John Garner

• Vice President to:       Franklin D. Roosevelt - Democrat, from New York.
  
  
  • Franklin Roosevelt served 1932 - 1945. He died in office in 1945, at the age of 63.
    
    
• Dates Served: Garner served as Vice President from 1933 - 1941.
  
• Political Party: Garner was a Democrat, from Texas.
  
• Born: 1868.
  
• Died: 1967, at the age of 98.
  
• The presidential opponents during the 1932 and 1936 campaigns were:
  
  
  • 1932 - Herbert Hoover - Republican - Incumbant President
    
    
  • 1936 - Alfred Landon - Republican - Kansas Governor
    
    
• Campaign issues:
  
  
  • During the 1932 campaign:
    
    
    • 1932 was the depth of the Great Depression, an economic malaise the likes of which the country had never seen before. Unemployment was over 25% nationwide and farmers in the Plains States were destitute due to the dustbowls sweeping the whole region and banks foreclosing on countless mortgages around the nation. And who was responsible? Hoover. At least that's what a large number of people had decided. The Depression and Hoover's anaemic response to the struggles of working Americans was the central theme this year. The Democrats ran Franklin Roosevelt as their candidate, as someone who understood the suffering of the common man and who had specific plans to turn things around. Roosevelt toured the country relentlessly giving speeches to spread his message and to show that his inability to walk would not be an impediment to his ability to lead the nation. He assembled a so-called Brain Trust, consisting of several advisors who hashed out his official policies. The Republicans knew they didn't stand a chance against Roosevelt, since crowds swelled wherever he spoke but Hoover drew mostly paltry, often angry crowds who placed full blame for the Depression squarely on his shoulders. He tried to poke holes in the opposition by pointing to Roosevelt's love of government programs while Governor of New York as evidence that he was dangerous to business owners. But he might as well have been speaking to a brick wall. His number was up. Roosevelt's campaign song was "Happy Days Are Here Again", and voters believed him. He burried Hoover under a mountain of votes on election day.
      
      
  • During the 1936 campaign:
    
    
    • This year the main issue was, obviously, the economy and Roosevelt's work-in-progress in trying to turn it around. Roosevelt was confident that he held the people's affection, since people trusted him and glued themselves to his "fire-side chats", a habit of addressing his flock by radio which he had begun doing while Governor of New York. The Republicans ran Landon as their candidate who approved of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, but didn't like the way he implemented them. They tried to argue that he was hostile to business and that some of his ideas bordered on violating the Constitution. But the average out-of-work American viewed the Republican Party as the party that had thrown the nation into a pit of poverty. They caused the mess and only Roosevelt could clean it up, such was the conventional wisdom on the street. On election day Landon was buried under a mountain of votes so huge it made Hoover's mountain look like an ant-hill, one of the worst Electoral defeats ever: 523 votes for FDR, 8 votes for Landon. He was toast.
      
      
  
  
• Notable Facts about John Garner:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation: Unknown.
    
    
  • Originally a lawyer, Garner served as a judge in Uvalda County, Texas from 1893 - 1896.
    
    
  • Garner began his political career by being elected to the Texas State Legislature, serving from 1898 - 1902. During his term he tried to have the cactus declared the official state flower of Texas. He lost, and was nicknamed "Cactus Jack" from then on.
    
    
  • He was elected to the US House of Representatives, representing Texas from 1903 - 1933, rising to Speaker of the House, in which post he served from 1931 - 1933, when he gave it up to get a real job as Vice President.
    
    
  • Garner was known for a unique method of political lobbying that he called "Striking a blow for liberty", which involved him inviting politicians over to his office and serving them bourbon, making sure that they became drunk enough to support his political ideas.
    
    
  • During the Democratic nominating convention, Garner was campaigning for himself to be nominated for President. After several ballots failed to produce a winner, he conceded the spot to Franklin Roosevelt and accepted the nomination to Vice President, which required that he give up his job as Speaker of the House.
    
