Harold L. Ickes and the National Park Service

Abstract

In 1933, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to balance his cabinet by nominating a Republican supporter to be secretary of the interior. Senators Hiram Johnson of California and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico both turned him down, preferring to remain in the Senate.' Roosevelt then turned to Harold LeClair Ickes, an "independent Republican" lawyer from Chicago. Ickes would serve as secretary of the interior from 1933 to 1945, longer than any man before or since. His responsibilities included the National Park Service, which-except for certain of its personnel -prospered under the leadership of this complex and colorful figure. Born in 1874, Ickes spent his first years in Pennsylvania but moved to the midwestern metropolis during his youth. As a reporter for the Chicago Record, he covered Republicans in the 1900 election and became a particular admirer of vice-presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. He worked actively in Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose campaign, reverted to Republican regularity on behalf of Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, but then supported every Democratic presidential candidate during the 1920s. At home in Chicago he battled Samuel Insull and the colorful Mayor William H. "Big Bill" Thompson. His tireless and uncompromising advocacy of reformist principles and his facility for verbal attack made him "almost the incarnation of lonely, righteous, and inextinguishable pugnacity." When Ickes finally found himself on the winning side of a presidential campaign in 1932, he thought first of becoming commissioner of Indian affairs; then he resolved to shoot for the top position in the Interior Department. He was not from the western states that traditionally supplied secretaries of the interior, and he had no personal familiarity with his successful candidate. He made his interest known to FDR through mutual acquaintances, however, and eagerly accepted the post upon his call to Roosevelt's Hyde Park home.2 The new secretary of the interior was "a remarkably complex and profoundly suspicious man who thrived on