Oral History Program Sidney Hyman Interviewed by Stephen Francis 18 July 2006 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sidney Hyman Interviewed by Stephen Francis 18 July 2006 Copyright © 2011 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Utah Construction Company/Utah International Inc. Oral History Project was created to capture the memories of individuals associated with the company. Several of the interviewees are family and relatives, others are personalities involved with Utah Construction Company/Utah International Inc. and some of the company’s prominent figures. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Sidney Hyman, an oral history by Stephen Francis, 18 July 2006, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Sidney Hyman. It was conducted by Dr. Stephen Francis of Weber State University on July 18, 2006. In the interview, Mr. Hyman discusses his experiences with Marriner Eccles and writing Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. SF: This is an interview with Sidney Hyman. We are in Ogden, Utah on July 18, 2006. Welcome and thank you so much for coming. SH: Delighted to be here. SF: I‟m looking at Marriner Eccles and his role in management and you are probably the world‟s greatest authority on him. SH: That would be right if you confined the scope of the world to one inch! SF: Would you explain how you met Marriner Eccles and came to work with him? SH: Yes, but you will have to put up with my slow start. During the Second World War, I served as a junior officer in the First Armored Division, starting under General George Patten in North Africa, and ending under General Mark Clark in Italy. When I was demobilized in Washington, I was tapped by Harry Hopkins to work with him on four books he wanted to write. The first would deal with the war years in which he served as Roosevelt‟s alter ego and communication link with Churchill and Stalin. The second would deal with the New Deal years, in which he was the head of the WPA [Works Progress Association], and then Secretary of Commerce. The third would be a profile of Roosevelt, drawing on Hopkins‟ exceptionally intimate relationship with him from 1930 to 1945. The fourth would amount to a book of reflections about the American commonwealth. 2 I was quite young at the time. I had been strongly recommended to him by David Hopkins, my former classmate at the University of Chicago; by Katherine Meyer (later Graham), also a classmate; and her father, Eugene Meyer, the owner and publisher of the Washington Post. It was agreed that I would do the research on the books in view, but, as Hopkins put it, by the time work began on the fourth book, I “would be grown up” and would join his name as its co-author. It was an extraordinary opportunity, coming after three and half years in the Army, most of which were spent overseas in combat situations. The opportunity became more extraordinary when I began actual work on Hopkins‟ war papers. I broke the wax seal on all the major wartime conferences, including those where basic strategic decisions were made by the Big Three, capped by the decisions contained in the Yalta papers. Hopkins, however, died in his New York apartment nine months after I began to work with him. I was too young and inexperienced to handle the writing side of the projected first book. When I was asked by David Hopkins, Harry‟s son, whether I would be willing to stay with the project, I answered with an emphatic yes. When he asked which senior writer I would want to work with, I said Robert R. Sherwood. He was a distinguished playwright, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a speechwriter for Roosevelt during the war years, and the head of the overseas work of the Office of War Information. The book for which I did the research, and for which I provided the organizational structure, was published in 1948 as Roosevelt and Hopkins. It won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, was serialized by the 3 Beaverbrook Papers in England, and was translated into thirty or forty languages worldwide. In consequence of it all, I was asked by the organizer of the newly formed Roosevelt Memorial Foundation to be the director of research. The work would entail getting oral histories from main figures in the Roosevelt story, starting with his election in 1932 and concluding with his death in April 1945. And here I come to Marriner Eccles. In Washington—I moved here in 1948—when I asked a basic question of a person being interviewed, I was often told, “I really can‟t answer that question. You better see Marriner Eccles.” Though I often heard the name, Marriner Eccles, I could not connect the man with anything I had brought together for use in Roosevelt and Hopkins. What is more, when looking in the index of the book, I found that he was mentioned only as having been present at a meeting in the White House during the war years. I thought, “Oh my Lord: so much for authoritative works of history and biography.” In a penitent mood, I called on Marriner in his Federal Reserve Office—the time was the early 1950s, and he was in the thick of his final, titanic, and ultimately successful battle to break the dictatorial power of the Treasury over the Federal Reserve Board in the battle against inflation. I explained what I had encountered in connection with my rounds in Washington for the oral history project, and I was shamed by what I had omitted from Roosevelt and Hopkins regarding his critical importance to so many aspects of Roosevelt‟s presidencies. He laughed at my concern, saying that he had not read Roosevelt and Hopkins, and so could not take offense at what I had left out about his work. After