National Affairs: Big Michigander

Big Michigander (See Cover)

The editor of the Grand Rapids, Mich. Herald dug a forefinger reflectively behind his ear, where his scholarly spectacles bit him, scratched a big house-match for his long denicotinized cigar, and turned back to his typewriter. It was November 1,1925; he was finishing his third book, The Trail of a Tradition. In it he had recorded his belief that, historically and logically, U. S. isolation from foreign affairs is not only an “unbroken highway from yesterday to now” but the “safer, surer way.”

On the title page of his book Editor Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg set this phrase: “Nationalism — not ‘Internationalism’ — ;is the indispensable bulwark of American independence.”

Last fortnight, Arthur Vandenberg, U. S. Senator since 1928, on the strength of the tradition he trailed 14 years ago, made a bet with his destiny. The stakes were the highest any U. S. citizen can set — the Presidency, in 1941. For Senator Vandenberg went to battle Franklin Roosevelt over what kind of neutrality the U. S. should have in World War II.

Sharply in the minds of political wiseacres was this thesis: if either combatant should win that battle clearly and conclusively, he would be a No. 1 figure in U. S. politics next year. And the Washington wise men added: besides Vandenberg and Roosevelt, no other man in either party stands to gain so much by winning the Neutrality debate.

The German invasion of Poland had waged an overpowering Blitzkrieg against the Presidential hopes of all other Democrats and of many Republicans. Temporarily in the background was John Nance Garner, who believes with “The Boss” that the sane course is a return to international law.

Thus the wise men came back to the possibility that this fight may make either Arthur Vandenberg or Franklin Roosevelt the Mr. Big of 1940. All the soothsayers realized that the vast unpredictability of World War II might make fine hash of their predictions at any minute. But in shooting guesses from the hip, they aimed at the biggest possibilities as last week’s shifting targets slid by.

Shall or May. Like all political fights, this one could be minimized into a quarrel over terms—in this case a grammarian’s choice: the word “may” or the word “shall.” Vandenberg helped draft the arms embargo clause for the Neutrality Act; in it he insisted that when a state of war was found to exist, the President “shall proclaim” an embargo on sales of arms to belligerents.

The State Department wanted the law discretionary; Secretary Hull sought to have the law read: “The President may proclaim.” Without enthusiasm, Franklin Roosevelt signed the bill that came to his ship in the Gulf of Mexico May 1, 1937 — and the word was “shall.” Last week the President spoke from the House rostrum his grave regret for that signature of approval — the first time since he became Chief Executive he has thus publicly admitted a major mistake. This conciliatory note was typical of the surface serenity of last week’s Washington scene.

Beneath that surface raged the first bitter skirmishes of what may be the greatest legislative battle since the 1919 Senate fight over ratification of the Versailles Treaty and entrance of the U. S. into the League of Nations.

In 1919 a dozen-and-a-half Senators gathered in the office of liberal, hell-roaring Isolationist Hiram Johnson of California, counseled there almost daily, swore to keep the U. S. out of that “entangling alliance.” Last week, in the same room, around the same Hiram Johnson (but now conservative and weak-voiced) another dozen-and-a-half gathered, pledged themselves to U. S. isolation and to defense of the arms embargo.

Battle Lines. In that room was visible evidence of the broken lines of the two political parties. Wisconsin’s Progressive Bob La Follette Jr. found himself shoulder to shoulder with conservatives who ordinarily have no truck with him; hulking David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, who wants a big two-ocean U. S. Navy, found himself working smoothly with Missouri’s rosy-nosed Bennett Champ Clark, who has consistently voted against every large Naval appropriation increase since he entered Congress in 1933.

Such solid old-line Democrats as Carter Glass and Harry Byrd of Virginia stood together with Young Turks Minton of Indiana, Schwellenbach of Washington; the Old South’s Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina was ready to vote with the New South’s Pepper of Florida. For the first time in many moons and many matters, Mississippi’s Harrison and Bilbo, Utah’s King and Thomas, were together. For in Washington this week were no pettifogging politicos seeking sewer projects. Every man was a Statesman.

The Great Debate had split Big Business as it had split party lines. Such men as Ernest Tener Weir of Weirton Steel, who sees no sense in costly plant expansion to make munitions for profits the Government will then confiscate, moved to support Vandenberg. But Washington lobbies were thick with the agents of Big Business, plugging embargo repeal furiously over the fumes of free cigars. And such business-sensitive newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Herald Tribune were hailing their onetime target, Franklin Roosevelt, and sniping anti-repealers.

