Harold LeClair Ickes ( ; March 15, 1874 – February 3, 1952) was an American administrator, politician and lawyer. He served as the United States secretary of the interior for nearly 13 years from 1933 to 1946, the longest tenure of anyone to hold the office, and the second longest-serving Cabinet member in U.S. history after James Wilson. Ickes and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins were the only original members of the Roosevelt Cabinet who remained in office for his entire presidency.
Ickes was responsible for implementing many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. He was in charge of the Public Works Administration, a major relief program, and led the federal government's environmental efforts.
In his day, he was considered a prominent liberal spokesman, a skillful orator and a noted supporter of many African-American causes, although he at times yielded to political expediency where state-level segregation was concerned. Before his national-level political career, in which he did remove segregation in areas of his direct control, he had been the president of the Chicago NAACP. Ickes supported an American invasion of Francoist Spain before the Allied invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch.
Robert C. Weaver, who in 1966 became the first African-American person to hold a cabinet position in the U.S., was in the "Black Kitchen Cabinet", Ickes' group of advisers on race relations.
Ickes was the father of Harold M. Ickes, who later served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton.
Early years
Of Scottish and German ancestry, Ickes was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Matilda (McCune) and Jesse Boone Williams Ickes. He and his entire family lived in nearby Altoona, Pennsylvania. At the age of 16 his mother died. Leaving behind his father and three other siblings in Altoona, Ickes and his younger sister moved in with an aunt in Chicago where he attended Englewood High School. He was the class president while at Englewood. After graduating, he worked his way through the University of Chicago, finishing with a B.A. in 1897. At Chicago, Ickes was a charter member re-establishing the Illinois Beta Chapter of Phi Delta Theta."Death Takes Phis Patterson, Ickes," The Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, March 1952, page 261.
He first worked as a newspaper reporter for The Chicago Record and later for the Chicago Tribune. He obtained a J.D. degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1907 but rarely practiced. One notable case was the death of Lazarus Averbuch. He became active in reform politics, especially on behalf of John Maynard Harlan in Republican politics.The Public: A Journal of Democracy, Volume 10Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919Chicago: A Biography
First World War From 1917 to 1918 he served with the YMCA in France while the organization was stationed with the 35th Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Forces.
Politics
Initially a Republican in Chicago, Ickes was never part of the establishment. He was unsatisfied with Republican policies and joined Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose movement in 1912. After returning to the Republican fold, he campaigned for progressive Republicans Charles Evans Hughes (1916) and Hiram Johnson (1920 and 1924). He later served as the manager of Hugh S. Magill's campaign to represent Illinois in the United States Senate in 1926.
He fought lengthy battles with Chicago figures Samuel Insull, mayor William Hale Thompson, and Robert R. McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. He had an ongoing feud with Thomas E. Dewey, the presidential candidate.
Although active in Chicago politics, he was unknown nationally until 1933. As part of this involvement, Ickes was involved in Chicago's social and political affairs; among his many activities include his work for the City Club of Chicago. He was also involved in state and county politics serving on state councils and party committees. He served as president of the People's Protective League of Illinois in 1922. He was a member of the Roosevelt Memorial Association and later vice president of the Roosevelt Memorial Association of Greater Chicago. He later served on the National Conservation Committee and on the board of advisers of the Quetico-Superior Council. He served as chairman of the People's Traction League in 1929.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he began putting together his cabinet. His advisers thought the Democratic president needed a progressive Republican to attract middle-of-the-road voters. Roosevelt offered the position to New Mexico Senator Bronson Cutting, who ultimately declined the position due to his unstable health. Roosevelt then sought out Hiram Johnson, a Republican Senator at the time who had supported Roosevelt in the campaign, but Johnson was uninterested. Johnson, however, recommended an old ally, Ickes.
Secretary of the Interior
Ickes served simultaneously in several major roles for Roosevelt. Although he was the Secretary of the Interior, he was better known to the public for his simultaneous work as the director of the Public Works Administration, where he directed billions of dollars of projects designed to lure private investment and provide employment during the depths of the Great Depression. His management of the PWA budget and his opposition to corruption earned him the name "Honest Harold." He regularly presented projects to Roosevelt for the President's personal approval, but also clashed no less often with Roosevelt and his Cabinet colleagues, being noted for combativeness in debate.
In 1937, Ickes expanded the boundaries of Yosemite National Park through a direct government purchase of a tract owned by the Yosemite Sugar Pine Company. This had the effect of ending large-scale commercial logging in the park.
