Aug 7, 2007

Chapter Six - Events, Dear Boy, Events

Lex Kasner spent the last months of 1939 and all of early 1940 with a solid gaze to the events in Congress, in Europe, and in Japan. To the untrained eye, Lex appeared as a meddler. Even so, the fathers of Ohio Republican politics saw him guiding VanderWall through an otherwise untenable balance, and the President’s own handlers saw Lex’s efforts as increasingly valuable to the Roosevelt – both as President and as a candidate for re-election. Lex understood a number of the President’s concerns. Athough not privy to all that was on the President’s desk, Kasner saw enough of the picture to recognize the national and political consequences of the actions of the electorate in 1940. VanderWall’s sense of duty to the country, and increasing sense of abandon as to his own re-election made him an unlikely ally to the President. It was, however, a role he relished, and he was good at it. If re-election was out of reach, then he would go back to the farm, knowing he had served his President when asked.
VanderWall’s bill passed Congress in Summer, 1940, and it took effect not long before the November election. In the course of his Senatorial duties, VanderWall had visited several draft offices, meeting the same resistance Lex had seen. Throwing himself into what was surely his final campaign, VanderWall fought his Democratic opponent tooth-and-nail. VanderWall saw the irony; the President, whom VanderWall had personally carried water for, was likely to take Ohio. And his opponent – an obscure Cuyahoga County Commissioner named Rex Riley – would likely run into the US Senate on FDR’s coattails. Of course VanderWall was incensed to learn that Vice President Garner had personally called Riley to ask him to run, just weeks after VanderWall agreed to be the public face of the draft bill. Duty before politics…
“Don’t these people have any loyalty?” VanderWall asked no one in particular a few days before the election.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won Ohio with 52% vote. A comfortable win, but not with the margins he was accustomed to. Byron VanderWall, unexpectedly also won re-election. After a recount mandated by Ohio law, it was deemed that VanderWall beat Rex Riley by less than two hundred votes out of over three million cast.
When asked for a comment after his surprise loss, Rex Rilely said,
“Had Roosevelt so much as lifted a finger for me, I’d have pulled it out….it is almost as if the man did not want me to win. Don’t these people have any loyalty?”
Roosevelt invited Senator VanderWall and Lex to the White House for meeting about the draft soon after the election. The President appointed Riley to the Securities and Exchange Commission as a thank you for his service as sacrificial lamb. Roosevelt was ready for whatever events the world would bring our way, as were Lex and VanderWall. As goes Ohio, so goes the nation.
VanderWall and Kasner were on hand together in the audience at the events during graduation week of the first class of peacetime draftees in February, 1941. Ohio soldiers were being asked to serve by their President; they were doing so in no small measure due to the public efforts of these two men.
The events of December, 1941, would remind the country that an absence of war is not peace. This fact lent legitimacy to those soldiers VanderWall and Roosevelt created. Lex knew he could not stop the inevitability of a World War, but he believed that he had done all he could to prepare his beloved Ohio, and to persuade his friends and neighbors to be ready. Although he was too old to serve in uniform, the citizens of Ohio quickly adopted him as one with foresight, and one they wanted to keep.
Upon returning from the graduation of Ohio’s first class of graduated draftees, as a guest of the President, a reporter stopped him while he was getting off the train.

“Mr. Kasner, two questions. Are you going to run for Congress in 1942-“
“No”.
“-and tell me – tell us – why did you work so hard for the peacetime draft??”
“Well, in light of the recent events in Hawaii, I guess it looks like we needed it, eh?”

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