Business: Again, Jones

A long and unfinished chapter in the annals of the New Deal has been written around the character of J. Edward Jones, a Manhattan oil royalty dealer whom the Securities & Exchange Commission has been assiduously trying to put out of business for more than a year. Last month Oil Royalist Jones won from the Supreme Court a legal victory and sweet revenge in the form of a verbal thrashing administered by Justice Sutherland to the SEC and all other New Deal agencies whose zeal might be exceeding their authority (TIME, April 13).

Oil Royalist Jones's revenge was exceedingly short. Day after the Supreme Court decision a Federal grand jury in Manhattan started to hear a special Department of Justice agent present straight mail-fraud charges against the onetime Kansas soda-jerker. Last week J. Edward Jones was indicted on 15 counts, not for violation of the Securities Act but for using the mails to sell $800,000 worth of oil royalty certificates with false promises and fraudulent pretenses.

"This is mad persecution advanced to the most pitiable stages of New Deal-irium," roared Royalist Jones. "While I, of course, realize that few business concerns could withstand such continued and powerful efforts at sabotage, nevertheless I warn against the dangers of vicious governmental malevolence bent on riding roughshod over individual rights and Constitutional guarantees hitherto respected by our Government.

"What has been persecution aplenty for me has now, following my Supreme Court victory, given place to revenge. But the face of an agency of the executive branch of our Government cannot be saved from the effect of severe excoriation by our judiciary through continual hounding of an individual to his eventual ruination."