Bio:Hugh S. Johnson

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Hugh Samuel Johnson (aka: Hugh Johnson, Hugh S. Johnson, and "Iron Pants" Johnson), a military officer, an author, a businessman, a speech writer, a governmental bureaucrat, and a newspaper columnist, was Time’s Man of the Year in 1933. He was born in Fort Scott, KS, on August 5, 1881. After growing up in KS and OK, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1899, graduated in 1903, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 1st Cavalry on June 11, 1903. He served in the Philippines (1907-1909) and as Superintendent of Sequoia National Park (1912) before receiving permission to attend the University of California at Berkeley Law School. After graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1915 and a Juris Doctor degree in 1916, he transferred to the Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG). Subsequently he served under General John J. Pershing in Mexico from May to October 1916, was appointed Deputy Provost Marshal General in October 1917, and co-authored the implementation regulations of the Selective Service Act of 1917. Then on April 15, 1918 he was promoted to Brigadier General, the youngest one since the Civil War. He resigned his commission and went into business on February 25, 1919 and, in 1926, was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal. During most of his military career, Johnson had produced a stream of fiction: two young adult novels (Williams of West Point, 1908, and Williams on Service, 1910) and over fifty short stories. But after 1926, he concentrated on nonfiction books and articles. In 1932 he began writing speeches for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1933 Roosevelt chose him to run the National Recovery Administration (NRA). But when things did not go well, he was fired in 1934. Finally, he became a syndicated newspaper columnist and political commentator. On April 15, 1942, at the age of 60, he died of pneumonia, in Washington, D.C. (The Blue Eagle, from Egg to Earth is a 1935 book by Johnson about his NRA career. “Old Iron Pants”: the Wartime Career of General Hugh S. Johnson, 1917-1918 (1971), by John Kennedy Ohl, recounts Johnson’s World War I career.)