that first meeting, I arranged to see him a number of times. The more we talked, the more fascinated I became with him, and the more I realized why so 4 many other people I interviewed said, “You had better see Marriner Eccles about that!” At one point, he said to me, “I was thinking of writing a book, but I just don‟t have the time. Besides, I don‟t know how to organize a book.” I said I might have some ideas about the matter, provided I could sample his papers. He consented to my doing so, but I had a problem convincing Marriner‟s suspicious secretary that in looking at his papers, I was not out to do him harm. By the end of two weeks of study of what was in his files, I put together a draft outline and structure of a book that would bear his name. At that point, I said to him, “Mr. Eccles, no one else in the Roosevelt years knows as much as you do about its inner dynamics, because you were the fundamental mover behind the major battles over policy decisions, and legislative and executive follows-through. Please consider writing the book.” To which he again said, “I really don‟t have the time.” At this point, I violated the old Army rule, “Never volunteer.” I said, “I‟d really like to work with you, and I am ready to quit my job with the Roosevelt Memorial Foundation to do so.” He suddenly became very alert and revealed to me that he had been approached by Alfred Knopf, the five-star New York publisher, to write a book of the kind I had outlined for him. He said that if I was serious about wanting to work with him, I should go to New York and meet with Alfred Knopf for a discussion about terms, etc. This was done. Knopf said yes to what I proposed. Marriner now also said yes. I resigned from the Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, and began to work with Marriner on his schedule. I would see him at lunch. I would see him at night. I would see him on Sundays and holidays. He would sometimes come to 5 the place I had rented in Washington. I would sometimes go to his place in the Shoreham Hotel, or to a side office next to his in the Federal Reserve Building. The book was written more on the basis of his memory than an elaborate marshalling of documents. The actual documents drawn upon would probably fill four filing cabinets. In my work with him on the draft manuscript—I would eventually be listed on the title page as the editor, with Marriner as the author—he did not want to talk about religion or about his formative years. He made some references to his father and mother, and a few to his eight siblings. He made some longer references to his innovations in banking, capped by his account of how he coped with runs on the bank during the Great Depression. The focus of the book was on his concept of how a compensatory economy works, and on his battle in Washington to win Roosevelt‟s support for fiscal and monetary policies that would help lift the country out of the trough of the Great Depression. The concept of a compensatory economy, which Marriner brought to Washington, was later called Keynesianism—but he introduced it at least three years before John Maynard Keynes, in 1936, published the work that gave the concept its theoretical polish. In the years that followed the publication of Marriner‟s Beckoning Frontiers, I “grew up” and could do things on my own from A to Z. I wrote The American President, the first book about the presidency itself to be published after the end of the Second World War. In it, I tried to bring a picture of the presidency as an institution into focus, given the changes that had overtaken it in consequence of the New Deal and war years. The book was published by 6 Harper Brothers, was translated into a number of languages, and was used as a basic textbook in about 800 American colleges. At the risk of being downright obnoxious, I want to flap my wings for a few seconds. Early in the Kennedy administration, a committee of university libraries under the chairmanship of Yale‟s librarian was formed to choose 3,000 books from all those ever published in the United States up to that point, that would form the core of a White House Presidential library. I knew nothing about the project, but when the titles of the books chosen were published in the New York Times, I saw that the list included three in which I had had a hand. They were Roosevelt and Hopkins, Beckoning Frontiers and The American President. Also during the years after the publication of Beckoning Frontiers, I began to write for the New York Times magazine; served on the staff of Senator Paul H. Douglas; served as a special assistant to Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post; married; spent two years in Europe at the International Institute of Educational Planning, a UNESCO agency; returned to Chicago as a senior fellow at the Adlai E. Stevenson Institute; joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, taught courses in the social sciences, and served as director of a degree-granting program in public affairs; was a contributing editor to the fourteen-volume Annals of America and a special editor of the Annals of Political Science; published the Lives of William Benton, The Politics of Consensus, Youth in Politics, and The Aspen Idea; helped build the Department of Criminal Justice in the new University of Illinois at Chicago; served as a member of the Illinois Racing Board and the Illinois Arts Council, and so on. To tell the truth and 7 shame the devil, in the course of twenty-five years, I had no direct communication at all with Marriner. Suddenly I got a call in Chicago from Marriner. He was deeply concerned about the course of American policy in Vietnam. He had a pacemaker in his