Black Tassels

On May 31, 1934, a lank, long-nosed Southern politician, weak from fever, stood on the deck of the cruiser Indianapolis just outside New York Harbor and proudly saluted 81 steel-gray warships in the mightiest display of naval strength ever to pass before a President. By then everybody but pacifists agreed that Claude Augustus Swanson, who had got his job for reasons of political expediency, was one of the best Secretaries of the Navy the U. S. ever had.

Claude Swanson was chairman of the Senate Naval Committee in 1918 (when Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy), and ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1932 (when Franklin Roosevelt was President-elect), but he might never have been Secretary of the Navy if Harry Byrd had not wanted a seat in the Senate and if Carter Glass had not turned down a Cabinet post. To make a Senate place for Virginia's ambitious young Boss Byrd, President Roosevelt named Senator Swanson to a Cabinet position which had often been filled by a mediocrity.

No mediocrity, but a shrewd, hard-working careerist was Claude Swanson. A son of Reconstruction, he worked and borrowed his way through college and University of Virginia's law school. He made money as a country lawyer, ran a country newspaper on the side. After twelve years in the U. S. House he was made Governor by the greatest of all Virginia political bosses, Senator Thomas Staples Martin, and then sent to the Senate for a career that lasted 22 years. He was one of Woodrow Wilson's main props in that chamber during the idealistic War years and the bitter years that followed. He wangled naval appropriations, formed a lasting friendship with Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, became the biggest Big Navy man in the Democratic Party. When he took office as Secretary, Washington's admirals breathed easier.

Hardly had his appointment been announced when he declared: "We must have a treaty navy second to none. The United States must cease leading the disarmament movement by example." He pushed the Vinson Bill authorizing construction of 101 new ships at a cost of half a billion dollars; he upped the Navy's enlisted personnel to 100,000, authorized the creation of aerial landing facilities on Guam, Midway and Wake Islands, threatened to fortify all trans-Pacific naval bases if Japan won parity with the U. S. By the end of 1935 he could say: "I am pleased to report that the Navy is in a very high state of efficiency and morale." It was, for the first time since the War.

The illness that had weakened Claude Swanson the day he stood on the deck of the Indianapolis with Franklin Roosevelt left him an easy mark. He had a series of slight paralytic shocks. In 1936 he broke a rib, developed pleurisy, nearly died. After that he went to his desk as regularly as he could, tossing details to his assistants, but working at his main task of building up the U. S. Navy as hard as if he had been well. To reporters he was always more than courteous, shaking hands with them at the beginning and end of each press conference, seeing that cigarets were passed (usually by an admiral). The press never played up Claude Swanson's illness because the press knew he would die in harness. After the death of Assistant Secretary Henry Latrobe Roosevelt three years ago, Franklin Roosevelt got his old friend another able assistant, Charles Edison, who has unostentatiously run the Navy Department when Secretary Swanson was too ill to work. But four months ago Assistant Secretary Edison also fell sick, had to leave Washington. Last week Charles Edison was back at his desk just in time to take over as Claude Swanson had his final stroke, died quietly on the Rapidan* in his native Virginia at 77. For 30 days every officer in the Navy will honor his late chief by wearing a black tassel on his sword.

*At the camp bought, built and given to the nation by President Herbert Hoover, now maintained by the National Park Service, used chiefly by Cabinet members.

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