by Amy Reading
Managerial enterprises had so efficiently organized their internal operations that the supply side of the economic transaction threatened to outstrip demand. American capitalism had succeeded in figuring out how to make products, and the stores and catalogs were awash with new goods like automobiles, kitchen appliances, and canned foods. Now the rapacious economy needed to manufacture consumers who would soak up all this excess. Industrialism required a new attitude toward money and spending to keep its factories humming. Manufacturers turned to aggressive marketing and advertising techniques to create demand and consolidate customers into predictable blocks. Old professions like traveling salesmen transformed overnight to meet this new economic mandate. New professions like advertising and market research sprang up to stimulate consumption; pollsters and sociologists found new ways to measure what happened in the marketplace; a new cohort of “managers” in all sectors of the government and economy began to regulate the changing class structure. The business writers who spoke out so forcefully against the evils of the swindler were not just trying to warn citizens away from shoddy financial deals; they were also trying to shore up the rhetoric of industrial capitalism, a new faith in the power of money to bring about the American dream. Everyone began to pay attention to the stock market.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was both a symbol and a concrete calculation of the growth that enfolded everyone into its game. You could turn on the radio to hear the latest stock price of Radio (as the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, was then nicknamed), and the number would always be higher than the last time you checked. In 1921, a share in Radio went for $1.50. By 1929, after splitting several times, that original share was worth nearly four hundred times its original cost. The mesmerizing numbers on the NYSE seemed transparent and self-evident. They told a story of increasing prosperity, of democratic prosperity, at least for everyone who stepped onto the climbing escalator. That first step could work like a springboard, vaulting you up into unprecedented heights, if you borrowed the money you invested and traded on margin. The new faith held that it was not self-repression that led to success but self-leveraging, not thrift or the sublimation of desire into hard work, but risk, speculation, investment, and consumption.
And yet, even within this heady era, there remained a seed of doubt in the market as the true forum for success, and this doubt coalesced in the figure of the stockbroker. To people who were not part of the financial elite, the stockbroker’s role in the creation of wealth was opaque and faintly sinister. He hoarded, manipulated, and dispensed information, ostensibly working for his clients’ interests, but probably only furthering his own at their expense. The broker’s reputation was marred by his conceptual association with bucket shops and swindlers, but also by the way he was so completely identified with the market. The monthly magazines published confessions, exposés, and stories that stereotyped the stockbroker as a cunning but weak-complexioned, socially maladjusted man with only one overriding interest. From 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., he could be found shouting on the exchange floor, and after that he would retire to a club to drink up his profits. He was the antithesis of the family man, because his obsession with money left him unfit for domestic life, nor did he seem to create anything of value. The stockbroker symbolized a life spent in pursuit of money—money as an increasingly abstract concept divorced from productive enterprise—and to many people that kind of life was not a worthwhile one. When the Liberty Bonds inducted American citizens into the world of investment, many wondered if the postwar era meant the end of the stockbroker. After all, the federal government had successfully sold its wares directly to the public; might not corporations now decide to do the same?
Instead, this era witnessed the entrenchment of the stockbroker, because the financial elite commenced a strenuous campaign to rehabilitate his image. The NYSE sought to legitimate itself by excoriating the fraud on its fringes, much as the Chicago Board of Trade had done with bucket shops at the turn of the century. In 1919, the NYSE launched the Business Men’s Anti-Stock Swindling League, an alliance of commercial bankers, leaders of industry, trade associations, and the American Federation of Labor, who banded together with NYSE publicists to broadcast news of spurious stock promoters and shepherd investors back to the brokerages with seats on their exchange. The World’s Work prefaced its “Pirates of Promotion” exposé with an essay on the necessity of the stockbroker to the efficient allocation of capital. The editors portrayed the heroic broker as a kind of financial explorer: “It is his business to discover the little wells of capital and lead them through rivulets, streams, and rivers into the great reservoirs where they are made available for financing the growing business of the country.” But he was “a conserver of capital as well as a discoverer of it. Because of his greater responsibility to the source of the capital, he can serve the corporation better than it could itself.”