It looked as if Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg was the biggest paradox of all. Vandenberg best symbolized all phases and shades of the opposition to embargo repeal, thus was chosen to open debate for the antis, while Clark (diehard extremist) was to manage the Floor fight; and Borah (traditional romantic) was to have the last word. Thus the “Big Michigander,”* always safe, sound, middle-of-the-road, now stood up to the Pretorian Guard of his party—Big Business. For there was no doubt he was flying in the face of Michigan’s corporate empire—General Motors. Henry Ford, however, vigorously backed his stand. To the American Legion (convening this week in Chicago) he said: “This so-called war is nothing but about 25 people and propaganda. Get them and you’ll have the whole thing. They want our money and men.”

While the Gallup and other polls continued to show a majority cross-section of the U. S. for repeal, Congressional mail ranged 10-to-1 to 1,000-to-1 against. Even discounting half that mail as inspired by such professional rainmakers as Father Coughlin, there were enough sane, sincere letters in the downpour to give shivers to Congressmen, notoriously the most mail-pervious group in the U. S.*

To weatherwise political observers, Vandenberg’s stand looked like first-class, Grade A politics. For he stood to win much, to lose little. He had in his grasp the kind of issue politicians dream about: national, emotional, impeccably honorable. With that stick he could drum a roll that would be felt by every mother’s heart in the U. S.: “I will never vote to send your sons to war.”

First Drink. Plump, hobbyless, hardworking, Arthur Vandenberg has as an asset in this fight the stoutest of political virtues—consistency. Since World War I he can point to a straight, if sometimes shortsighted record of opposition to the international viewpoint; of consistent, even violent nationalism. From his 1925 book to last week he was on the record, loud and long. Last February 27 he told the Senate: “We may still complacently and shortsightedly tell ourselves that we intend to stop [intervention] ‘short of war,’ but we are unfortunately no longer in control of these tragic traffic lights.”

On July 14 he said: “We cannot remain neutral and adjust our rules every time there is a shift in Europe’s power politics.”

“My passion is to keep America out of other people’s wars.”

Last week he said: “Repealing the arms embargo probably won’t get us into war. But it’s like taking the first drink of whiskey. After a while you’re drunk.”

From the background where he is preparing for battle (TIME, Sept. 25), Idaho’s ancient of the Senate, William E. Borah, vowed that Vandenberg is as good as nominated by the Republican Party in 1940 if the embargo repeal is licked.

But Vandenberg’s stakes were small as well as great—he comes up for re-election to the Senate next year, and he will face an electorate that could be the most feverishly pro-repeal of all U. S. states. Not only the motor-makers of the U. S. want repeal, in Michigan there are 330,000 Poles; 500,000 English and French-Canadians. Daily last week, however, his mail brought him courage: six 18-inch-high piles of anti-repeal letters; one eight-inch-high pro-repeal pile.

Behind those piles last week he went to work. And Vandenberg works hard. He has been called pompous, dull, a stuffed-shirt—but never lazy. For the Supreme Court fight of 1937 he wrote one speech of 80,000 words, packed with difficult legal research, just as a “prelude to a real speech.” He never got a chance to deliver it.

By careful attention Vandenberg now strives to inflect his monotonous growl instead of merely shouting less loudly. But in a Senate of mumblers, where the hisses and clicks of false teeth, the hashed platform delivery and the cracked croaks of old men predominate, Vandenberg sounds good, clear and loud. His one oratorical trick is to draw a deep breath, then roar into his first paragraph until his breath is gone. His gestures are patterned around a sweeping sidearm swish, something like Pitcher Carl Hubbell.

With this limited delivery and this one gesture he kept the Republican Party alive in the Senate from 1934 to 1939. He developed a new system of attack on the New Deal. Instead of useless frontal offensives, Vandenberg went along with the New Deal far enough to find the flaws; then by reading and study mastered the technical answers to those flaws; then amended constructively. In this way he exposed the “dangers” of the Social Security’s so-called $47,000,000,000 old-age reserve fund of the future. Similarly he won smashing victories over Franklin Roosevelt when he needled the Florida Ship Canal and Maine’s Passamaquoddy power project so effectively that Democrats joined him to vote them both down.

In 30 Days. This time his battle is bigger, broader, deeper. In it will be no place for his indecision, his flexible politician’s outlook that once caused the late Joe Robinson to suggest as a 1936 GOPresidential slogan: “Vacuity, Vacillation and Vandenberg.”

