by John Brooks
That Friday morning—a damp, drizzly, bone-chilling morning such as New York can often produce in early May— beginning at about seven-thirty, boys and girls by the hundreds began debouching from Wall Street’s two principal subway stations, the Seventh Avenue–Broadway stop at Chase Manhattan Plaza and the Lexington Avenue at Broadway and Wall. Most of them were from New York University, Hunter College, and the city’s public high schools, all of those institutions being closed for the day. Eventually something like a thousand strong, they jammed into the financial district’s central plaza, the intersection of Broad and Wall, where they milled around under the apprehensive scrutiny of a good-sized cadre of city policemen who had been dispatched there in anticipation of their arrival. But the students seemed to be in no mood to cause the police any trouble. In light rain, under the columns of Federal Hall, where George Washington had once taken the oath of office as the United States’ first President, and facing the intimidating entrance to the great marble building from which imperial Morgan had once more or less ruled the nation, they spent the morning rallying their spirits and formulating their demands. The demands, not too surprisingly, turned out to be the same as those agreed upon a few days earlier by a secret convention of radical youth leaders in New Haven, and now being put forth on dozens of northeastern campuses. One: immediate United States withdrawal from Vietnam and Cambodia. Two: release of all “political prisoners” in the nation—a pointed, not to say loaded, reference to the Black Panthers imprisoned on charges of participating in the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a Panther accused of being a police informer. Three: cessation of all military-oriented research work under the auspices of American universities. Unlike many student demonstrations in the spring of 1970, this one was wholly nonviolent. Indeed, it was positively good-humored, and when, as noon approached, the rain stopped and a warm sun broke through, the mood became even better. Most of the demonstrators sat down on the sidewalk to listen to speakers.
Eleven fifty-five: suddenly, simultaneously from all four approaches to the intersection, like a well-trained raiding force, the hardhats came. They were construction workers, many employed in the huge nearby World Trade Center project, and their brown overalls and orange-and-yellow helmets seemed to be a sort of uniform. Many of them carried American flags; others, it soon became clear, carried construction tools and wore heavy boots that were intended as weapons. Later it was said that their movements appeared to be directed, by means of hand signals, by two unidentified men in gray hats and gray suits. There were perhaps two hundred of them.
As they pushed through the mob of seated students, it became manifest that their two objectives were to place flags at the base of the Washington statue in front of Federal Hall, otherwise known as the Subtreasury Building, and to break up the demonstration, if necessary by violence. As to the first objective, they marched toward the statue shouting “All the way, U.S.A.!” and “Love it or leave it!”; their way was barred on the steps by a thin line of policemen; the policemen, overwhelmed by greater numbers, were brushed aside; and the flags were triumphantly planted under the statue. As to the second objective: construction workers repeatedly struck students with sticks, fists, boots, screwdrivers, and pliers. They chased screaming students of both sexes down the canyons of the financial district, striking to hurt when they came within range. They ripped the Red Cross banner, indicating the presence of the new first-aid station, from the front gates of Trinity. The air was filled with the cries of the enraged and the injured, and the acrid, ominous aroma of a storm-troop putsch. Vicar Woodward, brave and exposed, stood through it all by the Trinity front gates, directing victims to the aid station inside; twice, fearing an actual invasion of the church, he ordered the gates closed.
Inside Trinity, a communion service was in progress—a Mass, as it happened, for peace and in commemoration of the Kent State students and all the war dead in Vietnam. Those in the congregation were first aware of the noise of a rising mob filtering in from the street; then, as the service proceeded, they watched a steady stream of bloodied students walking or being carried down the nave’s side aisle to the Sacristy and Clergy Vesting Room where the young doctors and nurses were ready to treat them. In all, about fifty demonstrators were treated at the Trinity first-aid station; another twenty-three were serious enough cases to require attention at Beekman-Downtown Hospital.
For more than a week afterward, Wall Street bristled daily with police as if it were in a fascist state.
