Sir Richard Steele, in describing the Spectator Club, remarks of the
Templer that "most of his thoughts are fit for conversation, as few of
them are derived from business." Nevertheless, almost any man should
be able to philosophize more or less pleasantly and instructively over
his calling, and if statesmen, soldiers, lawyers and medical gentlemen
write autobiographies and describe the various debates, campaigns,
litigations and horrible operations they have been engaged in, why
should not an old stockbroker chat about his business, and give a
little "inside information," perhaps, about that Street whose ways are
supposed to be so tortuous?
Go into the Waldorf any afternoon you please, and see which has the
more attentive audience, Mr. Justice Truax discussing cases, or Mr.
Jakey Field tipping his friends on sugar. Watch the women at a tea and
see how their eyes brighten when young Bull, of the Stock Exchange,
comes in. Bull has a surer road to smiles and favor than all the
flowers and compliments in New York--he has a straight tip from John
Gates.
Business not fit for conversation! Ask Mr. Morgan if anybody fidgets
when _he_ talks? Has any clergyman as eager a congregation as the
audience Mr. Clews preaches to from the platform in front of his
quotation board every morning at eleven o'clock?
"Come, ye disconsolate," then, and if I can't tell you how to make
money, I venture to assert I can interest you in the place where you
lost it.
There is no place of business, indeed, so pictorial as Wall Street.
Sunk down amid huge buildings which wall it in like precipices, with a
graveyard yawning at its head and a river surging at its feet, its
pavement teeming with an eager, nervous multitude, its street rattling
with trucks laden with gold and silver bricks, its soil mined with
treasure vaults and private wires, its skyline festooned with ticker
tape, its historic sense vindicated by the heroic statue of Washington
standing in majestic serenity on the portico of that most exquisite
model of the Parthenon, and with the solemn sarcasm of the stately
brown church, backed by its crumbling tombstones, lifting its slender
spire like a prophetic warning finger in its pathway--this most
impressive and pompous of thoroughfares is at once serious and lively,
solid and vivacious. You say to yourself this must be a vast business
which is so grandly domiciled; and you wonder if the men live up to
the buildings.
The broker, in fact, who fills the eye of pictorial satire and the
country press, is not an admirable object. His tall hat and shiny
boots are in too obvious a foreground in sketches of race meetings,
uptown cafes and flash clubs. He is represented as a maddened savage
on 'Change, and a reckless debauchee at leisure, who analyzes the
operations of finance in the language of a monte dealer describing a
prize fight, and whose notion of a successful career is something
between a gambler, a revolutionist and a buccaneer. He is supposed to
vibrate in cheerful nonchalance between Delmonico's and a beanery,
according as he is in funds or hard up, and to exhibit a genial
assurance that "a member of the New York Stock Exchange, sir," will
prove a pleasant addition to the most exclusive circles.
This happy-go-lucky gentleman, however, to use one of his own
delightful metaphors, "cuts very little ice" in the region where he is
believed to exert himself most effectively. He is really but the
froth, riding lightly on the speculative current. Still, I have placed
him, like Uriah, "in the forefront of the battle," while we draw back
a little, because he is the caricature of that stocking-broking
man-about-town Wall Street has had the honor to create, and because in
popular fancy he is seen standing, like Washington, before the doors
of the Stock Exchange, with a gold pencil in one hand and a pad in the
other, ready to pounce on the pocketbooks of parsons and
schoolmistresses.
Parsons and schoolmistresses actually do come to Wall Street; all the
world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is
infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study
for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market
for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a
vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is
as logical as a syllogism.
Superficially, everything is manipulation, chance, accident. Really,
every fluctuation is regulated by laws of science, and, with adequate
knowledge and just deduction, profit is not speculative but certain.
It is this which differentiates it from all mere gambling. And it is
this union of impulse and logic which makes it so human, so humorous,
so dramatic and pathetic.
Perhaps its most curious incongruity is its combination of secrecy and
frankness. The atmosphere about the Stock Exchange fairly palpitates
with suspicion and subterfuge. No man knows what another man is about,
and every man bends his energy to find out. "Inside information" is
the philosopher's stone that turns every fraction into golden units.
The leading firms take the greatest pains to conceal their dealings.
