completed in 1877.

For years the Jaeckles lived in the house Jacob built at 26 Lemon St. in the "Fruit Belt" of citrus-named streets in the German Near East Side of Buffalo. Mary Marx had grown up in that neighborhood, and her father had a grocery store on Mortimer Street. "They were just good hearty German-American people who worked like hell," Jaeckle recalled in 1980 in a Buffalo News article.

Early political career

Jaeckle was first exposed to politics while attending the University of Buffalo Law School. A neighborhood restaurateur, Leo J. Schmidt — a family friend — was running for state committeeman and needed help. Jaeckle, then 20, offered his services, primarily driving Schmidt around.

Jaeckle graduated in 1915 and was admitted to the New York Bar in 1916. Shortly after, Schmidt suggested that he run for the Erie County Board of Supervisors in the 13th Ward. In 1917, at age 22, he ran for the nomination against a Republican incumbent. He won the general election, after a brutal primary campaign.

After having served in the United States Navy during World War I, Jaeckle returned to New York to build his private law practice. In 1920, he became clerk of the County Board of Supervisors. In 1927 he became back tax collector for the county treasurer. During this time he cultivated his inside knowledge of the political game. Jaeckle was elected Erie County (Buffalo) Republican Chairman in 1935 and held the position with an iron fist until he resigned it in 1948, ostensibly to devote his full efforts to Dewey's 1948 presidential campaign. During his tenure, he made the county's political organization one of the most powerful in the nation and dominated local elections.

State chairman and beyond

In 1938, Jaeckle threw his support behind Dewey, a racket-busting New York City district attorney, to be the next New York governor. Jaeckle was the sole upstate chairman to push for Dewey's nomination behind the scenes; he also served as Dewey's floor manager at the state convention.

Dewey lost the general election to the Democratic incumbent Governor Herbert Lehman; but the Jaeckle-Dewey partnership was now established and the two men would advance each other's interests off and on over at least the next decade.

After the 1938 election, Jaeckle assumed the chair of the GOP State Executive Committee and, with it, de facto leadership of the state party organization. His election to the Republican state chairmanship came in 1940. He ran Dewey for governor again in 1942, this time successfully. Dewey would retain control of the office for twelve years.

After Dewey's successful gubernatorial career, Jaeckle set to work helping campaign for the presidency in 1944, campaigning against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In analyzing Dewey's success in maneuvering for the Republican nomination that year, Time Magazine concluded it was due to the " . . . power and precision of the politicos who surround Dewey" -- "a group of political advisers perhaps unequalled since the first Roosevelt Brain Trust." Preeminent among them, the article listed Jaeckle, describing him as a "bulky, well heeled Buffalo lawyer, who almost singlehanded turned Buffalo's meager Democratic majorities into Republican landslides."

However, during the campaign against Roosevelt, Dewey broke with Jaeckle over strategy. As Jaeckle recalled in a 1971 interview with The Buffalo Evening News, "I played the game until after the election, then I quit as state chairman." The two men later reconciled, and Dewey asked Jaeckle to join his 1948 presidential run against incumbent Democrat Harry S. Truman. Jaeckle agreed and served as Dewey's floor manager at the 1948 Republican National Convention. During the general election campaign, Jaeckle rode the campaign train with Dewey and did most of his political work.

With polls showing Dewey in the lead, the governor chose to adopt a restrained campaign strategy. Once again as in 1944, however, the two men saw strategy differently and Jaeckle cautioned Dewey against this laid-back approach. Dewey lost the election in one of the most surprising upsets in presidential campaign history.

Death and Retrospective

Jaeckle was a liberal Republican who established a tough political machine, ran it with an iron fist, insisted on integrity in party and government affairs, and fostered a progressive agenda.

In his own dealings as party leader, he was attentive to his subordinates and fair but firm. As Van Devander noted: "Jaeckle spends half of each week at home and during the rest of the time shuttles back and forth to New York City [where his headquarters famously was the Hotel Roosevelt on Madison Avenue at 45th Street], to Albany when the legislature is in session [where his headquarters was the Ten Eyck Hotel], and to other parts of the state. He is in frequent touch will all of the county chairmen, and succeeds in giving them the double impression that he is devoted to their individual interests, and that he is quite capable of breaking any one of them, politically, who might attempt to put anything over on him."

In Life magazine's profile of Jaeckle in its June 12, 1944 issue, Arthur Dennis summarized Jaeckle's political philosophy while describing the fund-raising prowess that enabled him to make the New York Republican Party a well-heeled, well-oiled machine: "In New York Jaeckle has had periodic meetings with Banker Winthrop Aldrich and others on party finances, but with the explicit understanding that their contributions do not give them any operational control over party management. This fits in with Jaeckle's theory and practice that the real strength of a political machine is at the party-worker level, and that the leader who forgets this and begins to take his ease among the political Brahmins and the big-money boys is lost."

He lived long enough to see the demise of party control of politics and government and to lament the rise of the cult of individual personality over party organization. He believed this phenomenon fostered a lack of accountability in government. As he told The Buffalo News toward the end of his life: "Politics no longer operates the way it should. There's no party responsibility; too many individuals are calling the shots. . . . Everybody is a victim of this system. In the old days, the party was responsible for the conduct of government. If you did the job right and served the people, they kept you in office. If not, you were gone. It's not like that anymore."

In his political retirement, Jaeckle built a substantial law practice and a substantial personal fortune. After retirement from his law practice at the age of 93, he divided his time between Rochester, Minnesota and St. Petersburg, Florida. He died on May 14, 1992, in St. Petersburg of pancreatic cancer at age 97.

Jaeckle's papers covering his activities from 1911 to 1992 on the local, state and national levels, as well as recordings and notes of interviews conducted in 1981 by Professor Emeritus William E. Diez of the University of Rochester (NY), are housed at the University of Rochester, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation

The Jaeckle Center for Law, Democracy, and Governance of the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School, endowed by Jaeckle and named in his honor, focuses on "the ways in which law, politics and the principles of democratic self-governance intersect" and its projects include: The New York State Democracy Clearinghouse, and The New York Election News Blog.

Highlights of Jaeckle's Political Career