Whatever the reasons may have been, prosperous New York in the latter nineteen-twenties consisted of a great confusion of loosely connected social groups. Indeed, one might with some plausibility argue that just as there were enormous opportunities for economic privilege and great wealth, but there was little accepted leadership or control among the insiders who seized these opportunities, just so there was an enormously enlarged plutocracy, without that cohesion or that firmness of tradition which characterizes an aristocracy.
In this confused social scene the financial powers of the day played varying but in the main substantial parts. Let us glance for a moment at our fifty representative men.
The great majority of them lived in what might loosely be called the Park Avenue district—reaching roughly from Fifty-ninth Street to Eighty-sixth Street and from Fifth Avenue to Lexington Avenue, Manhattan. Four of them maintained their winter headquarters in the suburbs; two of them had gone eastward in the migration of many of the well-to-do to the shores of the East River; the Morgans and George F. Baker clung conservatively to their old strongholds in the Murray Hill section, a mile or two to the south; a few others had taken up their abode in the apartment houses just north of the Grand Central Station. But most of the fifty lived farther north in Park Avenue—that monotonous street of huge packing-box apartment houses—or in Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, or in the narrow side streets between Fifty-ninth and Eighty-sixth: if one marks their town houses upon a map, one finds the center of concentration to have been not far from Park Avenue and Seventy-second Street. It had moved a mile or so northward—and a little to the east—since 1905.
These fifty men were well represented in the fashionable and dignified clubs of the city. Six belonged to the Knickerbocker (three of them being Morgan partners). Fifteen belonged to the Racquet and Tennis, three to the Union, five to the Brook, eleven to the Creek, eight to the more intellectual and less fashionable Century, at least twenty-one to the New York Yacht Club, and no less than twenty-six to the Metropolitan—thereby enhancing its long-standing claim to the nickname of “millionaires’ club.”
Furthermore, nineteen of them belonged to the Piping Rock Club on the north shore of Long Island—a circumstance which introduces us to another characteristic fact about metropolitan men of wealth in the nineteen twenties: the extent to which this Long Island shore had become the out-of-town capital of the financiers. Naturally these fifty men had country houses as well as town houses (or apartments); some of them, indeed, had three or four. If one dots these out-of-town residences on a map, as many as eighteen of them will be found clustered near the northern edge of Long Island. The rest were widely scattered: there were a few in Greenwich or thereabouts, a few in northern Westchester County, or in Englewood or Morristown or Far Hills, New Jersey; or at Southampton, or at Tuxedo, or at Newport (still the headquarters of the old guard of formal metropolitan fashion); and there were summer homes on the Maine coast, “camps” in the Adirondacks, winter places in the South; but Long Island was definitely the favorite place for out-of-town living, especially for the bankers of the group and above all for the bankers within the Morgan sphere of influence.
Newport was very far from New York, for men whose fingers must constantly be on the financial pulse, and its social ritual was too solemnly punctilious to appeal to a free-and-easy generation. Tuxedo had no inviting waterfront. The Berkshire hills had long since ceased to attract the rich, and many of the grand estates of Lenox, with “FOR SALE” signs at their splendid entrances, were now growing up to weeds. On Long Island one was close to business; here were the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound for yachtsmen, here was Piping Rock—along with a dozen other clubs—for golf, here were gentle hills and pleasant valleys for riding.
The favorite sport of these fifty men, if we consider them collectively as a group, was perhaps golf, but there were many horsemen among them (and proprietors of racing stables, like William Woodward, owner of Gallant Fox) and hunters and duck-shooters and grouse-shooters; and collectively they owned twenty-eight yachts, ranging in size from little racing sailboats to Arthur Curtiss James’s Aloha (165 feet long), George F. Baker, Jr.’s Viking (217 feet), J. P. Morgan’s famous black Corsair (254 feet), and Vincent Astor’s Nourmahal (260 feet). And as the year 1929 drew to its close, Morgan was building a new Corsair, 343 feet long: it was to be the largest private yacht in the world.
