Nobody's Sweetheart

When Harold Ickes is having a good rich, wrathful week probably every man, woman and child in the U.S. is against him; and even when things are dull there are always at least a few million people who are still burned up at his last crack.

Honest, fearless, tough and shrewd --and loyal to his boss -- Harold Ickes long ago earned his post as dog robber to the New Deal. But he expanded this job, as he does all the jobs he can lay his hands on. For eight and a half years he has been performing a long list of necessary tasks.

He is the Scout who goes ahead, trial balloon in hand, prowling the unexplored bushes of public opinion, whipping up sentiment pro or con whatever the President has decided the U.S. should be for or against. He is the Whipping Boy who takes the blame whenever anything goes wrong. He is the New Deal's Janitor, who cleans out the goboons and sweeps up the floor (usually using some victim as the broom). He captains the Purity Squad that keeps his colleagues honest. He is the Public Executioner, the Court Poisoner and the Bouncer. In short, if there is on the docket a hard, nasty, grinding job, Ickes gets the assignment.

But he is something beyond all this. Harold Ickes is the gadfly of Conscience to the Administration. Every time the other New Dealers get fat, happy and optimistic, which is the natural laissez-faire attitude of the President. Harold bores in, stinging, squawking, -kicking like a case of first-degree tantrums. This is his great service to the New Deal.

Ickes believes that when a policy has been laid down, it should be followed. When the Administration said: No-more-Business-as-Usual; when the President pledged the U.S. to become the "Arsenal of Democracy" he took it all literally. Then he watched the dinosaur of a defense program falter, swamp itself, stumble from delay to delay, without plan understanding or grim intent. He listened carefully to the defense chiefs delivering excellently-phrased appeals to the U.S. to arouse, make sacrifices, speed up. This looked very good in the rotogravures, but Mr. Ickes then watched the same orators on their return to Washington, saw them wasting month after precious month.

Ickes cannot watch any spectacle for than a few minutes without comment, usually acidulous. First he chafed. Then his hackles rose. Finally he boiled over, blew his top. His basic point: the U.S. is going to run out of everything. He ran out of aluminum months before Big Ed Stettinius' materials division saw any real problem. He ran out of steel in January, although the President, Economist Gano Dunn and Stettinius were still insisting in February that the U.S. had of plenty of steel. In quick succession Harold Ickes then ran out of electric power, coal, transportation, railroad & shipping, and finally: oil.

Headaches. Fortnight ago Harold Ickes received his reward for having so long foreseen and so valiantly proclaimed the critical deficiencies in the U.S. defense program. He was left out of it. When Judge Samuel I. Rosenman waddled around getting advice on defense reorganization he found unanimity on only one recommendation : keep Harold Ickes out of this. With the President's full approval, the Gadfly was then completely boxed off and shut out of the program.

Yet not a tear fell anywhere for Harold Ickes. He had asked for it. Ickes was on vacation when the defense door was shut on him -- his first vacation in three years.

For the Secretary, Head Forest Ranger Bill Augustine had had his men tidy a weatherbeaten five-room log cabin on Mt. Storm King in Olympic National Park, the "last big woods" in the U.S., at the extreme upper-lefthand corner of the map. Harold Ickes pulled on a pair of the most unpressed trousers the natives had ever seen, an old grey sweater, a pair of scuffed brown oxfords, and opened his shirt-collar. His young red-haired wife, Jane (Dahlman), changed to tight-fitting blue cowboy dungarees, jodhpur boots, a tan wool jacket. Safe at home, 3,000 miles away on the Olney, Md. farm, were the two babies: two-year-old Harold McEwen Ickes, a beautiful, healthy, roto-section child, with big blue eyes and golden curls; and little four-months-old Jane, who looks like any four-months-old Jane. Without a care or worry the Ickes settled down to vacation.

This week the vacation ends. The famed peninsula rain, which sometimes drips 122 inches a year, washed them out. Ickes looked tired, his face grey where it was not floridly blotched. He growled to a reporter: "I haven't hrd a vacation yet." Said Jane Ickes: "All this talk of vacation is so much fluff."

In the rare bright spells Jane, so rain-weary she wanted to leave, slipped into a dark red swim suit, plunged into chilly Lake Crescent. Sometimes she chopped wood for the fireplace. For exercise the Secretary took hikes among the giant trees, where the wet ferns grow head-high and the epochs-old windfalls of trees are 50 feet high and as solid as a stone fort. Once they went salmon fishing--a pure public-relations gesture from Honest Harold, who loathes the water and once grumbled at riding on the President's yacht Potomac with a crack: "I'm willing to die for the President but I'll be damned if I get seasick for him."

The little fireball reformer just didn't know how to relax and have a good time on his vacation. He kept his assistant and his private secretary busy day & night (living at the Rosemary Inn near by they were losing money; Government expense accounts allow by statute only $5 per day). He answered heavy daily mail from Washington, talked long distance two to four times daily with his colleagues, wrote a magazine article on the gasoline problem.