heart and knew he was dying. He often said that if he had known what it was like to walk around with a pacemaker, he would have accepted death. He wanted to pick up the story he had to tell from where he left off in 1950. He asked whether I would be willing to work with him. I had enjoyed my earlier association with Marriner. Though I had had eminent professors of economics as a student at the University of Chicago, I believed that Marriner, under deep sedation, would make more sense about the application of economic concept to concrete cases and controversy than the economics faculty that comprised my academic mentors. Working with Marriner on his new book, which was to be a biography, not an autobiography, would entail my commuting between Chicago and Salt Lake City, but after a visit with him to discuss the details of the project—including fees, against which he pleaded poverty—I agreed to the project, and never regretted doing so. The book was published as Marriner Eccles: Private Entrepreneur and Public Servant. The Stanford Graduate School of Business was the publisher, and the University of Chicago Press was the printer and distributor. Marriner had the pleasure of learning that his book was accepted for use in the economics classes of two rival figures: Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard. I had a special, personal reason to be pleased with the publication of the book. Marriner was very lonely toward the end of his 8 life, and his vision was fading, but Sallie Eccles, his wife, put the book on tape, and he regularly listened to it, section by section, reliving the great battles he had fought in the past. It was one of his last pleasures. SF: How do you differentiate between the process of the memoir and biography? Were they similar from the standpoint of his input? SH: No. In the memoir, the input was all Marriner, except for some of the literary flourishes I added. I did no library research or talk to anyone except Marriner. In fact, I think he would have been distressed—considering that he was in the thick of a great battle at the time with the Treasury Department—if he knew that I was talking to anyone outside his office. Though I did the writing, except for the portions where I drew on his testimony before the Congressional committee, the story was told in the first person singular. By the time I got around to the biography in the early 1970s, a number of academics had made careers centered on a critical analysis of Marriner‟s work. In addition, many autobiographies or papers of major figures in the Roosevelt or Truman years had been published, including the Harold Ickes and Henry Morgenthau diaries. It was important in the autobiography to study the published works of Marriner‟s contemporaries in Washington, as well as the other major works of the period, such as Arthur Schlessinger‟s multi-volume study of Roosevelt, starting with the volume Collapse of the Old Order. It also made a great difference to shift from “I” to “He.” It was a shift that allowed me to say things in judgment of Marriner which he could not say or would not think of saying about himself. 9 SF: One of the things I found very interesting in the first part of Beckoning Frontiers was the comparison between Marriner Eccles in Washington and Joseph in Egypt. Whose idea was it to set up the parallel? SH: I did. I come from a religious background with more than a few years devoted to the study of texts in the original Hebrew. In fact, in my own writings, I often drew on the Old Testament for governing ideas and modes of expression. I think one of the reasons why I have always felt comfortable as a Gentile in my encounters with Mormon culture is due to my recognition of the Old Testament material that is entwined in the Mormon outlook. I believed the relationship between the sons of Leah and the sons of Rachel—where the latter want to dispose of Joseph, the son of Rachel—fit the nature of the relationship between the brothers of the first Eccles family and the brothers of the second. As in the Old Testament story, where Joseph survived to become an adviser-in-chief to pharaoh in Egypt, Marriner survived the hostility of the oldest sons of the first family to become, in Washington, the advisor to President Roosevelt. SF: Did Marriner enjoy the comparison? SH: Yes. Marriner was not a religious man, but he responded to the analogy, and believed it fit what he had experienced first in Utah, then in Washington. SF: How did he want his relationship with the Mormon church portrayed? You said he was not a religious man, but in Washington people would say, “Oh, you‟re a Mormon.” SH: The Mormon community that existed before World War II was not the Mormon community as it exists today. Before World War II, it was viewed by so-called “main stream” Americans as an eccentric mountain spur in American religious 10 history. When he first appeared before the Senate in the Roosevelt administration, Senator Alben Barkley made some sort of joke about the need for someone named Marriner, and a Mormon, to be confirmed. Marriner answered with a joke, and that was that. He never denied his upbringing as a Mormon, but never made a big thing about it. In his conversations with me, he was always respectful of the structural and material achievements of the community—as would be anyone with a pair of eyes in his head. He respected the efforts of the Mormon church “to take care of its own” during the Great Depression, but he also stressed the fact that the Church was in no financial position to take care of its own, and he was unhappy about the way Reuben Clark and other members of the general authorities decried the efforts of the New Deal to come