The Pittsburgh Press (February 9, 1946)
Background of news –
End in sight for the Ick?
By Bertram Benedict
One aftermath of the fight on the Pauley nomination may well be the departure of Secretary Ickes from the Truman Cabinet. If the nomination is rejected, the praise or blame will be laid primarily at the door of Mr. Ickes’s testimony against the California oil operator.
The secretary’s ears must have burned on Thursday when the president said that Mr. Ickes might have been mistaken in his statement about Mr. Pauley. That sounded like the rebuke direct.
Next month has two dates on which any Ickes resignation might fittingly become effective. On the Mr. Benedict coming March 4 he will have been secretary of the interior for 13 years. That is next to the longest record for any head of an executive department. The record is held by James Wilson of Iowa, secretary of agriculture for 16 years under William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Albert Gallatin served as secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson and Madison for 12¾ years. No other secretary of the interior has served so long as 10 years. The average tenure in office of Mr. Ickes’s 31 predecessors was only 2 2/3 years.
Only ‘original’ left
And on the coming March 15, Mr. Ickes will be 72 years old. He is the only member of the original Roosevelt Cabinet of 1833 to retain his 1933 post in the Truman Cabinet, for Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace originally was secretary of agriculture.
It is not only Mr. Pauley’s many influential Democratic friends who are after Mr. Ickes’s scalp. The secretary is opposed by most of the state governments, Democratic and Republican, in his attempt to have the federal government get title to the offshore oil deposits. And Mr. Ickes has long fought the Kelly organization in Chicago, one of the most powerful of the city machines on which success for the Democratic Party in national elections largely depends.
In fact, most regular Democratic leaders always have looked askance at Mr. Ickes as a Johnny-Come-Lately in the Democratic Party. That is not so much because Mr. Ickes was a supporter of the first Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 as because he returned to the Republican fold afterwards.
An active Republican
Harold Le Claire Ickes, descendant of early American stock (he is a member of the Sons of the American Revolution), was a newspaperman in Chicago before studying law. As a lawyer he took civil liberties cases without fees, taught at the social settlement, Hull House, fought the Insull utility interests, managed reform candidacies for the mayoralty.
He supported Charles E. Hughes, the Republican candidate, for president in 1916; was a delegate to the Republican National Convention of 1920; suggested Sen. Hiram Johnson of California for president in 1924, managed the campaign of an independent Republican for the Senate from Illinois in 1926.
Mr. Ickes has a sharp tongue (in 1940 he said Thomas E. Dewey had “thrown his diaper into the ring” and later he termed the late Wendell L. Willkie the “barefoot boy of Wall Street”). He has not rallied any labor support behind him as Mr. Wallace has done, and he has consistently charged the press with being subservient to big business.