The United States Post Office: Its Past Record, Present Condition, and Potential Relation to the New World Era (1917)
(Originally published in 1917. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1917. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
Daniel Calhoun Roper was an American Secretary of Commerce under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also was the 5th United States Ambassador to Canada in 1939
Background
Daniel Calhoun Roper was born in Marlboro County, South Carolina, United States, a descendant of John Roper, who had been a vestryman of Blisland Parish, Virginia, in 1678. His father, John Wesley Roper, a Confederate veteran, was a farmer; a native of adjacent Richmond County, North Carolina, he had bought the ancestral plantation of his wife, Henrietta Virginia McLaurin, upon their marriage in 1866. Daniel was an only child, his mother dying less than three years after his birth, but he had two half brothers and two half sisters by his father's remarriage in 1874.
Education
After attending a one-room elementary school and the high school in Laurinburg, North Carolina he entered Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, but transferred at the end of his sophomore year, in 1886, to Trinity College (later Duke University) in Durham, North Carolinafrom which he received the B. A. degree in 1888.
Career
After leaving college, Roper briefly taught school (1889 - 90), farmed, and sold life insurance. In 1890, during the agrarian upheaval in South Carolina led by Ben Tillman, he joined the Farmers' Alliance. Although a Populist at heart, he chose, like Tillman, to remain within the Democratic fold. He was elected in 1892 to the South Carolina house of representatives, where he promptly introduced a prohibition bill. The next year, his party loyalty won him an appointment as clerk to the United States Senate's Interstate Commerce Committee. After a brief term as an office manager in New York City (1896 - 98), Roper returned to Washington in 1898 as a life insurance agent. A new federal appointment, in 1900, took him to the Bureau of the Census as an enumerator of cotton gins, and over the next eleven years he developed an expert knowledge of the foreign and domestic cotton trade. During this period, in 1901, he earned a law degree from National University. In 1911, with the help of Congressman Albert S. Burleson , Roper became clerk of the House Ways and Means Committee. Well known by now in Democratic party circles for his familiarity with the economics of cotton and his support of tariff revision, he had substantial influence among the Southern delegations. Roper's major opportunity came when he joined the movement to make Woodrow Wilson the Democratic presidential nominee in 1912. For his role, he was rewarded with the post of First Assistant Postmaster General, responsible for filling the 60, 000 postmasterships made available by the defeat of the Republicans. He worked closely with another member of the Wilson administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to rebuild the Northeastern wing of the party in Wilson's image. Roper left the Post Office Department in August 1916 to serve in Wilson's campaign for reelection. In March 1917 he became vice-chairman of the United States Tariff Commission, and in September of that year, Commissioner of Internal Revenue. He administered the narcotics and wartime prohibition laws, created an intelligence unit to investigate tax frauds, and was popularly credited with the improvement of both the administration and the collection of the income tax. After leaving office, Roper served for a year in New York as president of a manufacturing firm, the Marlin Rockwell Corporation, while it was undergoing reorganization and then returned to Washington to practice law. At the Democratic convention of 1924 he was closely associated with the bid of William Gibbs McAdoo for the presidential nomination, and at the 1932 convention he played a significant role in swinging McAdoo's votes to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt named Roper to his cabinet in 1933 as Secretary of Commerce. Despite his earlier Wilsonian liberalism, the South Carolinian became a conservative influence within the administration. During the economy mood of 1933, he cut his department's budget and its domestic and foreign programs, and he set up a Business Advisory Council to funnel business attitudes to both Congress and the President. Although chairman of the cabinet committee set up to oversee the National Recovery Administration, he was generally overshadowed by its head, Hugh Johnson , and he often found himself ranged against more advanced New Dealers on social and fiscal issues. His integrity was widely respected, and he was an important link with the Southern leaders in Congress, but his own leadership was no longer dynamic. Once appraised as a "crisp administrator, " he was, in the New Deal, largely a harmonizer and balancer, skilled at smoothing ruffled feathers. Roper eventually came to believe that the administration had placed too much blame for the depression on big business, and when F. D. R. 's reorganization plan divested the Commerce Department of several of its units, he resigned in December 1938. The next year he returned briefly to government service as United States minister to Canada, having been appointed to serve during the visit of King George to North America.
Roper was an active member of the Methodist Church.
Connections
On December 25, 1889, he married Lou McKenzie of Gibson, North Carolina, a teacher and the daughter of an architect. They had seven children: Margaret May, James Hunter, Daniel Calhoun, Grace Henrietta, John Wesley, Harry McKenzie, and Richard Frederick.