American Default by Sebastian Edwards

Author:Sebastian Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

CHAPTER 11

The Path to the Supreme Court

January 1, 1934–December 1, 1934

On March 24, 1934, Wilder Hobson, an associate editor at Fortune, wrote to the new secretary of the treasury and requested his help for an article that he was writing. He asked some clarifying questions about Henry Morgenthau’s upbringing and about his farm business. He attached an eighteen-page “rough and tentative” draft of the piece. A barely legible carbon copy of the manuscript can be found in the Morgenthau Papers at the Roosevelt Presidential Library. In the archives there is also a seven-page commentary written by Henry’s wife, Elinor, in which she argues that the text is so inaccurate and misleading that it would be better not to run it. The draft article opens as follows:1

Henry Morgenthau, Jr. is about the most obscure Secretary of the Treasury this country has ever had.… Mr. Morgenthau is a rank amateur who has done none of the things which are usually regarded as prerequisites for his job. Today, of course, there are lots of minds elastic enough to endorse the idea of trying mere lawyers in our banks and mere professors in our cabinets and mere farmers in our treasuries. But so far Mr. Morgenthau is a beginner in his post, and it is impossible to give a cold opinion on his value until more results have been shown.

Hobson then tells the story of the secretary’s grandfather, Lazarus, a German cigar trader who immigrated with his eleven children to Brooklyn in 1862, where he suffered serious financial difficulties. His ninth child was Henry Morgenthau Sr., a brilliant and hardworking boy who would become a lawyer and make a fortune in real estate. Henry Sr. got involved in Democratic Party politics, and in 1913 Woodrow Wilson appointed him ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. From there, Hobson’s article moves to Henry Jr.’s schooling—three years at Exeter, and two stints at Cornell, with no degree earned—and his lack of sporting abilities. Hobson then writes of how, prodded by his father, young Henry became interested in farming and purchased the Fishkill Farms in upstate New York. The farm was only thirty miles from Hyde Park, where the Roosevelts had a large property. According to the manuscript, this geographical coincidence was at the heart of Morgenthau’s political career: “If Mr. Morgenthau had done his farming in Texas or Oregon he would probably not be secretary of the Treasury today.… Mr. Morgenthau’s whole public sector career has followed on the fact that he and the President became Dutchess County neighbors twenty years ago.”2

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