Most Americans couldn’t explain what the Department of the Interior does, so one could ask why anyone would want to read over 2,000 pages of the diary of the man who ran the department over eighty years ago. I suspect it’s easily the least likely candidate for the #1954 Club, the latest in Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year. Most of the books people offer during these events are novels, and most of these by British women. When I looked through various lists of notable books from 1954, though, I had to pause when I came to The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume III: the Lowering Clouds, 1939-1941. Back in another century when I was obsessed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, I’d read Volume I: The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936 and started Volume II: The Inside Struggle, 1936-1939 before running out of steam. This seemed a fit occasion to tackle it again.
It’s not unusual to be worn out by Harold Ickes. A lot of people were. Indeed, one of the tributes to FDR’s strength of character was his ability to put up with having Ickes in his Cabinet for the entire length of his Presidency, a record of Secretarial tenure exceeded by only one other person in America history. Ickes was often referred to in the popular press as a curmudgeon and in private conversations as many other things best left unrepeated. Walter Lippmann once called him “the greatest living master of the art of quarrelling.” As one of his biographers, Graham White, has written, “Ickes seemed to lack insight into his own motives, to be sometimes obtuse in understanding others, to become obsessed with certain goals to a degree that approached the irrational.” One Washington commentator described him as “a man of bad temper and good will,” and anyone who reads his diary will agree that those descriptors are in the right order.
Ickes was a classic American liberal. He started as a progressive Republican, followed Teddy Roosevelt to the Bull Moose Party, then became a Democrat to support candidates he saw as advancing the causes he believed in most: breaking up big corporate trusts, obtaining safe and fair conditions for working people, expanding the availability of public schools and housing, fulfilling the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. He headed the Chicago chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s, arranged for the black contralto Marian Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing in their auditorium in Washington, D.C. in 1939, opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of the Interior, he played a crucial role in the New Deal by running the Public Works Administration and helped greatly expand the number and size of National and state parks with the help of the Civilian Conservation Corps. When he finally stepped down from the Cabinet, it was in protest against what he saw as President Truman’s sanctioning of corruption and cronyism in the Federal Government.
But he was also handicapped by the dangerous combination of a big ego and a thin skin. FDR brought Ickes into the Cabinet to keep the support of the left wing of the Democratic Party, but he deliberately put him in charge of a department recognized by everyone as being in the second rank of the Executive Branch. A generation after Ickes, the reporter Stewart Alsop would write that, “Interior only becomes clearly visible on the horizon of Political Washington when there is a row about the redwoods, or the Indiana dunes, or shale oil,” and though the topics may have been different in the 1930s, nothing had changed in terms of visibility or importance in the intervening years.
The two great issues that tend to consume the attention and energy of American presidents are the domestic economy and national security. This is starkly illustrated by FDR’s time in office, which can be divided neatly into the period when he was primarily concerned with bringing the Great Depression to an end and the years when he was consumed with America’s involvement in the Second World War. Nothing got under Harold Ickes’s skin as much as the fact that he could only play a supporting role in these dramas.
It was a critical role at times, particularly in the first years of FDR’s administration, when Ickes organized and ran the Public Works Administration, which employed millions of workers on infrastructure projects such as the Grand Coulee Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the chain of bridges connecting Key West to the Florida mainland. But Ickes could not be satisfied with merely being a good public administrator, as much as he more than anyone else at the time believed in the value of such figures.
Importance in a political context correlates to power, and political power take two forms: formal authority and influence. Of the two, influence tends to be the more highly sought after. No power is so contested in Washington as that of being able to get the President to listen to what you have to say. Harold Ickes was tenacious in getting on FDR’s agenda at least once every week or so, preferably one-on-one or in small groups, and Ickes’s diary continues to be a primary source for historians studying Roosevelt. “I lunched with the President”, “I told the President”, and similar statements appear hundreds of times in these pages.
Ickes felt comfortable offering FDR advice on topics well outside his portfolio. One of the statements most often quoted from the diary comes from an entry in February 1938 at which Ickes argued that the U.S. should lift its embargo on selling arms to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. FDR told him that he’d discussed the matter with the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader in the Senate, and both felt that supporting the Republicans would lose Democrats the support of many Catholic voters. “This was the cat that was actually in the bag,” Ickes wrote afterwards in fury, “and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever.” To Ickes, it proved that there was a conspiracy of conservative Catholics in the U.S. and Great Britain to make it easier for Franco to win.
Unfortunately for Ickes, he was working for the cagiest President ever to occupy the White House. FDR once tellingly said, “You know, I’m a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.” He often gave members of his administration conflicting instructions simply to elicit which of them would prove more adept in coming out on top of the resulting squabbles. If FDR had on occasion to smooth Ickes’s ruffled feathers or flatter Ickes’s ego by appearing to take his advice, he would do it to serve his purposes. Ickes seems to have believed that, on the whole, FDR esteemed his advice highly. His diary, however, suggests otherwise. It’s clear that while FDR listened to Ickes selectively, Ickes pored over every communication with the President like a reader of tea leaves.
One reason FDR probably discounted Ickes’s counsel was that Ickes could never understand that influence tends to trumps formal authority. The only thing Ickes pursued more zealously than face time with the President was the preservation and expansion of the scope of his department. It’s very rare for substantive new functions to be established within any bureaucracy. Instead, battles over formal authority are almost always territorial disputes. For Ickes to increase the power of the Interior Department, it could only be by taking some away from another department. Throughout his time as Secretary, no territory so obsessed him as the U. S. Forest Service.
