Vice President Cactus Jack

Candidates for vice president are in the news today, almost as if the choice was important.  While the vice president becomes critically important if the sitting president passes away, until then, the job consists mainly of making boring speeches to small crowds, attending foreign funerals and placing the daily call to the White House, “Is he dead yet?”

No one described the job better than Vice President John Nance Garner, ““The Vice Presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Well…or words to that effect.  Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson had been offered the candidacy of vice president by John Kennedy for the upcoming 1960 election and Johnson had asked fellow Texan Garner for advice.  As we all know, that is not exactly the way two Texans talk to each other, Garner actually referred to a different bodily fluid not suitable to be named in newspapers.

Note.  Years later, LBJ offered similar advice to another Texas politician.  When Congressman George Bush was contemplating running for the Senate in 1970, he sought advice from the former president.  LBJ supposedly said, “"Being a senator is like being a chicken in a Colonel Sanders' house.  It's better to be a senator than a congressman.  It's the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit."  That is the way Texans talk to each other.

Someone ought to make a movie about Garner, he had a colorful life.  Born in a log cabin in Red River County, deep in the northeastern piney woods of Texas, Garner spent a single semester as a student at Vanderbilt before dropping out to return to Texas and “read for the law” at a law firm, effectively becoming an apprentice.  When the apprenticeship was over, Garner moved to Uvalde, Texas to practice law.

Shortly after moving to Uvalde, Garner decided to enter politics and ran for county judge.  His sole opponent was Ettie Rheiner, a local rancher’s daughter.  Garner won more than the job of being judge, he courted and married Ettie; their union lasted 53 years until her death in 1948.

John Nance Garner obtained the nickname "Cactus Jack" due to his Texas roots and his prickly personality.  The nickname "Cactus" was derived from his Texas origins, symbolizing his rugged and straightforward demeanor….Nonsense, but that was the story that Garner encouraged the newspapers to print.  Actually, while Garner was in the state legislature, Texas was choosing a state flower and Garner pushed hard for the adoption of the prickly pear cactus.  Despite his efforts, the state picked the blue bonnet instead of a cactus rose.

In 1902, Garner was elected to Congress, where he remained for thirty years, effectively homesteading the House of Representatives.  Garner was a staunch conservative southern Democrat, which in those days meant two things:  Undying support for white landowners and a hard fiscal policy.  Garner made very little effort to hide his outright contempt for minorities, whom he described as “inferior citizens”.  (At the time, this was hardly a unique position in Congress).

By 1931, Garner was the House Minority Leader and—following the election of 1930, after the crash of the stock market and the beginning of the Great Depression swept Republicans from power for the first time since the Civil War—Garner became the Speaker of the House.

In the 1932 presidential election, the Democrats held an open convention—something that, evidently, the party goes to great lengths to avoid today.  Though Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the strongest candidate, he was unable to secure enough delegate votes to secure the nomination.  After three ballots failed to select FDR, he made a deal with Garner, who was also running for the presidency.  Garner accepted the position of vice president in return for encouraging his delegates to vote for FDR.  The compromise worked and FDR won the nomination on the fourth ballot.

For Roosevelt, adding John Nance Garner helped to balance the ticket.  Roosevelt was from New York, so adding a Texan was hoped to help secure votes from the South.  While Roosevelt was a progressive, Garner was a conservative.  Perhaps this balance worked, for the ticket of Roosevelt and Garner defeated the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, in a landslide.

Since Garner had been the Speaker of the House (and second in the line of succession after the vice president), when he became the new vice president he also became the President of the Senate (as well as being first in the line of succession).  Only one other man in American history has been the head of both houses of the legislature.  (If you’re curious, the other man was in Schuyler Colfax, vice president during the Grant Administration.)

