The Wizards of Wall Street by John Brooks

Author:John Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

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On the last afternoon of the year and the decade, wild bells of a sort rang out from the Stock Exchange floor; the annual New Year’s Eve party, bigger and louder than ever, began an hour and a half before the close of trading with the installation of the 369th Infantry Band on a stand erected right in the middle of the floor. Noisemakers had been supplied to everyone, members and clerks alike; speakeasies had clearly been well patronized at lunchtime; when the final gong sounded at three, the pandemonium could be heard as far away as Broadway. And there was reason for celebration; not only was “it” thought to be over, but the fantastic trading volume that had gone with the crash had meant thousands of new clerical jobs and millions of dollars in commissions. Over the period since September, which had seen unemployment nationally rise from less than three-quarters of a million to more than three million, Wall Street, for those whose money was not in stocks, had become an island of temporary prosperity. This was none of Wall Street’s calculated doing but an accident, a perfect irony; still, the contrast was not lost on the public. The first mutterings of generalized, unconsidered public hostility to Wall Street and all its works were being heard, and they would rise.

Whitney was Wall Street’s symbol, so famous now that his moves and his quips were reported in the press like those of a movie idol. When in January he gave his barber a free trip to Florida as a whimsical reward for remaining silent while shaving him, the Times duly carried the story. Later that year Stock Exchange Post No. 2, the one where his famous “205 for Steel” bid had been made, was ceremoniously retired from the floor and presented to Whitney in tribute; he had it put on display in his office lobby. Simmons, the absentee Exchange president of 1929, had finally returned from his wedding trip in December, but he had long since decided to retire from the job at the end of his term, and when the new Exchange elections came around in April, 1930, it was a foregone conclusion that Whitney would be formally elected to the post he had actually been filling for a year.

It was a spring of great recovery and greater optimism. In April the Dow-Jones industrials touched a point 50 percent above their November low; no one could know that it was a point they would not touch again until 1954. In May the Secretary of Commerce said that “normal business conditions should be restored in two or three months”; the following month the Secretary of Labor chimed in, “The worst is over without a doubt.” Also in June, President Hoover himself greeted a delegation of clergymen who had come to ask for a public works program with the cheery reply, “You have come sixty days too late. The depression is over.” (Hoover never said that prosperity was just around the

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