Roosevelt empowered Garner to work out a compromise. When it evolved—an agreement to recommit the court-reorganization bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with the understanding that when it reappeared on the Senate floor, all mention of the Supreme Court would have been removed—it was an almost unmitigated defeat for the President, one which allowed him to save face only in that there would be some reorganization of lower courts. Alsop and Catledge, who did the most thorough job of contemporary interviewing of participants, concluded that Garner “wanted to do the best he could for the President”—and in fact did so, faced as he was with the overwhelming senatorial sentiment against the bill and the desire of some Senators to defeat it outright as a salutary lesson to the President. On one occasion, when he was attempting to bargain with Wheeler, the Montanan told him “with considerable firmness” that the opposition did not have to compromise at all, since it had enough votes to do as it pleased. But Roosevelt, “sore and vengeful,” in intimates’ words, took the loss hard. Wrote Alsop and Catledge: “He knew there was no way out of an immediate humiliation, but he had made up his mind that if he had to suffer the men in Congress whom he held responsible would suffer doubly later on.” And he felt that he knew who was most responsible. To Farley, a “fuming” President said: “He didn’t even attempt to bargain with Wheeler. He just accepted Wheeler’s terms. If Garner had put up any kind of a fight, the thing could have been worked out differently.” Corcoran, one of the President’s principal strategists in the fight, said flatly that “it was the Vice President who had betrayed the President.”
And the emotion was not one-sided. Garner felt Roosevelt was again “deviating” from “understandings.” In the fight to replace Robinson as leader, the two men agreed, in Garner’s recollection, not to interfere. In Garner’s view, he kept his word, while Roosevelt did not, maneuvering to secure the election of Kentucky’s Alben Barkley. Garner had also, in a memorandum, asked the President a question: “When was the government going to balance the budget?” Garner had asked the question before, and had been given a flat promise in reply: “I have said fifty times that the budget will be balanced for the fiscal year 1938. If you want me to say it again, I will say it either once or fifty times more. That is my intention.” But the budget for fiscal 1938 proved to be heavily unbalanced.
The antagonism between the two men could no longer be hidden. At Cabinet meetings, Ickes noted in August, 1937, the President “doesn’t overlook any chance to send a pointed barb, albeit with a laugh, in the direction of the Vice President.” And if Roosevelt expected Garner to be faced down, he did not know his man. In December of that year, Roosevelt was discussing his upcoming message to Congress when, staring straight at Garner down the length of the long Cabinet table, he said, “Jack, I am going to reassert leadership.” He said he had temporarily put it on the shelf because he was tired. Replied Garner: “You were afraid, Mr. President.” Roosevelt repeated that he had been tired. “… Both scared and tired,” Garner retorted. Wrote Ickes: “I have never heard anyone talk like this to the President, and the President did not pursue the subject any further.” Now, in 1938, with the economy sliding into a “new Depression,” Roosevelt was considering new government pump-priming expenditures—which would further unbalance the budget being prepared for fiscal 1939. In April, 1938, Garner warned the President that such expenditures would meet with considerable congressional opposition—making these statements with “vehemence”; he left Roosevelt’s office, the New York Times noted, “red-faced and noncommittal.” In an unusual outburst to a reporter, he said, “We’ve been trying this New Deal spending orgy for six years, and where has it got us…? I for one refuse to support more reckless spending. It’s got to stop.” And he apparently told friends that if it didn’t stop, he would stop it; it is “openly whispered in Texas, among Mr. Garner’s home advisers, that he will lead the opposition in Congress to measures not acceptable to many Democrats,” the Times reported. Among the measures not acceptable was Roosevelt’s attempt to reorganize, and expand, the White House staff and the executive branch of government generally; this measure—on its face, as James MacGregor Burns says, “one of the least controversial Roosevelt had ever proposed”—brought to a boil the long-simmering anti-Roosevelt bitterness in Congress, which, despite heroic efforts by Sam Rayburn, and the prodigal use by Roosevelt of patronage to try to bring Congressmen to heel, voted down the “dictator bill.” “As the vote was announced,” Burns recounts, “wild cheering broke out among representatives in the chamber. Congress was in open revolt.”
