Morals in Milwaukee

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who doubtless has no higher regard for the legal profession than any other outsider, sent word to the convention of the American Bar Association in Milwaukee last week that he was appointing a special committee to scrutinize the morals of lawyers, accountants and special agents who argue tax cases before the Treasury Bar. He advised the conventionites to oust voluntarily from their association out-&-out crooks, over-sharp connivers and boasters of special influence. To hammer home a point that has made a bad smell in Washington for many a year, he sent to the Bar convention his youngish assistant general counsel, Robert Houghwout Jackson.

"If the Bar regards the fumigation of its household as its own job, in which it can invoke the aid of the Treasury," declared Emissary Jackson, "the effort to place tax practice upon a higher plane will be successful. But if the Bar as a whole regards the right to be crooked as a priceless possession to be defended by hostility to all regulations and governance, the inevitable result will be that, as a whole, it will face a vexatious degree of regulation really needful for only a few rascals."

Lawyers as a group seem to love such castigation of the other fellow's ethics and this year they evidently wanted more of it than ever before. So Mr. Jackson laid on with another cat-o'-nine-tails, roaring:

"Our public zeal for suppression of crime is discounted because of our private willingness to defend any criminal for any offense. Of course not all lawyers accept criminal cases. We have a petty larceny bar and a grand larceny bar. Some will defend bandits who rob banks from the outside, and others will defend directors who rob them from the inside. Every Jack in crime has a Jill at the bar waiting to defend him."

Curly-headed Earle Wood Evans, president of the Bar Association, willingly took up the job of chastising a segment of his own profession. "The Bar . . . has been strangely apathetic toward dishonest lawyers," cried he, "and toward that offensive creature usually found in the large centres of population who advises clients how to commit crimes with the minimum risk of detection. . . . To the extent that they advise clients in advance how to commit crimes, whether crimes of violence or commercial frauds, to that extent they are as clearly lawyer criminals as are any of the so-called criminal lawyers, and should receive as such our hearty condemnation."

By this time the Bar convention had become an outspoken free-for-all. The things that were said did not help the profession's standing with the general public but it did give A. B. A. members a righteous sense of housecleaning. John Edgar Hoover, Chief of the Department of Justice's bureau of investigation, leaped into the melee, shouting darkly: "I do not say that pardons have been purchased, although there have been rumors current to this effect.

Chimed in Governor Paul Vories McNutt of Indiana, whose parole board once freed John Dillinger, and from one of whose county jails Dillinger escaped: "The ordinary man is not satisfied with the present-day administration of justice and does not hesitate to say so."

But about the only concrete suggestion the A. B. A. had last week for improving that administration of justice was the creation of a Department of Justice within each State. Such a department would "direct and supervise actively the work of every district attorney, sheriff, and law enforcement agency," should possess rec ord systems, a scientific laboratory, competent investigators. Cold water was thrown on such a scheme, however, by a Wisconsin prosecutor who said his State had tried it twice and failed for lack of men and money.

Not one important criminal lawyer made himself sufficiently noteworthy at Milwaukee last week to stand up and de fend his branch of the profession. The majority of the 3,000 A. B. A. members at the convention were corporation law yers, more interested in the New Deal than in crime or morals. Apparently the New Deal had brought them a vast deal of new legal business. They were obviously prosperous and contented. They dressed nattily. They sported canes. They smoked 25 cigars. And when they spread them selves in the chairs of hotel lobbies, their hitched-up trouser-legs displayed the ultimate in masculine self-esteem--gaudy socks and garters.

Although New Deal business makes lawyers rich, New Deal law makes them bewildered. New rules and regulations are being issued too speedily for lawyers to understand and remember. Bitterly Louis Goldsborough Caldwell, who once was general counsel to the Federal Radio Commission and so helped to promulgate demi-judicial, demi-legislative orders him self, complained that he was obliged to give up trying to tabulate New Deal rules and regulations in a handbook. He begged for a Federal Administrative Court, with branches and divisions, to take over the judicial functions of administrative boards and commissions.

But to many a lawyer, like Judge Joseph Bradley David of Chicago, the idea of such a court sounded like blasphemy. Cried horror-stricken Judge David last week: "It is an affront to the President of the U. S. . . . An attempt to prevent the greatest humanitarian who has sat in the White House for 70 years in carrying out his work."

Some of Judge David's auditors clapped their hands. Many laughed. Continued the Judge: "I doubt whether the people respect the courts more than they do these bureaus."

Judge David has many compatriots in assuming President Roosevelt's transcendency. Yet there was no hero-worship, no malice, in what a great detached intelligence. Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School, had to say in Milwaukee last week. Declared the man from whose school Franklin Roosevelt has drawn his best legal ideas, his smartest young legal-ites: "The present-day American President is a Tudor or Stuart king, ruling with his Parliament if he can, but without it if he must."

That is perfectly natural, Dean Pound reassured his audience. In the beginning Congress was the dominating force. Then Chief Justice John Marshall declared: "We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding--a Constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." And the judicial branch of the Government rose in influence. Now it is the Administrative branch's turn. "A tribute." soothingly continued Dean Pound, "to our governmental system that these changes can take place without revolution and without real danger to the usefulness of the branches that periodically appear to be eclipsed."

Into the refulgence which for a year haloes the president of the Bar Association stepped Scott Marion Loftin. Shrewd, sage and 55, President Loftin has practiced 35 years before the Florida Bar. He early became attached to the real estate, hotel and railroad interests of the late Henry Morrison Flagler. Since 1925 Mr. Loftin has been vice president and general counsel of the Flagler corporations. His influence spans the full "L" of Florida, from Pensacola where he began to practice law, to Jacksonville where he has his home and headquarters, to Miami where his law partners hold forth. One of his partners, John Patrick Stokes, made Florida the rich man's haven by writing Florida's constitutional amendment which prohibits state income and inheritance taxes.

Despite the fact the U. S. Senate wants to jail William Patterson MacCracken Jr. for contumaciously withholding airmail contracts which the Senate wants to see, the Bar Association last week re-elected Mr. MacCracken secretary. Day after Secretary MacCracken's reelection, lawyers for the Senate appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court to put him in jail.

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