(See Cover)
One day in 1836, near the end of his second term, old President Andrew Jackson walked across the street from the White House, struck the earth with his walking stick and said: "Right here is where I want the cornerstone." Then & there it was laid, and around it was built the columned granite pile of the U.S. Treasury Department.
Old Hickory had good reason to want the Treasury under his eagle eye. Ever since Alexander Hamilton became the first Secretary of the Treasury in 1789 (and regarded himself as second only to the President in importance), the Treasury had been at the center of the nation's high politics. Jackson staked his political career on a showdown battle over fiscal policy, and shuffled Secretaries like poker cards until he got one who agreed with him. And so, embroiled in one vital question or another, the Treasury was at the heart of politics in subsequent administrations; Treasury & tariff, Treasury & greenbacks, Treasury & free silver, Treasury & the gold standard were hotly argued at the nation's dinner tables through the generations, and into the first months of the New Deal.
Then, abruptly, that kind of argument shifted. It no longer turned around the Secretary of the Treasury.
Forgotten Men. Early in Franklin Roosevelt's Administration the U.S. began to forget how to argue its most important issues. Where politics used to be fought out in terms of the economy, economics were argued in terms of politics—first in the language of the social reformers, then of World War II's soldiers, and finally of the Marshall Planners and the diplomats. The succession of Treasury Secretaries—F.D.R.'s Henry Morgenthau and Truman's Fred Vinson and John Snyder—became, fiscally speaking, all but forgotten men themselves, charged mainly with paying the bills and borrowing money at the lowest possible interest rates.
How did the Treasury come to lose prestige in a generation when it handled more money than Andrew Jackson—or Theodore Roosevelt—could have conceived of? One significant answer: a government that accepts private business as the mainspring of the economy can use the Treasury as a regulator, but a government that considers itself the economic mainspring will put its economic power in the hands of the planners and managers. The passage of the Government's fiscal power from the Treasury to Harry Hopkins of WPA and Harold Ickes of PWA symbolized a whole new philosophy of the relation of government and business.
Now, perhaps, another and reverse shift is due. Eisenhower has named to the job a stocky, straight-shouldered man with a strong nose, bleak blue eyes and a disarming smile. George Magoffin Humphrey, 62, is the 55th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. By all readable portents he will be the first in a generation to restore Treasury to its function of high policymaking—by fiscal leadership—not by bureaucratic control of business.