Business: Burr & Sop

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There are five berths on the Securities & Exchange Commission, each with one vote. Ever since Commissioners J. M. Landis and J. D. Ross resigned few months ago (TIME, Sept. 27 & Oct. 25), there have been two liberals, William O. Douglas and

Robert E. Healy, and one conservative, George C. Matthews, holding down the SEC fort. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion that whenever President Roosevelt got around to filling the two vacancies, he would appoint at least one out & out liberal. It was also pretty obvious after the present depression appeared that the other appointee might be a sop to Business. Last week these predictions were justified as Franklin Roosevelt sent to the Senate as his SEC nominees the names of a former braintruster and a prominent Wall Streeter.

Braintruster. Jerome Frank, a brilliant Jewish lawyer with an audacious tongue and a taste for abstract thought, has been successively a braintruster to Mayor Dever's Chicago reform administration, a satellite of such literary liberals as Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell, a protege of Felix Frankfurter and a crony of Rexford Tugwell. As general counsel for AAA he became such a burr under the New Deal saddle on conservative AAA Administrator George Peek that the latter finally resigned. When satirical Jerome Frank presently broke lances with Mr. Peek's successor, Chester Davis, the result was the reverse; Lawyer Frank was presently ousted from the AAA. After a sojourn with RFC and PWA, he journeyed north to Manhattan to work for the liberal legal firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, where, aged 48, he still was last week when Franklin Roosevelt once more smiled upon him.