Undeclared War

(See Cover)

When President Roosevelt signed the Relief deficiency bill last month, he announced with annoyance that he would presently ask again for $150,000,000 which Congress had lopped off it. Last week he asked--but without annoyance. Before publicly putting the heat on Congress he told his press conference that he would ask only for as much as WPAdministrator Harrington found was needed. Three days later--behind closed doors in the White House--he politely asked a House subcommittee headed by Colorado's Taylor to provide the money. Not often before has Franklin Roosevelt said "Pretty please" to Congress.

The manner of his doing it was a small thing. No small thing, however, were the circumstances that dictated the manner. The President was treading cautiously because Government economy and the "appeasement" of business (see p. 11), including the repeal of burdensome taxes, had become serious issues within his own party, even within his own Administration. Democrats who could not be ignored had taken a stand that could not be ignored. And the leader of these Democrats was that supposedly greatest of nonentities, a Vice President of the U. S.

Party rebellion is no new thing in U. S. history. (The Republican Party found its left wing rebellious in the Coolidge-Hoover era.) Rebellion by the substantial leaders of a party against their leader-in-chief is rarer. And the rebellion which John Nance Garner now leads is rarer still in that it is, save in small things, almost intangible--less a rebellion than a resistance. It is nonetheless the biggest political struggle now going on in Washington.

This split between the President and his Vice President really dates from the winter of 1937 when John Garner bluntly berated Franklin Roosevelt for doing nothing about the Sit-Down strikes. Subsequently he made his famed remark (perhaps apocryphal, but truer than history): "You've got to give the cattle [Business] a chance to put some fat on their bones." That spring came the Supreme Court fight. Unwilling to help "The Boss" in that struggle, the Vice President asked and got permission to go home, go fishing. Joe Robinson was fighting Mr. Roosevelt's battle as well as he could. But the effort killed Joe Robinson. After the funeral at Little Rock, Ark., John Garner went straight to Franklin Roosevelt, plainly told him his Court plan was beaten, but he still was loyal enough to engineer a compromise that saved some face.

December 17, 1938 was the next big day for the Rebellion--when John Garner returned to Washington after six months in Texas. After two hours with National Chairman Jim Farley, the Vice President spent three and one-half hours with the President, trying to tell him that the November election results were not (as a famed Janizariat chart purported to prove) a collection of local overturns, but first evidence of a popular trend to the Right, toward economy. Ray Tucker, oldtime Washington correspondent who enjoys Mr. Garner's confidence more than most men, reported that in this session the Vice President told the President to "decide whether you're gonna get on or get off," and, "For God's sake, Mister President, have the baby or let it go!"

The baby produced in the President's next message was inspired by Chairman Marriner Eccles of the Federal Reserve Board: the promise of an 80-billion-dollar national income to be obtained by continued public spending. Ever since that birth, the President's Cabinet meetings have been sparring matches instead of consultations, with Mr. Ickes, Miss Perkins,

Mr. Wallace lined up beside the President against Mr. Farley, Mr. Hull and the Vice President. The War and Navy Secretaries mostly keep out of it, the new Attorney General sticks to his legal knitting. Harry Hopkins is still a loyal New Dealer but in his new job has discovered a new zeal for Recovery. And loyal, long-suffering Henry Morgenthau is at last showing his conservative colors.

All this is like modern war: undeclared. Minds have split, but the men haven't. John Garner does not want to fight with the President--not if he can help it. For the Party's sake he wants no open rupture. And as an old deerhunter he knows that you don't cut a buck's throat until it quits thrashing. Franklin Roosevelt is still much alive and kicking.

Garner & friends do intend to block the President so far as possible on public spending, to check him if he reverses himself on recovery and business appeasement (see p. 11). Because of this 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.

Objectives. Extraordinary fact about the Garner Rebellion is that its leader does not for one minute expect to win its Economy objective; at least, not at this session of Congress. John Garner, after 36 years in Congress, well knows that the President's taunt in his last annual message was a safe one, when he ironically asked whether Congress would like to economize on WPA relief, PWA projects, pensions or payrolls. More bitterly John Garner, life-long preacher and practitioner of thrift, feels that Economy is impossible so long as "that man is in the White House." To the President he says: "There'll be no economy unless you lead off."

Mr. Garner and his field marshal, Chairman Pat Harrison of the Senate Finance Committee, are hopeful of achieving some concrete results when the tax bill comes before Congress. For John Garner believes in ordinary U. S. business --Wall Street excepted. If the Garner bloc can repeal taxes that business objects to, it will do so.

Future at 70. These objectives might seem rather meagre were it not for the fact that the drive for them is already bound up with the campaign of 1940. All those who become serious candidates for the next Democratic Presidential nomination will find the issues ready made for them by the quiet struggle now going on.

John Nance Garner may very possibly be such a candidate. His friends say he seeks only to save the common people's party from perdition in loose liberalism, and that, while receptive, he is unselfish, unconcerned about becoming President. 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 the pot he might win.

