National Affairs: The Modifier

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Cordell Hull was polite and quiet to the point of colorlessness. A tall, studious, stooping man who talked with a faint lisp, he had a habit of clasping and unclasping his long, sensitive hands during periods of silent meditation. He was a Tennessee mountain man; in 52 years of public life he lived inflexibly by the code of the Cumberland frontier. He abhorred ostentation, insisted on personal independence, and never quite forgot the old Tennessee tradition of violence. As he grew old he developed a saintly look.

But he had shrewdness, a poker player's eye (said a friend: "He could look sad and beautiful and humble while he held four of a kind"). He was an implacable partisan politician. In moments of wrath he could curse, in his soft drawl, with the eloquence of a river gambler. Few events of the war years comforted official Washington more than the tongue-lashing old Cordell Hull delivered to the Japanese diplomats, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburo Kurusu, on the day of Pearl Harbor.

Little Billy's Boy. He was born in a cabin at Starpoint, in the Cumberland foothills. Cord's daddy, trigger-tempered, one-eyed little Billy Hull, was famous. He had killed the man who shot out his eye and had grown rich rafting logs down the river (he left nearly $300,000 when he died). Cord started early to add luster to the family name.

He was a lawyer at 19, a member of the state legislature at 21, a circuit court judge at 31. In 1906, when he was 35, he was elected to Congress and went away to Washington. He served in Congress for 24 years. During the bleak years of 1921-24, when the rumble of the Harding landslide still echoed across the nation, he served as Democratic national chairman. Slowly, he built a reputation as an economist. He was mentioned, vaguely, as presidential timber. But the '20s were dreary years for Democrats. When he was elected to the Senate in 1930, he had good reason to believe he had reached the zenith of his career.

First & Last Chance. Then, when Hull was 61, Franklin Roosevelt became President of the U.S. and Cordell Hull was made Secretary of State, Hull had been in office only a few months when a major rift opened between him and the New Dealers. He was heading the U.S. delegation to the London Economic Conference, which sought an objective dear to his heart: the revival of international trade. Success, in Hull's view, turned on reduced tariffs and fewer trade restrictions. Roosevelt publicly endorsed these goals, but while Hull was crossing the Atlantic, the New Deal planners saw that free trade conflicted with their own notion of a "managed" price level; their influence was added to the old high-tariff group among businessmen and farmers. Roosevelt pulled the rug out from under Hull and the conference was a spectacular failure, with the British government placing all blame on the Americans.