Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  After a few years, the Shrivers moved to a larger house at the corner of Willis and Center Streets, a little closer to the center of town. There were Shrivers everywhere: Sarge and his family lived at 100 Willis Street; Joseph Nicholas Shriver (one of Hilda’s younger brothers) lived up the road in a big, gray clapboard house at 145 Willis Street; and just across the street from that, William H. Shriver (another of Hilda’s younger brothers) lived in a large, white colonial house at 131 Willis. The parish priest, who was a close family friend and frequent visitor, lived at 54 Main Street, just around the corner from Sarge’s house. And the Shriver family plot was in the cemetery on East Green Street, adjacent to St. John’s Church, where Sarge attended a school staffed by stern but kindly nuns.

  In Westminster, everybody knew almost everybody else; people lived on their front porches in the evenings, talking to one another and waving at passing wagons and the occasional automobile. Neighbors looked on benignly as Sarge, Herbert, and their legions of cousins tore up and down Willis Street on their bicycles. When snow made the roads impassable for autos, they used their sleds to get around town.

  But for Sarge, the most exciting social life was at Union Mills. Driving from Westminster to the family estate, the Shrivers would pass the acres of open fields where the B. F. Shriver Canning Company grew its crops. The family’s first car, a Model T, could barely manage to crest the hill that rose just before Union Mills. At the base of the hill, on the right side of the road as the family drove in from Westminster, was the old mill, built by Andrew and David Shriver in 1797, still in operation when Sarge was a child. Alongside it was the Union Mills homestead, where the Union army had made its headquarters for a night on its way to Gettysburg. The homestead was now inhabited by Sarge’s uncle Lou, still bitter that Confederate troops had stolen his horse, Charley.

  Across the road from the homestead stood the home of Sargent’s aunt Mollie. Built by William Shriver in 1826, this was where the flamboyant Gen. Jeb Stuart had stopped for a night and belted out tunes on the Steinway that still stood in the parlor next to the chapel below Sarge’s bedroom. Aunt Mollie still bitterly recalled the damage done to her family’s crops by the trampling Union army.

  Life at Union Mills had an easy rural rhythm. A typical summer evening might have, as Sarge’s cousin Frederic Shriver Klein recalled in 1957, a “family of ten or twelve gathered on rocking chairs on the lawn near the front porch, as the rumbling of the mill wheel died away, leaving the entire valley quiet and poised for dusk, with only the music of crickets, treefrogs, birds, and the occasional bass grunt of a bullfrog.” A porch stretched all the way across the front of Mollie’s house, and every night in summertime, Sarge and his family would sit on that porch, watching the wagons go by. Every evening, Uncle Lou would limp across the road, leaning on his cane, to play whist with Aunt Mollie. As he played, he would regale the children with stories of the Civil War—the story, for instance, of how he had snuck off to Gettysburg as a twelve-year-old to hear Lincoln’s address. Always, at some point in the evening, Lou and Mollie would fall into arguing about the War Between the States (or the War of Northern Aggression, as Mollie called it). Every night, Lou would throw down his cards and stalk back across the street as fast as his aging legs would carry him, yelling over his shoulder that he would never, ever again lay a foot in Mollie’s Confederate household. The next night, of course, he would be back.

  After the Catholic Church and the Shriver family, the Democratic Party was the most integral part of Sarge’s identity. The Shrivers had played a significant role in Maryland politics since the state’s beginning as a colony in the eighteenth century—they were founders of Maryland’s Democratic Party—and Sarge was taught to revere his ancestor David Shriver’s crusade for American independence.

  Hilda succeeded early on in converting her husband to Catholicism, but changing his politics took slightly longer. For years Hilda Shriver had actively campaigned for women’s suffrage, and in August 1920 Tennessee became the thirty-second state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, making a woman’s right to vote the law of the land. Having finally won the right to vote, Hilda planned to exercise it. As a Democrat, she supported James M. Cox, who was the governor of Ohio, and his running mate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the presidential election. Her husband, a Republican, was campaigning on behalf of Warren G. Harding, who promised a more isolationist “Return to Normalcy” after the strains of the Great War. The discussions across the Shriver family dinner table that election season were heated and intense. “How can a wife cancel out her own husband’s vote?” Shriver recalled his father demanding.

