My Time With Woody Guthrie & John Nance Garner

“Hey, Boy! Why don’t you get a guitar?” This was a question he asked me when he stopped for a visit to our newspaper. He had bought a guitar when he was in high school in Pampa, Texas. It became his symbol and instrument for the musical, philosophical, and political life he followed. Years later, after I served in the Marines and went to college, I thought of Woody when I found Percy Shelley’s quote, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Woody demonstrated this fact during his life as a fighter for justice and equality. This was during and after the Great Depression and the Second World War. He was a self-taught public intellectual who became a crusader fighting against what he considered to be the forces of evil in a society that helped the wealthy and privileged at the cost of the poor. Some of the things he said about the political life of people in the United States are repeated today. He was an outspoken opponent of fascism, a fact that was written on the face of his guitar. I didn’t know at the time what influence he would have on America. I didn’t know I would also meet John Nance Garner, vice pPresident for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I met Woody when I was a thirteen-year-old printer’s devil at a small weekly newspaper in the panhandle of Texas. He claimed he was from Texas, after growing up in his home state of Oklahoma, and he occasionally stopped at The Groom News (my hometown newspaper) to visit with my boss, the editor, Max Wade. I met John Nance Garner when I was a 25-year-old English and journalism teacher in Uvalde, Texas, his hometown. He was a gruff old cigar smoking whiskey drinking character.

This is about two Texans, one who was born in Texas and one who adopted the Lone Star State after growing up in Oklahoma. He moved to Pampa, Texas, when he was still a teenager. Some people don’t believe, or they don’t remember, that Woody made many trips across the country on one of his favorite roads, old U.S. Route 66, which ran through my hometown of Groom, Texas. He traveled what Steinbeck called the Mother Road. That was back in the early fifties, long before Interstate 40 replaced Route 66. I worked for Max during my high school years, from 1954 to 1958. Woody would always stop at The Groom News because he liked Max, who was great at telling stories. They would swap tales about Max’s experiences in World War Two and Woody’s times crossing the country from California to New York, and the other direction. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were both public intellectuals. Max was a newspaper editor and publisher; Woody was a troubadour of social justice, singing his songs everywhere, a kind of Johnny Appleseed of music and progressive politics, spreading his message from coast to coast. He was tough. He didn’t back down. There were people who called Woody a communist because of what they thought of his songs and social activism.

John Nance Garner lived to almost 98 and was convinced his cigars and whiskey gave him his longevity. More about the former vice president later.

Woody started learning to play the guitar when he lived in Pampa, Texas, about thirty miles from my hometown of Groom. He told me he was a teenager when he began playing the guitar, and he got to be good enough to be a writer and singer of songs. For some reason, he liked Groom. It was just a wide place in the road, according to Max, only a two-lane highway back in the fifties, but Woody loved it.

Like Woody, John Steinbeck traveled across the country on old Route 66. Our little town of Groom had only about 800 people, and we were lucky to have a weekly newspaper. Max was an excellent editor, publisher, and philosopher. He hired me to be what he called his “printer’s devil,” a term that was used even back in Mark Twain’s time, when the young Samuel Clemens worked for The Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. I learned how to operate a Linotype machine, and I became a typesetter, among other things. I liked Woody because he was a brave poet and singer. John Nance Garner was a prodigious politician, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president for two terms. He quit when FDR decided to seek a third term.

Woody told me I should learn to play the guitar, because, as he put it, “You won’t go wrong if you can pick a few tunes and give people a song.” John Nance Garner got the nickname of Cactus Jack, but he didn’t write or sing any songs. He was a real politician. He worked in the chambers of the national Congress and made deals in smoke-filled rooms. That’s the way it was back then, according to Garner. He was a friend of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, both highly successful, well-known political leaders of the Democratic Party. As far as I could tell from our conversations, Woody had nothing to do with people like Garner and Rayburn. He knew they were Democrats, but he also knew that they were not the kind of Democrats that he was. He looked at them and realized, according to his ideas about social justice, they were not into music or working hard to help the “little people,” the hard-working citizens who scraped out a living in hard times during the Great Depression and those who served in the military during World War Two. Many gave their lives for this country. Woody would say they were cheated out of their lives by the Great Depression that forced people to be drafted to serve their country in a time of fascism. Hitler had been rising in power during Woody’s growth in popularity in the United States.

