Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,646

This is the grave of Carl Vinson.

Born in 1883 in Baldwin County, Georgia, Vinson went to the local schools and then to Georgia Military College. That led him to Mercer University for his law degree. He started practicing for a few years, but got interested in politics pretty quickly. He got elected to the Georgia legislature in 1908. He was gerrymandered out of his seat in 1912 and became a judge in Baldwin County.

In 1914, Augustus Bacon, one of the state’s senators died. The congressman from Vinson’s district, Thomas Hardwick, was appointed to replace him. That opened up a special election. Vinson ran and won. He would remain in Congress for the next 51 years. I guess I should have mentioned that Vinson was a Democrat, but this is the Jim Crow South so I assume everyone here already knew this.

Vinson would become a massive power player on the House floor. His major two principles were white supremacy and a strong military and he fought very hard for both of these things for the next five decades. On the white supremacy issue, Vinson went above and beyond. One thing the far right likes to do, regardless of the party, is take out their hate on Washington, D.C. Taxation without Representation indeed. So Vinson worked to segregate the District’s streetcar system and to ban interracial marriage there. He also wanted very much to sent out a constitutional amendment to repeal the 15th Amendment. So yeah, nice guy there.

Vinson’s other passion was more useful to the nation, at least if you believe in a strong military, which I don’t particularly, but whatever, let’s leave that aside for now. He came into office just as World War I had started and he was highly concerned by a lack of American preparedness. Incidentally, a lot of the opposition to American entry into the war in 1917 came out of his own district and similar southern districts, where a lot of young southern men had little farms and didn’t see the reason to leave them to fight for obscure reasons in Europe. This kind of opposition was a lot less organized than, say, radical labor, and it was certainly less political, but there was a ton of draft-dodging in the rural South.

By the early 20s, Vinson was the ranking Democrat on the Naval Affairs Committee and even though this was a Republican dominated era, Vinson became quite powerful on these issues, often being the only Democrat on special committees about the military, etc. That he held to these principles in the face of American isolationism over the next 20 years only increased his power when the nation moved to enter World War II. When Democrats took the House after the 1930 landslide repudiation of Hoover, Vinson became chair of Naval Affairs. Although he was no fan of FDR’s liberalism, his position in the House made him a key ally as the 30s went on and the Nazi threat grew. In 1934, he co-sponsored the Vinson-Trammell Act that replaced obsolete vessels with new ones and authorized the growth of the Navy within the limits allowed by the Washington Naval Treaty. It is worth noting here that the Hoover administration did not authorize a single new ship for the Navy so the American fleet was quite old.

With Japan rapidly ramping up its naval expansion in the late 30s, Vinson led the charge for the U.S. That is all good, but let’s be clear too–Vinson saw himself as the only real actor who understood the Navy and when you are a powerful Congressman with a huge ego, this can cause problems. Here’s an example. After World War II, Congress passed a bill to allow four naval officers to be promoted to Fleet Admiral. Why Congress should be involved in a decision like this is a whole other question; given how Congress has given up its powers to the executive branch in almost everything, it can be frustrating when someone tries to hold everything up to make some point, a la, the current idiot from Alabama Tommy Tuberville. But the point here is that Vinson wanted to choose them and so when the Navy tried to promote Raymond Spruance instead of Vinson’s boy William Halsey, Vinson got in the way and refused to allow it. He got his way too, though Congress responded by passing a different law allowing Spruance to get Fleet Admiral pay after he retired.

In 1946, the House Armed Services Committee was born, combining the Committee on Military Affairs and the Committee on Naval Affairs. Vinson chaired it after Republicans lost their brief hold on Congress in 1948. Vinson was an absolute tyrant as chair. He issued a rule that a junior member of the committee could ask one question for each year of service on the committee. Actually, given the way idiots like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene grandstand on their committees, maybe this isn’t the worst idea in the world upon further consideration. And of course he promoted the heck out of the Navy using his power in the early years of the Cold War. He got the nickname “Swamp Fox” as, as his Times obituary stated, “a tribute to his canny flair for running the Pentagon from his seat in the United States House of Representatives.” Harry Truman wanted Vinson as Secretary of Defense, but Vinson refused to take what he considered a demotion. He figured he could boss the Secretary around just fine from where he was thank you very much.

The 1950s also saw the rise of the civil rights movement and Vinson also used all his power to fight against anything that looked like rights for Black people. He hated King, he hated all of it. He was a stone cold racist to the end. He was a big supporter of the Southern Manifesto after the Brown decision. He was horrified by the sending of troops to Little Rock to integrate the schools and considered LBJ a traitor for pushing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which of course he voted against. LBJ tried to chill him out by granting Vinson the Presidential Medal of Freedom that year. Johnson knew Vinson well, as he had been one of those junior members on the Naval committee that Vinson bossed around. Since Johnson was a superb suck-up to anyone who could help him, he and Vinson were close, at least once.

I am not sure if it was the outrage to civil rights that led Vinson to retire after the 1964 elections, but he finally gave up his seat. Of course he was old too, but that often hasn’t led to retirements, as we know so well from the modern Democratic Party’s commitment to the gerontocracy. He remained a senior figure in Georgia politics. In fact, Sam Nunn was his great-nephew. The 50 years and 1 month in the House was the longest in history, though that was surpassed in 1992 by the extremely forgettable Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, who ended up serving a full 54 years before his 1995 retirement.

In 1980, although he was 96 years old, he went to attend the launching of the USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear sub named after him. It’s quite rare for any ship to be named after a living person. But he was in good health until close to the end, which finally came in 1981. He was 97 years old. Other honors included naming a bunch of stuff in Antarctica after him, including Vinton Massif, which is the continent’s highest mountain. That happened all the way back in 1961, actually.

Carl Vinson is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other chairs of the House Armed Services Committee, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Walter Andrews is in Porter, New York and Dewey Short is in Galena, Missouri. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.