Exit the Curmudgeon

One day in February 1933, Harold Le Claire Ickes stopped off in Washington to take in the sights and to see if, by chance, anybody in the New Deal wanted to pay off a political debt. During the campaign, Ickes had worked hard to organize Midwestern progressive Republicans for Franklin Roosevelt. But in the fever of preinauguration, nobody in the capital seemed to care--until Ickes bumped into an old friend who had connections. Next day Harold Ickes got a summons from the President-elect. "Mr. Ickes," said Franklin Roosevelt, "you and I have been speaking the same language for the past 20 years ... I am having difficulty finding a Secretary of the Interior . . . and I have just about come to the conclusion that the man I want is Harold L. Ickes of Chicago."

For the next 13 years, Harold L. Ickes of Chicago ran the vast domain of the Department of the Interior, and anything else he could get his hands on. He was "Honest Harold," bristling with incorruptibility, and so suspicious of everybody that he organized a private detective force to keep his department straitlaced. He was the "Old Curmudgeon," with a belligerent aggressiveness, a flair for day-to-day administration, a childish temper and a tongue like a branding iron.

Early one morning this week, Harold Ickes, ill for many weeks, lapsed into a semicoma at Headwaters Farm, his 200-acre Maryland estate, 15 miles outside Washington. He was rushed to Washington's Emergency Hospital with a fast-weakening heart. A few hours later, the Old Curmudgeon died at the age of 77.

Battle of the Billions. Hardly a correspondent in Washington had heard of Harold Ickes when Franklin Roosevelt announced his appointment. Pennsylvania-born, he had worked and scraped to get through the University of Chicago and its law school. Marriage to a wealthy divorcee gave him time to dabble in progressive Republican "trustbusting" politics, but did not alter his orthodox notions about the value of a dollar. The orthodoxy led to his memorable Washington feud with White House Favorite Harry Hopkins. Ickes wanted the Depression relief funds spent through his Public Works Administration on big projects that would pay for themselves, like TVA and the Boulder and Grand Coulee dams. Hopkins, the welfare worker, wanted to push out the money in makeshift WPA projects, so most of it would go directly into wages. They both shoveled out billions while they grappled for power, but it was Hopkins who eventually got the upper hand.

Few others who entered the bureaucratic lists against Ickes were as lucky. At the height of World War II, Ickes held down 16 major jobs, e.g., Solid Fuels Administrator, Coordinator of Fisheries, Petroleum Administrator. During his regime, Interior's budget expanded 347%, its payroll 160%. Once when the Senate voted to put a housing program under a separate agency, Ickes lashed individual Senators until (with an eye on public-works dispensations) they ignominiously reversed themselves the next day. In 1938 he stood off the State Department, the War Department, and even the President, in refusing to sell helium gas for Nazi Germany's dirigibles. (On Communists he was far less perceptive: in 1945 he scoffed at suspicions of Russia as "Goebbelese.")

The Cloud. Ickes stayed on with Harry Truman, but never felt quite at home. In 1946, when Truman tried to push through the nomination of Oilman Ed Pauley as Under Secretary of the Navy, Ickes resigned with a dire prophecy. "This kind of political pressure spiritually wrecked the Republican Party in the days of Secretary [of Interior Albert] Fall," said he. And he warned of coming corruption as "a cloud, now no bigger than a man's hand, that my experience sees in the sky."

But Ickes' public fame rests principally on the devastating sting of his tongue. Early in the days of NRA he branded NRAdministrator Hugh Johnson as a man "with mental saddle sores." Huey Long, said Ickes, had "halitosis of the intellect --that's presuming, of course, that Emperor Long has an intellect." Candidate Tom Dewey, Ickes announced scathingly in 1940, had "just thrown his diapers into the ring." Then, in a poker-faced "retraction," he added, "what I should have said was 'rompers.' " For Candidate Wendell Willkie, Ickes struck off one of the great word caricatures of U.S. politics, labeling Willkie a "simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer."

After he quit his job at Interior, Ickes tried his hand at writing a syndicated column for the New York Post, and magazine pieces--mostly for the New Republic. In his final New Republic article, written only a week before his death, he denounced congressional investigations of both political parties for "the wholesale dissemination of red herrings" to cover up "their fellow crooks, their political bosses and their grafting overlords."

It was typical of Ickes that he could accurately predict the corruption of the Truman Administration, and then denounce the men who uncovered the evils that he had predicted. Money could never corrupt Harold Ickes, but his character was somewhat corroded by an all-pervasive acid suspicion. He would rather have been right than President, and rather indignant than right.

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