In the first term, relations between FDR and Garner were generally cordial but with each man holding firmly to his own views. Early on, when Roosevelt declared a bank holiday to cope with any rush on the banks to withdraw deposits, Garner argued for a federal guarantee on deposits, but Roosevelt balked. At a dinner at the National Press Club, its president, Bascom Timmons of the Tulsa World, later Garner’s biographer, sat between them and heard FDR say, “It won’t work, John. You had it in Texas and it was a failure and so it was in Oklahoma and other states. The weak banks will pull down the strong. It’s not a new idea, and it has never worked.” Garner replied, “You’ll have to have it, Cap’n, or get more clerks in the Postal Savings banks. The people who have taken their money out of the banks are not going to put it back without some guarantee. A national guarantee can be made to work. Depositors are not going to run on banks which have a government insurance.”25 In the end, Roosevelt relented and took credit for the move.
When Roosevelt began considering diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, the two men went off on a fishing trip together to West Virginia. Garner, a veteran of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the occasion to tell the president, “You ought not to recognize Russia.” FDR shot back, “You tend to your office and I’ll tend to mine.”26
All this time, Garner never took the trouble of shielding his regret at having left the House speakership for the vice presidency. He told one interviewer, “When I was elected vice president it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. As Speaker of the House I could have done more good than anywhere else.” He often referred to the speakership as the second most important office in the federal government. His only public complaint about his most widely published derision of the vice presidency—that it wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit”—was that it was reported incorrectly. What he had really said, he insisted, was that it wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss,” complaining, “Those pantywaist writers wouldn’t print it the way I said it.”27 He also said, “Becoming vice president was the only demotion I ever had.”
But Roosevelt came to regard Garner as a man of down-to-earth wisdom to be consulted on all manner of affairs, calling him “Mr. Common Sense.”28 On the other hand, the president complained to Farley when Garner was too free in discussing administration strategies with his old legislative cronies. In 1935, when a veterans’ bonus bill was under consideration, Garner privately suggested to FDR that for tactical reasons he veto it “in temperate language so as not to incur the ill-feeling of veterans,” and then have Congress override the veto. FDR agreed, then fumed on learning that Garner had told some senators of the plan, leaving the president open to a charge of bad faith. “I can’t believe Jack let it out,” he told Farley. Roosevelt then got the veto sustained to save face.29 Garner’s alleged leaks from cabinet meetings led other members to watch what they said and to hang back afterward to get Roosevelt’s private ear. Garner called the practice “staying for prayer meeting.”30
In 1936, the Roosevelt-Garner ticket was renominated by acclamation and reelected in a landslide with minimal campaigning, carrying forty-six of the forty-eight states over the Kansas governor Alfred M. Landon and the Chicago newspaper publisher Frank Knox. The result led to the rephrasing of the old saying of Maine, as a national bellwether, to read, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” But the political success could not quell Garner’s growing concern about the first-term avalanche of reform legislation warranted by the Great Depression, in his mind of questionable wisdom now. He told his biographer, “The watchword for Democrats should be amend, amend, amend during the next four years. We are not putting out a fire. There is no reason why we can’t balance the budget now. You can repeal unwise and unworkable laws but you can’t repeal the public debt.”31
Beyond that, Garner was unhappy about the advent of a wave of sit-down strikes and unemployment and later FDR’s ill-conceived inspiration to pack the Supreme Court after its rejection of key New Deal initiatives. Finally he was most disturbed, as the specter of war clouds rumbled increasingly from Europe with the rise of Adolf Hitler, of an unprecedented third-term bid by an American president.
The country at this time was hit by a wave of strikes in the auto industry, led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) president John L. Lewis and his Union of Automobile Workers, hitting many General Motors and Chrysler plants. Garner told his biographer that when Roosevelt said he “couldn’t get those strikers out without bloodshed,” the vice president replied, “Then John L. Lewis is a bigger man than you are if you can’t find some way to cope with this.”32 Later, Garner said of the confrontation, “I think that is the only angry discussion we ever had. I disagreed with him many times and expressed my viewpoint as forcefully as I could, but there were no brawls.”33
In FDR’s second inaugural address, he signaled an expansion of his New Deal agenda, memorably referring to “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” But he had already encountered resistance from the Supreme Court, which by the end of its 1936 term had reviewed nine New Deal laws and ruled seven of them unconstitutional. The latter included the National Industrial Recovery Act creating the National Recovery Administration, and the Social Security and Wagner labor acts also appeared to be in jeopardy.