  In 1924 Robert Shriver again succumbed to his wife’s gravitational force and switched his party allegiance. After that, the Shriver household became a regular venue for Democratic Party meetings. The neighbors became accustomed to the sight of the big black car, belonging to Maryland’s four-term governor Albert Cabal Ritchie, parked in front of the Shrivers’ house.

  “States’ rights, religious freedom, local self-government.” That was the three-plank platform on which Shriver was always to remember Ritchie campaigning. Elected to the governor’s mansion in Annapolis in 1920, and reelected in 1924 and 1928, Governor Ritchie dominated Maryland politics, an oasis of Democratic rule during the Republican stranglehold on the Roaring Twenties. The Shriver family would sometimes travel with the governor around the state as he made campaign speeches—almost all of them boiling down to those same three planks: “states’ rights, religious freedom, and local self-government.” In the germinal political sensibility of Sarge Shriver, already sympathetic to the Confederacy’s Lost Cause of States’ Rights, and to his ancestors’ desire for religious freedom, Ritchie’s message found ready lodgment.

  Later in life, between 1956 and 1976, Sargent Shriver would play an important role in several Democratic National Conventions. He got his first taste of convention excitement, however, through the technical ingenuity of his brother, Herbert, in 1924. That year, the Democratic Convention was held in Madison Square Garden, in New York City. The 1924 convention saw Al Smith, the Tammany Hall candidate who was governor of New York, competing for delegates with Southern-born William Gibbs McAdoo, the favorite son of the Ku Klux Klan. With the convention deadlocked, delegates looked to alternatives: John W. Davis, a conservative lawyer from West Virginia; Oscar Underwood, a senator from Alabama; and the Shrivers’ friend Albert Ritchie, known as the great “wet hope” for his opposition to Prohibition. Unable to reach a decision, the convention stretched on for more than two weeks.

  The Shrivers were not at the convention, but they followed its every twist and turn from their living room. Earlier that year, thirteen-year-old Herbert had bought a kit for a “7.2 superheterodyne receiver” radio. He assembled it himself, as Sarge looked on in wonder. In 1924 radios were still a rarity, so there were not many radio stations. But KDKA in Pittsburgh had just four years earlier become one of the first commercial stations, broadcasting for hundreds of miles around the eastern part of the United States. Herbert’s giant receiver could pick up its transmission clearly. The first time Sarge heard a voice coming out of the machine, saying, “This is KDKA in Pittsburgh,” he nearly fell over from astonishment.

  During the 1924 convention, Herbert set up his radio in the living room, where it broadcast updates from the voting in New York twenty-four hours a day. The Shrivers and their neighbors took turns wearing the headphones and jotting down the latest delegate counts on a pad of paper. Everyone on the block, and all the local Democratic politicians, would gather in the Shriver living room, talking politics and waiting for the next round of voting. To nine-year-old Sarge, this was thrilling: the camaraderie and discussion, the suspense—who would come out ahead on the next ballot? It almost matched baseball for sheer excitement.

  When Governor Ritchie fell out of contention, the Shrivers hoped Al Smith, the governor of New York, would be named the Democratic presidential nominee. Smith was a political hero to the fa
mily, not only because he was a Democrat who was firmly against Prohibition, but also because he was a Catholic—the first serious Catholic candidate in American national politics.

  Although Smith’s candidacy eventually fell short, his strong showing set the stage for him to try again in 1928. When he won the nomination that year, he announced that he would make his formal acceptance speech at the governor’s mansion victory party in Albany a few weeks later. Hilda Shriver and her two sons traveled with Albert Ritchie to New York for the event. In a large room in the New York state house in Albany, where there were too few seats for everyone to sit down, thirteen-year-old Sarge watched Smith’s acceptance speech with a mixture of pride and embarrassment from his perch on Governor Ritchie’s lap. Afterward, Shriver and his cousin Mollie wandered among the cars parked outside of the state house, sticking chewing gum on any automobile without a Smith-for-President placard.

