U.S. PRESIDENT, NY GOVERNOR | One Weak, One Strong

March 30, 2020—The President denied the gravity of the crisis and stuck with his free-market message. The Governor of New York State understood the crisis and took action at once. The Governor was a stronger leader than the President, or any other Governor. The President tried to squash the New York Governor, and failed. Aghast at looking like a wimp, the President took decisive action against a vulnerable group that desperately needed help. The President's callousness backfired and from then on, the President's reelection prospects were doomed.

Hoover (L) and FDR, March 1933

The context, of course, was October 29, 1929. After dropping 5 percent the day before, the NYSE index dropped another 20 percent on what is called Black Tuesday. GOP President Herbert Hoover announced that this was a temporary blip and that the economy was “sound and prosperous.” 

However, the market persisted with its decline  and by mid-1932 it was a mere 17 percent of its September 1929 peak. By early 1933, 45 percent of all farm mortgages and 40 percent of home mortgages were in default. 

Hoover's excessive optimism and lack of action was noted in early 1930 by New York State's Labor Commissioner, Frances Perkins. When Hoover said the job market was rebounding, she observed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics data did not support this statement, and the January 1930 job numbers had deteriorated. Governor Franklin Roosevelt believed Perkins, and told her so, and in March 1930, he created the first state commission on employment in the country. He then became the first Governor to support the idea of unemployment insurance. Hoover said in May that the worst was over, but Governor Roosevelt told Democrats at their annual dinner at the Commodore Hotel (now the Grand Hyatt Hotel) that he disagreed and that Hoover's crowd just didn’t care about the impact of the crisis on vulnerable members of the public. The next speaker called for FDR's reelection as Governor.

Hoover (L) and FDR, March 1933

In 1930, the GOP put up racket-busting Charles Tuttle to oppose FDR's reelection as Governor (until the Constitution was revised in 1938, New York's Governors were elected every two years). Tuttle attacked FDR for not repudiating Tammany Hall. Hoover sent three Cabinet members—(1) the Oklahoman Secretary of State, (2) a New Yorker who was Secretary of War, and (3) the Undersecretary and later Secretary of the Treasury, New Yorker Ogden Mills—to support Tuttle and attack FDR. 

FDR ignored Tuttle's attacks and instead stuck with promoting his programs for unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. Not until three days before the election did he address Tuttle's attacks on him for being too close to Tammany Hall. He said he would address the charges in the courts, where they could be proven, and not in the newspapers. He attacked one of the visiting spokesmen for Hoover as a carpetbagging outsider and the other two as defeated candidates for Governor who had already been rejected by the State. “We of the Empire State can take care of ourselves,” said FDR. Tammany’s Jim Farley meanwhile delivered the most lopsided victory of any New York Governor.

So FDR had some momentum in 1932 when he took on Hoover, who botched his reelection effort by looking savage when he should have looked kind, and vice versa. Having shown himself as a ditherer on the economy, Hoover decided to look strong by sending in the U.S. Army to rout the unarmed veterans who were assembled to ask for early payment of World War I bonuses. At the order of Secretary of War Patrick Hurley, General Douglas MacArthur led cavalry and tanks to force with tear gas the decampment of unemployed World War I veterans. The troops burned the makeshift shelters. The Capitol's Republican newspaper said: “If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”

Meanwhile, Hoover was gentle where he should have been tough. To calm the financial markets, he needed to reassure the financial community that his Treasury policies would continue whether or not Hoover himself was reelected. He therefore asked FDR to commit himself to certain free- market and sound-money principles, though he knew that such a commitment would be incompatible with FDR’s New Deal proposals. FDR waited more than a week to respond, and then coolly replied to Hoover that it was too late for “mere statements,” showing Hoover up as too weak to take needed action. FDR stuck to that line right up to the inauguration, despite Hoover's rising panic as banks folded, gold flowed out to Europe, and unemployment rose, making the runup to the election and inauguration as disruptive as it could be. A good administrator, but not a leader, Hoover was helpless as tragedy washed over the country.

FDR beat Hoover in a huge landslide in 1932. The day before the inauguration, Hoover  told FDR, who had suggested calling on someone, “You will learn that the President of the United States calls on nobody.” FDR and Hoover famously rode together to FDR's inauguration. Hoover asked a favor of the President, to keep on a member of his staff. FDR was mostly silent. The two of them never again met.

