California's McAdoo
Sirs:
We, the undersigned, five or more California voters, hereby request you to publish the legislative record of U. S. Senator from California, William Gibbs McAdoo. . . .
CHARLES G. HEMMER IMJORT</br> GERALD H. TRAUTMAN</br> ROBERT C. KIRKWOOD</br> OWEN JAMESON</br> STARR THOMAS</br> WARREN A. ROUSE</br> San Francisco, Calif.</br>
The record of Senator William Gibbs McAdoo is as follows: Born: At Marietta, Ga., Oct. 31, 1863.
Career: Son of a lawyer and officer in the Confederate Army who was disfranchised and impoverished after the Civil War, William G. McAdoo was a messenger, clerk, handyman, worked his way during his three years at the University of Tennessee. While he was reading law in Chattanooga, he got into politics as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1884. He cast his first vote for Grover Cleveland, was admitted to the bar just after his 21st birthday. More businessman than lawyer, he lost his shirt trying to electrify the Knoxville Street Railroad system, mortgaged his wife's Chattanooga house for $5,000 and moved to New York. There he prospered mightily as organizer and president of Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Co., which opened the first tunnels under the Hudson River in 1908 and 1909 at a cost of $72,000,000. What he made from the tunnels has been much discussed (his own estimate: an average $50,000 a year for eleven years) but he has been a rich man ever since.
McAdoo's real political career began when he met Woodrow Wilson in the Princeton, N. J. railroad station in 1910, was so impressed that he helped elect Wilson Governor of New Jersey. Two years later he helped elect him President. He was the New Freedom's Secretary of the Treasury until after the Armistice. "To make it a people's Treasury rather than a bankers' Treasury," McAdoo made national banks pay 2 % interest on Government deposits, helped Carter Glass push through the Federal Reserve Act. The War saw McAdoo's zenith as a public servant: he issued $370,000,000 in emergency currency in three months, ran the spy-hunting Secret Service, floated four Liberty Loans, the Fourth being the biggest of all bond issues (23,000,000 subscriptions totaling $6,989,047,000), served as Director General of all U. S. railroads after Wilson took them over by proclamation Dec. 26, 1917.
As a great Wilsonian (he had cemented the relationship by marrying Daughter Eleanor Wilson in 1914), McAdoo came near the Democratic Presidential nominations in 1920 and 1924. Sidetracked by New York's Al Smith, McAdoo repaid that score and formed a second political alliance eight years later by helping to sidetrack Al Smith for Franklin Roosevelt at Chicago in 1932. At the same time he ran for the Senate with Hearst and Roosevelt backing, won his first big elective job at 69.