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Charles Sawyer—much as he looked the part—was neither banker nor industrialist. The businesslike Secretary of Commerce owned, among other things, an interest in the Cincinnati Reds ball club, the minor-league Cincinnati Mohawks hockey team, and the Shooting Star roller coaster. He was, primarily, a lawyer, a politician, a promoter.
The Secretary's Mirror. The best Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover had been looking in a shaving mirror, generally with satisfaction, for close to half a century. At 62 he was a millionaire, but he still had the reputation of being a frugal man; he considered lavish official entertaining "a waste of money." He lived in a large brick house (rented) on cobbled O Street in fashionable Georgetown, waited on by two servants; he himself was apt as not to answer the door. He had never visited his neighbor, Secretary of State Dean Acheson; until a few weeks ago he didn't know that his Cabinet colleague ' lived only a few blocks away. He had no hobbies—"except my grandchildren." He was a man who stood upon his dignity. "If there is anything I hate," he told some subordinates in his department, "it is for people to call me Charlie."
This was the man who was the nation's twelfth Secretary of Commerce, a job which has, at one time or another, fallen to an oddly contrasting lot of personalities : Herbert Hoover, a high-collared symbol of Republican conservatism; Harry Hopkins, the frail, dedicated symbol of the Roosevelt revolution; Henry Wallace, a symbol of the idealist gone wild and then sour; Jesse Jones, the hard-nosed banker-baron, Texas Stetson style; Averell Harriman, a symbol of the silver spoon and the itch to do good. If Charles Sawyer was the symbol of anything, he was a symbol of the man who never missed a bet.
His father was a Maine Republican who moved to the village of Madisonville, Ohio (now a part of Cincinnati), where father Sawyer was a school principal. With a record of good marks in high school, Charles, in 1905, went to Oberlin College. There, helping to pay his own expenses, he negotiated the four-year course in three years, went on to the Cincinnati Law School, where he won almost every scholarship prize that was offered. He placed first out of 193 students in the bar exams, set up as a barrister and promptly ran, at 24, for the Cincinnati city council.
He ran as a Democrat. Cincinnati was in the hands of a callous, blatant Republican machine. Sawyer put on a crusading campaign and won his seat in a ward that was normally Republican. Four years later the Democrats ran Sawyer for mayor. But that time a Republican opponent twice his age snowed him under by the biggest majority a Cincinnati mayor had ever piled up, and Sawyer went back to the law.
In 1917, he enlisted. He became engaged to Margaret Sterrett Johnston, niece of Colonel William Cooper Procter of Procter & Gamble, and married her just before he sailed for France.
He escaped the flu epidemic which ravaged his ship; overseas, he served in the General Staff College and provost marshal's office. Back in the U.S., he wangled his discharge almost as soon as his ship was warped into a Hoboken dock, and went back to Cincinnati to become, subsequently, a partner in the top Cincinnati law firm of Dinsmore & Shohl. Among other firms, Dinsmore & Shohl represented Procter & Gamble.