to the aid of the many millions of Americans who were in distress. He was also unhappy about the way they were critical of his personal efforts to promote the cause of population control through Planned Parenthood. When I asked him if he believed the story about Joseph Smith and the gold plates, he asked if I believed the story about Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets of the law written on stone. When I said I didn‟t believe that story, he said that in both cases a compelling reason to believe was the promise of land. SF: In 1951, he returned to Salt Lake from Washington and ran for the U.S. Senate. I noticed in the biography that you made a point of saying that was one area he really didn‟t want to talk about. Do you have any idea why? SH: I think he was embarrassed by his decision. I can understand why he ran in the first place. He was still in a fury over the way he had been dealt with by President 11 Truman in connection with his reappointment to the Federal Reserve Board. He was also deeply concerned over the messy things he saw on the move in the area of economic policy, and in the realm of American foreign policy. Dwight D. Eisenhower was bidding for the Republican nomination for the presidency at the same time, and Marriner may have thought—this is pure conjecture on my part— that if he identified himself as a Republican and as a candidate for the Senate, then even if he lost the party nomination to Senator Watkins—the conservative incumbent and a loyalist to Senator Taft‟s bid for the presidency—he might be considered for an appointment in an Eisenhower cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. Nothing worked out as he thought. Eisenhower appointed George Humphrey, a right wing corporate executive and the head of a coal company. SF: Once he returned to Utah, did you get any sense of which enterprises were most important to him? SH: All the enterprises with which the Eccles family had historic connections were important to him. In the case of the First Security Corporation, the flagship enterprise of the Eccles family, he could not, by law, as an ex-chairman and member of the Federal Reserve Board, take an active part in its executive management. He could only serve as chairman of the board. The importance he attached to the continued success of First Security was made manifest in the care he took in preparing Spencer Eccles to succeed George Eccles as its CEO. The fact that Marriner could not, under the law, be an active executive in the First Security Corporation, enabled him to concentrate his attention on Utah Construction. Not that Marriner was in any way a day-to-day executive in Utah Construction. He had an unerring eye for young executive talent, as when he 12 recruited Ed Littlefield to join Utah Construction. When Littlefield protested that he didn‟t want to get mixed up with other kinsmen who had a stock interest and a role in the management of Utah, Marriner replied: “Ed, that‟s exactly why I want you to prepare yourself to be the leader of Utah. Too many businesses have failed, not because of market conditions, but because of nepotism.” I believe Marriner was reacting to what happened when the sons of the first Eccles family took over the management, respectively, of Oregon Lumber and the chief executive function in Amalgamated. Whatever their personal qualities, they were not qualified to manage the enterprises for which they were responsible, but owed their posts simply to the fact that they were the oldest and second oldest sons in the first family. Marriner wanted Ed Littlefield to know that if he stood his ground and did not allow himself to be pushed around by members of the other families that had an interest in Utah Construction, he would have Marriner‟s full support. SF: Yet, Ed Littlefield is still from the family; and Spencer Eccles, in connection with First Security, is still from the family. SH: That‟s true. On the other hand, there were a number of other nephews on the scene in the First Security setup. Remember that the term “nepotism” comes from the Latin nepos, which means nephew. Marriner did not think the others were equal to the task of running First Security, whereas Spencer was. It would have been wrong to deny Spencer a steady advancement to the top post in the corporation simply because he was related to Marriner and George. Marriner, in a sense, was very selective in his nepotism. 13 Marriner may have been disappointed with the way his two sons turned out. One died in the prime of life from an avoidable sickness. The other had no interest in banking, but concentrated on photography. Ed Littlefield may have become the son Marriner would have liked to have had. Toward the end of his life, George Eccles, who was childless, may have found in Spencer Eccles the equivalent of a son. This is a very complicated family. SF: How would you assess Marriner as a business manager? SH: Could I talk about him with an eye towards his difference with George Eccles? SF: Actually, that was my next question. SH: George was a slam-dunk manager. Do this. Do that. Don‟t do this or that. He was very quick in his judgments and orders. Like other managers, he would never claim to be infallible, but he would insist that he was never wrong. George was very proud of his capacity to decide, and his record warranted the pride because he was immensely successful. There was, however, a price the bank itself paid because of his reluctance to delegate power to some of his subordinates. By retaining the power of major decisions in his own hands, he did not allow his subordinates to “grow up”; moreover, the effect deterred First Security from responding as fast as it should to meet the challenge of new competitors. The price here could be hidden when First Security was a relatively small institution. The price loomed very large when First Security grew to a size where no one man could logically be expected to hold in a single vision every rational decision that had to be made in connection with its affairs—often in a race against the absolute of time itself. 