A Disaster Averted: John Nance Garner and the 1940 Presidential Election
When discussing the Flint sit-down strike of 1937 last weekend, I noted John Nance Garner’s support for using soldiers to bust the strike. It reminded of just how awful Garner was. And how close we were to a Garner presidency in 1940.
We remember that Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in 1940, but we don’t pay much attention to what would have happened had he followed convention and stepped down. The almost certain Democratic nominee would have been John Nance Garner and given the nation’s repudiation of the Republican Party during the 1930s, he would probably have won the Oval Office as well.
Garner really wanted the job. I mean, he wanted it BAD. Garner was furious that FDR was going to run for a 3rd term and did everything in his power to outmaneuver Roosevelt. Most of what I know about this is from Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, about the early years of Lyndon Johnson. Essentially, LBJ catapulted himself up the Democratic Party power structure by selling his fellow Texans who had lined up behind Garner down the river, giving his support to Roosevelt and then taking over the running of Congressional elections around the county that fall, likely saving the House for the Democrats. That’s why Caro goes into such detail on Garner. At this point in his biographical sweep, Caro didn’t much care for Johnson, but he certainly preferred him to Garner. For good reason.
“Cactus Jack” Garner hated the New Deal. He was a Dixiecrat through and through. Garner was OK with the emergency measures of 1933, but began revolting against FDR by late 1934. Garner loathed government spending. He was however a loyal man and kept his complaining to private letters to FDR and close friends.
Garner hated one thing more than the New Deal: people of color. A man of west Texas (Uvalde, also the home of Dale Evans), Garner said about the Mexicans who worked his pecan plantations, “They are not troublesome people unless they become Americanized. The Sheriff can make them do anything.” When the Flint sit-down strike took place, Garner took this attitude toward labor and applied it to the GM workers. Essentially, he went bezerk. As Caro says, “To men accustomed to treating laborers like serfs, the very idea of unions was anathema (558).” Garner thought FDR told him he would come out against the sit-down strikes, but the consummate politician in the Oval Office only made Garner believe this. FDR did nothing of the sort. Garner and Roosevelt began arguing publicly. And when FDR introduced the court-packing bill, Garner essentially broke relations with the president. Rather than work with FDR, he left his post in the middle of the Congressional session (leaving the presiding seat empty) and went home to Uvalde.
By 1939, Garner was in open warfare with FDR over the third term. By this point, FDR and Garner hated each other and hated everything the other stood for. FDR hated Garner for being a reactionary, Garner hated FDR for being a big spending liberal. In truth, Garner was defeated by the Nazis as much as anything–the rise of the war in Europe made FDR seem indispensable and torpedoed his attempts to wrest the party leadership away from FDR.
But what would a Garner presidency had looked like? Horrible. A repeal of as much of the New Deal legislation as possible. A return to using the power of the state to crush labor. More than likely an ineptitude in preparing for war given Garner’s reticence in using the federal government’s power to build the economy.
John Nance Garner would have looked like a southern version of Grover Cleveland.
The nation is incredibly lucky that Roosevelt chose to run for a third term and held back the Garner challenge. I shudder to think what would have happened in the 1940s with John Nance Garner as our president.
The question is who FDR would have backed if he didn’t go for the 3rd term. Part of the reason he ran again in 1940 was that there was no New Dealer he trusted who he could past the torch to. Most of them were too low level to be able to get the nomination. And of the cabinet members he trusted Perkins, Farley, Wallace and Hopkins all had serious detriments against them.
I wonder what figures Caro will have a focus chapter on in the next volume. The Kennedy Brothers for sure but is there any Russell, Rayburn, or Al Smith that would need coverage in LBJ’s early Presidency?
The very limited polling done in 1940 suggested pretty broad support for Garner over Cordell Hull and Jim Farley, but of course that’s before FDR had a say.
Well, the Hearst papers were aggressively pushing Garner. That probably helped his numbers. Also, he was a household name, which Hull and Farley were not.
Doug M.
My mind immediately goes to George Marshall, but that’s my anachronistic self talking.
There’s no way the American public would have supported a general – a merchant of death! – in 1940. And there’s no way Marshall, from the generation of generals who took pride is not even voting, would have been interested.
But he would have made a hell of a President.
You’re making Marshall president before he did the things that made him a plausible candidate–it would never have worked.
We all have to remember that Roosevelt’s four successive election victories means he’s a dictator of the worst order.
Two term limitations never made much sense to me. Either lift the restriction or make it one term only.
Or, make it no more than two consecutive terms.
It’s not like any American politician would be willing to just keep the seat warm and then hand it back.