For eight long years, Garner did next to nothing—exactly what is expected of a good vice president.  During Roosevelt’s first term, this was fairly easy to do, but during the second term, Garner found himself increasingly at odds with FDR’s policies.  He disagreed with deficit spending, he was unhappy with Roosevelt’s devotion to unions, and worst of all, he strongly disagreed with Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court.  Like most vice presidents, however, he avoided an open break with the president in favor waiting out two terms and then running for the presidency himself.  

Everyone seemed to take it for granted that Roosevelt would follow the example of George Washington and not seek reelection to a third term.   Early in 1940, Garner announced his candidacy for the election (then just seven months away).  The newly created Gallup Poll indicated that Garner was the overwhelming presidential choice for most Democrats.  And FDR remained quiet, which was seen as a tacit endorsement of Garner.

Due to Garner’s obvious “problem” with the minority voters in the North and Midwest, he supported the passing of a federal law against lynching in the Senate.  This was an abrupt reversal for the Texan, since he had led the opposition to passing earlier versions of the bill.  But that was before he needed their votes to become president.

Though exact numbers are hard to determine, it is estimated that roughly 4,000 Blacks were lynched in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The Republican Party had sponsored the passage of a federal law against lynching as early as 1918, but the bills had failed to pass because of lack of support from Southern Democrats.

As late as 1937, another attempt to pass such a bill failed despite the active support of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.  Though Eleanor made several speeches in favor of such a bill passing, President Roosevelt, her husband gave no support to the bill which, once again, was blocked by southern Democrats including Vice President Garner.

In the spring of 1940, as the Democrats readied for their summer convention, Garner carefully lined up support for not only his presidential candidacy, but for the passage of the anti-lynching legislation.  Garner was certain that if he placated minority voters, he could be elected to the presidency.

At the convention, however, Roosevelt quietly engineered Garner’s defeat.  In a carefully organized and clandestine move, the president accepted a “surprise” invitation to run for an unprecedented third term.  On the first ballot, Garner received only 61 votes out of the 1,093 cast.  Roosevelt chose Henry A. Wallace as his new running mate.  Roosevelt blindsided his vice president, effectively forcing Garner out of politics simultaneously deliberately killing the anti-lynching bill.

After the election, Garner retired to Uvalde, Texas.  On his 95th birthday, he received a personal phone call from the President of the United States offering congratulations.  Seven hours later the president, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  John Nance Garner died of a heart attack just two weeks before his 99th birthday.  He is the longest living vice president in history.

Since Garner never became president, he never exerted presidential pressure on the South to pass that anti-lynching legislation (And no one else did either.).  President Roosevelt, having effectively killed the momentum to pass the bill, never publicly supported it.  It took Congress another 82 years to pass such legislation, titled the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022.  By that point, the effort to pass such important legislation had dragged on over 100 years and had failed to be passed on over 200 House or Senate votes.

If You Had Known Monty

Like every other American male, when I reached roughly the age of thirty, I had to make a serious choice of lifestyle:  I had to either become an expert at barbecuing meat or become an expert in the history of World War II.  Obviously, I chose the latter pursuit. 

This knowledge became useful a few years later when my wife (The Doc) and I took the boys (What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One) on a trip to England.  We toured the incredible British Museum (where the boys were incredibly bored with my highly detailed explanation of Ashurbanipal’s Lion Hunt), the Imperial War Museum (where we all learned that the British had won two world wars despite the incredible blunders of the American Army), and—at the insistence of my wife—several large, boring cathedrals.  (Or maybe we visited the same cathedral several times, I couldn’t really say).

The very best part of the trip was the week we spent on a canal boat as we cruised around what is referred to as ‘The Oxford Ring’.  We rented a 53-foot canal boat and, after about 15 minutes of instruction, we set off slowly—very slowly—to make our way in a very large circle around the beautiful countryside of Oxfordshire.  

Since the canal boats are only seven feet wide, they are referred to as narrowboats and are powered by diesel engines that have a maximum speed of about 4 knots—slow enough that you can easily step off of one onto the concrete side of the canal while the boat is moving and walk ahead of it.  England has opened up over 3000 miles of the canals that were primarily built in the nineteenth century to serve its rapidly growing industries.  Where the canals were once filled with barges hauling ore and coal (and they do still currently serve some commercial purposes), the primary traffic now is pleasure craft.

