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There rested, over the weekend, the issue of banking morality and responsibility. With one other angle: bankers high & low throughout the land, while not condoning the acts of 1929, loudly proclaimed that last week the greater villains were U. S. Senators who would risk the credit of the U. S. by putting scandal into the headlines when Confidence had already received body-blows at St. Louis (TIME, Jan. 23), New Orleans (TIME, Feb. 13), Michigan (TIME, Feb. 20) and in many another state.
But the Senate Committee had succeeded in getting its man. On Monday morning at 9 a. m. Charles Edwin Mitchell, 66, resigned, and James Handasyd Perkins, 57, was promptly elected chairman of the nation's second biggest bank. Few hours later the directors of National City Co. accepted the resignation of President Hugh Baker. Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Baker returned to Washington for further grilling.
A tall, dignified, 200-lb. Bostonian with a cropped mustache, Banker Perkins graduated from Harvard when Harvard had a "Sound Money Campaign Club" and a "Total Abstinence League." He was a member of neither. Captain of the 1898 crew, First Marshal of his class (and president the three previous years), he went to work for Walter Baker & Co. (chocolate), quit in 1905 to become a vice president of a Boston bank.
He entered Manhattan banking in 1914 as a vice president of National City bank. But after directing Red Cross activities in France during the War (after a brief interlude as an investment banker), he became head of Manhattan's old ultra-conservative Farmers Loan & Trust Co. Not until 1929 when his bank was absorbed by expansive Mr. Mitchell did he again work for National City.
Continuing to direct National City's trust division (City Bank Farmers Trust Co.) after the merger, he never became embroiled in any of Mr. Mitchell's stock selling schemes. He is known as a banker of the old type—which is precisely what National City needed to regain public approval. Manhattan knows little of him socially. He spends all his time at his big estate in swank Greenwich, Conn., rides horseback daily before breakfast. He is a trustee of Smith College, the Berkshire School, Sarah Lawrence College and an Overseer of Harvard College.
On his election this week he announced: "The primary business of the bank is to serve the domestic and foreign commerce and industry of the U. S. in the field of commercial banking. . . ."
*Editor Shively's point: "As everyone knows, the modern banker is not the mere money lender and interest snatcher of days gone by. The Wall Street bank, in particular, is as much an industrial institution as it is a bank ... a vast social enterprise as well. . . . National City must have at its head a man who thoroughly understands industrial problems."
†National City was biggest U. S. bank long before its resources reached $1,000,000,000 in 1919. The sobriquet, "Billion Dollar Charlie," became current when its deposits reached that figure in 1926. Though its assets increased to more than two billion, it was surpassed by Albert Henry Wiggin's Chase in 1930. Last December assets of Chase were $1,856,290,000; of National City $1,615,260,000.