Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Arthur Vandenberg
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1952
WEBSITE:
CITY: Grand Rapids
STATE: MI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Married to Liesel Litzenburger, a writer and novelist.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1952, in Grand Rapids, MI; son of Frederik Meijer and Lena Rader; married Liesel Litzenburger (a writer and novelist); children: three.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, degree in literature.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Reporter, editor, business executive. Journalist, 1973-1979; Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, vice-chairman and trustee; Meijer, Inc., co-chairman and CEO.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Hendrik Meijer is executive chairman of supermarket chain Meijer, Inc., which his grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, founded in 1934. Meijer was born in 1952 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and educated at University of Michigan with a degree in literature. He started his career as a journalist, then joined the family company, rising to co-chairman and CEO. In 1984, he wrote Thrifty Years: The Life of Hendrik Meijer, a biography of his enterprising Dutch grandfather.
In 2018, Meijer published, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century, a biography of the Republican senator from Michigan. The editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, Vandenberg (1884-1951) was elected to the Senate in 1928 where he spoke out against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and favored isolationism during World War II, discouraging aid to Europe. However, after the attacks at Pearl Harbor, he changed his opinions by the end of the war, recognizing America’s role as a peace keeper and moral leadership, and agreed to work with Democrats to establish the Marshall Plan, United Nations, and NATO, and be a voice for twentieth-century foreign policy decisions. Meijer also executive produced a documentary on Vandenberg, America’s Senator: The Unexpected Odyssey of Arthur Vandenberg.
In National Review, Jay Nordlinger commented about the book: “I thought this book might be a fond look by a multibillionaire with a taste for history at a half-forgotten figure from his hometown. No. It is a first-class political biography, enthralling, a page-turner. It ought to win prizes.” Nordlinger added: “Anyone interested in American politics and world affairs would be absorbed by this book. In our crowded lives, we scarcely have time to look at a book. Frankly, I may read this one twice.” Nordlinger also said that Meijer handles Vandenberg’s controversies, such as his affair with Mitzi Sims, who could have been a British spy, and Vandenberg’s son’s homosexuality with brevity, tact, and poignancy.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed that Meijer had written a detailed and admiring biography and that he “shows us a man who believed in working with rather than condemning his colleagues. A sturdy and necessary biography of a politically principled man who is sadly fading into obscurity.” According to Aram Bakshian Jr. in Washington Times Online, “The publication of Hendrik Meijer’s soundly researched and thoroughly readable new biography may mark the beginning of a long-overdue reappraisal of a man who was perhaps the last U.S. senator to play a truly decisive, positive role in defining American foreign policy and our place in the world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century.
National Review, November 27, 2017, Jay Nordlinger, review of Arthur Vandenberg, p. 44.
ONLINE
Washington Times Online, https://www.washingtontimes.com/ (November 13, 2017), Aram Bakshian Jr., review of Arthur Vandenberg.
Hank Meijer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Hank Meijer
Born
Hendrik G. Meijer
1952 (age 65–66)
Residence
Grand Rapids, Michigan, US
Nationality
American
Education
Creston High School
Alma mater
University of Michigan
Occupation
Co-chairman and CEO, Meijer
Net worth
US$6.5 billion (March 2017, jointly with brother Doug)[1]
Spouse(s)
Liesel Litzenburger
Children
3
Parent(s)
Frederik Meijer
Lena Rader
Relatives
Doug Meijer (brother) Mark Meijer (brother)
Hendrik G. "Hank" Meijer (born 1952)[2] is an American billionaire businessman, co-chairman and CEO of the US supermarket chain Meijer.
Contents [hide]
1
Early life
2
Career
3
Personal life
4
Works
5
References
Early life[edit]
Hank Meijer is the son of Frederik Meijer, and grandson of Hendrik Meijer, who founded the US supermarket chain Meijer in 1934.[1] He was educated at Creston High School.[3] In 1973, he graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in literature.[2]
Career[edit]
From 1973 to 1979, Meijer was a journalist.[3] In 1979, he joined Meijer, rising to co-chairman and CEO.[3]
According to Forbes, Hank and Doug Meijer have a joint net worth of $7.8 billion, as of June 2015.[1]
Personal life[edit]
He has three children from his first marriage, and is now married to Liesel Litzenburger, a writer and novelist.[3][4] He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.[1]
He was a close friend of President and Mrs. Gerald R. Ford, and is vice-chairman and a trustee of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.[5]
In 2015, his daughter's British ex-husband was jailed for 12 years for attempting to blackmail the family.[6][7]
Works[edit]
Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. University of Chicago Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-226-43351-6. Retrieved 2018-02-05.