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“I do not scruple,” wrote Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography, “to say that I prefer the society of distinguished people, and that even the distinction of wealth confers many advantages. The best education is to be had at a price as well as the best broadcloth. The son of a peer is more likely to rub his shoulders against well-informed men than the son of a tradesman.… The discerning man will recognize the information and the graces when they are achieved without such assistance, and will honor the owners of them the more because of the difficulties they have overcome;—but the fact remains that the society of the well-born and of the wealthy will as a rule be worth seeking.”
The financial leaders of America unquestionably enjoyed the sort of cultural opportunities which Trollope described—though some had not acquired these until they had reached mature years and the patterns of their intellectual life had been set beyond the possibility of fundamental change. What sort of use did they make of these opportunities?
Here we venture upon very treacherous ground for generalizations. Certainly there were in Wall Street—particularly among the speculative plungers and their throng of eager imitators, a throng larger and more reckless in 1929 than ever before—a great many callous, money-minded vulgarians, who for all their superficial polish and their bonhomie were essentially thick of skin, limited in outlook, and vulgar in taste. There were also, in greater if not in predominating number, men of finer grain who yet wore the blinders of Wall Street conventionality. Of this type were hundreds of the correct young men who drifted almost inevitably into bond-selling from the approved universities, where as a matter of course they had not “cracked a book” except under the pressure of dire necessity and had been quite content with the bare passing-marks expected of privileged indolence. Pleasant of aspect—though some of them, with the passing of the years, began to look as if a season of asceticism would do them good—these men possessed that ease which is the product of social experience; they possessed also a well-trained sense of what a conventionally fastidious taste would approve in books and plays and etchings and furniture; yet in most cases they were mentally unadventurous, incurious, bound by the intellectual fetters of their class, slaves to the economic and political and social orthodoxy of the moment. Culturally they were willing followers, seldom contributors. Yet among them and among the diversity of other types which so large a collection of individuals must inevitably include, one found other men, especially in the higher ranks of the banking class, who had made full use of those advantages for “information and graces” to which Anthony Trollope referred. Some of these men, it might be added, were more sensitive of perception, more catholic and elastic of mind, than the majority of the radical critics who imagine all bankers to have resembled the gross, dollar-marked millionaire of the popular cartoons.
One thinks offhand of a powerful banker (a member, as it happens, of our group of fifty) who knew most of Gilbert and Sullivan by, heart—and a good deal of Shakespeare as well; of another who, though he worked nine or ten hours a day under full steam of energy, yet found time to read voluminously, and could outmatch most professional publishers in first-hand knowledge and critical understanding of the current literary output; of at least two men who from time to time served as publishers’ readers without pay, criticising not books on finance but fiction and memoirs; of another whose collection of modern paintings was known wherever artists and connoisseurs are found; and of other collectors—whether of paintings or books or of objets d’art—who combined with zeal in accumulating treasures a laboriously acquired knowledge of their significa
nce and a genuine love of their beauties. One thinks of Morgan the Younger, to whom the enhancement of the huge collections built up by his father was not merely a duty but a pleasure. And of course one thinks of Otto Kahn, who not only was the heart and soul of the Metropolitan Opera but aided the Theatre Guild, the Provincetown Playhouse, Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, and heaven only knows how many other artistic enterprises and how many individual artists and writers.
It would be grossly unfair not to recognize that men such as the best of these—men who were at home in the society of people of other nationalities and other vocations, familiar with the finest products of many cultures, and intent upon nourishing as well as enjoying that of their own country—lived up to a high tradition of the cultural function of the man of wealth and thereby helped to leaven our business man’s civilization. If America was slowly coming of age culturally, if the man of means thought a little less instinctively in 1929 than in 1905 of art as something which you go to Europe to buy, if there had been real progress toward the development of native rather than derivative arts, and if there had been a little—a very little—mitigation of the common ugliness of the general American scene, to such men must go at least a share of the credit.
