"Mr. Commonsense"

(See front cover)

To become Vice President affects men as much as coming of age, getting married, going to jail, or meeting death. Thomas R. Marshall resignedly turned jester. Calvin Coolidge, until reprieved by Warren Harding's death, grew colder and stiffer day after day. Charles Gates Dawes flared up in boisterous self-assertion, only to settle back into the humdrum of a perfunctory office. Charles Curtis steadily inflated with the love of pomp. Two years ago John Nance Garner joined their company. By last week, as he neared the close of his third session as President of the Senate, it was apparent that he, too, had undergone a Vice-Presidential change.

John Garner--"Cactus Jack" to those who must have nicknames for their politicians--was the first Vice President to come from Texas. At the time of his election, 43 of his 63 years had been spent in the pursuit of politics, for by special dispensation (known in Texas as "removal of disabilities") he ran for county attorney at the age of 20. For 29 years he had represented in Congress a strip of semidesert along the Rio Grande border.

The fact that his career in Congress was not sensational--he made no speech during his first eight years of service, introduced on the average less than one bill a year, and served three-quarters of the time as an inconspicuous member of the minority--had given the U. S. at large no high opinion of his abilities. In his home town of Uvalde, fellow Texans who had seen him rise from a penniless young lawyer to a substantial citizen, reputedly worth $1,000,000, thought differently. So did local politicians who realized that he had his Congressional district sewed up so tight that after the first one he never had to make another campaign speech in it. So did national politicians who had watched from the inside his quiet march from a Texas greenhorn in 1903 to Speaker of the House in 1931 upon the death of his great & good Republican friend Nicholas Longworth. But Jack Garner, with his love for poker and baseball, his fondness for a good highball with good friends, his habit of going to bed every night at 9 o'clock sharp, did not fit the public concept of an able politician, much less of a great statesman.

In 1932 William Randolph Hearst came out for Garner-for-President as the best way of stopping the nomination of Al Smith. Nobody was more surprised or pleased than Democrat Garner who, up to that time, had had no close ties, personal or political, with the California publisher. Then Boss James A. Farley made a deal at Chicago with the Hearst forces, and Garner was nominated for Vice President--"just the waterboy on the team," as he later called himself. Neither Publisher Hearst nor Nominee Roosevelt understood the calibre of their man. If Publisher Hearst expected John Garner to become a supporter of Hearstian policies he was mistaken. During the few months after the new Vice President took office, Mr. Hearst's contact men, James T. Williams Jr. and John A. Kennedy, used to call often on Mr. Garner. Now their visits are few & far between. Nominee Roosevelt made a different mistake. He feared that his running mate might make the ticket look ridiculous. So the Brain Trust sent a bright journalist, Charles Hand, to act as censor of the Garner utterances. To a man who had been a practicing politician when Roosevelt was in short pants, this was the ultimate insult.

But many a man who voted for Garner for Vice President thought as Franklin Roosevelt did. Jittery journalists wrote pieces to the effect that never before was the health of a President more important. On the evening of Feb. 15, 1933, when an assassin in Miami pumped a gunful of bullets at the President-elect and succeeded in fatally wounding Mayor Cermak of Chicago,* many a voter sighed with relief that the U. S. had been spared Garner as President.

Then came the Inaugural and so far as the public was concerned John Nance Garner was just one more Alexander Throttlebottom./- He made no public speeches, seldom said anything to the Press, refused to go out socially. Once a year he clapped on his silk hat like a sombrero and dined formally with the President at the White House. Once a year he returned the President's invitation at his hotel. Outside the Senate he was seen three or four afternoons a week in his reserved box at the ball park or occasionally riding through the streets in the Vice President's 16-cylinder Cadillac bearing the number 111. But if for a time Congressmen thought as the public did, they have since changed their mind, for Throttlebottom has a hand on the throttle.

Like other recent Vice Presidents, John Garner was invited to attend Cabinet meetings. Unlike Messrs. Coolidge, Dawes and Curtis before him, he not only attended regularly, but spoke his mind forcefully. Such meetings are naturally as secret as they can be made. Hence only an occasional leak disclosed the part the red-faced, blue-eyed, white-haired Vice President played around the Cabinet table. Significant is the fact, however, that after one of his discourses Franklin Roosevelt, a great giver of nicknames, dubbed him "Mr. Commonsense." Significant, too, are the things the stubby little Texan is generally given credit for having achieved within the Cabinet. He, as much as any one man, quashed the idea of armed U. S. intervention in Cuba when the Cabinet had it under consideration because of the series of Cuban revolutions in the autumn of 1933. Supposed dialog:

Roosevelt: But suppose an American is killed?

