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List. President Fleming had no monopoly on good temper. Off the convention floor the delegates were cheered by a round of festivities including two boat rides around San Francisco Bay, a grand banquet and ball at the Palace Hotel, a golf tournament at the Olympic Club's Lakeside course. Amadeo Giannini's Bank of America, biggest U. S. bank west of Manhattan, outdid itself in the matter of hospitality. To each of the bankers' ladies on the night of the formal ball, Bank of America sent a corsage of two orchids. To each of the bankers it dispatched a neat package of seven bottles of assorted California wines. To top it all off, Bank of America chartered a Douglas airliner, for three days taxied some 600 bankers on half-hour trips over the Bay.
On the floor, in corridors, at divisional meetings, bankers gloomed little. Anathema two years ago, Federal deposit insurance was generally accepted. The low-status of commercial loans as earning assets was treated for the first time not as a horrifying abnormality but as a more or less permanent condition to which banks would have to adapt themselves. In a report for the A. B. A.'s economic policy commission, Cleveland Trust's financial seer, Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, described this change as the most important bankers have faced since the Civil War.* Said he :
"If the earning assets of banks are to consist for any long period mainly of investments, and only in minor degree of loans, important changes will have to be made in the policies and in the personnel of the institutions. . . ."
For more than a year one of A. B. A.'s great public purposes has been to "take the mystery out of banking," ingratiate the U. S. Banker with the U. S. Citizen. To the convention last week went General Foods' lean President Clarence Francis with evidence that efforts had better be redoubled. President Francis had partial results of a survey made among 7,400 bank presidents and 50,000 "cross-section consumers." The evidence: 34% of the consumers thought they were better treated by shopkeepers than by bankers, 57% believed bankers were not doing their bit in Recovery, and 42% of the bankers were apparently aware of this attitude. Furthermore, while Franklin D. Roosevelt led all the rest on a list of men whose views on finance met with public approval, no banker showed up in the list until it had passed down through Ogden Mills, Senator Glass, Senator Borah, Alf Landon, Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, William L. Lemke, Dr. Townsend, Father Coughlin, Norman Thomas.
Election. When Salt Lake City's Orval Adams demanded a bankers boycott of Government bonds in New Orleans last year, he was elected by acclamation to the post of A. B. A. second vice president, which meant that he would be moved up automatically to first vice president this year, president in 1937. At San Francisco last week there was a brief attempt to prevent Banker Adams from moving up in the regular line of succession. When elections came round, however, not a murmur arose against either Mr. Adams or the hand-picked banker nominated to succeed him in 1938—Philip Adolphus Benson. A likable middle-of-the-roader, Banker Benson has been president of Brooklyn's Dime Savings Bank for four years, is 54, small, bright-eyed, quiet and an assiduous speaker on Thrift.