Storm at SEC

To Vermont Republican Robert E. Healy, sole remaining "charter member" of the five-man SEC, Franklin Roosevelt last week sent a message: would he please reconsider his resignation? This was not the first time that temperamental "Judge" Healy, sore at New Deal politicking within the commission, had threatened to quit. But never before had he gone so far as to submit his resignation.

The provocation: A New Deal youngster, 36-year-old Ganson Purcell, had got the White House green light to become SEC's sixth chairman in seven years. He would succeed New Dealer Edward Clayton Eicher, ex-Iowa Congressman who jumped from the SEC springboard* to Chief Justice of the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia.

Nice enough boy was Purcell; he knew the stock exchange end of the commission's work thoroughly; he was a true SEC career man ( TIME, June 9). But "Judge" Healy's candidate for chairman was ex-businessman Sumner T. Pike, his sole Republican colleague. A chairman picked on a strict seniority basis would have been Healy himself. But the Judge would always be more effective as an outsider--storming, needling, threatening to resign. Evidently Mr. Roosevelt hoped he would stay on in that effective role, to storm, threaten and relent many times again

* Most vibrating springboard in Washington is the SEC chairmanship. From it Joseph P. Kennedy took off to the Maritime Commission and the Court of St. James's; James M. Landis to the deanship of Harvard Law School; William O. Douglas to the Supreme Court; Jerome Frank to the Circuit Court of Appeals.

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