Harry Garfield, the Fuel Administration, and the Search for a Cooperative Order During World War I

during World War I, is one of the least known of the major Wilsonian war administrators. This is not surprising. Garfield's jurisdiction as Fuel Administrator was comparatively limited; he could not intervene in the broad range of economic and foreign policy issues open to contemporaries such as Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, or Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, or William Gibbs McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury. Nor did Garfield even seek the kind of status as theoretician of industrial mobilization that his wartime colleague Bernard Baruch achieved in the postwar years. He did not take the same care to shape public attitudes toward his wartime administration. Compared with the War Industries Board chairman, indeed, or with Food Administrator Herbert Hoover, Garfield showed remarkably little appetite for power or capacity for selfpromotion a tribute, perhaps, to character, but a barrier, apparently, to recognition. 1 Such historical oversight, if understandable, is unfortunate. Garfield's Fuel Administration supervised a crucial segment of the industrial economy. Its policies dramatically affected the government's stabilization policies; its

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