THE GOVERNMENT: Halfway Mark

• Share

On the morning of June 1, 1938, black-robed Federal Judge Francis Gordon Caffey looked down from his huge bench in Manhattan's gleaming new U. S. courthouse upon a bank of lawyers. Standing at the flat, mahogany counsel table with a sheaf of notes, earnest, tousle-headed Walter Lyman Rice, trust-busting Special Assistant to the U. S. Attorney General, was ready to give his opening outline of a lawsuit to dissolve $253,000,000 Aluminum Co. of America as a monopoly in restraint of trade.

Judge Caffey put in a word first. Said he: "May I inject the remark that I am most helped by statements which omit the trees and show me the forest."

Since that day, more than a year ago, the new courthouse has begun to dull with a patina of smoke and weather, the Sixth Avenue Elevated has been torn down, the "World of Tomorrow" on Flushing Meadows has grown up into a World's Fair. But Judge Caffey is still hearing the same lawsuit, still looking down upon the same bank of lawyers. On June 1, a year to the day from the opening of the case, the U. S. rested. Last week, Alcoa launched its defense.

In the Government's case many a tree had been shown Judge Caffey in 18,331 pages of evidence taken in court. Out of these many trees, the Government's smart young men tried to make a forest by presenting a 291-page brief, for Judge Caffey to digest while the defense was in process. He needed a good digestion. With 159 court days behind it, the Alcoa case was last week already the longest trust-busting suit in U. S. history. Only comparable suits in duration and importance were the 50-day prosecution of the Sugar Institute in 1933, the 120-day prosecution which resulted in the dissolution of the old Standard Oil Co. in 1911, and the 31-day prosecution which resulted in breaking up the tobacco trust the same year.

The Alcoa suit's long-distance mark for consecutive testimony was set last spring by Edward K. Davis, publicity-shy president of Aluminium Limited of Canada. Younger brother (59) of Alcoa's Board Chairman Arthur Vining Davis, Mr. Davis held the stand for six and a half weeks while the Government went after him hammer & tongs trying to show that Aluminium Ltd. is not a separate, independent corporation, but an international stooge set up by Alcoa. When he was finally excused, Harvardman Davis was glad to get back to his 400-acre estate on Cape Cod, where he raises fine flowers and succulent vegetables, works a few hours a day in his office between frequent trips to Montreal to handle affairs of Aluminium Ltd.

One of the big trees in the Federal forest is the contention that when Arthur Vining Davis organized Aluminium Ltd. in 1928, he had no intention of making it a competitor of Alcoa. What he did want, the Government said, was to reach through Aluminium Ltd. into the world aluminum cartel and share international trade with Swiss, German, French and British aluminum monopolies on a nice, friendly basis, with an ugly throat-cutting all laid out for any upstart competitors.

Chief contentions in the Government's case which Alcoa set out last week to rebut: