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For 1937. In effect, ABA presidents are selected two years before they take office. President Robert Vedder Fleming, who was elected last week, was named as second vice president in 1933, moved up to first vice president last year. Picking a second vice president is usually as routine as the traditional succession. This year, for the first time since 1912, the delegates repudiated the official candidate in a hot fight on the floor.
The campaign quickly shaped up as a contest between two Utah bankers—one a genuine New Dealer who had served in the Administration, the other a fire-eating foe of the New Deal and all its works.
Elbert Gladstone Bennett is a close friend and business associate of his fellow townsman, Reserve Board Governor Marriner Stoddard Eccles. Stout, white-haired at 47, Banker Bennett is vice president of Salt Lake's First National, head of the Eccles chain of 28 banks in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. For a short time he served in Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. He is not a Mormon.
Orval Webster Adams is vice president of Utah State National Bank, a pillar in Mormon affairs and a power in local banking and politics. Tall, heavy, popular, he is 52 and father of six sons. Bankers Bennett & Adams are good friends socially but not in business. Ostensibly the issue between them in New Orleans last week was the old ABA skeleton, unit v. branch banking.
But the real issue was the New Deal, and if any delegate thought otherwise he was soon disabused of his misconception by Orval Adams, who unofficially keynoted the convention with a savage attack on Administration policy, urging a bankers' boycott of Treasury securities, damning the ABA for its policy of peace. Cried he:
"Through our silence ... we will be branded as modern Attilas plundering and pillaging the people, and as having betrayed our sacred trust. ... So long as we remain mute, denunciation will be hurled at us by those who are assiduously broadcasting the seeds of banker distrust. . . .
"As long as the Federal Government can get money without limit, it will spend without limit. ... As long as this reckless public spending continues, private business will remain in its cyclone cellar. . . . This is a disease. We must provide the remedy. . . . Since it [the Government] cannot spend without using the bankable funds of the nation, it is up to us to declare an embargo. We must decline to make further purchases [of Gov- ernment securities]."
Already holding 60% of the national debt, the bankers well knew that Banker Adams' proposal was too explosive to touch. But hundreds of delegates who despised the ABA's meek official attitude swung to his support. When Mr. Adams was nominated from the floor in opposition to Banker Bennett, a banker from Wichita, Kans. jumped up to second him. Then delegates all over the floor of the Orpheum Theatre, where general sessions were held, leaped to their feet—bankers from Canton, Ga.; Doty, Tex.; Hannibal, Mo.; Elmira, N. Y.; Green Bay, Wis.; Grand Rapids, Mich.