The pity was that there were so few of them (though there were more, perhaps, in Wall Street than in any other place where business men congregated), and that to the majority of successful American business men the stuff of which civilization is made was a mere decoration for a life dominated by the clatter of the adding-machine and the ticker.
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Another change which strikes the eye of anybody who compares the record of the financial leaders of 1905 with that of the leaders of 1929 is in religious affiliations and activities. Of the ten men in our 1905 list, at least seven were churchgoers and at least six were active in church affairs. Among the fifty men in the 1929 list, only about half either mentioned any church affiliations in Who’s Who or were otherwise publicly known to have a part in church affairs, and the available evidence would seem to suggest that some of these affiliations were nominal. Although at least eight were actively engaged in church organizations—as wardens, vestrymen, or trustees of churches, or otherwise—it is pretty clear that the tradition that a man prominent in finance should also be prominent in the church was breaking down. This, of course, is not surprising: the churches no longer occupied so vital a place in the community as in earlier days.
That the tradition of good works had not broken down, but had simply become secularized, is however equally apparent. These fifty men made an impressive record in the holding of college trusteeships, and trusteeships or other offices in charitable institutions, settlements, hospitals, and institutions dedicated to science or to art. For example, they held, between them, no less than eighteen university or college trusteeships or directorships in educational foundations or associations. There were also, in this group of fifty men, five trustees of the Metropolitan Museum, five of the New York Public Library, three of the American Museum of Natural History, and three of the New York Zoological Society; five officers or directors of the various organizations responsible for the Metropolitan Opera, and one officer of the Philharmonic Orchestra Society.
Naturally, one reason why such men were invited to hold such positions was that they were rich. No director of a struggling charity—and nearly all charities are struggling—but yearns to have a millionaire on his board who at an opportune moment might say, “I’ll take care of that.” College officials, too, have been known to succumb to the temptation to woo wealth in the hope of new scholarships or a new chemical laboratory. It may be pertinent that the fifty financiers on our list had been awarded, up to 1930, a total of forty-six honorary degrees—nearly one apiece on the average! (Owen D. Young was high man, with 15; David F. Houston was second, with 8, mostly awarded while he was a member of President Wilson’s cabinet; J. P. Morgan was third, with 5.) It is likely that some of these degrees were awarded in the remembrance or the hope of gifts. Yet to say this and no more, would be to misinterpret the position which these men held in the community.
They were eagerly sought after as trustees—and were awarded honorary degrees—because they were held in genuine admiration. By the great rank and file of business and professional men of what might be called the middle class, their judgment of policies and of men was considered the best that could be got. Their mere names had a great prestige value, standing as they did in the opinion of the well-to-do classes for success, power, hard sense, and reliability; and never before had this prestige value risen so high as it rose in 1929.
These men undertook their service as trustees of colleges and charities and civic institutions as their tribute—sometimes but by no means always perfunctory—to the principle of noblesse oblige. To this principle hundreds of men in Wall Street paid scant attention, but in the banking sector, at least, it was deeply rooted; in fact, there were so many prominent men of affairs on the boards of some of the local charities that many a young man with a shrewd eye for advancement would accept a gruelling assistant secretaryship or assistant treasurership in a local charity in the hope of falling under the appreciative eye of a grand panjandrum of the Street.
To the objective observer, the benefactions and public services of the wealthy might appear as attempts at partial reparation for the cruelties and uglinesses brought about by the order which made them rich. The objective observer might be reminded of Carnegie’s giving to the cause of peace the millions which he had made manufacturing armaments. But to the men themselves such a parallel would have seemed grossly unfair. They did not regard themselves as responsible for the defects of the social order; and many of them conscientiously felt that their responsibilities to this order were being fully discharged by their services to educational and charitable and cultural enterprises.
