Chapter 24
WHAT manner of person is Vandenberg? What does he stand for, and what does he believe in most? What are the determining characteristics of this man who is senior senator from Michigan and the Republican party’s chief spokesman on foreign affairs—the man who, ticketed for years as an isolationist, has lately been a leading American delegate to the UN Conference at San Francisco, the Foreign Ministers’ Conference at London, and the “Peace” Conference in Paris?
I called on the senator in Washington recently, hoping to find out. We sat in black leather chairs in the president’s room in the Senate, and talked an hour. It goes without saying that, since November 1946 and with the Republican party in control of Congress, Vandenberg’s importance has steeply risen. He and Taft run the Senate.
Vandenberg has written two books about his greatest hero, Alexander Hamilton; the title page of one carries the motto, Nationalism—not “Internationalism”—is the indispensable bulwark of American independence. But this was written in 1921, since which date both Senator Vandenberg and the world have traveled a considerable way. In 1939, addressing an American Legion convention, he proclaimed, “This so-called war is nothing but about twenty-five people and propaganda. They [presumably the Europeans] want our money and our men.” This from the senator who has spent almost every moment of the last two years working with Europeans!
Actually Vandenberg, a temperate and discriminating man, has never been an isolationist of the blindly implacable type of Hiram Johnson or Henry Cabot Lodge. There is little of the intransigent or irreconcilable in the big Michigander’s character, and his voting record on international issues has been mixed. He vigorously opposed revision of the Neutrality Act in 1939, during the Sitzkrieg, but, though this is not always recollected, he voted for Lend Lease, and he was one of six Republican senators who favored United States participation in the World Court. Also Vandenberg, by far the most influential Republican in the Senate on foreign issues, worked staunchly for UNRRA and was to an extent responsible for putting UNRRA through.
The most severe criticism of Vandenberg I have come across is by Milton S. Mayer in The Nation of May 11, 1940. “Vandenberg is liberal (for a Republican), enlightened (for a politician), and industrious (for a senator). But you can’t find out what makes him go. Dewey and Taft have cores; you may not like them, but they’re there. Vandenberg doesn’t add up to anything. He cancels out. … On domestic problems you can’t locate him at all. He has stood squarely on both sides of every issue for the past ten years. He has been against subsidies to the farmer and for the payment of equalization fees; for the RFC and against pump priming; for economy and against reorganization; for devaluation and against “repudiation”; for housing and against the spend-lend theory (and for and against housing); for the SEC and against marginal trading and holding company regulation; for tariff and loan benefits to the suffering poor (and for and against relief); for and against federal control of relief; for budget balancing and at the same time for a general pension; for and against income tax publicity; for higher surtaxes and against taxation of tax-exempt securities.”
But this was written almost seven years ago. What Vandenberg himself is proudest of in his senate record, in the domestic field, is his fatherhood of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation law, which is usually thought of as a New Deal measure. The Michigan senator considers that this act has contributed more to the economic stability of the United States than any other single measure in fifty years. Yet, in the early days of the Roosevelt administration, the proposal that the federal government should insure bank deposits was considered little short of insurrectionary by many of his Republican colleagues. Today, hardly a finger in the land would be lifted against it. Vandenberg expands and grows; so does the country grow, through the fierce education imposed by threat of disaster.
Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg is a large, solidly built man, now sixty-two, who wears his age well. If I had to describe him in a sentence I would be tempted to say that he looks exactly like what he is—a senator. White hair combed laterally across a bulging brow; a heavy gold watch chain worn laterally across a massive waistcoat—these are as familiar as black pants. But he has nothing of the blowsy look of some “professional” senators. He has dignity; he never uses words vapidly; and though he is a large hunk of man he is also tidy. No one would ever mistake him for a McCarran. And his intensely dark eyes look at you with a shiny glare at once searching and beneficent. Vandenberg gives at one and the same time an impression of power—an easy and affluent kind of power—plus an irreverent wit and comfortable good humor, a note of laziness (despite his unrivaled reputation for industry), and a very definite and alert sophistication.
“My whole life,” the senator told me, “was underlined by my having to go to work at the age of nine, while supporting my mother and father. As a result of this, I solemnly promised God Almighty, first, that if it lay within my power, I would never permit what happened to my father to happen to me. This resolution has made a permanent notch in my character. Second, I gained a lot of early equipment in self-confidence, and ever since I’ve held to the conviction that if you really want to go somewhere in life, you can.”
For a man to have perfect self-confidence means, as a rule, that he also has acute knowledge of his own limitations, which indeed Vandenberg has. But he went on:
“My experiences as a child bent me two ways, if I assign myself to any political category. I know from bitter experience what it feels like to have nothing in your pocket, but also I know the value of enterprise, and how enterprise can protect old age. I’m half a conservative, half a liberal. The liberalism derives from my having been poor, the conservatism from having got moderately rich.”
