Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century
448
Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century
448Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226682037 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 09/19/2019 |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
CLASS OF 1900
The Panic of 1893 ruined the brisk harness trade of Aaron Vandenberg. His son, Arthur, nine years old, was profoundly affected. "I had no youth," he insisted decades later, with typical hyperbole. "I had one passion — to be certain that when I grew up I would not be in the position my father was."
Aaron was a native of the Genesee Valley in upstate New York — "Mohawk River Dutch," he called it, a tribe with "gumption enough to get out of New York and hew its way in the wilderness." He had been postmaster of tiny Clyde, New York, during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. A young widower with two small children, he married Alpha Hendrick, whose family's Republican fervor was at least the equal of his own. Alpha's physician father had served as a Lincoln delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention and had provided a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Ready for a fresh start, the newlyweds ventured west. Michigan had been the near frontier for New Yorkers since the opening of the Erie Canal. In the lumber-rich west of the state, Aaron found a burgeoning metropolis where his surname blended in with those of recent immigrants from The Netherlands. There, in Grand Rapids, he opened a harness shop. And there, in 1884, in an upstairs room of their ample Victorian home, Alpha gave birth to her only child, Arthur Hendrick. He was eleven years younger than his half-sister; his half-brother was already eighteen.
Grand Rapids was no isolated outpost. Forty trains a day passed through, bound for Chicago, Detroit, or the Straits of Mackinac. Around the Union Depot ranged the freight yards, markets, and warehouses of a trading center. By the 1880s, as immigrants from Germany and Poland as well as Holland joined descendants of French traders and Yankees, the population had swelled to fifty thousand. City hall and the county building were Romanesque temples, flush with civic pride. Tolling church bells, factory whistles, the clatter of trains — all echoed across the valley.
Spiked boots of flannel-shirted lumberjacks scarred the plank sidewalks. Millions of logs from the great pine forests floated down the Grand River. Sprawling factories shaped and tooled the timber. By the end of the century, Grand Rapids was America's "Furniture City."
This was a place, said one reporter, "big enough to have the conveniences of a city, but small enough to enable everybody to know everybody else." Everybody knew the amiable Aaron Vandenberg. His shop was just up Division Avenue from the Cody Hotel, with its enormous bison heads supplied by the proprietor's uncle, Buffalo Bill, whose visits gave the town a tenuous link to a wilder West.3 As "Vandenberg the Harness Man," Aaron developed a thriving mail-order trade. The family enjoyed middle-class comforts, the luxury of freshly starched collars, the social rewards of the Shriners and Masons. On the Fourth of July, father and son watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march up Fulton Street — a vivid reminder of how Republicans had rescued the nation in the Civil War.
Then came the Panic of 1893. Exactly what happened to the harness business is not clear, but large orders, perhaps government contracts, were canceled. Aaron Vandenberg could not meet his payroll. Later claims of insolvency seem exaggerated, but Alpha took in boarders. The stigma of failure clung to the Vandenberg household. The collapse of Aaron's business was the seminal event of Arthur Vandenberg's early life. At the age of nine, as he described it, he left boyhood behind to help support his family. In a world of rising expectations, the trauma of so sudden a reversal "made a permanent notch" in his character, he said later. In his mind, at least, he was on his own: "And ever since I've held to the conviction that if you really want to go somewhere in life, you can." This reaction to failure feels akin to an adult's sense of taking charge. The loss of security, the shock to a comfortable existence, seems to have kindled in the boy an entrepreneurial impulse that knew few bounds.
Arthur devised one scheme after another. He started a delivery service, using pushcarts from his father's shop to haul crates of shoes from a downtown factory to the Union Depot. He sold vegetables, flowers, lemonade. He ushered in a theater and peddled newspapers. He set up a trading business for stamp collectors under the name Comet Stamp Company.
The precocious teen entered Central High School a year earlier than most of his classmates. He was slender, with pursed lips and a small mouth, his dark eyes peering from beneath wide brows, black hair parted in the center, jug ears jutting out. He was enamored of a classmate twenty months older, Eslizabeth Watson, whose father owned a hardware store on the West Side. (She was, their yearbook noted, "To all, most attractive / by all, most admired," a shy brunette, "blushing and sweet.")
Arthur received better marks in science and mathematics than in literature, yet it was in English class, as well as rhetoric, where his passion for speeches and stories was on display. "A is for Arthur, the man with a voice," the yearbook said. In his junior year, classmates wrote, "When will Vandenberg stop talking?" At fifteen he addressed his fraternity banquet with the speech "Our Progress." His subtitle: "Not What We Have Done Avails Us, But What We Do and Are." In another speech, "Success," Arthur told his audience that "the world's given a reward to him who makes an honest effort."