I think the dynamic of the Bush/Cheney administration works against your argument.
Bush shut Cheney out about halfway through his second term.
On the other hand, as I noted on Twitter, without FDR’s 4 terms, we wouldn’t have had the 22nd amendment, in which case who knows how many terms Reagan or Clinton would have served?
Reagan was unpopular when he left office, so probably still two. Clinton might have served more than his two, but I’d have willingly paid that price to avoid Bush.
Also, even without the 22nd amendment Presidents tended to not serve more than two terms anyway, and in the Parliamentary democracies, where PMs can theoretically rule forever as long as their party keeps winning elections, 10 or so years seems to be the rule for even the most wildly successful ones.
Erik, it’s actually much worse than that. Garner very nearly became president in *1933*, when an unemployed bricklayer named Felipe Zangara decided to shoot President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt.
Zangara got a clean shot at FDR in Miami just a couple of weeks before the inauguration. (Back in those days, Presidents-Elect didn’t get Secret Service protection.) But he had never fired a handgun before and really had no idea what he was doing. So he missed — he hit and killed former Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, who was standing next to FDR, instead. Cermak’s tomb has an inscription on it… it’s worth looking up.
Anyway, point being, we came yay close to having Garner be President right from the git-go. And wouldn’t that have been swell.
Doug M.
I believe The Man in the High Castle is the definitive take on just how awful it would have been if FDR had been assassinated and Garner had become President.
How likely would a communist revolution have been, I wonder? I’ve always felt that FDR was the capitalists’ best friend, precisely because the New Deal seemed significant enough to take the wind out of communism’s sails.
South of the Ohio, and east of the Mississippi, zero chance.
I want to hear what Dr. Dick, the Oklahoman, has to say about that.
Oklahoma used to be a hotbed.
… Oklahoma is east of the Mississippi?
Hrmm. Er…opinions vary.
I’m drinking because I finally got hired for a teaching job.
Congratulations.
Congratulations!
Is it celebration or preparation?
He could have meant “South of the Ohio OR…”?
God, I forgot about that. Yikes!
And Cermak’s death leads pretty directly to the development of the pan-ethnic Kelly-Nash machine, at least if Mike Royko’s thumbnail sketch of Chicago machine history in “Boss” is accurate.
Fascinating post, Erik.
Nothing else to add. Carry on.
Seconded.
Erik’s best posts are just off the charts, and this is one of them.
Agreed. However, can we at least acknowledge Garner’s one signature accomplishment, which was likening the vice-presidency to “a bucket of warm piss”?
I think “ineptitude in preparing for war” is being seriously generous to people like Garner. Who’s to say that he couldn’t have come to a detente with the Nazis, on their shared hatred for “coloreds”, jews, and uppity unionists?
Yeah but…Japan.
Is it plausible that Hitler wouldn’t have honored his alliance with Japan with a friendlier President in the White House? As I recall he really, really didn’t want to declare war on the United States.
Hard to know how he’d have felt without FDR joining the Battle of the Atlantic early, but Hitler is supposed to have thought of the U.S. as weak and not much of a threat.
Shockingly, Hitler had a dumb opinion.
I dunno.
Even if so, however, imagine an unprepared United States being hit at Pearl Harbor, and fighting even just a Pacific War – with the English not really putting up much of a fight in the Burma/India theater (because they’re so much more hard-pressed in Europe and North Africa).
We’d still have kicked Japan’s ass. It just would have taken longer.
Yamamoto had it right; Japan had zero ability to strike at our industrial base and population centers, which meant they had no real ability to win a war with us. And we’re a vengeful people who don’t much like being sucker punched. Japan was tied on a bunch of fronts and had restive conquered populations to deal with, while we’d have had the full angry might of a unified populace fighting only on one front.
Yamamoto did indeed know the industrial score, and was furthermore outspoken in promoting it. Fearing his assassination by Army fanatics, the Navy was obliged to transfer him to sea duty. Of course, it was during that tour of sea duty he orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I don’t think that’s right. Hitler’s alliance with Japan certainly did not oblige him to declare war on a country because Japan attacked it. If he had really, really not wanted to declare war on the US, he would have, well, not declared war on the US.
All the more reason to reach an accord with our Aryan brothers so we could wallop those yellow bastards.
Yeah, it’s not like the alliances had to make a lot of sense in the runup to the heavy WWII action.
Case in point, Finland.
The recent book “Finland’s War of Choice” details what may be the single craziest forgotten theatre of a war that had a LOT of insane, forgotten theatres.