He went on to describe his early days; he was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1884; his father was an old-style harness maker. The family came originally from the Mohawk Valley. The harness business developed into a good thing, and young Vandenberg grew up in a comfortable home with all normal conveniences until he was nine, when the crash of 1893 wiped his father out. The family home became a boarding house, his mother had to find work as a laundress, and Arthur saw his tormented father become quickly a broken old man. So he became the main support of his family, at the age of nine.
“What kind of a job did you get?” I asked.
“A damned good job! I ran a pushcart, in the hours after school, delivering shoes from a wholesale house to the freight yards. By the time I was twelve, three others boys worked for me. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was getting fifteen to twenty dollars a week, which was a lot of money for those days.”
The Horatio Alger pattern is as clear in this story as it is in a thousand others. But Vandenberg’s career turned out to be Alger with reverse English. Because his next step forward came as a result of getting fired for disobedience. It is astonishing how many Americans owe much of their good fortune to having lost rather than gained a job.
“In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt was running for president, and I was a tremendous TR fan. I was out of high school by this time, working as a billing clerk in a cracker factory. There was a TR parade in town, and I asked the boss for time out to see it. He refused. I went anyway. I came back, and he fired me. I had to have another job right away, and I got one as an office boy on the Grand Rapids Herald.”
Young Arthur’s subsequent career as a newspaperman was rapid, to say the least. At twenty-one he was city hall reporter and political writer, and as such covered the senatorial campaign of a Republican dignitary named William Alden Smith. Smith took a considerable fancy to Vandenberg, bought the paper in 1906, and made the young man publisher, manager, and editor—when he was twenty-two.
“What a chance for a youngster!” Vandenberg exclaimed. “The paper dominated the morning field in western Michigan, and here was I, twenty-two years old, running it! A break like that can’t happen to more than one person in a million. I’ve been a creature of great good fortune. Just the same, I could have lost the whole thing the next year—or any other year—if I had been a flop. When I say to my wife nowadays that I’ve been lucky, she replies that I was so indefatigable that something would have had to give way to me, no matter with luck or not.”
I asked him when he first became interested in politics, and he answered with a kind of good-humored, retrospective assurance that his ambition was to be a United States senator from the first moment he had a conscious thought. “Public life in the broad sense has always appealed to me.” He made speeches and won oratorical contests when still in high school, and by odd coincidence took part in 1899 in a debate on the Peace Conference at The Hague. “Forty-six years later, I signed the San Francisco charter for my own country.”
Though Vandenberg had a good job on the Grand Rapids Herald for twenty-five years he did not make any enormous amount of money, and though he was resolute in his determination to go into public life some day, he was just as resolutely determined never to run for office until he could easily afford it. As he put it, grinning at his own epigram, “I decided not to go into public life until I was independent of public life.” As early as 1907, however, though not running for office himself, he campaigned throughout Michigan for the Republican party, and became a member of the state central committee. Nine years later, in 1916, he was so well known that all factions urged him to run for governor, on the assumption that only he could mend a local bull moose split, but he refused. Not till 1928 did he come out for senator, when he was perfectly certain (a) that he would win, and (b) that he had means enough to support the job. His opponent in the 1928 elections would have been Woodbridge N. Ferris, a hard Democrat to beat. But Ferris died just as the campaign began, and Vandenberg was appointed by the then Republican governor to be his successor—another example of his good luck. Then, running for the new term, he won handily, as he did again in 1934, 1940, and 1946. In 1934 he was the only Republican senator in the whole country to win re-election.
Vandenberg says today—with his fingers crossed—that he is not a presidential candidate. He declined the Republican nomination for vice president in 1936 (it went to his good friend Frank Knox instead),1 and, as he jokingly puts it, “he was declined” for the presidential nomination in 1940, when Willkie took it on the run. But the Michigander got seventy-six votes for president in the 1940 convention. And though—today—he claims that he has no burning desire to be president himself, he wants to have a lot to say as to who the Republican candidate shall be, especially since, at the moment of writing, a 1948 GOP victory seems inevitable. In 1944, as is well known, he came out for MacArthur, but the MacArthur movement sputtered out after brief fireworks. Could Vandenberg be “persuaded” to run himself in 1948? Of course—if all the circumstances are propitious.