Still, the American public’s skepticism toward the stockbroker persisted. Four years later, when Lou Blonger’s gang was netted and jailed, the Denver Times editorial staff interpreted the events as a parable with a now-familiar lesson: “The man with money to invest who does not consult reputable bankers and brokers in regard to the propositions into which he is urged to put his savings need not sneer at the ‘sucker’ who drops a fortune in the con game.”
Con men preyed on the old middle class, precisely the same group of people who chafed under the management of the new professional-managerial class but who were nonetheless tempted by the allure of the stock market, almost always to their peril. In 1918, the Federal Trade Commission collected data on the trading done on the Chicago Board of Trade from 1916 to 1918. It was the doctors, dentists, lawyers, clergymen, and teachers who performed most dismally, second only to those in the “manufacture and mechanical” category at the bottom, while “capitalists and retired” sat at the top of the list.
As the monthly magazines that addressed themselves to the middle and professional classes saw that their efforts to educate readers in the new economy were failing, their tone became shriller. They pointed their fingers right at their readers. Thomas Lee Woolwine, the district attorney of Los Angeles who had helped Norfleet catch the two rogue cops on Joseph Furey’s payroll, wrote an article in The American Magazine about the big con called “Would You Walk into a Trap Like This?” Woolwine could not make his point emphatically enough: “Perhaps you think you would never ‘fall for’ such a game. Maybe you think your father wouldn’t, or your mother, or wife, or sister, or brother, or friend. Don’t be too sure. The man in this story never dreamed that he would be caught by confidence men. Neither did his family dream that he would. But he was. Remember that it is always easier to see stupidity in the other fellow than it is to see it in yourself.” And when none of their efforts to publicize swindling operations had any effect on the overall quantum of susceptibility in the American populace, the monthlies simply threw up their hands. As one author fretted, “This ignorance and credulity shows itself at a time when men of all-round soundness of judgment have taken a long step forward, and when positive knowledge is increasing at a rate never before known.” Another writer ended his long, detailed exposé of financial frauds by complaining, “It seems quite hopeless, this article.”
It was. In addition to the $1 billion lost each year to the con men, novice investors continued to shovel their money into the maw of the stock exchange. A Harvard study in 1928 found that fully 97 percent of margin traders on Wall Street lost money, 2 percent broke even, and 1 percent realized a profit. By the end of the decade, The Saturday Evening Post pointed to the only possible remedy: public schools in Brookline, Massachusetts, had begun educating all of the grades above kindergarten in “the fundamentals of sound investment” as well as preparing “future salary earners to budget their incomes and manage their personal incomes with thrift and good sense.” American adults, as the next decade would soon show, were already a lost cause.
Amid all these hectoring, desperate articles, the charismat
ic Norfleet stood out as someone who remained unconstrained by the rhetoric of the day. Like an outlaw, he slipped in and out of magazines and newspapers just long enough to bedevil the notion that American managerial capitalism was one smoothly integrated system. He was not the smarmy swindler, nor the pathetic mark, nor the colorless bureaucrat. He had no use for any middlemen or experts and didn’t abide by anything that common sense couldn’t solve. He believed in money but was not mastered by it. He was an uncategorizable exception, a mark who appeared onstage whenever someone claimed a victory in the fight for the definition of American modernity. And of all the actors in the drama, he was the one having the most fun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Showdown
Norfleet arrowed to Salina, Kansas, as fast as the train could shoot him, but once he arrived, it took him just a short while to ascertain that W. B. Spencer was not there, and had not been there in the last few weeks. He nodded to himself, realizing too late that the suitcase in the Empire Hotel had been a ruse, typical for criminals on the run. Norfleet did what anyone would do in such a situation: he went to Ogden, Utah. There, he just happened to encounter a railroad officer who told him that a man answering Spencer’s description had passed through a few days previously, bound for Helena, Montana. From Helena, Norfleet trailed Spencer north to the border town of Nelson, and then onward to the swindler’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario.
