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Turtles & Towboats. The Department of Commerce Building (sometimes called "Hoover's Folly" after the ex-Secretary who laid its cornerstone four months before the 1929 crash) is a wondrously massive seven-story limestone, granite and marble pile with 3,311 rooms and 5,200 windows, covering three full city blocks. From its-vast collection of books and reports, U.S. citizens can learn how to run a pants cleaning shop or whether there is a market for hookah pipes in Nicaragua. Its archives contain patents for ornithopters (beating-wing flying machines) and a "pedal calorenticator" (a flexible rubber tube reaching from the nostrils to the inside of the shoes; the wearer can warm his feet merely by exhaling). In its basement is an aquarium left over from the Bureau of Fisheries (now under the Department of the Interior) where catfish, a man-eating piranha and a two-headed turtle sport and splash and amuse small boys.
Commerce has jurisdiction over nine watertight bureaus: Patents, Census, Foreign & Domestic Commerce, Coast & Geodetic Survey, Weather, Civil Aeronautics Administration, Public Roads, Standards, and Inland Waterways, which runs the world's biggest barge line (the Federal Barge Lines on the Mississippi and its tributaries) and whose pride and joy is the new towboat, Harry Truman.
The Buzzer. When Charles Sawyer took over, he quickly earned the nickname "Buzz" by keeping his aides hopping to answer his buzzer. He sent out a memo: "There will be no smoking in the Secretary's office or at conferences with the Secretary." That was distressing news to Commerce's economists, who love their ancient, richly caked pipes. It also set the tone for his administration: cordiality but no intimacy. Charles Sawyer lost no time in getting into affairs on a level above the merely administrative.
He started figuring out ways to get more venture capital into U.S. industry. He set about trying to clarify the Government's antitrust policy. These were longtime projects. While they jelled, he set about improving relations between Harry Truman and the U.S. businessman. This idea was not new: it goes with the job. Even Harry Hopkins cheered for business as long as he was Secretary of Commerce. Even Henry Wallace had declared, "We must have an expanding private industry" before he was booted out of the Commerce secretaryship for speaking out on foreign affairs.
But Sawyer began pounding the table in Cabinet meetings and reiterating the idea. In the middle of the recession last spring, he spoke up in the Cabinet: "I feel certain there is nothing wrong with the economy of the country. I know businessmen. I'm one myself. They're as emotional as women. I'd like to go out into the country and talk to them face to face." Harry Truman thought it was a capital idea.
"This Is 100%." So began what might be called the era of good wishes and the green light. So began the brisk flurry of hand clapping across the land. And so began the mixed, skeptical and hopeful questions. How genuine was the Administration's new friendliness? What real significance did Secretary Sawyer's words have? And what real effect did he have on Administration policies?