For reasons that few taxpayers could explain, the U. S. Forest Service was established under the Department of Agriculture, while the National Parks Service falls under the Department of the Interior. Ickes had a legitimate argument that the government could better ensure the conservation of forest land by transferring the Forest Service to Interior, but the cause was, in fact, driven as much by personal ambition as civic vision. When Ickes first brought up the idea with FDR in early 1934, the President was blithely supportive, telling Ickes that if he “could bring it about, it would be quite all right so far as he was concerned.”
That wording is classic FDR. He was, in effect, placing all the responsibility on Ickes’s shoulder. As Ickes himself recognized, although the Department of Agriculture had a smaller budget and staff than Interior, it also had, in a House and Senate still imbalanced in favor of rural voters, exceptionally strong support for maintaining its status quo. FDR was sending Ickes out to land Moby Dick with a rowboat and a butter knife. Seven years later, Ickes was still pressing FDR on the case for moving the Forest Service to Interior. And FDR was still nodding in mild encouragement. To this day, the Forest Service remains under Agriculture.
Ickes also protected his own territory like a junkyard dog. It helped that he had an ultra-sensitive conspiracy detector. Just two weeks after joining the Cabinet, Ickes told the President that, “in my judgment, a well-conceived conspiracy was in process of being carried out to make my position in the Cabinet untenable.” When, in 1939, FDR decided it would be necessary to adapt the Public Works Administration, moving it out from Interior and shifting its focus to war preparations, Ickes came close to resigning in anger. FDR invited him up to Hyde Park for a placating chat, but sent him home with a letter that was less gentle in tone: “My dear Harold, will you ever grow up? [FDR was eight years younger than Ickes.] Don’t you realize that I am thinking in terms of the Government of the United States not only during this Administration but during many Administrations to come?” FDR closed the letter, however, by assuring Ickes that, “For the hundredth time, I am not forgetting Forestry.”
One reviewer described Ickes the diarist as “Pepys with a chip on his shoulder.” In these pages, Walter Trohan of The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Ickes dies a thousand deaths in welters of self-pity, indignation, injured feelings, frustration, and tears.” Bankers, oil companies, Senators, Congressmen, White House staffers, journalists, lobbyists, and even life-long friends show up as hostile blips on Ickes’s ego-defense radar. In small doses, it’s amusing. At the length of these three volumes, it’s exhausting.
What’s also exhausting, but recounted in perhaps unparalleled detail, is the endless give-and-take involved in working in and around the highest levels of a national government. An enormous amount of Ickes’s time is consumed in meetings with members of Congress, staff from the White House, staff from his own department, to develop, test, refine, lobby for, defend, salvage, and, occasionally, resurrect proposals for new programs or changes in priorities and policies. Despite the considerable erosion of bi-partisan cooperation in Washington, this back-and-forth, give-and-take is the reality of how politics work at the Federal level. One needn’t read three volumes of Ickes’s diary to understand this, but it’s still a useful illustration of much the success of the good ideas that get through depends on the willingness of a few key people to push for them almost to the point of insanity.
Ickes’s diary also shows how politics is always enmeshed with personal issues, and none more than personal ambition. Almost every entry includes one or more conversations about what jobs are up for grabs, who are the likely candidates, who are backing them, what are their relative advantages and drawbacks. In Ickes’s day, there were many fewer so-called “Plum Jobs” (“Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointment,” to quote GovInfo.gov), but the wheeling and dealing over appointments was a constant subject of discussion. Here, for example, is part of the entry for 24 January 1937:
Vice President Garner discussed the personnel of the joint committee that is to be appointed to consider the President’s reorganization plan. He brought up the name of Senator Byrd [Harry Flood Byrd, long-time senator from Virginia] in this connection, but the President objected to the inclusion of Byrd because he has been fighting his plan in favor of one of his own. I leaned over to Jim Farley and whispered to him that for my part I would rather take care of a man on the inside than on the outside and that I thought it would be good policy to appoint Byrd. Jim agreed and quoted what I had said but the President seemed to be set against Byrd. The Vice President also agreed with me, and finally the President said he would leave the matter to him. I rather suspect that the Vice President will appoint Byrd as a member of this committee and I hope that he will.
I quote this at length not to highlight Ickes’s prose style, which is unexceptional, but just to show how tiresome these discussions must have been. And this business with Byrd comes up two more times in the diary before a final decision is taken.
The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes is not particularly good literature. When it was first published, excerpts from the first two volumes were serialized in newspapers across the country. But back then, the memory of FDR and the personalities of his administration were still fresh in people’s minds. Today, the diary is illuminating not because we remember or care who Tommy Corcoran or David Lilienthal were but because it remains the most candid account of the grinding day-in, day-out work of governing.
As Graham White has put it, “It allows us to observe, from Ickes’ highly distinctive perspective, the messy processes of official decision-making; the rancorous controversies that disturbed the affairs of state; the personal charm and manipulative skills of a president who deftly kept his unruly team together; and, through all these things, the subtle and shifting relationship between idealism and ambition, principle and power.” Along with all the bargaining and sore feelings and backstairs deals that Ickes records, we also have a record of some of the boldest programs in American history, set down by a man who may have had a giant chip on his shoulder — but who also had the personal integrity not to hide this from the reader.
Ickes kept a diary the entire time he was in office. He was known for scribbling notes in most meetings, notes he would then use to dictate the first drafts of his diary entries. Considering the hectic schedule of a Cabinet secretary, even in the days before constant connectivity and social media, his commitment to keeping a record of his activities demonstrates — depending on your perspective — admirable discipline or a relentless compulsion.
The complete work amounts to an estimated six million words. His widow, Jane, helped edit these volumes, which appeared after Ickes’s death in 1952, but the publication of the remaining period (Volume III ends with FDR’s speech on December 8 calling for a declaration of war on Japan) was stopped when her relationship with the publisher, Simon and Schuster, broke down. At this point, it’s unlikely that further volumes will ever appear.
