[1] In an 1899 speech, he declared, "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me.

This attribution is doubtful, however, as the phrase was current earlier in the 1890s, so it appears that Vandiver merely popularized it.

He graduated from Central College in 1877; studied law, and became a professor of natural science at the Bellevue Institute from 1877 to 1880 and served as its president in 1880–1889; accepted the chair of science in the Missouri State Normal School at Cape Girardeau, Missouri in 1889, and became its president in 1893 and served until 1897.

He was a delegate to the Democratic State conventions in 1896, 1898, 1918, and 1920 and served as chairman in 1918.

Vandiver was elected as a Democrat to the Fifty-fifth United States Congress in 1896, and was re-elected three times.