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But his juiciest wrath has always been reserved for the private power interests. He always thinks of them as he thinks of the late Samuel Insull. Ickes fought Insull bravely but utterly without result for 25 years. From 1907, when Ickes got a law degree, until 1932, he was on the losing side in every local, State and national campaign, whether he was Republican, Bull Mooser or whatnot, with one exception—1923. He made a record only as the most persistent gadfly of all Chicago's generations of crusading reformers. He never knew when he was licked, and he never forgot who had licked him. Thus for years his greatest pleasure came from blackballing Insull's attempt to enter Chicago's exclusive City Club.
Philosophy. The rock on which Harold Ickes' relationships with businessmen have always been wrecked is his complete inability to understand the processes of earning a nickel. He has no idea what a man goes through to earn money. He married a wealthy divorcee, big, kindly Mrs. Anna Wilmarth Thompson in 1911 (she was killed in an auto crash in 1935 and he married young Jane Dahlman in 1938). For years he collected stamps, grew dahlias (he became expert, raised prize flowers, named one well-known dahlia "The Anna W. Ickes"), and wrote insulting letters to the newspapers. His office work as a lawyer, was chiefly in defending civil liberties cases, and in reading about conservation — which is the one subject he has thoroughly mastered.
The weary, unrested Secretary who returns to Washington this week still loves flowers, loves comfort, still has no roots in reality. He has never had to take into account the shabby, compromising people that other men must rub elbows with in politics or business. Never having had to figure angles, always being certain of his certainties, he is unable to understand the pressures which force honest Senators to make deals, compromises, or shade their positions to square with realities. He is against politicians. He does not believe in sharing-the-wealth. He is the tightest, stingiest, string-saving, pinchfist Administrator the U.S. Government has had in many years. Personally he is generous, but exact.
Ickes is unlike anyone else in Washington or anywhere else. He will not really be happy until he has a chance, some Saturday afternoon after his return, to slide his legs under his old typewriter in the little study in his big spacious, white frame home, pull the clips out of his brief case, and alternately scowling and chuckling, finger out insulting letters to the newspapers who have most recently at tacked him. The Department will stop as many of these letters as possible, will try to ration him on the newspapers he hates most, but of one thing Publisher Robert R. McCormick may be sure : in the next six months the isolationist Chicago Tribune will receive at least a half-dozen of the most sulphurous letters Har old Ickes can write — which is very sul phurous indeed.
Such is the man Mr. Roosevelt asked to handle the oil transportation crisis. Small wonder then that when the U.S. stepped on the gas, Ickes stepped on the U.S.