HAROLD L. ICKES - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 12/09/1950 - HFSID 85481

HAROLD ICKES
He signed this typed letter in 1950, complaining that the Democratic Party had fielded a very weak candidate to run against Senator Howard Taft.
TLS: "Harold L. Ickes", 1 page, 6¼x8½. Washington, D.C., 1950 December 12. To Mr. Daniel Francis Clancy, Springfield, OH. In full: "I received your note of November 3 to which was attached your by-line article on the political situation in Ohio. I was unable to answer at the moment because of two trips out of town and a subsequent illness that laid me low for a period. You were right in predicting that Senator Taft would win but I suspect that you were as surprised as some of the rest of us were by the size of his majority. To me, the only explanation is that Republicans and even a large part of the labor vote could not stomach Ferguson. I note that you proposed to vote for Ferguson but I could never have done so. I declined two urgent invitations to go into Ohio to speak for Ferguson. It seemed to me that if the Democratic Party wanted us to oppose Taft it should have given us something better than the an who is alleged to have declared that he would carry Formosa when he was asked his views on that subject. Of course, this may have been apocryphal but it may also have been one of those witty inventions that says more than a volume can. Pretty soon now I want to write a column on the pending constitutional amendment to limit the terms of the President. There are so many important things to write about these days that one cannot do much in one brief page a week in THE NEW REPUBLIC." Harold L. Ickes (1874-1952), a Chicago journalist, lawyer and civic reformer, was local head of the NAACP. Originally a progressive Republican, he headed the Presidential campaign of Senator Hiram Johnson in 1924. Named by President Franklin Roosevelt as Secretary of the Interior, he served in that office throughout FDR's terms and into Truman's (1933-1946), the longest tenure of any Interior Secretary in history. In that office he oversaw much of the New Deal program. His son, Harold M. Ickes, also a veteran political activist, was Deputy Chief of Staff in the Clinton administration. Fine condition.