VICE PRESIDENCY: Mr. Commonsense

(See front cover)

To become Vice President affects men as much as coming of age, getting married, going to jail, or meeting death. Thomas R. Marshall resignedly turned jester. Calvin Coolidge, until reprieved by Warren Harding's death, grew colder and stiffer day after day. Charles Gates Dawes flared up in boisterous self-assertion, only to settle back into the humdrum of a perfunctory office. Charles Curtis steadily inflated with the love of pomp. Two years ago John Nance Garner joined their company. By last week, as he neared the close of his third session as President of the Senate, it was apparent that he, too, had undergone a Vice-Presidential change.

John Garner—"Cactus Jack" to those who must have nicknames for their politicians—was the first Vice President to come from Texas. At the time of his election, 43 of his 63 years had been spent in the pursuit of politics, for by special dispensation (known in Texas as "removal of disabilities") he ran for county attorney at the age of 20. For 29 years he had represented in Congress a strip of semidesert along the Rio Grande border.

The fact that his career in Congress was not sensational—he made no speech during his first eight years of service, introduced on the average less than one bill a year, and served three-quarters of the time as an inconspicuous member of the minority—had given the U. S. at large no high opinion of his abilities. In his home town of Uvalde, fellow Texans who had seen him rise from a penniless young lawyer to a substantial citizen, reputedly worth $1,000,000, thought differently. So did local politicians who realized that he had his Congressional district sewed up so tight that after the first one he never had to make another campaign speech in it. So did national politicians who had watched from the inside his quiet march from a Texas greenhorn in 1903 to Speaker of the House in 1931 upon the death of his great & good Republican friend Nicholas Longworth. But Jack Garner, with his love for poker and baseball, his fondness for a good highball with good friends, his habit of going to bed every night at 9 o'clock sharp, did not fit the public concept of an able politician, much less of a great statesman.