Gardner (Pat) Jackson

• Gardner Jackson
• Born: September 10, 1896
• Died: April 17, 1965

Journalist, New Dealer, union aide, and agricultural reformer, was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the son of William S. Jackson, a wealthy Colorado landowner and builder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, and Helen (Banfield) Jackson, a descendant of an eminent New England family. William Jackson’s first wife was Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Ramona and Century of Dishonor, an early exposé of the mistreatment of American Indians. Following her death Jackson married her niece, Helen Banfield; Gardner Jackson was the youngest of the four sons and two daughters of that union. Throughout his life Gardner always spoke with awe of the fact that his sister Edith, who was a psychoanalyst and a faculty member at Yale, had been analyzed by Sigmund Freud while studying in Vienna.

Jackson went east in 1914 to attend Amherst College; its president, Alexander Meikeljohn, who was a passionate civil libertarian, made a deep impression on the young man. He interrupted his studies in 1917 to join the army, which sent him to Georgia with a machine-gun company. Following his discharge, he studied journalism at Columbia for a year and then moved to Denver, where he worked as an investment counselor for a brief period before becoming a reporter for The Denver Times.

Returning east in 1920, Jackson joined the Boston Globe as a reporter and editorial writer. He developed an early interest in the Sacco-Van-zetti case, and in 1926 he quit his job to become the full-time secretary of their defense committee. The friendships with John Dos Passos and Felix Frankfurter that flowed out of his involvement in that case had a profound influence on his life. He also maintained lifelong ties with Aldino Felicani, head of Boston’s Italian community defense effort. In 1928 Jackson edited the collected letters of the two anarchists, and twenty years after their execution he created a furor in Boston by proposing that a memorial be erected to them on Boston Common. He also attended some classes at Harvard in the 1920s as a special student. There he met Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and in 1930 his Boston ties led to an introduction to Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and a lasting association that affected him deeply.

Jackson went to Washington, D.C., in 1931 as a correspondent for a group of Canadian newspapers. With the advent of the New Deal, he was named assistant consumers’ counsel in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a post intended to protect the interest of the consumer by insuring that increased farm prices came out of the pocket of the intermediate dealer. He quickly became part of a reform faction within the AAA headed by Jerome Frank that wanted to use the powers of government to redistribute farm income as well as shore up the agricultural sector.

In 1935 Jackson was dismissed, along with Frank, Lee Pressman, and Frederic C. Howe, in what became known as “the Wallace purge,” after the group had tried to change departmental policy to prevent sharecroppers from being evicted as a result of legislation that took farm acreage out of production. Jackson returned to the Agricultural Department in 1940 when Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace’s tenure ended but he left again in 1942 after unsuccessfully lobbying for an expansion of the Farm Security Administration to aid subsistence farmers.

Jackson maintained a lifelong interest in the problem of the small farmer. In the mid-1930s he worked as a volunteer for the National Committee on Rural Social Planning and for the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Concerned with infractions of the civil rights of southern farm workers, he organized a dinner at Washington’s Cosmos Club in 1935 and promoted the idea of a congressional investigation. Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin was present and succeeded in establishing the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, whose hearings on violence against members of labor unions had great effect in 1936 and 1937. As late as 1958-60 Jackson worked as a volunteer for the National Farm Labor Union, trying once more to publicize the plight of the tenant farmer.

Wanting to remain in Washington close to the pulse of public life, in 1936 Jackson became a legislative-liaison political aide to CIO president John L. Lewis, formally employed by Labor’s Non-Partisan League, the CIO’s political front. Lewis had cultivated this friendship while he was still a member of the administration; now Jackson became part of that incestuous network of relationships that made the wheels turn. He held this post for five years. In 1940 he broke with Lewis when the labor leader abandoned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support the Republican candidate, Wendell L. Willkie in that year’s election.

For a brief period in the 1940s Jackson worked as a labor reporter for PM, the short-lived liberal New York tabloid. In spite of his advocacy of the Spanish Republican cause in the 1930s—he had sponsored a plan to provide refuge in the United States for 500 Basque children—he had always been a staunch anti-Communist, and he used his platform in PM to warn that Communist influence in labor unions was growing precipitously during the war. In 1944 he was badly beaten up outside a Greenwich Village restaurant by an individual he recognized as an official of the National Maritime Union, then under Communist control, and he lost the sight in his left eye as a result. His anticommunism made him immune from McCarthyite attacks in the 1950s, and in 1952 he participated in John F. Kennedy’s senatorial campaign.

From 1951 to 1958 Jackson again worked for the CIO, at first as a legislative-liaison aide and then in the organizing department. He cooperated with James B. Carey, secretary-treasurer of the CIO, in investigating the problem of Communist influence in unions involved in defense industries. The CIO dismissed Jackson in 1958, as a result, he believed, of his sympathizing with union field organizers who were attempting to form their own union to bargain with headquarters. His constant insistence that the labor movement pay more attention to agricultural workers also alienated his employers.

Jackson died in Washington at the age of sixty-eight following a heart attack. He and his wife, Dorothy Sachs Jackson, the daughter of a Denver newspaper and mining entrepreneur, had four children: Gardner Jr., Geoffrey, Everett, and Deborah.

Jackson was essentially a free-lance reformer who quickened the minds and pricked the consciences of those whose lives he touched, but it is difficult to point to many specific achievements. A friend once remarked of him that “the underdog has him on a leash.” As a mover and shaker of the liberal wing of the Democratic party—Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled that in the White House President John F. Kennedy used to ask him “what Pat Jackson is up to these days”—he served as part of that collective consciousness that turned the New Deal into a generation of reform.

Gardner Jackson’s memoirs can be found in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University; a small manuscript collection is housed at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York. Additional information for this article was provided by Gardner Jackson Jr. Jackson’s role in the New Deal is discussed briefly in A. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (1958) and J. P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (1971). M. Dubofsky and W. Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (1977) touches on his years in the labor movement. See also A. Schlesinger Jr., “Gardner Jackson,” The New Republic, May 1, 1965; W. V. Shannon, “Death of a Liberal,” Commonweal, June 4, 1965; The New York Times, April 18, 1965; and The Washington Post, April 18, 1965.