The American Vice Presidency (51 page)

Curtis meanwhile continued to move up the party ladder in the Senate, becoming the majority leader in 1925. There he served more as a traffic cop on legislation and generally supported the Coolidge administration,
though occasionally breaking with it to back state interests, as in farm relief. When in 1928 Coolidge vetoed such a bill, however, Curtis voted to sustain in a show of solidarity.

In 1928, Curtis challenged Herbert Hoover for the Republican nomination, denying he was really seeking only the vice presidency. He argued that to nominate the Great War relief czar, a man with no political experience, would place “a hopeless burden” on the Republican ticket.
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But farm protests against Hoover and his opposition to some major Harding-Coolidge administration bills were not enough to bar his first-ballot nomination in Kansas City.

Hoover first considered as his running mate the Progressive senator George W. Norris of Nebraska but settled on Curtis, known as “Egg Charlie” for his heavy support of the poultry industry. As a solid farm-state leader, Curtis signed on despite differences with Hoover on farm legislation. The reporter Thomas L. Stokes wrote of Curtis’s acceptance of the role: “He had eaten his bitter words, but he was suffering from indigestion, you could see.”
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For the first time, both Republican nominees came from west of the Mississippi.

On the Democratic side was New York’s governor Alfred E. Smith, seeking to become the first Roman Catholic president, and Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, a Protestant and a teetotaler, balancing off Smith’s prominent beer drinking. Smith’s Catholicism, as well as his gruff if friendly street smarts developed on the sidewalks of New York, made him seem foreign to many Americans outside the teeming cities of the East and did him in. Hoover and Curtis were easy winners, giving little hint of a Democratic sea tide to come four years later.

Curtis moved comfortably into the presiding officer’s chair but sometimes asserted authority that seemingly went beyond its constitutional limit. He seemed to many in the Senate to play now to his Indian origins, filling his Senate office with native artifacts and often posing in Indian headdress. He appeared to chafe at the lesser influence than he had enjoyed as the Senate majority leader and began to insist on deference to his vice presidential stature. One aspect was a search he began for an official vice presidential residence, where he could entertain as he thought the position warranted, beyond the Mayflower Hotel suite he rented.

Curtis fixed on a mansion in downtown Washington owned by the wealthy widow of Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri, a brownstone castle only a few blocks north of the White House on Sixteenth Street, which she wished to have named the Avenue of the Presidents. She even sold some parcels of land along it as an enticement for foreign embassies to locate there. She had offered a house there to Vice President Coolidge, but he declined. Curtis, hoping to pick up on the offer, sent his sister Dolly to examine the house, and she came back excited about the prospect. But in the end Mrs. Henderson’s relatives balked, and nothing came of an official vice presidential residence until the 1970s, when Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his mansion on upper Massachusetts Avenue for that purpose.

Curtis later found himself embroiled in a diplomatic spat when Dolly got into a feud with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and the wife of House Speaker Nicholas Longworth, over a matter of protocol. When Curtis’s wife died, his sister invited the vice president to live with her at her Washington home, where she would serve as his official hostess at diplomatic and congressional dinners. Alice, it seems, raised an objection with her husband that at such dinners Dolly should be seated after the dean of the diplomatic corps and his wife but before other diplomatic and congressional wives. The Longworths used Dolly’s show of pretense to boycott Prohibition-era “dry” dinners the Speaker didn’t care to attend anyway. In the end, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson placed Curtis’s sister after the dean of the diplomatic corps and his wife but before other diplomatic wives.
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William Allen White in the
Emporia Gazette
wrote, “If Washington does not do right by our Dolly, there will be a terrible ruckus in Kansas. We will be satisfied with nothing less than she be borne into the dinner on the shoulders of Mrs. Nick Longworth, seated at the center of the table as an ornament with a candelabra in each hand and fed her soup with a long-handled spoon by the wife of the Secretary of State.”
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Curtis himself suffered major ridicule during the Washington march of bonus-seeking veterans in 1932. The vice president had presented himself as a major figure of sympathy for the Great War veterans marching for early payment of the bonuses that Congress had promised them. Although Curtis had never served in the military, he often cited his father’s Civil War
service in asking for veterans support. But when the marchers came and encamped around Washington and the Capitol, he called on Hoover to call out troops to disperse them.

In July, the architect of the Capitol had its lawn sprinklers turned on, so the marchers, rather than encamping, decided to march single file around the Capitol. Curtis declared he had not authorized the march and ordered them off the property. But the District of Columbia police chief told him only the president could call out the army or move them. So Curtis then took it upon himself to call out the marines, which made him even more the brunt of ridicule.
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It was in this context that voices were heard calling for dumping Curtis from the next Republican national ticket. Curtis himself talked about going home to Kansas and running for the Senate again. But with the Kansas delegation still behind Curtis, Dawes reiterating he was not available, and no other Republican willing to hitch his wagon to Hoover and the Depression, Curtis was renominated.

As a little native color, about all he added to the Hoover cause in the subsequent election was his Indian heritage. On the campaign train, an Indian maiden reciting “Hiawatha” performed from time to time on the rear platform. Curtis campaigned heavily, particularly in the West, but was often heckled by veterans for his role in the dispersal of the Bonus Army in 1932. When a veterans’ group presented a petition to the Senate censuring Hoover, Curtis demanded that the language be deleted but was told to strike it out himself, and the leader of the group in leaving refused to shake the vice president’s hand.
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It was a fitting coda to what is widely considered a failed vice presidency in a failed administration. In November, Hoover and Curtis, unable to extricate themselves from the political carnage of the Great Depression, were snowed under by the New York Democratic governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his running mate, House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas.

