Background
Arthur Vandenberg was born on March 22, 1884, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was the son of Aaron and Alpha Hendrick Vandenberg.
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(Excerpt from America at the Crossroads: Address of Hon. A...)
Excerpt from America at the Crossroads: Address of Hon. Arthur H. Vanderberg of Michigan at St. Paul, Minn., On February 10, 1940 I am glad to be here on this particular occasion - to join with you in celebrating this annual Lincoln anniversary. So long as memory survives this man of God, this son of destiny, will be enshrined in the American heart - not only as the savior of the Union, not only as the emancipator of a race, not only as the highest embodiment of self-made genius, but always and forever as the supreme personification of the spirit of democracy in its finest faith and truest form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Arthur Vandenberg was born on March 22, 1884, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was the son of Aaron and Alpha Hendrick Vandenberg.
After attending the Grand Rapids public schools, Vandenberg studied law for one year at the University of Michigan (1900 - 1901). He had no additional formal education.
After a brief stint in New York working at Collier's magazine, he returned home in 1906. Shortly after his return to Grand Rapids, Vandenberg was hired as editor of the Grand Rapids Herald by Congressman William Alden Smith, who had recently purchased the nearly defunct newspaper. Smith was later elected to the U. S. Senate and his protégé was left in charge of the Herald. Vandenberg served as editor from 1906 to 1928, and after 1919 was a financial manager as well. He invested heavily in the Herald Publishing Company and received shares of stock each year as a bonus.
This stock was worth over a million dollars by 1928 when he exchanged it for securities in Federated Publications, which had bought the Herald. He also had extensive holdings in the Newspaper Engraving Company and the Grand Rapids Savings Bank, where he served on the board of trustees. At the Herald, Vandenberg spent each afternoon typing his own editorials for the next morning's edition. Although editorially he considered himself a progressive, Vandenberg supported moderate and structural reforms but parted company with his hero Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and endorsed William Howard Taft.
His emerging conservatism caused him to attack Woodrow Wilson's progressive legislation and during the 1920's found expression in a publication of three undistinguished books, The Greatest American: Alexander Hamilton (1921), If Hamilton Were Here Today (1923), and The Trail of a Tradition (1926). A jingoist and chauvinist, Vandenberg supported the aggressive foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt and Taft. He was critical of Woodrow Wilson until the United States entered World War I. Vandenberg then supported Wilson's conduct of the war and afterward urged Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, including the Covenant of the League of Nations with appropriate reservations. Upon the death of Senator Woodbridge N. Ferris in 1928, there was considerable political pressure on Governor Fred Green to appoint Vandenberg to fill the vacancy. He reluctantly did so and Vandenberg immediately declared his intention to stand for election to both the short, unexpired term and the full six-year term. Vandenberg handily won the 1928 election.
In the Senate, he piloted into law a bill for automatic redistricting of the House of Representatives after each national census. He was at first an ardent supporter of President Herbert Hoover but he became discouraged by Hoover's intransigence and failures in dealing with the Great Depression. After the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Vandenberg went along with most of the early New Deal measures, except for the NIRA and AAA. With the exception of his amendment to the 1933 Glass-Steagal Banking Act, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Vandenberg failed to secure enactment of any significant legislative proposals.
By 1934, election, his own political position was precarious, and although he lost his home district he carried the state by 52, 443 votes. When the new Congress convened in 1935, there were only twenty-five Republican senators and Vandenberg became Senate minority leader. Vandenberg had become a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1929. In mid-1939, he introduced legislation nullifying the 1911 Treaty of Navigation and Commerce with Japan and urged that the administration negotiate a new treaty with Japan recognizing the status quo with regard to Japan's occupation of Chinese territory. Instead, Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull used the resolution as a pretext for giving Japan the required six months' notice of intent to cancel the treaty, thus beginning the policy of putting pressure on Japan that led to Pearl Harbor. Although Vandenberg's position on American foreign policy radically changed during World War II, he was considered, like Henry Cabot Lodge following World War I, the greatest threat to Senate approval of United States membership in any postwar international peacekeeping organization.
Vandenberg took part in the Committee of Eight deliberations with the State Department concerning Senate support for the UN. Although largely unavailing, the meetings did result in general agreement that the United States should participate in some type of postwar collective security organization. Vandenberg then urged the 1944 Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, and his foreign policy adviser, John Foster Dulles, to keep foreign policy issues out of the campaign. After Dewey's defeat, Vandenberg decided to make a clear statement of his postwar objectives.
