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Secretary of the Interior. Ray Lyman Wilbur, the outgoing Secretary of the Navy's younger, taller, thinner brother, goes from California into the Cabinet on the sun-tinted wings of long personal friendship with Herbert Hoover. President Harding imported many Ohio friends. They said "yes" to his face and "no" behind his back, but he continued to like them as friends. Out of New England, President Coolidge brought John Garibaldi Sargent to be Attorney General, William Fairfield Whiting to be Secretary of Commerce. Old friends are necessary in a Cabinet, if only to keep a President from getting lonely.
The Hoover-Wilbur friendship began in undergraduate days at Stanford University. Mr. Hoover went out into the world to slay the Jabberwock. Dr. Wilbur stayed behind to become president of the university. During the War, Mr. Hoover called Dr. Wilbur to assist him. Now, despite Mr. Hoover's well known intention of truncating the Department to which he has called Dr. Wilbur, the latter's friends vigorously deny that his role is to be that of a particularly docile yes-peg. Suppose, for example, that President Hoover should decide to include a new Department of Education in his reorganization of the Government. How convenient it would be to have the able president of a great university right on hand to take over the work.
Secretary of Agriculture. Arthur M. Hyde of Missouri neatly combines the various contentions of warring farm groups. Last spring he was a Lowden man in the belief that the farmer must be immediately saved by bountiful Federal aid. Then he nimbly leaped into the Hoover omnibus by deciding that the notorious equalization fee was no proper method of salvation. Mr. Hoover picked him over his own protest and has set him down to hoe one of the hardest rows in the Administration's patch of current troubles.
In Grundy County, Mr. Hyde has three farms. Yet it was not as a Farmer that he was chosen, but as a Business Man. Born in Princeton, Mo., 51 years ago, he became a lawyer, lived to be the town's mayor, moved away to Trenton, Mo., where he opened an automobile sales agency. He acquired a law office in Kansas City, headed an insurance company, was well along toward prominence.
The rural Missouri voters love their own kind, which explains his election as governor in 1920. So lavishly did he go about getting good country roads and better village schools that in 1922 he was charged with inefficiently increasing Missouri's taxes. Yet his record as an administrator was held up by Mr. Hoover as a reason for his election.
On the stump Mr. Hyde is loud and noisy. Missouri's Senator James A. Reed used to call him "the steam whistle on a fertilizer plant." In the new Administration the voice will be the Secretary of Agriculture but the words will be the President. Mr. Hyde, because his post is politically conspicuous, will have to be a polite Dr. Jekyll to survive.