GOVERNMENT: Up from the Ranks

Like a casting director with one eye on the box office, President Roosevelt has picked moderately big names for SECommissioners. Last week he changed that policy. To fill the vacancy created when Jerome Frank became a Federal judge, he chose an SEC career man, scarcely known at all outside Washington and Wall Street: tall, calm, taciturn, young (36) Ganson Purcell.

Purcell is one of the second-generation New Dealers who have been quietly working with the hard facts of Government administration while older men made policies and headlines. He has been a Government man since he left Harvard Law School in 1930. Ex-Yale Professor Bill Douglas liked his tough, factual mind, helped make him chief of SEC’s important Trading & Exchange Division.

His appointment—as the first SECom-missioner to come up through the ranks—was good news to those who believe that Government, like business, should be administered by professional management instead of dilettantes or political spoilsters. It was also good news to Wall Street. No one expects Purcell to be a lenient administrator. But he knows his business and Wall Street knows where he stands.