After his first press conference, FDR paid a call to the I Street home of retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose birthday it was, and asked Holmes for advice, thereby ignoring Hoover's advice. FDR took the advice of Holmes, who said, as a veteran of the Union Army: “Mr. President, you are in a war. Form your battalions and fight.”

The Great Depression, but not poverty, ended within weeks of the arrival of FDR, as the nation recognized that someone was in charge and people started going back to work. Key elements were: (1) Treasury Secretary William H. Woodin’s commandeering of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce greenbacks, pack them up for the banks, send off the trucks to the banks, and film the entire process for the newsreels in movie theaters during the following weeks, all across the country. (2) President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, which showed that someone competent was in charge and that people could be confident that the country would get through the crisis. 

FDR showed public relations genius as well as an acute understanding of the nature of the problem the country faced and how it could be. He put a Republican CEO in charge of implementing the practical steps to address the panic and then rebuild the country. He told Will Woodin to handle the task of getting money out to the banks, while he crafted his Fireside Chats. The financial system they created lasted for 70 years. FDR's social safety net is still with us.

The story resonates today, as we watch President Donald J. Trump interface with Governor Andrew Cuomo. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. 

P.S. (May 16, 2020) ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news source, argues that in crucial days in early March, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio were slow to listen to their health experts. The story contrasts New York State with California, which had a friendlier relationship between Governor and Mayor (or San Francisco) and lost fewer lives to the coronavirus. The story is long and full of details. It succeeds most effectively at conveying the difficulty of trying to make the right decision about something unexpected when there are legitimate arguments on both sides about how best to proceed (the health experts did not always agree).  https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-new-york-suffered-nearly-10-times-the-number-of-deaths-as-california

CHARLIE MINER, R.I.P. | Vero Beach and East Hampton

Charlie Miner (R) enjoying his great-nephew and great-great-
niece and her (unrelated) Angry Bird. (Photo by JT Marlin.) 

March 20, 2018 – Charlie Miner interrupted his studies at Princeton (Class of 1943) to sign up with the U.S. Army Air Forces.

He served in Europe as pilot of a B-25 bomber.

He died yesterday, according to his daughter, and Vero Beach resident, Charmaine Caldwell.

A memorial service in Vero Beach is planned for May 3 and another one in the summer in East Hampton. 

The following is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote about Miner for The Vero Portfolio, May-June 2015 issue, p. 24. The ending is, of course, updated.

Charlie Miner was one of seven grandchildren of his illustrious grandfather, FDR’s first Treasury Secretary, Will Woodin. His mother was Woodin's eldest daughter, Mary, who married an infantry captain, Robert Charles (Charlie) Miner, Sr., grandson of famed anti-slavery Federalist Congressman Charles Miner. 

Miner divided his time at the end of his life between Vero Beach and East Hampton until his cousin and constant companion Anne Gerli died in 2016. 

He was born in New York City in 1921 and prepared for college at Buckley School and Choate. At Princeton he studied engineering and joined the war effort as pilot of a B-25 Mitchell twin-engine bomber, which had a crew of three or more. Miner flew many of the 18 bombing missions of his squadron over northern Italy. [More about his contribution to the war effort here.]

He was lucky to have survived. Of 16 million American veterans of World War II, fewer than one in 16 were alive in 2015, only 80,000 in Florida. That year Miner was one of only about 250 World War II vets left in Indian River County, when he may have been Indian River County's oldest surviving European-theater WWII bomber pilot.

Miner told me how much he loves Vero Beach. Years ago in the 1950s and 1960s, he spent time with his mother (who divorced Charlie Sr. and did not remarry) in the Riomar social life. It  revolved, he said, around rotating dinners and celebrations among the original 12 houses. The 30 residents took turns throwing parties. The Riomar clubhouse facilities came later. John's Island—where Miner and his late wife Maisie lived—opened in 1970 and he said was at first resented because it drew people away from Riomar (and then became successful, and was imitated by the Moorings).

Charlie Miner’s grandfather, Will Woodin, was the man who dealt with the Wall Street and banking panic that started in 1929 and was not put to rest until FDR came into office in March 1933. FDR's first Treasury Secretary was given wide latitude in addressing the problem. 