If Norfleet’s peripatetic searching charged him with purpose, it was proving to be a liability in Denver. In the days since Red Gallagher posted bond for them, Blonger and Duff had retained both Horace Hawkins, a lawyer who’d earned a reputation as a champion of the underdog after winning the freedom of the union leaders in the bloody Ludlow mine massacre, and S. H. Crump, noted for his belligerent cross-examinations, and they commenced to file every conceivable motion to delay, obfuscate, and attack the state’s case against the bunco men in advance of the trial. Crump petitioned the district attorney for a reduction in thirty of the defendants’ bonds, a tactic designed to force Van Cise to tip his hand, because he’d be required to divulge any evidence he possessed that justified such high bonds. But the proceedings before Judge Charles C. Butler could not begin on time. “Bunko ‘Sucker’ Disappears as Hearing Opens,” cried the Rocky Mountain News. The defendants had issued a subpoena for the prosecution’s star witness, but the sheriff had been unable to find him in the entire city of Denver. Norfleet had vanished, which made Van Cise look very bad. Attorney Crump seized the upper hand: “I have strong intimations that as soon as this hearing came up he was advised to leave.” Judge Butler requested that Van Cise do everything possible to rope his wayward witness, and the next day Norfleet was back in Denver, denying that he’d been kidnapped and held hostage by an evasive district attorney.
In mid-September 1922, Norfleet testified in the West Side Court before Judge Butler, as well as a special detail of police detectives hired to augment the sheriff’s guard. As the bunco men glared at him, Norfleet related the story that everyone now knew from the newspapers. Yet his testimony actually dented Van Cise’s conspiracy case, because he was able to provide direct evidence against only three of the men, Cooper, Davis, and Reamey. Van Cise was reduced to taking the witness stand himself to say that he would continue investigating, and “in all probability we will have other witnesses.” Judge Butler ruled that nine of the bonds be reduced to $7,000, eight bonds to $5,000, one to $12,500, and one to $15,000. Van Cise had been forced to retreat from the defense’s first sally. Yet even with the discounts, no one came forward to post bail for the other swindlers, and they smoldered in jail.
Norfleet, too, retreated. Ever since his presence in Denver had been publicly coerced, the rumors had flown that an attempt would be made on his life. The district attorney assigned two armed officers to shadow Norfleet around town throughout the day and night. Norfleet carried his own weapons, of course, and the Post helpfully listed their placement: “He carries two of the pistols on his belt. The third, a small automatic, is worn under his arm.” When he left town the day after the hearing, Norfleet was accompanied by two different bodyguards, one of them his son Pete, the other a private detective who sat across the aisle of the Pullman car, ever vigilant. How the self-reliant hero must have chafed under the need for such supervision.
On his own again, Norfleet continued to charge around the country, pulled along by the very wispiest of clues to the whereabouts of Spencer. While he was in Canada, he wrote to the authorities in Montreal and learned that he’d just missed his prey. Spencer had been arrested and fingerprinted under the name William Percy Hurd, but he’d been let go. Fortunately, he’d also been photographed, so Norfleet ordered dozens of copies of the updated likeness and began sending it around in advance of his own travels. On a whim, he sent a copy to Lucille Carson, the teenage sleuth he’d deputized in San Francisco to capture Furey, and once again she proved her moxie. She telegrammed Norfleet to say that Spencer had, indeed, appeared in San Francisco for a few days, and when he left, he was headed to Salt Lake City. Norfleet sped to Cheyenne, hoping to head him off on the Lincoln Highway, but had no luck. He then tried his luck in Arvarda, Colorado, where Spencer’s wife’s family lived, and finding nothing there, he popped in on Van Cise in Denver, posting photographs of Spencer wherever he went. Then to Colorado Springs, south to Raton Pass, New Mexico, and farther south to Roswell.