Most important of all, Mr. Secretary Ickes delivered a shrewd speech in Tacoma to win the Northwest to his side in the great three-cornered battle which is now going on for control of the new defense power projects--a three-cornered battle in which Ickes is arrayed against Leland Olds of the Federal Power Commission on one side and all the sponsors of the Regional Valley Authorities on the other. In his speech, dedicating the Tacoma power substation to J. D. Ross, the late public power pioneer, he hit the farthest north any New Deal figure has come in programming the Administration's future power policy:

"If we are to have here in the North west a great public power empire, it means we must buy out the private utilities . . . as complete entities, at a price that would be fair and just, but which would contain no gratuitous squandering of public funds." The speech ended amid a terrific ovation for his tribute to Ross. But at least some of the handclaps were for the lonely, applause-hungry little Secretary.

Sometimes Harold Ickes gets wistful, wonders why he is nobody's sweetheart. Said he recently: "I'm not a backslapper. I'm not a popular man and I know it. ... I'm short-tempered. I don't want yes-men around me. . . . I'm arbitrary--but I get things done." His intimate adviser, big, handsome, dark Mike Straus, interrupted: "I'll say he's arbitrary. He's ornery, hardheaded, the damnedest, most unreasonable hot-headed man you ever saw." Ickes spoke up mildly, with almost childlike eagerness, peering over the tops of his spectacles: "You see? Listen to him. See how he talks to me. But I don't want any yes-men working for me. . . ."

Very little credit has ever gone to the gruff, dour little Chicago lawyer. He was 67 on March 15, and the most careful search of the records fails to show any major occasion in the 67 years where any substantial group of citizens or high officials (or even low officials) ever paid him any great tribute, named a street or a baby after him, sent him flowers or just told him they loved him.

The scion of generations of Pennsylvanians (Great-Grandfather Nicholas Ickes shouldered a musket at the age of 16 for the Continental Army in the Revolution). Harold went to the University of Chicago, became campus correspondent for the Chicago Record, graduated, went to work as a reporter on space rates, some weeks earning as much as 75-c-. Just as the ax was about to fall, he came on the dream of a cub reporter: a big scoop. Chicago newspapers had been looking for a missing Mamie Doane for weeks. Returning from the morgue one day, where he had inspected a drowned possible Mamie, young Harold had a bright idea: why not call on the Doanes? Mrs. Doane greeted him: "Come in, young man. Mamie just got home."

The exclusive story brought Ickes the promise of a regular job at a full $12 a week, a better offer from the Chicago Tribune. By faithful plugging he worked himself up to the post of assistant sports editor, which was then (and in some shops still is) ranked slightly below that of composing-room office boy.

Ickes still refers to himself as an ex-newspaperman, maintains stoutly that his literary style is a product of his years as a reporter. This style, studied closely, resolves itself into a trick of calling names more luridly than anyone else. He once said that the late Huey Long had "halitosis of the intellect"; that General Hugh Johnson had "mental saddle sores"; that when Racket-Buster Thomas E. Dewey announced his Presidential candidacy he "tossed his diapers into the ring."

But his juiciest wrath has always been reserved for the private power interests. He always thinks of them as he thinks of the late Samuel Insull. Ickes fought Insull bravely but utterly without result for 25 years. From 1907, when Ickes got a law degree, until 1932, he was on the losing side in every local, State and national campaign, whether he was Republican, Bull Mooser or whatnot, with one exception--1923. He made a record only as the most persistent gadfly of all Chicago's generations of crusading reformers. He never knew when he was licked, and he never forgot who had licked him. Thus for years his greatest pleasure came from blackballing Insull's attempt to enter Chicago's exclusive City Club.

Philosophy. The rock on which Harold Ickes' relationships with businessmen have always been wrecked is his complete inability to understand the processes of earning a nickel. He has no idea what a man goes through to earn money. He married a wealthy divorcee, big, kindly Mrs. Anna Wilmarth Thompson in 1911 (she was killed in an auto crash in 1935 and he married young Jane Dahlman in 1938). For years he collected stamps, grew dahlias (he became expert, raised prize flowers, named one well-known dahlia "The Anna W. Ickes"), and wrote insulting letters to the newspapers. His office work as a lawyer, was chiefly in defending civil liberties cases, and in reading about conservation -- which is the one subject he has thoroughly mastered.

The weary, unrested Secretary who returns to Washington this week still loves flowers, loves comfort, still has no roots in reality. He has never had to take into account the shabby, compromising people that other men must rub elbows with in politics or business. Never having had to figure angles, always being certain of his certainties, he is unable to understand the pressures which force honest Senators to make deals, compromises, or shade their positions to square with realities. He is against politicians. He does not believe in sharing-the-wealth. He is the tightest, stingiest, string-saving, pinchfist Administrator the U.S. Government has had in many years. Personally he is generous, but exact.

Ickes is unlike anyone else in Washington or anywhere else. He will not really be happy until he has a chance, some Saturday afternoon after his return, to slide his legs under his old typewriter in the little study in his big spacious, white frame home, pull the clips out of his brief case, and alternately scowling and chuckling, finger out insulting letters to the newspapers who have most recently at tacked him. The Department will stop as many of these letters as possible, will try to ration him on the newspapers he hates most, but of one thing Publisher Robert R. McCormick may be sure : in the next six months the isolationist Chicago Tribune will receive at least a half-dozen of the most sulphurous letters Har old Ickes can write -- which is very sul phurous indeed.

Such is the man Mr. Roosevelt asked to handle the oil transportation crisis. Small wonder then that when the U.S. stepped on the gas, Ickes stepped on the U.S.

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