14 As for Marriner, it was often said that if he had to get the washing in on time, he would starve to death. The hyperbole was based on the fact that before he made a decision, he turned its elements inside and out. Once he was satisfied that he had taken every contingency into account, the decision he made hit a bull‟s-eye like a rifle shot by an expert marksman. He always seemed to stand outside himself and to ask: “What am I looking at? How do I know what I think I know about it? Am I sure? And if I am, what—if anything—should I do with respect to it?” Another part of the difference between Marriner and George goes back to what I said about the relationship between Marriner and Ed Littlefield. George thought he was going to live forever, and so balked at any move to designate a successor to his own post, and his reluctance to delegate power to subordinates was related to that fact. Marriner, on the other hand, being conscious of mortality, was always on the lookout for young executives who could be brought forward to top posts while still quite young. SF: He saw George‟s ability when George was a young man. SH: I‟m glad that you mentioned that. I want to add something more about Marriner. He was the kind of person who comes along once in a generation. He didn‟t care two-pence for the pride of place, except for what it would mean by way of enabling him to do the things he was convinced were in the public interest. He once said to me that if he were accused of anything, it would be patricide. I said, “In what sense did you kill your father?” He said, “I repudiated his governing outlook. The outlook was defensible for his time, but not for mine. 15 To cling to it in the depths of the Great Depression would have been an invitation to a compounded disaster. My father‟s outlook had to be cast aside.” SF: Do you think he would be willing to accept another generation saying to him, “Marriner, you were right for the time but not for now?” Or would he insist that he got things right for the farthest future? SH: He would not insist on anything dogmatic. He was too sensible for that. He thought that every age is an age of change. The challenge for the passing moment is to try to anticipate the nature and the direction that change will take before it occurs. He used the image of a general maneuvering at the head of troops who, by taking measures born of foresight, turns events in desired directions, instead of waiting until it is decided by events before he acted. He believed that power and responsibility should go together. It made no sense to him to give an individual power in either a public of private context, without holding him accountable for the use he made of it. Conversely, it made no sense to hold an individual responsible for the outcome of an action without giving him the material means to do what was expected of him. He was a star in the New Deal, but he was also highly critical of it, as well, because it did not get the United States out of the Great Depression. It was the Second World War that did that. He also warned against the United States getting involved in Asian conflicts. I initially disagreed with him about his opposition to America‟s role in the Vietnam conflict, but I later realized that he was right and I was wrong. He was also brave enough, at a very early hour, to stress the importance of an accommodation with Communist China, and he was 16 widely assailed for doing so in 1952. Now everyone is investing like mad in China, or complaining about the Chinese because they are too successful. SF: What, if any, impact did his Washington experiences have on the way he managed businesses? Do you see a difference between how he ran his corporations before Washington and then after, or was it just a continuation? SH: In Washington, of course, he was not free to choose the people he worked with— from the Secretary of the Treasury down to members of the Federal Reserve Board. There were also limitations on what he could do without the consent of Congress, but in all other essential respects, there was a striking symmetry between the way Marriner bore himself in business and in Washington. In business, he was an innovator—the inventor of the multi-state operating bank holding company. In Washington, he was the innovator in the field of insured mortgages, and in the realm of central banking. Also, in business and in Washington alike, the aides he chose were young people at the forefront of new thinking. If they made a convincing argument to Marriner about what should or should not be done, he would make the argument his own. Moreover, in meetings in Washington, and in the meetings of his corporate executives‟ directors, he was the eternal missionary, with a case to make and skeptics to convert. He was always accessible to young students who wanted an interview with him, whether they were writing for a school newspaper or a term paper. I think he never got over being the LDS missionary who always said, “Now wait a minute, I‟ve got another point to make,” and, just like LDS missionaries, he got used to being heckled when he made speeches. Marriner, to my knowledge, 17 never lost his temper while being badgered before a congressional committee. He just plowed ahead, saying what he thought was right. SF: I see him as very much