Good-Times Charlie

(See Cover)

Mr. Truman's Secretary of Commerce drove down from Palm Beach, Fla. last week to Miami. Carefully combed, immaculate in a brown tropical suit and two-tone shoes, and so characteristically erect that he seemed to be leaning slightly backwards, white-haired Charles Sawyer walked into the Flamingo Hotel to dine with 42 officials of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their wives.

He was diplomatically attentive to the wives, earnestly attentive to their husbands. What he said to them, although not new, was off the record. The burden of his speech was the Administration's friendly feeling towards U.S. business, a point which he made without humbleness and without apology for the past history of the Fair Deal. The evening ended in a brisk flurry of hand clapping, and Charles Sawyer drove glowingly home to his Palm Beach apartment.

Brisk flurries of hand clapping had followed Mr. Sawyer across the country. The scene was becoming familiar: Secretary Sawyer, leaning backwards, speaking reassuringly--waving a green light for U.S. business.

He had waved the light at meetings of the Business Advisory Council, during a four-month, 15,900-mile tour of businessmen's luncheons, before such groups as the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Iron and Steel Institute. Over hundreds of fruit cocktails and plates of chicken a la king, his metallic, Ohio-bred voice had proclaimed: "I am a believer in private enterprise . . . Profit is the ignition system of our economic engine . . . Businessmen know more about their own business than Government officials." The Administration had faith in "our American system," and in capitalism's strength and good. Sawyer--who writes his own excellent speeches--could see capitalism whistling along a clear track towards better & better times, until it reached that distant, happy horizon where (he quoted H. G. Wells) men "shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars."

Sawyer for President. If the reaction to such fine words was no more than a brisk hand clapping, it was because U.S. businessmen, more accustomed to red lights, sidings and switchpoint derails were reserving final judgment. There were some skeptics. One listener, who thought of the situation in terms other than railroading, observed: "He seems to be inviting us to get into bed with the Truman Administration--just to get warm. Nobody ever came out of that situation just warmed." A Houston banker emerged from a closed meeting with the Secretary snarling over his cold cigar: "If that guy means what he says, how can he stay in the Truman Cabinet? I don't see how he can look himself in the eye in his shaving mirror every morning."

But most applauded hopefully and decided that personally they approved of Mr. Sawyer. At least he talked their language. He listened to their complaints. He had his feet on the ground. And after watching him in the Cabinet for 20 months, they were ready to say that he was the best Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover. One Southern businessman commented: "Now if we only had a man like that for President, we'd be all right."

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.

The Early Bird. "No man ever worked harder all his life than I have," the Secretary says. And no man who didn't get up pretty early in the morning could get ahead of Charles Sawyer.

He made two smart investments--in American Rolling Mill, in which Colonel Procter was interested, and in Crosley Radio Corp., for which he was counsel. The investments, which he cannily sold out before the 1929 crash, became the foundation of a comfortable fortune. He acquired the franchise for a hockey team and formed a syndicate which erected the $3,000,000 Cincinnati Garden (hockey, boxing, wrestling and conventions). A Cincinnati sport and amusement promoter, Willis Vance, who had dreamed of such an enterprise for a long time, still keeps an architect's drawing of his project hanging in his office, draped in black--in memory of not getting up early enough in the morning.

The interests of up & coming Charles Sawyer were wide. He became attorney for Cincinnati's big Union Central Life Insurance Co. and chairman of its investment committee. After some criticism by examiners of the company's loan policy, Sawyer resigned the committee chairmanship. No loss was suffered in the investments. Sawyer remained as counsel until he took the Commerce job.

He bought a string of newspapers, one of which, the Lancaster (Ohio) Eagle-Gazette, he still owns. Today he also has minor interests in an advertising firm, the Churngold (margarine) Corp., American Thermos Bottle, Procter & Gamble, the Reds and the Garden. Besides the Lancaster newspaper, he controls Dayton's WING and Springfield's WIZE radio stations, and Cincinnati's Coney Island. Its Shooting Star roller coaster is the fastest ride in the state of Ohio.

Time for Politics. Charles Sawyer, busy making money, nevertheless had not forgotten politics. In 1930 he was defeated for Congress. In 1932 he was elected lieutenant governor, and two years later he filed for the governorship, but he was licked in the primaries by Tree Surgeon Martin L. Davey, a college friend. In 1938 he beat Davey in a bitter primary campaign, but lost to Republican John Bricker.

In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt offered him the ambassadorship to Belgium. "What could be more interesting," Roosevelt said to him, "than the carrejour [crossroads] of Europe in the closing days of the war?" Margaret Sawyer had died in 1937 after bearing him five children. In 1942 Charles Sawyer had married again: his bride was handsome Countess Elizabeth de Veyrac, nee Lippelman, a neighbor and onetime professional dancer. He took her off to Belgium. He escaped machine-gunning by a Nazi flyer on New Year's Eve, 1944, made friends among the Belgians by his understanding and sympathy, and returned to the U.S. at the end of the war. He planned to settle down in his rambling, unpretentious home in Glendale with its stretch of lawn and its' big recreation room containing a billiard table and a easeful of ribbons won by Sawyer horses and stock at state and county fairs.

Instead, in the spring of 1948 Harry Truman asked him to succeed Averell Harriman as Secretary of Commerce. It was a time when most Democrats were shying away from what looked like a lost cause. Sawyer took the plunge and went to Washington.

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?

That the Administration listened to him was apparent. It was he who first raised the ultimate vision of a trillion-dollar economy by the year 2000. After the speech the President not only sent him a note saying: "This is 100%--H.S.T.," but flatteringly cribbed the idea. New Dealing Leon Keyserling quoted him in the Council of Economic Advisers' report to the President. The Administration did not buy all his ideas, which included balancing the budget by cutting defense funds, ECA funds, appropriations for atomic development and the farm price-support program. But the Administration certainly echoed his sentiments.

The reasons why it did were obvious. Harry Truman, who somehow couldn't seem to balance his budget, was staking his political future on the U.S. economy holding up under the weight of a $263 billion national debt in 1951. The whole gamble depended on an "expanding economy." In a way, Mr. Truman's future was in the hands of the U.S. businessman.

Simple Answer. As his ambassador to business, therefore, Sawyer was in a somewhat critical role, and bound to get a respectful hearing not only over the fruit cocktails but from Mr. Truman himself. The President and his Commerce Secretary, who like each other, are curiously alike. They look somewhat alike, dress nattily alike, abhor tobacco, approve of whisky, and mutually subscribe to the basic theory of free enterprise. Although Charles Sawyer arouses none of the warm loyalties which Harry Truman enjoys, lacks his common touch and has few close friends, he is gregarious and coolly amiable.

The President and his Commerce Secretary are both politicians, and proud of it. This fact, in the minds of businessmen, raised the biggest question of all. When the best interests of business appeared to conflict with the best interests of the Fair Deal, where would Charles Sawyer stand? The answer was simple. By his record and by his own statements, he would stand with the Fair Deal.

Furthermore, as a realist, he does not expect the Fair Deal to make any concessions to business that will lose votes among the much bigger voting populations of farmers and labor. Harry Truman, another political realist who can see as far ahead as 1952, has no intention of doing any such thing either.

Charles Sawyer's function is limited and clear--wave the green light and keep business whistling happily along the track. So far he has done very well. Business is enjoying some surcease from harassment. Despite skepticism there is the beginning of a feeling of mutual understanding between business and the Administration, and even some good will. Said a White House aide: "That's useful, and Charlie Sawyer is useful. If there were no Charlie Sawyer, I am sure we would have to invent one."

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