  Alas, November 6, 1928, was a dark day in Catholic Democratic households across America. Herbert Hoover, campaigning on the prosperity of the Harding-Coolidge years, defeated Smith by more than 6 million votes. Worse, Smith had lost parts of the “Solid South,” a Democratic stronghold since the Civil War, suggesting to expert observers that Catholicism had made him unelectable. This remained a political article of faith for thirty-two years, until Sargent Shriver’s brother-in-law demolished it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Education of a Leader

  Sargent Shriver began his education at the St. John’s Catholic Parochial School, in downtown Westminster, where he was taught by nuns from the Sisters of Notre Dame de L’Amour, a French order. He would have continued at St. John’s but a family feud at the B. F. Shriver company caused Robert Shriver to decide it was time to leave the cannery business and return to banking. By 1923 Sarge’s family had sold the house on Willis Street and moved to a Georgian-style house at 641 University Parkway in Baltimore, when his father got a job as vice president of the Baltimore Trust Company. Sarge, beginning the third grade, was sad to leave Westminster, but Union Mills was only 28 miles away, so Pipe Creek picnics remained a regular part of his life.

  In Baltimore, Sarge quickly settled into a comfortable routine. He attended the Cathedral School, which was affiliated with the Baltimore Cathedral, across the street, where he served as an altar boy. In the morning, Louise Carpentier would walk him the four blocks from his house to school. On his way home from school, when he was old enough to walk on his own, Sarge might stop to pick something up for his mother at Hopper McGraw’s, a grocery store, or he would go across the street to browse in Remington’s Books. His parents believed in the importance of reading and let their sons charge one book per week to the family account. Sarge read books from the Wizard of Oz series and plowed through all the Tom Swift books. He also loved the Dr. Doolittle books, reading and rereading until he had them nearly memorized.

  Sarge’s best friend during these years was an Italian boy named Emil Goristidi, whose family ran the Lexington Market; they sold fish caught fresh in the Chesapeake Bay. A German family, the Matthais, lived next door to the Shrivers; their two boys, Worth and Bruce, joined Emil and Sarge. Together, these four made the core of a gang, the Maryland Military Club, with Sarge as the ringleader. The Maryland Military Club would play baseball with other gangs on the field at Johns Hopkins University. After games they would walk to the local druggist for chocolate malted milks.

  The highlight of living in Baltimore was baseball. As with just about everything in Maryland, the Shrivers were involved with the game from the beginning. The first national professional baseball league was established in the United States in 1857—and in 1860, Hervey Shriver became its vice president and first non–New York officer. Hervey, a cousin of Sarge’s grandfather, had been the founding second baseman and the secretary of the Baltimore Excelsiors since 1859.

  A half century after Hervey Shriver’s career ended, Sarge Shriver began his life as a fan by following the Baltimore Orioles. In the 1920s, the Orioles played in the International League of the “High Minors,” the equivalent of what today would be a Triple-A team. Sarge came of age at probably the best time in history to be an Oriole fan. Playing in Oriole Park, at the corner of Greenmount and Twenty-ninth Streets in Baltimore, the team went on a tear between 1919 and 1926, winning the International League pennant in seven consecutive years—more than any other team, in any other professional league, had ever won. Sarge went to as many games as he could, usually with his brother, his cousin Nick Shriver, and his family’s driver, John Caesar, a tall, distinguished-looking African American. If Sarge ever received any stares for attending the game with a black man, he never noticed; he was too riveted by the game. Many spring and fall days through the 1920s, John Caesar would pick Sarge up at school at 2:30 and they would buy fifty-cent tickets and sit in the bleachers together, a tall black man and a slightly corpulent white boy, watching the great Lefty Grove pitch. Life was good.

  In a stroke of bad timing, however, Robert Shriver and his colleague Eugene Norton decided the late winter of 1929 would be a good time to become founding partners of a new investment bank in New York. So the Shrivers sold their house in Baltimore and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Madison Hotel, at the corner of Sixty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Because it was late winter, Sarge immediately enrolled in the seventh grade at the Browning School, a private boys school just seven blocks up Madison Avenue. There, despite being the new kid, he soon asserted his leadership, launching Browning’s first student newspaper and starring on the athletic fields.