Hendrik Meijer worked as a reporter and editor before joining Meijer, Inc., where he is executive chairman. He is the author of a biography of his grandfather, Thrifty Years: The Life of Hendrik Meijer and the executive producer of the documentary America’s Senator: The Unexpected Odyssey of Arthur Vandenberg.
Michigan Men
Jay Nordlinger
National Review. 69.22 (Nov. 27, 2017): p44+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century, by Hendrik Meijer
(Chicago, 448 pp., $35)
When you grow up in Michigan, as I did, you know the name Meijer--as in the superstore chain. (The stores were once called "Meijer's Thrifty Acres." Now they're just "Meijer.") The Meijer family is from Grand Rapids, which is in West Michigan, which is Dutch country. They have a slogan there: "If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much."
True, Gerald R. Ford sprang from Grand Rapids. He was of English stock. But they tolerate the Other in West Michigan.
Hendrik Meijer is the executive chairman of Meijer, Inc. After college, he spent about six years in journalism, then joined the company. In 1984, he wrote a biography of his grandfather, the founder, also named Hendrik Meijer: Thrifty Years. Now he has written another biography of another Dutchman from Grand Rapids, Arthur Vandenberg.
Vandenberg was one of the most important U.S. senators in the first half of the 20th century. He served from 1928 until his death in 1951. A Republican, he was the leader of the isolationists--until the war, when he saw the world differently and helped forge a bipartisan foreign policy in the United States.
By the way, Arthur Vandenberg was the uncle of Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force general who became the director of the CIA.
At the risk of offending Hank Meijer (as the author is called), I will make a confession: I thought this book might be a fond look by a multibillionaire with a taste for history at a half-forgotten figure from his hometown. No. It is a first-class political biography, enthralling, a page-turner. It ought to win prizes. Meijer ought to quit business and do this full-time.
His book is about Vandenberg, sure. It is also about the New Deal, World War II, and the immediate aftermath. Furthermore, it's about an era, or eras. There was a time when people in Michigan towns heard Caruso sing and saw Pavlova dance. (My grandparents were such people.) On a humid summer day, you dipped into Lake Michigan, below the dunes. (We still do that.)
In 1922, a book went off like a stink bomb in the Midwest: Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. It mocked the values that Arthur Vandenberg embodied and championed. In a strange turn of events, he and Lewis became friends, or at least friendly acquaintances.
On top of everything else, this biography is "relevant," as people like to say. Indeed, it is "ripped from the headlines."
It discusses, among other issues, nationalism, populism, immigration, "America First," the United Nations, NATO--even the Civil War and the nature of the Confederacy.
Senator Vandenberg is obviously at the center of the book, and a biographer is tempted to treat his subject as the center of the world. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a biographer, everything looks like his subject. But Vandenberg was at the center of a lot, and Meijer exploits this, while recognizing that Vandenberg was just a senator, however important.
Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg was born in 1884. (How did that "c" sneak into "Hendrick"?) His parents had come to Grand Rapids from upstate New York. One of his grandfathers was a delegate for Lincoln at the 1860 convention. This man also provided a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Vandenberg's father was in the harness business: "Vandenberg the Harness Man" was his moniker. The Panic of 1893 ruined him, something that left a deep mark on his son.
He was a little political junkie, Arthur was. As a high-schooler, he ate, slept, and breathed politics. He gave an address on the Hague Peace Convention of 1899. In a mock election, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate. His idol was Alexander Hamilton, about whom he would go on to write two books (one of which is called "The Greatest American"). He also admired the governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.
TR was the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1900. One of his campaign stops was Grand Rapids. Arthur Vandenberg, 16, had graduated from high school and was working as a billing clerk in a biscuit factory. He was warned not to leave his desk--but he couldn't resist. He dashed out to see his hero, the Rough Rider. When he got back to his desk, he was fired.
Arthur saw him again in 1911. TR was again in Grand Rapids, this time as the ex-president (looking to run again). He gripped young Vandenberg's hand and said, "By George, it does me good to meet a good Dutchman." (That was Dutchman to Dutchman.)
Vandenberg went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, leaving after his second semester because he had run out of money. Not to worry: With his talents and drive, he became a journalist, and a successful one. More than that, an excellent one. He worked at the Grand Rapids Herald. When he was 21, he became editor.
I love what the proprietor said. After giving Vandenberg the news, he nodded toward the editor's office and said, "Go over and kick your feet under the mahogany."
