Four In, Eight To Go

BOARDS & BUREAUS

Quietly from the Washington scene last week passed the National (Wickersham) Commission on Law Observance & Enforcement, its legal life ended. Twentyfive months ago President Hoover called it into being as his first and greatest special agency. Its eleven members trooped importantly to the White House. President Hoover made them a speech of welcome in the Cabinet Room. Photographs were taken on the rear posing-ground. An elaborate luncheon was served in the State dining room. Press headlines throughout the land blared the news. Last week there were no White House ceremonies, no Hoover speech of thanks, no news pictures, no luncheon, no big headlines.

Romance. But unexpected romance saved the Commission's exit from being altogether drab. When Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School, second only to Chairman George Woodward Wickersham in legal eminence, went to Washington in 1929 to serve his President as a commissioner, he put up at the Lafayette Hotel on 16th Street. Who should also be staying there but Mrs. Lucy Berry Miller, widow of his old Washington friend, Dr. James E. Miller. When Dean Pound, himself a widower, was not hard at work at the Commission's headquarters, he courted Mrs. Miller about the hotel and elsewhere. Last week just as moving vans were backing up to the Tower Building and overalled work men were beginning to clean out the Com mission's offices there. Commissioner Pound, aged 60, escorted Mrs. Miller, aged 49, to famed old St. John's Church, made her his second wife. He and his bride sped to New York, sailed for Scotland aboard the S. S. Transylvania. Declared Honeymooner Pound: " I've been working very hard these last few weeks.I'm tired and need a rest."

Reports. Moved out of his Tower Building suite with its airy outlook and fine furniture, Chairman Wickersham last week hired out of his own pocket a tiny office with two second-hand desks and chairs in the Walker-Johnson Building, close to the White House. There with two assistants and a clerk he read proof on the Commission's unfinished reports. In 25 months the Commission had spent $475,000 of its $500.000 appropriation. It had made four reports to the President : 1) Prohibition (preliminary); 2) Prohibition (final); 3) crime statistics; 4) prosecutions.

Before its assignment was over, it had eight more to hand in: 1) crime causes; 2) crime costs; 3) prisons and probation; 4) police methods; 5) foreign-born crime; 6) lawless law enforcement; 7) juvenile delinquency; 8) deportation of criminal aliens.

Secretary of Labor Doak had written a 5"-page letter heatedly protesting against the Commission's conclusions on his Department's deportation methods.

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