Last Roundup

For four years Thurman Wesley Arnold (ex-Yale law professor, former mayor of Laramie, Wyo.) had ridden herd on trusts like a paunchy cowboy. He had corralled more monopolies, obtained more indictments of corporations and labor unions than any other man in history. Last week his trust-busting rodeo was over. To the Senate the President sent his nomination to be an associate justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

In the Justice Department's Anti-Trust division, the irreverent, irrepressible Assistant Attorney General had long since reached a dead end. First capital, then labor had been irritated by his monolithic determination to enforce the Sherman and Clayton anti-trust laws. Two years ago Arnold's brisk roundup of labor unions for trade-restraining practices was brought to an abrupt halt. The Supreme Court virtually forbade anti-trust prosecution of organized labor.

The war slowly narrowed the big industries in which Thurman Arnold could move. He shifted his strategy, attacked trusts for their sins against defense, smashed Hydra-headed I. G. Farbenindustrie's patent hold on the U.S. But soon he was back in essential war industries, striking out for his ideal of free pricing. The Army & Navy began to complain of his robust interference. Thurman Arnold went right ahead building up a case against railroads for rate fixing; Attorney General Francis Biddie turned thumbs down. Arnold's ride as a trust buster was over.

Friends say he passed up a $100,000-a-year offer from a New York law firm to accept Franklin Roosevelt's $12,500 court appointment. Washington's thinning band of original New Dealers, in which Thurman Arnold was a whimsical free lancer, shuddered to think of him in a black gown. Philosophized Arnold: "I guess I'm like the Marx brothers--they can be awfully funny for a long while, but finally people get tired of them. A lot of the bureaucrats are not only tired of me but also awfully sore."

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