Crowley for Cummings

"A Big Job, Well Done--Franklin D. Roosevelt."

In the President's own handwriting that tribute was engraved on a silver plaque and the plaque presented last week to Walter Joseph Cummings, outgoing chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Its donors were officials of the corporation from which the RFC had plucked Mr. Cummings to represent the Government's majority stock interest in Chicago's Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. With Mr. Cummings comfortably settled as board chairman and "chief executive" of Continental Illinois, President Roosevelt got around last week to picking his successor as FDIC's chairman. He was a Wisconsin banker named Leo Thomas Crowley and no tyro at New Dealing. Long before March 4, as chairman of Wisconsin's Banking Review Board by appointment of Governor La Follette, Mr. Crowley sponsored legislation to insure deposits of public monies and to bolster weak Wisconsin banks. Lately he has been close to Henry Morgenthau Jr. as the Farm Credit Administration's general agent in the St. Paul district.

Born into a family of nine children at Milton Junction, Wis. 46 years ago. Banker Crowley got his start as a grocery clerk in nearby Madison, rose to a partnership in a wholesale paper house, finally became president of the Bank of Wisconsin. After his bank was absorbed by the Wisconsin Bankshares Corp., he retired to public life. For his good works in the Catholic Church he was knighted and awarded the Cross of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XI. He was confidential adviser to Governor Schmedeman when the Governor was Madison's mayor, followed him into the capitol last year without salary, is now chairman of the State Executive Council, a mixed advisory body of legislators and citizens. A 200-lb. bachelor with curly white hair and a reputation for high power at the council table, he lives in one of Madison's show places with four sisters, one of whom is his secretary.

Last week Leo Thomas Crowley had a good laugh on his fellow bankers. In solemn conclave at a meeting of the American Bankers Association in Chicago last summer they had resolved that in their "deliberate judgment" deposit in surance involved dangers both "genuine and serious." And ever since Jan. 1 when limited Federal deposit insurance became effective for $15,345,832,955 in 54,000,000 accounts, the bankers have been holding their breath waiting for the first crash. Up to this week not one of the 13,431 insured banks throughout the land had closed its doors.

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