Word: macleish
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Next day Franklin Roosevelt unveiled another plan he had been nursing. He nominated for Librarian of Congress one of the eminent literary persons whom he had consulted on the Hyde Park library idea: Poet Archibald MacLeish...
...House rafters rang indeed with opposition. Republican John Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, member of the Dies Un-American Activities Committee, leaped up to flay Poet MacLeish as a "fellow traveler" of the Communist Party, a cofounder of the League of American Writers ("of the 23, twelve were well-known Communists"), an active sympathizer with Loyalist Spain...
...MacLeish appointment was, of course, none of the House's business. But to the Senate, whence his confirmation must come, went protests against Poet MacLeish based on charges-more considerable than "Communism"-to which he humbly pleaded guilty. In announcing the appointment, Mr. Roosevelt explained that ever since 77-year-old Dr. Herbert Putnam (40 years Librarian, emeritus since last year) asked to be relieved, a search had been afoot for a successor possessing the many qualifications required. Mr. Roosevelt had finally decided that technical assistants could be hired for a librarian whose attainments as "gentleman and a scholar...
...most important library in the world needs the skill of a trained and experienced library administrator. I have the highest respect for Mr. MacLeish as a poet, but I should no more think of him as Librarian of Congress than as chief engineer of a new Brooklyn Bridge . . . about the same as appointing a man Secretary of Agriculture because he likes cut flowers on his dinner table...
Likelihood of the Senate rejecting Poet MacLeish was small. Recognition of his abilities beyond scholarship and gentility are not confined to the White House in Washington. There he was first introduced as a writer for FORTUNE during the New Deal's honeymoon in 1933, and Franklin Roosevelt was pleased to recall that they had a mutual friend in Felix Frankfurter, whom Archie MacLeish encountered at Harvard Law School, which graduated him in 1919 with top honors. For FORTUNE in 1935 he wrote The Case Against Roosevelt, unearthing from Massachusetts' constitution the basic American tenet (a prime plank...