Will Woodin was born in Pennsylvania and settled in New York after a successful career as the CEO of a huge business selling railroad rolling stock. He had four children. The eldest and youngest settled in Vero Beach — Mary Woodin Miner and Libby Woodin Rowe. Libby’s husband, Wally Rowe, and a brother bought homes in Riomar. Mary and Libby eventually lived in Vero Beach most of the year. Charlie’s mother lived in John's Island after Riomar and died in 2007 at 102.

Charlie remembers not just the bridge that connected the two sides of the Indian River, "Beachland Boulevard" where Route 60 crosses, before the concrete-arch Barber Bridge.  He remembers the drawbridge that was built earlier, in 1995. Before that, back in the 1930s, there was a bridge made of wooden railroad ties and swung around horizontally to let boats through the Indian River. 

Charlie (R) and me in 2014. Photo by
Alice Tepper Marlin.

Back in those early days Beachland Boulevard was the northern edge of Vero Beach, and there wasn’t a Riverside Theater. Charlie says the money was raised in several ways. Rosie and Sterling Adams organized a dance every year. He and his cousin, Bill Rowe, used to sell season tickets and organized an auction of donated prizes to raise money for the theater. The Theater is, of course, now a central  institution in Vero, contiguous to the Vero Museum of Art.

What Charlie Miner liked about Vero is that it is quiet. That was one of the original motivations of the developers, along with the availability of rail transportation and ocean beaches. There is no strip with night clubs, no airport. As Charlie says, “I’m not a teenager anymore.”

Charlie’s Advice at 93 for a Long and Happy Life:

For a Long Life: Every morning a meal of two eggs and tomato juice or V-8 (with or without the hair of the dog). 

For a Happy Life: “Enjoy life while you can. If you want to do something, don’t wait. Do it while you can because life goes by quickly. You may never get another chance.” He says his years have “Gone… Boom!”

During the many recent years that I have been studying and writing about FDR's forgotten first Treasury Secretary, Charlie's grandfather, I and my wife Alice have been amused and impressed by Charlie's joie-de-vivre and his sharp recollections of his long life. It was a sad moment when I learned of his death, just two months after he celebrated his 96th birthday.

Postscript, May 3, 2018: The East Hampton Star just published my "Guest Words" on the passing of Charlie Miner, remembering him and others who have bravely faced the guns of Adolf Hitler.

FDR AND WOODIN | Warm Springs, Georgia

Treasury Secretary Will
Woodin (L) and FDR.

John Reagan (“Tex”) McCrary, who lived from  1910 to 2003), ran a radio show for NBC from the RCA Building.

On August 12, 1949 he wrote to General Motors financial executive John J. Raskob (1879-1950) at 350 Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building).

Tex McCrary enclosed a copy of Westbrook Pegler’s column for August 4, 1949 and a transcript of his own broadcast comments on Pegler's column. (The correspondence may be found at http://digital.hagley.org/raskob-1456.)

The correspondence is interesting from two perspectives.

Al Smith (L) and John J. Raskob (R). 

First, there is venom in Pegler's bite at Raskob for accepting a "bribe" from FDR. It was also a side-swipe at FDR himself. 

In the New York Journal American (syndicated by King Features), Pegler said:

[Al] Smith never told publicly the truth about the bribe of $250,000 which John Raskob underwrote as Roosevelt’s price for coming out of his convalescence to run for Governor in 1928. That was the year Smith ran for President.

McCrary reported on Pegler's column in a broadcast the next day:

Yesterday [Pegler] hit an all-time low in unsubstantiated slander. According to Pegler, John J. Raskob underwrote a bribe of $250,000 as the price of persuading the late Franklin D. Roosevelt to come out of his convalescence to run for Governor … According to Pegler, the $250,000 was milked from Raskob as a contribution to Warm Springs Foundation for Crippled Children. 

The other interesting aspect of the correspondence is the sweeping denial that Raskob wrote back to McCrary on August 16:

I know nothing whatever about the financing and operation of Warm Springs except that the late William Woodin, former Secretary of the Treasury, did head a drive for funds some years ago to which I contributed.

