Background
Francis Patrick Matthews was born on March 15, 1887 in Albion, Nebraska. He was the son of Patrick Henry and Mary Ann Sullivan Matthews, owners of a country store in Spalding, Nebraska.
Businessman attorney politician
Francis Patrick Matthews was born on March 15, 1887 in Albion, Nebraska. He was the son of Patrick Henry and Mary Ann Sullivan Matthews, owners of a country store in Spalding, Nebraska.
Matthews received both the B. A. (1910) and the LL. B. (1913) from Creighton University.
During the 1920's Matthews became a successful businessman in Omaha, Neb. In addition to practicing law he served as an officer or director of business ventures that included a construction firm, a financial corporation, a stove factory, a chemical products corporation, and a hardware company. The onset of the Great Depression wiped out his substantial business interests, but he gradually recouped his losses during the 1930's. By the early 1940's Matthews was a prominent member of the Omaha business community: president of a bank, part owner of a radio station, and a member of the board of directors of several corporations. In 1932 Matthews supported Franklin Roosevelt for president. His acceptance of the New Deal reform proposals was inspired, at least in part, by his own severe economic setback. In the same year he was elected chairman of the Democratic Central Committee for Douglas County, which consisted of Omaha and its environs. This marked the beginning of Matthews' close association with Democratic politics, which was rewarded with important political appointments: in 1933 he was named Reconstruction Finance Corporation counsel for Nebraska and Wyoming. During World War II, Matthews worked for the USO and various Catholic agencies. Two months later Truman appointed him to the President's Committee on Civil Rights, headed by Charles E. Wilson. This committee's report, To Secure These Rights, formed the basis of Truman's civil-rights proposals to Congress. In 1941 Matthews had been named to the national board of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Five years later he accepted the chairmanship of the Chamber of Commerce Committee on Socialism and Communism. The committee published Communism Within the Government (1947), a pamphlet that anticipated the extreme right-wing charges of the McCarthyites by alleging that communists had been deeply entrenched at policy-making levels during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Despite his association with this attack on the president, Matthews is generally credited with swinging the Nebraska delegation to Truman at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. In the ensuing campaign he became close friends with Louis A. Johnson, a key fund-raiser for Truman. Early in 1949 Johnson was appointed secretary of defense, and then in April, following a bitter dispute with Johnson, Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan resigned. Although he was not the first choice, Matthews was selected by Truman to head the Navy Department, leading the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to comment (May 20, 1949): "It passes understanding that a man associated with unfair criticism of the Administration should be invited to become a part of it. " Matthews took office in the midst of open protest by naval officers against the diminished role assigned to the navy under the unification system established by Truman. Matthews successfully confronted this "revolt of the admirals" by ousting its leading spokesman, Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, as chief of naval operations. On Aug. 25, 1950, two months after the outbreak of the Korean War, Matthews made a speech that placed him in direct opposition to Truman's policy of limiting the fighting and avoiding the possible threat of a third world war. In July 1951 Matthews resigned the secretaryship in order to become ambassador to Ireland. He died in Omaha while on leave from that post.
Having served on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the early years of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, he served as Director and Vice President of the United Service Organizations (USO) during World War II. Appointed by President Harry S Truman to serve on the President's Committee on Civil Rights in 1946, he was Truman's choice for Secretary of the Navy in 1949. Of Irish ancestry, he accepted Truman's appointment as Ambassador to Ireland in 1951. He was serving as Ambassador at the time of his death while on a visit to his hometown of Omaha in 1952. President Harry Truman awarded him the Medal of Merit in October 1946 for working for the USO and various Catholic agencies.
Throughout his life Matthews was active in Catholic humanitarian and fraternal activities, and during World War II he supervised relief work done by the church in Europe and the Middle East. These and other charitable efforts brought him papal honors, including designation as a papal chamberlain by Pius XII in 1944.
The United States, he said, should willingly pay any price for world peace, " even the price of instituting a war to compel cooperation for peace. " His remarks drew immediate international condemnation and were publicly repudiated by both the White House and the State Department.
On November 24, 1914, he married Mary Claire Hughes; they had six children.
