"The Old Car Peddler"
(See Cover) In the vast, air-conditioned, limestone building covering five acres of Washington, D.C. which Harold Ickes built for his Interior Department in 1936, there is a sixth-floor suite lovingly planned by Ickes for Ickes. Two private elevators lead to the Ickes suite; two Alaskan totem poles flank the entry hall, 55 feet long. Beyond come stenographic offices and then the Secretary's private office: walnut-floored, oak-paneled and immense (960 sq. ft., as much as a five-room house). Near by are the private aide's office, private dining room, private conference room (which Ickes sometimes used as his bedroom) and private bathroom (where Ickes used to wipe his feet happily on a bath mat emblazoned with the Republican elephant). In Ickes' enormous room, at Ickes' great, gleaming desk, there now sits a successor who cares nothing for mussolinian magnificence: Douglas McKay, 61, veteran Chevrolet dealer --"the old car peddler," he calls himself--from Salem, Ore.
This election year, Doug McKay is engaged in a basic political struggle with the shade of Harold Ickes and his heirs. The issue: federal management of resources v. the Eisenhower slogan of partnership between Government and business. In the West, this conflict is much sharper than in the rest of the U.S. The West grew up under the Federal Government's wing. McKay's opponents are betting that it wants to stay there. Eisenhower, McKay & Co. think they see signs that the West, even on such issues as who develops water power, is ready to emerge from Washington's sheltering protection. Control of Congress (six seats in the Senate, about a score in the House) may depend on which of these views is correct. Doug McKay is politician enough to know this, but the unaccustomed weight on his shoulders doesn't worry him much.
"Country Boy." When McKay was governor of Oregon--his biggest job before coming to Washington with Ike--two of the toughest decisions he faced were whether to proclaim daylight time (thus annoying farmers) and whether to ban hunting when forests were tinder-dry (thus annoying Oregon's legions of deerslayers). In Washington McKay's horizons have enlarged considerably, without affecting the size of his hat. As Interior Secretary, he is the nation's biggest landlord, greatest giver of light and water, master of forest and range, controller of minerals and oil, boss of 56,000 people and a $519 million budget.
"It's fantastic, me having this job," McKay told the crowds on a trip home to Oregon last year. "I'm just a country boy, just a punk governor from a little state." His appointment as Secretary of the Interior, he said, reminded him of the small boy who entered his pet pooch in a pedigreed dog show; when told he was sure to lose, the boy replied, "That's all right--I didn't expect him to win. I just wanted to enter him so he could meet a lot of nice dogs."
Personally--but not politically--McKay has been compared to Harry S. Truman. Both have a chipmunk's cheeky air; both are short, jaunty, friendly and folksy. They would look even more alike if McKay's nose had not been flattened years ago by a fall from a horse. Like Truman, McKay has a zest for people and politics, a talent for off-the-cuff oratory and off-the-cob jokes. The resemblance to Truman ends there: McKay made money in business, and he learned his politics not from Kansas City's Pendergast but in Salem's antiseptic, traditionally Republican atmosphere.
Crutch & Cripples. At his first Washington news conference, early last year, Secretary McKay remarked that the Interior Department has as many parts as a Chevrolet. He knew the car parts were essential, but he added that he was not too sure about Interior's. Since then he has abolished five divisions, dropped 4,000 workers and cut the budget nearly $200 million from its pre-McKay peak. Interior remains one of the greatest, most powerful and least-known departments of the Government.
Interior rules one-third of the nation's area. It controls ranching, mining, lumbering and all economic activity on 750 million acres--an area greater than France, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia combined. It supervises 16,000 Eskimos, 400,000 Indians and 3,000,000 far-flung people from self-governing Puerto Rico to Yap, a South Pacific trust island where the currency is stones. It marketed, in 1952, more electric power than the nation's eight biggest private utilities.
Interior's domain and duties seem boundless:
P: Its Reclamation Bureau has spent $2 billion to water the arid West and tame rivers like the Colorado (see color pages). Reclamation built the world's greatest irrigation system--California's Central Valley Project--and four biggest dams: Hoover, Shasta, Hungry Horse and Grand Coulee (which has generating rooms twice as big as Yankee Stadium). <| Its Bureau of Indian Affairs supervises 56 million acres of Indian land, operates 62 hospitals. One problem: Who is an Indian? A man who was only 1/256th Indian once cut himself in on tribal bene fits. The answer: an Indian is, usually, anyone with at least one Indian grandparent.