What is going on here? I have read elsewhere about Raskob's involvement with solving FDR's financial problems at Warm Springs. I consulted a new book by Kaye Lanning Minchew, A President in Our Midst: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Georgia (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), and on page 74, it is all spelled out:

In addition to health concerns and his fear that 1928 might not be the year for the Democrats, Roosevelt hesitated to run for governor because of his heavy financial commitments at Warm Springs. John J. Raskob, a wealthy businessman who had recently been named chair of the National Democratic Committee, talked to Roosevelt on the phone on October 2. Following their discussion of Roosevelt's obligations to Warm Springs, Raskob wrote a check for $250,000. When Roosevelt refused the check, Raskob formed a committee to raise funds while committing $50,000 to the cause. Following that conversation, Roosevelt agreed to run for governor.

What there seems to be agreement on is that Roskob recruited Will Woodin to head the committee to pay off the Warm Springs debt. Woodin also served on the board of the Warm Springs Foundation. If Minchew's story is accurate, then Raskob was being disingenuous in his letter of August 16 (in other words, he lied or had severe amnesia). His suggestion to McCrary that Woodin was the man who knew was a safe one, since Woodin was entombed in his Berwick mausoleum 14 years earlier.

Even if Pegler's facts are correct, it is hardly fair to label FDR's agreeing to run for governor in return for assistance to the Warm Springs Foundation as a "bribe". The Warm Springs debt was an obstacle to FDR's running for Governor of New York State. I have read that FDR's mother Sara Delano Roosevelt said she would not give FDR any money for his campaign unless and until he paid off the Warm Springs debt. The committee's contributions to the Foundation removed this obstacle to FDR's running for governor.

What is peculiar about all this is Raskob's denial of any knowledge about the Warm Springs finances. Doubtless he was not familiar with every detail, but he had to be aware of the large size of the Foundation deficits. In 1928 Al Smith wanted FDR to run for governor so that New York State would be safe for Democrats. It was when FDR ran for President himself four years later that Raskob decided FDR was a dangerous radical and from then on perhaps he preferred not to take any credit for having helped him become governor.

VERO BEACH | Mar 12–Day of FDR's 1st Fireside Chat

Charlie Miner (Seated) and L to R: Alice Tepper
Marlin, Suzanne Hyatt, John Tepper Marlin and
Charmaine Caldwell. We were celebrating John's
75th birthday and Charlie's 95th.

Mar 12, 2017—Earlier today, on the 84th anniversary of FDR's first Fireside Chat, Alice and I were the guests for brunch of Charles Miner, Jr. in Vero Beach, Fla.

Charlie, as he calls himself (his cousins have called him Chas, pronounced Chaz), is one of three surviving grandsons of FDR's first Treasury Secretary, William H. Woodin. 

Charlie's mother Mary was the eldest daughter of Will and Nan Woodin. Mary married Charlie Miner Sr.

FDR was able to devote the time to perfecting his first Fireside Chat because he delegated the calming of the panicked financial markets entirely to Will Woodin, an unjustly forgotten Republican member (one of three recruited by FDR from the GOP) of FDR's first Cabinet.

Joining us at lunch were Charlie's daughter Charmaine Caldwell and his niece Suzanne Hyatt.

I picked up some new stories from Charlie about his life. His late wife Mary Mae (Maisie) was from the south. He had previously told me that marrying her opened up to him a part of America with which he was unfamiliar, and which he came to know more about, appreciate and love. He gave some examples and ended, as he often does, with some dry humor:

We had a man in East Hampton named George who would take care of things for us. When we had a problem, Maisie would say: "Let George do it."
Back then, the main job of girls in the south was to look pretty... nice hats, you know. We played tennis but she was more of a spectator at sports. When I stopped playing tennis I started playing golf more. 
Maisie is buried in the John's Island cemetery. It's on the river side. I asked them whether I could get a few more spots in the cemetery and they said I couldn't get as many as I wanted. I guess people are dying to get in.

Besides the first FDR Fireside Chat, we were celebrating retrospectively Charlie's 95th birthday in December and John's 75th birthday earlier in March.

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WOODIN | Finding His Bio in a Bookstore

Autobiographies are shelved in this bookstore by last
name of the author. Franklin and Eleanor is also
shelved under the author, i.e., Rowley.

My previous post showed where one would look for biographical information in a library.

This is about where a biography of Will Woodin might be found in a bookstore.