When the world war started in Europe, Vandenberg was like his man Teddy Roosevelt: mad at President Wilson for staying out. Vandenberg likened Wilson to an ostrich, "thinking he is safe because his head is buried in the sand." Eventually, Wilson went in. And later, Vandenberg took the view that greedy, blood-stained Big Business had connived America into war.
This was a common view among Midwest conservatives. I know this, in part, from talking to the grandparents of my friends, long ago.
In 1922, Vandenberg addressed himself to a perennial American question, immigration. The melting pot was "running over," he thought. The country was becoming "a polyglot boarding house." Americans had "an obligation to defend our immigration gates against an influx of alien races," which "could overwhelm our white complexion." This was Vandenberg in an illiberal moment. It was not a typical moment, however. Indeed, Vandenberg was known by a now-defunct phrase: "Lincoln liberal."
Back in high school, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, in an exercise. In 1928, he went to the real one. As he went, he said that he would be an editor "until I die." He was "incurably daubed," he said, "with printer's ink."
In the 1930s, he would be a principal antagonist of that Dutchman in the White House, TR's distant cousin. He went along with some of the New Deal. Otherwise, he was a fierce opponent, dubbing the program "the New Ordeal." He was also Isolationist No. 1. It was "impossible for the United States to police the world," he said, in time-honored language. Speaking of timehonored language, he also quoted Scripture, as he was wont to do: I Timothy 5:8: "... if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." Vandenberg then pronounced, "If that makes Timothy an isolationist, so am I." (It was Paul, writing to Timothy, but never mind.)
Mr. Meijer takes care to weave in the personal, by which I mean the familial. Vandenberg's first wife, Elizabeth, died young. He then married Hazel. Both women were apparently splendid--and Hazel was longsuffering. In Washington, Vandenberg had an affair with the wife of a man in the British embassy. Her name was Mitzi Sims. Was she a British spy, charged with trapping the Great Isolationist? In any case, someone dubbed Vandenberg "the senator from Mitzigan." Also, Vandenberg's son, Arthur Jr., his longtime aide, was homosexual. Meijer handles this matter with brevity, tact, and poignancy.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the interventionists felt vindicated. So did the isolationists. FDR and that crowd had egged the Japs, and then the Germans, into war, said the isolationists. Be that as it may, Vandenberg had this pithy observation about December 7: "That day ended isolation for any realist."
After the war, he said, "I am entirely willing to admit that America herself cannot prosper in a broken world." He also said, "Ours must be the world's moral leadership--or the world won't have any." Vandenberg espoused what he called "intelligent American self-interest," or "enlightened self-interest." (I think of today's "principled realism"--a phrase whose meaning is conveniently opaque.) He was a man in the middle, with one-worlders to the left of him and die-hard isolationists to the right of him. (These were now led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, along with Colonel McCormick and his Chicago Tribune.)
Meijer's subtitle--"The Man in the Middle of the American Century"--has more than one meaning.
Vandenberg helped birth the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. He never made it to the presidency, or to the Republican nomination, but he was in the running, to varying degrees, quadrennially. He once joked, "When I die, I want the minister to be able to look down on me and say, 'There would have been a great president.'"
Vandenberg died in his hometown in April 1951. Meijer writes, "The funeral at Park Congregational Church was Grand Rapids' largest between those of middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel in 1910 and Vandenberg protege Gerald Ford in 2007."
I suppose I'm the ideal reader for this book: a political junkie from Michigan, consumed by some of the same issues that consumed Arthur Vandenberg. Yet anyone interested in American politics and world affairs would be absorbed by this book. In our crowded lives, we scarcely have time to look at a book. Frankly, I may read this one twice.
