National Affairs: Secretary Whiting

The country seemed surprised last week when President Coolidge appointed William Fairfield Whiting to the Commerce Secretariat. Mr. Whiting was an “unknown,” people said. It was a “personal” appointment. It was calculated to please, encourage and rally the G. O. P. of New England, which is gloomy and restive under the textile industry’s depression.

Doubtless, the President, a man of much sly humor, was pleased with the country’s surprise. He knew that as people began to learn about his mysterious friend it would gradually dawn on them how unusually “logical” and defensible an appointment it was. Not the thinnest cream of the jest would be when newspaper readers and editors discovered that the “unknown’s” name has appeared daily for many years on the front pages of leading U. S. newspapers—in the tiny bottom-line advertisements which say: “When you think of Writing, think of Whiting.” The personal phase of the appointment was that from the time Calvin Coolidge was president of the Massachusetts Senate (1914-15), William Fairfield Whiting has believed him a man of destiny. He believed even more faithfully than Mr. Coolidge’s political pastor, the late great Winthrop Murray Crane. In 1920 a delegate to the Chicago convention, Mr. Whiting voted to the bitter end to head the ticket with Mr. Coolidge. Then, after Mr. Crane and Senator Lodge and the rest of the Massachusetts men had capitulated to the Ohio idea, Mr. Whiting pushed their man again for vice president. Mr. Crane was dour. “He’s done,” he said. But Mr. Whiting had distributed copies of Calvin Coolidge’s essay “Have Faith in Massachusetts.” Over he went and Delegate Whiting had the pleasure of voting to keep him over in 1924. In 1928 he was the last Massachusettsman to despair of drafting-Coolidge.

Mr. Whiting, like Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow and other Coolidge intimates, went to Amherst college. But he was nine years ahead of Mr. Coolidge, whose class was 1895. It remained for their sons to be undergraduate comrades. This association has perhaps helped fortify Mr. Whiting’s claim against William Morgan Butler and Frank Waterman Stearns to being “the original Coolidge man.” If Mr. Butler or Mr. Stearns was invited to the Commerce Department ahead of Mr. Whiting—and one of them was so invited—no false pride or lack of understanding prevented Mr. Whiting from playing a distinguished second fiddle.

Holyoke, Mass., the little city which produced the Man Who Filled Hoover’s Shoes, was not insensible of the honor and the “Boost” that it had received. “Oh, how the people here do like it,” said the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram’s editorial. Yet Mr. Whiting is not today a very familiar figure to his fellow townsmen. It is three decades since the angle of his derby hat was the barometer of Holyoke local politics. He gave up the idea of running for Congress, where his father had been, when his friend Allen Towner Treadway chose to run. Mr. Treadway has been a Representative for 15 years. Mr. Whiting has made writing-paper at home and a vice president in the land. His monster factory moated by a tributary to the Connecticut river is the World’s largest fine-paper plant. The master “of such a plant is, especially if he walks to work as Mr. Whiting does, only one of many important executives on the scene. He can pass unnoticed far more easily than a manufacturer of half the Whiting stature.

The Whiting mansion, brick, painted yellow, stands far back from the corner of Appleton and Elm streets, a mansion out of an old aristocratic novel whose inmates are more likely in Europe than at home. It was from Europe that Mr. Whiting returned last week. He went straight to Wisconsin and took his oath of office in the Superior high school. This haste, observers said, was so that the Hoover resignation might be accepted before that Nominee reached Washington, where as Secretary and Nominee his position would be equivocal.

Tall, with sparse white hair on a large rounded head, habituated to the white starched shirts and plain black clothes including black gloves and black tab of a bow tie, Secretary Whiting approached Washington via Holyoke where there were arrangements to make. They asked him what he thought he would do to the Department of Commerce.

“You know,” he replied with a quizzical grin, “I think I ought to see it first.”

It was recalled that Mr. Whiting’s friend and only admitted rival at papermaking, the same late Winthrop Murray Crane who taught politics to Calvin Coolidge, was asked to be Secretary of the Treasury by President Roosevelt. Mr. Crane declined. Reason: The papers made by Crane & Co. (embellished and distributed by Eaton, Crane & Pike) are of two kinds—bank note paper and bond-paper. Crane & Co. had large contracts with the U. S. Treasury. A law, of which President Roosevelt was perhaps ignorant, forbids any person being Secretary of the Treasury who does business with the Treasury directly or indirectly.

No such law governs the Commerce Secretariat.

* In its original sense, the paper used for Government bonds and other State papers. Some 438 million people are said to carry Crane paper in their pockets, the currency of 22 countries. Eighteen countries use Crane paper for their State bonds. Real “Bond” paper is made from clean rags (cuttings from textile mills, shirt factories, etc.). But the term has been corrupted to mean all sorts of cheap business stationery.