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Graft? The Department of the Interior has never quite lived down the bad name Albert Bacon Fall gave it as a result of the oil scandals a decade ago. When honest Harold Ickes took office, he promised the country he would not be "the black sheep" of the Cabinet. Yet, like everyone else, he knows perfectly well that three billion Federal dollars cannot be poured out of the Treasury without some of it spilling over improperly. Day & night he reiterates his determination to keep graft out of his Public Works Administration. He can trust himself and his immediate aides, for dishonesty at the top is a rare exception in national government. But what he and Washington fear are stealing and crockery down the line among the hordes of minor officials far removed from his office. To catch such greedy sinners he has organized a Bureau of Investigation under Louis Russell Glavis whose job it will be to choke graft in its tracks wherever found. Emergence. When Harold Ickes went to Washington on March 4 the general public marveled at his name, wondered who he was. Today, after four months, he has emerged as one of President Roosevelt's closest and most trusted advisers. "My forebears lived in the foothills of the Alleghenies and there I learned to love flowers and trees," is the way he generally begins his own biography. When he was 16 he left Pennsylvania for Chicago where he worked his way through the University of Chicago, got a job as a newshawk on the Daily News. He quit the Daily News to return to the University for a law course, came out and set up a small practice in the Loop. His onetime partner was Donald Randall Richberg, longtime attorney for railroad labor and now counsel to General Hugh Johnson's Industrial Recovery Administration in Washington. "Mrs. Ickes' Husband." In 1911 Harold Ickes married Anna Wilmarth Thompson who had divorced Professor James Westfall Thompson. By her first marriage she had two children, Anna and Wilmarth, and by her second two more, Raymond and Robert. Mrs. Ickes had money from her father who was in the gas light fixture business. The family built a house on a six-acre lot in Winnetka and named it "Thorncroft." In the backyard Mr. Ickes who did not have to practice his profession too hard began growing dahlias. Their development into prize-winning strains became a passion with him matched only by his interest in stamp collecting. Because his wife, tall, grey-haired and not as severe as she looks in her photographs, was the active, successful member of the family, he was long known around Winnetka as "Mrs. Ickes' husband." In 1928 she re- signed as a trustee of the University of Illinois, was elected as a Republican to the State Legislature. There she is now serving her third term as one of three representatives from an enormous district which encircles Cook County from Glencoe on the north to Blue Island on the south. As a Chicago lawyer Harold Ickes was early attracted to reform politics. He backed Charles E. Merriam for Mayor—and lost. He backed Theodore Roosevelt for the Presidency in 1912. He backed Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 and James Middleton Cox in 1920. He backed Hiram Johnson for the Presidency in 1924. In 1928 he voted vainly for Al Smith. Nominally a Republican, he liked to call himself a "lone wolf" in politics. In 1932 for the first time, Lone Wolf Ickes picked