A Place for Poppa

Men who manage employment agencies tend to become critical about jobs. Naturally choosy is greyish, gracious little Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter, who ran a one-man, unofficial, unpaid employment agency for legal talent for 25 years before it found its biggest client in the New Deal. In 1932 he turned down an appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In 1933 he turned down Franklin Roosevelt's offer to make him Solicitor General. Last week, however, Franklin Roosevelt made Felix Frankfurter an offer he could not reject: to ascend to the famed "scholar's seat" on the U. S. Supreme Court, succeeding his friend Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who in turn had succeeded another friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Friend Cardozo performed Felix Frankfurter's marriage ceremony in 1919. Friend Holmes told Massachusetts it would be lucky to get him on its Supreme Court. Friend Roosevelt's tribute last week was equally impressive. For up to the last moment pressure was strong on the President to make his third Supreme Court appointment count politically by giving it to the West (now represented only by Minnesotan Pierce Butler) and possibly to a Catholic. The President paid his respects to Catholics by naming Frank Murphy Attorney General. He succeeded in paying sufficient respect to the West by asking Nebraska's George W. Norris who should get the Supreme Court vacancy. Senator Norris said Frankfurter. So Mr. Frankfurter's strongest supporter, Franklin Roosevelt, had his own way and Adolf Hitler was again offered a subtle rebuke.

Two Friends. Thus was crowned a friendship that began in New York City in 1907. When Franklin Roosevelt, fresh from Columbia Law School, was a well-dressed young man in the offices of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, he met Felix Frankfurter, who was the smart young trust-busting assistant of Roosevelt I's U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Henry L. Stimson.

Both men were born talkers and they got along famously. Frankfurter had been born in Vienna to a family of rabbis, learned to speak English (with an occasional thickened s) after he was brought to the U. S. at the age of twelve. From a job delivering chemicals at $4 a week he worked his way through New York's City College into the Harvard Law School, which graduated him with highest honors in 1906. After a spell of moneymaking in the Stimson office and three years in Washington as law officer of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, in 1914 Star Pupil Frankfurter was invited back to Harvard to teach.

Young Roosevelt and young Frankfurter met again in Wartime Washington, Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Frankfurter as a legal jack-of-all-trades who wound up as assistant and right-hand man to Secretary of War Newton Baker. Both were members of the War Labor Policies Board, set up to straighten out the employment conditions of the overworked Government agencies and industries with Government contracts. Before returning to Harvard, Frankfurter thoroughly enjoyed himself as one of the brighter apostles of Wilson's "New Freedom." With a group of cronies he lived, entertained and talked in a house on 19th Street. This establishment, which humorous old Oliver Wendell Holmes called The House of Truth, was the precursor of the "little Red House on R Street" which several of Mr. Frankfurter's proteges, including Ben Cohen and Tom Corcoran, made famous.

The Boys. Felix Frankfurter's notes recommending young lawyers--over a scrawled "FF"--fluttered into Washington long before the New Deal (Corcoran, for instance, was a gift to Hoover's RFC). The fact that 125 "happy hot dogs" are in Washington today spurred General Hugh Johnson to call Professor Frankfurter "the most influential single individual in the U. S."

Childless Felix Frankfurter is pleased when the hot dogs call him "Poppa." Some of their doings please Poppa completely. He is proud of the share Hot Dogs Cohen & Corcoran had in drafting the Public Utility Holding Company Act and the Securities Exchange Act, both expressions of the Brandeis-Frankfurter economic crusade against bigness and irresponsibility. But NRA left Mr. Frankfurter cold and suspicious. And though he did not publicly attack the Court Plan, he wrote an indignant letter of repudiation when an article in a British magazine gave out that Proteges Cohen & Corcoran had helped originate it.

Like Lawyers Holmes, Cardozo and Brandeis, Lawyer Frankfurter is a firm believer in judicial self-limitation. The most relevant qualifications for a Supreme Court appointee, he once wrote, "are his breadth of vision, his imagination, his capacity for disinterested judgment, his power to discover and suppress his prejudices."

Fighter & Fight. "Don't call me judge," Felix Frankfurter implored newsmen who stormed his Cambridge home after the appointment, "I'm not confirmed yet." Ten years ago, getting Fighter Frankfurter, defender of Tom Mooney and of Sacco & Vanzetti, by the Senate would have meant a sizable fight. Last week Tom Mooney walked out of jail, and it seemed that Felix Frankfurter would step as easily into the Supreme Court. Felix Frankfurter had become so relatively inoffensive that last September the arch-conservative legal profession, Gallup-polled, gave him five times as many votes for the Court as any other candidate. As a Senate subcommittee got busy to consider whether Felix Frankfurter should be called Associate Justice, busy Professor Frankfurter declined an invitation to appear in person, deputized his friend Dean Acheson to represent him.

Harvard's Byrne Professor of Administrative Law believes above all else that the independent Government boards and agencies that have taken over much of the lawmaker's function should be no more arbitrary than other lawmakers. If Fighter Frankfurter's enthusiasm for drawing this line inconveniences red hot New Dealers, at 56 Felix Frankfurter may still be in a bitter fight after he joins the Supreme Court.

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