Orders are given in cipher. Certificates are registered in the names
of clerks. Large blocks of stock are bought, and sold, and "crossed,"
for the mere purpose of misleading. A wink or a shrug is accepted as
more significant than the most positive assertion. The disposition to
"copper a point" is so general that the late Mr. Gould used to say he
always told the truth, because nobody ever believed him.
The very penny chroniclers of the market acquire an infelicitous
adroitness in the phraseology of deceit. And yet nowhere on earth is
ignorance so carefully counseled and so almost ludicrously warned as
in this place of trickery and innuendo.
What conceivable enterprise which expected to exist on public
patronage would assume as the unofficial metaphor of dealings a pair
of wild beasts bellowing and growling over the carcass of a lamb, and
make this most helpless and stupid of animals the representation of
the customer? To call a trader a lamb is as opprobrious an epithet as
it was to call a Norman baron an Englishman.
In any other business the buyer is an honored and privileged patron;
in Wall Street he is welcomed with the respect and pleasure that was
exhibited to a bailiff serving a writ in Alsatia. Should he stroll
guilelessly into the Exchange he proposes to benefit, he is set upon,
mobbed, hustled, mussed and finally ejected from the door with a
battered hat and torn coat collar. Every other broking office in the
Street has a pictorial caricature hanging over its ticker of his
hesitancy and timidity, his rash venture, his silly and short-lived
hilarity, his speedy and inevitable ruin, and his final departure,
with his face distorted by rage and grief, and his pockets turned
inside out.
The air is thick with signs and evil portents: Stop-loss orders,
breaks, raids, slumps, more margins, are in everybody's mouth. The
path to fortune is emphasized as slippery by every adjective of peril,
and is hedged with maxims, over each of which is dangling, like a
horrible example, the corpse of a ruined speculator.
A too subtle analyst might suggest that this presentation of
opportunity and restraint, while apparently incongruous, is the most
fascinating form of temptation. But subtlety, except in manipulating
stock values, is not a Wall Street characteristic. The Stock Exchange
is an arena where men fight hand to hand, head to head. Beneath the
conventions of courtesy, each man's fists are guarding his pockets and
his eyes are on his neighbor. Such a vocation breeds courage,
quickness, keenness, coolness. Weak men and fools are weeded out with
surprising celerity and certainty.
Wall Street men are frank because they have learned it is wisest. The
average commission broker secretly regards his clients with a feeling
of benevolence delicately tinctured with contempt. Experience teaches
him to use a favorite professional phrase, that there are times when
"you can't keep the public out of the market with a club," and that
when engaged in stock operations they usually display the judgment of
a child picking sweets out of a box. His first care, naturally, is to
protect himself, financially and otherwise, against the losses which
ensue. Hence he surrounds their transactions with every legal and
friendly restraint. But his existence depends on their success, or in
replacing them. The broker, therefore, is quite as anxious for his
clients to make money as they are themselves. More profit, more
margin; more margin, more commissions and less risk. There you have it
in a nutshell.
The stockbroker says to the public: "My dear sir, here is an open
market. Nowhere else can you get such large and quick returns on so
small an investment. For these opportunities I charge you the
ridiculously small percentage of one-eighth of one per cent., and loan
you, besides, ninety per cent. of your investment. Could any man with
a proper regard for his wife and children do better by you? You own
whatever security you buy, and get its dividend. Your margin is your
equity in it. In property whose market value fluctuates so widely and
rapidly, I naturally require you to keep your margin at the per cent.
agreed upon. If, unfortunately, it becomes exhausted, I, as mortgagee,
foreclose at the best price obtainable. I shall be pleased to execute
all orders with which you may favor me on the above basis, in all
securities dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange, reserving to
myself, of course, the right to refuse to carry any security I do not
care to loan my capital on. Some are risky, some safe, some inactive.
All speculation implies risk.
"I beg you to remember my relation with you is only to execute your
orders. You must use your own judgment. I should advise you,
nevertheless, to keep in the active stocks. Opportunities for quick
and profitable turns in them are more frequent, and the broader the
market, the closer the trades, and the less the difficulty of
disposal. Union Pacific, just now, looks good for a rise. They tell
me, confidentially, that the Rockefellers are buying it, but I know
nothing about it. It acts all right. Mr. Jones, this is my partner,
Mr. Robinson. I've just been telling Mr. Jones, Robinson, that we hear
the Rockefellers are buying U. P. There it is, three-quarters, on the
board now----"
And the broker glances over the quotation board, grabs his hat, and
flies to the "floor," shaking his head and saying to himself: "I'll
give that fellow just six months to drop his wad."
