Harold
Ickes was
born in Frankstown, Pennsylvania on 15th March, 1874. He attended
the University of Chicago and after graduating in 1897 he set himself
up as a lawyer. Ickes held progressive political views and often worked
for causes he believed in without pay. As a young man he was deeply
influenced by the politics of John
Altgeld.
Ickes worked for Theodore Roosevelt
in the 1912 presidential election. After the demise of the Progressive
Party, Ickes switched to Hiram Johnson
and managed his unsuccessful campaign to became a presidential candidate
in 1924.
Ickes became a follower of Franklin D.
Roosevelt after being impressed by his progressive policies as
governor of New York. In 1932 Ickes played an important role in persuading
progressive Republicans to support
Roosevelt in the presidential election.
In 1933 Roosevelt appointed Ickes as his Secretary of the Interior.
This involved running the Public Works Administration
(PWA) and over the next six years spent more than $5,000,000,000 on
various large-scale projects. Ickes, a strong supporter of civil
rights, he worked closely with Walter
Francis White of the NAACP to establish
quotas for African American workers in PWA projects.
Ickes felt that others in the administration, such as Harry
L. Hopkins, had more power and influence over Roosevelt's decision.
Ickes did not get on with Harry S. Truman
and resigned from his government in 1946 in protest over the appointment
of Edwin W. Pauley, Under Secretary of the Navy.
In his final years Ickes wrote a syndicated newspaper column and contributed
regularly to the New Republic.
Ickes wrote several books including Third
Term Bugaboo,
Not Guilty
and
his memoirs, The
Autobiography of a Curmudgeon
(1943). Harold Ickes died in Washington
on 3rd February, 1952. The
Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes,
was published posthumously in 1953.
Philadelphia Inquirer (8th April, 1935)
(1)
Harold Ickes, The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon (1943)
My first Presidential vote was cast in this
election (1896) and, while I put it on the line for the Republican
ticket, it was
without any enthusiasm. However, in the same election I voted for
John P. Altgeld, who was running for re-election as Governor of Illinois
on the Democratic ticket. I felt that he had been a greatly traduced
man. How the Chicago Tribune
and others had smeared this humane and courageous man because he had
fought for the underdog, and especially because he had pardoned those
who still lived of the innocent victims who had been railroaded to
the penitentiary after the Haymarket riot! So far as I could see,
Altgeld stood about where I wanted to stand on social questions.
(2) Harold
Ickes, Back to Work (1935)
Many billions of dollars could
properly be spent in the United States on permanent improvements.
Such spending would not only help us out of the depression, it would
do much for the health, well-being and prosperity of the people. I
refuse to believe that providing an adequate water supply for a municipality
or putting in a sewage system is a wasteful expenditure of money.
Any money spent in such fashion as to make our people healthier and
happier human beings is not only a good social investment, it is sound
from a strictly financial point of view. I can think of no better
investment, for instance, than money paid out to provide education
and to safeguard the health of the people.
(3)
Harold Ickes, The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon (1943)
Most
of us will remember how boldly he (Franklin D. Roosevelt) attacked
the most desperate
problem that ever faced a Chief Executive, not excepting the one that
had confronted Abraham Lincoln nearly seventy-five years before.
The "business administrations"
that had been going on in Washington under three Presidents had ruined
virtually everybody in the country (as well as their own reputations).
Spurred by an existing
national emergency, a panicky Congress lost no time in passing, among
other pieces of remedial legislation, the National Industrial Recovery
Act, hereinafter referred to as the NIRA. Congress, it seemed, could
move faster in those days than it did subsequently, when it developed
a slow, painstaking, and supercritical streak, which it continued
to maintain even when the Nazi dogs were ready to spring at our throats.
But in 1933 Congress quickly turned into
flour the grist that came to it in the form of the NIRA.
First off, it appropriated
the then staggering sum of $3,300,000,000 to be spent on permanent
public works, and it gave the Administrator, to be appointed by the
President, the right to set up a Public Works Administration. The
President honored me with that appointment.
(4)
Profile of Harold Ickes, New York Times (March, 1934)
Mr. Ickes knows all the
rackets that infest the construction industry. He is a terror to collective
bidders and skimping contractors. He warns that the PWA fund is a
sacred trust fund and that only traitors would graft on a project
undertaken to save people from hunger. He insists on fidelity to specifications;
cancels violated contracts mercilessly, sends inspectors to see that
men in their eagerness to work are not robbed of pay by the kickback
swindle.
(5)
Harold Ickes, The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon (1943)
We
should never forget that, in an era of unrest, a demagogue
even as fantastic as Hitler first appeared to be can develop at such
a pace that, before we realize it, he is beyond our catching. There
are men here, and in England and in France as well, who believe in
their hearts that a dictatorship is more desirable than democratic
self-government. Given a brutal dictator such as Hitler, union labor
could be "put in its place and kept there." In the thought
of some of our prominent citizens, including persons inside of Congress,
and even within our administrative agencies, the "place of labor"
is at a machine for long
hours at a bare subsistence wage. A dictator would also make short
shrift of the farmers who think that they ought to have at least a
decent living out of their long hours of sweaty toil. There are those
among us who, without compunction, would reduce free-born farmers
to the serfdom to which Hitler has consigned, in Europe, men who live
on and by the land.
That types of American
big business and concentrated wealth are not afraid of a dictatorship,
even such a one as Hitler's, is attested by recent shocking disclosures
with respect to secret and intimate business alliances between them
and German big business-alliances that deliberately strike
at the common man.
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