At this time, Roosevelt took his first public cognizance of the rumors about the rift between him and Garner. He denied that it existed. When Garner was asked about it, “he merely smiled, then tightened his lips.” But then came the purge, a cross-country trip on which Roosevelt attempted to defeat in their district primaries selected Representatives and Senators who had opposed him. John Garner, to whom party unity was so vital, could hardly believe that a President was doing this to members of his own party; in fact, at the time of the court compromise, he had personally promised Senators—his intimates believe on the basis of a commitment given to him by Roosevelt—that there would be no reprisals from the White House. Some of Roosevelt’s targets were, moreover, among Garner’s oldest friends and closest allies. He no longer bothered to keep his feelings secret. In Texas, where Roosevelt snubbed Garner’s friend Senator Tom Connally by announcing from the back platform of his train the appointment to a federal judgeship of a Texan who was a Connally enemy, Garner stayed home in Uvalde, telling reporters he was busy “fishing.” The President of the United States had come to the Vice President’s state—and the Vice President had refused to meet him! When Garner returned to Washington from Texas, on December 18, 1938, Garner and Roosevelt met privately for the last time. “We didn’t get anywhere,” Roosevelt told Farley. “Jack is very much opposed to the spending program; he’s against the tax program, and he’s against the relief program. He seems to be pretty much against everything and he hasn’t got a single concrete idea to offer on any of these programs. It’s one thing to criticize but something else again to offer solutions.” At the next Cabinet meeting, Garner’s feelings spilled over. When the hated liberal Henry Wallace began discussing new plans to reduce the cotton surplus, the Vice President, in Ickes’ words,
opened up all along the line on cotton. The Vice President said that people had moved into the South because they liked to be free and the freedom that they wanted was the right to grow as much cotton as they wanted to grow. He believes that restricting crops is bad, both economically and politically. He reminded the President that he had discussed this subject with him at their recent conference.
He “opened up” in his Capitol Hill stronghold, too. A week after the Cabinet meeting, Time reported that congressional Democrats were determined to have “economy” in government at last—and that “if they need a leader, John Garner stood ready to lead.” The nation was given at last a glimpse of the power he had long wielded: in what Time called “an unusual spectacle, … a scene that may in fact have been all but unprecedented in American politics,” on the same day, two Cabinet members, appointees of the President, had to call, “hat in hand,” on the Vice President to plead for congressional approval of the President’s policies—Wallace to try to persuade him on acreage restrictions, Harry Hopkins to obtain Senate confirmation as Secretary of Commerce. Roosevelt himself had to go to Garner hat in hand; when Hopkins came close to breaking under the vicious questioning by a Senate committee, Roosevelt asked his Vice President, in Ickes’ phrase, “to call off the dogs ‘for the sake of the party.’” Garner did. He refused, however, to give in on acreage, and also beat the President on the relief bill. In the Cabinet now, the two men who sat at opposite ends of the table could barely contain their enmity for each other. Sometimes when Roosevelt was talking, Garner would begin talking—not in a whisper—at his end of the table. Sometimes, in what Ickes felt was a “truc
ulent … very unpleasant” manner, he would interrupt the President, saying, “Well, didn’t I tell you so?” or “You remember that I brought that up two or three years ago.” Said Ickes: “How the President takes this from Garner, or anyone else, is more than I can understand. … I suspect that there is growing up in the President’s heart a hatred of Garner. …” Notified during a Cabinet meeting of still another Senate defeat by Garner’s allies, Roosevelt, staring down the table at Garner, said, “Well, that is that. Now we will go on to Chapter Two.” After the meeting, talking with Ickes, he said, “Do you notice that I am whistling?” (And he was, more or less, from between his teeth, Ickes says.) “Then he added, ‘I always whistle when I’m mad.’”