“The almost certain Democratic nominee would have been John Nance Garner and given the nation’s repudiation of the Republican Party during the 1930s, he would probably have won the Oval Office as well.”
I believe you’re forgetting a man named James. A. FARLEY.
Never underestimate a Farley.
I thought the saying was, It’s impossible to underestimate a Farley?
I thought the saying was “What do you do with a drunken Farley?”
the rise of the war in Europe made FDR seem indispensable and torpedoed [Garner's] attempts to wrest the party leadership away from FDR.
Heh-heh.
This is great — I still think of FDR’s presidency in the naive way I did in elementary school, as if the four terms were simply natural (and the subsequent restriction to two equally so).
That was me.
Mind, while almost everything Erik writes about Garner is true, there were some additional wrinkles.
1) Garner was old; born in 1868, he would have turned 72 a week after the 1940 election. He was a very vigorous old man — he ended up living to the age of 99 — but his age definitely would have been an issue.
(Also, his age explains a lot about him. You compare him to Grover Cleveland; well, he was already a man grown, a practicing lawyer and a sitting judge, during Cleveland’s second term.)
2) Garner was a conservative, but he didn’t object to all of the New Deal. He was fine with Social Security (which was, at the time, a modest program to alleviate elder poverty) and had no objections to the CCC or many other “make-work” programs. Back in 1931-2, as Speaker of the House he introduced a massive public works bill that prefigured much of what FDR would do a year later. (Hoover vetoed it.) So I don’t think it’s quite correct to say he was against using the power of the federal government.
On racial issues he was probably better than average for a southern politician of his generation — which is to say he was a stone bigot, and firmly against civil rights, but not a Bilbo-style malevolent racist.
3) Garner was a self-made man — he claimed to have been born in a log cabin, and this only slightly stretched the truth. He wasn’t an autodidact, though; he dropped out of college after one year and never did get much education. So in many ways he remained deeply provincial.
That said, he was able to respect a principled opponent, and managed to work with politicians of almost every stripe right up until his 1938 break with FDR. Garner was a deeply practical politician who preferred back-room bargains, compromise and consensus to stemwinding speeches and confrontation. His openly antagonistic relationship with labor was, in this regard, somewhat unusual for him.
4) Finally, Garner was a good old Yellow Dog, a loyal Democrat of a sort that has almost vanished today. So I don’t think he would have aggressively sought to roll back New Deal advances against determined opposition from his own party.
Note that Sam Rayburn — an intelligent, thoughtful man, about as liberal a Southerner as you would get in the first half of the 20th century, and a truly great Speaker of the House — was Garner’s protege, and always spoke of him with respect that bordered on reverence. So there was a bit more to Garner than just the labor-killing cartoon that John L. Lewis presented.
All that said, yeah, it would have been a hell of a mess.
Doug M.
As I recall, and the book is in the office and I am at home so I can’t check, Caro basically portrays Rayburn as wanting to support FDR but for Rayburn and for Garner, loyalty trumped all and so he backed Garner.
Yes, it was a sticky situation for Rayburn. He was a New Dealer, a relative liberal, and a firm supporter of FDR — but Garner was his mentor, and he felt deep personal loyalty to him.
Fortunately Rayburn wasn’t Speaker of the House yet — that happened just a couple of months later, in September 1940 — or he really would have been on the spot.
Doug M.
2):
So, what was Garner against? The central economic planning stuff that was abandoned – some because it didn’t work, some overturned by the courts – anyway?
The central economic planning stuff and anything that gave rights to labor. Also, he had a much more limited view of executive power. He didn’t think much of using the Presidency to reach out directly to public opinion — no bully pulpit or fireside chats. (He was a mediocre public speaker anyway, though charming at close quarters.)
There’s a decent potted bio here: http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_John_Garner.htm
Doug M.
He lived long enough to see the Great Society and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act put into law?
That is DELICIOUS.
Nobody does irony like History.
He wouldn’t have had strong objections to the Great Society. VISTA, Medicare, Medicaid, the urban transportation bills, Head Start, consumer protection, truth in lending, the enviromental stuff, the increases to Social Security, none of that would have bothered him much. He wouldn’t have liked the food stamp expansion, the minimum wage increase, federal aid to public education, or the creation of PBS and NPR — but keep in mind that this is a guy who worked hand in glove with FDR to get the first two waves of New Deal legislation passed.
Civil Rights, well, you wouldn’t find too many white Southerners born in 1868 who were strong civil rights supporters, no. He would have opposed it. But it wouldn’t have excited him to gibbering rage.
Doug M.