According to the Dolph Briscoe Center in Uvalde, “John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner (1868–1967) was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives during the last two years of Herbert Hoover’s presidency (1931–1933) and vice president during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first two terms (1933–1941). Garner was a dominant national political figure who played a critical role in the passage of much of the New Deal legislation aimed at alleviating or ending the most severe economic crisis in U.S. history. Considered to be the godfather of Texas politics, Garner paved the way for Texans to occupy the highest levels of the nation’s government, including the oval office.” Lyndon Johnson might have felt that he was a protégé of Garner’s. They were both successful democrats of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s time in which the country needed leaders to save them from national poverty.

On the other side of the picture, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter-composer-crusader who was one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His influence was as widespread as some of the most popular artists who came along later, like Bob Dylan. He covered the country traveling at his own expense, picking up jobs as he went. He really did travel by freight train, in boxcars when he could climb aboard without being detected by the security men who tried to prevent those who wanted to ride free. He didn’t get elected to any Congress, like John Nance Garner who led the way in politics when he served in Congress and worked hard to get legislation passed at the national level.

Woody Guthrie was an American hero. He didn’t have time for smoking cigars and drinking whiskey, the way politicians like John Nance Garner did.

Woody was a slightly built man who had a full head of hair, like Max. In fact, I thought they looked alike enough to be brothers. They loved swapping stories when Woody stopped for a visit. They talked about Max’s service in the infantry in World War Two. Max had made the landing at Omaha Beach. When Woody became famous, Max would often talk about him, and I remember Max would be angry when anyone said Woody was a communist. Max said Woody was only a man who wanted the ordinary people to get a break from the hardships of those days.

So, one might say that Woody was the Bob Dylan of his day. He was a folk singer and a social activist. He was also a novelist and a friend of Bob Dylan’s. His novel, Bound for Glory, was a story that began in Pampa, Texas. I wish he had written about Max and The Groom News and Groom, Texas. As a young printer’s devil, I didn’t realize who Woody was, and that he was famous. Max often said, “Woody is well known. If only he would settle down, he might amount to something someday.” Those were truly humorously ironic words, now that I look back and see how Woody changed America. He didn’t settle down. He kept moving to save America.

I was just a teenager and didn’t realize how important Woody was in this country. Now, at 83, when I hear him sing, “This land is your land, this land is my land,” I feel honored to have met him. He was a great influence in my life. My love of his work as a singer and crusader led me to become a poet and novelist, and I am still indebted to him for giving me the courage to be what I call “woke” and for giving me the courage to practice what I preach. I am grateful for the fact that the world has developed people who are like Shelley’s assertion that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This is the clearest illustration of his belief that imaginative practice and political activism are inextricably intertwined. It is the creed that Woody Guthrie lived by.

One of the most memorable people in the modern history of Texas, other than the man named Woody Guthrie, who adopted Texas as his home state, was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president for two terms. Woody was a man who fought for the little man, and woman. He knew about starvation times and how people survived during the Great Depression. He was there with them. He championed the cause of freedom to live in the world’s greatest nation, freedom to live, with a job and a chance to be prosperous, or just to feed the family and put a roof over their heads. Woody was a crusader in ways that made the American people believe.

John Nance Garner was from a different school. He believed in the United States in a more structured, politically established way that supported the lives of working men and women. Garner believed it too, but he was more one of the “in crowd” of politics, the people who made the laws and voted on the budgets.

John Nance Garner was an old time Texas politician. The labor leader John L. Lewis is said to have once called Cactus Jack a “labor-baiting, poker playing, whiskey drinking, evil old man.” Garner was well past 97 when I met him. His house was around the block from mine. Because of his age, he didn’t do much anymore but sit in his rocking chair on the front porch of his old Uvalde home.