the “big idea” man who needed agents to implement his big concepts. SH: You couldn‟t have put it better. Marriner thought in strategic terms and George in tactical terms. He saw, for example, that Utah Construction had to go in new directions at the end of World War II, and he found in Ed Littlefield the makings of the gifted young executive who took Utah Construction to new fields of business. By the way, though Marriner seldom complimented anyone for the way they performed in a job, he could not say enough in praise of Ed Littlefield. Ed was “terrific,” “a star,” and “brilliant.” I saw some correspondence in which Marriner urged George to study the way Ed Littlefield ran Utah Construction, and apply the lesson to his own management of First Security. SF: Why do you think Marriner seldom complimented anyone else for their work? SH: I think it was because his father never did. His father, David Eccles, was a dour Scot who rose to prominence in the intermountain West from the lowest depths of misery in Glasgow, Scotland. If one of his many employees did a good piece of work, David Eccles would say, “Why should I compliment him for doing what he was hired to do?” Incidentally, with the exception of some institutions of higher learning in Utah, none elsewhere complimented Marriner personally for his immense contribution to America‟s political economy by giving him an honorary degree. Harvard never gave him an honorary degree; nor did Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, etc. Why not? I suppose it was because Marriner was such an odd duck who never fit any traditional mold that could 18 serve as a standard for judging his merits. At the same time, he was never elected as a director of any major corporation other than his own. Perhaps the other directors knew he might raise hell if they invited him into their secret lairs. SF: Why, despite being so crucial to the New Deal, doesn‟t he get the recognition he deserves? SH: It was against his own temperament to engage in puffery, to hire a PR agent who would plant flattering pieces about him in the press. What counted with Marriner were the results achieved through the application of his ideas to concrete cases and controversies. He was always concerned with ideas about ideas, and he seemed to welcome the time he could spend in his own company where he could quietly think through what the best course of action might be in a given situation. I am always leery about playing curbstone psychoanalyst—to claim that I understand the secret mainsprings of another person‟s action. If a pure guess is allowable, perhaps the answer to the question you asked entails a carryover of Marriner‟s upbringing when the second family, because of its polygamous status, lived in isolation in Baker City, Oregon, instead of actively drawing attention to itself. SF: If it were not for the regulations that prevented Marriner from taking an active part in banking, do you think he would have been as concerned as he was with Utah Construction? SH: David Eccles, his father, never maintained a desk in any bank in which he was a dominant figure, nor did Marriner, even before he went off to Washington. His father used to say that banking was “just a bunch of notes.” Marriner would not be that dismissive, but he was bored with the mechanics of banking—making 19 loans, collecting on loans, deciding on interest rates, etc. George Eccles, on the other hand, loved every aspect of banking, and it would have surprised no one if he showed up at a First Security Bank before anyone else did, just to open the front door. For that reason, Marriner should have been grateful that George was always around “to mind the family store.” On his return to Salt Lake City from Washington, Marriner wanted to be chairman of the First Security Executive Committee, but George was already chairman, and in no mood to yield the place to Marriner. To repeat, the actual business of making and collecting loans at First Security—coming against a background of seventeen years of making economic decisions in Washington that affected the nation, if not the world beyond it—could not make Marriner‟s heart skip a beat with excitement. Utah Construction, on the other hand, opened up entirely new challenges in the post-War World II era, and seemed a perfect fit for Marriner‟s interest. SF: Is there a way you could distinguish his time spent in pushing the management of his business interests with some of his broader concerns such as Vietnam, and population control? SH: I think he made fundamental, strategic decisions where he thought Utah and Amalgamated Sugar should go. More than that, once he had set in place the order of succession to top posts in both companies—not to overlook the succession of Spence to George as CEO of First Security—I think he tended to retreat from a front and center concern with these corporations. In any case, toward the last years of his life, he was plainly more preoccupied with public 20 matters than with business matters. The public matters, in his view, acted in inexorable ways on business matters. He had something interesting to say in response to my question about how he used to choose new officers for First Security. He said, “We would look for the top graduates from different schools, and once employed, they would get off to a fast start, but some would then level off. I kept wondering why. It then occurred to me that the people we were picking, originally, were those who got „A‟ grades because they were able to respond as a phonograph record and to repeat what they had been taught by their professors in answer to questions asked on a test. In business, the important thing to know is what question