The Government Week

Ernest Angell, for two years administrator of the Securities & Exchange Commission's New York office, last week resigned to return to private practice. In so doing, he was following a well-established precedent which has given SEC about the highest rate of personnel turnover in the Government. Reasons for this are twofold: 1) though SEC is full of career men, only a few top-of-the-heap jobs pay an adequate salary; 2) SEC is also full of bright young lawyers who are glad to starve for a year or two in order to get an insight into SEC procedure which makes it easy to land a good berth in Wall Street.

Last week SEC and the Federal Power Commission simultaneously laid a big wet blanket over the second situation. SEC announced that no former members of its staff would be allowed to argue before it or assist at hearings in connection with cases which were pending during their SEC employment without first obtaining permission. FPC announced that no for mer members could appear before it or assist at hearings within one year after resigning. By no means uncommon, similar rules are already in effect for the Treasury Department and the Federal Communications Commission, though not for the Federal Trade or the Interstate Commerce Commission.

P:The State Department concluded with Czechoslovakia a trade pact which New England shoe factories deplored, is now negotiating another with Great Britain.

P:The ICC granted a sop 5.3% rise in freight rates to U. S. railroads (see col. 2).

P:In the White House, Chairman Arthur Ernest Morgan of the Tennessee Valley Authority stood up to Franklin Roosevelt as few men have dared to do in years. Meanwhile, TVA's plan to purchase a Commonwealth & Southern subsidiary progressed rapidly (see p. 15).

P:To succeed resigned Joseph A. Broderick in the longest (14 years) term on the Federal Reserve Board, Franklin Roosevelt nominated bright-eyed Assistant Secretary of Commerce Ernest Gallaudet Draper, whose job it was to ride herd on the riotous Little Businessmen's Conference in Washington (TIME, Feb. 14). Six years out of Amherst, in 1912 Ernest Draper became president of American Creosoting Co., in 1920 shifted to vice president of Hills Brothers Co., packers of Dromedary Dates. Long prominent in such groups as the New York State Advisory Commission on Minimum Wage and Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper's Business Advisory Council, he be came Assistant Secretary of Commerce in 1935, has since pleased Franklin Roosevelt by his frequent high-sounding definitions of New Deal intentions. Sample: "By some method yet to be discovered, it seems to me that industry must learn to function as a whole, not to advance its own private ends but to assist Democracy to act for the good of all."

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