P: Its Fish and Wildlife Service tries to keep the nation's 32 million fishermen and hunters happy, runs 200 game refuges, breeds 227 million fish eggs yearly, has developed underwater television to study fishing from the viewpoint of a fish.
P: Its Office of Territories runs Interior's exterior, tries to entice industry to America's outposts. As one result, the Exquisite Form Brassiere Co. may set up a bra factory in Samoa.
P: It puts identifying bands and tags on birds, fish, crabs and the bats from New Mexico's vast Carlsbad Caverns; it runs a railroad; it operates 2,791 radio transmission stations; it combats the West's halogeton weed (which poisons cattle) and the South's water hyacinth (which smothers fish); it inspects mines; it maintains more than 60,000 graves; it flies 67 planes and three helicopters; it manages a herd of 1,500,000 fur seals on the Pribilof Islands; it is the world's biggest employer of engineers and it protects the nation's last 23 whooping cranes, 577 trumpeter swans and a few midget deer.
Work for Worth. All this, to Secretary McKay, is too much. "Once we make a crutch of the Government," he believes, "we are on our way to becoming political cripples." He wants--at the right time and on the right terms--independence for the Indians, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, private initiative on electric power and more private ownership of public lands.
On the last named point of this program, McKay has good historical precedent. In the 19th century, Interior's General Land Office did a land-office business virtually giving away land--for railroads, land-grant colleges and, mostly, homesteading.* Lincoln, who made homesteading the law, believed in "settling of the wild lands into small parcels so that every poor man may have a home." The theory was that the people would work the land, build up the nation and make it great. In the 20th century came a new idea: the Federal Government should build up the nation and make it great.
That idea grew to obsess Ickes and, until McKay, the Interior Department. In 1935, under Ickes, all public lands were closed to public settlement. Thenceforth the pattern was plain: the public domain was for the Government, not the public. The result: 54% of the eleven Western states is still federal land, much of it undeveloped and unproductive. Nearly 100 million acres have never been surveyed. In Interior's forests some 9 billion valuable board feet of wind-thrown timber are moldering away, hindering new growth.
McKay believes in conservation, not decomposition. He has pushed the surveys needed for land development. In Nevada, which is 85% federally owned. says McKay, "the survey was going so slowly it wouldn't have been finished for a thousand years. I've fixed it so the job will be done this century anyway." He has pushed timber cutting to provide a permanent yield (as practiced by big Western operators, like Crown Zellerbach and Weyerhaeuser, whose future lies in future forest growth).
McKay's definition: "Conservation means wise use . . . Natural resources are not worth a thing unless you put work into them."
Struggle for Power. To Doug McKay, there is no public-power issue. In 1932 he was president of the Salem Public Ownership League; he has long supported local public power, and he insists: "Public power is here to stay." The real issue is federal power, which is very different--and which has increased from less than 1% of the nation's total in 1935 to more than 13% last year.
McKay ended Interior's struggle for power. One evening last year, soon after taking over, McKay told his wife: "I've made my decision on Hell's Canyon--boy, will I catch hell tomorrow." His decision: to drop Interior's delaying action against the Idaho Power Co. No Congress, Democratic or Republican, had ever authorized Interior to build at Hell's Canyon, and no Congress in the foreseeable future would vote the needed funds ($842.5 million). But Interior had done everything possible to get the site and to stop Idaho Power from building dams with its own money.
Healthy Climate. Partnership means simply that Interior will help power projects, where possible, and might pay part of construction costs (for flood control and navigation benefits, both federal responsibilities). Henceforth, McKay said, the Federal Government will build only projects too big for any other outfit. Example: the $1.2 billion five-state Upper Colorado project.
