Matt Yglesias

Can Gary Locke End the Commerce Cabinet Crisis

The rumors of Gary Locke are flying.

I once decided arbitrarily that Locke would make a good candidate for national office—great story, seems to have been a good governor, etc., but he’s not very charismatic. Then he gave a really crappy SOTU response in 2003 and seemed to drop off the map. But I’ve still got a soft spot in my heart for him. Bonus trivial, the next guy who I arbitrarily decided should be president was Howard Dean and, indeed, I watched the Locke SOTU response from a motel in Burlington, VT where I’d gone to check the Dean campaign out. That didn’t work out either, but after that I decided that Barack Obama should be president. And guess what? He is. The moral of the story is that whatever the inscrutable Dean-Obama beef is, Dean would still be a good HHS nominee and Kathleen Sebelius would still be a good US Senate candidate.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis X: Henry Wallace

In Henry Wallace, the nation once again found a Commerce Secretary who, though a very noteworthy figure, didn’t do much of note in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce—Henry Wallace.

Wallace was born in Iowa, and his father, also named Henry, was the editor of an agriculture-themed publication called Wallace’s Farmer. The younger Wallace worked on the Farmer and served as editor from 1924 to 1929. The elder Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924. In 1915, he’s credited with having published the first ever corn-hog ration charts, which I think shows the amount of corn you need per hog but honestly I have no idea. More importantly, he worked on the development of higher-yield strains of corn which became important for farmers across the nation. This work was the foundation of his company, Hi-Bred Corn, later Pioneer Hi-Bred which was eventually acquired by Dupont.

The Wallaces were liberal Republicans and the younger Wallace was a New Deal supporter, and thus FDR reached out and appointed him Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. As Secretary, Wallace was in charge of implementing one of the New Deal’s odder and more misguided ideas, namely that the government should try to foster the deliberate destruction of agricultural products in an effort to raise commodity prices and turn deflation around.

Meanwhile, during FDR’s second term, his Texas conservative Vice President moved into a posture of more aggressive opposition to Roosevelt, going so far as to challenge FDR for the nomination at the 1940 convention. Clearly, a new VP was needed, and Roosevelt tapped Wallace, a reliable liberal, in part to ensure loyalty and in part because FDR new full well that he was turning away from the New Deal and toward national security and wanted to keep the New Dealers in the tent. During the campaign, GOP operatives got their hands on a series of letters written from Wallace to Russian new age leader Nicholas Roerich. In the letters, Wallace address Roerich as “dear guru.” Democrats threatened to expose an extramarital affair of Wendell Willkie’s if the Republicans went public with the “dear guru” letters, and both sides wound up agreeing to hold their fire. As Vice President, Wallace ran the Board of Economic Warfare, denounced anti-black riots in Detroit, and earned the enmity of conservatives in the United States and U.K. by portraying the war as part of a broader campaign for racial, social, and economic equality. Wallace’s clashes with the conservatives got him stripped of his authority, and dumped from the ticket in the 1944 election at which point he became Secretary of Commerce.

He didn’t actually do anything important as Secretary of Commerce related to the job’s responsibilities, but he did clash with Harry Truman over policy toward the Soviet Union, arguing for a softer line. Truman eventually sacked him, at which point he became editor of The New Republic. At the time TNR’s foreign policy involved being too far left rather than too far right, so Wallace denounced the Truman Doctrine and lay the groundwork for his 1948 Presidential Campaign on the Progressive Party ticket. The Wallace agenda was in many ways admirable—he stood foresquare for civil rights, voting rights for African-Americans, and universal health care. The campaign was also shot-through with Communists being controlled by Moscow, and there’s some indication in the Mitrokhin Archive that Wallace himself was considered a KGB asset at the time.