Curtis, rather than going back to Kansas, stayed in Washington. In 1935, he became chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, hoping he could restore his reputation in the party by returning it to majority status in the Senate. But before the 1936 election he died of a heart attack at age seventy-six at the home of sister Dolly. He never regained
his earlier political success or his popularity as the Indian jockey and has been more remembered as the inspiration for Alexander Throttlebottom, the hapless vice president who applied for a public library card but couldn’t get the required two references in the Broadway stage hit
Of Thee I Sing
, by George and Ira Gershwin.

JOHN NANCE GARNER

OF TEXAS

W
hen John Nance Garner became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1931, he attained the highest public office to which he had ever aspired. With considerable reluctance, he then traded it in for another that he later famously described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” or at least that was the sanitized version of what he actually said.

His assessment no doubt grew out of his experience. Serving as president-in-waiting for arguably the most powerful American chief executive in history was often a most frustrating responsibility. Garner was vice president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the first eight of FDR’s thirteen-plus years, long enough to inspire Garner to seek to take the office from him and to end his own more than forty-year political career in the failed effort. Yet for most of their association, “Cactus Jack” was regarded by many as the most constructive vice president up to his time, helping his president carry out the policies he did not always favor.

Garner was born on November 22, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, in the town of Blossom Prairie, Red River County, Texas. He was the namesake son of a Confederate cavalry officer whose family came from colonial roots in Virginia by way of Tennessee. His grandmother was a direct descendant of Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister of England.
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His Scots-Welsh father was a hard-working farmer who raised the boy in a Texas
log cabin. Young Garner had only four years of primary education, walking three miles twice a day to an unpainted schoolhouse. With Texas entering statehood, politics became a constant subject of discussion at home, and his father often took him to local debates, giving him political aspirations of his own. At age eighteen, John set off for Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, but for reasons of inadequate preparation, health, and finances soon returned home and found a job in a local law firm. At twenty-one he was admitted to the Texas bar and set up practice in the county seat of Clarksville.
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With little thought and no hesitation, young Garner ran and lost a bid for his first public office as a city attorney. Feeling run down, he went to a doctor and was told he had tuberculosis. To relieve his respiratory afflictions, in December 1892 he moved to Uvalde, in the dry Rio Grande Valley west of San Antonio. There he joined a local law firm and began to ride the judicial circuit for hundreds of miles over nine counties through what was known as cattle-and-cactus country. He often bedded down on the ground at night. At one point he took ownership of the Uvalde
Leader
in lieu of a legal fee, gathering, writing, and printing local items.
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In 1893, he was elected a county judge, the same year he met Mariette “Ettie” Rheiner, who became his wife and life-long secretary. Garner served as ex-officio county school superintendent, charged with overseeing a local poor fund. When he learned that some Mexicans had used the dole to buy tequila and whiskey, he began giving harmless placebos to those suspected of doing so. A few days later, Garner’s political foes spread the word that a welfare recipient had died of the “pills” Garner had given him. They blamed the man’s alleged death on Garner, and the bad publicity cost him his judgeship. But shortly afterward, the “dead” man, who had been kept out of sight until after the election, reappeared on the local streets. Garner said later of his defeat by trickery, “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Had he not lost that seat, he said, he probably wouldn’t have run for and been elected to the Texas Legislature in 1898.
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There he won a reputation as a deft and fair mediator between railroad and shipping interests. In a debate over the state flower, he proposed the cactus blossom but lost out to the bluebonnet. Henceforth, the nickname “Cactus Jack” stuck to him. Another legislative nonstarter was his plan to carve Texas into five states to give it more U.S. senators, but when a colleague asked, “Who would get the Alamo?” the notion died.
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In 1896 Garner was a delegate to the Democratic state convention in Corpus Christi to choose a nominee for a vacant congressional seat. Armed with ten proxy votes, Garner threw in with Rudolph Kleberg, part owner of the famous King Ranch, in return for being named chairman of the convention’s redistricting committee in the booming state. Kleberg was nominated for the House seat and then elected. As the committee chairman, Garner carved a new legislative district out of his home county and surrounding area and won election to Congress from it in 1902 and reelection for the next thirty years.
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Upon his initial election, Garner immediately issued a declaration of independence, telling his constituents he wanted to hear their views, then clarifying his position: “But when a piece of legislation is in its final form and comes up for a vote, you won’t be there. You will be down here attending to your business. I propose to make up my mind on any measure and cast my own vote according to what I think is in the public interest.”
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He was, however, essentially a loyal party man on most matters and slowly rose to leadership posts. When President Woodrow Wilson finally called on Congress to declare war on Germany in 1917, Garner voted for the resolution and summoned his only son, Tully, recently graduated from college. “Son,” he asked, “how do you feel about going to war?” The boy replied, “I aim to go, Dad.” Garner answered, “I’m glad to hear it, for you’ve got to go. I couldn’t have cast that vote to send other fathers’ boys to war if I hadn’t known I was sending my own.”
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