The bookstore I have examined in detail is the Vero Beach Book Center in Vero Beach, Fla. It is the only listed independent bookstore between Orlando and Palm Beach.

Biographies in Author Order

Chernow's Hamilton is next
to the story of a Holocaust
survivor, Chiger.

You won't find nearly as much in a bookstore as in a library about genealogies of families or small areas. The reason is that these books are not big sellers and space is at a high premium in bookstores, which tend to be in prime commercial space. Biographies can be big sellers. But in a bookstore, they can be harder to find:

• In a library, biographies are shelved by name of the person who is the subject of the biography.
• In a bookstore, biographies are shelved by author, not the name of the biographee–except for  autobiographies, where the authors are also the subjects.

Didion is next to Keynes because
Daugherty is next to Davenport.

So comparative shopping among biographies may be hard to do. Hence Franklin and Eleanor (see photo at top), by Hazel Rowley, is between autobiographies of Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld. Biographies of FDR could be shelved anywhere in the alphabet.

Some books have the covers facing out. (At the new
Amazon store in Seattle, all covers face out.)

TV tie-in
helps.

Bookstores feature some books by showing their whole cover facing out.

In the new Amazon bricks-and-mortar store in Seattle (with another in the pipeline in San Diego), all the books face out, as shown on the first page of the Business Section of the NY Times on Saturday and in an article in GeekWire.

Bookstores are less concerned about having many biographies as having the ones that people are looking for. Some biographies sell themselves based on their subjects, like Prince Philip or Teddy Roosevelt.

FDR is next Lincoln's cabinet
because both are by Goodwin. 

It helps if the biographee is a television personality like Regis Philbin or the late Roger Ebert, or  a classically famous author like Mark Twain (his "Autobiography" is actually a collection of his writings).

A good bet for sales are books about royalty in the news, like [Prince] William & Catherine [Kate Middleton] or William and Harry.

Note from the photos of the shelves how important it is to have a cover that can be read quickly, in large type.

From all of the above, it seems that a book about Will Woodin would have to have FDR in the name, to establish Woodin's closest connection to fame today. Treasury Secretary is a long title and by itself does not establish Woodin's importance.

A title like How Roosevelt and Woodin Calmed the Banks gets the subject matter across. If this could be tied into the election-year debate about Glass-Steagall, even better.

Woodin's name is so little known that a title might be better not including it, as in FDR's Money Man. This conveys that Woodin was the person to whom FDR delegated all the money problems that the country faced when FDR was inaugurated:

• The need for greenbacks.
• The need for more liquidity from the  Federal Reserve.
• The need for gold (gold reserves were declining).
• The long-term need for fiscal spending to reduce unemployment.

American History Books in Author Order

Another approach to shelving a biography of Will Woodin would be to put it under American History. It would most likely go chronologically between books on the Crash of 1929 and books on the Great Depression. It belongs exactly next to a book on FDR's First Hundred Days. Here are some key books that evaluate the First Hundred Days and the New Deal, starting with the three most recent, two of which sought to knock the New Deal from its pedestal:

2007. Amity Schlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (Harper Collins).

2006. Alter,  Jonathan. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (Simon & Schuster).

2003. Powell, Jim. FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great  Depression (Crown Forum).

1999. Kennedy, David M. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press).

1993. McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Random House).

1989. Anthony Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940 (Ivan R. Dee).

1963. Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (Harper & Row).

1958. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin).

1939. Moley, Raymond. After Seven Years (Harper Brothers).

Better Place: Business Books

Banks and banking never fail to
draw business interest. The
business reader wants a takeaway.

A better place to be than in American History is the Business Section of a bookstore. These books will be found at airport newsstands and get reviewed in places where book-buyers will find them – the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The Economist, Forbes etc.

Business books need a takeaway. Business buyers want to be educated so they can do their jobs better.

A book on Will Woodin fits the criteria. 

The Big Short updates 1929-33
 to 2008-2016.

Woodin was a Main Street executive, the top executive in a company town, Berwick, Pa. His company was swept up in the merger boom of the 1890s. Originally named Jackson & Woodin, the company was renamed American Car & Foundry in 1899, and it gobbled up other railway car manufacturers to become the largest car manufacturer in the country. It benefited greatly from New York City's new subway system and then the commuter rail boom. 

