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CALIFORNIA: Footnote to History

3 minute read
TIME

Hatching in Congress is a Treasury plan to help finance the nation’s colossal bill for defense: the sale of baby bonds and thrift stamps. The scheme roused dusty memories of War Savings Stamps and Liberty Loan drives. Other memories of the same era will be buried this week with William Gibbs McAdoo, the tall, spare, sprightly man with the high voice and the face like Punch, who led the drives.

McAdoo was then Secretary of the Treasury. Georgia-born, he had grown up in Tennessee, practiced law and lost his shirt in a street railway project. He moved to Manhattan and as organizer and president of Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Co. built the Hudson tubes, and laid the foundation of his fortune.

In 1910 Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, made such an impression on the Tennessee lawyer that he took up Wilson’s political aims, helped get him elected Governor of New Jersey and, later President of the U. S. McAdoo’s reward was the Treasury.

One day, at the foot of the Washington Monument, McAdoo plucked up courage to propose to Wilson’s 24-year-old daughter Eleanor. His wife had died the year before, he was then 50, and already a grandfather. Nevertheless he became Wilson’s son-in-law. The war took him to the zenith of his public career: he floated four huge Liberty Loans, took over the rail roads, issued $370,000,000 in emergency currency in three months, ran the Secret Service, helped Senator Carter Glass launch the Federal Reserve System.

In 1920 McAdoo ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Four years later he tried again, and deadlocked with New York’s Al Smith in a sweltering Madison Square Garden convention that went to 103 ballots before John W. Davis noodled through as the nominee. McAdoo carried away a grudge against Smith that he paid back with interest. He never raised his voice against the anti-Catholic bigotry of the 1928 Smith campaign. In 1932 he delivered the California delegation to Franklin Roosevelt and ended all hopes for Smith. McAdoo himself, with the backing of William Randolph Hearst, went to the Senate, where he remained for six years, cackling in the corridors, voting the New Deal way, and waltzing spryly and frequently at Washington nightclubs. Divorced by Eleanor Wilson, he married again, this time to 24-year-old Doris Cross.

He tried in 1938 for another Senatorial term but was beaten for the nomination by Sheridan (Up-and) Downey. McAdoo was then 75. A lean, grey wheel horse of the Democratic Party, politically swaybacked, politically a pensioner, he retired to quieter pastures. Just to keep his hand in, he assumed the chairmanship of the American President Lines.

Thereafter he minded his boats, speaking out on politics only occasionally. Few paid him much mind. Last October he whimsically registered for the draft. “Seventy-six and eager to go,” he remarked. “Maybe I’ll get a little adventure. It would be grand if I could meet Hitler in battle array.”

Old Mr. McAdoo was in Washington for the inauguration; he was still there last week when he met a greater conqueror than Adolf Hitler. Stricken with a heart attack, a few hours later William Gibbs McAdoo died.

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