Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

came up on a quiet afternoon on the Gulf of Mexico, it must have had the flavor of the beginning of tranquillity. It must have had the lift of inspiration. From a party point of view, the thing that gave complete and obvious qualification to Hughes was the fact that he had been the candidate of his party for President of the United States and had received the approval of practically every voter in the party. On the broader grounds, Hughes had a substantially perfect availability. In one respect only was he inferior to any other man. The quantity of his diplomatic experience was less than Mr. Root's, but no one doubted that it was only in this accidental lack of a specific kind of experience that he was inferior. The quality of his mind was just as good, he was fifteen years younger, and he was in fact, just in process of supplanting the place that Mr. Root, by virtue of his years and his

natural wish for ease at the end of his honors, was more or less abdicating as leader of the bar of his country.

I have said that those who followed Harding's Cabinet-making closely, surmise that he chose Hughes first and built the rest of his Cabinet around him. That is not literally true. From the day Harding first gave thought to his Cabinet, or even to the then distant possibility that he might some day be called on to make a Cabinet, there were a few men whom he had in mind. These were chiefly old political friends and associates. Ultimately, not all of them landed. If Harding had chosen his Cabinet the day after his election, it would have been much more nearly a Cabinet of politicians than it now is. Harding, as his position grew upon him, and as he rose to it, went through a process of growth readily apparent to those about him. He realized in

ANDREW W. MELLON, OF THE TREASURY

In the opinion of Mr. Sullivan "By every way of estimating, Mellon ought to be, for present conditions, the best Secretary of the Treasury we have had for a generation." Secretary Mellon has had most of his financial connections in Pittsburgh

[graphic][merged small]
[graphic][merged small]

creasingly that his responsibility was less and less to his party and more to something broader. Out of that four months of growth there are at least two casualties, two men who, by every warm impulse of Harding's heart, were destined for the intimacy of his official family, but who fell outside as sacrifice to a newly elected President's increasing responsiveness to considerations other than personal.

In the end, three men landed in the Cabinet of whom the basis of choice was largely political. The most obvious was the National Committee Chairman who managed the campaign, Will Hays. The naming of Hays to be Postmaster-General was designed to fulfil two precedents of practical politics-one, that a successful National Chairman shall be given the ribbon of a Cabinet post, and the other, that the Postmaster-Generalship shall be a political appointment. Wilson, it is true, did not give his national chairman, the late William McCombs, a Cabinet post; but Wilson's absent-mindedness about political obligations of this kind was one of the traits which lost him support among the politicians and failed to gain for him an equivalent compensation from as much of the public as might have been expected to give him praise rather than blame for his frequent -and yet not uniform failure-to pay his political debts. Even

WILL H. HAYS

The new Postmaster-General. While in the eyes of many people Hays is too much of a politician, he is, in the eyes of many politiians, too much of an amateur. He is the youngest man in the cabinet, and owes his present position directly to the fact that he was Chairman of the Republican National Committee. However, he is a man of great energy and considerable ability

[graphic][subsumed]

so, Wilson's appointment of Burleson to be Postmaster-General was purely political, and the precedent was fully observed by Taft in selecting Frank Hitchcock, and Roosevelt in choosing Cortelyou.

Superficially, Harding's selection of Hays to be Postmaster-General seems a mere following of the precedent. But the fact is, it is one of those unhappy whims of fate which occasionally pursue a prominent man that, if to the public Will Hays is too much of a politician, to the politicians he is too much an amateur. Not all the old-time politicians completely approve of Hays. He isn't "hard-boiled" He isn't "hard-boiled" enough. They sometimes think of him as the boy scout in practical politics, or as a Y.M.C.A. secretary or a college cheer-leader. It is true, Hays's public experience has been wholly within the field of political organization, coming up through the county committee. the state

committee, and the national committee. A good deal of it is pretty rough work; and, in the hands of some men, a good deal of it is pretty smooth work-"smooth" in the wrong sense; but through it all Hays carries the faintly trailing aura of an elder in the First Presbyterian Church in a Middle West town of ten thousand, à quality that ever so slightly marks him apart when you see him in any group of sophisticated politicians or business men, or in any city drawing room.

Hays is young. He is the youngest man in the Cabinet and one of the youngest in any Cabinet. any Cabinet. His character and personality are not fully crystallized yet. If he continues to avoid the corroding influence of an older and more sordid school of politics, keeps free of that practice of compromise between principle and expediency, which is so frequently the heart of party management, and avoids

HERBERT HOOVER

Secretary of Commerce. "He has indisputably the touch of genius," in Mr. Sullivan's estimation and, too, in the estimation of most Americans. Newspaper men in Washington think that he is likely to be "the pace-maker of the Administration"

[graphic][merged small]
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small]
« AnteriorContinuar »