Wallace went back to farming, supported the Korean War in 1950. In 1952 he published Where I Was Wrong, disavowing his earlier soft-on-Stalin views. He backed Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 and Nixon in 1960, and died in 1965.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis IX: Jesse H. Jones

Harry Hopkins was followed by a second Commerce Secretary who was an important Roosevelt administration figure, but not really important in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce. That man was Jesse H. Jones. Born in Tennessee, as a young man Jones went to work for his uncle at age 19; the uncle then died when Jones was just 24, at which point he moved to Houston and took over the family business. Jones became a major Houston figure, and helped secure federal funding for the Houston Ship Channel that turned Houston into an important port.

Woodrow Wilson offered him the Commerce job back in the day, but Jones turned it down. Later, Wilson prevailed upon him to run military relief for the American Red Cross. After the war, Jones went back into private business, but Herbert Hoover called on him to serve as a member of the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which was initially tasked with trying to rescue troubled banks by providing loans and liquidity. This didn’t really work very well and, as is well known, the situation got worse and worse throughout the Hoover years. When FDR took office, he reorganized the RFC and put Jones in charge.

The new RFC had more funding and a broader mandate—it made loans directly to businesses and to state and local governments across the country. The result was perceived by Jones’ rivals inside and outside of the administration as a patronage empire, but it seems Roosevelt was happy enough with his work. When Hopkins was sent abroad to represent FDR in London and Moscow, his Commerce hat was passed to Jones. Soon enough, the war was on and domestic reform projects were out of the spotlight. Instead, the RFC was reoriented toward war production. By 1944, Roosevelt was sick of Vice President Henry Wallace and wanted him dumped from the ticket which he was, in favor of Harry Truman. But there was a desire to keep Wallace on the inside of the tent pissing out, so the Commerce job was given to him and Jones was forced out in 1945.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis VII: Harry Hopkins

Harry Hopkins was born in Iowa. As a child, his family moved to Nebraska then to Chicago, then back to Iowa where Hopkins attended Grinnell College. After graduation in 1912 he took a job with Christodora House, a settlement house, in the pre-hipster Lower East Side of New York City. From there he shifted to a position at the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. In 1915, the mayor appointed him executive secretary of the Bureau of Child Welfare which administered what we would now call welfare payments to single mothers but at the time was understood as pensions for widows with dependent children. He then became the director of the Gulf Region of the American Red Cross, and then in 1921 the Gulf Region was merged with the Southeast Region and he ran the whole thing out of Atlanta. In 1922, he moved back to the city and took the helm at the New York Tuberculosis Association and helped expend the outfit and merge it with the New York Heart Association.

He stayed in this position for nine years until, in 1931, New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt but Jesse Straus in charge of an agency called the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. Straus hired Hopkins as executive director, and about a year later Hopkins replaced Straus as President of TERA beginning his long association with FDR.

FDR, obviously, became president soon after this. Hopkins was a hugely important figure in the New Deal as the administrator relief and jobs programs such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He was also a hugely influential political adviser to Roosevelt to whom the apocryphal strategy “We will tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect” is typically attributed. In December of 1938, the post of Secretary of Commerce was added to Hopkins’ portfolio. In practice, however, his work in this job was largely overshadowed by his FERA/WPA gigs and his role as a political adviser. At this same period, Harold Ickes was dual-hatted as Secretary of Interior and head of the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Ickes/Hopkins clashes of the perogatives of Interior-PWA and Commerce-WPA were legendary.

Even before U.S. entry into World War II, FDR began to shift his attention from the New Deal to the fight against Nazism. As such, Hopkins was shifted out of the Commerce job and sent overseas as an unofficial emissary to Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin as well as to a key role in the Lend-Lease program.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis VII: Daniel C. Roper

In March of 1933, the United States of America emerged from its nightmarish flirtation with the ludicrous concept of being governed by a President whose former job was Secretary of Commerce, and returned to the honest and decent practice of picking a relatively inexperienced governor. And along with Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal came a new Commerce Secretary, Daniel Calhoun Roper of South Carolina, one of the white supremacists who made mid-century Democratic Party politics so charming. Roper’s father was a leader of the so-called Scotch Boys (they came from Scotland County, SC) during the Civil War. Roper himself was born shortly after the war’s end, in 1867, and graduated from Duke in 1888.

