No Venom

It used to be an invariable rule in Boston newspaper offices to identify a bustling young banker by the name of Joseph Patrick Kennedy as "the son-in-law of former Mayor John F. Fitzgerald." In 1914, on the strength of $5,000 he had cleared from a venture in a sight-seeing bus, the son of a Democratic ward boss married the daughter of Honey Fitz.* Good Catholics, the Kennedys had a child on the average of every two years, the ninth born in 1932. And when President Roosevelt remembered his old friend with a post on the Securities & Exchange Commission, he found him in his big house at Hyannis Port on Massachusetts' cool South Shore, where Mr. & Mrs. Kennedy and the nine little Kennedys live and play in the summer time.

Last week, still limping from a broken leg, Joseph Patrick Kennedy had to leave his pleasant home and his big family to journey to Washington, no summer resort. There the chairman of the SEC was to deliver a long-awaited speech on the policies of his potent body--a speech which would be an authoritative definition of the Administration's attitude toward the financial community.

What Mr. Kennedy said, however, was heartening to a far larger group of citizens than those who buy & sell the nation's securities. For the first time since March, 1933, an accredited New Dealer, whose speech had been carefully edited by his liberal colleagues and read by Presidential advisers, promised U.S. Business in so many words an opportunity "to live, make profits and grow." Excerpts from Mr. Kennedy's speech:

"There is no belief, at least none in the minds of the SEC commissioners, that business is to be viewed with suspicion; that it must be harassed and annoyed and pushed around. Domestic tranquillity is as essential to business as it is to our political system.

"We of the SEC do not regard ourselves as coroners sitting on the corpse of financial enterprise. . . . We are not working on the theory that all men and all women connected with finance . . . are to be regarded as guilty of some undefined crime.

"I conceive it to be an important part of the job we are trying to do here in the SEC to reassure capital as to its safety in going ahead and to reassure the investor as to the protection of his interests. . . .

"Some will try to tell you that pioneering and daring in business have been discouraged by the new Stock Exchange law. Don't let them get away with that. . . . No honest man, no decent institution which seeks to render service, instead of merely achieving profit need fear the regulations that have been set up.

"The whole motive of the Securities Act is to be found in the effort--the necessary and no longer escapable effort--to make finance more responsible. There is to be no vindictiveness in its interpretation, no concealed punishment to those who must live under it. There are no grudges to satisfy; no venom which needs victims. . . . Only those who see things crookedly will find it harsh. The commission will make war ... on any who sell securities by fraud or misrepresentation.

"In common with all other forms of business, financial enterprises require profits to keep them going. There is, not the slightest thought of eliminating or restricting proper profits. . . . The earning power of a nation should be the controlling factor in establishing security levels, and the security business itself has the right to claim part of this earning power."

* Father-in-law Fitzgerald was always known as Honey Fitz from the incredible length to which he could draw the notes of "Sweet Adeline" while singing to his constituents.

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