It’s been pointed out to me that I’ve fallen down on the job of the Commerce Cabinet Crisis series, which hereby resumes with Alexander Trowbridge. Born in 1929 into a model WASP family in New Jersey, Alexander Trowbdridge attended Philips Andover and then Princeton, graduating in 1951. He interned at the United Nations and served as an officer in the Korean War. After that he became a somewhat obscure oil company executive and was serving as president of Esso Standard Puerto Rico in 1965 when “President Johnson’s talent scout, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission, … pulled Mr. Trowbridge’s name from a file of 20,000 potential appointees and asked whether he was interested in working in Washington.” He took a job as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and then got bumped up into the big chair when John Connor stepped down.

As Secretary he had part of the Great Society brief and was supposed to work on overseeing programs to help create jobs for poor inner-city communities. He left the position in 1968 after a relatively brief tenure, having obtained the lofty status of youngest-ever commerce secretary. He went back into the business world, again working for Connor, this time at Allied Chemical Corp where he was instrumental in resolving litigation around some toxic waste dumping the firm had been engaged in before his time. After getting passed over for the chairmanship, he got back involved in Washington life. He served on the Greenspan Commission on Social Security where he pushed for keeping the program’s basic structure in place, and he spent the 1980s as President of the National Association of Manufacturers. After about ten years at NAM he stepped down to found a consulting firm and served on some corporate boards as well as George HW Bush’s base realignment and closure commission.

When Sinclair Weeks stepped down as Secretary of Commerce, President Eisenhower swiftly acted to tap Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss for the job. Strauss was an important figure in the development of the H-bomb, an antagonist of Robert Oppenheimer, and one of the proponents of the “Atoms for Peace” strategy. But he ended up being an early victim of Senate confirmation limbo, hanging as acting secretary for months, and eventually forced to withdraw his nomination.

Into the breach stepped Frederick H Mueller of Michigan, a man so obscure he barely has a Wikipedia page. Further internet research reveals a somewhat strange life story. Way back in 1892, Mueller’s dad, J Frederick Mueller, founded a furniture company in Michigan with some other duded. The year after that, he had a son, Frederick. Frederick graduated from Michigan State University in 1914 and by 1915 he had a controlling interest in his dad’s furniture company. He then spent the next 40 years (PDF) being general partner in a furniture company he inherited almost immediately upon graduating from college. He had a lot of minor civic roles in Grand Rapids, was an active member of the Peninsular Club, and was basically a local bigshot in a not very glamorous city.

Then in his sixties, he suddenly changed direction and moved to Washington to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce. After a couple of years in that position he moved up to be Undersecretary of Commerce. When the Strauss nomination fell through, his rise from being a director of the Grand Rapids Furniture Manufacturers’ Association to the lofty status of full-fledged cabinet secretary was complete. Needless to say, having scaled the heights he didn’t manage to leave any mark on history.

The rumors of Gary Locke are flying.

I once decided arbitrarily that Locke would make a good candidate for national office—great story, seems to have been a good governor, etc., but he’s not very charismatic. Then he gave a really crappy SOTU response in 2003 and seemed to drop off the map. But I’ve still got a soft spot in my heart for him. Bonus trivial, the next guy who I arbitrarily decided should be president was Howard Dean and, indeed, I watched the Locke SOTU response from a motel in Burlington, VT where I’d gone to check the Dean campaign out. That didn’t work out either, but after that I decided that Barack Obama should be president. And guess what? He is. The moral of the story is that whatever the inscrutable Dean-Obama beef is, Dean would still be a good HHS nominee and Kathleen Sebelius would still be a good US Senate candidate.

In Henry Wallace, the nation once again found a Commerce Secretary who, though a very noteworthy figure, didn’t do much of note in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce—Henry Wallace.

Wallace was born in Iowa, and his father, also named Henry, was the editor of an agriculture-themed publication called Wallace’s Farmer. The younger Wallace worked on the Farmer and served as editor from 1924 to 1929. The elder Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924. In 1915, he’s credited with having published the first ever corn-hog ration charts, which I think shows the amount of corn you need per hog but honestly I have no idea. More importantly, he worked on the development of higher-yield strains of corn which became important for farmers across the nation. This work was the foundation of his company, Hi-Bred Corn, later Pioneer Hi-Bred which was eventually acquired by Dupont.