In 1928, Woodin was CEO of one of the 20 companies in the Dow. He was also Chairman of another company in the Dow, American Locomotive Co. The rise of his company is a history lesson of the 100 years leading up to 1929.

Woodin's second act was as confidant and financier of FDR's ascent to the presidency and then as the man who carried out the calming of a panic-stricken country. In addition to creating liquidity, FDR and Woodin got through the Glass-Steagall deal to insure bank deposits while preventing speculators from having access to the insured deposits. The Glass-Steagall Act is often cited but few people understand how and why it was enacted.

Even Better Place: Staff Picks

A better place for a book is in a section called "Staff Picks", where  bookstore staff pick out books they like or think their customers will like.

To get here, presumably one would have to establish a connection between the customers and the subject matter. So a book on Will Woodin could be promoted to staff in bookstores in Pennsylvania, where he came from, and New York and Washington, D.C., where he went.

Another way to get a bookstore to pick the book would be to establish a local connection in another way. Two of Woodin's children retired to Vero Beach, for example, and he has many descendants who still live there. Tucson and Sedona, Arizona also have Woodin grandchildren in residence.

Best Place: Best Sellers

The best place to be–and libraries also offer these shelves–is on a best-seller shelf.

This is harder to maneuver onto. The shelves are filled based on periodic consultation of a standard ranking system, such as the New York Times Book Review section, which has weekly rankings of the nationally top-selling books in fiction and nonfiction as well as other categories.

Biographies routinely make it onto the best-seller list. The shelf at right includes recent biographies of Jefferson, the Wright Brothers, Reagan, Clementine Churchill and the Koch Brothers (Dark Money).

The inclusion of two books on Vero Beach and Palm Beach suggests they are on a local (Florida? Southern Florida?) best-seller ranking.

WOODIN | Finding His Bio in a Library

William H. Woodin,
Secretary of the Treasury, 1933

Where does a biography fit in the book marketplace? I will approach this from three perspectives:

1. A well-stocked library.
2. A bricks-and-mortar-bookstore.
3. Online sources.

Today, I write about the library, using as my example William H. Woodin, whose biography I am writing.

1. A Library

My library research began with browsing in the library of the Society of Genealogists in London and the NY Public Library.

My in-depth research on the book marketplace was at the Indian River County Main Library in Vero Beach, Fla. This is well-stocked, serving an affluent community that values knowledge and culture.  The county's per capita income ranks #7 out of 199 counties in Florida. The Vero Beach 32963 zip code is one of three wealthiest in Florida that include at least 1,000 taxpayers (the other two are Palm Beach and Longboat Key). At the end of the 20th Century, the library was first or second in Florida in per capita attendance at adult programs and new borrowers.

The Genealogy and Local History Room

The genealogical resources at the library have benefited from unusual support:

• The Julian W. Lowenstein Family in 1985 through a bequest donated towards a new two-story Main Library that opened in 1991.  The much-expanded 2nd floor houses the Florida History and Genealogy Department.
• Indian River County added significant support of the reference and genealogy departments–in the decade after 1991 the genealogy department quadrupled in size, to 4,000 square feet.
• The Indian River County Historical Society donated photographs (5,000+) and documents (20+ boxes) to the library's Archive Center, which has more than 35,000 titles, 40,000 microfiches, 11,000 microfilms, nine computers and Wi-Fi.

In the Genealogy room are histories of families and local areas. The books go deep into ancestors and descendants. The local history books often include more than one family and seek to show how the area played its part in the history of the county, state and nation. These books are of huge interest to the families and residents of the local areas, but beyond that they have a limited audience.

I recently reviewed the product of years of research by Edgar Jadwin of his ancestors and relatives, who have played a great part in the maintenance of a strong U.S. military through two, going for three, centuries–his grandfather of the same name was Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers in 1926-29. His book, written over the years with the help of members of the Indian River Genealogical Society, is a good example of the family-history genre. His book is useful and interesting, but because it is produced by a local printer rather than national publisher it is not so accessible to a wider audience. It lacks some of the visual aids and other anchors that help a reader follow a long stretch of time over broad areas of the earth.