Well, is it his fault? He has been honest with you, frank with you. Be
sure he will help you make money if he can.
"I did _my_ best for him--damn fool!" is the mental summary inclosed
along with many a closing-out statement.
To the visitor accustomed to regard Wall Street as a vast faro layout,
its very face should be a striking object-lesson.
Emerging from the lofty and beautiful hallway of the Empire Building,
those stupendous heights of stone and glass which confront him in
solid squares are evidently not the creations of the baccarat table
and the roulette wheel. The most dignified temples of chance are
designed to shelter pleasure and frivolity. These huge homes of the
corporation and the bank, with entrances as sternly embellished as
palaces of justice, are oppressively significant of business.
As one crosses Broadway and descends to Broad Street, the impression
deepens, stirs, until you realize you are standing in a place of
strength and power, in the very heart of the nation's financial life.
The crowd of curb brokers yelling out quotations before the Stock
Exchange seems merely a casual and ludicrous episode, and the Stock
Exchange itself but a factor in this tremendous neighborhood.
Here is a world force which expresses itself on land and sea, and in
the heaven above; which has built itself an abode that is the wonder
of man; which bids fleets go forth, transports armies, and commands in
foreign senates; which restrains kings in their wrath; which feeds the
peasant on the banks of the Gloire, and clothes the coolie toiling in
the rice fields of Honan.
You stand there, I say, and recognize that you are in the presence of
the creative energy of millions of men and machines building, hauling,
planting, laboring, all over the world; and then you go into your
broker's office and hear slim young gentlemen talk of "playing the
market," and you don't wonder the broker is cynical and careful.
This serious, solid, fundamental character of Wall Street, performing
amid its colossal setting, an important and essential office in the
world's work, must be conscientiously painted in and emphasized in any
portrait, however gay and frolicsome, which attempts to depict its
spirit.
This sense of drama, indeed, this consciousness that tremendous things
are happening while we amuse ourselves, is one of the causes which
make Wall Street so fascinating. You can take it as seriously or as
frivolously as you please. You can operate with all the statistics of
"Poor's Manual" and "The Financial Chronicle" packed into your head,
or you can trade with the gay abandon of M. D'Artagnan breakfasting
under the walls of La Rochelle.
I have said all the world comes here, and the more I reflect upon it,
as a man of twenty years' experience, the less I wonder. The wonder is
that anybody stays away. It is so tempting, so amusing, so
respectable, so reckless or cautious, as you choose.
In appearance, a broker's office is something between a club parlor
and a bank, and it unconsciously represents its business. The room is
spacious and richly carpeted. The great quotation board, with that
jumping jack of a boy bobbing up and down on the platform before it,
is of solid mahogany. The chairs are large and comfortable. From the
great windows you can look out on the varied and beautiful panorama of
the Hudson and the harbor, the water flashing in the sunlight and
lively with tugs, schooners, steamers, yachts. On the table are all
sorts of stock reports, newsfiles, financial statements.
The daily papers are in a rack, and over the mantel are bound volumes
of the "Chronicle," and copies of "Poor's Manual." Here is a
commodious desk with note paper, order pads and so forth for your use.
By the quotation board the ticker is clicking busily, and next it
Dow-Jones' news machine is clacking out printed copy that the newsboy
will be howling "Extra" over an hour afterward. Cigars in the table
drawer await your acceptance.
A knot of gentlemen are chatting about the ticker; some more are
watching the board. An old man with a white beard is dozing in a
corner with a "Reading Annual Report" on his knee. If you are a quick
and accurate judge of values, here is a means of livelihood under the
most agreeable, gentlemanly and easy auspices. You are making your
fortune seated comfortably among your friends, so to speak, smoking
and chatting pleasantly.
Every minute something happens, and every other event is a financial
opportunity. A boy rushes in with a news slip that Russia is to coerce
China--wheat rises. Chicago unloads stocks to buy grain--shares
decline a point all round. A money broker in to offer a million
dollars, and he _knows_ the City Bank people are buying Amalgamated
Copper. There is a sudden chorus of greetings and smiles; the popular
man of the office has arrived unexpectedly from London. The telephone
rings; the board member sends word the market looks like a buy.
