All Sorts & Conditions

Earnest, spectacled William McChesney Martin Jr., 34, who looks more like an apple-cheeked bumpkin than the $48,000-a-year president of the New York Stock Exchange, resigned his job, and last week joined the U.S. Army at $21 a month. Because willing service by the wealthy is good draft publicity, Manhattan's Selective Service publicity used the occasion to set off plenty of red fire. Mr. Martin cooperated. With $30 in his wallet ("I suppose I shouldn't have that much"), little more than a change of underwear in his zipper bag, he cheerfully suffered many an interview and photo. He also dramatized the leveling influence of the draft by sticking close to a contrasting fellow recruit: an awed $16-a-week Stock Exchange page boy.

Fire of another color fumed up last week in Washington. Ellison DuRant Smith Jr., 26, sprout of bag-eyed, walrusy Senator "Cotton Ed" of South Carolina, is clerk of the Senate Agriculture and Forestry Committee, whose chairman is old Cotton Ed. Young Mr. Smith, who has had the $3,900-a-year clerkship only eleven months, has been going to night classes at the National University Law School. When his draft number came up, he asked for deferment (to Class 2A) on the ground that he has a special employment status: he was indispensable to the Senate's Agriculture and Forestry Committee. Local Draft Board No. 8 made his request public.

Young Cotton Ed's request was backed by a letter, signed by twelve of the committee's 20 members: "To remove a clerk with the experience and background that he must have . . . would greatly impair the effectiveness of the committee work and retard general progress in vital legislation. . . . It is the desire of the committee that Mr. Smith be deferred." Signers included Isolationist Burt Wheeler, Nebraska's liberal George Norris, half a dozen brother Senators of Senator Smith (but not old Cotton Ed). Three of the signers (like old Cotton Ed) had voted against the Selective Service and Training Act; four had not voted on it at all.

The draft board's reply to this imposing intercession was that young Mr. Smith could be deferred to July (because he is a student) but no longer. Trumpeted old Cotton Ed, wroth at all the publicity: "Character assassins . . . unprincipled individuals . . . unprecedented for a draft board to lend itself to a murderous assault."

Meanwhile, reporters found that two other Senators had wangled deferments for relatives. Delaware's New Dealer Tunnell got his 26-year-old son Robert on the deferred list because he was needed in the management of "eight or nine" of his father's farms. Delaware's James H. Hughes had got his 33-year-old nephew, Randolph Hughes, deferred because the Senator needs him for his secretary.

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