In July 1938, Ickes wrote a letter to then-President Roosevelt, imploring him not to turn Palmyra Atoll over to the U.S. Navy for use as a military base. Quoting his letter, he writes,
... the Navy Department has plans for the acquisition and development of the island as an air base. Our representatives have studied conditions at Palmyra and other islands in the south Pacific, and they report that use of this small land area as an air base for Navy Department purposes would undoubtedly destroy much if not all that makes the island one of our most scientifically and scenically unique possessions.
The letter was unsuccessful, and plans for the base proceeded, but he was by all accounts the first official to propose that Palmyra Atoll become a national monument. Today the atoll is part of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, and despite suffering the kind of damage Ickes predicted, it has recovered and is used regularly for scientific study, having still retained what Ickes also described in his letter as "geologic and biologic exhibits ... of great beauty and scientific importance".
He was instrumental in establishing the Kings Canyon National Park, commissioning Ansel Adams as a 'photographic muralist' in an ambitious public relations project that Ickes had himself conceived to document and communicate, on a visceral level, the outstanding beauty of the parks for the public to see, and indirectly but effectively persuading the Congress to pass the bill and send it to President Roosevelt in 1940.
After the loss of the German passenger Zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937, the Zeppelin Company director Dr. Hugo Eckener sought to obtain inert helium from the United States to replace the highly flammable hydrogen gas for use in their future airships. At the time, the United States held a monopoly on helium and the Zeppelin company could not obtain the gas from other sources. Ickes opposed the sale although practically every other member of the Cabinet supported it along with the President himself. Ickes remained adamant in his opposition, fearing Germany would use the helium in military dirigibles. Eckener refused to risk passenger safety with the continued use of hydrogen and as a result, Zeppelin passenger service came to an end.
The Saudi Aramco oil corporation, with Ickes' assistance, got Roosevelt to agree to Lend-Lease aid to Saudi Arabia, which would involve the U.S. government in protecting American interests there and create a shield for ARAMCO.
Due to a projected oil shortage between June and October 1941, Ickes issued orders to close gasoline stations in the eastern United States between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.Current Biography 1941, 426
Ickes was a powerful orator and the only man in the Roosevelt Administration who could rebut John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who often delivered radio addresses critical of the Roosevelt administration.
Segregation and civil rights
Ickes was a strong supporter of both civil rights and civil liberties. He had been the president of the Chicago National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and supported African American contralto Marian Anderson when the Daughters of the American Revolution prohibited her from performing in DAR Constitution Hall. Ickes was the organizer and master of ceremonies at Anderson's subsequent concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
In 1933, Ickes ended segregation in the cafeteria and restrooms of his department, including national parks around the country. He encouraged private contractors working for the PWA to hire both skilled and unskilled black workers. Robert C. Weaver, who in 1966 became the first black person to hold a cabinet position, was one of his advisers on race relations, a group known as the "Black Kitchen Cabinet." White attitudes toward blacks evolved little in the 1930s, and Ickes did not try to speed up the change, arguing that first there needed to be emergency relief and the upgrading of black skills.
In 1937, when Senator Josiah Bailey, Democrat of North Carolina, accused him of trying to break down segregation laws, Ickes wrote him that he worked towards and foresaw equality but did not waste his energy on state-level segregation:
In 1941 Ickes paved the way for the National Park Service to desegregate its facilities in the nation's capital after a group of black men came to play mini-golf at East Potomac Park Golf Course and were verbally harassed by the patrons of the then white-only facility. He did so the day after this event and almost fourteen years before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling that struck down segregation laws.
He complained in his diary about the Japanese American internment in 1942, but made no public protest.Watkins, p 792
World-level colonial independence
As an official delegate to the founding United Nations conference in San Francisco, presided over by Acting Secretary General Alger Hiss, Ickes advocated for stronger language promoting self-rule and eventual independence for the world's colonies.Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy, 146
Jewish refugees in Alaska
In a news conference on the eve of Thanksgiving 1938, Ickes proposed offering Alaska as a "haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions." The proposal was designed to bypass normal immigration quotas, because Alaska was not a state. Ickes had toured Alaska that summer, meeting with local officials to discuss how to attract greater development, both for economic reasons and to bolster security in an area so close to Japan and Russia and to develop a plan to attract international professionals, including European Jews. In his press conference, he pointed out that 200 families had been relocated from the Dust Bowl to Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna Valley.