The eminent political statistician, Emil Hurja, observes that early leaders of popular polls (as now taken) invariably hold their leads and win in the end.-"Cactus Jack" Garner leads current polls for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1940 and Mr. Hurja does not mind saying that the forces now putting Mr. Garner ahead will keep him there through the 1940 Democratic convention. Political events, says Mr. Hurja, nowadays follow the drift of such polls rather than the drift of cigar smoke in hotel rooms. To answer yes-butters who say, "But if Mr. Roosevelt decides to run again . . .?" Mr. Hurja has only to point again to the polls: 53% of all Democrats are now counted against a Third Term.

The Garner Bloc. Jack Garner's enemies are certainly right when they say he has bided his time. Time-biding is rule No. 1 in his lexicon for new Congressmen, to whom he says: "The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there, and let seniority take its course." He grasped time's forelock just once, when he went to the Texas Legislature for the single purpose of carving a new Congressional District, an area about the size of Mississippi along the sparsely-populated U. S. bank of the Rio Grande south and west of San Antonio. He promptly got himself elected from that District in 1902 and so impressed himself upon his constituents that in 30 years he was never seriously opposed for the seat. Even when he ran for Vice President in 1932, Mr. Garner took the precaution of running again also for the House (again successfully).

So firmly had he impressed rule No. 1 upon Texans who came up to Congress after him that when the Democrats' big day came and he left the House after one term as Speaker, his Texas bloc possessed a degree of control out of all proportion to Texas' importance in the Union. Today Texans are chairmen of the House committees on Agriculture (Marvin Jones), Elections No. 1 (West), Judiciary (Sumners), Public Buildings & Grounds (Lanham), Rivers & Harbors (Mansfield), Un-American Activities (Dies), to say nothing of Sam Rayburn being Majority Floor Leader. In the Senate, Morris Sheppard (who outranks John Garner by a half-year in length of uninterrupted Congressional tenure) heads the committees on Commerce, Military Affairs and (to the New Deal's recent embarrassment) Campaign Expenditures. Senator Tom Connally has Public Buildings & Grounds and is influential on Finance, Foreign Relations, Judiciary, Privileges & Elections.

This collection of key men is, however, only one squad in the following with which John Garner has equipped himself in the Congress. Since Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon (1837-1927), who finally met in Jack Garner his match at poker, no man, not even the late convivial Nick Longworth, 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. He takes Capitol freshmen aside and instructs them philosophically. "Now, Scott," he said, for example, to Senator Lucas of Illinois, "first thing to do is to get other Senators' respect, if you have to fight 'em twice a day. After you get their respect you'll have their confidence. Then first thing you know you'll have their affection."

Since he undertook to lead a Congress which Franklin Roosevelt left to stew in its own juice, John Garner has taken to rambling out of his room in the Senate office building to call on Senators young & old, to having likely new House men brought in to his "school of education" by mutual friends. He does not dazzle them with brilliance. He is more apt to invite them to join him in "striking a blow for liberty" (taking a snort of Mount Vernon rye). He has no whip to crack. He does not drive. He hardly leads. But the Garner gang, fighting an intangible rebellion, is bound together by intangible ties of friendship for and trust in the old man. That such a bloc, so guided, can get results was shown last week: the President abandoned his plan, opposed by Garner, Harrison & Co., to increase the limit of the public debt to $50,000,000,000 (see p. 11).

Dodging the Lightning? John Garner has no great mind. He serves no great cause. His fundamental difference with Franklin Roosevelt is in the matter of property rights. "I had rather see my party wrecked," he says, "than to see my country ruined." Garner has appreciated property ever since he ran away from a home which had little, became a lawyer, married an heiress (Ettie Rheiner, his secretary ever since). Demons to him, as a Texas millionaire, are the multimillionaires of Wall Street. He is a Uvalde, Tex. banker tried & true (with mortgages on half the town) and therefore suspicious of larger operators. He has been credited with the world's largest herd of goats on his 23,000-acre ranch. He has recently built with his own money 25 houses for about $2,000 each in Uvalde, the like of which cost FHA one-third more. He is making better than 10% on this operation. "If. everyone spent his money like Jack Garner, there wouldn't be any depression," is a crack attributed to Franklin Roosevelt.

For Mr. Garner his rebellion is only a resistance to things that to him do not make sense. As a political realist he knows that the odds are long against any particular man other than a President in office winning the Presidential nomination. But if his rebellion should serve as a lightning rod to draw the lightning his way, who is he to say it nay? Or to object if his becoming a candidate consolidates a group to nominate another who represents Garner's ideas of what the Democratic nominee should be? Jim Farley, who controls most of the national Democratic machinery, can be seen playing along with old Mr. Garner (or old Mr. Hull) because he believes in their sanity and because as No. 2 man on the ticket with either of them he might become the first Roman Catholic President.

One of John Garner's old buddies and political campaign managers is Roy Miller, lobbyist for the Texas sulfur interests. Mr. Miller last December started a Garner-for-1940 boom with a celebration near Mr. Garner's birthplace in Coon Soup Hollow, Tex. In January, the Vice President did not stop Representative Milton West of Brownsville from putting into the Congressional Record the nominating speech in which Roy Miller said:

"John Garner is a liberal and a great liberal ... a great American who in my humble opinion has been marked by the hand of destiny to become the President of the greatest, richest and most powerful nation of all time. . . ."

Mr. Garner has a cute statement to match that one: "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."

* Mr. Hurja also cites an executive and a legislative cycle in Presidents, says the legislative is now due again.

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