Second Stocking

"Don't kid me, boys. This is the Christmas season and I'm accepting anything."

So said Harry Hopkins one day last week after a Cabinet meeting which, though no member, he had attended as usual by Presidential request. When Reorganization failed last spring with it died Harry Hopkins' dream of becoming the first Secretary of Welfare. Now, for weeks, Washington wiseacres had been saying Secretary Roper of Commerce would be let out to make room for Friend Hopkins, with twofold purpose: to take him out of the Congressional barrage soon to fall upon his WPA; to throw him into contact with businessmen and build him up as 1940 Presidential timber.

The first part of this prediction had now come true. Following the death of his son-in-law, David R. Coker, whose large affairs in South Carolina needed overseeing, kindly, seam-faced Daniel Calhoun ("Uncle Dan") Roper's resignation was at last announced. Instantly a Big Business chorus arose led by President George H. Davis of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, seeking to head off the Hopkins appointment. Franklin Roosevelt, like his most trusted friend, laughed away questions about it and Christmas continued to come, with two Cabinet stockings instead of one for the White House Santa Claus to fill.

In the magnificent $17,500,000 coliseum built to house the Department which was Herbert Hoover's monument and his stepping stone to the Presidency, Uncle Dan Roper of Marlboro County, S. C. seemed like a very small potato indeed in a very big box. His training for the job consisted of clerking in Congress, working in President Wilson's Post Office Department (as the co-equal of his contemporary, Assistant Secretary of the Navy F. D. Roosevelt), later on the Tariff Commission and as Internal Revenue Commissioner. From 1921 until after the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 he was a workaday Washington lawyer. Helping to swing his friend Senator McAdoo's delegates from Garner to Roosevelt at Chicago, and being a Southerner, put him in line for the Roosevelt Cabinet. An assiduous politician but not a brilliant executive, 71-year-old Secretary Roper contributed to the New Deal more than comic relief for cynical journalists, more than platitudinous speeches. He performed the useful function of massaging the bumps on Business' head every time Franklin Roosevelt cracked down on it. The impressive-looking vibrator which he was allowed to use for this purpose was his Business Advisory & Planning Council, chairmanned first by Franklin Roosevelt's friend Gerard Swope of General Electric, later by Uncle Dan's friend Samuel Clay Williams of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. There is nothing in the record to show that the BA & PC and Uncle Dan ever really altered Franklin Roosevelt's attitude toward Business, but several times it revived that sufferer's failing heart with short waves of Confidence.

The alarmed view taken last week by most Business spokesmen toward Harry Hopkins as Secretary of Commerce was that, as a chronic social worker and economic planner, he might devise ways--in cahoots with his trust-busting fellow Janizary, Robert Houghwout Jackson, who seems likely to succeed Attorney-General Homer Cummings in January--of fastening new Federal controls upon Business. An entirely different view was expressed by Journalist David Lawrence, one of Business' most alert and alarmable servants. He wrote:

"Clearly, if the Business & Advisory council. . . should now formulate proposals and if Harry Hopkins concurs in them, the business group will find a better and more vigorous champion at the White House than they have ever had. Unhappily one of the complaints about Secretary Roper's regime was that he did not have the confidence of the left wing in the New Deal and hence was not as powerful in Administration policy as he should have been or as Mr. Hopkins would be.

"Mr. Hopkins has had an unusual administrative experience in the Government. . . . Everybody hereabouts recognizes that the biggest job of the next 18 months is to get the economic recovery machine going. This means a meshing of business and Government action. If Harry Hopkins makes a success of it, and the business men feel he has accomplished something affirmative in the oft-talked-about but little-realized Government-&-business cooperation policy, it will be because the man now being suggested for the Department of Commerce portfolio will have brought left and right wings together in a practical way."

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