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Jewish-Irish— Muncie, Ind. is "Middletown," U. S. A. Benjamin Victor Cohen was born there in 1894, son of a scrap iron merchant. He broke all scholastic records at University of Chicago Law School (1915), took a postgraduate year at Harvard Law School and became secretary to U. S. Circuit Court Judge Julian Mack (receiverships). The War and the Jews' plight brought Cohen into contact with Louis Dembitz Brandeis. He is still a director of Palestine Economic Corp., wherein he first tasted planned economy. In the reckless 19205 he was not above playing the stockmarket. A killing Chrysler stock (he was so excited about it at the time that he used gleefully to point to every Chrysler he saw on the street) made him temporarily rich. He kept enough pelf for comfort, is not "socialistic because of the Crash." Revisiting Harvard in 1924, Ben Cohen walked into his old room. The current occupant was out. His name was Thomas Gardiner Corcoran. They did not meet until nine years later, when T. G. Corcoran had been for a year a cog in the legal staff of President Hoover's RFC. Ben Cohen had signed on to help James Landis draft the Securities Exchange Act. Thrown together on this job, Corcoran & Cohen have been inseparable since.
Tom Corcoran was born in Pawtucket, R. I. in 1900. His father's father was Irish (Presidential Purgee John J. and ex-Presidential Law Partner Basil O'Connor are distant Corcoran cousins). His mother's people were pre-Revolutionary New Englanders. His education, after Brown University (where he worked his way through, centred on the football scrubs) and Harvard Law School (where he led his class) was topped off by a year at the knee of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, great Liberal colleague of Ben Cohen's Brandeis. He used to read Greek classics aloud to the old gentleman, who followed him with an English trot to study the parsing. Dante and Montaigne were the young scholar's favorite writers. From those golden days he carried away a store of literary sparklers which today he sprinkles through Franklin Roosevelt's speeches. From Justice Holmes he passed into the Wall Street law firm of Cotton, Franklin. Wright & Gordon. His take from the booming '20s was some promotion stock in a company he helped organize for one of his bosses. This stock became worth $250,000 but he could not sell it, still has it, depreciated but paying dividends. These he now lays by to pay, some day, for the stock which was given him.
Eugene Meyer took him to Washington, and in the scrambled days of Mr. Hoover's exit and Mr. Roosevelt's advent, alert young Lawyer Corcoran made himself extremely useful as a personnel man to staff the new administrative agencies with legal talent. For this he was equipped by having run a placement bureau for Harvard Law graduates. Washington became full, and still is, of his "boys," who not only get work done the way he wants it but constitute an argus-eyed personal intelligence service. He particularly delights in drafting able sons of Tory fathers and infecting them with Liberalism. Example: Joseph Cotton Jr.