Fifteen days after Roosevelt’s address, he jolted Congress by sending it a radical court reorganization bill. The first Garner knew of it was when Roosevelt read it to him. Hoover, on hearing the plan, labeled it “court packing,” and the label stuck, kicking off the biggest row of the FDR years. The bill, obviously inspired by the Supreme Court’s resistance to New Deal reform schemes at the heart of the Roosevelt economic recovery plan, called for the presidential appointment of six additional justices, one for every sitting justice over the age of seventy. The rationale was that the existing nine could not keep up with the court’s workload. The Democratic senator Carter Glass of Virginia likened FDR’s gambit to putting in “a lot of judicial marionettes to speak the ventriloquisms of the White House.”34
In the midst of the resulting uproar, Garner suddenly headed back to Uvalde for a previously planned vacation, believing earlier that Congress would have adjourned by that time. But the Senate debate on the court-packing bill droned on, and Roosevelt fumed again. He asked Farley, “Why in hell did Jack have to leave at this time for?… This is a fine time to jump ship. What’s eating him?”35 Farley cooled Roosevelt off for a time, and then a few weeks later the president wrote Garner a conciliatory letter persuading him to return. “I miss you because of you yourself, and also because of the great help [you could bring] to the working out peacefully of a mass of problems,” the letter said.36
Garner returned to Washington after attending a senator’s funeral in Arkansas. On the train back, he held a session of the “Board of Education” with the senators aboard and took a good nose count on how the Senate would vote on the court reform. On arrival he went to the White House and was asked by Roosevelt how he found it. “Do you want it with the bark on or off, Cap’n?” Garner asked. “The rough way,” FDR said. “All right, you are beat,” Garner told him. “You haven’t got the votes.”37 Farley wrote later, “I don’t think the President ever forgave Garner. I believe this marked the beginning of coolness on his part. In the past he had accepted criticism from Garner good-naturedly, evidently aware Jack would finally support him even against his own judgment. Thereafter things were never the same between them, so I judged from my seat at the Cabinet table.”38
But by this time the Supreme Court problem had evaporated. Before a watered-down version of the bill could be brought to a final vote, the court had changed course. It suddenly reversed a 1936 decision that had declared a minimum-wage law in Washington unconstitutional and shortly afterward upheld the Wagner labor act. In June, one of the court’s conservative justices retired, giving Roosevelt his first opportunity to appoint a more liberal judge.39 With a rash of subsequent retirements, Roosevelt was able to appoint f
ive liberal justices within thirty months, all to his satisfaction.
Meanwhile on March 4, 1937, Roosevelt told a dinner party that he planned to retire in January 1941, at the end of his second term, in keeping with the Washington tradition. With another recession hitting in 1937–38, Roosevelt was obliged to launch another spending program that fell short of the need to achieve his goal of full employment in his second term. In his Democratic Party, the growing breach between northern liberals and southern conservatives undercut the progress of the New Deal reform, and right-wing agitation against communism and other perceived un-American threats was mounting.
The political outcome of the party’s division was another divisive FDR decision in the 1938 congressional election campaign: to seek the defeat of foes of liberal Democrats, a strategy quickly denounced as an intramural “purge.” Garner, as an unvarnished loyal Democrat, was against it. He told Roosevelt, “I don’t think you ought to try to punish these men, Cap’n. On many details of party principles men disagree. Some branch off in one direction and some in another. Men who oppose you on one thing are for you on another and there is always a legislative program for which you have to find votes.… You may have reason to be provoked at them, but you can’t defeat the Southern senators and if you defeat the Democrats in the North you will get Republicans instead.”40
With war clouds darkening and rumbling with Hitler’s march into Austria in March 1938, Garner said, this was no time for party disunity. But Roosevelt went ahead anyway. Garner blamed the so-called liberal Brains Trust around FDR for seeking to weed out conservative Democrats. In July, the president delivered a radio fireside chat defending his decision to campaign against dissident Democrats and then took aim at them in a swing by train across the West and South. All were reelected, but other Democrats lost eighty-one seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and eleven governorships in a conspicuous slap at the president.
Meanwhile, at the Texas Democratic convention, Garner was unanimously endorsed for president in 1940, to which he gave no encouragement. On returning to Washington, the vice president flatly confronted Roosevelt on whether he intended to seek a third term. He told Washington correspondent Ray Tucker he had advised FDR that he had to decide whether he was “gonna get on or get off,” also telling him, “For God’s sake, Mister President, have the baby or let it go!”41
In July 1939, Farley proposed to Garner that he join him and Secretary of State Cordell Hull in opposing a third term. When FDR proposed the development of “a revolving fund fed from the earnings of government investments … to finance new projects when there is a need for extra stimulus of employment,” Garner said the idea “in some particulars is the worst that has come up here. It gives the president discretion to spend billions where he wants to, how he wants to and when he wants to” without annual congressional appropriations.42 The legislation, somewhat reduced, passed the Senate, but the House refused even to consider it. In a cabinet meeting, Garner also opposed the shipment of oil, scrap metal, and other war materiel to Japan, declaring, “I never thought a white man ought to sell knives to Indians.”43
The last two years of the second term drove Roosevelt and Garner further apart, as the vice president objected to more spending, to what he saw as use of relief funds for political purposes, and to FDR’s leftward swing. With the 1940 presidential election more than a year away, Time magazine wrote of Garner, “His enemies say that, having long bided his time, this 70-year-old sagebrush poker-player at last holds the makings of a royal flush and can scarcely contain himself when he looks at a pot he might win.” But Garner told the magazine, “I am not giving a living soul permission to speak for me or to put forth my name as a candidate—but I’m not telling anybody not to.”44
Roosevelt for his part continued to tell all interrogators, in public and in private, that he would not accept a third term. When a reporter for the New York Times asked again, the president singled him out by name, saying, “Bob Post should put on a dunce cap and stand in the corner.”45 At the same time, he made clear he was dead against any third term for anybody, but with Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the declarations of war by France and Britain, a Roosevelt draft spread swiftly.