By 1939, Ickes himself, seeing Garner’s “old, red, wizened face on the rostrum above the President when the President delivered his message to Congress,” found him “disgusting.” Even the King and Queen of England were not exempt from his rudeness! At the White House dinner for Their Majesties, “He was as full of life as a kitten. He has no breeding or natural dignity and I doubt if he exercised any more self-restraint than he would have shown at a church supper in Uvalde, Texas. … He pawed the King with his hands. … To Garner the King was simply a visiting Elk.”
Younger New Dealers, including, as one reporter wrote, “those ambitious young intellectuals around Mr. Roosevelt and their journalistic friends, get blue in the face when you mention John Garner’s name.” Time reported in a March 20, 1939, cover story on Garner, titled “Undeclared War,” that “John Garner has become to arch New Dealers a symbol of sabotage. They consider him a prairie politician whose archaic notions, plus popular veneration for long public service, accidentally make him the leader of reaction against six years of enlightened reform.” The articles of the young New Dealers’ “journalistic friends” reflected the intensity of their feelings about the old Texan. Wrote Hamilton Basso in the New Republic, “His heart, and most of his mental processes, belong to the America of 1875. … As a person, he is not liked. … Mr. Garner has taken his personal smallness, his lack of generosity, and forged it into a political principle. The metaphysicians may argue that this, per se, is not evil: but on a human plane, it is certainly not good. … He has no imagination, no convictions, and he substitutes political cynicism for social understanding.” In his Newsweek column, Raymond Moley, himself long gone from the reservation, offered a different opinion:
A good many of the “feature articles” about Mr. Garner manage to suggest that he’s a kind of glorified clown, spending his time thinking up what the next wisecrack should be, what kind of funny hat to wear the next time his picture is taken, and what he can eat and drink that will look well in the newsreels. The trouble with those who write such pieces—and there are a good many earning a living in Washington—is that they can never take a man for what he is. They have seen so many phonies in their day … that they automatically conclude that nothing is what it seems to be.
It is true that Mr. Garner is picturesque. I have never thought of calling him anything but Mr. Garner. … Not many people call him Jack to his face. There is dignity about the man. … He’s picturesque only because his method of life, which is simple and natural, contrasts so weirdly with the sham living that goes on in Washington. … He’s a man who lives his life as he wants to live it. …
The New Dealers’ feelings were reciprocated by the object of their scorn. He detested what even their journalist friends had to concede was their “slightly ostentatious intellectualism,” and what he saw as a hypocrisy which made them talk of principles when, as he told a friend, “All they’re interested in is staying in power.” They were, in Garner’s view, unscrupulous men who were persuading the President to desert his party, the party Garner loved.
And now the feud was climaxing, for the presidential election of 1940 was drawing steadily closer.
Historians may puzzle over when Franklin Roosevelt decided to defy the Third Term tradition and run for the Presidency again, but John Garner’s intimates never had the slightest doubt as to what the decision would be—“Why, he is panting to run,” one of them said as early as the Autumn of 1938—and neither did Garner, although Roosevelt had assured him he would not run again. “He has too much power and is continually asking for more,” he had told Timmons; that predilection could lead to only one decision. Later, he would tell Timmons, “He will never leave the White House except in death or defeat.”
Garner, Timmons wrote, “abhorred even the idea of a third term for any President,” good or bad. The basis for his abhorrence was simple: four decades in Washington had taught him what power did to men. “No man should exercise great powers too long,” he said. On another occasion, he was to say: “We don’t want any kings or emperors in this country. You have to curb the ambitions of every man, even the best of them, [because] they are human.” Often now, there crept into his blunt conversation, when discussing Roosevelt, the word “dictator.” Whether or not he wanted the Democratic nomination for himself—whether, as his advisors were to maintain, he was standing for the nomination merely as an anti-third-term symbol—or whether, as the New Dealers said, the seventy-year-old poker player, having long bided his time, had at last found himself holding a royal flush and could scarcely contain his greed at the pot within his grasp—he was determined that the nomination would not go to Franklin Roosevelt.
