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The Approach. So far, what had Lew Schwellenbach done in his new job? Mainly he had busied himself with trying to knock an organization together.
To Madame Perkins' roomy office in the Labor Department, he had brought the solid backing of Harry Truman, with carte blanche to do what he wanted. Many of the powers that should have been in the Department had long since been given piecemeal to boards & bureaus like WLB and NLRB. Even if labor lay low for a while, the new Secretary would have had plenty of work to do.
In those first days he had the solid backing of labor, which welcomed its new advocate to Washington. He sat down and hurriedly began to reorganize the Government's labor functions.
Soon he had brought into the sprawling, ineffectual Department the once independent War Labor Board, now dying of natural causes; the War Manpower Commission, also moribund; the U.S. Employment Service, which Congress wants to hand back to the states. He hoped also to bring in the National Labor Relations Board.
But above all, he wanted to stiffen the U.S. Conciliation Service, make it the backbone of his Department. From Chicago he summoned handsome, energetic Regional WLB Chairman Edgar L. Warren, made him boss conciliator, began to talk of better pay and better men in the conciliation setup.
Lew Schwellenbach, believing that the labor storm was somewhere back in the hills, had other plans too. But he scarcely got them on paper when the facts of lift-went thundering past the facts of administrative doodling.
By last week he had pinned his hopes mainly on the labor-management conference—in the manner of Woodrow Wilson's Industrial Conference—to convene in Washington Nov. 5.
The Background. To solve the U.S. labor problem, Harry Truman had picked a man whose career was a curious mixture of the dull and the intriguing. As a Senator, Lew Schwellenbach had been among the most violent of the New Deal's "young Turks," but his personal life has been in every instance conservatively planned. A mild man who chews his cigars, wears horn-rimmed spectacles and sports a zippered sport jacket on the job. Schwellenbach is studious by temperament but short of temper; judicial-minded but a bear at partisan politics; labor-minded but with a sense of fairness to industry. He is also a man who did not want the job of Labor Secretary: he took it on the urging of his old Senate crony, now the President of the U.S.
Wisconsin-born, 51-year-old Lew Schwellenbach is a man with a purpose. A boyhood admirer of William Jennings Bryan, serious-minded young Lew sold newspapers and magazines on the streets of Spokane, where his family moved when he was eight, saved every cent for a college education. At the University of Washington he became a formidable debater, a campus politico, a precinct committeeman in the Democratic Party before he left the classroom. Friends recall that he became a Democrat because the state was full of Republicans; he figured he could get in on the ground floor.
The Lawyer. In 1919 he started a modest law practice, earning about $35 a month. Soon (1921) he found himself in the limelight of Seattle's famous Mahoney trunk murder. His client. James A. Mahoney, was convicted and hanged, but every crime-reading family in the Northwest knew of Lew Schwellenbach's fight to save him.