The Wallaces were liberal Republicans and the younger Wallace was a New Deal supporter, and thus FDR reached out and appointed him Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. As Secretary, Wallace was in charge of implementing one of the New Deal’s odder and more misguided ideas, namely that the government should try to foster the deliberate destruction of agricultural products in an effort to raise commodity prices and turn deflation around.

Meanwhile, during FDR’s second term, his Texas conservative Vice President moved into a posture of more aggressive opposition to Roosevelt, going so far as to challenge FDR for the nomination at the 1940 convention. Clearly, a new VP was needed, and Roosevelt tapped Wallace, a reliable liberal, in part to ensure loyalty and in part because FDR new full well that he was turning away from the New Deal and toward national security and wanted to keep the New Dealers in the tent. During the campaign, GOP operatives got their hands on a series of letters written from Wallace to Russian new age leader Nicholas Roerich. In the letters, Wallace address Roerich as “dear guru.” Democrats threatened to expose an extramarital affair of Wendell Willkie’s if the Republicans went public with the “dear guru” letters, and both sides wound up agreeing to hold their fire. As Vice President, Wallace ran the Board of Economic Warfare, denounced anti-black riots in Detroit, and earned the enmity of conservatives in the United States and U.K. by portraying the war as part of a broader campaign for racial, social, and economic equality. Wallace’s clashes with the conservatives got him stripped of his authority, and dumped from the ticket in the 1944 election at which point he became Secretary of Commerce.

He didn’t actually do anything important as Secretary of Commerce related to the job’s responsibilities, but he did clash with Harry Truman over policy toward the Soviet Union, arguing for a softer line. Truman eventually sacked him, at which point he became editor of The New Republic. At the time TNR‘s foreign policy involved being too far left rather than too far right, so Wallace denounced the Truman Doctrine and lay the groundwork for his 1948 Presidential Campaign on the Progressive Party ticket. The Wallace agenda was in many ways admirable—he stood foresquare for civil rights, voting rights for African-Americans, and universal health care. The campaign was also shot-through with Communists being controlled by Moscow, and there’s some indication in the Mitrokhin Archive that Wallace himself was considered a KGB asset at the time.

Wallace went back to farming, supported the Korean War in 1950. In 1952 he published Where I Was Wrong, disavowing his earlier soft-on-Stalin views. He backed Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 and Nixon in 1960, and died in 1965.

Harry Hopkins was followed by a second Commerce Secretary who was an important Roosevelt administration figure, but not really important in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce. That man was Jesse H. Jones. Born in Tennessee, as a young man Jones went to work for his uncle at age 19; the uncle then died when Jones was just 24, at which point he moved to Houston and took over the family business. Jones became a major Houston figure, and helped secure federal funding for the Houston Ship Channel that turned Houston into an important port.

Woodrow Wilson offered him the Commerce job back in the day, but Jones turned it down. Later, Wilson prevailed upon him to run military relief for the American Red Cross. After the war, Jones went back into private business, but Herbert Hoover called on him to serve as a member of the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which was initially tasked with trying to rescue troubled banks by providing loans and liquidity. This didn’t really work very well and, as is well known, the situation got worse and worse throughout the Hoover years. When FDR took office, he reorganized the RFC and put Jones in charge.

The new RFC had more funding and a broader mandate—it made loans directly to businesses and to state and local governments across the country. The result was perceived by Jones’ rivals inside and outside of the administration as a patronage empire, but it seems Roosevelt was happy enough with his work. When Hopkins was sent abroad to represent FDR in London and Moscow, his Commerce hat was passed to Jones. Soon enough, the war was on and domestic reform projects were out of the spotlight. Instead, the RFC was reoriented toward war production. By 1944, Roosevelt was sick of Vice President Henry Wallace and wanted him dumped from the ticket which he was, in favor of Harry Truman. But there was a desire to keep Wallace on the inside of the tent pissing out, so the Commerce job was given to him and Jones was forced out in 1945.