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JEANNE NIENABER CLARKE, Roosevelt's Warrior: Harold L. Ickes and the New Deal (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 377 + pp. $39.95 cloth (0-8018-5094-0).
Harold Ickes is, thus far, the most important national figure to hail from Altoona, Pennsylvania. A self-styled curmudgeon, Ickes was virtually unknown when Franklin Roosevelt chose him for the job in 1933. His qualifications were simple: he had favored Roosevelt's candidacy before FDR won the nomination, was a midwesterner (he'd moved to Chicago) and he was a Progressive Republican. Even in 1933, the squire of Hyde Park was not finished exploiting the legacy of the Republican Roosevelt. As FDR's secretary of the interior for thirteen years, Ickes oversaw the transformation of his department from a scandal-plagued backwater to a modern, efficient organization. He picked able subordinates, including his inspired choice of John Collier to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ickes' , responsibilities grew to include administering Public Works and oil administrator under the National Recovery Act. Ickes also served as the administration's hatchet man and "liberal lightning rod:' swapping barbs with FDR's critics on any number of issues. Although Ickes virtually worshipped Roosevelt, he exercised considerable independence. He desegregated Interior's facilities in 1933 without asking the president's permission (which might never have come) and refused to sell helium to Nazi Germany in 1938, over Roosevelt's objections.
Ickes' most important, and controversial, responsibility was overseeing the Public Works Administration. From the beginning, Ickes battled charges that the recovery program was awash with political favoritism and graft....