CLASS OF 1900

The Panic of 1893 ruined the brisk harness trade of Aaron Vandenberg. His son, Arthur, nine years old, was profoundly affected. "I had no youth," he insisted decades later, with typical hyperbole. "I had one passion — to be certain that when I grew up I would not be in the position my father was."

Aaron was a native of the Genesee Valley in upstate New York — "Mohawk River Dutch," he called it, a tribe with "gumption enough to get out of New York and hew its way in the wilderness." He had been postmaster of tiny Clyde, New York, during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. A young widower with two small children, he married Alpha Hendrick, whose family's Republican fervor was at least the equal of his own. Alpha's physician father had served as a Lincoln delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention and had provided a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Ready for a fresh start, the newlyweds ventured west. Michigan had been the near frontier for New Yorkers since the opening of the Erie Canal. In the lumber-rich west of the state, Aaron found a burgeoning metropolis where his surname blended in with those of recent immigrants from The Netherlands. There, in Grand Rapids, he opened a harness shop. And there, in 1884, in an upstairs room of their ample Victorian home, Alpha gave birth to her only child, Arthur Hendrick. He was eleven years younger than his half-sister; his half-brother was already eighteen.

Grand Rapids was no isolated outpost. Forty trains a day passed through, bound for Chicago, Detroit, or the Straits of Mackinac. Around the Union Depot ranged the freight yards, markets, and warehouses of a trading center. By the 1880s, as immigrants from Germany and Poland as well as Holland joined descendants of French traders and Yankees, the population had swelled to fifty thousand. City hall and the county building were Romanesque temples, flush with civic pride. Tolling church bells, factory whistles, the clatter of trains — all echoed across the valley.

Spiked boots of flannel-shirted lumberjacks scarred the plank sidewalks. Millions of logs from the great pine forests floated down the Grand River. Sprawling factories shaped and tooled the timber. By the end of the century, Grand Rapids was America's "Furniture City."

This was a place, said one reporter, "big enough to have the conveniences of a city, but small enough to enable everybody to know everybody else." Everybody knew the amiable Aaron Vandenberg. His shop was just up Division Avenue from the Cody Hotel, with its enormous bison heads supplied by the proprietor's uncle, Buffalo Bill, whose visits gave the town a tenuous link to a wilder West.3 As "Vandenberg the Harness Man," Aaron developed a thriving mail-order trade. The family enjoyed middle-class comforts, the luxury of freshly starched collars, the social rewards of the Shriners and Masons. On the Fourth of July, father and son watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march up Fulton Street — a vivid reminder of how Republicans had rescued the nation in the Civil War.

Then came the Panic of 1893. Exactly what happened to the harness business is not clear, but large orders, perhaps government contracts, were canceled. Aaron Vandenberg could not meet his payroll. Later claims of insolvency seem exaggerated, but Alpha took in boarders. The stigma of failure clung to the Vandenberg household. The collapse of Aaron's business was the seminal event of Arthur Vandenberg's early life. At the age of nine, as he described it, he left boyhood behind to help support his family. In a world of rising expectations, the trauma of so sudden a reversal "made a permanent notch" in his character, he said later. In his mind, at least, he was on his own: "And ever since I've held to the conviction that if you really want to go somewhere in life, you can." This reaction to failure feels akin to an adult's sense of taking charge. The loss of security, the shock to a comfortable existence, seems to have kindled in the boy an entrepreneurial impulse that knew few bounds.

Arthur devised one scheme after another. He started a delivery service, using pushcarts from his father's shop to haul crates of shoes from a downtown factory to the Union Depot. He sold vegetables, flowers, lemonade. He ushered in a theater and peddled newspapers. He set up a trading business for stamp collectors under the name Comet Stamp Company.

The precocious teen entered Central High School a year earlier than most of his classmates. He was slender, with pursed lips and a small mouth, his dark eyes peering from beneath wide brows, black hair parted in the center, jug ears jutting out. He was enamored of a classmate twenty months older, Eslizabeth Watson, whose father owned a hardware store on the West Side. (She was, their yearbook noted, "To all, most attractive / by all, most admired," a shy brunette, "blushing and sweet.")

Arthur received better marks in science and mathematics than in literature, yet it was in English class, as well as rhetoric, where his passion for speeches and stories was on display. "A is for Arthur, the man with a voice," the yearbook said. In his junior year, classmates wrote, "When will Vandenberg stop talking?" At fifteen he addressed his fraternity banquet with the speech "Our Progress." His subtitle: "Not What We Have Done Avails Us, But What We Do and Are." In another speech, "Success," Arthur told his audience that "the world's given a reward to him who makes an honest effort."

The youngest member of the class of 1900 also boasted the second-longest entry in the yearbook — which, perhaps not coincidentally, he edited. He also edited the Daily Whoop, sang in the chorus, and managed the baseball team. And he endured the jibes of classmates, not only for his preening zeal but also for riding to school "on his pneumatic-tired ear." That year Arthur won second prize in a speech contest with his address "The Peace Conference at The Hague: Cause and Effect." In 1899 delegates from the Great Powers had convened, he said, to do "something tangible toward the promotion of a better understanding between the nations, and to lay the foundation of a durable peace." The silver medal, engraved with his initials, became his talisman.

He was going places, his class prophecy predicted:...