"Mr. Morgan has started for the Steel meeting," reads the manager,
from the news machine. "The div-i-dend on Steel"--whirr--whirr--clack,
clack, clack--"one per cent." ... "regular."
"Gee whiz! Look at Steel," calls the tape trader. "Three-quarters,
one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth, one! See 'em come. _Three thousand_
at a clip. Sell 'em! Sell me two hundred, Robinson, quick!"
A clubman drops in with a funny story. Somebody offers to match you
for lunch. A friend invites you, over the telephone, to dine with him.
You conclude to take your profit in Wabash Preferred on the rally. It
is three o'clock and "closing" before you know it, and time to run
over to Fred Eberlin's and have Frank mix you a cocktail.
But aside from a profitable acquaintance with values, I know of no
place equal to a stockbroking office for the acquirement of that
general and intimate knowledge of men and of the town, which,
organized and classified, constitutes the science of life. Here
congregate men of every conceivable calling and character, all meeting
on the equal and easy terms of a reputable pursuit, and all more or
less under the influence of the natural and perfectly selfish ambition
of money making.
One has only to observe them to be instructed. They are well groomed.
They are rosy and plump. Any one of them evidently could sit down at
the desk and write you a check any minute. Whatever they may be
elsewhere, whether their private lives are distinguished and
benevolent or riotous and shameless, whether their margins are the
fruit of admirable diligence or the purloined inheritance of the widow
and the orphan, while they are here these men are capitalists. They
have the feelings, the ideals, the desires and fears of the rich.
Here is a railway president amusing himself taking a flier in sugar,
while he waits for his steamer. He is chatting with a tobacco
manufacturer who sold out to the Trust. On that sofa by the window
Jerry Jackson, the bookmaker, is whispering a point to a man of
pleasure from the Knickerbocker Club. There is a clergyman from
Chelsea Seminary talking to a doctor smelling of iodoform. The two
tall gentlemen laughing with the manager are lawyers who will be
scowling fiercely at each other presently before Recorder Goff.
The man with his hand in a bag is a mine owner from Colorado, showing
a copper specimen to a dry-goods merchant on his way to the Custom
House. The man with his nose glued to the ticker globe is a
professional operator who trades from the tape. And that
hungry-looking person who has just rushed in is a bankrupt tipster,
making a precarious and pitiful existence, like a woman of the town,
out of the means of his ruin.
Graduates of Oxford and alumni of Harvard rub elbows with City Hall
politicians, and farmers from Kansas and Pennsylvania exchange market
opinions with men of science.
It is only for short intervals that the customers in broking offices
can be busy. At other times they must lounge, and smoke; and chat, and
read, and watch the board. A good-sized concern may easily have two
hundred running accounts. Can you imagine a livelier, more
entertaining place of gossip? You can have stocks, horses, commerce,
law, medicine, small talk, art, science, the theater and religion in
fifteen minute _causeries_, every day if you like. You have the
_milieu_ of every club in New York and the Waldorf cafe massed in one
elegant composition in more than one broker's parlor.
I once knew a clever fellow who dined out every evening. He always had
the latest scandal, the newest story, the straightest tip and the last
word from Washington. He knew all about stocks, grain, races,
theaters, society, clubs, athletics. He could advise you about ocean
steamers, table d'hote places, country hotels, Berlin pensions, young
ladies' schools, where to buy Ayrshire bacon and who had a yacht to
sell. And he acquired this vast and useful assortment of knowledge
simply by spending his afternoons, from noon to three, at different
Wall Street offices.
The brokers cordially welcome such a visitor. Now and again they carry
a hundred shares of stock for him. He is a kind of private news
agency. The dull office gets ready to laugh when _he_ comes in; and
his tips, whispered merely out of friendship, of course, to the
customers, add many a credit entry to Commission Account. It may be
said, without any hysterical exaggeration, that he represents the
worst of Wall Street; and that the worst of Wall Street is very bad.
But among his virtues are a merry mind and an abiding faith that a
"board member" is the most distinguished of associates.
