William Cox Redfield to William G. McAdoo

I have just received your communication of the 31st ult. asking me to confer with you today, Wednesday. I regret that it will be impossible for me to call on you either today or Thursday. An important conference, arranged long ago, at the Labor Department on the supply of seamen will take all day today except a portion of the afternoon when the Council of National Defense meets and most of tomorrow when also I have a meeting of the Federal Board of Vocational Education and, I think, one of the Export Council.

I have been glad to note your suggestions with care. I have not read the amendment about clearances suggested by you. No opportunity has been afforded me to do so. My only knowledge of it was a telephone message from Senator Ransdell describing its effect which led to my immediate protest against it. The amendment was offered by you to the Committee without my knowledge and without your consulting me although it radically affected a duty charged upon me by law and which you are prohibited by law from carrying on. I should be grieved if I thought any unkind act on my part had led you to take a course which on its face seems so discourteous. Certainly I should not think of taking any action of the kind as regards any of my colleagues without informing them in advance.

Furthermore I am informed, I hope mistakenly, that you told the Senate Sub-committee that I had approved the other amendments offered by you to the Trading with the Enemy Act. So the Department of Justice has advised me. This I am sure you know is a mistake. I do not know what the amendments were. The President wrote me of certain ones without giving details and I approved them. Senator Ransdell spoke of others which seemed to me right, but I learn from the Department of Justice that there were a number of these amendments of whose tenor I know nothing at all, yet for which my approval was without my knowledge given to the Committee by you. You had not conferred with me about them and the use of my name was quite unauthorized, as I have made clear to the Department of Justice.

I do not approve the suggestion made respecting clearances in your letter. It proposes a departure from a lawful practice which has prevailed for fourteen years without friction until you brought the subject up. It would require duplication of work in your office, now efficiently performed here, to say nothing of the delay in the double transmission. After long experience and full debate, all powers over navigation except those of revenue were taken from the Treasury Department by law, and not only so but the Secretary of the Treasury was expressly prohibited by law from exercising them thereafter. These powers, therefore, are not such as can be lawfully exercised by the Secretary of the Treasury and every such exercise of them in recent years is, I am advised, illegal and void.

The Collectors of Customs, in so far as their duties with navigation are concerned, are officers under the Department of Commerce, not subject in these respects to the jurisdiction of the Department of the Treasury. This has worked perfectly, is working today perfectly save in the respects where you are exercising authority over clearances not warranted by law.

It seems to me that it should be preliminary to any discussion of the matter that the lawful status should be restored. When that is done I shall be glad to so cooperate with you, not only in the present respects but in every other way, so as not only to avoid friction but to assist you in every possible means in my power.

I await your further pleasure,Secretary.Hon. WG McAdoo,Secretary of the Treasury,Washington, D. C.