Up Again Henderson

One day in 1935 Leon Henderson rang up a reporter on the Washington Herald.

"Listen," he said, "I'm down now, and everybody in Washington knows it. I'm not worth kicking around."

Mr. Henderson then was on his way out of crumbling NRA, which he had served as director of Research and Planning, chief economist, member of its short-lived National Industrial Recovery Board. He subsequently fell so low that in 1936 he had to ask Democratic Press-agent Charlie Michelson for a $50-a-week job with the Democratic National Campaign Committee in Manhattan.

This week hearty, shaggy Leon Henderson soared as far up as he had been down.

Franklin Roosevelt nominated him to the Securities & Exchange Commission to fill the vacancy left when William O. Douglas was appointed to the Supreme Court.

In 1937 Leon Henderson became consulting economist of WPA, catching Harry Hopkins' attention with a treatise entitled "Boom or Bust." He owed his resurrection to his phenomenal vigor, and his facility for digesting great gobs of statistics, transforming them into entrancing, apparently profound diagnoses of national ills. Janizary Tommy Corcoran last year took him in hand, putting his capacities to good use for the Temporary National Economic (antimonopoly) Committee.

Gifted with supreme faith in himself, Leon Henderson whirls around Washington in clothes almost sensationally unkempt. He is a dark-haired, truculent 200-pounder with a temper which often sets his fists a-flying, seldom gets him into controversy with superiors who can shove him upward. As a boy out of Millville, N. J., he worked his way through Swarthmore College, played basketball and football there. Once, in a huff, he stripped off his basketball suit, marched naked from the gym. When he was an economics instructor at Carnegie Tech, he had the fortitude to take his class to hear Socialist Eugene V. Debs. At 43, he looks like a Sunday-supplement caricature of a radical.

These things, and the fact that, economist or no, he has little technical knowledge of finance, moved Wall Street to try to head off his appointment, may move some Senators to oppose the confirmation of his appointment. The fact that he was named to succeed Chairman Bill Douglas on SEC does not mean that he will automatically become its chairman. Legally, SEC elects its own chairman. How much opposition to his confirmation develops may depend on whether assurance is quietly given to the Senate that SEC will elect as chairman some one else, such as Commissioner Jerome Frank.

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