Oliver Max Gardner was an American politician and statesman.
Background
Gardner was born on March 22, 1882 in Shelby, North Carolina, the youngest of ten children of Oliver Perry Gardner and his second wife, Margaret (Young) Gardner; there were also two children of his father's first marriage. Gardner's father, who had served as a Whig member of the state legislature and as an officer in the Confederate Army, was a struggling country physician and farmer. His mother died when he was ten, and he was reared largely by his older sisters. Gardner's brother Junius was mayor of Shelby, and his sister Bess had married Clyde R. Hoey, local newspaper owner and later governor and United States senator.
Education
After attending the Shelby high school, Gardner entered North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now North Carolina State University at Raleigh), where he majored in chemistry; he received the B. S. degree in 1903, and stayed on for two years as an instructor.
Career
Gardner had begun to read law in Raleigh, and after a year in the law school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he began a practice in Shelby on January 1, 1907. The alliances through his wife and siblings created the so-called "Shelby dynasty, " which was to be a power in North Carolina politics for the next forty years. Gardner entered politics in 1907 as chairman of the county Democratic committee. He was elected to the state senate in 1910 and 1914 (he did not run in 1912). A moderately progressive spokesman for the new South, Gardner supported state prohibition in 1908 and a statewide primary law in 1915. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1916. He was a leading candidate for governor in 1920 but was defeated in both the first and the second primary by a political ally of Furnifold M. Simmons, North Carolina's veteran political leader. Meanwhile, Gardner had begun to build a personal fortune. Besides his successful law practice, he invested in real estate, raised cotton, and in 1926 became half-owner of the Cleveland Cloth Mills, a rayon mill which became a multimillion-dollar company. In his purchase and rehabilitation of rundown farms, he became known as an advocate of scientific agriculture; and he helped organize local cooperatives to bring rural electrification and establish a creamery. In 1928, having wisely decided not to challenge Simmons' organization in 1924, Gardner received the gubernatorial nomination unopposed; and despite his cautious support of Alfred E. Smith, whose presidential candidacy split the state's Democratic party, he was easily elected. Although his hopes for a tranquil administration were upset by the impact of the depression, he governed according to the slogan "reorganization, retrenchment, and consolidation. " He pushed through the legislature an Australian ballot bill and a workmen's compensation act. He secured important measures to centralize and improve the state's administrative machinery and to consolidate the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State College, and North Carolina College for Women into a single state system. He achieved state responsibility for maintaining roads and for the public school system, and successfully fought against a sales tax. At least partly because of his personal reputation, the state's credit was sustained during a period of financial stringency. During the violent labor unrest at the textile towns of Gastonia and Marion in 1929, Gardner attempted to see that justice was done in the courts, insisted that Communists had the right of protection by the law, attacked obstinate employers, and won attention by his firm assertion, "We cannot build a prosperous citizenship on low wages. " Gardner, whose own mill workers were among the best paid in the South, emerged from these crises with a favorable national reputation. Gardner's term as governor ended in 1932; that year he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president, and during the New Deal their acquaintanceship, begun when they both were governors, ripened into friendship. In 1933 Gardner opened a law office in Washington specializing in tax matters. With contacts in both the political and business worlds, he became one of Washington's most effective lobbyists, serving among others the Cotton Textile Institute, the Rayon Producers Association, Pan-American Airways, and Coca-Cola. During these years Gardner had easy access to the White House. He served on the Commerce Department's advisory and long-range planning committee, negotiated the government's airmail contract with private carriers, and frequently contributed speech material to the president and other government officials. Still a political force in his home state, Gardner also exerted an influence on North Carolina patronage decisions. Although he supported much of the New Deal, he opposed Roosevelt's Supreme Court "packing" plan, and was so upset by the attempt to purge anti-New Deal senators in 1938 that he quietly organized the successful reelection campaign of Georgia's Sen. Walter F. George. During World War II, as chairman of an advisory board to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (1944-1946), Gardner acted as a liaison between Congress and the White House. President Truman appointed him undersecretary of the treasury in 1946. In this post Gardner supported the British loan and freer trade with England. He worked to reorganize the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs and to prepare the way for a joint accounting system that would coordinate the Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget, and the General Accounting Office. In December 1946 Gardner was appointed ambassador to Great Britain. In poor health for several years, he died of a coronary thrombosis in New York City two months later, on the day he was to set sail for his new post. After funeral services at the First Baptist Church in Shelby, he was buried in the town's Sunset Cemetery.
Achievements
Gardner is best remembered as the 57th Governor of the U. S. state of North Carolina from 1929 to 1933. A member of the Democratic Party, he also worked in the administrations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
Religion
In religion Gardner was a devout Baptist.
Personality
A tall, rugged, handsome man, Gardner was tactful and pragmatic. His probity of character, genius for friendship, and love of entertaining aided his success in business and politics. Yet he was also modest, and he was characteristically uncomfortable when Boiling Spring Junior College in North Carolina, of which he was a benefactor, changed its name to Gardner-Webb.
Connections
On November 6, 1907 Gardner married Fay Lamar Webb of Shelby. They had four children. Gardner's wife was the daughter of James L. Webb, judge of the local superior court, and a niece of Congressman E. Yates Webb.