    When asked about this decision years later he replied, "It was the worst damn fool mistake I ever made!"
    
    
  • Garner was never enthusiastic about Roosevelt's New Deal, and was opposed to all Organized Labor.
    
    
  • Due to his disagreement over Roosevelt's plan for "packing" the Supreme Court - replacing any justice over 70 and who had served for at least 10 years - he proposed increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from 9 to 16, in order to avoid having them all be hand-picked by Roosevelt. His idea didn't catch on. But then, neither did Roosevelt's.
    
    
  • When asked once about the value of the office of Vice President, Garner responded by saying, "It isn't worth a bucket of warm spit!" (Some scholars, who have apparently done extensive research, claim that he really said "piss").
    
    
  • Garner opposed Roosevelt's decision to break with Presidential tradition and run for a third term in 1940, and didn't appear on the ticket as VP for that year's campaign. Instead, he campaigned himself for the Democratic nomination for President against Roosevelt, but lost.
    
    
  • Long after the end of his term in office, Garner became a vegetarian, on his 89th birthday.
    
    
  • When Garner turned 95 he received a phone call from then-President John F. Kennedy congratulating him.
    
    
  • Garner died on November 7, 1967, only 15 days before his 99th birthday.
    

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• Assassination attempt. On February 15, 1933, only 3 weeks prior to inauguration day, Roosevelt was riding in a motorcade through Miami, Florida when a 32-year old bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara shouted from the crowds, "Too many people are starving to death", and then pulled out a gun and fired 5 shots at Roosevelt. The Mayor of Chicago, who was riding in the motorcade, was killed and four others wounded. Roosevelt was unhurt. Zangara was tried and found guilty of murder, being electrocuted a year later.
  
  
• The New Deal. In an effort to seriously try, for the first time, to use the federal government to help alleviate the economic depression, the worst in the nation's history, Roosevelt launched a series of Acts and Regulations that marked the beginning of modern government programs that are the bane of many Conservatives' existence to this day. Among them were:
  
  
  • Banking Acts, in 1933 and 1935. The collapse of the US economy had caused millions of people to make "runs" on the bank to withdraw all of their personal savings. The banks didn't have enough currency to back the amounts listed as deposited with them, and a total of about half of the banks in the entire country went bankrupt or refused to issue withdrawals. Millions of people lost all their money and it wasn't a safe time to be a banker. Roosevelt ordered all banks closed for one day while federal workers audited all banks' records. Those banks that were determined to be economically viable were allowed to re-open, which returned some sense of confidence in the general public and slowed down the rush to withdraw. Roosevelt also suspended the rights of the banks to deal in the Stock Market, suspended the exportation of gold from the country, and officially took the US currency off of the gold standard.
    
    
  • Civilian Conservation Corps, in 1933. Otherwise known as the CCC, this program hired 3 million men at 1 dollar a day to build roads, build trails in national parks, improve flood controls, and generally improve Conservation efforts. Workers were housed and fed in military quarters.
    
    
  • Agricultural Adjustment Acts, in 1933 and 1938. These acts attempted to reduce the surpluses of crops that were sitting in warehouses and silos, unsold. In an effort to boost prices, farmers were paid by the government to limit their crop output, with the government money coming from a new tax levied on processors of farm products. Paying farmers to grow less food was not universally supported and the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1936, but it succeeded in raising prices for farm produce.
    
    
  • Tennessee Valley Authority, in 1933. Floodwaters of the Tennessee river were harnessed by the building of dams and turbines, creating new sources of electricity.
    
    
  • National Industrial Recovery Act, in 1933. This allowed for the creation of the Public Works Administration, under the control of the Dept. of the Interior, which provided grants to states for major construction projects. It also created the National Recovery Administration which suspended antitrust laws in order to allow business to work together easier on recovery efforts. In exchange, businesses were required to improve workers' conditions by increasing wages, reducing the work week, end all child labor, and allow for Unions to organize. Some industrialists, like Henry Ford, refused to cooperate since price-fixing was making a comeback and prices were rising. The Supreme Court ruled this part of the Act unconstitutional 2 years later.
    
