Background
Leo Crowley was born on August 15, 1889 in Milton Junction, Wisconsin, United States. He was the son of Thomas Franklin Crowley and Catherine Elizabeth Ryan.
banker federal official Industrialist
Leo Crowley was born on August 15, 1889 in Milton Junction, Wisconsin, United States. He was the son of Thomas Franklin Crowley and Catherine Elizabeth Ryan.
He attended the public schools in Milton Junction and Madison, Wisconsin. He then studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Working as a delivery boy for a grocery store, he helped to support his eight brothers and sisters after his father's death in 1901. He owned his own grocery store by the time he graduated.
He went to work for the General Paper and Supply Company of Madison and became the company's president in 1917, at the age of twenty-eight. Crowley rose rapidly in Wisconsin business circles. In 1928 he became president and director of the State Bank of Wisconsin. In the early 1930's, he bought several banks and became chairman of the Wisconsin Banking Review Board. In 1933 Governor Albert G. Schmedman appointed Crowley chairman of the Wisconsin Advisory Committee. He was also chairman of the executive council and state director of the National Recovery Administration. The possibility of Crowley's running for United States senator from Wisconsin was discussed, but he never held elective public office. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Crowley chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC, authorized under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, insured deposits up to $5, 000 in participating banks. The agency also served as receiver during the reorganization of failing banks. In his capacity as chairman, Crowley participated in the crafting of the Banking Act of 1935, together with Marriner Eccles of the Federal Reserve Board and Comptroller of the Currency J. F. T. O'Connor. But the final legislation bore Eccles's stamp much more than that of Crowley and other administration conservatives, such as O'Connor, Jesse Jones of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and Senator Carter Glass of Virginia. The new law moved further toward monetary management, credit control, and federal supervision than Crowley would have liked. Crowley also believed that legislation regarding the FDIC should be separate and take priority over other banking laws, while Eccles successfully championed an omnibus law that made significant changes in the Federal Reserve System.
In 1939 Crowley also became chairman of the board of the Standard Gas and Electric Company of Chicago, a holding company controlling utilities in twenty states and Mexico. The following year he became president of Standard Gas and Electric as well. He had been supported for these posts by Jesse Jones and apparently had the concurrence of President Roosevelt in assuming his multiple private and public roles. Crowley remained chairman of the FDIC until 1945.
Crowley also held numerous corporate directorships, including those of National Guardian Life Insurance Company, Pan American Airways, Lehman Corporation, and several utility companies. In addition, he was a trustee of St. Mary's Hospital in Madison, Wis. Althugh rumors named Crowley as a possible successor to Postmaster General James A. Farley in 1940, ostensibly to keep a Roman Catholic in the Roosevelt Cabinet, the president instead named Frank Walker, also a Catholic.
In March 1942, President Roosevelt named Crowley (still head of the FDIC) to head the newly created Office of the Foreign Economic Administration, which included the function of Alien Property Custodian. In the latter capacity Crowley could seize and dispose of enemy-owned or controlled businesses in the United States, foreign-owned patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and foreign ships. Rather than sell off the properties, Crowley administered at least $3 billion of seized assets, including thousands of patents that he licensed to American manufacturers for a fee of $50. Many of the patents involved chemical processes developed by German firms. Crowley also ensured republication of foreign scientific and technical works when the United States acquired copyright jurisdiction. When Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones and Vice-President Henry Wallace engaged in a well-publicized feud over the Bureau of Economic Warfare in June 1943, Roosevelt defused the conflict by abolishing the BEW and replacing it with the Office of Economic Warfare on July 15, 1943. The President named Crowley, long rumored to be a Jones protégé, to head the new agency. Roosevelt also moved the Export-Import Bank, the rubber and petroleum agencies, and other similar enterprises into the OEW, making OEW directly responsible to the State Department. Crowley resigned from his $50, 000-per-year job as head of Standard Gas and Electric to accept the post. Refusing even the token "dollar-a-year" which usually came with such service, Crowley became a "nothing-a-year" man to support the war effort. Liberals and sympathizers of Vice-President Wallace soon left the agency, and Crowley dismissed one economist, allegedly to placate Representative Martin Dies, who suspected the offending staff member of Communist sympathies. In less than a year, President Roosevelt centralized all foreign economic operations by merging the Office of Economic Warfare, the Office of Lend-Lease Administration, and the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation into the Foreign Economic Administration in September 1943.
Crowley, whom FDR regarded as "one of the best administrators in or out of Government, " headed the new agency until 1945, when he resigned from all his federal posts. After he left government service, Crowley maintained a number of business associations, including acting as chairman of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad from 1945 to 1963.
Crowley never married.