Caption: Gerald R. Ford and Arthur H. Vandenberg in 1949
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Nordlinger, Jay. "Michigan Men." National Review, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514616960/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3fd56dd6. Accessed 13 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514616960
Meijer, Hendrik: ARTHUR VANDENBERG
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Meijer, Hendrik ARTHUR VANDENBERG Univ. of Chicago (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 11, 1 ISBN: 978-0-226-43348-6
The executive chairman of superstore chain Meijer, Inc. offers a detailed and admiring biography of Arthur Vandenberg (1884-1951), who played key roles in forming U.S. policy throughout the early decades of the 20th century.Meijer, who has published a biography of his grandfather (Thrifty Years: The Life of Hendrik Meijer, 1984) and produced a documentary about Vandenberg (America's Senator, 2011), has done a thorough job collecting and examining the pieces of the story of the Michigan Republican who served in the Senate from 1928 to 1951. In a text that moves with resolute chronology, the author notes the senator's significant involvement in many important U.S. policy initiatives, including the United Nations, NATO, and the Marshall Plan. Although Vandenberg was initially an isolationist, he gradually changed his tune; by the end of his career, he was singing his full-throated support of America as an international leader. As Meijer demonstrates, Vandenberg worked across the aisle, which was a necessary strategy during the Franklin Roosevelt years when the Democrats held majorities in both houses. Vandenberg worked with fellow senators, Roosevelt, and President Harry Truman. The author also shows us a man with a wandering eye. Although he was twice married (his first wife died), he seems to have had an extended fling with another woman. The author describes and speculates but does not condemn these deeds, but he does suggest they could have been factors in his decision not to campaign more earnestly for the 1948 presidential nomination. Meijer gives us a portrait of a politician with somewhat of an old-school manner; he was an orator, a backroom master, and a strategist who loved hearing good things about himself (are their politicians who don't?). Principally, he shows us a man who believed in working with rather than condemning his colleagues. A sturdy and necessary biography of a politically principled man who is sadly fading into obscurity.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Meijer, Hendrik: ARTHUR VANDENBERG." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217469/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=47ffebe0. Accessed 13 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217469
A statesman in life, forgotten in death
Story TOpics
Arthur Vandenberg
Print
By Aram Bakshian Jr. - - Monday, November 13, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
ARTHUR VANDENBERG: THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
By Hendrik Meijer
University of Chicago Press, $35, 432 pages
History is unkind to compromisers. If they succeed, disaster is averted and the compromiser is soon forgotten. If they fail, they’re often scapegoated for subsequent events. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister whose negotiations averted war with Hitler over Czechoslovakia comes to mind. Chamberlain thought his concessions had brought “peace in our time.”
Instead, they brought peace for only a few months and emboldened Hitler to invade Poland, thereby launching World War II with all its attendant horrors. Chamberlain’s name remains a byword for foreign policy failure to this day. Ironically, one of the greatest successful compromisers of the World War II-Cold War era that followed has been relegated to obscurity.
Harry Truman once defined a statesman as “a dead politician.” With Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan (1884-1951) it worked the other way around. Recognized as a statesman in his lifetime, the architect of the bipartisan American foreign policy that defeated German fascism and stalemated Soviet communism is largely forgotten today.
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In a way, the process began only 24 hours after his death. As a seven-year-old, I remember listening on the radio to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s address to a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951, his famous “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech.
But it was Mr. Vandenberg, not Gen. MacArthur, who faded away. The veteran senator had died the previous evening and the tributes paid him by his colleagues on the Senate side in the aftermath of Gen. MacArthur’s speech were hopelessly upstaged.
Nancy Dickerson, a young staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time (she would later become a distinguished television correspondent), remembered listening to the underreported eulogies, recalling that Mr. Vandenberg’s “integrity and personal charm gave him a unique power and standing in the Senate. He imbued committee members with the thought that partisanship had no place in foreign affairs — that while dissent was permissible and welcomed at home, when we presented ourselves to other nations we should appear as a united whole.”
Thanks to Arthur Vandenberg’s vision and ability to work across the aisles, a foreign policy consensus was forged that would endure for a generation after his death, finally sinking in the morass of Vietnam. Dwight Eisenhower, who had worked with him during World War II and the rebuilding of a devastated western Europe, listed Mr. Vandenberg as one of five great men he had known, also including Winston Churchill and Secretary of State George Marshall, whom history has treated much more generously than Mr. Vandenberg.
The publication of Hendrik Meijer’s soundly researched and thoroughly readable new biography may mark the beginning of a long-overdue reappraisal of a man who was perhaps the last U.S. senator to play a truly decisive, positive role in defining American foreign policy and our place in the world.
Global impact aside, it is also the engaging tale of a largely self-educated, small-town boy’s rise from obscure beginnings to become one of the most respected citizens of his day. His hometown was Grand Rapids, Mich., where he advanced from junior-most staffer to editor of the morning newspaper, soon becoming active in state and national politics. Young Vandenberg’s personal inspiration was Alexander Hamilton (about whom he would write two books), another ambitious, enterprising, self-made man with an appreciation of America’s unique destiny.
