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2. Harold Ickes Goes to Work
- University Press of Mississippi
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C H A P T E R 2 HAROLD ICKES GOES TO WORK The personality of Harold Leclair Ickes dominated the Public Works Administration (PWA). A good clue to that personality is the fact that he titled his published memoirs The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon.1 He prized his independence, guarded his integrity, and loved a good fight. He grew up a Republican in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and moved as a young man to the bare-knuckle, largely Democratic city of Chicago. Young Harold was a reformer and a believer in honest government. He could not approve of the graft and corruption that were a central part of the urban political machine. But the Chicago Republican Party was rarely the party of reform. Many of its members had their own stake in the status quo. The reformers in its midst were frequently defeated or double-crossed in primaries.2 The principal Republican reformer was Charles Merriam, a young University of Chicago political science professor. Ickes had organized Merriam ’s successful campaign for city council in 1909 and tried unsuccessfully for a position himself the following year. In 1911 he headed Merriam’s bid for mayor. Merriam won the Republican nomination but lost to the Democrat because of weak support from his own party.3 Ickes’s law career also allowed him the chance to crusade for reform and champion underdogs. Early one morning in 1908, an eighteen-yearold Russian Jew was shot by the Chicago chief of police. The chief claimed it was in response to an assassination attempt. The newspapers called for the banishment of anarchists, most of whom were assumed to be Jewish, and the police began raiding suspected Jewish anarchists’ hangouts. Jane Addams, head of the Hull House settlement, called a meeting to find ways to quell the panic. She wanted a lawyer to represent the dead boy’s sister 12 HAROLD ICKES GOES TO WORK 13 at the inquest. All those at the meeting refused; Ickes accepted. He had the body exhumed and a second autopsy performed. He discovered that the coroner had not only mishandled evidence, failing to notice, for example , that the alleged assailant had a bullet hole in his back, but also that the boy’s brain had been removed and taken away for study. Ickes threatened to make this public if the authorities did not call off the anarchist hunt. His actions, his biographer T. H. Watkins believes, prevented a dangerous anti-Semitic hysteria from dividing the city. Ickes’s own conclusion about the cause of the incident was that the chief had been drunk and fired without provocation.4 In 1911 Ickes once again came to the aid of Hull House, which had joined with the Women’s Trade Union League in defense of seamstresses on strike against sweatshop conditions at the factory of the famous clothier Hart, Shafner, and Marks. Ickes’s wife, Anna, joined the picket line. The police were rough in arresting immigrant women pickets but avoided the upper-class supporters until one day when they picked up Addams’s friend Ellen Gates Starr. Addams asked Ickes to defend Starr, who was charged with assaulting a police officer. Ickes had the alleged victim, a ‘‘hulking clod of a policemen,’’ stand beside the diminutive Starr. The courtroom burst out laughing, and the case was over.5 Other minority groups received Ickes’s support. He was briefly (1922– 1924) president of the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and worked for antilynching legislation, but found both black and white members of the NAACP discouragingly passive. He also developed a strong interest in the rights of Native peoples. Because of his wife’s asthma, they had built a small adobe house in New Mexico near the Navajo Reservation in 1916. This led to meeting John Collier, an advocate for the Pueblo Indians who was to become commissioner of Indian affairs during the New Deal. Ickes became involved with Collier in a fight with white ranchers over Native water rights and was a board member of the American Indian Defense Association. Though Ickes’s politics remained focused on Chicago during the 1920s, he and his wife continued their involvement in American Indian rights.6 Thus, as Ickes gained experience campaigning for and managing Republican reform candidates in the first decades of the century, he was also establishing connections with a growing number of people, known as Progressives, who stood outside both parties. The Progressives...