And Roosevelt, whether or not he had decided to run again, was determined that his successor not be someone who might tear down what he had built; he was determined to deny the nomination to any of the Democratic conservatives who did not believe in the New Deal—in particular, he was determined that the nomination would not go to John Garner.
Nineteen thirty-nine was Garner’s year. The war was open now. The “Garner gang” of conservative congressional barons, Time magazine said, had long been bound together by “intangible ties of friendship for and trust in the old man. … Since Speaker ‘Uncle Joe’ Cannon, who finally met in Jack Garner his match at poker, no man [has] enjoyed such influence among members on both sides of the aisle in both Houses as this stubby, stubborn, pink & white billiken with the beak of an owl, eyebrows like cupid’s wings, tongue of a cowhand.” And he was using that influence to the full. During the first months of 1939, Congress defeated several Roosevelt proposals. Then the President proposed a new public works program, for self-liquidating projects, which would include the creation of “a revolving fund fed from the earnings” of these projects which could be used “to finance new projects when there is need of extra stimulus of employment.” Garner felt that this proposal would free the executive branch from the need of congressional approval for these projects. “This bill in some particulars is the worst that has come up here,” he said. “It gives the President discretion to spend billions where he wants to, how he wants to and when he wants. It is another step away from constitutional government and toward personal government.” The House, by a substantial majority, refused even to take it up for debate.
Previously, the President had relied on Garner to kill, or hamstring, potentially damaging congressional investigations. Now, a young Texas Congressman, Martin Dies, Jr. (thirty years before, Garner had served in the House with Martin Dies, Sr.), was given a substantial appropriation for his House Un-American Activities Committee, which, as William Leuchtenberg puts it, “served the purposes of those who claimed that the New Deal was a Red stratagem.” And over furious administration opposition, Congress passed—and Roosevelt was forced to sign—the Hatch Act, which would in the event prove ineffective (because, Garner believed, the administration did not enforce it), but which, at the time of its passage, was believed to be a deterrent to political activity by federal employees. The reason for its passage was common knowledge in Washington: at the 1936 Democratic Convention, a majority of the delegates had been made up of postmasters, United States marshals, IRS employees and other federal officeholders, who might be disposed to favor an incumbent President. Garner and his conservative a
llies wanted to make sure that the incumbent President would have no such advantage at the 1940 Convention.
“A sullen world” was, in Burns’ phrase, “girding for war”; a sullen Congress refused to change the Neutrality Act to give the President more room to maneuver on behalf of the embattled democracies. Summoning Senate leaders to the White House, Roosevelt pleaded with them. Then Garner asked them if there were enough votes to change the Act—and summed up: “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes; and that’s all there is to it.” He had turned the Vice Presidency, Time said, from “a sarcophagus into a throne.”
And if 1939 was Garner’s year on Capitol Hill, it was his year in the polls, too. In March, the Gallup Poll asked the question: “If Roosevelt is not a candidate, whom would you like to see elected?” Jim Farley received 8 percent, Cordell Hull 10 percent—John Garner 45 percent. And Roosevelt could hardly have been sanguine about the results if his name had been included in the poll: 53 percent of all Democrats were opposed to a third term. As the New Republic had to report with chagrin, political prognosticators generally felt that a candidate with so commanding a lead could not be overtaken; pollster Emil Hurja said that “Mr. Garner is so far ahead of all other candidates that he cannot be stopped.” If he was to be stopped, certainly, only one man could do it—just as Garner himself was the only man who could stop Roosevelt if Roosevelt chose to run. As the Congressional Digest put it, “It is a case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, epitome of the New Deal, … against John Nance Garner, to whom much of the New Deal is anathema.” Discussing possible candidates with Jim Farley at Hyde Park, Roosevelt said: “To begin with, there’s Garner, he’s just impossible.” Although other names would continually be floated, the contest had, in 1939, narrowed down to two men—each of whom not only hated the other personally but hated also much of what the other stood for.
The Path to Power Page 85