THE CABINET: Hero Hated

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"I've known for a long time I'm not loved with all the fervor I think I'm entitled to. If a man worked hard at it, he couldn't get up a bigger list of enemies than I. I have accumulated a choice collection of critics and enemies, especially among certain rings of contractors, public utility interests and oil interests. I also understand I am under the serious criticism of not being polite. I have had to say 'no' very frequently. I have been asked to make appointments and approve projects which I could not do."

When Harold Le Clair Ickes took office as Secretary of the Interior, he quickly became one of the outstanding Cabinet heroes of the New Deal. He was honest. He worked hard. He refused to play peanut politics. He had billions of Federal dollars to spend. Yet last week Secretary Ickes was ruefully admitting that his popularity had vanished, that he was, in fact, one of the most thoroughly hated members of the Cabinet. Like everyone else, he knew the reasons.

Congressmen had grown to dislike Secretary Ickes because he would not listen to their pleas for political patronage or for "pork" from the $3,300,000,000 Public Works fund he administers. To save time he would receive Congressional callers at his office in batches, require them to come up to his desk and whisper their requests. Senator Sheppard of Texas once had to wait eight days to get a private appointment. So intense was the feeling against Secretary Ickes at the Capitol last week that House Democrats refused to vote an additional $4,000,000,000 for public works and emergency relief until they had been assured by President Roosevelt himself that Public Works Administrator Ickes would have practically nothing to do with this new fund (see p. 24).

Last week President Roosevelt received another complaint about his Secretary of the Interior, this time from Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi. The point at issue was Mr. Ickes' antipolitical administration of the Virgin Islands. Secretary Ickes had insisted that Paul Martin Pearson, sexagenarian Chautauqua organizer appointed by Herbert Hoover as Governor of the Virgin Islands, should not be removed to make room for a deserving Democrat. Senator Harrison had a job-seeking friend named T. (for Thomas) Webber Wilson of Mississippi who in 1928 gave up a seat in the House to run for the Senate and lost. Lest his friend run for the Senate in 1936, Senator Harrison got Postmaster General Farley to induce Attorney General Cummings to appoint Mr. Wilson a judge in the Virgin Islands.

Judge Wilson is a stern Justice and a Mississippi orator. In one of his first cases in the Islands he had declared: "I am responsible only to Homer Cummings and to God Almighty." He refused to dismiss a case against a minor public works employe charged with pilfering a small amount of lumber and cement. Instead, he put witnesses on the stand, questioned them and then, without a jury, found the employe guilty and fined him $200, saying, "You have become a Judas and Benedict Arnold to your country." This procedure was, according to the Department of Justice, proper under Danish law.