Thacher for Hughes Jr.

No. 2 man in the U. S. Department of Justice is the Solicitor General, chief counsel for the Government, prime defender of the Constitution before the bar of the Supreme Court. To succeed Charles Evans Hughes Jr., resigned, in this post President Hoover surprisingly picked a man no one had thought of. He was Thomas Day Thacher, a judge of the U. S. District Court in Manhattan.

What was surprising about Judge Thacher's acceptance was that his judgeship was a life office. Relatively young, wealthy, Judge Thacher had been tempted away from judicial security by the prospect of more lively and strenuous action before the Supreme Court bar.

Born in Tenafly, N. J., in 1881, Judge Thacher went to Taft School, was graduated from Yale in 1904, from the Yale Law School in 1906. In 1907 he was ap pointed Assistant U. S. District Attorney in Manhattan. He joined his father's firm, Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, of which Ambassador Dwight Whitney Mor row was once a member. He had many large corporations among his clients, de fended the directors of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad in 1915 when they were charged with trying to monopolize New England commerce, was attorney for the "Terra Cotta Trust" in the Untermyer-Lockwood building inquiry (1921).

Appointed by President Coolidge to the U. S. bench in 1925, he has shown inde pendence in his Prohibition decisions, dis agreed violently with Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt's crusading activities. He won the cheers of Conservatives when he re fused to protect with an injunction radicals who were mutilating U. S. stamps with protests against marine intervention in Nicaragua.

Judge Thacher's appointment as solicitor general was likely to receive the same pawing at the hands of the Senate as Charles Evans Hughes's for chief justice, ard for about the same reasons. Because of personal holdings in public utilities, he had, as a U. S. judge, declined to hear the case of Federal Trade Commission v. Electric Bond & Share. Chairman Norris of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who led the attack on Chief Justice Hughes, announced that his committee would investigate the Thacher appointment in the light of information that, as a onetime member of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, he had been an "attorney for Electric Bond & Share Co."

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