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From 1903 to 1913 our nation’s lighthouses were under the direct control of the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the Chairman of the Light-House Board had to report to the Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor, as did the Commissioner of Lighthouses when the Light-House Board was dissolved in 1910, and U.S. Bureau of Lighthouses was created. Then in 1913 when the Department of Commerce and Labor were split up into two separate departments and cabinet posts, the most powerful man in the Bureau of Lighthouses, the Commissioner, had to report to the new and first Secretary of Commerce, who answered directly to the President of the United States.
From 1913 to 1919, William C. Redfield served as the very first Secretary of the newly created Department of Commerce. He had previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1911 to 1913. In 1912 Redfield had campaigned for the Democratic nomination for the vice presidency at a convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson on the 46th ballot. However, Wilson wanted Thomas R. Marshall for the vice presidency, so Redfield backed down. In response to his support, when Wilson was elected president, he appointed Redfield to head the Department of Commerce. Redfield took on the position with gusto and tried his best to guide all the many different departments under his auspices in a nation that was experiencing rapid growth that was complicated by nearly every action being hindered by Congressional political oversight.
After he left office, Redfield spent much of his remaining life writing about the difficulties of managing the growing expanse of the Department of Commerce and his dealings with the many new laws and regulations that had been passed by Congress that had directly and indirectly affected his work, in which he had said was supposed to have been all non-political. In 1923 he wrote a series of very lengthy and detailed articles for The Outlook, one of America’s most popular magazines that were published from 1870 to 1935. Throughout all of those articles he praised the people who worked in the many departments and agencies that had been under his control, but he was very critical of the politics and bureaucracy that prohibited those people from effectively doing their jobs. He wrote about the inner workings of the Department of Commerce and Congress that very few Americans of the time where aware of. In doing so, he apparently wanted not only to explain the hard work that was going on in the different agencies under the Commerce Department, but also to expose the many aspects of waste and mismanagement by Congress - perhaps thus becoming one of America’s early whistleblowers.
In those lengthy articles he described one of his average work days and the many people with whom he would meet, including George Putnam, the man who was in charge of our nation’s lighthouses. He wrote that the meeting would go something like this: “The Commissioner of Lighthouses enters with his naval architect to submit drawings of a new seagoing tender for the Pacific coast. He remains to say that the light station on Navassa Island, West Indies is completed after serious difficulties arising from isolation and the lack of fresh water. He shows the schedule for new aids to navigation in Alaskan waters for the present year, and expresses concern about the inadequate depot near Hampton Roads. He urges particularly that steps be taken to secure from Congress adequate pay for the district inspectors. Perhaps he leaves a copy of the “Lighthouse Service Bulletin” with such items as the following: “The keeper of the Cape Ann Light Station, Massachusetts, reports: ‘At 9 P.M. December 31, a large flock of geese bound south hit the north tower, killing five. Three broke through the glass in the tower, breaking two window panes and chipping the prisms of the lens very badly on the northeast side.’” (Bad for the tower, but good for the keeper’s table.)
Later on in the article Redfield tells of a meeting with the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of Navigation about appointments for delegates to the Conference on Safety of Life at Sea, soon to be held in London. “Then came a surprise – the owner of the motor vessel Kilkenny, purchased to aid in enforcing the navigation laws, returns the check for $8,500 sent to pay for the boat, and presents the Kilkenny to the government.” We wonder how many people or businesses would simply donate a vessel to the government in this day and age. Things were much different in those days.
A meeting that same day was held with the Chief of the Steamboat Inspection Service who brings with him to introduce to Redfield a supervising inspector to introduce to Redfield. Apparently the inspector had discovered a defect on a vessel that could have caused the death of its 300 passengers.
Interestingly, although there had been some discussions and hearings at that time about departmental consolidation, it is doubtful that any of these men could have realized at the time in the early 1900s that all three of their divisions would all eventually be dissolved and merged into the U.S. Coast Guard, which took over the U.S. Bureau of Lighthouses (Lighthouse Service) in 1939.
The Steamboat Inspection Service, formed in 1852, and the Bureau of Navigation, formed in 1884, which had both been operating under the Department of Commerce since 1903 were merged in 1932 to form one organization, and in 1936 the name of organization became the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation. During World War II this organization was transferred to the Coast Guard under Navy control, and in 1946 it was abolished and its duties were permanently taken over by the United States Coast Guard.
