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Jerome Frank is a warm-blooded, quick-witted, supersensitive, argument-loving man of 51 with a bald sloping brow, bulging eyes, and the slightly travel-worn air of a shambling, sub-leonine cat. At University of Chicago he is remembered as one of the two brightest students of pre-war generations. (The other: Benjamin Cohen.) Son of law-loving Chicago Lawyer Herman Frank, Jerome had a reputation for legal brilliance almost before he started practice. This he increased with the firm of Levinson, Becker, Schwartz & Frank, corporate specialists. Jerome also developed a reputation for hard work and absentmindedness. Asking his secretary to come to the office Sunday, he would fail to show up himself. On the North Western to and from his North Shore home he wrote novels, never published any. But he was a well-to-do corporation lawyer when he went to Manhattan in 1930 to join the slick big-time firm Chadbourne, Stanchfield & Levy. And he was still more so when he volunteered his services to the New Deal "for the duration" (his words to Felix Frankfurter) in early 1933. By that fall, as counsel to AAA, he had led the revolt of consumer-minded, non-agrarian New Dealers that ousted George Peek. Less than two years later he was himself ousted in a similar revolt against the more durable Chester Davis. Rex Tugwell, his friend and sponsor, quickly got him placed in RFC. Thence he moved to PWA, for which he won the Alabama Power case against the late great Newton D. Baker. By 1937 he was back in private practice, had earned $38,000 helping reorganize Missouri Pacific.
When the President summoned him to SEC that fall, the New Deal was entering its tough, fighting, back-to-the-wall phase. Said Bill Douglas: "It's lonely in the front-line trenches these days." Jerome Frank heroizes Douglas, joined the Commission. But he did so reluctantly. Reasons for reluctance: 1) he needed to make more money than a commissioner's $10,000 a year; 2) he had written his share of laws, hoped others would see them through. Temperamentally unsuited to trench warfare, Jerome Frank is above all an Intellectual.