The Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Wallace, is an excellent technical adviser, as unobtrusive as experts usually are.
The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Denby, with his flabby jowls and large shapeless mouth, has a big heart, and more enthusiasm than he has self-command, judgment, or intelligence. He committed political suicide cheerfully, when the Cannon machine in the House fell into disfavor. He would do anything for a friend, not as Mr. Daugherty would because it pays, but because he is a friend. A cause commands an equal loyalty from him. Just because his head is not as big as his heart he is a minor factor.
Mr. Davis, Secretary of Labor, is a professional glad hand man, appointed because the administration meant to extend nothing to Labor but a glad hand. When a crisis presents itself in industrial relations, Mr. Hoover, who spreads himself over several departments, attends to it. At the conference on unemployment, which was Mr. Hoover's, the best and only example of the unemployed present was the Secretary of Labor.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR OF MUCH LITTLENESS
We have a form of government suited to effect the will of a simple primitive people, a people with one clear aim. When we are all of one mind the government works. The executive represents the general intention, Congress represents the same intention. The party in power owes its position to the thoroughness with which it expresses the common purpose. Or, if you go back further, the structure of business serves the same social aim.
Now, under such circumstances, it makes little difference where authority resides, whether there is government by business, or government by parties, or executive domination, or whether Congress is the ruling branch. The result is the same, the single purpose of the community finds its just expression.
And so it was in the blessed nineties to which Mr. Harding would have us return. The people were united upon one end, the rapid appropriation of the virgin wealth of this continent and its distribution among the public, and they had no doubt this was being admirably accomplished by the existing business structure. Parties and governments were subsidiary. The system worked.