The youngest member of the class of 1900 also boasted the second-longest entry in the yearbook — which, perhaps not coincidentally, he edited. He also edited the Daily Whoop, sang in the chorus, and managed the baseball team. And he endured the jibes of classmates, not only for his preening zeal but also for riding to school "on his pneumatic-tired ear." That year Arthur won second prize in a speech contest with his address "The Peace Conference at The Hague: Cause and Effect." In 1899 delegates from the Great Powers had convened, he said, to do "something tangible toward the promotion of a better understanding between the nations, and to lay the foundation of a durable peace." The silver medal, engraved with his initials, became his talisman.
He was going places, his class prophecy predicted: "Then Vandenberg a diplomat / will grow quite corpulent and fat." In mock elections he won a seat in the U.S. Senate. He was also named secretary of the Treasury, an apt choice for a teenager whose idol was Alexander Hamilton. He took government seriously, later claiming that he began reading the Congressional Record at the age of fifteen.
Arthur graduated with two goals: to make a fortune and to become a senator. First, however, he needed a job. He soon found full-time work as a billing clerk in a biscuit factory. That lasted until September 1900, when the campaign train of Theodore Roosevelt, President William McKinley's running mate, arrived in Grand Rapids. The energetic hero of San Juan Hill, then governor of New York, was to parade uptown from the railway depot in early evening, passing within a block of the biscuit works. For a teenager with a penchant for hero-worship, Roosevelt was irresistible. The streets were filled with "Teddy" fans and curiosity seekers, and Vandenberg was both.
The siren song of a band "playing lively airs" drew him from his desk. "Not so fast, sonny," said his supervisor. Defying orders, he slipped out. He cheered as a squad of Rough Riders, rakish in khakis and slouch hats, reined in their horses to stay abreast of the carriage from which the mustachioed candidate flashed his toothy smile. The biscuit clerk was swept up in the tide of pomp. "I marched behind that Roosevelt parade," Arthur recalled, behind men who would later be his bosses and boosters, his rivals and heroes, "but when I got back to my desk, I was fired."
In search of work, he walked the next day to the offices of the city's morning newspaper, the Herald. Editor E. D. Conger, who knew young Vandenberg's stories from the Daily Whoop, put him to work rewriting news gleaned from other Michigan papers and from "flimsy," the thin sheets of telegraph copy. He was given scissors, a glue pot, and $6 per week. He had been on the job for eight weeks when William McKinley was reelected, with Roosevelt as his vice president. When the Sunday Herald ran a full-page history of the Electoral College, the byline belonged to its youngest staffer. Assigned to the police beat, Vandenberg explored the dark side of his city, its miscreants and its secrets. He reveled in the stories and could wring drama from a loose dog's raid on a hen house. He was frugal, too. In August 1901 he combined his savings with a check from his half-brother and boarded the Michigan Central Railroad for the University of Michigan, where he enrolled in the law department. Autumn was a heady time in Ann Arbor. Under new football coach Fielding Yo st, the Wolverines were on their way to the inaugural Rose Bowl.
Vandenberg was chairman of the freshman banquet, to which he escorted a Delta Gamma girl, Hazel Whitaker. "Look out," a mutual friend warned her, "Arthur's engaged." That was not quite so, but he made no secret of his attachment to a girl back home. Still, he and Hazel became close, and when Elizabeth Watson came to visit, Hazel, in a big-sisterly way, entertained her. Vandenberg's college life lasted barely a year, however, before he ran out of money. He dropped out after his second semester.
Returning to Grand Rapids, he returned as well to the Herald, where Conger assigned him to cover city hall for $15 per week. The young reporter quickly impressed colleagues with his ingratiating manner and considerable energy. "He got the news in a wonderfully pleasant way," an older staffer recalled, always with "the right slant on things. ... He seemed to understand every situation and treat it with sincerity rather than any belittling spirit." Vandenberg became the Herald's most prolific writer. No one was better at bulking up a story with five-dollar words. Reporters tacked their copy to a newsroom wall. At the end of each day, his was always the longest string.
He also began to write short stories. In one he described a reporter's routine: "It was the manner of his task to make the daily rounds of the municipal offices in the great City Hall, dropping in for a friendly word with the Treasurer, a passing pleasantry with the Clerk, a story here, a joke there, but always with a cheery smile and a hearty handgrasp." His stories blended wide-eyed ambition of the Horatio Alger variety with the cynical edge of a city-hall reporter torn between righteous muckraking and the urge to make a buck. He collected rejections by the dozen. There were letters from legendary editors S. S. McClure and Frank Munsey, from Cosmopolitan and Smart Set. The editor of Everybody's wrote, "We like the way this story is told, though the story itself seems to us too slight."
While publishing his fiction presented an uncertain prospect, he thrived on the allure and immediacy of politics. The Herald was hotly partisan. Its eighteen-year-old ace reporter was elected secretary of the Young Men's Republican Club of Kent County. The owner of the paper, the Republican congressman William Alden Smith, took a special interest in the "bright-appearing lad."