In a Senate speech on January 10, 1945, he called for cooperation and candor between the administration and the Senate to help establish the United Nations. The speech was greeted with hundreds of laudatory editorials and thousands of favorable letters and resulted in Roosevelt's asking Vandenberg to serve as a delegate to the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, which drafted the UN Charter. Thereafter, Vandenberg was the chief Republican spokesman on foreign policy.
At the San Francisco Conference, he helped draft Articles 51-54 of the UN Charter, which allow for regional defense agreements. Subsequently, he helped secure Senate ratification, on July 28, 1945, of the Charter by a vote of 89-2. President Harry S. Truman appointed Vandenberg as a delegate to the first and second United Nations General Assemblies and he was an adviser to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes at the Big Four Foreign Ministers' conferences in Paris and New York. In 1946, Vandenberg had little time for his reelection campaign and made only two political speeches in Michigan. Nevertheless, he won by 567, 647 votes. In the new, Republican-controlled Senate, he was president pro tem (there being no vice president), but, more important, he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
While Vandenberg chaired the committee he secured unanimous committee approval of 48 bills and treaties and left a distinguished record of reform with regard to committee procedures. To implement the Truman Doctrine, he guided through the Senate aid to Greece and Turkey. Working closely with Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Assistant Secretary Robert A. Lovett, Vandenberg helped persuade the Senate to approve the Marshall Plan. With Lovett's help, he also drafted the so-called Vandenberg Resolution, which became the basis for U. S. leadership in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Despite these bipartisan successes, Truman tagged the 80th Congress the "do nothing" Congress in the presidential election campaign of 1948. Vandenberg was distressed by Truman's rhetoric but persuaded Dewey, who was again the Republican candidate, not to make foreign policy a campaign issue. Truman was elected and congressional control passed to the Democrats. Despite his loss of the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, Vandenberg continued to work steadfastly to preserve bipartisanship, opposing, for example, the efforts of Senator Robert A. Taft to obstruct the diplomatic policies of Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Although Vandenberg worked closely with the Democratic administration in formulating United States policy, he was no puppet of the State Department or the president.
Vandenberg is best known for leading the Republican Party from a foreign policy of isolationism to one of internationalism, and supporting the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from 1947 to 1949. The former Vandenberg Creative Arts Academy of the Grand Rapids Public Schools was named after him. On September 14, 2004, a portrait of Vandenberg, along with one of Senator Robert F. Wagner, was unveiled in the Senate Reception room. The new portraits joined a group of distinguished former Senators, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert M. La Follette, Sr. , and Robert A. Taft. Portraits of this group of Senators, known as the "Famous Five, " were unveiled on March 12, 1959. A statue dedicated to Vandenberg was unveiled in May 2005 in Downtown Grand Rapids, on Monroe Street, north of Rosa Parks Circle. Senator Vandenberg is memorialized in a Michigan historical marker for the Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg/Vandenberg Center in Grand Rapids. Vandenberg Hall at Oakland University is named in his honor. Two Arthur H. Vandenberg Elementary Schools are named after him, in Redford and Southfield, Michigan.
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(Excerpt from America at the Crossroads: Address of Hon. A...)
Vandenberg was one of the most effective opponents of the second New Deal and voted against most Roosevelt-sponsored measures, notable exceptions being the Banking Act of 1935 and the Social Security Act. His was a policy of what he called fiscal responsibility, a balanced budget, states' rights, and reduced taxation. He felt that Roosevelt had usurped the powers of Congress, and he spoke of the dictatorship of Franklin Roosevelt. But at the Republican national convention in 1936, Vandenberg refused to permit the party to nominate him for vice-president; he sensed the coming debacle and did not want to suffer a humiliating defeat. As part of the conservative coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, Vandenberg helped defeat Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court. Thereafter, Vandenberg worked closely with this group. He helped defeat such pork barrel legislation as the Passamaquoddy Bay and Florida Canal projects, voted against the National Labor Relations Act, various New Deal tax measures, and the Hours and Wages Act.
A modified internationalist, he voted in favor of United States membership on the World Court; but the situation in Europe moved him towards isolationism. Also his experiences during the Nye committee hearings on the munitions industry, of which he was the Senate cosponsor, convinced him that entry into World War I had been a disastrous error. He supported the isolationist Neutrality Acts of the 1930's but sponsored more severe bills which were designed to renounce all traditional neutral "rights" and restrict and prevent any action by the president that might cause the United States to be drawn into war.
