Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who doubtless has no higher regard for the legal profession than any other outsider, sent word to the convention of the American Bar Association in Milwaukee last week that he was appointing a special committee to scrutinize the morals of lawyers, accountants and special agents who argue tax cases before the Treasury Bar. He advised the conventionites to oust voluntarily from their association out-&-out crooks, over-sharp connivers and boasters of special influence. To hammer home a point that has made a bad smell in Washington for many a year, he sent to the Bar convention his youngish assistant general counsel, Robert Houghwout Jackson.
"If the Bar regards the fumigation of its household as its own job, in which it can invoke the aid of the Treasury," declared Emissary Jackson, "the effort to place tax practice upon a higher plane will be successful. But if the Bar as a whole regards the right to be crooked as a priceless possession to be defended by hostility to all regulations and governance, the inevitable result will be that, as a whole, it will face a vexatious degree of regulation really needful for only a few rascals."
Lawyers as a group seem to love such castigation of the other fellow's ethics and this year they evidently wanted more of it than ever before. So Mr. Jackson laid on with another cat-o'-nine-tails, roaring:
"Our public zeal for suppression of crime is discounted because of our private willingness to defend any criminal for any offense. Of course not all lawyers accept criminal cases. We have a petty larceny bar and a grand larceny bar. Some will defend bandits who rob banks from the outside, and others will defend directors who rob them from the inside. Every Jack in crime has a Jill at the bar waiting to defend him."
Curly-headed Earle Wood Evans, president of the Bar Association, willingly took up the job of chastising a segment of his own profession. "The Bar . . . has been strangely apathetic toward dishonest lawyers," cried he, "and toward that offensive creature usually found in the large centres of population who advises clients how to commit crimes with the minimum risk of detection. . . . To the extent that they advise clients in advance how to commit crimes, whether crimes of violence or commercial frauds, to that extent they are as clearly lawyer criminals as are any of the so-called criminal lawyers, and should receive as such our hearty condemnation."
By this time the Bar convention had become an outspoken free-for-all. The things that were said did not help the profession's standing with the general public but it did give A. B. A. members a righteous sense of housecleaning. John Edgar Hoover, Chief of the Department of Justice's bureau of investigation, leaped into the melee, shouting darkly: "I do not say that pardons have been purchased, although there have been rumors current to this effect.
Chimed in Governor Paul Vories McNutt of Indiana, whose parole board once freed John Dillinger, and from one of whose county jails Dillinger escaped: "The ordinary man is not satisfied with the present-day administration of justice and does not hesitate to say so."