Word: vandenberg
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Borrowing some money, Van bought Herald stock, prospered, married, bought a house, raised three children. His first wife died in 1916. Two years later he married a former college friend. Hazel Whitaker, a women's-page writer for the Chicago Tribune. The Vandenbergs became solid citizens of Grand Rapids. (In 1928, when the Herald was sold, Vandenberg's stock brought...
Editorializing was patently fun for Editor Vandenberg. He was already becoming known in Michigan political circles (his own listing in the 1920-21 Who's Who stated: "Widely known as a popular and political orator"). Politicos urged him to run for this office or that. Biding his time, Vandenberg stuck to his prose-which was oratorical, occasionally thunderous, and often adorned with archaic words. (He still writes with a dictionary on one side of his typewriter and a Bible on the other...
Making of a Senator. From that time on, Editor Vandenberg became a politician. He got to know Warren Harding, who was also a Midwestern newspaper editor, and helped write the foreign relations sections of Harding's campaign speeches. He enthusiastically supported Henry Cabot Lodge, and is credited with changing William Howard Taft's original enthusiasms for the League of Nations by the sheer force of a searching interview with the ex-President...
...Movie Queen Bebe Daniels (Bebe, Bebe, Bebe, Be Mine), whose father lived in Grand Rapids. Now he turned to sterner stuff. Alexander Hamilton had long been his hero; he wrote three books about him. (Lodge had also written a biography of Hamilton.) The books are largely forgotten, and Senator Vandenberg is glad they are. But the inscription in one is a characteristic example of how faithfully Vandenberg represented, as he still represents, the popular thought of the day. He wrote: "Nationalism-not internationalism-is the indispensable bulwark of American independence...
...March 1928 his chance at the Senate came. He was appointed to fill a vacancy and was elected the following autumn. In the traditionally Republican state of Michigan, Vandenberg has never had much trouble getting reelected, although in the New Deal landslide of 1934 he squeaked through largely because of a Democratic split. Except for California's ailing Hiram Johnson and Kansas' aging Arthur Capper, he is now the ranking Republican in the Senate...