William Cox Redfield to Woodrow Wilson

I have received your letter of the 26th respecting the Trading with the Enemy Bill. Several days ago an amendment to the effect suggested in your letter was submitted to me and I was glad to approve it because it seemed obvious that financial matters affected by the Act should be in the hands of theSecretary of the Treasury. Today before your letter came I was glad to say to the Chairman of the Senate Sub–Committee, in response to his inquiry, that I approved this amendment. So far then as your letter goes we are in accord.
I regret, however, to hear that this is not the only matter in which amendments to the bill were suggested by Secretary McAdoo.
Senator Ransdell telephoned me, if I understood him correctly, that the Secretary of the Treasury asked to have the bill amended to take the control over clearances out of the Commerce Department and put it in the Treasury Department. He asked my views on this and I protested against it both as to its substance and manner. This is a matter of which you have heard from time to time.
If I may judge from what seemed a casual remark dropped by you at a Cabinet Meeting, this appears a simple thing, taking the apparently obvious form that officers of one department should not give instructions to those of another. If this were all and if the matter affected only clearances, there would be less to say, but this is not all and the matter affects much more than clearances. It was not by accident that after many years of experience and long debate all the legal phases connected with navigation, not merely clearances alone but entries and everything except revenues, were not only taken from the Treasury Department and placed in the Commerce Department, but a special prohibitory statement was added in the law that the Secretary of the Treasury should not hereafter exercise any of these powers. The Opinions of the Attorneys General in the past are conclusive upon the matter. From that day to this not in one respect but in many the Collectors have been and are now acting as officers of the Department of Commerce under its instructions daily and guided by its rulings. This has gone on without friction, with the approval of the Collectors, without objection on the part of the Secretaries of the Treasury, and its coming up now is merely the revival of an ancient combat settled fourteen years ago. At that time the Bureau of Navigation, now part of this Department, was in the Treasury Department with the same head it now has. By the law the entire source of authority in the Treasury Department, to wit: the Bureau of Navigation was taken bodily out and has been since then a part of the Commerce Department.
What is involved, therefore, is not clearances alone but the question in substance whether an important bureau of this Department shall be taken out and put back into the place whence it was fourteen years ago removed. Since that time the Bureau of Navigation has been vivified. It has done larger, more effective, work then ever and it never has been as efficient as in the last four years. The intimate, daily relations of the Steamboat Inspection Service, (itself formerly a part of the Treasury Department) and the Bureau of Navigation is such that one could hardly be moved without the other. If the Bureau of Navigation must be altered, I should be forced myself to recommend that the Steamboat Inspection Service went with it. Against either or both changes in whole or in part, both as result of experience and of present conditions, I feel obliged to enter my most respectful and earnest protest.
Before approval is given to what seems so simple and is so far–reaching a change let me ask that the subject be studied not in one phase but in all its relations.

Yours very truly,

William C. Redfield
Secretary,

The President,
The White House,
Washington, D.C.