In 1892 he got himself elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. Then in 1893, he went to work on the staff of the US Senate’s Interstate Commerce Committee. Starting in 1900, he spent ten years working for the Census Bureau and then joined the House Ways and Means Committee staff. Woodrow Wilson made him first assistant postmaster general, which was an important patronage position at the time, and he served as chairman of Wilson’s reelection campaign. He then became chairman of the 1917 US Tariff Commission, which sounds dull but at the time it was a quite important economic policy position as lowering trade barriers was a major Democratic Party priority. His service in the Wilson administration ended with a stint heading up the IRS from 1917-1920. Then it was into the wilderness for Roper until the Democrats came roaring back with FDR.

In the early New Deal years, Roper was sort of FDR’s envoy to the business community. He set up an outfit called the Business Advisory Council composed of pro-New Deal executives. The National Recovery Administration cartelization policies really were pretty favorable to the interests of big business, but there were tensions over the administration’s pro-union inclinations, which led to the departure in 1934 of some initially supportive BAC members. Still, the BAC helped spearhead some business support for the creation of Social Security, though the majority of the business community was having none of it. He resigned from the cabinet in 1938 and became Ambassador to Canada.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis VI: Roy D. Chapin

By August of 1932, I imagine that Herbert Hoover already knew that he was doomed to the dustbin of history. But still, he found himself facing the very situation that today faces Barack Obama—an economic crisis, and a vacancy at the Commerce Department. In his hour of need he reached outside the government, to an executive from the auto industry named Roy D. Chapin.

Chapin had a pretty interesting life in business. He worked for automotive pioneer Ransom E. Olds (namesake of the Oldsmobile) and then left to be one of the founders of Hudson Motor Company in 1909. Hudson was named after its primary financial backer, a Detroit department store mogul named James L. Hudson, but Chapin was their top car guy. Under his leadership Hudson, and its subsidiary Essex Motors, were responsible for a number of innovations including the first affordable mass-produced enclosed automobile. In one of the pioneering moves of the alliance between automakers and the highway lobby, Chapin joined forces with Henry B. Joy of Packard Motors to spearhead the drive for the construction of the Lincoln Highway. In 1932, Hudson left the private sector to go work in the Hoover administration, where he tried and failed in an effort to convince Henry Ford to bail out the Guardian Trust Company of Detroit. Guardian’s collapse led to the Michigan Bank Holiday which prefigured FDR’s nationwide bank holiday in 1933. Chapin’s tenure at Commerce was brief, since Hoover lost the election just a few months later, and after FDR’s inauguration he went back to work for Hudson. He died in 1936.

Hudson merged with Nash Kelvinator in 1954 to become American Motors which, in turn, was acquired by Chrysler in the 1980s. And now it seems that Chrysler will soon either be liquidated or else acquired by Fiat.

Bad Burris

I think it’s fair to say that Roland Burris’ debut as a U.S. Senator is not going so well:

In the latest in a series of shifting accounts of his conduct, Sen. Roland W. Burris (D-Ill.) told reporters that he tried to raise money for then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich at the same time he was asking Blagojevich to appoint him to the Senate.

Burris said he contacted “some people” about holding a fundraiser at the request of Blagojevich’s brother, Robert, only to learn that no one was willing to help the governor. He said he later changed his mind, raised no money and contributed none.

The account to reporters in Peoria, Ill., was Burris’s fifth version of his contacts with close associates of Blagojevich and the first time he acknowledged trying to raise money for the former governor, who was arrested and forced from office on corruption charges.

Now we’ve got an Illinois prosecutor looking into things along with the Senate ethics committee and I’d say Burris’ shot at the 2010 nomination look pretty slim. He doesn’t really seem to have done anything corrupt per se, but ambition and desire for a Senate seat definitely seem to have gotten the better of his good sense and basic ethics. Maybe he could be made Commerce Secretary?

