Undersecretary No. 2

No trouble whatever did President Roosevelt have last week filling the job of Undersecretary of Agriculture as soon as the post was created (see p. 14). But the job of Undersecretary of the Treasury has given the President nothing but trouble and tribulation for the 14 long months he has been in the White House. First of the Administration's Undersecretaries of the Treasury was Dean Acheson who spent most of his term in office as acting Secretary during William Woodin's illness. Because he never saw eye to eye with the President on money matters, he was retired, unthanked, last November. Second was Henry Morgenthau Jr., Undersecretary in name only, who was promptly put in command of the department when Secretary Woodin formally resigned. Third was Earle Bailie, partner in the Manhattan banking house of J. & W. Seligman, who held the job but not the title, because the Senate objected to his Wall Street background.

Last week the President finally found the rare man he was looking for: a fiscal adviser who satisfied him and who had no financial connections that were politically objectionable. The man was Thomas Jefferson Coolidge III of Boston.

In Massachusetts there are two branches of the Coolidge family which claim only the remotest kin. The more plebeian branch produced the 30th President of the U. S. The new Undersecretary of the Treasury stems from the more aristocratic one.

Thomas Jefferson Coolidge 3rd's great-great-great-grandfather was the President from Monticello. His grandmother was a Randolph of Virginia; his grandfather was a president of the Santa Fe Railroad and, later, McKinley's Ambassador to France. His father was the founder and president of Boston's Old Colony Trust Co. In 1914, playing left-end for Harvard in the opening game in the Yale Bowl, young Coolidge scooped up a Yale fumble, almost on Harvard's goal line, and ran 98 yards for a touchdown. A year later Harvard graduated him, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.

In the best tradition of the distinguished Coolidges he followed in his father's banking footsteps, became a vice president of Boston's First National Bank. An independent in politics, he qualified for his new job by voting for Roosevelt in 1932. A few weeks ago he was called to Washington to see whether he could fill the bill unofficially as Undersecretary. Last week after a month's trial the President sent his nomination to the Senate.

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