Honoring Michigan Senator’s Foreign Policy Leadership

Hank Meijer plans book, film on Arthur Vandenberg

by Mary Radigan
May 16, 2010

Hank Meijer has always considered himself a failed novelist and wannabe poet.

After all, it’s tough to make time for writing when you’re the CEO and co-chairman of Walker-based Meijer Inc., with 194 supercenters spread across five Midwestern states.

Still, the 58-year-old Meijer is fascinated with history and historical figures. When time allows, he researches the life and legacy of Arthur H. Vandenberg, who served Michigan and the nation as a Republican senator from 1928 to 1951. A book is underway as Meijer dons his unofficial historian’s hat to honor the man.

The working title is “America’s Senator: The Unexpected Odyssey of Arthur Vandenberg.” Plans are to release the book in late 2011, along with a PBS documentary Meijer also is creating under a collaboration with independent filmmaker Mike Grass in Grand Rapids.

Hank Meijer. Photo by Michael L. Hale

“I feel Sen. Vandenberg is the most important political figure in the history of this country of which there is no definitive biography,” Meijer says. That alone is justification for the book, but Meijer says he can relate to Vandenberg in many ways, including their collective Grand Rapids roots and a love of writing.

Vandenberg was a reporter, editor and publisher, with his work featured in the old Grand Rapids Herald from 1906 to 1928.

Meijer also held the same positions for a variety of newspapers across the state, with journalism always a passion hard to pursue as he joined the Meijer grocery business. He tried his hand at fiction and has written the forewords in books about his father, Fred Meijer, 90, chairman emeritus of the family’s estimated $13.5 billion company.

While at the University of Michigan, Meijer’s essays were honored with a Hopwood Award, which recognizes creative work in writing.

“I started working on a biography of my grandfather and the company (Thrifty Years: The Life of Hendrik Meijer) after I graduated with an English degree in 1973,” Meijer says. “I finished that biography in 1985 and I wanted to do another biographical person. I missed the writing and research process, which I really love.”

Meijer says Vandenberg was influential long before he formally got into politics.

“He was a bit more complicated than you would think, and he thought long and hard about politics,” Meijer says. “From a desk in Grand Rapids, he wrote editorials that were quoted by people like Henry Cabot Lodge.”

Meijer says he was curious about the senator who made such an impact on this country. The Grand Rapids-born Vandenberg’s political career saw him swing from an isolationist stance to internationalism when it came to his opposition or support of America’s foreign policy. Vandenberg made headlines with what the news media called the “speech heard around the world,” announcing his change of heart.

In a small way, Meijer can identify with Vandenberg’s initial anti-war involvement stance. In October 1969, Meijer joined an estimated two million people in Washington as a protest against the Vietnam War. This was on the same day his father, Fred, was down the street at the White House with President Richard Nixon to discuss major retail matters. Fred Meijer later said he wished he had been marching with his son.

Vandenberg was talented in achieving compromise and adjusting policies to gain support on issues from opposing members of Congress.

“He introduced bipartisanship, which was unheard of and symbolized one of the finest moments in American (politics),” Meijer says of Vandenberg’s more notable undertakings.

Vandenberg helped establish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), worked to modify the more controversial parts of the New Deal legislation and, at the beginning of the Cold War, became the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was ready to accept a presidential nomination in both 1940 and 1948, but lost out to more aggressive Republican candidates. Vandenberg died in 1951 at the age of 67.

The story caught Meijer’s attention and research began.  “He wasn’t just the blow-hard senator some portrayed him to be,” he said.

After working with Grand Rapids historian Gordon Olson on various projects, Meijer in 1991 spoke to the Michigan Historical Society about Vandenberg and his support of the Neutrality Act in the 1930s. From that speech he received a call from the daughter of Dr. C. David Tompkins, who had done his dissertation on Vandenberg while a student at Michigan.

“Tompkins had used his dissertation to start on a biography, but he died before he could get the book together and only one volume was done,” Meijer recalls. “His daughter didn’t want to throw out all his work and wanted to know if I was interested. I ended up bringing a van full of materials from Chicago and have been working on it ever since. David’s work saved me a lot of the research effort.”

The work has been rewarding and surprising, Meijer says. He had many conversations with the Vandenberg family and the senator’s friends, including President Gerald R. Ford, U.S. Sen. William Fulbright and author/playwright Gore Vidal.

“I got this sense of mission that if I didn’t do this, who would do it?”

Meijer is an “independent” historian, who did some graduate work in history but fell short of a formal degree, he says. Still, he’s used his unfinished manuscript to glean enough information about Vandenberg for publication in the Michigan Historical Review and the Encyclopedia of the United States Congress. He recently spoke at the Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids about Vandenberg and his role in the Cold War.

But Meijer’s role as a historian is just getting started. He plans to do more.

Meijer will explore the little known story about an American military unit called the Polar Bears assigned at the end of World War I to the northern parts of Russia as part of an allied force under British command. Sent there to protect remaining military supplies, the unit ended up in bloody battles with Bolshevik troops, with more than 400 casualties.

“Vandenberg fought to get the remains out of there and many of them were from Michigan,” Meijer says. “I’m interested and very intrigued in the Polar Bears and want to tell their story.”

Mary Radigan is an award-winning journalist whose work includes 26 years as a columnist and reporter for The Grand Rapids Press until her retirement in 2007.