Commerce Cabinet Crisis V: The Return of Commerce Cabinet Crisis

I’d forgotten to revive this feature after Judd Gregg’s withdrawal. But here goes:

Upon his ascension to the Presidency, Herbert Hoover, a former Commerce Secretary, naturally turned to former subordinate Robert P. Lamont to take the helm at this not-so-important agency. Sources disagree as to whether Lamont was born in Illinois or Detroit. But he definitely built the “summerland” vacation cabin in Wisconsin which apparently went on to have a distinguished career as a haunted house.

Everyone agrees that Lamont moved to Chicago where he was a businessman and possibly involved with the Robert P. Lamont Office Building project. Either way, during World War One he was the top procurement officer in the country, and he went on to serve as an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Harding administration. After being tapped by Hoover to be Secretary of Commerce he failed to revive the economy from its Depression doldrums. In 1932 he left the Hoover administration in a pioneering “revolving door” move to become president of the American Iron and Steel Institute. President Hoover offered the following effusive remarks:

Secretary of Commerce Robert P. Lamont has found it necessary to resign in order to reenter private business.

Mr. Lamont has remained in his position at great sacrifice for several months at my request. I regret extremely his loss from the Cabinet as his abilities and service have commanded the respect and confidence of the entire country.

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Roy D. Chapin of Detroit, as Mr. Lamont’s successor.

Indeed!

Judd Gregg Fail

It seems like the whole idea of appointing a Commerce Secretary who doesn’t support the President’s agenda didn’t work out so well.

A majority of the American public voted for Barack Obama and an even larger majority approves of the job he’s doing as President. That creates a pool of well over 100 million Americans from whose ranks Obama could reasonably appoint a Secretary of Commerce.

Judd Gregg

By Matthew Yglesias

Just a quick point on this. If I were a Republican United States Senator who was supportive of Barack Obama’s economic recovery agenda at a time when the vast majority of my colleagues seem inclined to obstruct it, I would feel that the U.S. Senate was a promising venue from which to advance that agenda. And if I wasn’t supportive of said agenda, I don’t think I would be inclined to serve in Obama’s cabinet.

Judd Gregg for Commerce?

Roll Call reports that Barack Obama might appoint Judd Gregg (R-NH) to be Secretary of Commerce. If that were to come to pass, I’m sure Senator Gregg’s unique qualifications for this crucial post would be the sole consideration. The fact that Gregg joining the cabinet would lead to Gregg being replaced by a Democratic Senator is surely something nobody in the White House would give even a moment’s consideration to.

If this scenario were to come to pass, it would sort of make me wonder why Gregg would want to make the switch. Being a United States Senator seems like a pretty good job to me. Commerce Secretary—eh? But tastes differ.

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.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis III

America’s third Secretary Commerce, Herbert Hoover, is the most distinguished by a longshot:

Hoover was born in 1874 in Iowa and oprhaned at age 9 after which time he lived with a grandfather and two uncles before entering Stanford University in 1891 as part of their first class. After graduation, Hoover worked in the mining industry in Australia, then China (where he and his wife are said to have learned Mandarin), then Australia again, and then as a mining consultant on a global basis. When the First World War broke out, he put his Quaker instincts for humanitarianism to good use and helped organize the orderly evacuation of American citizens from the war-affected countries. Success in that role pushed him to the creation of the Committee for Relief in Belgium which brought food and humanitarian aid to that semi-occupied nation. When the United States entered the war, Woodrow Wilson appointed him head of the American Food Administration and after the war he continued doing humanitarian work in Europe both through the American Relief Administration and the American Friends Service Committee.

In light of his broad popularity and non-political persona, there were efforts made to recruit him as a Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1920. Instead, Hoover revealed that he was a Republican—albeit of the progressive bent and a Theodore Roosevelt supporter in the 1912 presidential three-way—and tried to get support in the California GOP primary. He lost, and down went his short-term presidential ambitions.