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What of the ethical standards of the men of Wall Street in their daily work?
Here we must take leave of our list of fifty men, for we enter a realm of motive which objective facts and statistics will do little to illuminate.
At the outset of the discussion we shall do well to remind ourselves that we are dealing with thousands of men who ranged all the way from the incorruptible to the predatory; and also that this body of men was made up of various groups with different sorts of obligations and hence with different codes. The best we can do is to arrive at very tentative approximations of the prevailing standards—not of the exceptionally scrupulous or exceptionally unscrupulous, but of the rank and file of the financially powerful.
We shall do well to remind ourselves, also, of the background against which any such discussion must be carried on: the general standard of conduct of American business as a whole. So flagrant have been some of the financial operations uncovered during the past few years by the receding tide of business that many excellent people have come to believe that Wall Street was a haunt of natural villains, of men of lower principle than elsewhere. To believe this is to forget how widespread in the business world as a whole was and is the doctrine of anything for profit.
This doctrine perverts selling into an effort to unload goods by hook or by crook, regardless of the real advantage of the purchaser. It perverts advertising into a blast of half-truths and soothsayers’ myths such as the radio pours daily into millions of ears. It perverts business-getting into a contest in the offering of favors and inducements; indeed, so instinctively does the average American male take for granted the inevitability of such offers that when a business man is caught giving a bribe to a public official, the recipient may be condemned but the giver seldom is: the implicit verdict of public opinion is that he was only doing what other business men would do in his place. The doctrine of anything for profit perverts the labor policies of companies large and small into an effort to get the utmost in production with the least in concessions. It perverts legislation into a compromise between the objectives of paid lobbyists working for the advantage of various business g
roups without the slightest concern for the general public interest. Few are the American corporations, large or small, which could submit all their transactions to the examination of Ferdinand Pecora’s accountants, and all their policies to the glaring light of a congressional investigation, without a tremor of uneasiness. The generally prevailing standard of ethics of American business is perhaps not much higher than that succinctly expressed by Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York when Governor Franklin Roosevelt was examining him on the witness stand at Albany: “I don’t think it is ethical for anybody to do anything illegal.”
Never, perhaps, has the distinction between disinterested service and profit-hunting greed been so obscured by the haze of sentimental adulation for business success as in the nineteen-twenties; but the profit imperative was nothing new in our life. Look at the image of Uncle Sam—a smart trader indeed, if his appearance does not belie his character—and you will realize how long it has been accepted as characteristically American.
It is probable that the general average of character and scruple was as high in the financial world as elsewhere in American business during the period which we are discussing; that, man for man, the financiers had at least as keen a sense of honor as one would be likely to find among the business men of the average small city. The only question is whether their principles were commensurate with their great opportunities and powers.
Another fact must be borne in mind. In almost every occupation one will notice that the relations among those who are engaged in it are on a higher standard than their relations with their customers or clients. The code of medical ethics, for example, is in effect largely a code of fair practice between physicians, for their mutual benefit; the protection of the patient is a secondary consideration. So with the elaborate codes of ethics drawn up by many trade associations: the primary purpose is to prevent men within the trade from damaging the business of their fellows. Just so in the financial world. There are many matters in which the standards are very high because they have to be, or everybody in the Street would suffer. For example, all transactions on the Stock Exchange are oral. When one man on the crowded floor of the Exchange offers a hundred shares of Steel at 42 and another man says “Take it,” no documents are exchanged, yet there is no question in the mind of either man that this sale is as valid as if it were embodied in a written contract. Millions of dollars’ worth of securities thus change hands every day at Broad and Wall Streets. Or consider the way in which orders involving hundreds of thousands of dollars are casually negotiated by telephone; or, if you prefer, how completely any depositor may take for granted that his bank will keep the tally of his balance honestly. The standard of integrity in such matters has long been very high, and naturally so; for otherwise it would be impossible for the bulk of financial business to be carried on.
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