Commerce Cabinet Crisis IV
Following Herbert Hoover’s resignation, President Coolidge took the Commerce Secretary job in a basically caretaker direction with William F. Whiting:
Whiting was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts on July 20, 1864 into one of those families of Yankee industrialists who were the mainstays of the pre-WWII Republican Party. His father worked in the paper industry for Holyoke Paper Company and the Hampden Paper Company before founding his own firm, the Whiting Paper Company which I believe is different from the George A. Whiting Paper Company, since the founder’s name was also “William.” Papa Whiting had been mayor of Holyoke and a State Senator as well as a delegate to various Republican conventions.
The younger Whiting followed his father into business, serving as Treasurer of the company and then President (at which point his brother became treasurer) but he didn’t have much in the way of political ambitions, though he was a Massachusetts Republican Delegate at some conventions. Nevertheless, somewhere along the way Whiting befriended Calvin Coolidge who was making his way up through Bay State politics (they may have met in college, both went to Amherst). With just a few months left in his term after Hoover’s resignation, Coolidge tapped his friend Whiting for the Commerce post but the Coolidge administration was generally short on legislative initiatives and little happened its waning days. It occurred to me, incidentally, to wonder if I wasn’t overlooking a major Commerce Department role in Prohibition during the 1920s, but it seems that Volstead Act enforcement was lodged inside the Treasury Department (initially subordinate the IRS’ precursor agency, later as a freestanding Treasury component like today’s BATF) rather than Commerce or Justice.
16 Responses to “Commerce Cabinet Crisis IV”
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January 27th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Of course, if we had a Commerce Secretary like Whiting around today, he wouldn’t let 6.5 Million Obama supporters be screwed out of their rebates for transition to digital TV.
I’m getting all out of patience with those assholes in Washington DC.
They let George W Bush steal $3 Trillion out of my Social Security Trust FUnd.
They killed 7200 of my countrymen whoring for the Israel Lobby.
And they let Hank Paulson buttfuck my 401K.
I understand. I understand. “Mistakes were made”.
But they better not fuck with my goddamm television set. If they want to give half of the electromagnetic spectrum away to Verizon, they damm well can send me my $40 rebate so my view of Summer Glau’s tits is not interrupted.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Obama should remember Julius Caesar’s Rule:
“panem et circenses matris fornicari”
January 27th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
What? Eliot Ness worked for the Treasury Department, rather than the powerful Commerce Department? Next you’ll be telling me that they got Capone for tax evasion instead of running afoul of the National Bureau of Standards.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
How could you not have known that enforcement of the Volstead Act was done by Treasury? Old hillbillies running stills called the Feds that came after them “revenuers” for a reason. And haven’t you ever seen the Untouchables? Sheesh.
And to echo Don Williams–I’ve long suspected that the switch to digital TV might be the only thing that could actually spark a serious insurrection in this country. My wife, yes. My dog, maybe. My television? Never!
January 27th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
It’s unlikely that Whiting met Coolidge at Amherst, since Whiting was ‘86 and Coolidge was ‘95. The Whitings were (and still are) one of those families where everybody over a very long period goes to Amherst, but there don’t seem to have been any Amherst Whitings between ‘88 and ‘98, so presumably they met later.
Does anyone know of an adequate book on the Western Massachusetts republicans of this era? or a good book on industrial Western Massachusetts (Amherst was, as I recall, a center of straw hat and cigar production) in the old Republican era?
January 27th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
That’s Juvenal, not Caeser, though the extraneous words make it more like Juvenile, or should I say Terius Canus Iuvenalis.
January 27th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Terius Canus Iuvenalis also said you shouldn’t fuck with King
Jugurthine
“If you owe a nigga pay him they be holdin a grudge
He don’t want to take a loss but he’ll take it in blood”
January 27th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Coolidge was Mayor of Northampton. The Whitings were from Holyoke. The towns border each other. It is not surprising that they knew each other
January 27th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
At the risk of beating this to death, and with malice toward none, Coolidge was from Vermont and only moved to Northampton to study law. Knowing a little about Amherst solidarity in the 1900 era, I strongly suspect they did meet through the local Amherst Club or whatever, but not as undergraduates. Whiting does not appear in Coolidge’s mostly charming autobiography.
Parenthetically, Coolidge seems to have been from a more provincial and less wealthy social background than the typical Amherst student of the day. In point of fact to this day Amherst claims a responsibility to recruit students from rural New England who don’t fit the mold of the typical Amherst student (as I certainly didn’t either!)
January 28th, 2009 at 2:58 am
Re: “In point of fact to this day Amherst claims a responsibility to recruit students from rural New England who don’t fit the mold of the typical Amherst student (as I certainly didn’t either!)”
Williams, which would like its library back ever since you Lord Jeffs (treasonously) broke away and absconded with it in 1821 in your sojourn over the mountains, actually began for precisely this reason, because so many youths from western New England — the Litchfield Hills in Connecticut, Vermont, the Connecticut River Valley, adjacent New York — could not afford, in terms of distance, time, and money, to attend the established colleges at Harvard and Yale. It was a society that regarded the existence of a learned ministry as crucial for civilization; thus the need for a place like Williams (and later Amherst), or Dartmouth for that matter.
As far as the latter-19th C. industrial Connecticut River Valley — I’m not really aware of much that’s been done on it, and I’m a historian of the region. Christopher Clark has a great book on the capitalist transformation of Western Mass., 1780-1860, THE ROOTS OF RURAL CAPITALISM and there’s a good book on the changing landscape of Franklin County, LANDSCAPE AND MATERIAL LIFE IN FRANKLIN COUNTY, MA by J. Ritchie Garrison. I’m not sure about the later period from a specifically economic perspective; I’ve often found old Federal Writers Project books informative in random ways on this sort of thing, and the Massachusetts edition is excellent. Hope this helps.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:00 am
I should add that kids from the Berkshires, Vermont, upstate NY, etc., still get preferential points in the admissions process because of that original mission. And rightly so.
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