is worth asking. There was no guarantee in advance that the people you hired had that kind of mind set—that is, to seize a problem at its center and then ask questions worth asking about it.” SF: Marriner seemed quite proud about not having a college education, although he was maybe a little insecure about it at the same time. SH: He surrounded himself at the Federal Reserve with graduates of Harvard, some of whom had also served as instructors there. He may have originally felt uncomfortable in his dealings with them, but not for long. He made himself their student while he learned their vocabulary, especially their vocabulary expressed in terms of mathematical formulations. As I‟ve said before, Marriner got his ideas about how a compensatory economy works several years before he came to Washington. Once in Washington, he depended on his staff members from Harvard to give the concept a dressing in mathematics. SF: Was he willing to give them credit for their work? 21 SH: Yes, and that goes for the credit he gave George, as well. He knew he owed a great deal to George, just as George owed a great deal to him. It was really a love-hate relationship between the two, because they had many fights. The only time that George Eccles was known to look beaten was when he came out of an executive committee meeting of First Security and when he had an encounter with his brother. The report is that people in other offices would run for cover when these two went at each other. To the external world—this again is a carryover from growing up as the second family at a time when they would suspect that clandestine life—they presented a united front. SF: Did that same type of relationship exist with Ed Littlefield? Do you know if they clashed privately but presented a united front publicly? SH: An author of a book on Utah Construction mentioned a case where Littlefield and Marriner disagreed over compensation for employees. They went at each other for some time until Marriner said: “Okay, Ed, you and I are never going to agree. Let‟s put the issue to a vote of the board.” When the vote was taken, a majority sided with Littlefield, at which Marriner proposed to make the vote unanimous rather than have the record indicate that there was some kind of split over the matter. Marriner also sided with Ed and opposed George at a meeting when Ed wanted First Security to finance at prime a Utah Construction project. George, who was present as a Utah board member, said that First Security would not make the loan at prime—because no bank would make a loan at prime to a construction company. Marriner, though Chairman of the Board at First Security, spoke up and said hotly to George: “You know damn well if you don‟t give us the 22 loan at prime, we will get it from the Bank of America.” His responsibility at that meeting was to Utah Construction. In another context, where it was a meeting of First Security directors, he would have a different judiciary responsibility to discharge. SF: What was the main difference, or thing that struck you from the early time you knew him and then right at the end of his life? SH: A good question. I was, myself, twenty-five years older and had had many intervening experiences that would naturally be conducive to my seeing things more clearly than when I first began to work with Marriner. I had enough sense to recognize from the start that his qualities were those that make for a great man, but I was shy at first about asking him direct questions that would touch on sensitive subjects—and that he might think presumptuous coming from a kid. By the time the biography was being prepared, I had passed—independently of my association with Marriner—a number of confidence building tests. I knew that he recognized that to be the case, and while I could never reduce the full distance between the two of us, I could be more open and direct in asking him what I wanted to know. As far as he, personally, was concerned, he was the same man when it came to public anxieties. That included his anxieties over the Korean War, over proper fiscal and monetary policies, over the Vietnam War, over the shabbiness of the Nixon Administration, over population control and so on. There might be a shift in the immediate object of his anxieties, but not in his innate tendency to be anxious about the trend of public things. He always held himself responsible for doing something that would help set right things that were out of joint. As a 23 young man of twenty-two or so, he held himself responsible for the welfare of his mother and his eight siblings. He held himself responsible for the survival not only of First Security banks during the Great Depression, but those of the Intermountain region. He held himself responsible for saving the whole of the American state and society from dissolution. There was something egocentric about the way he placed himself at the center of responsibility for what was done or not done. It was a sacred egocentricity—considering what he actually did to set wrong things right. Unlike George, who accumulated a large estate, Marriner‟s estate was relatively small, partly because he gave much of it away before his death, but mainly because he had no compelling drive to accumulate money. When he finished the first book, Beckoning Frontiers, he said to me, “What do I need to go back to Utah for? To make another couple of million? I have that already.” I think he would have wished to spend the rest of his life in Washington—to be deeply involved in political arguments leading to major political decisions. He missed that kind of challenge in Salt Lake and in San Francisco, as well. SF: Thank you so much. I gained a lot.