Wikipedia

Michael DiSalle

Michael Vincent DiSalle (January 6, 1908 – September 16, 1981)[1][2] was an American politician and attorney who served as the 60th governor of Ohio from 1959 to 1963. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 46th mayor of Toledo from 1948 to 1950, and as a member of the Toledo City Council and Ohio House of Representatives.

Michael V. DiSalle
DiSalle in 1962
60th Governor of Ohio
In office
January 12, 1959 – January 14, 1963
LieutenantJohn W. Donahey
Preceded byC. William O'Neill
Succeeded byJim Rhodes
Director of the Economic Stabilization Agency
In office
December 22, 1952 – January 20, 1953
PresidentHarry S. Truman
Preceded byRoger Putnam
Succeeded byAgency abolished
Director of the Office of Price Stabilization
In office
December 1950 – January 23, 1952
PresidentHarry S. Truman
Preceded byOffice established
Succeeded byAlan Valentine
46th Mayor of Toledo
In office
January 1948 – November 30, 1950[1]
Preceded byLloyd Emerson Roulet
Succeeded byOllie Czelusta
Member of the Toledo City Council
In office
1942–1950
Member of the Ohio House of Representatives
In office
1937–1939
Personal details
BornMichael Vincent DiSalle
(1908-01-06)January 6, 1908
New York City, New York, U.S.
DiedSeptember 16, 1981(1981-09-16) (aged 73)
Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy
PartyDemocratic
Spouse
Myrtle Eugene England
​
​
(m. 1929)​
EducationGeorgetown University (LL.B.)
ProfessionLawyer

Early life and education

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DiSalle was born on January 6, 1908, in New York City,[1] to Italian American immigrant parents, Anthony and Assunta DiSalle. His family moved to Toledo, Ohio, when he was three years old. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from Georgetown University in 1931 and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1932.[2] He married Myrtle E. England; the couple had four daughters and one son.[1][2] In 1949, the University of Notre Dame conferred DiSalle an honorary Doctor of Law.[1]

Political career

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In 1936, DiSalle was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives;[1] he served one term and lost an election for the Ohio Senate in 1938.[2] Following the loss, DiSalle held a series of offices in the city government of Toledo, Ohio. He worked as an assistant law director from 1939 to 1941 before being elected to the Toledo City Council in 1941;[1] the council selected him as vice-mayor in 1943 and 1945.[1]

In 1946, DiSalle ran in the U.S. House of Representatives election in the Toledo-based 9th district, but narrowly lost to the Republican incumbent, Homer A. Ramey.[3] DiSalle was elected as mayor of Toledo in 1947 and re-elected in 1949, and served from 1948 until his resignation on November 30, 1950, to accept a federal appointment.[1][4] During his mayoralty, Toledo fully re-paid its debts.[1]

In 1950, he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate.[5] He lost to then-state auditor Joseph T. Ferguson, who in turn lost the general election to the Republican incumbent, Robert A. Taft.[5] In December 1950, President Harry S. Truman appointed DiSalle as director of the Office of Price Stabilization, a sub-agency of the Korean War-era Economic Stabilization Agency which established and enforced war-time price controls.[1]

DiSalle resigned as director on January 23, 1952, in order to run again for U.S. Senate.[6] He won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election to the Republican incumbent, John W. Bricker.[7] In December 1952, President Truman (now a lame duck) appointed DiSalle as director of the Economic Stabilization Agency, replacing Roger Putnam.[8] The appointment lasted less than one month, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower abolished the agency on April 30, 1953.[9]

Governor of Ohio (1959–1963)

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In 1956, DiSalle was the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, losing to then-state attorney general C. William O'Neill.[10] In their 1958 re-match, DiSalle defeated O'Neill.[11][12] The gubernatorial term had in 1954 been lengthened from two years to four years, starting with the 1958 election; so DiSalle served as governor from 1959 to 1963.

In July 1959, DiSalle signed a bill designating "with God, all things are possible" as the official motto of Ohio after it passed the unanimously in the Ohio House of Representatives.[13][14] The motto is derived from the recount of Jesus and the rich young man in the Gospel of Matthew 19:16–30.[14]

DiSalle was a favorite son candidate in the 1960 Democratic Party presidential primaries. He ran only in the Ohio primary, which he won with 60.25% of the vote against Albert S. Porter,[15] who had run against him in the gubernatorial primary in 1958.[11] Of the total popular vote in the primaries, DiSalle placed sixth behind the eventual nominee, Senator John F. Kennedy, as well as Governor Pat Brown, perennial candidate George H. McLain, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and Senator George Smathers.[16]

