Gumptious Governor

BOARDS & BUREAUS

Gumptious Governor

First step in President Roosevelt's inflation program calls for the Federal Reserve System to enter the open market and buy up to $3,000,000,000 worth of U. S. securities. With the purchase money commercial banks would expand credit to their customers, help industry and business to get started again. Last year President Hoover tried this method of credit inflation to the tune of nearly $1,000,000,000. It did not succeed because the period was one of liquidation. Now that pressure has been relaxed, if not definitely reversed, President Roosevelt believes that with a strong and sympathetic man at the handle, he can make the Reserve credit pump work effectively.

To find a man to succeed Governor Eugene Meyer of the Federal Reserve Board was no easy matter. President Roosevelt hunted' high & low, far & wide. Last week he made his selection--Eugene Robert ("Gene") Black, Governor of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank.

Governor Black is very tall, very thin, with a very big nose, big ears, big mouth and very merry eye. He looks something like Andy Gump, does not mind being told so. More important, he is full of what is known as gumption. It was gumption rather than high finance that qualified him in the President's eyes for his Washington job.

Governor Black is more lawyer than banker. Born in Atlanta ten years after Sherman burned it, he went to the University of Georgia, was admitted to the bar despite his refusal to study criminal law, took on Southern Railway as a client. In 1897 he married Gussie Grady, daughter of the late great Editor Henry Woodfin Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, prophet of the "New South," burier of the bloody shirt. One day ten years ago "Gene" Black, noticing that banks closed in midafternoon, decided banking was easier than the law. Shortly thereafter he accepted the presidency of Atlanta Trust Co., discovered his mistake. In 1928 he was chosen Governor of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank. He lives out on fashionable Peachtree Street in a rambling two-story house on a five-acre lot not far from Washington Seminary, famed girls' school. A good Baptist, he helped sponsor Billy Sunday's Atlanta meetings. A member of East Lake Country Club, he golfs with Robert Tyre Jones Sr. there and also at Highlands, N. C., where both spend the summers. The Black score is in the high 80's.

As the Reserve Governor responsible for the dollar in Havana, he has saved national banks there by rushing them millions in cash by train and plane to stop runs. The worst crash in his own area was that of Caldwell & Co. ("We Bank on the South.") He was one of the first to see and say out loud that the U. S. would never ballyhoo itself out of the depression. In 1930, he tossed aside a speech, prepared for the Investment Bankers Association meeting at New Orleans and drawled out his now famed dictum:

"We have been living in an automobile, a frigidaire, a radio era and have been sitting in an atmosphere of a Corona-Corona. . . . Let's not fool ourselves. . . . We can't have any permanent prosperity when there's a load of debt around our necks."

A facile after-dinner speaker, Governor Black wisecracks with a straight face, never repeats himself, can always get a laugh with some new anecdote about how "Gussie" (Mrs. Black) holds him down.

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