He was one of the most effective of the die-hard isolationists in the Senate. Except for advocating aid to Finland after the Soviet invasion of that country and urging a quid pro quo in the Far East to prevent a war with Japan over the Manchuria-China question, his position was consistently isolationist. Although he continued to vote with the conservative coalition against Roosevelt's domestic proposals, Vandenberg gradually abandoned his isolationism to become an architect of a bipartisan foreign policy, which he defined as a consensus developed by consultation between the President, the State Department, and congressional leaders from both parties especially those in the Senate. At first Vandenberg was opposed to a Senate statement on postwar objectives, but he worked with the subcommittee that drafted the Connally Resolution, which provided for United States membership in the future United Nations, subject to ratification by the Senate as a treaty.
Similarly, when in 1943 the administration announced proposed United States participation in the postwar United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Vandenberg raised serious objections. After lengthy negotiations with the State Department the Senate approved an amended relief agreement. The resolution of the UNRRA dispute became the model for bipartisanship. During the fall of 1943, at the Mackinac Conference, Vandenberg helped draft a statement, which all Republicans could support, concerning United States membership in the UN. The party would endorse such membership if it were in treaty form and ratified by the two-thirds vote of the Senate required by the Constitution and did not violate American sovereignty.
A full-fledged cold warrior, given to excessive rhetoric, he shared the generally held assumption that Soviet Communism threatened United States security by either internal subversion or armed aggression. That threat could be met throughout the world only by a united, aggressive, and bipartisan foreign policy.
For his cooperation and assistance, he exacted his own concessions and remained relatively independent of the Democrats. During the Marshall Plan debate, Vandenberg insisted that independent studies be made of the European economic situation as well as the impact of the program on the United States economy. The administration agreed and also accepted Vandenberg's nominee, Paul Hoffman, to head the new program. Vandenberg also pared down the size of the initial appropriation and the length of time for the aid program to run.
Vandenberg frequently expressed reservations about many aspects of American foreign policy but he held off the irrational attacks of conservatives William Jenner, Joseph McCarthy, and William Knowland, and refused to use foreign policy issues for partisan advantage. He reluctantly adjusted to the appointment of Dean Acheson as secretary of state. Acheson's subsequent claim that he manipulated Vandenberg and that flattery was a small price to pay for Vandenberg's assistance fails to hold up under careful examination. Vandenberg expressed serious doubts about America's commitment to the Nationalist Chinese, and after their expulsion from the mainland, he temporarily endorsed recognition of the Communist Chinese.
His commitment to the constitutional guarantee that only Congress can declare war bothered him when Truman sent troops to Korea, but his commitment to the UN blunted his reservations. He also agreed with Taft that there was a constitutional question about sending U. S. troops to Europe, but supported the action because of the U. S. commitment to NATO and fear of the further spread of Communism into Western Europe. He argued that Congress would have final control since the necessary appropriations would have to be approved by both houses.
Vandenberg was close only to colleagues of long-standing and had little patience with small talk and large parties. He found it difficult to maintain relationships with local political figures. Clearly a member of the Senate establishment, he took great pains to observe Senate protocol and not offend senatorial sensibilities. He most valued working with colleagues who no longer worried about reelection and politics as usual.
Quotations:
"It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity. "
"I am more than ever convinced that communism is on the march on a worldwide scale which only America can stop. "
"Scare the hell out of the American people. "
Vandenberg's flamboyant and theatrical speaking style featured repetition of favorite words, emotional clichés, and arguments, as well as attention to facts. He enjoyed the extensive press coverage of his Senate activities in part manipulated by himself and based on his own knowledge of how best to gain press attention.
The Vandenbergs lived relatively modestly in a small apartment in a Washington hotel, but both enjoyed the official duties connected with their numerous trips abroad. Hazel Vandenberg's diaries provide a valuable glimpse of the 1945-1950 Washington era.
In 1906, Vandenberg married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Watson. They had three children. She died in 1917, and in 1918 Vandenberg married Hazel Whittaker.
14 February 1838 - 28 October 1912
1843 - 24 March 1926
28 January 1869 - 12 December 1953
1884 - 20 June 1950
29 July 1881 - 7 May 1917
1909 - 26 December 1973
