"No Monkey Business"

The man who said, "Give me the making of the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,"* had never heard of the U. S. Supreme Court. Tommy-the-Cork Corcoran and his boss, the President, love ballads, but believe that the laws they have got on the statute books are better and should be preserved to posterity by a high court minded like the New Deal's lawmakers.

These considerations guided Franklin Roosevelt's search for a successor to Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who retired from the Supreme Court in February. Demands that a Westerner be named this time restricted the choice. Suddenly it was remembered that William Orville Douglas, 40, chairman of SEC, was born in Minne sota, raised and schooled in Yakima and Walla Walla, Wash. A trial balloon for the Douglas appointment was released just before the President went war-gaming with the fleet (TIME, Feb. 27). This week, the President named Mr. Douglas to be the youngest Associate Justice since Joseph Story, who was but 32 when President Madison appointed him in 1811 for a term that lasted 34 years.

Although Bill Douglas will not put his lanky legs on the high court's august desk or chain-smoke cigarets during hearings, he may often wish he could. That is the way he behaved in the chair of SEC. His care less clothes, sandy hair awry, speech plain as a pikestaff, are essentially characteristic of the young man who only 17 years ago herded sheep and bummed on box cars to get East for his legal education.

Dr. Bob Hutchins, now president of the University of Chicago, once called Bill Douglas the "outstanding professor of law of the nation." Douglas wrote a textbook and taught three courses to earn his way through Columbia Law School, was graduated No. 2 in his class. For two years with the high-powered Manhattan firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood he threaded the jungles of corporate law and finance. He went back to teach at Columbia, was called to Yale where he became Sterling Professor, declined an even finer chair at Chicago, went to SEC in 1934 on Joe Kennedy's invitation.

His credo suited all but the most doctrinaire New Dealers. He said: "To tell you the truth, I think that I am really a pretty conservative fellow from the old school, perhaps a school too old to be remembered. I think that, from the point of view of the investors, the one safe, controlling and guiding stand should be conservative standards of finance--no monkey business."

Reformers such as the Nation fear that Bill Douglas is too conservative because he does not believe that high finance, even when honest, is still "the art of getting something for nothing." Wall Streeters, however, believe that he inherited more than enough righteousness. Last week, for example, just when the stock exchanges thought they had him all lined up to relax the rules about trading by "insiders," as SEC's contribution to "appeasement," he sharply called their report "a phoney."

Senate sentiment this week indicated prompt confirmation for the youngest Associate Justice. A lot of Washington's younger, less social folk, and proprietors of various quick-order restaurants, were thrilled to the core at the prospect of already knowing a real, live, Scotch-drinking, story-telling member of the Supreme

Court. His pretty wife, Mildred (Riddle), is his boyhood sweetheart from La Grande, Ore. She tends their two children, Mildred (9), and Bill Jr. or "Bumble" (7), with only the aid of a colored house man named Rochester at their roomy, rented home on the edge of the city. Besides work he likes golf, bridge, wild life and sunsets.

*Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, Scotland (1655-1716).

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