New No. 10 Man

Though it was the last created (1913) and hence the "lowest" in rank, the Labor portfolio is easily the fourth most ticklish for a President to assign. His Treasury choice, most ticklish, must have the approval of the American Bankers' Association and Big Business at large. Next most ticklish is picking an Attorney General and on this Presidents invariably consult the American Bar Association. Secretary of State is of less definite, more external importance, causing a President to calculate how his Administration will be regarded by other nations. Then, having suited Capital, Bench & Bar, and the World at Large, and even before choosing his Postmaster General (political patronage man), the President must think of Labor. Always a wise President tries to please Labor's main organized body, the American Federation of Labor (some 3,000,000 votes).

When James John Davis wanted to resign last year, President Hoover already had a successor in mind--his good friend William Nuckles Doak, the scowling, big-featured editor of The Railway Trainman, for years Washington lobbyist of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen. Mr. Doak worked with Mr. Hoover in Food Administration days. He came up from shunting boxcars in the hardboiled coal town of Bluefield, W. Va. Therefore he could command respect from workingmen. As a Brotherhood official he had functioned in the legislative field (helping, among other things, to draft the Watson-Parker Railroad Labor Act). He had not fought for strikes and boycotts and against company unions. Hence he would be acceptable to Business.

But the Brotherhood of Railway Train men is not in the A. F. of L., backbones of which are the building and printing trades unions. And it was because, like West Virginia's Doak, James John Davis had shown sympathy for the employers' side of labor disputes, that the late great President Samuel Gompers of the A. F. of L. gave President Harding so much opposition in Mr. Davis' appointment in 1921. President Hoover decided to conciliate the A. F. of L. and its present President William Green.

He is said to have offered William Green the Davis portfolio when the two met at Boston. Mr. Green declined. Then the President was reported willing to appoint anyone upon whom Mr. Green's federation could agree. Some time later, Mr. Green called at the White House not with one agreed-upon candidate, but with four candidates representing four groups: Miner Matthew Wohl, Metalworker John P. Frey, Plumber John R. Alpine, Carpenter William Hucheson. Apparently Mr. Green was emboldened by the President's consultations. He protested too strongly against the appointment of any man outside these four.

Last week President Hoover threw conciliation and consultation to the winds. Unexpectedly he issued a statement appointing Editor Doak after all. He took occasion to rebuke Mr. Green, saying: "[His] enunciation that appointments must come from one organization in fact imposes upon me the duty to maintain the principle of open and equal opportunity and freedom in appointments to public office."

At the last minute a hitch in Mr. Doak's appointment developed. James John Davis, "for sentimental reasons," had wished to terminate his ten years of Cabinet membership simultaneously with assuming his position in the Senate. When it became known that he would not be seated on the Senate's opening day, his resignation became momentarily ineffective, he still retained his secretariat. Mr. Doak was not sworn in as a recess appointee. Meantime, Messrs. Doak and Davis had gone through preliminary ceremonies for the newsreels in which the retiring official had presented his successor to the successor's wife as "the handsomest Secretary of Labor in American history." Acme News Pictures Inc. broadcast newspaper photographs of the occasion nationwide.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.