After covering other various meetings and happenings on a typical day, Redfield continued in his article by writing, “Do you think, my reader, that accounts of Congressional debates and administration policies inform you fully about your government? Does it seem to you that much of it is rather dreary, without vivid human interest or strong personal appeal? You get but a small part; most of the living story is untold. You have not heard of the wreck of the Armeria or the search that found and rescued the crew of the lost Tahoma. The life of one fine officer that led it went out when the Lusitania went down. There are enterprise and adventure and heroic sacrifice of which the world knows little, and there is realism of the finer sort that would make the teller of pessimistic tales ashamed.
“Do you seek life in the great out-of-doors, contact with the wild? Spend a few weeks with a field party of the Coast Survey or go with them to run the east boundary of Alaska. Do you wish to see strange lands and people? Accompany a traveling officer of Foreign and Domestic Commerce on a trip to Africa or Asia. Or perhaps you covet adventure at sea? It can be found on a lighthouse steamer. Are tales of shanghaiing, mutiny, cruelty and fierce abuses only echoes of the past? Talk with the chief maritime officer of the Navigation Service and you will realize that the small rapid-fire gun on the bow of the Kilkenny was not put there for ornament.
“Can you grasp the infinite romance of science? That romance appears in many forms and in close relation to human happiness in much that can be heard and seen in the Bureau of Standards. You may hear at the Fisheries Office of millinery taken from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps in a moment of deep confidence you may learn of a fish hatchery put by law where there was no water. And if you are fortunate, you may spend an evening with the genial chief of the Steamboat Inspection Service while he tells you the tales from his long experience. You will thus acquire a new sense of what your government is and does and will awake with surprise to the fact that so little is known about it.
“It is common, and perhaps unconscious, assumption that the Government is the Capitol and the White House. There could hardly be a greater misapprehension of the subject. The Government begins with these; it does not end with them. Congress makes the laws; the Executive carries them out; but it is the carrying out after Congress and the White House have both acted that constitutes the daily work of the Government. This work is varied as the interests of mankind. It covers the whole round earth and affects us all, did we but know it, in our daily lives.”
However, it was in the July 4th (Independence Day) edition of The Outlook that Redfield, in his sixth article for the magazine, wrote a five-page scathing report with many details, which he titled “The Meanness of Uncle Sam,” where he also described the petty side of the government that, because of actions by Congress, allowed beggarly pay for experts in Government service, starvation wages for clerks, and the actual loss of life due to a lack of sufficient funds for the proper maintenance of lighthouses.
Redfield went on to explain that Congress seemed so riveted in areas where there was gross waste, excess, and duplication that they ignored many of the areas of real concerns, causing some in government to become downright petty and just plain mean. It was so bad, he reported, that the heads of many departments could tell the public, but would not for fear of reprisals. “Some of them know well that for years their necessary work has been crippled for lack of means and that poverty rather than excess of funds has been their usual lot.”
In writing about the Fisheries Service, he wrote, “The seagoing Fisheries steamer Albatross ran only two and half months in the fiscal year 1916 and we presented the extraordinary spectacle of a vessel with a crew of eighty men lying idle at her dock for over nine months for the lack of coal to operate her. That had been the spectacle for two years. The words were mine to the Appropriations Committee on March 30, 1916. The Chairman asked why we did not discharge the crew. The importance of using the steamer did not seem to occur to him. We told him the crew was a naval crew and we could not discharge them. This recalls another phase of economy to which we may digress for a moment. The Albatross, as appears above, had a naval crew of eighty. We offered to run her with a civilian crew of forty on the same basis as other ships of the service. But as the naval crew was provided under the general navy appropriation for us (which would show when the other would not), our request was refused although we offered to run this ship and another smaller ship at an annual saving of over $27,000. Indeed the Chairman indicated that at the time, before the war, the Navy needed this Fisheries steamer for instruction purposes – lying at the dock three quarters of the time for two years.”
