Hugh Samuel Johnson was a U. S. Army officer, businessman, speech writer, government official and newspaper columnist. He wrote numerous speeches for FDR and helped plan the New Deal.
Background
Johnson was born on August 5, 1882, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the oldest of three sons of Samuel and Elizabeth (Mead) Johnson (originally Johnston). The Meads had come to Connecticut from England in the seventeenth century, the Johnstons from northern Ireland around 1812. As a struggling Illinois country lawyer, Samuel Johnston had dropped the "t" to avoid being confused with a Negro attorney of the same name. Variously a farmer, small-time land speculator, and postal clerk, he moved his family repeatedly in search of better fortune - from Illinois to Fort Scott, thence to other Kansas towns, and finally, in 1893, to the newly opened Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma Territory, where young Hugh grew up among gun-slinging frontiersmen and Indians.
Education
Hugh attended Oklahoma Northwestern Normal School, which awarded him a diploma in 1901. Meanwhile, in 1899, he had entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he was graduated, B. S. , in 1903.
Career
Johnson served as a soldier in America's new empire for 2 decades, 1900-1920. In 1906 the young lieutenant took on an awesome responsibility as acting quartermaster charged with caring for 17, 000 victims of the San Francisco earthquake, the first of his experiences with economic mobilization. From 1907 to 1909 he served a tour of duty in the Philippines. When he returned, the army detailed him to be executive officer of Yosemite National Park in California (1910-1912) and superintendent of Sequoia National Park (1911). By then he had begun to publish potboiling fiction, including two juveniles, Williams of West Point (1908) and Williams on Service (1910), as well as short stories about military life which appeared in national magazines.
Johnson's career as soldier-administrator took an important turn in 1914 when the War Department ordered him to begin a cram course at the University of California Law School. The lieutenant, who until then had lived the rootless, rowdy, sometimes irresponsible life of a Kipling border officer, applied himself so diligently that within eighteen months the university awarded him both an A. B. and a J. D. with honors. On the afternoon of his graduation in 1916, Johnson departed for Chihuahua, Mexico, to join Gen. John J. Pershing's punitive expedition in pursuit of Pancho Villa. That October he went to Washington as assistant to the law officer in the Bureau of Insular Affairs, in charge of the civil litigation of the overseas empire.
World War I rocketed Johnson to national prominence. As a newly appointed captain on the army's legal staff, he wrote the key sections of the Selective Service Act of 1917. Without authority, he boldly ordered 30, 000, 000 registration forms printed and distributed before the law was enacted. Two weeks after the passage of the act he was named major judge advocate in charge of directing the draft. Johnson also represented the army on the War Industries Board, where he began his long association with Bernard Baruch, the head of the board, and played an important role in the war mobilization as chief of military purchase and supply. In these posts, he rose swiftly to lieutenant colonel and colonel, and at thirty-five became the youngest brigadier general since the Civil War. In the fall of 1918 he took command of the 8th ("Pathfinder") Division, but the war ended as he was about to embark for France. Heartsick at being denied the chance to lead troops into battle, General Johnson resigned from the army in February 1919. Johnson passed the years of the Republican interregnum between Wilson and Roosevelt in business ventures with wartime associates, acquiring the expertise that would serve him in good stead in the next mobilization under the New Deal. In September 1919 he joined George N. Peek in the Moline Plow Company as assistant general manager and general counsel. During these same years he aided Peek in developing the seminal ideas of the McNary-Haugen Bill for federal aid to agriculture.
