Men who manage employment agencies tend to become critical about jobs. Naturally choosy is greyish, gracious little Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter, who ran a one-man, unofficial, unpaid employment agency for legal talent for 25 years before it found its biggest client in the New Deal. In 1932 he turned down an appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In 1933 he turned down Franklin Roosevelt's offer to make him Solicitor General. Last week, however, Franklin Roosevelt made Felix Frankfurter an offer he could not reject: to ascend to the famed "scholar's seat" on the U. S. Supreme Court, succeeding his friend Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who in turn had succeeded another friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Friend Cardozo performed Felix Frankfurter's marriage ceremony in 1919. Friend Holmes told Massachusetts it would be lucky to get him on its Supreme Court. Friend Roosevelt's tribute last week was equally impressive. For up to the last moment pressure was strong on the President to make his third Supreme Court appointment count politically by giving it to the West (now represented only by Minnesotan Pierce Butler) and possibly to a Catholic. The President paid his respects to Catholics by naming Frank Murphy Attorney General. He succeeded in paying sufficient respect to the West by asking Nebraska's George W. Norris who should get the Supreme Court vacancy. Senator Norris said Frankfurter. So Mr. Frankfurter's strongest supporter, Franklin Roosevelt, had his own way and Adolf Hitler was again offered a subtle rebuke.
Two Friends. Thus was crowned a friendship that began in New York City in 1907. When Franklin Roosevelt, fresh from Columbia Law School, was a well-dressed young man in the offices of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, he met Felix Frankfurter, who was the smart young trust-busting assistant of Roosevelt I's U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Henry L. Stimson.
Both men were born talkers and they got along famously. Frankfurter had been born in Vienna to a family of rabbis, learned to speak English (with an occasional thickened s) after he was brought to the U. S. at the age of twelve. From a job delivering chemicals at $4 a week he worked his way through New York's City College into the Harvard Law School, which graduated him with highest honors in 1906. After a spell of moneymaking in the Stimson office and three years in Washington as law officer of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, in 1914 Star Pupil Frankfurter was invited back to Harvard to teach.