A conservative, former railroad attorney and Senator from Indiana, Fairbanks was selected to balance the ticket with the more progressive Theodore Roosevelt. In 1916, Fairbanks made a second try for the vice presidency running, and losing, with GOP presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, to fellow Hoosier Thomas Marshall and his presidential candidate, Woodrow Wilson.

Like his early political opponent Benjamin Harrison, Fairbanks was a native of Ohio, born in that state on May 11, 1852, in Union County. Fairbanks was one of the few politicians who could truthfully say that he had been born in a log cabin, a house owned by his farmer father, Loriston Monroe Fairbanks. According to Fairbanks, he absorbed his abiding interest in politics and political discussion from his father, a wagonmaker and an abolitionist, who often built "liberty wagons" for political rallies and parades held at the county seat.

At the age of fifteen, Fairbanks entered Ohio Wesleyan University, a small Methodist institution located in Delaware, Ohio. Although he worked his way through school, the Ohio farm boy still found time to serve as one of three editors for the campus newspaper, the Western Collegian. Graduating with honors in 1872 (he ranked eighth in a class of forty-four students), Fairbanks was offered a job as a reporter for the Associated Press in Pittsburgh by Smith, Western AP general manager. After spending a year in Pittsburgh, the young reporter received a transfer to the news service's Cleveland office. While in the city, Fairbanks attended law school for six months, receiving a degree from the Cleveland Law College on July 10, 1874.

In the fall of 1874 Fairbanks took two important steps in his life. On October 6 he married Cornelia Cole, a fellow editor on his college newspaper and daughter of Judge P. B. Cole of Marysville, Ohio. Also, he accepted an offer from another uncle, Charles Warren Smith, Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad System general manager, to become claims attorney for the Indianapolis, Bloomington, and Western Railroad. The young couple moved to Indianapolis, and Fairbanks set out his shingle for a law career that saw him try only one criminal case. Instead, he turned his legal talent to working with railroads, becoming a general solicitor for the Ohio Southern and the Dayton and Ironton railroads; president and principal stockholder of the Terre Haute and Peoria Railroad; and director, general solicitor, and principal stockholder of the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railroad.

It was during his days with these various railroad enterprises that Fairbanks amassed a considerable personal fortune, which he made with assistance from his relatives who provided him with investment tips. In 1888 Fairbanks, at age thirty-six, entered the hurly-burly world of Hoosier politics as the manager of his friend Judge Walter Q. Gresham's attempt to capture the Republican presidential nomination. Gresham's effort failed, and the nomination went to a rival Indiana candidate, Benjamin Harrison. Despite losing out to the former Civil War general, Fairbanks remained true to the GOP, campaigning energetically on Harrison's behalf during the general election, which Harrison won.

With the Harrison faction's loss of control of the Indiana GOP following the president's 1892 reelection defeat, Fairbanks became a powerful force in Hoosier Republican party circles. In 1892 he was named as the Indiana Republican Convention's permanent chairman and worked to place men loyal to him on the Republican State Committee. To help solidify his political power in the Hoosier state, Fairbanks, in 1893, became a silent partner with his uncle William Henry Smith in purchasing the Indianapolis News.

It was during Harrison's failed 1892 campaign that Fairbanks first met a man who would do much to advance his political career in the coming years--Ohio politician and future president William McKinley, who told the railroad lawyer that he belonged in the United States Senate. In 1897, with the support of now President McKinley, Fairbanks was elected by the Indiana General Assembly to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Although his political mentor McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Fairbanks remained a potent force in state and national GOP affairs. in June 1904 Republican delegates at the GOP National Convention in Chicago selected the Hoosier politician as the party's vice presidential candidate to run with Theodore Roosevelt.

Although the two men were never close friends--Roosevelt even once proclaimed that Fairbanks was nothing but a "reactionary machine politician"--their coolness toward each other had no effect on the 1904 election's outcome. As he had in other elections, Fairbanks traveled throughout the country touting the glories of the Republican party, ending with a whirlwind tour through Indiana. His efforts did not go unrewarded; the GOP national ticket swamped Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker by more than 2.5 million votes.

During his four years in office, Fairbanks played little or no role in the Roosevelt administration. In fact, the vice president worked with conservative House Speaker Joseph "Uncle Joe" Cannon to halt Roosevelt's Square Deal program, vowing to delay "all progressive measures in committee so that they [will] never come to vote." Not surprisingly, Roosevelt threw his support to William Howard Taft, and not Fairbanks, for the 1908 GOP presidential nomination.

The last hurrah for Fairbanks in the political arena came in 1916 when he was once again the GOP's choice as vice president. Although Fairbanks helped his running mate Charles Evans Hughes to carry Indiana, the duo lost in a close race to incumbent President Woodrow Wilson and his Hoosier running mate, Thomas Marshall. The defeat ended Fairbanks's political life.

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