Harold L. Ickes

Harold L. Ickes is a progressive Republican turned Democrat who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior for nearly thirteen years, the second-longest tenure of any member of Roosevelt’s cabinet. In the novel, he appears as an outspoken opponent of fascism, while the department he led is also identified as a partner in Homestead 42, the government-backed relocation scheme imposed on Jewish families. The contrast places his public anti-fascism beside an administrative system whose language of opportunity and Americanization obscures coercion.

Identity and Public Career

Ickes’s brief biographical entry identifies him as both a dedicated conservationist and an active foe of fascism. His nearly thirteen years as secretary of the interior situate him within Roosevelt’s administration over a period when the department becomes part of the machinery of the novel’s domestic political order. The evidence establishes his office and his broader commitments, but does not describe his personal participation in every action taken in the department’s name.

Opposition to the Nazi Honor

In 1938, Henry Ford accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Adolf Hitler’s government at a birthday dinner in Detroit. Charles A. Lindbergh received the same medal later that year. At a December meeting of the Cleveland Zionist Society, Ickes condemned both men, saying, "Henry Ford and Charles A. Lindbergh are the only two free citizens of a free country who obsequiously have accepted tokens of contemptuous distinction at a time when the bestower of them counts that day lost when he can commit no new crimes against humanity." The rebuke makes Ickes a public countervoice to the men whose prominence and political influence help give isolationism and pro-Nazi sympathies standing in American life.

The Interior Department and Homestead 42

The department’s other appearance is less personal but consequential. In a letter dated May 22, 1942, Metropolitan Life informs Herman Roth that, at the request of Homestead 42 and the Office of American Absorption within the United States Department of the Interior, the company is offering relocation opportunities to selected senior employees. The letter invokes the Homestead Act of 1862 and describes the new program as a chance for families to deepen their Americanness; the moves are to be funded by the government. This is the department’s institutional role in the policy, not evidence that Ickes devised or approved the specific arrangements.

The program’s administrative reach becomes visible in the account of the Roth family’s neighborhood. Maps and pins represent families selected for relocation and the places to which they have been assigned, with assignments coordinated among offices, Washington headquarters, and receiving states. The separate Good Neighbor Project brings Italian families into vacated flats on Summit Avenue through government-assigned housing and rent discounts. Although officials describe such policies as a way to enrich Americanness, people around the Roth family understand them as efforts to weaken Jewish communal solidarity and electoral strength. The narrative thus connects the department’s bureaucratic authority to policies whose polished language conceals pressure and displacement, without making Ickes’s own stance toward those policies explicit.

Narrative Significance

Ickes’s significance lies partly in this unresolved institutional contrast. His denunciation of Ford and Lindbergh is direct and morally unequivocal; the relocation evidence, by contrast, shows how coercive measures can proceed through agencies, corporate partnerships, maps, eligibility categories, and incentives. The novel supplies no scene of Ickes confronting Homestead 42, so it does not establish whether he opposed, supported, or shaped it. His presence instead marks the difference between an individual’s stated opposition to fascism and the less visible operations of a government department associated with forced assimilation and relocation.