We gently motored along, enjoying the green beauty of the English summer (for which the BBC claimed to provide music for “all thirty minutes of it”!) and stopped whenever we wanted.  While the canal boat sported a full, well-stocked galley—as well as several bedrooms and two bathrooms—we frequently stopped at canal-side pubs and restaurants.  (Well, mostly the former).

Since all of the narrowboats moved along at about the same speed, over the idyllic days, we came to make friends with a number of the people in other boats.  One group  of people we met was an extended family traveling together, led by the matriarch of the family—an elderly, frail-looking woman, who had fascinating stories to tell.  During World War II, the woman had been the secretary to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein KG, GCB, DSO, PC, DL, the hero of the Battle of Alamein (or as American General George Patton used to refer to him, “Monty”).

No two generals serving on the same side ever disliked each other more than Montgomery and Patton.  Perhaps some of their rivalry was due to both men’s rather obvious desire for publicity and recognition, along with the natural rivalry of each man as representing his own country.   Both men had enormous egos that frequently interfered with their job performance and both men were undoubtedly extremely good at their jobs.  General Dwight Eisenhower knew both, disliked both, and had either relieved or had come close to relieving both from their jobs.  Oceans of printer’s ink have been used to describe these men, and (like any good student of history) I had spent my share of time reading about both.

Naturally, I wanted not only to meet the woman, but also to pump her for details of her memories of her former boss.  Here was a woman who knew the truth about one of the most controversial leaders of the war.  Since I didn't get permission from her to reveal the story she told me, I'm not going to use her name and the photo below, though fairly close to her likeness, is AI generated.

Naturally, I was far from the first person to have wanted to ask her questions about the general.  Treating me with more kindness than I deserved, she invited me over for tea.  The canal boat her family had rented was much more luxurious than the boat my family was using.  At the bow end of their canal boat was a rather nice parlor, with padded comfortable chairs facing each other.  I sat on the edge of my seat, gingerly holding one of those overly-decorated, delicate teacups whose handle was far too small to get a finger through.  

She outlined how she had landed the job after the Africa campaign and had worked with Montgomery in the days leading up to D-Day.  She detailed how she had remained in his office in England after the invasion, only rejoining the general after Operation Market Garden, working with his staff until a few months after the end of the war, when she returned to London and her family.  

It was only after I asked her what she personally thought of the man that she began to relate stories that were not already in the history books.  After she carefully refilled our teacups and attended to the elaborate ritual of adding the cream and sugar, she leaned back in her chair and spoke of the man she knew.

“You Americans did not like Lord Montgomery,” she said as she stopped to sip her tea.  She continued, “But, if you knew him as I did…knew him as a man you worked with and for…”  She stopped again to take another sip of tea before continuing, “You would have LOATHED him.”

Et Tu, Brute?

History is filled with the tales of downfall of political leaders. Such falls are common enough for us to look for the commonalities to reveal a pattern.  This pattern is just a template, not a rule, but it can be useful to help predict probable future events.

Palace coups usually start with popular protests that mount over time, but the coup de grâce is traditionally delivered at the hands of someone within the palace—a confident or follower of the leader.  The most obvious example is Julius Caesar being assassinated in a plot organized by his close friend, Brutus.  There are multiple other historical examples.

Leon Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, but Trotsky was eventually ousted from power and was later assassinated by an agent of Stalin, who was once his comrade in the revolution.

Anwar Sadat, the third President of Egypt, was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal.  The assassination was undertaken by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and led by an officer in the Egyptian Army.

During the French Revolution, Louis XVI was overthrown and later executed.  Many of those involved in his overthrow were members of the Estates-General, which Louis XVI himself had convened.

The Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, was overthrown and arrested in 1943, following a vote of no confidence by the Grand Council of Fascism, which was an entity that Mussolini had created and had filled with his closest followers.