All that train travel began to wear on Norfleet, and he longed for the flexibility of motor travel, so next he stopped at his ranch to pick up his car and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Ruth. For no reason at all, their first stop was Mineral Wells, a health resort sixty miles west of Fort Worth. Norfleet parked the car in a garage, and, as had become his routine, he showed the photograph of Spencer to the garage mechanic and asked if he’d seen him in the past few weeks. The mechanic called another man over, and they both peered at the photo. “Looks like the car belonging to that fellow is in the garage here now!” said the first man. “It sure does look like him all right,” agreed the second, and they told Norfleet that the car’s owner would be returning shortly. His blood quickening, Norfleet found an unobtrusive place to wait, and in just a few minutes a man walked past him. It was Spencer. Norfleet darted out of his hiding place, tapped Spencer on the shoulder, and, like the absolute ham that he was, cried out, “Howdy!”
When Spencer turned around, Norfleet saw that it was not he. He was face-to-face with a man who looked exactly like Spencer but without the bunco man’s broken, crooked nose. “I beg your pardon,” Norfleet murmured. “I thought you were a friend of mine.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Norfleet,” replied the man with a laugh. “I know you and I’ll bet I know who you thought I was. You thought I was your man Spencer! I have been told by several men who have seen his picture that we might be twin brothers.”
It must have cleaved Norfleet in two to hear those words. On the one hand, his campaign to decoupage the nation with photographs of his quarry seemed to be working. On the other, his own personal notoriety was becoming so great it might be impeding his quest, since surely Spencer was as well-informed of Norfleet’s plans as everyone else. But then the look-alike said something that sparked Norfleet’s ever-ready hope. “Only a few minutes ago when I was getting some mineral water at the bar, the bartender remarked that he had seen my brother a few days before and thought it was I.” Norfleet strode down the street to the bar and flashed his photograph to the bartender. “Yes, I seen that feller,” the man replied. “He’s been here ’bout a week. I ain’t seen him for a day or two, but his woman was sittin’ round the lobby of the hotel night before last. They got a cottage up on that hill there an’ I been sending mineral water up to them regular.” Now Norfleet was dead certain he was close.
In Denver, Philip Van Cise was meeting with far less success. The bunco men were safely behind bars, but his chances of winning a trial against them seemed increasingly remote, despite the spies and the Dictaphone and the crates of evidence they’d seiz
ed in the raid. In the weeks after the raid at the end of August 1922, Van Cise found himself waging two distinct campaigns, one against the Blonger gang in a fevered scramble to bolster the state’s case, and one against the city machine that stood to lose in direct proportion to Van Cise’s gain.
As the bunco spielers and ropers grew beards to disguise themselves from potential witnesses, Denver citizens grew suspicious that all was not as it seemed in their town. The first intimations that certain city officials had colluded with Blonger came a week after the raid. “Why did members of the police advisory board contribute funds for the Van Cise raids,” wondered the Rocky Mountain News. “Did members of the board believe that the police department was not competent to participate in the raid? Is there a powerful influence brought to bear on the city administration that would frustrate such a raid?” Readers had only to glance at adjacent articles in the same newspaper editions to ascertain who might be on the swindlers’ side. While Governor Oliver Shoup praised Van Cise and the Rangers “for their splendid work and the results obtained,” Mayor Dewey C. Bailey let out a plume of vitriol against the district attorney. Naturally, he could not be seen to defend the debased bunco men, so his support took the form of an attack on Van Cise’s use of money and personnel. He flatly denied Van Cise’s request for $15,000 in city funds to reimburse the private donors who had bankrolled the sting, calling Van Cise extravagant in his use of the money and claiming that the city “does object to paying for the establishment of a national detective headquarters to work in competition with the police department and to do the work that should properly be done by the federal department of justice.”