    
  • The creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in 1934. Created to fix abuses in the Stock Market that had contributed to the Crash in 1929, the Commission required almost all stocks to be registered with the SEC and was given the authority to regulate securities transactions. The first chairman of the SEC was Joseph Kennedy, father of future-President John F. Kennedy.
    
    
  • National Housing Act, in 1934. This created the Federal Housing Authority which issued low-interest mortgages to poor families.
    
    
  • Social Security Act, in 1935. This guaranteed income past retirement to all citizens over 65, payed for by monthly withdrawals from paychecks throughout one's working years.
    
    
• Recognition of the Soviet Union, in 1933. The USSR had been created in 1905 but it took the US 28 years to officially recognize them. A deal was worked out where the US would recognize the new government in exchange for Soviet promises of religious freedoms and legal rights for Americans residing in the USSR. The Soviets didn't exactly live up to their end of the bargain.
  
  
• The first canned beer is sold, in Jan. 24, 1935, by Krueger Brewing Co. in Richmond, Virginia.
  
  
• The science of polling hadn't been perfected yet and the polls taken prior to the 1936 elections showed how flawed they can be. The magazine Literary Digest conducted a poll amongst voters to try and gauge who would win, which they did by calling likely voters over the telephone and asking who they were going to vote for. Alfred Landon came up as the clear winner by a large margin. But somebody didn't take into account the fact that the Depression was so severe that millions of voters didn't own a telephone. So the people they were calling represented the wealthy classes, who naturally were inclined to vote for Landon. On the eve of the election they predicted a landslide victory for Landon, only to end up dead wrong.
  
  
• The Good Neighbor Policy, in 1936. This was intended to replace Taft's Dollar Diplomacy by reducing American claims of military privileges in the Western Hemisphere and replacing it with a policy of economic aid. US troops were withdrawn from Haiti and diplomats were removed from Cuba.
  
  
• Court Packing Plan, in 1937. Roosevelt was irked by the Supreme Court's hobby of invalidating several of his New Deal programs, so he tried to get legislation passed that would allow him to appoint up to 6 new justices, replacing any justice who was over 70 years old and had sat on the Supreme Court for at least 10 years. This was not one of Roosevelt's more popular ideas and he got a lot of heat for it, including from many of his own Party supporters, especially his own Vice President. The idea wasn't approved.
  
  
• President Roosevelt signs bill outlawing marijuana, on Aug 20, 1937.
  
  
• Spam is invented in 1937 by Hormel Foods. The mixture of surplus pork shoulder, ham, salt, and sugar is given the name "spam" by Kenneth Daigneau, who wins a $100 prize from Hormel for coming up with the name. For some reason it becomes the largest selling canned meat in the world.
  
  
• The first issue of "Superman" is released in June of 1938.
  
  
• The outbreak of World War II, in 1939. The Great Depression had spread across Europe, and several countries there responded to the crisis by electing fascist governments to re-establish order in their countries. Germany was especially hard-hit by the economic collapse, combined with their already difficult punitive payments stemming from Word War I. When Hitler decided to erase the borders between Germany and Poland in September of 1939 Europe got ready for another "war to end all wars". While Germany plowed across Europe erasing more borders, and allying itself with other fascist leaders like Mussolini in Italy, Roosevelt initially declared the US to be neutral, just like President Wilson had done in 1914. But when Germany conquered France and started dropping bombs on England, the US decided to respond by entering into the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, in which Britain received US military supplies in exchange for the right of the US to build military bases on British territories, such as on the British colony of Bermuda.
  
  
• Velcro is invented by George de Mestral in Switzerland, in 1941.
  
  
• 21st Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1933, which repealed Prohibition.