Tsar Nicholas II, an incredibly inept leader, was overthrown during the Russian Revolution of 1917, after losing support of both the military and the Russian people.  The coup, however, would not have been successful without the active participation of elements within his own court.

Park Chung-hee, the South Korean president, was assassinated in 1979 by Kim Jae-gyu, the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and (allegedly) a close friend.

President Francisco Madero accepted the support of General Victoriano Huerta in the early years of the Mexican Revolution.  In February 1913, Huerta joined a conspiracy against Madero, who had entrusted him to control a revolt in Mexico City.   This period, known as “La Decena Trágica” or “The Ten Tragic Days”, ended with Huerta and Félix Díaz meeting in the U.S. Ambassador’s office and signing the so-called “Pact of the Embassy”, in which they agreed to assassinate Madero and install Huerta as president.

Over time, dissatisfaction can build among a leader's supporters due to perceived failures, from corruption, or from a growing feeling of being under-appreciated or unrewarded by the leader.  Loyalty among supporters can also shift based on changing circumstances, such as economic downturns, military defeats, or social unrest.  Supporters may then see a change in leadership as necessary to address these issues.

It is also not rare for the betrayer to believe that a new leader will offer them employment at a higher level.  A common thread in the betrayals listed above is that the  betrayer believed they would be praised for their action or become famous.

Which brings us to President Biden, who is currently suffering a slow death by a thousand cutting news articles that question his mental acuity and fitness to serve out the remainder of his current term (much less, judge him fit to be elected to and serve a second term).  The pressure to force Biden to withdraw his candidacy for a second term has probably already reached a point of no return, but the breaking point has not yet arrived.

Using the informal rule I’ve established above, I predict that the final blow will come from within the White House in the next few days.  Some trusted member of Biden’s inner circle will “leak” a story about the President falling asleep during his intelligence briefing, or forgetting the name of his long-time personal secretary, or mistaking his wife, Jill, for a staff member. 

Someone will seize the opportunity to become the center of attention and be the one responsible for changing history and so that opportunist will let loose a story that cannot be ignored.  Maybe the person just wants to lay a foundation for his future best seller, but whatever the motive, it will have to be someone with “gravitas” and position.

The story will quickly go viral, and it will be picked up by every news service and online blog.  Late night hosts will make endless jokes about the incident.  Every starved-for-material newspaper editor will promote the item.  Within eight hours, over half of America will know the story and the rest of America will eventually catch up by reading about it on social media.

The small trickle of Democratic defectors will turn into an unstoppable torrent that will force the President to accept the inevitability of his withdrawing from the upcoming presidential race.  Since the Democratic Party will officially nominate Biden in just under two weeks, the clock is ticking.

Resurrectionists

Summer is here and since I am free from reading what is required by my classes, I’m free to read anything and everything—an apt description of how I select books.  I’ll read almost anything except romance and self-help books.  Currently, I’m finishing off a great little history book by Thomas Craughwell, “Stealing Lincoln’s Body”.

This is an excellent history of the decades immediately following the Civil War, when a group of counterfeiters had the somewhat strange little idea that they could secure the release from prison of their best engraver by stealing the corpse of Abraham Lincoln and holding the body as ransom.  The grave robbers had entered the tomb and had  removed Lincoln’s coffin from his sarcophagus before being chased off by a combination of  Pinkerton operatives and Secret Service agents.  I highly recommend the book.

The book got me thinking about the long history of grave robbing.  However, I’m not referring to the practice of disturbing burial sites for the treasure that was buried along with the deceased—that practice predates recorded history and probably started shortly—very shortly--after early man started holding funerals.  