President John F. Kennedy attends DiSalle's birthday party

In 1962, DiSalle lost re-election as governor to then-state auditor Jim Rhodes,[17] after voters disapproved of several aspects of his administration, including his opposition to capital punishment, a tax increase, and a policy which billed wards of state for living necessities.[4]

Opposition to capital punishment

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DiSalle was an opponent of death penalty and commuted a number of sentences as governor.[18][19] He allowed six of the 12 death sentences he reviewed as governor to proceed. DiSalle stated that despite being "totally opposed to the death penalty", he could not use his power of executive clemency without mitigating circumstances or evidence of miscarriage of justice. To do so would be to personally repeal the law providing for capital punishment in Ohio, and he might have been impeached for violating his oath of office, DiSalle wrote.[20]

DiSalle personally investigated all cases of people scheduled to be executed by electric chair and even personally met with some of them.[21] He agreed with Clinton Duffy, who said that murderers are more likely to be rehabilitated than other criminals.[20] "To demonstrate his faith in rehabilitation, [DiSalle] made it a point to hire convicted murderers to serve on his household staff" at the Ohio Governor's Mansion.[20][22]

One of DiSalle's primary concerns regarding the death penalty was that poorer defendants did not have the same access to counsel as rich defendants, and therefore would suffer the death penalty disproportionately. He recalled: "I found that the men in death row had one thing in common: they were penniless".[23] They were defended in court by court-appointed attorneys, some without criminal legal experience. Professional criminals "did not have to depend on volunteers", DiSalle wrote. "Nor were they ever, in my experience, executed".[20]

DiSalle believed that penology should be improved. Ronald Fenton, among the 12 cases he reviewed, had raped and murdered a baby. The governor believed that such acts had proved his insanity, but psychiatrists had found him sane. Although he believed that the M'Naghten Rule was flawed, because of the finding—and expecting that had he been commuted to life imprisonment "his prisonmates would have made his life unbearable"—DiSalle allowed the execution. He cited the case as an example of how the justice system had failed to study the behavior of a minor criminal to prevent him from committing murder.[20]

After leaving the governorship, DiSalle co-founded and served as a chairman of the National Committee to Abolish Federal Death Penalty.[23][24] His 1965 book, The Power of Life or Death, discusses this issue and chronicles his difficult experiences as the man charged with making the final decision regarding a sentence commutation.[25] He is quoted in the book Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution as saying, "No one who has never watched the hands of a clock marking the last minutes of a condemned man's existence, knowing that he alone has the temporary Godlike power to stop the clock, can realize the agony of deciding an appeal for executive clemency".[26]

Later life and death

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In 1966, DiSalle joined the Washington, D.C., law firm of Chapman, Duff, and Paul.[2] In 1979, he co-founded the Washington, D.C., law firm of DiSalle & Staudinger.[2] The same year, DiSalle also authored the book Second Choice, a history of the U.S. vice presidency.[27]

DiSalle led a draft movement for a potential 1968 presidential campaign by Senator Ted Kennedy. He later served as the honorary chairman of Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign.[2][4]

DiSalle died on September 16, 1981, of a heart attack while vacationing in Pescara, Italy.[28] In Toledo, the Michael DiSalle Government Center and Michael V. DiSalle Bridge, which carries I-75 across the Maumee River, are named after him[4] The DiSalle Center (no longer standing) at the Ohio Expo Center and the Ohio State Fair in Columbus, Ohio, was also named in his honor.

