The American Vice Presidency (52 page)

By the 1920s, Garner was the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. He became a regular attendee at Speaker Joe Cannon’s poker-and-whiskey club, called the Boar’s Nest, the predecessor of one of Garner’s own clubs when he attained his great ambition. But he did not have an easy path to his prime goal, the speakership. After the landslide election of Herbert Hoover, the enlarged Republican majority in the House easily retained Nicholas Longworth in the chair. The defeat, however, left Garner as the undisputed Democratic leader in the House, and soon Longworth and Garner teamed up in what came to be known as “the Board of Education.” It was a bipartisan watering-hole hideaway on the floor above the Capitol rotunda, where the daily dispensing of wisdom and whiskey prevailed, along with the “education” of wayward legislators.

Once asked why it was so called, Garner said, “You get a couple of
drinks in a young congressman and then you know what he knows and what he can do. We pay the tuition by supplying the liquor.”
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While prohibition was still the law of the land, attendees at the Board would ignore it as they engaged in Garner’s favorite toast: “Now we’ll strike a blow for liberty!” Afterward, Republican Longworth would give Democrat Garner a ride to his hotel in the Speaker’s car and often pick him up for work the next morning as well.
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In 1930–31, politics and mortality contrived to bring Garner his life’s wish. After the year’s congressional elections, the control of the House was in doubt, to the point that Longworth sent Garner a telegram: “Whose car is it?” Garner replied, “Think it’s mine. Will be pleasure to let you ride.”
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Garner was wrong at that moment but not for long. By the time of the opening of the next House session, fourteen members, including Longworth, had died. After special elections to replace them, Garner was elected as Speaker by three votes.

Garner became a harsh taskmaster of the House Democrats. He told them, “You are at the controls. You must remember that you are in command and are no longer the minority party.”
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With the Great Depression now enveloping the country, he appealed for a balanced budget, uncharacteristically taking to the House floor with an impassioned plea for necessary programs and the taxes to pay for them. He warned, “I believe that if this Congress should decline to levy a tax bill there would not be a bank in the United States in existence in sixty days that could meet its depositors.” Challenging the whole chamber, he went on, “I want every man and every woman in this House who … is willing to try to balance the budget to rise in their seats.” At first there was silence, then one by one nearly every member stood. Garner continued, “Now, if they don’t mind, those who do not want to balance the budget can rise in their seats.” None did.
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The first interest in Garner as a national candidate came from William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon, who raised the possibility in a radio talk in early January of the election year. They had known each other when Hearst was in the House of Representatives, and when Garner was asked at his daily press conference, “What have you got to say about your presidential candidacy?” he shot back, “I haven’t a word to say. I am trying to attend to my business here. Now I’ll talk about anything else you want to.”
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Garner’s adamant resistance did not, however, still a rising interest in
Texas, but Garner held fast. After visiting Hoover on one occasion, he offered, “I always thought of the White House as a prison, but I never noticed until today how much the shiny latch on the Executive office door looks like the handle on a casket.”
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Garner’s real interest was cementing his hold on the House speakership. He told his biographer, “I have no desire to be President. I am perfectly satisfied right here in the Speaker’s office. I worked twenty-six years to get to be Speaker. If we win this election I will have a comfortable majority to work with in the House. If we are on the political upswing as it looks, I will have a longer tenure as Speaker than any other man ever had.” He said he had no intention of doing anything that might deadlock the Democratic National Convention against the nomination of the presidential frontrunner, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York.
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But with Hearst leading the way in California and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo also in Garner’s corner, the Democratic primary in the Golden State in May 1932 surprisingly gave Garner the state’s forty-four delegates over New Yorkers’ FDR and rival Al Smith. Together with the Texas delegation, Garner went into the convention with ninety delegates and a scattering of second-place support.

McAdoo, speaking for the California delegation, had promised, “California will stay with Garner until hell freezes over.”
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But Roosevelt’s floor manager, James A. Farley, told Garner the convention would deadlock unless Roosevelt went over the top on the next roll call. Garner said later, “So I said to Sam, ‘All right, release my delegates and see what you can do. Hell, I’ll do anything to see the Democrats win one more national election.’ ”
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The floodgates opened, FDR was nominated on that ballot, and Garner was nominated as Roosevelt’s running mate by acclamation.

In the fall campaign, Garner was happy to be pitted against Hoover, painting him as a tool of Wall Street, and he went off for two weeks of hunting and fishing. At Farley’s urging, he made a few speeches but was convinced the election was in the bag. Meeting Roosevelt in Hyde Park, Garner told him, “All you have to do is stay alive until election day. The people are not going to vote for you. They are going to vote against the depression.”
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And he added, “Hoover is making speeches, and that’s enough for us.”
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Later, after delivering a speech to businessmen in New York, Garner said, “I got on a train and came back to Texas. I had no more to say about the
campaign. I had not campaigned for the nomination for vice-president. I didn’t want the office. I wanted to stay on as speaker of the House.”
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On Election Day, the Roosevelt-Garner ticket won forty-two of the forty-eight states, and Garner was also elected to the House for the sixteenth time but resigned his House seat to take the vice presidency. Accepting the limits of the office, he declared, “I am nothing but a spare tire and have nothing to say. I believe it is my duty as vice president not to do any talking about government policies. I owe that to the boss. He is spokesman for the administration.” And he told his old friends in the press corps, “I will always be glad to see you, but don’t ask me to talk. That is not my job anymore. The man who is moving into the White House will do the talking.”
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Later, however, he acknowledged, “I couldn’t get it into my head that I shouldn’t express my own views instead of agreeing with the president about everything. I had the feeling that it was my duty to express honest views, whether they agreed with the president [or not].”
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Less than three weeks before FDR and Garner were to be sworn in as president and vice president, Garner came fatefully close to the presidency itself. On February 15, 1933, President-elect Roosevelt was riding in a motorcade in Miami with Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago when an unemployed and disgruntled bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara fired five times at the car, killing Cermak and wounding four others, but Roosevelt escaped unscathed. Had the president-elect been slain, the vice president elect would have been sworn in as president on March 4.

After nearly a lifetime in one of the highest leadership positions in Congress, Garner was not likely to go gently into semiretirement as a benign Senate presiding officer. He carried out its routine duties with good humor, as when the despised Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, the infamous King-fish, paused in a filibuster and demanded that Garner require the presence of all senators. Garner replied, “In the first place the senator from Louisiana should not ask that. In the second place, it would be cruel and unusual punishment!”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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