William N. Doak

William Nuckles Doak (December 12, 1882 – October 23, 1933) was an American politician who served as Secretary of Labour from 1930 until 1933. He is best remembered for being the driving force behind Herbert Hoover's Mexican Repatriation policy, under which hundreds of thousands of people were illegally deported.

Biography

William Nuckles Doak was born in Virginia to Canaro and Elizabeth Doak. He was brought up as a Methodist and attended both public and business school in Virginia. In 1908 he married Emma Cricher.

Doak served as Vice-President of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen from 1916 to 1928. Two years after leaving this position, he was appointed Secretary of Labour of the United States by President Herbert Hoover. One of his early actions as Labour Secretary was to support the Davis-Bacon act, which determined the wages paid to government employees.

In 1929, one year before Doak was appointed, Hoover's administration had begun a policy of deporting illegal immigrants. Doak aggressively pursued this policy as far as Mexicans were concerned, deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants over a period of four years. About sixty percent of those targeted were in fact citizens of the United States and present legally in the country. This is today considered to be a form of ethnic cleansing. It has also been alleged that Doak targeted the leaders of strikes or protests and had them deported by falsely calling them illegals. The methods employed by Doak's underlings were later found to be unconstitutional. Doak justified the deportations by claiming that the immigrants were to blame for the Great Depression.

On March 4 1933 Doak retired, although the deportations continued until 1936. He died six months later of heart disease.