The Ax

After a decade of high-priced le~al haggling, the U.S. Supreme Court let the ax fall on holding companies. This week. by a 6-to 0) vote* the Court upheld the "Death Sentence" clause of the Public Utility Act of 1935.

No one was surprised. Most holding companies gave up hope long ago and began breaking up their systems. North American, whose appeal in 1943 from a Government order to divest itself of its 80 companies brought the Supreme Court into the fight, is still largely intact. It will now have to confine its activities to St. Louis (the Union Electric Co.).

Upholding this old cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Justice Murphy wrote: Congress, in passing the act, was "concerned with the economic evils resulting from uncoordinated and unintegrated public utility holding company systems. These evils were found to be polluting the channels of interstate commerce. . . . The national welfare was thereby harmed. . . . Congress therefore had power to remove those evils."

In other decisions the Court ruled that:

Carl B. Williams, a missionary in the Church of the Nazarene, was not guilty of a crime in "gaining carnal knowledge of" his Indian girl assistant on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, in Arizona. The Court unanimously decided that an 1889 federal law which makes such action a crime only in the case of a girl under 16 took precedence over an Arizona law which protects girls under 18. The Indian girl was between 16 and 18.

Federal courts had no right to throw out the case of A.L.O.F. Bell of "Mankind United" (a California religious sect), who had sued FBI agents for unlawful search and seizure. The federal courts had dismissed the case on the ground that there was no federal question involved. The Court ruled that it was for the citizen to decide whether his constitutional rights had been violated, not the courts. Except in the case of "insubstantial or frivolous pleas," the federal courts had to listen.

* Justices Reed, Douglas and Jackson disqualified themselves (they had all from time to time fought the holding companies). Justice Jackson is still at the war crimes trial in Nurnberg.

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