I found nothing about Will Woodin in the Genealogy area at the Indian River County Main Library, but I did find information about the two of Will Woodin's three daughters who retired to Vero Beach (Mary Miner and Libby Rowe). I went back a second time only to find that the Genealogy area is closed on Saturday and Sunday (as well as during the lunch hour on weekdays) although the library itself is open these days. I can report that there are paper files only in the New York Public Library, and not much there, and the same is true of the Society of Genealogists in London. The Woodins have been largely forgotten by genealogists catering to the print media, and unfairly so.

I have accumulated more material on Will Woodin's ancestors and descendants than is likely to be of interest to a general reader, but will be of great value to some people. This material might be carved out and published as a print-on-demand book for genealogists and family members.

Biography Shelves

Nothing between Woodhull and Woodruff.

At the Indian River Main Library, biographies are located in huge rows of shelves filed, naturally, by last name of the biographee. A natural market for any book about a person is the biographical shelving.

There is no book about Will Woodin or any other Woodin. The biographies skip from Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States, to Judy Woodruff.

The question will be asked by anyone faced with a missing biography–"Why is he/she important?" The answer would be, for Will Woodin, that (1) he rose in 1928 to become President or Chairman of two of the 20 huge companies that then made up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and then (2) he became Treasury Secretary at the most challenging period of American history for its labor and financial markets.

Dual-biography (Kennedy and Roosevelt), and
Multiple Biography (FDR and His Enemies).

Woodin can be found mentioned in passing in biographies of FDR, in comparative/group biographies (e.g., Beschloss's Kennedy and Roosevelt) and in collections of biographies like Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, on Lincoln's cabinet.

Of least relevance, he is in theme-neutral collections by geographical area (county, state and nation) or by industry and occupation. The brief biographies of Woodin that appear in many such collections are too short to establish a story beyond a few bare facts.


American History Shelves


Another place the biography might be shelved is in history–American History–especially if the title suggests something other than a conventional biography, by, for example:

• Going beyond biography, as in FDR and His Enemies. Such a book could show the bravery and loyalty of Woodin in supporting FDR as a Republican deeply entrenched in the New York establishment.
• Focusing on only one period of a biography, as The Great Depression. Woodin's life naturally falls into two parts. The first might be called Woodin and the Capitalization of the Railway Car Industry, up to 1928. The second could be called FDR and Woodin–The Panic and Calming of 1929-33.

So there is a strategic question for an author and a publisher–does one want to be sold and filed as a biography, as a comparative or collective  biography, or as a study of a period of history built around a biography.

For Will Woodin, my biographee, the easiest approach is to call the book a biography and make that clear in the title: Will Woodin, the Man Who Calmed the Panic, focusing on his last four years, or Will Woodin: From Main Street, Wall Street, White House, which gives a fuller hint of the breadth of the story that Woodin represents. A book devoted to Woodin has the advantage of filling a clear gap, because Woodin has not yet been given a book-length biography.

But from the perspective of the library-book buyer, it might be more interesting to focus on the period of history, as in The Rise and Fall of Financial Capitalism, 1890-1933, which would use Woodin's life as the spine of a narrative showing how (1) In 1890-1928 a middle-sized firm was pumped up into a giant company that in 1928 was one of the 20 index companies in the Dow, and then (2) In 1929-33 the global financial system collapsed, only to be put back on its feet by FDR and Woodin–but too late to prevent the rise of Hitler to his German dictatorship. The second half would include the Glass-Steagall Act and other reforms that were put in place in 1933. A final chapter would swiftly review the unwinding of Grass-Steagall and the financial meltdown of 2008, as a way of underlining the significance of Woodin's achievement.

HITLER | Mar 5, 1933–Nazis Win and End Democracy

This post has been updated and superseded and replaced by this one:

http://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/03/hitler-mar-5-1933-germany-elects-nazis.html

This post is maintained to preserve links.

WOODINp | Ancestors, Descendants, Will Woodin, FDR's First Treasury Secretary (Update April 18, 2020)

April 18, 2020—These chapters of a book on Will Woodin have been transferred to a private blog, in anticipation of publication of a biography of Will Woodin. Woodin was Secretary of the Treasury in the depth of the Great Depression. He was highly successful. Your blogger is actively working on this bio in May 2020. To obtain access to this blog, or to contact the author for any other reason, send an email to jtmarlin at post.harvard.edu.

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