Mr. Vandenberg came to Washington as a fairly conventional Midwestern Republican senator in the Coolidge years, a man with a “round face, inquiring eyes, and eager, slightly bumptious manner. Cartoonists had fun with his round black glasses. He combed his sparse hair vainly across a balding scalp, suggesting someone born middle-aged, an effect reinforced by the watch chain smiling from his vest, the spats, the pinkie ring, and the inevitable ash-laden cigar.”
Bit by bit, year by year, Mr. Vandenberg grew in stature, still a trifle vain and pompous, but with a detailed grasp of foreign policy and a sense of mission few if any of his colleagues could match. As the author concludes, “Long after his last cigar, Arthur Vandenberg lingers vaguely in civic memory. His name offers an iconic shorthand for cooperation between political parties. Particularly in foreign affairs, and particularly when there is divided government.”
One of Mr. Vandenberg’s youngest disciples began his own congressional career in his hero’s hometown, Grand Rapids. His name was Gerald Ford and it was my privilege to serve on his White House staff when, as a beleaguered president struggling to preserve an honorable foreign policy in divisive times, he would occasionally recall his old mentor. Unfortunately for Jerry Ford — and our country — there were no Arthur Vandenbergs left in the Senate.
Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
Michigan Men
By Jay Nordlinger
November 27, 2017 12:50 AM
Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century, by Hendrik Meijer (Chicago, 448 pp., $35)
W
hen you grow up in Michigan, as I did, you know the name Meijer — as in the superstore chain. (The stores were once called “Meijer’s Thrifty Acres.” Now they’re just “Meijer.”) The Meijer family is from Grand Rapids, which is in West Michigan, which is Dutch country. They have a slogan there: “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.”
True, Gerald R. Ford sprang from Grand Rapids. He was of English stock. But they tolerate the Other in West Michigan.
Hendrik Meijer is the executive chairman of Meijer, Inc. After college, he spent about six years in journalism, then joined the company. In 1984, he wrote a biography of his grandfather, the founder, also named Hendrik Meijer: Thrifty Years. Now he has written another biography of another Dutchman from Grand Rapids, Arthur Vandenberg.
Vandenberg was one of the most important U.S. senators in the first half of the 20th century. He served from 1928 until his death in 1951. A Republican, he was the leader of the isolationists — until the war, when he saw the world differently and helped forge a bipartisan foreign policy in the United States.
By the way, Arthur Vandenberg was the uncle of Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force general who became the director of the CIA.
At the risk of offending Hank Meijer (as the author is called), I will make a confession: I thought this book might be a fond look by a multibillionaire with a taste for history at a half-forgotten figure from his hometown. No. It is a first-class political biography, enthralling, a page-turner. It ought to win prizes. Meijer ought to quit business and do this full-time.
His book is about Vandenberg, sure. It is also about the New Deal, World War II, and the immediate aftermath. Furthermore, it’s about an era, or eras. There was a time when people in Michigan towns heard Caruso sing and saw Pavlova dance. (My grandparents were such people.) On a humid summer day, you dipped into Lake Michigan, below the dunes. (We still do that.)
In 1922, a book went off like a stink bomb in the Midwest: Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. It mocked the values that Arthur Vandenberg embodied and championed. In a strange turn of events, he and Lewis became friends, or at least friendly acquaintances.
On top of everything else, this biography is “relevant,” as people like to say. Indeed, it is “ripped from the headlines.” It discusses, among other issues, nationalism, populism, immigration, “America First,” the United Nations, NATO — even the Civil War and the nature of the Confederacy.
Senator Vandenberg is obviously at the center of the book, and a biographer is tempted to treat his subject as the center of the world. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a biographer, everything looks like his subject. But Vandenberg was at the center of a lot, and Meijer exploits this, while recognizing that Vandenberg was just a senator, however important.
Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg was born in 1884. (How did that “c” sneak into “Hendrick”?) His parents had come to Grand Rapids from upstate New York. One of his grandfathers was a delegate for Lincoln at the 1860 convention. This man also provided a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Vandenberg’s father was in the harness business: “Vandenberg the Harness Man” was his moniker. The Panic of 1893 ruined him, something that left a deep mark on his son.
He was a little political junkie, Arthur was. As a high-schooler, he ate, slept, and breathed politics. He gave an address on the Hague Peace Convention of 1899. In a mock election, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate. His idol was Alexander Hamilton, about whom he would go on to write two books (one of which is called “The Greatest American”). He also admired the governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.
TR was the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1900. One of his campaign stops was Grand Rapids. Arthur Vandenberg, 16, had graduated from high school and was working as a billing clerk in a biscuit factory. He was warned not to leave his desk — but he couldn’t resist. He dashed out to see his hero, the Rough Rider. When he got back to his desk, he was fired.