“Who’s to say that he couldn’t have come to a detente with the Nazis, on their shared hatred for “coloreds”, jews, and uppity unionists?”
No. Garner was no isolationist; he’d supported Wilson’s entry into WWI, and was a firm believer in a muscular foreign policy. He dabbled with isolationism briefly in the 1940 campaign because he struck a (fortunately futile) devil’s bargain with Hearst, and he thought FDR was being a bit overwrought about the whole Nazi menace thing. He probably wouldn’t have come up with lend-lease or bases for destroyers, and the naval and army bills of 1939-40 might not have passed. (Which would have been bad enough.) But cut a deal with Hitler? No.
Doug M.
In 1939 and 1940 FDR would still have been president, no?
I think Doug M. should write a guest post for LGM, Garner revisited or so
We-ell… years ago, I wrote a series of Usenet posts on soc.history.what-if about the world where Felipe Zangara killed FDR after all. Here’s one that I wrote from Garner’s POV (warning, long):
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/71ff1f93fa44ffcb?
“Yellow Dog” was the old term for diehard Democrats — as in, he’d vote for a yellow dog over a Republican.
cheers,
Doug M.
Does it make me a terrible person that the story about LBJ selling Texan conservatives down the river in order to support a northeastern liberal makes me like Johnson more?
When you’re in public service, it’s good to have cordial and honorable relationships with your coworkers, but your real loyalty always needs to be to the people. You have responsibilities, and if that means behaving towards other politicians in a manner that would normally be considered disreputable, then that’s what you have to do.
Although as soon as FDR died, LBJ totally distanced himself from the president, moving to the right as quickly as possible to survive in a McCarthyist time.
Case in point:
That’s another way of saying that FDR lied to him, mislead him, and set him up. Personally, individually, did this to him.
Good man, FDR.
FDR liked misleading people. He didn’t like to flat-out lie, but his charisma was such that he could generally convince most people that he was firmly in agreement with them.
This was very effective in his first term. It wore a bit thin in his second as people around him figured it out.
Doug M.
FDR also really loved co-opting people, making every attempt to draw them into a personal, rather than professional, orbit around him so he could then exploit those personal connections for his own political gain.
There’s a good story about how he once tried to start this project with George Marshall the same way he started it with a lot of people, by inviting him into his office and being all chummy and familiar with him, calling him “George,” etc. and Marshall shut him down hard, letting him know what whatever FDRs relationships with other Generals or people in the War Department were like, when it came to HIM, he was “General” or “General Marshall” and Roosevelt was “Mr. President.”
Roosevelt respected him for it.
Murc, have you read General of the Army?
In fact I have not. I confess that I haven’t actually read a lot of bios, and the only ones I’ve read about WWII figures are about Churchill.
Most of what I know about Marshall actually comes from Robert Leckie and David Halberstam, in the context of the biographical information they included in their longer form works.
Correct — FDR liked people to like him, and strove to personalize all his relationships. In some ways, this was charming. And it was a very effective political tool. As a management technique, less so.
Usually we associate this character trait with people who are needy. But FDR was a rather unusual personality type. There was nothing needy about him. He just liked to be liked, was good at making people like him, and found this the best way of getting what he wanted. He was a genial manipulator. The geniality seems to have been real, but the manipulation was too.
Doug M.
Roosevelt once summed his methods by saying, “my right hand doesn’t know what my left hand is doing”.
He believed in management by competition, no question. He liked to have his subordinates bickering and squabbling with each other, so that he could step in and play the wise father and judge.
FDR was a great President! but, yeah, kind of a d-bag sometimes.
Doug M.
you’re assuming Wilkie wouldn’t have beaten Garner.
Now that is a question I would like to rise too. Willkie did get 44.8% of the vote in 1940, after all.
A democratic candidate who wasn’t Roosevelt and was openly feuding with Roosevelt against a moderate republican like Willkie or Dewey – would Garner really be a sure thing?
Here’s the thing: Garner couldn’t have got the nomination without FDR’s support. But if FDR were planning to retire, he probably wouldn’t have supported Garner.
Doug M.
Nitpick — Uvalde’s not really considered West Texas. It’s like the western edge of the Hill Country. And why go with Dale Evans as the reference when you could have gone with Matthew McConaughey?
McConaughey went to high school in Longview so regardless of where he’s born, he’s from east Texas..
As long as I’m slagging FDR, one other thing: he didn’t like to let any tree grow too tall around him. No “Cabinet of Rivals”, no anointed successors.
There were things about FDR that were admirable and lovable; there were other things about him that were pretty obnoxious. Again: great President! But a complicated character.
Doug M.