Simulacrum

What would happen behind the scenes of the Supreme Court if its members had to induct six young New Dealers is a subject to pique reportorial imagination. Last week several laymen had the opportunity of witnessing a comparable spectacle when black-haired, round-faced John Biggs Jr. of Delaware took office as a member of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware).

A graduate of Princeton (1918), of Harvard Law School (1922), grandson of a Delaware Governor and son of a Delaware Attorney General, Judge Biggs is only 41. He had the political good fortune in 1932, when chairman of the Delaware delegation to the Democratic Convention, to be For-Roosevelt-Before-Chicago. Pennsylvania's Senator Guffey got a bill through the last Congress providing for the appointment of a fifth judge to the Third Circuit, for the reason that Judge Victor Baynard Woolley, aWilsonian Democrat, has been seriously ill for two years. Interesting was the appointment of a fifth judge because ailing Judge Woolley will be 70 this month and the other three members of the court are all older than he.*

Governor McMullen and Senator Hughes of Delaware came to see the ceremony when Judge Joseph Buffington, at 81 the oldest man on the Federal bench, inducted Youngster Biggs. The affair could not have been more amiable. In the first place Judge Buffington is no gaffer. He still keeps a medicine ball in his chambers which he delights to jam into the abdomens of elderly colleagues. He was married to his third wife only six years ago and still likes to go occasionally to a night club. Moreover, he remembers that he also got his start in politics at a convention--the Republican Convention of 1880, where he cast 36 successive votes for U. S. Grant--and that he was only 37 when Benjamin Harrison named him to the Federal bench. Placidly Judge Buffington read a passage from the Bible, made a little speech welcoming young Judge Biggs as a helper to "four old men."

Just to let everybody know that the Third Circuit keeps abreast of the news, Judge John Warren Davis, 70 and Democratic, owlishly interposed: "Judge Buffington welcomes you to help us four old men. But he is inconsistent. He's not in favor of having you go to help the Nine Old Men." The Republican and Democratic oldsters thereupon united to give their neophyte a hazing. That afternoon they dragged him into the midst of a complicated reorganization case, pointedly "browsed" while he tangled himself in tortuous financial discussions with lawyers.

*Unlike the President's proposal for the Supreme Court, the law providing for the appointment of a fifth member will not permanently increase the size of the Third Circuit Court. It provides that when a death or retirement takes place, the Court shall revert to four members.

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