I asked Vandenberg what his basic political conviction was and he replied that what he believed in most was the essential dignity of the individual citizen, and his right to have the kind of free opportunity “to go places” he himself has had. “You can’t regiment ’em into a slot.” He thinks that the American constitution is still the most progressive document in the history of the world, and that the American republic is still the most progressive country in the world. He wants to resist all efforts to “standardize us into bureaucratic tyranny.” On the other hand, he concedes that any presidential candidate must hereafter take heed of the times by being “socially minded,” and he thinks that “the whole world has moved into a new relationship between state and citizen, which cannot be ignored.” This relationship should, however, be adjusted within the old framework, he insists. “We don’t have to be Communists to be broadminded.” Finally, he seems to be aware that any total reversion to the ideas and ideals of 1929 would—for the time being anyway—be altogether impossible and ruinous.
I wanted to know how Vandenberg relaxed, since a man’s play will often tell as much about him as his work, but he said that nowadays he had no time for hobbies. For seventeen years what he liked to do was travel, not merely for fun but for self-improvement. He traveled in a very special way; every year he went to a different country and stayed there for two months, sticking to the one place. He did this for seventeen consecutive years, and so it may be presumed he has today a fair enough acquaintance of seventeen different foreign countries.
Next to travel, what he likes most is writing. His first book on Hamilton, called Alexander Hamilton, the Greatest American, was prompted in part by Gertrude Atherton’s The Conqueror. The late but not lamented President Harding, of all people, contributed the preface to this largely forgotten volume. Vandenberg loved both the research and the writing attending his literary work. His other books are If Hamilton Were Here Today, published in 1923, and The Trail of a Tradition (1925), a highly nationalist tract on foreign policy, which I imagine the senator would not like to have quoted against him today.
A good many people were surprised when Vandenberg was selected by Mr. Roosevelt as an American delegate to San Francisco—and more surprised still when the Michigan senator accepted.
But after the presidential elections of 1944, Vandenberg found himself in a quandary. Roosevelt had been overwhelmingly re-elected, with all that that showed as to the temper of the country. All senators, if not in their dotage or unless cranks, want to be re-elected—this is their first law of life—and Vandenberg was coming up in 1946. He had been influenced gradually to believe in international conciliation and a modified American participation in the world structure; yet, as leader of the Republican opposition in the Senate, he could not possibly jump with both feet on the Roosevelt bandwagon. He studied hard, thought things over, and scouted around for a compromise. Then on January 10, 1945, he came out with one of the most important speeches on foreign policy ever made by an American, putting himself on record for an immediate alliance between the United States and the other great powers (including Russia) for the future control of Germany by permanent armed force. He even went so far as to suggest that the president might, if necessary, enforce the future peace treaties by use of American military strength without consent of Congress.
A brief time later, Roosevelt appointed him to the San Francisco delegation. The invitation appealed at once to Vandenberg’s vanity, his genuine sense of public duty, and his politics. Nor has he ever regretted accepting it. He is as proud as punch, still, of being a signatory to the charter. He tells friends, “They can’t take that out of history!” Another point is that San Francisco taught him a lot, and men who are capable of intellectual growth in their sixties, capable of acquiring new knowledge and new points of view, are rare indeed.
In January, 1946, Vandenberg went to London, this time as a delegate to the UN. Previously he sought assurance from President Truman that we were properly safeguarding our knowledge of the atomic bomb. He was still, in other words, a kind of Republican watchdog, a brake on the delegation as a whole; later this was his role in Paris too, though he cooperated well and cordially with Byrnes. Looking at him in large perspective, it can hardly be denied that his contribution over the years is substantial, if only by contrast to what happened in 1919. Today, the United States is not only part of the contemporary equivalent of the old League of Nations; the United States Senate passed the San Francisco charter by eighty-nine votes to two. No development in American history more cardinally represents a greater change of point of view in the short span of twenty-six years. Suppose Vandenberg had been a Lodge. He could have wrecked the treaty. Negatively at least, the Michigander is as much responsible for American participation in the present cycle of peacemaking, however shaky this may turn out to be, as any American now living.
To summarize, Vandenberg’s brain is better than the puddings some senators have inside their skulls, and he has never lost the advantage of the half-a-generation head start he got in life, as a result of having had to go to work at the age of nine. Most lucky men tend to become complacent, but Vandenberg worked hard to make his own luck hold. What caused the great “sea change,” the transposition in adult years from a narrow kind of nationalist approach to his present position? Surely the answer is not hard to find. The keynote of his whole life and career has been security—the loss of security, the search for it, the gaining of it, and the canny weighing of every decision to the inch, so that security shall not be lost again. Vandenberg would hate to think of the world, and his own country, going to ruin just at the juncture when he is in a position to enjoy it most and serve it best. Security in the personal sphere has simply been transposed into security nationally and internationally. The only way any man can be secure himself—in this robot and atomic age—is to help make the world secure, if he can.
1 He and Knox were cub reporters together on the Grand Rapids Herald.