If Vandenberg belonged in Grand Rapids, it could not contain his ambition. In the fall of 1903, he managed somehow to secure a job in the art department of Collier's magazine in New York. The position was a mismatch for his skills, and the teeming metropolis was an alien place. "Have you ever known the loneliness of a great city?" he wrote later. "There is no misery like it." The haunts of his hero, Alexander Hamilton, were in the grip of corrupt Tammany Hall. Elections back home were tame compared to "real ones" in New York. He closed a letter to Elizabeth with a plea for news, adding, in French, "Je vous aime."
By the spring of 1904, he had returned again to the Herald newsroom. While college had come to naught, and New York as well, Vandenberg believed he had only to work harder. Nowhere more than in Michigan were men of humble origins prospering beyond all expectation. Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, and Ransom Olds were creating a new industry for automobiles. The Kelloggs and C. W. Post in Battle Creek became nutrition tycoons with their breakfast cereals. In a profile of Marshall Field, from nearby Chicago, Vandenberg called the merchant's story "another tale of the rise of a barefoot country urchin to a proud position among America's noblemen." He was becoming a student of self-help. "Field succeeded because he was thorough," he wrote, "because he was conscientious, because he was self-controlled, because he was abstemious, because he was economical yet progressive, ... because he was keen, because he was careful."
As for the careful young reporter, Vandenberg saved enough from his pay to buy a little stock in the Herald. As the paper's fortunes fluctuated, he rode out one change in ownership, then benefited in a startling way from another.
William Alden Smith had been elected to Congress in 1896 as a defender of Michigan interests in tariff debates. Popular with his colleagues, he was mentioned as a vice presidential possibility for Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Smith had peddled newspapers as a boy, but he knew little of publishing in early 1906 when he acquired controlling interest in western Michigan's leading Republican journal.
Then-editor E. D. Conger died. There was no obvious successor. Smith strolled into the city room on March 17, 1906, days shy of Arthur Vandenberg's twenty-second birthday. The congressman's gaze fell upon the "dark-eyed lad" with the long strings of copy and a grasp of politics from city hall to the Electoral College. "You are now editor-in-chief and general manager," Smith informed him. He nodded toward the editor's office. "Go over and kick your feet under the mahogany."
Vandenberg was stunned, or so he said afterward: "There was just no sense to it. It was one of the most amazing incidents. One of those fortuitous circumstances that changes a whole life."
A year later, when the owner of the Herald was elected to the U.S. Senate, a Herald reporter told his young editor that someday he hoped to vote for Vandenberg for senator. The self-conscious retort? "You're crazy."
CHAPTER 2
THE SHREWDNESS OF VANDENBERG
Theodore Roosevelt defined the Republican Party for Arthur Vandenberg. He had invented the bully pulpit and inspired a generation. He understood the rise of American power. Even as he approached the self-imposed end of his presidency in 1908, he cast a giant's shadow across the political landscape.
Herald editorials reflected Roosevelt's blend of progressivism and traditional Republican virtues. Twenty-five years before Senator Vandenberg brought to pass federal bank-deposit insurance, editor Vandenberg proposed a similar state initiative. He attacked John D. Rockefeller and called for vigorous enforcement of new antitrust laws. "A few stiff sentences," he wrote, "will have a greater salutary effect on Big Business ... than all the fines ... which ever were or ever will be meted out to corporate offenders." He supported the right of socialists to assemble, urged suffrage for women, and favored direct election of senators. He proposed a national agency to administer public welfare funds. He had known what it was to make a living as a child, and he took a keen interest in child labor.
Vandenberg's understanding of politics found expression in his stories, too. He was twenty-two when "Revolt of the Puppets" appeared in Popular Magazine. In it, an idealistic county chairman challenges the boss of the state party machine. With the sudden death of its Supreme Court nominee, the contentious majority party decides to put the selection of his replacement before a smoke-filled caucus of county chairmen. The "coming man," in the eyes of party boss Samuel T. Rich, is Watson Kairns, who resembles a young Abe Lincoln. Kairns discovers that the machine has already settled on a nominee — a crooked lawyer. Rich dismisses Kairns's concerns: "This ain't a college oratorical contest, my young friend." Kairns's colleagues seem prepared to go along with the machine, hiding behind a call for party harmony. "When the slave-driver used to curl his whip about his Negro's leg he usually secured harmony," the hero declares.
Rich laughs at Kairns's pretensions; the younger man's idealism poses little threat. But Kairns springs a legal maneuver that forces the boss to back down. Cowed colleagues, taken by surprise, awake to the discovery that the caucus is out of bondage. Here was the Herald editor's image of himself — eloquent, of course, but also savvy about the way things really worked.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Arthur Vandenberg"
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Copyright © 2017 Hendrik Meijer.
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