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Secretary Hull will have a fellow Tennesseean to work with in the person of Norman Hezekiah Davis, President Hoover's Man-About-Europe, chairman of the U. S. delegation to the Disarmament Conference.
The plumpest diplomatic plum, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, seemed last week about to drop into the dapper lap of Robert Worth Bingham, 61, wealthy Louisville, Ky. publisher. Born and educated in North Carolina, Mr. Bingham crossed the mountains to Kentucky to seek fame & fortune. He practiced law, served as Mayor of Louisville (1907), sat on the bench, organized long leaf tobacco growers into cooperatives. After his first wife was killed in an automobile accident, he married the widow of Henry Morrison Flagler who made $70,000,000 developing the Florida East Coast. In 1917 she died, leaving Mr. Bingham $5,000,000. The next year he bought the famed Louisville Courier-Journal and the less famed Louisville Times. In his papers he wobbled between the Republican and Democratic parties. In 1928 Hoover was his candidate. In 1932 it was Roosevelt. A man of position and polish, Publisher Bingham now sits on the board of a bank, a railroad, a creosoting company. He has a married son living in Scotland whither he goes grouse-shooting every August.
Secretary of the Treasury. William Hartman Woodin, 64, had 21 important directorships to resign when President-elect Roosevelt picked him for this portfolio after Carter Glass turned it down. The appointment of such a successful manufacturer of railroad equipment to head Federal finances heartened U. S. business. Secretary Woodin is a "hard money" man who can be counted on to oppose all schemes for currency inflation. He was a stanch Union League Republican until, as fuel administrator for New York in 1922, he came under the spell of Governor Smith, whose presidential candidacy he supported.
Mr. Woodin's father had a foundry at Berwick, Pa. where he was born. As a college graduate the son was put into this shop, cleaning castings at 90¢ per day. It was hateful work for an esthete like young Will Woodin. Once he became an expert foundryman, he fled to Europe to study music. Recalled by his father, he entered
American Car & Foundry, world's biggest of its kind, emerged as president in 1916. His company also builds ACF cruisers. When Federal agents began potshooting innocent yachtsmen as rum-runners, Mr. Woodin turned violently Wet (TIME, April 29, 1929).
His contribution to the Roosevelt campaign was twofold: 1) $35,000 in cash; 2) a Big Businessman's assurance to Big Business that the "New Deal" would benefit the country. A close personal friend of the new President, he sits as a trustee on the Warm Springs Foundation.
Music is still Mr. Woodin's avocation. At night he sits up in bed in his penthouse just off Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and plucks out new melodies on a guitar. For this week's Inaugural he has written "The Franklin Delano Roosevelt March." Works of his which have been well received professionally include "The Oriental Suite" and "The Covered Wagon Suite." But he says: "I'm not a budding Mozart or Brahms. I don't claim genius." Last week politicians poked fun at one of the verses of his songs for children which goes:
Oh, hear the happy bluebirds singing in the rain.