Bankers at San Francisco

Swinging off special trains, stooping out of special airliners, squinting at California highway signs, nearly 4,000 U. S. bankers merged into San Francisco last week for the 62nd annual convention of the American Bankers Association. In their baggage were golf bags and tail coats. In their heads were vivid memories of the 1934 convention in Washington, when Jackson Eli Reynolds of Manhattan's First National Bank swayed them by eloquence and earnestness into a truce with Franklin D. Roosevelt. And on their collective conscience was last year's meeting in New Orleans, where they had broken that truce by damning the New Deal until they were hoarse. But they had not circulated long at convention headquarters in the St. Francis Hotel before they knew that 1936 was another truce year.

Early comers had been spooked by the knowledge that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marriner Stoddard Eccles, Comptroller of the Currency James Francis Thaddeus O'Connor, and RFChairman Jesse Holman Jones, still convalescent after his air-crash shake-up three months ago, were all in San Francisco. Of these, only Jesse Jones was slated to address the convention but rumor had it that his colleagues represented a New Deal concentration for pressure purposes. It was a false alarm. Mr. Eccles disappeared in the general direction of home at Ogden, Utah. Mr. O'Connor merely issued cheery figures on California banking and equally cheery denials of an engagement to Cinemactress Elissa Landi. At the last minute Mr. Jones packed off for Washington, pleading that he was still too "shaky on his pins" to make his speech. In parting he rumbled genially: "It has been a pleasure to work with the bankers during the trying period from which happily we have emerged. . . ."

Left to play in their own backyard, the bankers followed a program carefully planned to keep political rancor out of hearing, focus attention on professional problems. For U. S. Banking, shifted off its old base by Depression and the New Deal, they considered reorientation. Most of the speakers at A. B. A.'s general sessions were businessmen, not bankers, invited to assist in this procedure.

Help Wanted. On his way to the convention, A. B. A. President Robert Vedder Fleming of Washington's Riggs Bank had stopped off in Spokane, Wash, long enough to get himself named "Chief Black Hawk" by the Flathead Indians. This warlike title he bore gracefully. Mr. Fleming, amiable and solid as he is jolly, reminded the bankers that during the year Congress and the Administration had given A. B. A. "courteous and attentive consideration." Banks had been excluded from the provisions of the law taxing undistributed earnings. "Splendid cooperation" had been received from the Government in a survey aimed at ending "competition between banks and government lending agencies."

"With regard to expenditures which have caused deficit financing," the Washington banker observed. "I think every fair-minded man recognizes that in times of national emergencies . . . the Federal Government of necessity, by virtue of its duty to the people of the nation, must undertake steps involving unusual expenditure of funds. . . ."

List. President Fleming had no monopoly on good temper. Off the convention floor the delegates were cheered by a round of festivities including two boat rides around San Francisco Bay, a grand banquet and ball at the Palace Hotel, a golf tournament at the Olympic Club's Lakeside course. Amadeo Giannini's Bank of America, biggest U. S. bank west of Manhattan, outdid itself in the matter of hospitality. To each of the bankers' ladies on the night of the formal ball, Bank of America sent a corsage of two orchids. To each of the bankers it dispatched a neat package of seven bottles of assorted California wines. To top it all off, Bank of America chartered a Douglas airliner, for three days taxied some 600 bankers on half-hour trips over the Bay.

On the floor, in corridors, at divisional meetings, bankers gloomed little. Anathema two years ago, Federal deposit insurance was generally accepted. The low-status of commercial loans as earning assets was treated for the first time not as a horrifying abnormality but as a more or less permanent condition to which banks would have to adapt themselves. In a report for the A. B. A.'s economic policy commission, Cleveland Trust's financial seer, Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, described this change as the most important bankers have faced since the Civil War.* Said he :

"If the earning assets of banks are to consist for any long period mainly of investments, and only in minor degree of loans, important changes will have to be made in the policies and in the personnel of the institutions. . . ."

For more than a year one of A. B. A.'s great public purposes has been to "take the mystery out of banking," ingratiate the U. S. Banker with the U. S. Citizen. To the convention last week went General Foods' lean President Clarence Francis with evidence that efforts had better be redoubled. President Francis had partial results of a survey made among 7,400 bank presidents and 50,000 "cross-section consumers." The evidence: 34% of the consumers thought they were better treated by shopkeepers than by bankers, 57% believed bankers were not doing their bit in Recovery, and 42% of the bankers were apparently aware of this attitude. Furthermore, while Franklin D. Roosevelt led all the rest on a list of men whose views on finance met with public approval, no banker showed up in the list until it had passed down through Ogden Mills, Senator Glass, Senator Borah, Alf Landon, Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, William L. Lemke, Dr. Townsend, Father Coughlin, Norman Thomas.

Election. When Salt Lake City's Orval Adams demanded a bankers boycott of Government bonds in New Orleans last year, he was elected by acclamation to the post of A. B. A. second vice president, which meant that he would be moved up automatically to first vice president this year, president in 1937. At San Francisco last week there was a brief attempt to prevent Banker Adams from moving up in the regular line of succession. When elections came round, however, not a murmur arose against either Mr. Adams or the hand-picked banker nominated to succeed him in 1938--Philip Adolphus Benson. A likable middle-of-the-roader, Banker Benson has been president of Brooklyn's Dime Savings Bank for four years, is 54, small, bright-eyed, quiet and an assiduous speaker on Thrift.

A. B. A. president for the coming year is Tom K. Smith of St. Louis' Boatmen's National Bank. Banker Smith is unlikely to depart from Mr. Fleming's policy of friendship with a Democratic Administration. A Democrat himself, he served for a while under Secretary Morgenthau as a Treasury adviser. White-haired, ruddy well-brushed President Smith wears his Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain, said last week: "I am convinced that there is no problem in banking confronting us today which research, education and co-operation cannot solve. They are the bulwarks upon which I base my hope for American banking."

* Offered by The American Banker was a theme song for the commission's report: "Ma' assets in the cold, cold bonds."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.