The Colorado basin would benefit immensely; however, thousands of protests against the project have hit McKay's desk. Reason: professional nature lovers like Bernard DeVoto, Richard Neuberger and Wallace Stegner, all of whom wear shoes and live in houses while writing about the great outdoors, have raised an outcry because the project would flood part of Dinosaur National Monument.
McKay's reply: "As it is, 2,200 people a year see that park. On the other hand, 3,750,000 people in the Upper Colorado basin are thirsting for water. I'm all for wilderness areas, but when there is a choice between that and man's chance to earn a living on reclaimed soil, I'm for the working man's chance."
To McKay, partnership is based both on principle and on practical sense. The Northwest alone requires $3.5 billion worth of new power by 1974, and no conceivable Congress would pungle up that much money for one region. "This country," said McKay, "is growing so rapidly that we must have the effort of everyone. The Federal Government cannot do it all." And a federal dog-in-the-manger attitude holds off private capital.
Can local initiative and private capital produce the power? "You're damned right we can!" declared Kinsey Robinson, president of Spokane's Washington Water Power Co. "We could have done it a long time ago if the climate had been right." Superintendent Paul Raver of Seattle City Light, former chief of the federal Bonneville Power Administration, joined in a declaration: "We recognize our responsibility to produce 1.6 million new kilowatts in the next ten years, and we intend to do it."
Partnership may be paying off. Presently planned new projects in the Northwest alone total a thumping 5,249,000 kilowatts capacity. Construction cost: $1.5 billion, not at federal expense.
Power Politics. McKay's partnership power policy is a hot issue in several states. In Kentucky, concern for TVA could defeat Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper, although he does not share his party's position. In Wyoming, ex-Senator Joseph C. O'Mahoney is trying to come back with an all-out attack on McKay. In Idaho, where Hell's Canyon is a burning issue, some pro-McKay candidates lost last week's primaries. In Montana, Fair-Dealing Senator James Murray is campaigning against McKay rather than his opponent. In Washington, two Republican Congressmen (Walt Horan and Russell Mack) have disassociated themselves from McKay's policy. In Oregon, McKay's own state, he is blamed for the shortage of kilowatts which requires dimouts. The Oregon issue is as clear as mountain air: a victory for Journalist Dick Neuberger, the Democratic senatorial candidate, would be a stinging defeat, not just for Republican Senator Guy Cordon, but for McKay and Administration policy.
As McKay expected, he has caught hell. No other member of the President's Cabinet, not even Ezra Benson, has suffered so much personal attack. Sample labels: Dimout Doug, No-Dam Doug and Giveaway McKay. Orators call him a stooge of the power trusts, lumber barons, cattle kings and the other Lucifers of New Deal demonology. McKay shrugs: "I've sold automobiles for 32 years, and I was once a second lieutenant in the Army, so I've been cussed by experts. It doesn't bother me a bit." Sometimes it does: when his honesty is questioned, McKay is apt to reply--firmly--in the next mail. He resented the charge of selling out the West: "How could I sell my own state down the river? Oregon's where I've made every penny I've earned, where everything I own is tied up, where my family has been now for generations."
Hard & Loose. In Oregon, which has nice weather for ducks, McKay is called a "real webfoot." His grandparents, covered-wagon pioneers, settled there more than a century ago. A great-grandmother died on the endless Oregon Trail, and a great-uncle was disemboweled by Indians, who filled his stomach with stones and tossed his body back into his cabin. His grandfather ran a Hudson's Bay Company store, drifted to California looking for gold with three burros ("one for groceries, one for dynamite and one for chewing tobacco") but returned emptyhanded.
As a boy McKay milked the cows at his grandfather's farm on a Columbia River island. His father seldom came home with any money and, one day, never came home at all. His mother found a job as a seamstress, and young Doug McKay went to work. He sold candy in a Portland theater between the acts, until stopped by the child-labor laws. Later he delivered papers, drove a meat wagon, then quit high school to work in a railroad office. But he yearned for a farm of his own; he studied nights and saved enough to get a degree at Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State). But the war came, and the farm went glimmering.
On the last night of 1915's Meuse-Argonne offensive, Lieut. James Douglas McKay, back from patrol, stopped at his outfit's field kitchen just as a German shell landed. Shrapnel ripped open his leg, nicked an ear and tore off part of his right arm and shoulder. He lived mainly because "he refused to die," an Army doctor said, but he left the hospital 13 months later with a gimpy right arm. After the shellburst, he could never again handle a plow.