Finally, in December, Garner issued a forty-five-word statement: “I will accept the nomination for President. I will make no effort to control any delegates. The people should decide. A candidate should be selected at the primaries and conventions as provided by law, and I sincerely trust that all Democrats will participate in them.”46 Roosevelt had no comment.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, neither Roosevelt nor Garner was present, choosing to remain in Washington. In an obviously orchestrated kabuki dance, the convention chairman, Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, pulled from his pocket a letter from Roosevelt saying he had no “desire or purpose to continue” as president and declaring his delegates were “free to vote for any candidate.”47 The statement created an uproar and an immediate floor demonstration for FDR, organized by the Chicago mayor and party boss, Edward J. Kelly. Immediately as well, the hall erupted on cue with calls of “We want Roosevelt!” and “America wants Roosevelt!” amplified to an ear-splitting pitch by a single voice in the basement, quickly labeled by the press “the Voice from the Sewers.”48 A huge photograph of FDR was raised in the hall, and he was overwhelmingly nominated for an unprecedented third term.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, at her husband’s request, flew to Chicago and personally presented Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, the Iowa farmer-agronomist, as her husband’s choice as his running mate. The selection was unenthusiastically received in the hall, as will be seen in the next chapter, but accepted by the convention.
In September, Garner returned to the Senate to finish his duties as presiding officer and attended cabinets meetings at the White House despite his overt role of rebellion. As for his sentiments toward Roosevelt, he predicted after the election, “Roosevelt will be a candidate for a fourth term if he lives. He will never leave the White House except in death or defeat.”49
In retirement, Cactus Jack and Ettie Garner talked of world travels, but the plans went for naught when she was stricken with Parkinson’s disease. They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with family and friends at home in Uvalde in 1945, and a wheelchair-bound Ettie died three years later at age seventy-eight. John Nance Garner continued at home for nearly twenty-two more years, until fifteen days before his ninety-ninth birthday on November 7, 1967, when a coronary occlusion brought his death, with his son, Tully, and friends at his bedside. To this day, visitors can explore the Garner Museum in Uvalde, laden with scrapbooks, photos, letters, and telegrams from the famous who have toured it or corresponded with arguably the most revered Texan never elected president.
HENRY A. WALLACE
OF IOWA
With John Nance Garner, Roosevelt’s vice president in his first two terms, out of favor after his rebellion against FDR’s third term and his New Deal agenda, the president decided he was not going to leave the selection of his next running mate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940. Upon his renomination in Chicago, Roosevelt wanted a man unquestionably loyal not only to him but also to his liberal agenda. And with war now broken out in Europe, he was also obliged to consider the important role foreign policy would play in the next four years.
The president therefore had been casting his eye on his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, but Hull said he felt he “could render far more valuable service in the troubled days ahead by staying at the State Department.” On three separate occasions Hull said this to FDR, until the president finally told him, “If you don’t take it, I’ll have to get Henry Wallace to run.”1
The man Roosevelt mentioned to Hull seemed a most unlikely individual to be considered for the second political office in the nation. As FDR’s secretary of agriculture, Henry Agard Wallace was not widely regarded as a working politician; rather, he was known as a classic man of the soil who had grown u
p on a farm in Iowa and had made his name as a pioneer in developing new strains of corn, the state’s prime crop. His roots were distinctly in the rural life. His Scots-Irish forebears had emigrated from Ireland as early as 1734 to western Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, and thence to Iowa. His father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, called Harry, a farmer and publisher of farm journals, himself rose to be secretary of agriculture under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.2
Born into the staunch young Republican farm family of Harry Wallace in rural Adair County, Iowa, on October 7, 1888, young Henry, as he was called then, was engulfed in farm life from an early age. He made a successful career in agriculture quite apart from politics. His namesake grandfather, known as Uncle Henry, wrote for and then published farm journals.3 His father became editor of the Iowa Homestead, the state’s largest and leading farm journal, a professor of agriculture at Iowa State, and later publisher of his own highly profitable family paper, Wallaces’ Farmer. When the family moved to the outskirts of Des Moines, young Henry tended his own garden and in time became fascinated with studying and growing corn.
In those days, corn farmers emphasized the appearance of their crop; competitive corn shows were held in which ears were judged by the orderliness of their kernels and their “perfection.” In 1903 Young Henry wrote an article in the family journal asking, “What’s looks to a hog?” arguing it was flavor that mattered.4 He demonstrated the point with his own carefully treated cobs. In 1904, the young farmer took a special course at Iowa State on growing quality corn, then went back to the family paper, and for more than twenty years devoted himself to the breeding of quality corn.
The American Vice Presidency Page 38
