By the time of William C. Redfield’s resignation in 1919, the wheels had really fallen off Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. The Versailles Treaty had failed ratification in the Senate, the 1918 midterms were a big win for the Republicans, Wilson had suffered strokes and alienated longtime political allies, Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer was undertaking the most serious violations of civil liberties in American history, the Spanish Flu pandemic had killed tons of people, etc.

Not known to have participated in this in any noteworthy way was Congressman Joshua W. Alexander of Gallatin, Missouri. Alexander was born in Ohio in 1852, but moved to Missouri as a child and attended public school and college there, becoming a lawyer and setting up his law practice in Gallatin in 1875. He became president of the Gallatin Board of Education, and then joined the Missouri House of Representatives, rising to serve as its Speaker in 1887. He then briefly served as mayor of Gallatin and then was a judge from 1901 to 1907 when he entered congress. As a member of the House of Representatives he was dispatched to be the American delegate to the International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea which was formed in the wake of the sinking of the Titanic. When Redfield resigned, Wilson tapped Alexander as his replacement and he helmed the department—doing, as usual for Commerce Secretaries, nothing important—throughout the remainder of the Wilson Administration.

The first-ever Secretary of Commerce was William C. Redfield who took over in 1913, the first year that the Department of Commerce and Labor was split into the present-day Department of Commerce and Department of Labor:

Redfield did this and that for a number of years before moving to the then-independent city of Brooklyn. He appears to have been an opponent of Brooklyn’s incorporation into New York City. In 1896, he joined many so-called “Bourbon Democrats”—conservatives—in opposition to William Jennings Bryan’s capture of the party nomination on a free silver platform and served as a delegate to the rogue convention of Gold Democrats that mounted a third party campaign against Bryan and eventual victor William McKinley.

He ran for congress as a Gold Democrat and lost. He was Commissioner of Public Works in Brooklyn in 1902-03 and made it to congress for the 1911-1912 term before getting the Commerce gig. As Secretary, he inaugurated the tradition of undistinguished people serving without distinction in this not-very-important job.

As the Obama administration heads into the last day of its first working week, exactly nobody is poised at the edge of their seat wondering who the next Commerce Secretary will be. The reason is that nobody cares about the Department of Commerce. The only important sub-cabinet job—the head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—has already been filled by Jane Lubchenco (an excellent choice).

Jonathan Zasloff suggests doing away with the department altogether:

In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the department. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally.

Of course it’s hard to actually save very much money doing this, since you wouldn’t actually be eliminating the department’s main sub-agencies. NOAA would be a good fit inside the EPA or the Department of the Interior, the Patent Office could be spun off as an independent agency or sent to Justice (or even Education; I think several countries put their patent agencies inside their education ministries) and the Census Bureau and the other statistical agencies could go hang out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And actually the price of carrying out the reorganization might well exceed the monetary savings. Still, political symbolism isn’t always about doing things that make sense.

At any rate, as long as the Commerce Cabinet Crisis continues, I’m going to profile one Secretary of Commerce per day until Barack Obama finds his man. Check this space tomorrow for the first edition.

Bill Richardson is withdrawing from consideration as Commerce Secretary. I’m going to throw my hat into the ring Caroline Kennedy-style.

The latest buzz is Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security and Penny Pritzger for Secretary of Commerce. Pritzker fits firmly into the model of giving the job to a friend of the president’s so he can have a buddy in the cabinet. Not really sure how that tradition came into place, but that’s the way it goes. The big change, of course, is that the president’s buddy is usually a dude.

Napolitano is a bit more of a surprise because there are considerations related to the fact that her successor in Arizona will be a Republican and that a lot of folks are also looking at her as a 2010 Senate candidate. But she has extensive experience with the department’s immigration portfolio and with aspects of its law enforcement portfolio. The department has been a mess administratively ever since being created, so her main challenge will be as an administrator to get the thing into shape and she seems to have the record for it.