In the fall of 1927 he went to New York as an assistant to Bernard Baruch at a salary that eventually exceeded $100, 000 a year. It was as a "Baruch man" that Johnson became a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" in July 1932 and contributed speeches to F. D. R. 's first presidential campaign. In 1933 President Roosevelt called on Johnson to administer the National Industrial Recovery Act, a law which the General had helped draft. Johnson carried out this new assignment with such demonic energy that he rivaled the President for national headlines. The indefatigable head of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) worked from sixteen to twenty hours a day and, at a time when air travel was still novel, flew 40, 000 miles in an army Condor, organizing and haranguing parades and mass rallies to invest the cause with patriotic ardor. He supervised "codes, " worked out in conjunction with employers and employees, for more than 500 industries, helped establish maximum hours and minimum wages as national policy, and made the "Blue Eagle" symbol of the NRA a household emblem. Yet Johnson carried vituperation, like so much else in his life, to excess, and by 1934 he was becoming an embarrassment to the administration. He overextended himself, lost his temper too often, brawled with businessmen and labor leaders, cabinet officers and Senators, drank heavily, and, frequently ill or absent from his office, gave too much rein to "Robbie, " his attractive, red-haired confidential secretary, Frances Robinson. Critics charged, not always fairly, that he impeded recovery, fostered monopoly, hurt small business, and substituted bluster for coherent policy. While some accused Johnson of being "a sheep in wolf's clothing, " others, recalling that he had once jocularly identified himself with Mussolini, branded him a would-be dictator with a fondness for the corporate state.
By the summer of 1934 Roosevelt recognized that the General would have to go, and on October 15 Johnson's tenure as NRA administrator ended. At a farewell conference, Johnson called NRA "as great a social advance as has occurred on this earth since a gaunt and dusty Jew in Palestine declared a new principle in human relationship, " quoted the final words of Madame Butterfly before she took her life, and wept copiously. Johnson's subsequent career proved anticlimactic. In 1935 he turned in a three-month stint as Works Progress Administrator in New York City and in 1936 represented the Radio Corporation of America as labor counsel. But he spent most of his final years as a syndicated columnist for the Scripps-Howard chain and as a radio broadcaster. Johnson's column, at the outset pro-New Deal, gradually shifted to denunciation of the administration's "radical" inclinations.
Johnson died of pneumonia the following April, at the age of fifty-nine, in his apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D. C. An Episcopalian of Anglo-Catholic leanings, he was buried with military honors in the National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, a fitting end for one who had contributed the perspective of a military mobilizer to the growth of the twentieth-century state.
Achievements
Politics
Credited with helping develop a boom for Wendell L. Willkie as the Republican presidential candidate, he became one of Willkie's most prominent supporters in 1940, but, predictably, found fault with the way the campaign was conducted. In a book published in 1941 he warned that the administration was Hell-Bent for War, but he was deeply wounded when Roosevelt turned down his application for renewal of his commission as brigadier general.
Personality
Johnson's appearance and demeanor marked him as an unreconstructed horse soldier. Stocky, thick-necked, powerfully built, "Old Ironpants" had the jutting jaw, gravelly voice, and brusque manner of one accustomed to command. His open collar, uprolled sleeves, and rumpled trousers implied he was still in the field. But he stared at the world through improbable horn-rimmed glasses, and his ruddy complexion, deep pouches, and sagging paunch suggested dissipation. Yet this same truculent warrior wept over opera arias, nurtured rare plants, and had a sentimental and romantic perception of the world.
His cavalryman's language captivated the country. He gave currency to words like "chiseler" and "crack down, " suggested that code evaders like Henry Ford would "get a sock right on the nose, " and sneered at a writer "in whose veins there must flow something more than a trace of rodent blood. "
Quotes from others about the person
The columnist Raymond Clapper described him as "gruff and tough, with large round hardblue eyes which can become as flinty as a banker's, a jaw that snaps with the impact of a sledge hammer. "
Johnson, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. , has written, "saw all life as melodrama slightly streaked with farce; he was forever rescuing the virtuous, foiling the villains. "
Connections
Johnson married Helen Leslie Kilbourne, the sister of a West Point classmate, on January 5, 1904; their only child, Kilbourne (who reverted to the spelling "Johnston"), later went to West Point.