When Redfield testified in Congress about the poor pay and food reimbursement that was allotted to the Steamboat Inspectors and Fur Wardens in Alaska and he stated that it was actually depriving the men of eating proper food because the cost of food was so high in Alaska, the Chairman of the committee replied, “They are not compelled to stay in the service,” to which Redfield replied that, in order to get good competent men, they needed to take good care of them and told the Congressman, “It may be the law, but it is absolutely indefensible as law. We cannot excuse it.”
In the case where a Coast and Geodetic Survey vessel rescued a shipwrecked party and provided them with food and clothing to the value of about $130, the captain of the vessel was held personally accountable for using public property, and had to cover the cost out of his own pocket, even though the captain had done the humane thing. It took Congress two hearings before a special law was passed to reimburse the captain of vessel.
Another time Redfield said that his own personal secretary, while on official business and during a thunderstorm, took a taxi instead of walking and turned in the $1.25 cab fare on her expense report. Two years later the bureaucratic nightmare took hold when she was notified in a demanding letter to return the $1.25 to the government because she should have walked. One has to wonder how much government paperwork and time was spent over a two year period of time before that demand was made.
Later in the article Redfield wrote, “Valuable apparatus has fallen into decay and been replaced at needless cost because estimates have been cut down. I know of one wreck near a lighthouse where lives were lost for lack of appropriations to keep a telephone in use, for neither the lighthouse nor the life-saving station close at hand had any means of communication. Many vessels have been wrecked, many human lives have been lost and much property has been destroyed because estimates have been cut down.
“There is little, if any appearance in Washington discussions of the principle that wise expenditure is economy or that the wisdom of outlay is to be determined by its productive results.---- There are areas off of the New England coast over which no wire drag has passed, and much of our Pacific coastal waters are unsurveyed, taking their toll on human life and property. On January 27, 1919, I told the Appropriations Committee: “The unsurveyed condition of our Pacific Coast is a National reproach. . . . There is twenty years’ continuous work for one surveying steamer on the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington alone.”
“Alaska channels remain a slightly diminished peril, and the service has them in charge is so housed in Washington as to make its operations both cumbersome and costly.
“I have said that public expenditures are discussed with more vigor than accuracy, and as this is written there comes to hand a notable example . . . Once upon a time, an official did spend less than he was allowed, and turned the balance back to the Treasury. Instead of plaudits he got ridicule and ignominy, and probably there wasn’t a Congressman, at least of then dominate party, who did not consider this official a Pharisee and a pest.”
In referring to the heads of the Lighthouse Service, Coast and Geodetic Survey and Steamboat Inspection Service, Redfield wrote, “Some of them know well that for years their necessary work has been crippled for lack of means and that poverty rather than excess of funds has been their usual lot. It is high time the lid was lifted from the inner workings of some services, and that men who have done much with limited means should have a larger measure of public understanding.”
Obviously, we have covered only a small portion of Redfield’s writings and scathing reports, but he did write in one of them that he could understand why and how money was wasted through graft and political shenanigans in a place like New York City, but not in Washington, D.C., which almost sounds like he was writing about the government of the 21st Century, rather than the 20th Century.
By reading between the lines of Redfield’s writings, most historians can fully understand why he exposed what he did after he left office, instead of while he was in office. But for six years at the beginning of the 20th Century, William Cox Redfield, the first United States Secretary of Commerce, was the man to whom the Commissioner of Lighthouses, who managed our nation’s lighthouses, reported, to, yet very few people have ever heard of him or know that he was one of our nation’s first whistleblowers.
An extremely prolific writer, William Redfield was the author of a great many books, including: Industrial Day (1912),
With Congress and Cabinet (1924, memoir), Dependent America (1926), and We and the World (1927).
William Cox Redfield died in New York City on June 13, 1932 at the age of 73 and was buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York. At the time of his death, he was living at 37 Monroe Place, Brooklyn Heights, New York. Upon hearing of his death, President Herbert Hoover, sent the following message to his wife Mary: “I am deeply grieved to learn of the death of your husband, who was my good friend and distinguished predecessor in the Department of Commerce. His services to country were so varied and valuable as to earn the gratitude of the Nation and his character won him the high regard of a host of friends. I send you my profound sympathy in your bereavement.”
This story appeared in the
Mar/Apr 2014 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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