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Authors: James MacGregor Burns
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Stimson, Roosevelt had gained an indomitable, world-minded, richly experienced war administrator. Equally significant was the fact that Stimson brought into his administration a symbol and rallying point for a host of Republicans who since Hoover’s time, and even since Teddy Roosevelt’s, had felt cut off from the nation’s service—cut off by the stultifying Harding and Coolidge administrations, by the congressional Republicans, by Roosevelt and the national Democracy. These men came mainly from the larger cities, especially in the Northeast; attended old preparatory schools and Ivy League universities and took on a speech and a set of airs with a slightly alien, British tinge; fanned out into law firms and banks and brokerage houses; worked smoothly together in clubs, foundations, and on boards of trustees; read the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or their moderate, internationalist counterparts in Boston, Philadelphia, or a dozen other cities. Experienced in managing or advising big enterprises, cosmopolitan in their national and international travels and contacts, accustomed to dealing with governmental bureaucracy even while denouncing it, these Republicans, along with their opposite numbers in the Democratic party, were anti-Hitler, pro-British, and defense-minded.
Frank Knox represented a somewhat different sector ofRepublicanism. A Rough Rider who had backed Teddy Roosevelt in the great schism of 1912, while Stimson, as a member of William Howard Taft’s Cabinet, had stayed with his chief, Knox had been a newspaperman and politician in both New Hampshire and Michigan before becoming publisher of the Chicago Daily News in 1931. In the Chicagoland of Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Tribune, he had been a voice for moderate, internationalist Republicanism, especially in more recent years.
The two presidential parties supplied Roosevelt with public servants as well as political support. Stimson and Knox, along with old New Dealers Hopkins, Justice Frankfurter, and others, served as recruiting sergeants for the host of lawyers and businessmen who were taking posts in Washington—including Robert Patterson, Union College 1912, Harvard Law School, and infantry officer in World War I, and a federal judge until coming to Washington; James V. Forrestal, a Princetonian who had seen naval service during the first war and had later worked his way up to the presidency of Dillon, Read; John J. McCloy, a graduate of Amherst, Harvard Law School, and prestigious New York law firms, who became Assistant Secretary of War in the spring of 1941; Robert Lovett, Yale University, Harvard graduate school, and long a banker. These men had the defects of their virtues; they were sometimes narrow in vision and conventional in outlook, but few challenged their public spirit—or their usefulness to Roosevelt as the nation mobilized for defense.
If Stimson and others provided Roosevelt’s coalition with authentic Republican credentials, Cordell Hull and the new Secretary of Commerce, Jesse Jones, spoke for the old and the new South. After eight years in office Hull was still the Wilsonian idealist and moralizer, still the advocate of world trade as the long-run solution to world conflict, still a link between the White House and the old Southerners on Capitol Hill. Jones was cut from different calico. A towering, white-thatched Texan, long hostile to Wall Street finance, he had built a small bureaucratic empire in alien New Deal soil just as he had once built a financial empire in Texas. Part capitalist, part populist, but always a Houston Texan, the “Emperor Jones” wielded wide influence because of his control of both Commerce and the Federal Loan Agency, and because of his ties with Southerners on the Hill.
The rest of the Cabinet seemed to reflect all the main elements of the New Deal Democratic party: Morgenthau, who could speak for Eastern financial, philanthropic interests; Frances Perkins, for the labor, humanitarian,
Frank Knox represented a somewhat different sector ofRepublicanism. A Rough Rider who had backed Teddy Roosevelt in the great schism of 1912, while Stimson, as a member of William Howard Taft’s Cabinet, had stayed with his chief, Knox had been a newspaperman and politician in both New Hampshire and Michigan before becoming publisher of the Chicago Daily News in 1931. In the Chicagoland of Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Tribune, he had been a voice for moderate, internationalist Republicanism, especially in more recent years.
The two presidential parties supplied Roosevelt with public servants as well as political support. Stimson and Knox, along with old New Dealers Hopkins, Justice Frankfurter, and others, served as recruiting sergeants for the host of lawyers and businessmen who were taking posts in Washington—including Robert Patterson, Union College 1912, Harvard Law School, and infantry officer in World War I, and a federal judge until coming to Washington; James V. Forrestal, a Princetonian who had seen naval service during the first war and had later worked his way up to the presidency of Dillon, Read; John J. McCloy, a graduate of Amherst, Harvard Law School, and prestigious New York law firms, who became Assistant Secretary of War in the spring of 1941; Robert Lovett, Yale University, Harvard graduate school, and long a banker. These men had the defects of their virtues; they were sometimes narrow in vision and conventional in outlook, but few challenged their public spirit—or their usefulness to Roosevelt as the nation mobilized for defense.
If Stimson and others provided Roosevelt’s coalition with authentic Republican credentials, Cordell Hull and the new Secretary of Commerce, Jesse Jones, spoke for the old and the new South. After eight years in office Hull was still the Wilsonian idealist and moralizer, still the advocate of world trade as the long-run solution to world conflict, still a link between the White House and the old Southerners on Capitol Hill. Jones was cut from different calico. A towering, white-thatched Texan, long hostile to Wall Street finance, he had built a small bureaucratic empire in alien New Deal soil just as he had once built a financial empire in Texas. Part capitalist, part populist, but always a Houston Texan, the “Emperor Jones” wielded wide influence because of his control of both Commerce and the Federal Loan Agency, and because of his ties with Southerners on the Hill.
The rest of the Cabinet seemed to reflect all the main elements of the New Deal Democratic party: Morgenthau, who could speak for Eastern financial, philanthropic interests; Frances Perkins, for the labor, humanitarian,
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