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When anti-New Dealers curse long-haired, radical theorists, they are unwittingly giving a three-word sketch of Jerome Frank. Too busy to think of haircuts, he often lets his greying mane hide his ears. Subtle, learned, mentally insatiable, he combs arcane source books for cosmic ideas, wholesales them in brilliant conversation to friends. At Chadbourne, Stanchfield & Levy the partners used to say: "It's worth $50,000 a year to us to have Jerry around just to hear him talk." In 1938, in a speech in Kansas City, he denounced fixed charges in favor of equity dividends. To make his point he invoked the following authorities: Aristotle, Lactantius, St. Luke, St. Basil, St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Calvin, Cotton Mather, Andrew D. White, Chesterton, Will Rogers. Fond of parties, he holds his cigaret between his teeth, dominates the room with talk. Regularly he falls asleep at 10 p.m., wakes at 11:30, talking. A lover of word games, playful mental feats, he is often to be found contorted on the floor, acting out some far-fetched pun.* Battling with a fellow commissioner on a point of law, he recently sent him a memorandum containing the following: "As Coke would have said, id est quod cursum equorum facit."† As a radical, Frank is not so uncompromising as shillelagh-artists like Corcoran, Old-Testament purists like Cohen, bouncers like Henderson. Least hardboiled, most likable of the New Dealers, he is nevertheless the most daring and original theorist among them too.
Jerome Frank's most radical words were written in 1930, directed at the Law. Then studying psychoanalysis, he applied its techniques to legal philosophers (Law and the Modern Mind), argued what a few had before and many have since: that there are no legal absolutes, there are only judges' prejudices. Seekers for certainty in the law, wrote he, are victims of the psychological hunger for a father-substitute.* To Scholar Frank, the most intriguing legal philosopher was Jehring, who saw the law as a pliant weapon, a means to an end. But the greatest was Justice Holmes, who saw the law as "an experiment" like life itself.
A wholesaler of ideas, Frank is also largely responsible for the semantics fad. But no theory, no dogma, sticks to Jerome Frank very long. A connoisseur of them, his only principle is not to become enslaved to any set of principles, to trust no rules beyond his own democratic instincts and pragmatic sense.
On the Spot. Few of the utility men or stockbrokers whom Chairman Frank was to regulate had ever read his books. But as an alternative to Henderson, he was welcomed as the more knowing man. No foe of bigness-as-such, he had helped write NRA, had praised (in Save America First) the social value of "the intelligent monopolist," especially when subjected to government guidance. Taking office, he called SEC "in a true sense, a conservative institution," its purpose "conserving, by improving, our profit system," promised no radical departures from the Douglas regime. Then he went to work.