When Harold Ickes is having a good rich, wrathful week probably every man, woman and child in the U.S. is against him; and even when things are dull there are always at least a few million people who are still burned up at his last crack.
Honest, fearless, tough and shrewd —and loyal to his boss — Harold Ickes long ago earned his post as dog robber to the New Deal. But he expanded this job, as he does all the jobs he can lay his hands on. For eight and a half years he has been performing a long list of necessary tasks.
He is the Scout who goes ahead, trial balloon in hand, prowling the unexplored bushes of public opinion, whipping up sentiment pro or con whatever the President has decided the U.S. should be for or against. He is the Whipping Boy who takes the blame whenever anything goes wrong. He is the New Deal's Janitor, who cleans out the goboons and sweeps up the floor (usually using some victim as the broom). He captains the Purity Squad that keeps his colleagues honest. He is the Public Executioner, the Court Poisoner and the Bouncer. In short, if there is on the docket a hard, nasty, grinding job, Ickes gets the assignment.
But he is something beyond all this. Harold Ickes is the gadfly of Conscience to the Administration. Every time the other New Dealers get fat, happy and optimistic, which is the natural laissez-faire attitude of the President. Harold bores in, stinging, squawking, -kicking like a case of first-degree tantrums. This is his great service to the New Deal.
Ickes believes that when a policy has been laid down, it should be followed. When the Administration said: No-more-Business-as-Usual; when the President pledged the U.S. to become the "Arsenal of Democracy" he took it all literally. Then he watched the dinosaur of a defense program falter, swamp itself, stumble from delay to delay, without plan understanding or grim intent. He listened carefully to the defense chiefs delivering excellently-phrased appeals to the U.S. to arouse, make sacrifices, speed up. This looked very good in the rotogravures, but Mr. Ickes then watched the same orators on their return to Washington, saw them wasting month after precious month.
Ickes cannot watch any spectacle for than a few minutes without comment, usually acidulous. First he chafed. Then his hackles rose. Finally he boiled over, blew his top. His basic point: the U.S. is going to run out of everything. He ran out of aluminum months before Big Ed Stettinius' materials division saw any real problem. He ran out of steel in January, although the President, Economist Gano Dunn and Stettinius were still insisting in February that the U.S. had of plenty of steel. In quick succession Harold Ickes then ran out of electric power, coal, transportation, railroad & shipping, and finally: oil.
Headaches. Fortnight ago Harold Ickes received his reward for having so long foreseen and so valiantly proclaimed the critical deficiencies in the U.S. defense program. He was left out of it. When Judge Samuel I. Rosenman waddled around getting advice on defense reorganization he found unanimity on only one recommendation : keep Harold Ickes out of this. With the President's full approval, the Gadfly was then completely boxed off and shut out of the program.