Electoral history

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See also

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References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Loftus, Joseph A. (December 1, 1950). "Key price job goes to Toledo's mayor; price stabilizer". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on July 22, 2018. Retrieved April 22, 2020. WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 --- President Truman named Mayor Michael V. DiSalle of Toledo, Ohio, today to be Director of Price Stabilization. ... He flew to Washington today, met Mr. [Alan] Valentine and President Truman, and then flew home to quit the Mayor's job. His term has another year to run. He was elected a [Toledo] City Councilman, and the Council elected him as Mayor. ... Mr. DiSalle was born in New York [on] Jan. 6, 1908. He has lived in Toledo since 1911. He attended the public and parochial schools there and was graduated from Georgetown University in 1931 with a Bachelor of Law degree. Notre Dame bestowed an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1949. He began his law career in Toledo as assistant district counsel of the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 and served in that post for about two years. He was a member of the Ohio Legislature in 1937 and 1938 and was Assistant City Law Director from 1939 to 1941. He has been a member of the City Council since 1942 and served two terms as Vice Mayor before his election as Mayor in 1947 and again in 1949. During his service the city paid off its entire indebtedness. ... He is a Roman Catholic, is married and is the father of a boy and four girls, the oldest a student at St. Mary's College in Indiana.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Michael V. DiSalle, 73, former governor of Ohio". The New York Times. September 17, 1981. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on July 7, 2019. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  3. 1 2 "U.S. House election results (Ohio's 9th district, 1946)". Our Campaigns. November 5, 1946. Archived from the original on March 24, 2016. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Zimmerman, Richard. Call Me Mike: A Political Biography of Michael V. DiSalle. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-87338-755-4.
  5. 1 2 3 "U.S. Senate primary election results (Ohio, 1950)". Our Campaigns. May 2, 1950. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  6. ↑ Egan, Charles E. (January 24, 1952). "DiSalle to enter race for Senate; O.P.S. head seeks nomination in Ohio to unseat Bricker; Lausche aid counted". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  7. ↑ "U.S. Senate election results (Ohio, 1952)". Our Campaigns. November 4, 1952. Archived from the original on March 16, 2016. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  8. ↑ Peters, Gerhard; Woolley, John T. (December 16, 1952). "Letter to Michael V. DiSalle on his appointment as administrator of the Economic Stabilization Agency". The American Presidency Project. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  9. ↑ Knowles, Clayton (December 23, 1952). "Revived pay board sought by DiSalle; inducted as the stabilization chief, he calls on industry to return to agency". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  10. ↑ "Ohio gubernatorial election results (1956)". Our Campaigns. November 6, 1956. Archived from the original on March 25, 2016. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  11. 1 2 "Ohio gubernatorial primary election results (1958)". Our Campaigns. May 6, 1958. Archived from the original on October 23, 2012. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  12. ↑ "Ohio gubernatorial election results (1958)". Our Campaigns. November 4, 1958. Archived from the original on March 22, 2018. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  13. ↑ "Motto For Ohio Nears Adoption". The Blade. Toledo, Ohio. Associated Press. June 23, 1959 – via Google News.
  14. 1 2 Radel, Cliff (September 4, 1998). "A mom to match our state motto". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Gannett Company. Retrieved January 20, 2015.[dead link]
  15. ↑ "Democratic presidential primary election results (Ohio, 1960)". Our Campaigns. May 3, 1960. Archived from the original on January 20, 2019. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  16. ↑ "Democratic presidential primary election results (1960)". Our Campaigns. February 1, 1960. Archived from the original on March 20, 2020. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  17. ↑ "Ohio gubernatorial election results (1962)". Our Campaigns. November 6, 1962. Archived from the original on March 5, 2018. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  18. ↑ Stephens, Martha. The Treatment: The Story of Those who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests, 2001, p. 201.
  19. ↑ "Ohio executions". Archived from the original on February 23, 2008. Retrieved April 14, 2008.
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 DiSalle, Michael (May 1966). "Capital Punishment: The Barbaric Anachronism". Playboy. pp. 129, 134, 186–190. Retrieved December 25, 2024.
  21. ↑ Jones, Tim (April 8, 2007). "Resistance to death penalty growing". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  22. ↑ Gottschalk, Marie (March 16, 2011). "Is death different?". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Archived from the original on November 10, 2018. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  23. 1 2 "Negating the absolute". TIME. July 12, 1968. Archived from the original on June 24, 2013. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  24. ↑ Tompkins, Dorothy C. (1967). "Across the Desk". Criminology. 5 (3): 60–65. doi:10.1111/j.1745-9125.1967.tb00711.x. ISSN 1745-9125 – via Wiley Online Library.
  25. ↑ DiSalle, Michael V. The Power of Life or Death. New York: Random House, 1965.
  26. ↑ Sarat, Austin. Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop An Execution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-691-12140-0.
  27. ↑ DiSalle, Michael V. Second Choice. Stroud, Gloucester, United Kingdom: Hawthorn Books, 1966.
  28. ↑ "Ex-Ohio governor dies of heart attack". Wilmington Morning Star. Associated Press. September 17, 1981. Pg. 3B. Retrieved March 18, 2011.

Further reading

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  • DiSalle, Michael V. The Power of Life or Death. New York: Random House, 1965.
  • DiSalle, Michael V. Second Choice. Stroud, Gloucester, United Kingdom: Hawthorn Books, 1966.
  • Marcus, Maeva. Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. ISBN 0-231-04126-8.
  • Sarat, Austin. Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop An Execution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-691-12140-0.
  • Zimmerman, Richard. Call Me Mike: A Political Biography of Michael V. DiSalle. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-87338-755-4.
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