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a winning candidate in Franklin D. Roosevelt. The
Ickeses for years have had a small summer place at Coolidge, McKinley
County, 20 miles from Gallup, N. Mex. There Mrs. Ickes goes to study
the Navajos and Pueblos who consider her their good friend. Her
husband on his visits likewise came to know Indians fairly well. On the
basis of that knowledge Senator Hiram Johnson last winter recommended
Mr. Ickes to the President-elect as a man who would make a good
Commissioner of Indian Affairs. At their first meeting Mr. Roosevelt
and Mr. Ickes discovered that they spoke the same political and economic
language. Mr. Ickes' appointment to the Interior portfolio
quickly followed. Public Business. In Washington Secretary Ickes,
aged 59, is now a bachelor, Mrs. Ickes spending the summer in New
Mexico. He has rented an old house in Georgetown but to date has spent
so little time in it that he has not seen all its rooms. No golfer, he
takes his fun on Sunday afternoon motor trips. At the Interior
Department he works, generally in his shirt sleeves, at one end of a
large rectangular room with brown panelled walls decorated with buffalo
heads. His callers all flock in at once and wait their turn at the
other end while he conducts public business publicly. While a visitor
is talking, he squirms in his chair, shuffles papers, breaks in with
quick, pointed questions. When the office door is shut and he settles
down to dictate, not even another Cabinet member can get in to see
him. He dictates a daily letter to Mrs. Ickes, scribbles a few personal
lines at the end. His humor is dry and unsmiling. When he and a
colleague got lost in the new Department of Commerce building, he told
a passing newshawk: "Please wire Mr. Hoover to tell us how to get out
of his building." When President Roosevelt summoned his Cabinet to the
cruiser Indianapolis in choppy Chesapeake Bay, Secretary Ickes, a
wretched sailor, announced: "I'll die for my President but I'm damned
if I'll get seasick for him."
Though he never held a big public job before in his life Secretary Ickes
in his calm, informal, dogged way makes a surprisingly good Cabinet
executive. With a broad streak of the Puritan in him he overworks
himself and his staff.
Final Punch? Secretary Ickes is really, personally interested in Indians
and national parks. Early in his term he tried to grapple the oil
problem by shutting producers up in a room and keeping them there
until they made terms among themselves. Last week President Roosevelt
made him responsible for the enforcement of the executive order banning
interstate shipment of "hot oil".
But these and other official duties pale beside Secretary Ickes'
interest in public works. Though others are dubious, he is convinced
that national recovery will turn on the building program started last
week; that the wise expenditure of $3,300,000,000 will supply the
final punch to knock out the Depression.
For two years after the crash, President Hoover pressed for public works
as a prime unemployment relief measure. After spending hundreds of
millions he suddenly dropped it as a failure, warned the country that
it could not squander itself into prosperity. His critics claimed that
if he had spent billions instead of millions he might have turned the
tide.