Ever since, McKay has been careful of his health. On political campaigns, he has learned to sleep sitting up; in Oregon he carried a pillow in his car to sleep on while crossing town between speeches. He likes to quote the old colored mammy: "When I works, I works hard. When I sits, I sits loose. When I worries, I goes to sleep."
Elks, Eagles, Everything. After the war McKay, 66% disabled, got a Saxon car and started to sell. By 1927 he had saved enough money to move his family to Salem, buy a General Motors franchise, rent an old laundry as his showroom and go into business. He dropped his first name James, for poetic reasons: "Doug McKay, Chevrolet--it rhymes." Now the company, which sells Cadillacs too, covers an acre of Salem's Commercial Street; the payroll runs to about 80 men and the year's business to $2,500,000. His two sons-in-law run it.
In Salem, McKay belongs to the Elks, Eagles, Kiwanis, Knights Templars, Masons, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Order of the Purple Heart, Phi Delta Theta, and the Capital Card Club. For parades, he blossoms out in elegantly embroidered Western cowboy clothes. He likes to ride his horse--named Eugene Peavine, Gene for short. His outfit turned out to be good business, good politics and good fun.
McKay, a natural-born politician, has never lost an election since college, where he was elected class and student-body president. In Salem, after only five years in town, he was elected mayor.
Above & Beyond. On Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Doug McKay was in Hawaii with the Willamette University football team from Salem. When a bomb landed two blocks from the hotel, he exploded: "By God, I'm Marion County defense chairman. I've got to get back home."
Before he could do so, he had to help defend Hawaii by passing out Springfield rifles to the football squad and leading them that night on a beach patrol. Back home he volunteered (at 48), waiving disability pay, and was commissioned a captain. The Army kept him in Oregon all through the war; at least, said McKay, "I released a WAC for overseas duty." In 1945 state party leaders urged him to get his discharge .and run for president of the state senate. McKay refused: "I asked to get into the Army. I won't ask to get out." In 1947, Oregon's governor was killed in a plane crash and McKay decided to run. "I'm not mad at anybody," he announced. "If the people want me--O.K. If they don't--O.K." They did. twice running.
McKay supported Ike for President in 1951 but never met him until 1952's famed "return to Abilene." Ike's memorable ad-lib speech that afternoon overwhelmed McKay. "It was the most moving thing I have ever heard," he later declared.
Just before the 1952 convention, McKay visited Ike at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "General Eisenhower," he recalled, "walked down the hall with me. He put his arm over my shoulder and asked me what I thought of the idea of a Columbia Valley Authority. I said I was against it, that I didn't believe in federal domination of a river valley. That's the only time I ever told Eisenhower my views until he called me and asked me to join the Cabinet."
"Oh dear," said Mrs. McKay, when she heard of the call to Washington, "I just planted 200 bulbs."
Of Cakes & Mink. Mabel Hill McKay is famed across Oregon for her angel food cake. In Salem once, Oregon Journal Photographer Les Ordeman took some pictures of her at the oven. He tried some cake, liked it and said so. Pleased. Mrs. McKay said she'd bake one for his birthday. He laughed and left without even telling her the date; soon he forgot about it. On his next birthday a black Cadillac drove up to Ordeman's, a chauffeur swung open the door and out stepped the governor of Oregon, who walked briskly to the door and delivered a homemade angel food cake. "I don't think the neighbors will ever get over it." said Ordeman. "I know my wife won't."
In Washington, as in Salem, Mabel McKay does her own cooking and much of the housework in her five-room apartment. She writes bi-monthly reports to the Salem Bridge Club about Washington's social whirl, celebrities, gardens and fashions. She baked angel food cakes for Mamie Eisenhower's wedding anniversary, for cabinet wives and for Minnie, her part-time maid.