The broker, indeed, if he is not always that most elevated of human
spectacles, a Christian gentleman, is a highly pictorial and
interesting person. He is the creature of his business, and is half
host and half business man. His habitual chatty intercourse with all
kinds of men of means gives him the easy nonchalance of the town, and
the nervous strain he is constantly under to protect himself and his
clients against those impulses of greed and fear so fostered by Wall
Street, creates that keen, rapid concentration for which he is so
remarkable.
Where everybody is liable to lose his wits any instant, it is
necessary those in authority should be cool. This constant state of
high tension, these perpetual changes from extreme concentration to
frivolity, produce, in the end, the Wall Street manners, and the
desire for exciting, highly colored amusements.
Every day in Wall Street is a completed day. It is a cash business.
Your broker likes to talk about his trades over his after-dinner
cigar, and to tell you, in the horsy, professional jargon of the
Street, how he "pulled a thousand out of 'Paul,' and went home long of
'little Atch.'"
He is, like all nervous people, a social animal. He is gregarious by
instinct and interest. Accustomed all day long to his exciting pursuit
and his club-parlor office, he seeks society for amusement and profit.
He wishes to chat with his friends and to increase his following. He
has no wares to display. He has no monetary advantage to offer over
any of the other seven or eight hundred commission men in the
Exchange. All members must charge one-eighth of one per cent, per
hundred shares, each way. Interest charges can't be very much reduced.
Every broker in Wall Street has inside information of some kind. His
appeal, therefore, for commissions must rest on acquaintance and
personality. He must know how to stimulate cupidity and create
confidence. He must impress himself on as many people as possible as
successful, honest, jolly, shrewd, well informed; a capital fellow and
a first-rate business man. It is only fair to him to remark that
whatever his faults, he almost invariably is a capital fellow and a
first-rate business man. But is it extraordinary that this individual
should become a man's man, a man about town?
Whether he is the blatant, vulgar wretch of the caricaturist, or the
cultivated, polished person who justifies Wall Street's boast of being
the aristocracy of trade, depends, of course, not on his being a
broker, but on his being a gentleman.
His completed portrait, however, would be a too ambitious performance
for the limits of my sketch, and I have made this little office study
of him, as he leans against his ticker pinching the tape, with bits of
board-room paper falling off his hat and a cigar between his teeth,
simply to show the influence of his vocation on himself and on his
companions.
The flavor of speculation permeates Wall Street like soot, and settles
on the professional and the public alike. It is a sporty business. It
appeals to the idle, the reckless, the prodigal and the _declasse_. In
the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately
so analogous to racing and gaming that their terms are interchangeable,
and to the thoughtless the stock market is the ranking evil in that
unholy trinity.
"Stocks, papers and ponies," is the ringside slang for Wall Street,
cards and horses. The sporting man finds it a no less hazardous, but
an equally congenial and more respectable, means of money making, and
he drifts into a broker's office as naturally as the broker relaxes
his nerves--_similia similibus curantur_--spending half an hour over a
roulette wheel in his client's "place."
The flash public very naturally choose the same pleasant road to
fortune. To their minds, whether they place their money on "Reading
Common" or on "Waterboy," the intention, the risk and the result are
the same. There are "fake races" and "fake pools."
"The percentage will ruin you in the end," they warn you, "no matter
what you play." And the business man, who should know better, too
often enters the share market as if he were sitting in an open poker
party, among sharpers and pickpockets, and recklessly surrenders
himself to every temptation of this devil-may-care atmosphere, while
he "plays the game."
It is this combination of the gambler, the sporting man, the fast
broker, the frivolous and ignorant trader and the speculative public,
all possessed with the mad passions of gain and fear, and all
struggling more or less grimly in the maelstrom which boils about the
Stock Exchange, that constitutes the Wall Street spirit.
It is a derisive goblin or a piteous, ineffective human soul,
according as you are a laughing or a weeping philosopher. It expresses
everything in the Street that is pictorial and dramatic; but Wall
Street is first and last a realm of business. It is a strong man's
country.
The men who built the buildings and work in them are giants. When they
war, they hurl millions at each other, as the Titans did mountains.
When they combine, civilization strides.
The Stock Exchange is their battleground. It is a dangerous place for
ladies and civilians. It is best to be serious and cautious, and to
keep one's eyes open, when one travels that way.