  Hilda and Robert continued the Catholic social work they had been doing in Baltimore. They worked with Richard Dana Skinner to found Commonweal, which remains today a distinguished progressive Catholic magazine. They also opened a Catholic bookstore, the St. Paul’s Guild, on the north side of Fifty-seventh Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, an incongruously low-rent storefront among all the fancy clothing shops. Hilda ran the day-to-day operations and ordered the books for the shelves; Herbert and Sarge both helped out in the afternoons after school.

  New York in the late 1920s still had a Jazz Age glimmer, although in retrospect this pleasant sheen obscured portents of the dark times to come. But for a while the halcyon days continued. The Shrivers lived a modestly glamorous existence, establishing themselves among Catholic society in the city; after a few months, they moved from the Madison Hotel to a brand-new apartment at 1215 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 102nd Street. Soon after they arrived, a winter storm hit the city, covering the streets in a blanket of white. The roads were impassable. Sarge got his skis and trudged up to the apartment of some friends who lived on Park Avenue, and they spent a giddy afternoon skiing down the Park Avenue boulevard all the way from Ninetieth Street to the Waldorf-Astoria, some fifty blocks away.

  On October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed and Robert Shriver’s new investment firm was hit hard immediately. Hoping the downturn was temporary, Robert struggled to keep the company afloat. But his savings dwindled and he had to move his family to a smaller apartment, at 1170 Park Avenue, and then, not much later, to an even smaller apartment down the street at 1070 Park Avenue. The Shrivers remained residents of the Upper East Side, so they could still consider themselves part of upper-class Catholic society, but they were coming down in the world.

  As the market fell further over the ensuing months, the economy slid into a depression, and in 1930 Robert Shriver’s company went belly up. He and his partner soon signed on with another investment firm, the Cyrus J. Lawrence Company. But that firm, too, was ailing, and Robert moved on to yet another firm, Wickwire & Company. And then Robert Shriver went bankrupt.

  Although Sarge’s parents never said anything to him, he knew something was amiss. At night in bed, he could hear his parents talking in hushed, urgent voices about finances. His father, almost overnight, looked ten years older. Departed servants were not replaced; dinners became plainer and smaller, guests less frequent.

  Co
ming home from school one day, Sarge found his mother sitting with her head in her hands, her forehead glistening with perspiration. She had gone down to Fifty-seventh Street on the bus to shop for groceries. At the store, she spent the few dollars she had left and did not have a nickel left over to catch a bus home. So she walked the thirty blocks, groceries in hand. Seeing his beloved mother, his existential anchor in this world, in this condition, made a profound impression on Sarge.

  His father was hit even harder. Robert Shriver was a different man after 1929. Not having been in New York long enough to have the job security of some of his peers, Robert had to take a series of decreasingly important jobs on Wall Street. Over just a few months, he went from being a vice president of a big Baltimore bank and a man of influence in local politics to being a fifty-year-old hawker of stocks that no one any longer wanted to buy. The flow of distinguished guests to the Shriver household slowed to a trickle. Robert Shriver felt he was an embarrassment, a failure to himself and his family. He would live for twelve more years, long enough to see the Depression ending, but he would never fully recover from the crash.

  The economy, spurred by massive military spending during World War II, eventually would recover, but not before Franklin Delano Roosevelt transformed American politics completely. By the time Roosevelt’s presidential successor, Harry S. Truman, left office in 1952, the size and functions of the US government had changed dramatically. From the minimalist government of the GOP-dominated Harding-Coolidge-Hoover era (when Calvin Coolidge could say, with only slight hyperbole, “If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time”), FDR’s New Deal fashioned a government juggernaut that millions of Americans relied on to subsidize their education, their livelihood during hard times, and their retirement in old age. FDR—with the help of the Depression that swept him into the Oval Office and the world war that happened while he occupied it—changed forever the US government’s relationship with American citizens, with the American economy, with American business, with the American court system, and even with American culture.