"POWERS AND SPIRIT"

Whatever history will have to say about the policies of President Roosevelt, it will not laud him for being especially well versed in the art of appointing. With Black as the most glaring example, the President has picked officials, advisors, and cabinet men who have in certain cases lacked ability and in other cases been about as poor as possible.

Yesterday, however, as one Harvard man to another, the President named Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court of the United States, and this nomination is an example of vision as sound and enlightened as Black's was ill-considered and petty. For most of his twenty-five years at the Law School Frankfurter has symbolized to Boston's State Street interests a dangerous and bombthrowing form of liberalism, a reputation which he gained from his participation in the Tom Mooney commission and the Sacco-Vanzetti trails. In 1932 these interests heaved a sigh of relief when he refused his appointment to the Supreme Bench in Massachusetts. Then came the Court Bill, and he was believed to have broken with Roosevelt.

But State Street's view of the appointment is of little consequence. The fact is that Roosevelt has appointed a man of integrity, ability, and tolerance to the highest legal position in the land. The charge that Frankfurter is too guided by emotion in questions of labor may be well founded, but few will deny that Harvard's professor far outshone his rivals in legal experience and vision. Perhaps Frankfurter himself hammered home the nail when he said in his book with Dean Landis on the Supreme Court, "The powers and spirit thus demanded of the bar, the universities alone can cultivate."