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.