Adjourned

Suddenly and unexpectedly last week the Senate Banking & Currency Committee voted to halt its probe of Wall Street. No decision was made on whether it would start again in the autumn but politicians know that most such investigations when once allowed to lapse are seldom revived. The Committee returned to Representative La Guardia his little brown trunkful of papers relating to Wall Street and the Press. Only a week ago $50.000 had been received to continue the investigation until March 4, 1933 but in Washington it was guessed that that much was needed to cover a deficit already incurred.

William Fox, still under subpoena, lay ill abed, rising only when he heard that the investigation was ending (see col. 3). The final session was marked by the appearance of two women who lost money in the market. The Senators listened to Miss Grace Van Braam Roberts of Highland, N. Y., "farmer," suffraget and clubwoman. She was no ordinary sheared, bleating lamb but a shrewd woman who was once a very active trader, whose father was the late Charles Henry Roberts, president of the Carolina Central Railroad and whose brother is Owen F. Roberts, former independent member of the New York Stock Exchange. The bone of her contention was that in 1921 Hayden. Stone & Co. had "induced" her to buy 150 Atlantic, Gulf & West Indies shares although the house was running a pool in the stock at the time to keep it up while the partners, including Richard Hoyt, unloaded their own holdings. She said that she brought a suit over the transaction, won $16,000. What especially angered her was that, the New York Stock Exchange failed to discipline Hayden, Stone on this evidence but instead exonerated it of wrongdoing. Miss Roberts told of having lost "several hundreds of thousands of dollars because of this sort of thing." She spoke caustically of "the assured impudence of Mr. Whitney's dishonesty." Unwilling to re-open this old feud, which had hitherto escaped publicity, was Hayden, Stone & Co. last week. They implied that the suit had been won on technicalities, that Miss Roberts was a "bad loser" as well as a woman who would leave no Hayden, Stones unturned.

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