The Path to Power (100 page)

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 non-committal.” 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,

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 “truculent … 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:

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 Leuchten-berg 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 allies wanted to make sure that the incumbent President would have no such advantage at the 1940 Convention.