I didn’t know I was renting a house so close to the former vice president of the United States. It was in Uvalde, Texas, where I was a new instructor at the local Southwest Texas Junior College.

John Nance Garner, “Cactus Jack,” served two terms as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. Then, as I have reported, he quit when FDR ran for a third term. I didn’t know much about him, only that he was Uvalde’s most famous citizen. Some folks in Uvalde told me Garner was the most famous vice president in the history of the United States. He took a “hands on” approach to his vice presidency. He was not like most vice presidents, those relegated to the title only who had no actual, meaningful work to do, except wait for the President to die so they could take over.
Those Texans I spoke to in my time in Uvalde said Garner was a political leader who was able to bring democrats and republicans together to pass needed legislation.

Despite his daily cigar smoking and affection for whiskey, Cactus Jack lived for almost 98 years. He loved Uvalde, and I know from experience that it is an easy town to love. Some of its giant oak trees are said to be hundreds of years old. Some say there are trees that could be a thousand years old. Like John Nance Garner, there are many things about Uvalde that encourage a long life. Woody didn’t live as long, but some say he had a more lasting impact on the culture than Garner did.

I enjoyed sitting on the front porch and visiting with Cactus Jack. Now that I am in my eighties and removed from Texas for many years, I was surprised to find that he had such a famous history. At the time I knew him, for me, he was an interesting man who had lived a rich, full life. He didn’t talk about being Speaker of the House of Representatives or Roosevelt’s number two man. We talked about the weather and how glad he was that he chose Uvalde to be his hometown. He also spoke a little about being vice president during the Great Depression. He got a distant look on his face and said, “It was a bad time for everyone.” Now, I wonder what he would have thought of the massacre of school children in Uvalde, May 24, 2022.

When I met him, I think he had given up smoking his daily cigars. Maybe he still drank a bit of whiskey “for medicinal purposes,” but I don’t know. I believe his drinking may have contributed to his long life. He said it did. He liked the fact that he was past his mid-nineties and still able to sit on the wide front porch of his old Texas home. He told me that Uvalde pecans are the best of any grown in the U.S. He said World War Two was the worst thing ever for people all around the world. He said the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a big tragedy for America. He said he liked JFK and regretted that the young president was killed by an assassin.

Mr. Garner was a lifelong democrat, but he got along well with republicans. He said he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with leaders of labor unions, but he claimed to be in favor of unions and what some people called “the little man.” He mentioned that he thought the U.S. was a strong country and we could hold our own against any enemy. He didn’t say foreign or domestic enemies, but I think he would have said the U.S. would always be strong against any competition. He died a few days short of 98 years. I moved to another teaching job in Kansas. The people of Uvalde built a museum in his memory, and in honor of their late Governor Dolph Briscoe. Later, on May 24, 2023, nineteen students were massacred in their classroom at an elementary school in Uvalde, where I once lived. I am glad I got to spend time with Cactus Jack, and live for a time in Uvalde, the pride of the Texas Golden Triangle. John Nance Garner was a memorable man, certainly not as memorable as Woody Guthrie, who is more well known these days. Garner was not known for traveling around the country singing songs and defending working people against what he called fascists. Woody was a man of the people, just like Cactus Jack. Woody was a traveling man. He invested his life in serving his country. He said, “This land was made for you and me.” As I grew older and gained more experience with time in the Marines and years spent earning a Ph.D. and teaching, one thing I grew to like about Woody was his honesty and his liberal attitudes. One thing he said in his journeys in life was true for me.

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”

 

John Garmon is an 84-year-old poet, essayist, and novelist at the College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas. He grew up in the Texas panhandle near Amarillo. He served in the Marines, then went to college, and eventually became president of Berkeley City College. His novels and poetry collections are listed at Amazon. His poems and essays appeared in Oddball Magazine, Commonweal, Radius, Southern Humanities Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, The Oregonian, Oyster River Pages, and other places.