Underdog Fancier

CITY LAWYER-Arthur Garfield Hays -Simon & Schuster ($3).

Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays exists as an emergency telephone number in the mind of nearly every U.S. radical in trouble with the law. For he is a "chronic, old-fashioned liberal," and his favorite pets are underdogs. Hays has another telephone number: he is also a shrewd attorney with a penchant for plunking the mandolin out of office hours.

City Lawyer is: 1) a frank description of how certain lawyers attract trade and win suits; 2) a docket of the civil-liberties cases whereby Lawyer Hays has helped to keep leftists out of jail and himself in the public eye.

Arthur Garfield Hays's first important run-in with the law was almost his last. In 1917, while Hays was busy being a Red Cross collection agent in the West, his partners, who were then lawyers for the New York Evening Mail, submitted a report to the Alien Property Custodian showing an investment of $100,000 in the Mail by one Sielcken, an enemy alien. The Government claimed that the Mail was receiving German gold. Kaufmann and Lindheim were sentenced to a year in jail, and disbarred. Hays, however, came through unscratched.

The "famous debacle" of E. W. Wagner & Co. (1921) gave Lawyer Hays "an education in high finance and a practice in the bankruptcy courts." Wagner & Co. were called upon by the Board of Governors of the Stock Exchange "to answer for some delinquency in their Fort Wayne, Ind. office."

Millions in It. The firm went into bankruptcy. Indicted by a New York grand jury, Wagner himself "jumped out of a tenth-story window" before trial. The Hays firm came off all right, however. Legal expenses of the bankruptcy proceedings were "over three quarters of a million dollars."

Other profitable Hays legal business included the famed Wendel will case, involving the $50,000,000 fortune of Ella Wendel, the "hermit of Fifth Avenue"; the Dionne Quintuplets ("contracts, trademarks, infringement suits, tax cases and so on"); countless divorce cases.

Like a mischievous boy, Lawyer Hays enjoys rattling the dry bones left by many an old battle against Prohibition, censorship, race prejudice, Mayor Hague, and for "Communists, IWWs, evolutionists, birth-controllers, union organizers. . . ."

When Hays led his civil-liberties parades against Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City (1938), he met his match. Hays wanted Hague's police to jail him (to create an issue). Instead, a disobliging cop simply hustled him along the street. Hays "managed to blurt out: 'All right, as long as you push, I'll go.' " But there wasn't much fun in that. Hays came back a few days later to orate against Hague from the top of an automobile. It was no use. Mayor Hague was too smart to play.

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