Gamer: I'd wait and see which American it is.

By pointing out its enormous political dangers, he is said to have talked the President out of a scheme, proposed by Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell, to have the U. S. buy up all land on which taxes were delinquent, devote it to national planning and the unemployed.

He read the Cabinet a practical political lecture on emptying their minds and exposing their plans to the Press, pointing out that the habit got New Dealers into quarrels with one another and exposed their schemes prematurely to sniping from the opposition. With this bit of good advice the President heartily concurred.

Whether or not these reports were apocryphal, they were what would be expected of Garner by those who know him best: an isolationist in foreign affairs, a conservative in economics, a practical man in politics.

His chief peculiarity in the Cabinet is that he is no New Dealer at heart. All his life he had practiced the virtues which Calvin Coolidge admired. He and his wife, who belongs to a frugal Swiss family acclimated for some generations in Texas, lived modestly, saved out of their income even when it was only $5,000 a year. She worked, and still, from habit, works as his secretary at the Capitol. They "put by," and their fortune grew. Now they have their 350 acres in Uvalde, including a pecan plantation. In their safe deposit box are said to be mortgages on every church in Uvalde, and stock in many a local bank.

Such folk do not believe in the redistribution of wealth, in Title II of the Banking Bill (government-controlled central bank), in AAA crop restriction. Hence John Nance Garner is much closer in economic views to Carter Glass than to Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, when Garner was in the House he favored budget balancing and government economy. Nearest he got to New Deal financial views was when as Speaker he went on record for a public works program of a billion or two--and for that the Republicans booed him loudly (TIME, June 13, 1932).

Therefore, as statesman, Vice President Garner is opposed to much of the New Deal, disagrees often with his Cabinet colleagues. To him this or that Roosevelt scheme may seem "plain damn foolishness" but once it has been adopted as Cabinet policy and he has lost his fight in camera, he dutifully buttons his tight little mouth together and only his closest friends ever hear how he felt about the matter. Personally he is fond of Franklin Roosevelt, takes this attitude: "I'm the silent partner in the firm of Roosevelt & Garner. The Chief does all the talking for the firm." And while Partner Roosevelt is talking. Partner Garner, as a loyal party-man who has voluntarily suspended his judgment as a statesman, is getting in better backstage political licks for the Administration than any Vice President in modern times.

Occasionally, like Mr. Dawes, he has tried to hurry up Senate proceedings, has threatened, in disputes with the House, to appoint Senate conferees who would favor Administration bills but his net accomplishment of such rough & ready shortcuts has been negligible. His real work begins when he turns the chair over to a colleague and wanders down to the floor to confer with Senators, when he chats with Senatorial friends over a few highballs in his office, when Leader Robinson, Whip Harrison and other Administration men of House and Senate drop in to consult him. For he is recognized as a wise old man of Congress. A word from him and the strategy of handling a bill may be changed overnight. Seldom does he speak of the merits of a bill, but to those who want to know he drops a hint of how a bill may be passed. That work relief was finally enacted as the President wanted it was largely due to Vice President Garner's advice to the bill's managers to withdraw it from the floor when it was blocked by the McCarran prevailing wage amendment, reform their lines in committee for a second and successful drive.

Thus he is a very useful helper to the New Deal. When he dropped a hint, to Franklin Roosevelt's annoyance, that Congressmen would be doing the President a favor if they passed the Bonus over his veto, there is little doubt that he was trying to be politically helpful by killing the Bonus issue before the next election.

To all appearances John Nance Garner is just a good-natured man, with a shrewd tongue and no worries in his head, who likes to sit convivially in his office, or go to a baseball game with a few chosen friends. To Washington wiseacres, however, he is recognized and respected as a real political power in a politically powerless office.

*On that occasion when the news reached Washington Mr. Garner was already asleep as usual in his apartment at the Hotel Washington. Unable to awake him because of the strict precautions he takes not to have his rest disturbed after 9 p.m., his friends, to save him from public obloquy, gave the Press a statement bearing his name, expressing his horror. Not until next morning did Mr. Garner hear the news. In all innocence he wired Franklin Roosevelt that he had not heard of the attempt upon his life until that moment. /-The timid, fumbling, impotent Vice President, as played by Victor Moore in Of Thee I Sing (TIME, Jan. 4, 1932).

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