At one Washington party McKay sharpened his tongue on an abrasive woman columnist, a strong New Deal supporter, who chattered: "I'd like you better if you'd give me one of your wife's angel food cakes." He snapped: "I didn't know you New Dealers sold out for anything less than mink coats." Usually he skips Washington parties, gets to bed around 9 for an hour's reading before lights out. Current favorite: The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes--"so I'll learn how not to run the department."
Interior's Exterior. McKay has acquired an adequate education in Washington ways. In his first week he ordered all purchases above $10,000 to clear through his office. He noted that some bureaus wanted to buy supplies of which others had a surplus. Solution: transfer of supplies. McKay called in experts to survey every bureau in Interior, studied the three-inch-thick pile of recommendations, is rapidly reorganizing the department.
He made flying visits to Interior territories and last month covered Alaska in a whirlwind, ten-day, 7,500-mile inspection trip by plane, train, car and weasel tractor. Badgered about Alaskan statehood, McKay told off Alaskans like a Dutch uncle: "When you went down to Washington, your approach was bad. You were belligerent ... It was reported to me that you made several Congressmen mad . . . Get back down to earth! Start acting like ladies and gentlemen!" His reply to reports that he wanted to keep Alaska under his control: "Horsefeathers." Alaskans were at first angry and astonished, but some applauded his straight talk.
Home in Salem, however, he is invariably genial, smiling, fast-talking, wisecracking and cracker-barreling. On a trip home this month he walked into Salem's Hotel Marion and talked his way across the coffee shop nonstop: "Hi, Ted, how's the new job? Sold your house yet? . . . Well, Ben, never thought I'd see you in this part of the state this time of year. What brings you down? . . . Wayne, can I sell you a Corvette? It's a real slick car. You ought to get rid of that old heap you been driving. With the money you made out of lumber last year you ought to buy two Corvettes . . . Bill, how's your mother? Her backache any better?"
McKay deals out homilies and wit like a prestidigitator dealing out cards, with such quick ease that the worn edges make no difference. Item: "We shouldn't run down the Democrats. I never made a nickel in my life running down the opposition. When I was selling Chevrolets. I never said a word about Fords. Heck. I didn't even know they made 'em." Item: "Anybody who quarrels with a newspaper, a traffic cop or his wife is just plain crazy." Item: "My folks were all Democrats. I come from a long line of Democrats, but I left home and learned to read."
A House & a Lot. In South Salem, McKay has a roomy, comfortable white shake house. One daughter lives there and another six blocks away. In the front hall is the familiar motto: "Home is where the heart is." Every room has some souvenir of McKay's life: a seal tusk, Eugene Peavine's trophies, family photos. Downstairs, in the basement playroom, hang Mabel McKay's blue ribbons (for cake), McKay's show ribbons (for Gene) and silly signs ("Danger--Hangover Under Construction").
In almost any nation except the U.S.A. a Cabinet minister like Doug McKay would be almost inconceivable; he is not an intellectual, an actor, a proved big-time administrator, or a leader with a large personal following. He dislikes arguing issues and he distrusts "New Deal longhairs." He knows how to do a job and how to get along with people and, in the U.S., that is sometimes better than theory.
On his first vacation as Secretary, after the hard-driving Alaskan swing, McKay went on a hard-riding packhorse trip in California's Yosemite National Park (part of Interior's domain). For five days McKay, wearing a comfortable cowboy outfit, roughed it frontier-style--riding the steep Sierra trail, cooking in the open, camping out at night. This week, at his summer house on the Oregon coast, he relaxed with his family (13 in all, with Mabel McKay cooking).
At month's end, McKay will return to his place in the Cabinet (which he admires), to the enormous Ickes office (which he dislikes) and to his problems: reclamation and recreation, field and stream, parks and power--above all, power. He has no ambition beyond making a success of the Eisenhower program and of his job. "I've got a house in Salem and a lot in the cemetery, so I'll be coming home some day," he assures his friends.
* The first homesteader: Union Soldier Daniel Freeman, on Jan. 1, 1863. A few minutes after the law came into effect at midnight, he dragged a protesting land registrar from a New Year's Eve dance to file his claim at Beatrice, Neb., later built a log cabin for his family and planted 400 peach trees on his 160-acre quarter section. Typically, Interior has since reclaimed the claim. Now it's Homestead National Monument.
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