Note.  Perhaps the most prolific grave robber in history was an Italian circus strong-man-turned-archaeologist by the name of Giovanni Battista Belzoni.  After England captured the stolen Egyptian loot of Napoleon, there was a popular craze for Egyptian artifacts in Europe.  Belzoni capitalized on this popularity by “acquiring” as many artifacts as possible and shipping them back to Europe.  Besides being the first man to enter the pyramid of Khafre, he also discovered and ransacked the tomb of Seti I (now ironically popularly called Belzoni’s Tomb).  Belzoni is also remembered for using high pressure water hoses to pulverize mummies to reveal the treasures concealed within the burial wrappings.  I have often wondered if Belzoni was the inspiration for René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Someday, I’ll have to write George Lucas and ask him.

Grave robbing for treasure was prevalent almost everywhere, but particularly in Egypt.  Due to the large amount of valuable commodity included with the departed, it is generally believed that most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were looted within 100 years of their sealing.

In contrast, the grave robbing that I am thinking about is the practice of digging up fresh graves to steal the cadavers and sell them (usually to doctors or medical schools, but occasionally also to artists who wished to study anatomy).  One notable early instance occurred in the 3rd century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy I in ancient Egypt.  The Greek physician and anatomist Herophilus, who lived in Alexandria, reportedly dissected human bodies for medical study.  It's believed that the bodies used by Herophilus and other early anatomists were obtained through various means, including potentially through grave robbing or by other clandestine methods.

The practice of grave robbing increased dramatically with the rise of medical training.  The first fully documented case of this occurred in Belgium in 1319, when medical students, desperate to learn more about anatomy, disinterred a body less than a day after it had been buried.  The practice of disturbing graves for medical teaching grew as the field of medicine developed.  

Interestingly, this phenomenon occurred almost solely in Western Europe.  In Eastern Europe, there was a long history of authorities turning over unclaimed bodies or the bodies of criminals to doctors for research.  In Western Europe, though, unclaimed bodies were usually buried by the authorities. When the graves were disinterred, the crimes were usually ignored, with the few cases that were prosecuted being treated as misdemeanors.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, grave robbing became much more common in the United States, partially because the grave robbers could steal the bodies of Native Americans or slaves, which theft—though still technically a crime—was usually ignored by the authorities.  Since doctors or medical schools would pay from $5 to $20 dollars for a cadaver, this was considered a high reward for a single night’s work.

In Baltimore, grave robbing thrived for more than seventy years due to a shortage of bodies for dissection in medical schools.  The corpses were often shipped to medical schools in barrels filled with whiskey to mask the odor.  The grave robbers (who called themselves “resurrectionists”) preferred to remove the bodies of children because the smaller graves were easier to exhume and the cadavers were easier to conceal and transport.

Ironically, probably the most famous story of 19th century grave robbing (other than the tale of Doctor Frankenstein and his monster, that is) never actually happened and is included in what many people incorrectly assume is a book for children.  In the ninth chapter of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Tom and Huck take a dead cat to the cemetery in the middle of the night to perform a superstitious ritual absolutely guaranteed to cure warts.  While there, they see young Dr. Robinson and his two sidekicks, Muff Potter and Injun Joe, digging up a cadaver so the doctor can study anatomy.  A fight breaks out, and Injun Joe kills the doctor, framing Muff Potter for the murder.  Besides being a central point of the book, Twain’s inclusion of the story shows the prevalence of the crime in 19th century.

Just how prevalent was the practice?  There are no exact records, but when construction workers were renovating a 150-year-old building at an Augusta, Georgia medical school in 1989, they found over 10,000 human bones buried in the basement under layers of quicklime.  By all accounts, that would be evidence it was a common practice.

Eventually, it was the frequency of the crime that outraged the public and led to the enactment of stiffer punishments for it.  Some medical schools began modest payments for cadavers while others began accepting donated cadavers.  And while it is fascinating to reflect on how the noble and proud profession of Medicine once depended on sneaking into graveyards in the middle of the night to dig up the remains of the recently departed—even with 20,000 anatomical donations annually, are we really sure that the profession of the resurrectionists is obsolete?

I submit as evidence the arrest, less than a year ago, of the manager of a morgue at the Harvard Medical School…for the theft and sale of body parts.