Nevertheless, when Warren Harding became president he offered Hoover either the Commerce Department or the Secretary of the Interior job. Hoover took Commerce, believing he could turn the thus-far-undistinguished cabinet post into a kind of national economic policymaking hub. It’s a matter of some dispute how much policy impact he wound up having at the end of the day, but as Secretary he energetically promoted public-private partnerships, tried to help spread the gospel of business efficiency, and was an early promoter of the car-centric brand of urbanism that would come to define the country after the war. This, combined with his earlier humanitarian work, was good enough to leave him as a kind of national symbol of prosperity, can-do spirit, and the idea that a business orientation wasn’t antithetical to the general welfare. He resigned his post as Harding’s term [UPDATE: Should be Coolidge's term, Harding was dead] was nearing its end, captured the GOP nomination, and badly beat Al Smith in the 1928 general election.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis II

By the time of William C. Redfield’s resignation in 1919, the wheels had really fallen off Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. The Versailles Treaty had failed ratification in the Senate, the 1918 midterms were a big win for the Republicans, Wilson had suffered strokes and alienated longtime political allies, Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer was undertaking the most serious violations of civil liberties in American history, the Spanish Flu pandemic had killed tons of people, etc.

Not known to have participated in this in any noteworthy way was Congressman Joshua W. Alexander of Gallatin, Missouri. Alexander was born in Ohio in 1852, but moved to Missouri as a child and attended public school and college there, becoming a lawyer and setting up his law practice in Gallatin in 1875. He became president of the Gallatin Board of Education, and then joined the Missouri House of Representatives, rising to serve as its Speaker in 1887. He then briefly served as mayor of Gallatin and then was a judge from 1901 to 1907 when he entered congress. As a member of the House of Representatives he was dispatched to be the American delegate to the International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea which was formed in the wake of the sinking of the Titanic. When Redfield resigned, Wilson tapped Alexander as his replacement and he helmed the department—doing, as usual for Commerce Secretaries, nothing important—throughout the remainder of the Wilson Administration.

Commerce Cabinet Crisis I

The first-ever Secretary of Commerce was William C. Redfield who took over in 1913, the first year that the Department of Commerce and Labor was split into the present-day Department of Commerce and Department of Labor:

Redfield did this and that for a number of years before moving to the then-independent city of Brooklyn. He appears to have been an opponent of Brooklyn’s incorporation into New York City. In 1896, he joined many so-called “Bourbon Democrats”—conservatives—in opposition to William Jennings Bryan’s capture of the party nomination on a free silver platform and served as a delegate to the rogue convention of Gold Democrats that mounted a third party campaign against Bryan and eventual victor William McKinley.

He ran for congress as a Gold Democrat and lost. He was Commissioner of Public Works in Brooklyn in 1902-03 and made it to congress for the 1911-1912 term before getting the Commerce gig. As Secretary, he inaugurated the tradition of undistinguished people serving without distinction in this not-very-important job.

At The Department of Forgotten Cabinet Secretaries

As the Obama administration heads into the last day of its first working week, exactly nobody is poised at the edge of their seat wondering who the next Commerce Secretary will be. The reason is that nobody cares about the Department of Commerce. The only important sub-cabinet job—the head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—has already been filled by Jane Lubchenco (an excellent choice).

Jonathan Zasloff suggests doing away with the department altogether:

In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the department. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally.

Of course it’s hard to actually save very much money doing this, since you wouldn’t actually be eliminating the department’s main sub-agencies. NOAA would be a good fit inside the EPA or the Department of the Interior, the Patent Office could be spun off as an independent agency or sent to Justice (or even Education; I think several countries put their patent agencies inside their education ministries) and the Census Bureau and the other statistical agencies could go hang out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And actually the price of carrying out the reorganization might well exceed the monetary savings. Still, political symbolism isn’t always about doing things that make sense.

At any rate, as long as the Commerce Cabinet Crisis continues, I’m going to profile one Secretary of Commerce per day until Barack Obama finds his man. Check this space tomorrow for the first edition.

Richardson Out

Bill Richardson is withdrawing from consideration as Commerce Secretary. I’m going to throw my hat into the ring Caroline Kennedy-style.