William Nuckles Doak (12 December 1882–23 October 1933), secretary of labor, was born on the Wythe County farm of his parents, Canaro Draton Doak and Elizabeth Dutton Doak. He attended Southern Business College, in Bristol. About 1900 he began working in Bluefield, West Virginia, as a switchman for the Norfolk and Western Railway Company. In 1904 Doak joined the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, one of the four major labor unions representing railroad workers, and four years later he became general chair of the union for the Norfolk and Western system. On 15 October 1908 in Williamson, West Virginia, he married Emma Marie Cricher, of Ironton, Ohio. They had no children.

Doak moved to Roanoke late in 1908 or early in 1909. Elected a vice president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen in 1916, he became the organization's national legislative representative in Washington, D.C. In arbitration proceedings and at congressional committee meetings, his skill as a mediator earned him the approval of railway executives as well as laborers. Doak spoke against railroad consolidation and in 1917 opposed a bill that would have prohibited strikes and lockouts on interstate carriers, even though he was disinclined to advocate strikes or boycotts. Throughout his career he and most other white railroad union officers opposed admitting African Americans into the unions or permitting them to work for the railroads.

The entry of the United States into World War I led the federal government in December 1917 to assume control of the nation's rail lines under the United States Railroad Administration. The following April, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen named Doak its representative to the administration's Railway Board of Adjustment No. 1. Composed of four delegates from railroad management and one delegate from each of the four major unions, the board resolved disputes between railroads and their employees. Doak also served on a wartime committee to fix the prices of wheat and meat.

Doak attended the December 1918 National Transportation Conference that the Chamber of Commerce of the United States had called to develop a plan for the operation of transportation facilities after the end of government control. Representing the conference, he argued before a congressional committee in July 1919 that railroad labor disputes could best be resolved by voluntary boards on which management and employees had equal representation. The government returned the railroads to private ownership the following year, provided for regional boards of adjustment with jurisdiction over conflicts not involving wages, and established the Railroad Labor Board to settle wage controversies and to break deadlocks. From 1921 to 1928 Doak sat on the train service boards of adjustment for the southeastern and eastern regions. He worked with railway executives and other labor leaders to draft legislation that Congress enacted in 1926 to replace the ineffective Railroad Labor Board with more-flexible boards of adjustment, mediation, and arbitration.

Doak was elected first vice president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen in 1922 and assistant to the union's president in 1927. In the latter year, while the organization's chief executive visited abroad for several months, Doak became acting president and successfully directed a movement to secure wage increases in the Southeast. He met with mixed results in a similar campaign in the West. In 1928 the union consolidated the positions of national legislative representative and editor of the Railroad Trainman, the union's publication, and he won election to that reconstituted post.

In 1915 Doak was the Republican candidate for the Senate of Virginia from the district encompassing the cities of Radford and Roanoke and the counties of Montgomery and Roanoke. He was soundly defeated, as he was again five years later when he ran for the House of Representatives from the district that comprised Roanoke and the surrounding counties. In 1924 Doak sought a United States Senate seat but lost in a landslide to the Democratic incumbent Carter Glass. During the 1928 presidential campaign Doak directed the labor bureau of the Republican National Committee in support of the successful candidacy of Herbert Hoover, a personal friend.

Hoover considered Doak for the post of secretary of labor in 1929 but passed him by after leaders of the American Federation of Labor objected because Doak's union was not part of the federation, which had been instrumental in creating the Cabinet-level office. When the labor post became vacant the following year, Hoover appointed Doak and issued a statement that no organization could dictate who could serve in the president's Cabinet. The Senate confirmed Doak on 8 December 1930, and he took the oath of office the following day. In 1932 he instituted a five-day work week in the Department of Labor.

In an effort to stabilize wages during the early years of the Great Depression, Doak promoted a bill that Hoover signed in March 1931 requiring contractors to pay workers on federal projects at prevailing local wage rates. Doak alienated union leaders, however, when Hoover's influence led him abruptly to retract support for a measure that would have replaced the ineffective United States Employment Service with a new employment agency organized around federal aid to states. Doak drew up a substitute bill that was palatable to Hoover, but Congress passed a version of the original. The president predictably issued a veto, after which Doak oversaw an expansion of the existing service that drew widespread criticism for its inefficiency.

In March 1932 Congress passed an act declaring that federal courts could no longer issue injunctions against peaceful strikes or enforce labor contracts in which an employee had promised not to join a union. Hoover and Doak played no role in the bill's passage. The president signed it, probably because he knew that Congress would override a veto, but he tried to undermine it by suggesting that the courts rule on its constitutionality. In October one of the bill's sponsors accused Doak of having offered a federal judgeship to a prominent labor attorney in exchange for working to sabotage the legislation. Doak strenuously denied the charges.

In September 1930 the president announced stringent restrictions on immigration in an attempt to improve the labor market for American citizens. Doak, responsible for the Bureau of Immigration, directed an energetic deportation program that targeted Communists and illegal immigrants. Immigration plummeted early in the 1930s, but critics protested that his tactics showed little regard for civil liberties.

Doak campaigned for Hoover's reelection in 1932 and made the keynote address at the Virginia Republican State Convention in April of that year. Following Hoover's departure from office in March 1933, Doak resumed his position as the national legislative representative of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, from which he had taken a leave of absence while serving in the Cabinet. William Nuckles Doak died of heart disease on 23 October 1933 at his home in Arlington County. Temporarily interred with Masonic rites at Abbey Mausoleum in Arlington, his remains were moved in January 1934 to Black Lick Cemetery, near Rural Retreat in Wythe County.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Roger W. Babson, Washington and the Depression, Including the Career of W. N. Doak (1932), 89–108, Gary M. Fink et al., eds., Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders (1974), 79, and National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1891–1984), 25:29–30; Birth Register, Wythe Co. (first name recorded as Willie), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Mingo Co., W.Va., Marriage License, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Charleston, W.Va.; New York Times, 1 July 1920, 8 Jan. 1929; Washington Post, 29 Nov. 1930; Time, 8 Dec. 1930; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 July 1931; Walter F. McCaleb, Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, with Special Reference to the Life of Alexander F. Whitney (1936); Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (1960); BVS Death Certificate, Arlington Co., LVA; obituaries (all with portraits) in Richmond News Leader and Roanoke World-News, both 23 Oct. 1933, and New York Times, Roanoke Times, and Washington Post, all 24 Oct. 1933; account of re-interment in Washington Post, 21 Jan. 1934.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Jennifer R. Loux.

How to cite this page:
Jennifer R. Loux,"William Nuckles Doak (1882–1933)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2019 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Doak_William_Nuckles, accessed [today's date]).

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