In assessing his chances of victory last week, Vandenberg was well aware, as were all the Senate’s elders, that: 1) if the President is to win, he should do it in 30 days, for a dragged-out fight makes embargo-repeal unlikely unless such potential horrors as the bombing of Westminster Abbey or the destruction of Paris swing U. S. sentiment; 2) while delaying tactics probably mean victory for the Isolationists, the U. S. public will stand for no filibuster; 3) he must join with his fellow-Republicans in holding down Bob La Follette, who is bent on stealing the show for the Progressives. Well he knew, too, that the Administration’s 49-vote majority was a paper majority, that paper majorities are like paper profits unless quickly taken.

Well he knew that he had many friends in & out of the Senate, yet no intimate friend, was even now as lonely as Franklin Roosevelt since the death of crabby, brilliant, gnomish Louis McHenry Howe. Coldly he could figure that this was a fight he must win, for not simply the Presidency but his Senate seat was at stake. Many a Michigan boss would like to see a more employable man in Washington.

To this fight last week Vandenberg came in top form. The much-used bookcases in the unpretentious two-story brick-stucco house in Grand Rapids had been explored night after night; the rolltop desk in his little den had rattled steadily under the impact of his heavy-handed typing. That house holds all of Arthur Vandenberg’s private life. There he moved the year (1906) he jumped from city-hall reporter to managing editor of the Grand Rapids Herald—the paper to which he came as a cub the same night in 1902 that Frank Knox also applied for work. To that house went his first wife, Elizabeth Watson, mother of his three children, who died in 1916. Two years later he married Hazel Whittaker of Fort Wayne, Ind., took her home there.

From that den he fired the editorials that brought praise from President Woodrow Wilson, whom he loved and supported until the League of Nations issue burgeoned in 1919. There he fell in love with traditions, with constitutionalism, with Alexander Hamilton. He still wears a rosette of the Sons of the American Revolution in his coat lapel.

There, in his study of politics, he marked well one priceless maxim: always ask for more than you can get, then compromise for half. Thus he could appreciate last week Franklin Roosevelt’s stratagem in asking absolute repeal of the Neutrality law and a return to the vague vagaries of international law, in order that a compromise on cash-and-carry would seem to anti-repeal forces like a victory.

As he sat slumped in a front-row black-leather seat in the House last week, chin cupped in hand, listening to a pale, grave, calm President (see p. 11), possible attacks on that aggressive defense went through his mind. By week’s end one thing was clear about the isolationist strategy: the old bogey of the House of Morgan was to be hung like an albatross around Franklin Roosevelt’s neck.

For the men who sat on the old Senate Munitions committee in 1934-35—Nye, Bone, Clark, Vandenberg, Pope, George, Barbour—implicitly believe that World War I was engineered by and run for the benefit of J. P. Morgan & Co., and the munitions-makers whom they dubbed “merchants of death.” And last week, on an unguarded flank of the Roosevelt Administration, whose big guns for six years have boomed denunciations of “princes of privilege,” “entrenched greed,” “wolves of Wall Street,” “money-barons,” etc., etc., they found a rich ammunition dump: at the head of the all-important War Resources Board, Edward Stettinius Jr. Morgan-man, head of U. S. Steel; as a member of the Board, Morgan-man John Lee Pratt of General Motors; in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s new, powerful financial advisory committee, Morgan-men William C. Potter, Leon Eraser, and Henry Morgan, J. P.’s son.

Temporarily throttled while the national focus was on the Senate, the House watched carefully, dug out from their mail only to recess again. But while nothing has ever hurried the tempo of the Senate, the Administration was ready to try. Key Pittman convened the pro-repealers among his Foreign Relations Committee steadily over the weekend, came to a full committee meeting Monday with a tightly knitted bill sharply defining U. S. neutrality, generally limiting the President’s powers, but re-establishing the cash-and-carry system for trade with belligerents, except that go-day credit supplanted the cash phrase. With this before them, Vandenberg and the Opposition groomed for the latest Battle of a Century of many battles. On strategies, Vandenberg constantly counseled with aging, astute Jay Hayden, of the Detroit News, who often shifts his tobacco-quid disgustedly as he blue-pencils the reek from Vandenberg’s rhetoric; constantly he saw Borah and McNary; constantly he smiled his Kewpie smile with the air of a cat set for cream. La Follette’s crisp battle-slogan: “We’ll fight this thing from Hell to breakfast” he contentedly adopted as his own policy.

Ahead of him, in the swirling, unpredictable future, loomed the mirage of the job that goes with the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. W., in Washington, the job he once described: “Why anybody should want to shoulder that crucifixion down the street I don’t know.”

*Mrs. Vandenberg, Grandson “Duke” Knight, the Senator, Mrs. Edward Pfeiffer (daughters), Son Arthur Jr. *This mail alone shifted early odds, favoring a quick Presidential victory, to even-Stephen. There was some money available at 1-to-2 Franklin Roosevelt would lose this fight.