Arthur saw him again in 1911. TR was again in Grand Rapids, this time as the ex-president (looking to run again). He gripped young Vandenberg’s hand and said, “By George, it does me good to meet a good Dutchman.” (That was Dutchman to Dutchman.)
Vandenberg went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, leaving after his second semester because he had run out of money. Not to worry: With his talents and drive, he became a journalist, and a successful one. More than that, an excellent one. He worked at the Grand Rapids Herald. When he was 21, he became editor.
I love what the proprietor said. After giving Vandenberg the news, he nodded toward the editor’s office and said, “Go over and kick your feet under the mahogany.”
When the world war started in Europe, Vandenberg was like his man Teddy Roosevelt: mad at President Wilson for staying out. Vandenberg likened Wilson to an ostrich, “thinking he is safe because his head is buried in the sand.” Eventually, Wilson went in. And later, Vandenberg took the view that greedy, blood-stained Big Business had connived America into war.
This was a common view among Midwest conservatives. I know this, in part, from talking to the grandparents of my friends, long ago.
In 1922, Vandenberg addressed himself to a perennial American question, immigration. The melting pot was “running over,” he thought. The country was becoming “a polyglot boarding house.” Americans had “an obligation to defend our immigration gates against an influx of alien races,” which “could overwhelm our white complexion.” This was Vandenberg in an illiberal moment. It was not a typical moment, however. Indeed, Vandenberg was known by a now-defunct phrase: “Lincoln liberal.”
Back in high school, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, in an exercise. In 1928, he went to the real one. As he went, he said that he would be an editor “until I die.” He was “incurably daubed,” he said, “with printer’s ink.”
In the 1930s, he would be a principal antagonist of that Dutchman in the White House, TR’s distant cousin. He went along with some of the New Deal. Otherwise, he was a fierce opponent, dubbing the program “the New Ordeal.” He was also Isolationist No. 1. It was “impossible for the United States to police the world,” he said, in time-honored language. Speaking of time-honored language, he also quoted Scripture, as he was wont to do: I Timothy 5:8: “. . . if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Vandenberg then pronounced, “If that makes Timothy an isolationist, so am I.” (It was Paul, writing to Timothy, but never mind.)
Mr. Meijer takes care to weave in the personal, by which I mean the familial. Vandenberg’s first wife, Elizabeth, died young. He then married Hazel. Both women were apparently splendid — and Hazel was longsuffering. In Washington, Vandenberg had an affair with the wife of a man in the British embassy. Her name was Mitzi Sims. Was she a British spy, charged with trapping the Great Isolationist? In any case, someone dubbed Vandenberg “the senator from Mitzigan.” Also, Vandenberg’s son, Arthur Jr., his longtime aide, was homosexual. Meijer handles this matter with brevity, tact, and poignancy.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the interventionists felt vindicated. So did the isolationists. FDR and that crowd had egged the Japs, and then the Germans, into war, said the isolationists. Be that as it may, Vandenberg had this pithy observation about December 7: “That day ended isolation for any realist.”
After the war, he said, “I am entirely willing to admit that America herself cannot prosper in a broken world.” He also said, “Ours must be the world’s moral leadership — or the world won’t have any.” Vandenberg espoused what he called “intelligent American self-interest,” or “enlightened self-interest.” (I think of today’s “principled realism” — a phrase whose meaning is conveniently opaque.) He was a man in the middle, with one-worlders to the left of him and die-hard isolationists to the right of him. (These were now led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, along with Colonel McCormick and his Chicago Tribune.)
Meijer’s subtitle — “The Man in the Middle of the American Century” — has more than one meaning.
Vandenberg helped birth the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. He never made it to the presidency, or to the Republican nomination, but he was in the running, to varying degrees, quadrennially. He once joked, “When I die, I want the minister to be able to look down on me and say, ‘There would have been a great president.’”
Comments
Vandenberg died in his hometown in April 1951. Meijer writes, “The funeral at Park Congregational Church was Grand Rapids’ largest between those of middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel in 1910 and Vandenberg protégé Gerald Ford in 2007.”
I suppose I’m the ideal reader for this book: a political junkie from Michigan, consumed by some of the same issues that consumed Arthur Vandenberg. Yet anyone interested in American politics and world affairs would be absorbed by this book. In our crowded lives, we scarcely have time to look at a book. Frankly, I may read this one twice.