FDR - Jean Edward Smith [184]
For Treasury, Carter Glass of Virginia had no competition. The architect of the Federal Reserve Act while a member of the House, secretary of the Treasury under Wilson, and now ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the seventy-four-year-old Glass had been the party’s senior spokesman on public finance so long as anyone could remember. This was the one cabinet post on which Roosevelt had no wiggle room, and he made the offer to Glass at the same time he approached Hull. Both FDR and Glass were apprehensive. Glass was committed to hard currency, fiscal restraint, and a sound dollar. He deplored deficit spending. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was pragmatic: “We’re not going to throw ideas out of the window simply because they are labeled inflation.”65 When Glass declined because of ill health, the Roosevelt camp breathed a sigh of relief. To head Treasury, FDR immediately turned to Republican William H. Woodin, a respected New York industrialist who had helped bankroll each of Roosevelt’s campaigns. Woodin, too, was reluctant, but Basil O’Connor convinced him to take the post during an hour-and-a-half cab ride circling through Central Park. Like Glass, Woodin was uneasy about inflation, but he was not obsessive about it, and his personal loyalty to FDR was absolute. Like Hull, he would be easy to work with.66
When Glass decided to remain on the sidelines, Roosevelt turned to his senior senatorial colleague, Claude A. Swanson, to head the Navy Department. Swanson, dapper in frock coats and winged collars, had chaired the Naval Affairs Committee when FDR had been assistant secretary, and he shared Roosevelt’s love for the service. His appointment not only ensured that the admirals would remain in charge but cleared a Virginia Senate seat for Roosevelt’s old friend Governor Harry F. Byrd.
For the War Department, Roosevelt selected Governor George Dern of Utah. FDR was indebted to Dern for his preconvention campaigning in the West and had originally slated him for Interior. When conservationists objected, he moved Dern to War. One of the few non-Mormons to hold elective office in Utah, Dern knew little about the Army, but in those days of small budgets and international isolation it seemed of little consequence.
When Dern proved unacceptable at Interior, Roosevelt turned first to Senator Hiram Johnson of California, then to his Republican colleague Bronson Cutting of New Mexico. Both declined. At the last moment Roosevelt asked Harold Ickes of Chicago, whom he did not know but who was recommended by Johnson and Cutting. Ickes had originally hoped to be appointed commissioner of Indian affairs but was elevated to the secretaryship almost by default. “Well,” Louis Howe quipped, “that’s the first break the Indians have had in a hundred years.”67
For attorney general Roosevelt went again to the Senate and named Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, who had chaired both the 1924 and 1932 Democratic conventions. Walsh had devoted much of his public life to investigating corporate malfeasance, and his appointment sent a clear signal that special interests were no longer immune. Another septuagenarian, Walsh led an active social life and suffered a fatal heart attack on March 2—two days before the inauguration—having just courted and married a much younger Cuban sugar heiress in Havana. He was replaced by Homer Cummings of Connecticut, whom FDR had planned to name governor-general of the Philippines.
For Commerce FDR had intended to appoint Jesse Straus of R. H. Macy, a position Straus’s uncle had