To get down to names. Many business men entered the service of the government during the war. Almost none of them left it with enhanced reputations. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, who served in the Treasury Department, had little success, so the men who surrounded him felt. I am not able to assess the causes of his failure. Perhaps he had assigned to him an impossible task.
Similarly men who had contact with him while financing the Republican campaign of 1916 were disappointed. After his service at Washington he ceased to be head of a great Wall Street bank. What do these adverse circumstances mean regarding Mr. Vanderlip's fitness to be, let us say, Secretary of the Treasury? Precisely nothing, let us admit. And his success for a number of years in banking, the large fortune he accumulated, by the same reasoning, mean no more.
Mr. Vanderlip is one of our best known business men, yet what the public knows about him is nothing. He was the president of a great bank and amassed wealth. An old financial journalist, he has gift of speech and writing, unusual in the business world. His agreeable personality made him liked by editors. He achieved unusual publicity. Was his reputation solidly based or was it newspaper made? The public does not know, cannot know. I use his case by way of illustration. Perhaps he ought to be President of the United States. But choosing a man for office on the basis of his business success, even so well known a man as Mr. Vanderlip, is plainly enough blind gambling.
We have in office now one of the great business men of the country. Mr. Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who is posed somewhat uneasily upon what is, many say, the highest pile of wealth any one has ever heaped up, except Mr. John D. Rockefeller. I say "somewhat uneasily" because I have in mind Mr. Mellon emerging from a Congressional hearing at the Capitol, flustered and uncomfortable, turning to a subordinate and asking anxiously, "Well, did I make a good impression?" What could a subordinate reply except, "Yes, Mr. Mellon, you did very well."?
But Mr. Mellon does not make a good impression on the witness stand. If he were unjustly accused of a crime he would hang himself by appearing in his own defense, unless the jury sensed in his stammering hesitancy not guilt but an honest inability to express himself.