Swinging off special trains, stooping out of special airliners, squinting at California highway signs, nearly 4,000 U. S. bankers merged into San Francisco last week for the 62nd annual convention of the American Bankers Association. In their baggage were golf bags and tail coats. In their heads were vivid memories of the 1934 convention in Washington, when Jackson Eli Reynolds of Manhattan's First National Bank swayed them by eloquence and earnestness into a truce with Franklin D. Roosevelt. And on their collective conscience was last year's meeting in New Orleans, where they had broken that truce by damning the New Deal until they were hoarse. But they had not circulated long at convention headquarters in the St. Francis Hotel before they knew that 1936 was another truce year.
Early comers had been spooked by the knowledge that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marriner Stoddard Eccles, Comptroller of the Currency James Francis Thaddeus O'Connor, and RFChairman Jesse Holman Jones, still convalescent after his air-crash shake-up three months ago, were all in San Francisco. Of these, only Jesse Jones was slated to address the convention but rumor had it that his colleagues represented a New Deal concentration for pressure purposes. It was a false alarm. Mr. Eccles disappeared in the general direction of home at Ogden, Utah. Mr. O'Connor merely issued cheery figures on California banking and equally cheery denials of an engagement to Cinemactress Elissa Landi. At the last minute Mr. Jones packed off for Washington, pleading that he was still too "shaky on his pins" to make his speech. In parting he rumbled genially: "It has been a pleasure to work with the bankers during the trying period from which happily we have emerged. . . ."
Left to play in their own backyard, the bankers followed a program carefully planned to keep political rancor out of hearing, focus attention on professional problems. For U. S. Banking, shifted off its old base by Depression and the New Deal, they considered reorientation. Most of the speakers at A. B. A.'s general sessions were businessmen, not bankers, invited to assist in this procedure.
Help Wanted. On his way to the convention, A. B. A. President Robert Vedder Fleming of Washington's Riggs Bank had stopped off in Spokane, Wash, long enough to get himself named "Chief Black Hawk" by the Flathead Indians. This warlike title he bore gracefully. Mr. Fleming, amiable and solid as he is jolly, reminded the bankers that during the year Congress and the Administration had given A. B. A. "courteous and attentive consideration." Banks had been excluded from the provisions of the law taxing undistributed earnings. "Splendid cooperation" had been received from the Government in a survey aimed at ending "competition between banks and government lending agencies."
"With regard to expenditures which have caused deficit financing," the Washington banker observed. "I think every fair-minded man recognizes that in times of national emergencies . . . the Federal Government of necessity, by virtue of its duty to the people of the nation, must undertake steps involving unusual expenditure of funds. . . ."