Walla Walla to Washington

Last week President Roosevelt appointed a fifth member of the Securities & Exchange Commission to fill a vacancy created when Joseph Patrick Kennedy resigned last autumn. The post was offered to Benjamin Victor Cohen but that New Deal legalite turned it down. Sent to the Senate for confirmation was the name of William Orville ("Bill") Douglas, 37, as brilliant a professor as the New Deal has attracted to Washington. President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, who tried to buy him away from the Yale Law School with a salary of some $20,000, declared that Bill Douglas was the nation's "outstanding professor of law."

This remarkable young man turned up in the East in 1922 on the brake rods of a transcontinental freight train. Son of a poverty-plagued Presbyterian minister, he odd-jobbed his way through Whitman College, Walla Walla, Wash., washing his own clothes, living at times in a tent. Burning for a big university degree, he arrived at Columbia Law School with 6-c- in his pocket. Before he graduated high in his Class of 1925 he had written a legal text book for a correspondence course. In his last year he taught three courses on the side.

In two years with the big Manhattan firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood, Lawyer Douglas learned all that he cared to know about the current state of corporate law. He returned to Columbia to teach, having gained little respect and no love for Wall Street law or finance. Today he can accept a luncheon invitation from Morgan Partner George Whitney without a twitter. When Joe Kennedy drafted him to conduct SEC's investigation of protective committees, Mr. Douglas was occupying the well-upholstered chair of a Sterling Professorship at the Yale Law School. Having since ploughed through the mire of 200,000 committees, which in varying degrees were ostensibly protecting an investors' stake of $36,000,000,000, he will soon report his findings to Congress, probably with recommendations for toothy legislation.

Slim, sandy-haired Lawyer Douglas has a genial grin which twists itself into grim seriousness with disconcerting rapidity. He married a colleague of his high-school teaching days in Yakima, Wash., is careless in dress, likes bridge and the cinema.

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