To the extent that it had any part in this dispiriting affair—this small but fierce and rancorous struggle that came so close to being a crystallization of the whole nation’s tragedy at that moment—professional Wall Street, the Wall Street of finance and law, of power and elegance, seemed to be on the side of the students. Perhaps out of common humanity, or perhaps out of class feeling, the bulls and bears felt more kinship with the doves than with the hawks. At Exchange Place, Robert A. Bernhard, a partner in the aristocratic firm of Lehman Brothers, was himself assaulted and severely cut in the head by a construction worker’s heavy pliers, after he had tried to protect a youth who was being beaten. A few blocks north, a young Wall Street lawyer was knocked down, kicked, and beaten when he protested against hardhats who were yelling “Kill the Commie bastards!” But most of the mighty of the Street—Communist bastards or not—had no part in the struggle. They were not on the street. Like the famous, allegedly anarchist bombing on Wall Street in 1920, when thirty persons were killed and hundreds wounded, the riot of 1970 occurred just before noon: not quite lunch time. There was a racket in the street, and everyone above (or everyone privileged to have a window) looked out. The market was unaffected. Most of Wall Street’s elite working population watched the carnage from high, safe windows.
Indeed, there was little else they could sensibly have done; no purpose would have been served by their rushing down and joining the fray. Nevertheless, there is an all too symbolic aspect to professional Wall Street’s role that day as a bystander, sympathizing, unmistakably, with the underdogs, the unarmed, the peace-lovers, but keeping its hands clean—watching with fascination and horror from its windows that looked out over the lovely (at that perspective) Upper Bay with its still-green islands and its proud passing liners, and down into the canyon from which there now rose, inconveniently, the cries of hurt or frightened children.
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The event (like the unreal gyrations in the fortunes of Perot) called attention to the relationship, or the lack of one, between Wall Street and the nation in the new times. Did it make sense anymore to live—and live at the top of the heap—by playing games with paper while children screamed under the window? Could not one almost hear the tumbrils to the revolutionary guillotine rattling in the distance? Well, at any rate, if you were a Wall Streeter in 1970 you were at least no longer directly profiting by war. As late as the Eisenhower era the market had adhered to its age-old habit of greeting war news with complacency if not with outright glee, and of greeting peace news— “peace scares” was the local term—with panic and hysteria. But sometime in late 1967 Wall Street had come to decide that the Vietnam war was bad business, and had broken all precedent by turning decisively bearish on war and bullish on peace. The defense contractors were no longer blue chips; one of the biggest, Lockheed, would soon be in danger of bankruptcy. The peace initiatives of early 1968 had caused or contributed to a huge bull market on record volume. An unheard-of phenomenon; an old shame of Wall Street ended, to sighs of relief from financiers with consciences.
Or again: if you were a conscientious Wall Streeter you could tell yourself that you were contributing to progress by financing industrial expansion that would help reduce poverty and would finally abolish it. But now you knew, or had recently been compelled at last to reflect, that industrial expansion was not an unalloyed blessing; that each new factory, however modern and antiseptic, would mean new money for many but might also mean—through pollution—ugliness, suffering, and death.
Wall Street as a political issue was long dead except in those homes of the stuck record, Moscow and Peking. Even the American Old Left had stopped attacking Wall Street long since (and was probably long since in the market itself). “Lackeys of Wall Street” was a phrase to laugh at when Mao or Khrushchev mouthed it—as well say “lackeys of Monte Carlo.” Spreading affluence and the rise of corporate and federal power had reduced Wall Street to the status of a national facility without important political influence. The New Left simply ignored it, except in 1967 when Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie friends had the inspired notion of throwing dollar bills from the visitors’ gallery onto the Stock Exchange floor. A few months later, the Exchange management did its bit for the Yippie cause by installing bulletproof glass around the visitors’ gallery, thereby seeming to indicate that it considered thrown-away dollar bills to be lethal weapons. (And maybe, after all, from the Exchange’s point of view they were.) In short, a taunt was offered and magnificently accepted. But the taunt was not even to Wall Street; Wall Street had become a convenient metaphor for commercial America. Hoffman was right to crow, “Throwing money onto the floor of the Stock Exchange is pure information. It needs no explanation. It says more than thousands of anticapitalist tracts and essays.” And how magnificently bulletproof glass underlines the message! Wall Street, which despises suckers, had been suckered.
And all through the stormy course of 1967 and 1968, when things had been coming apart and it had seemed that the center really couldn’t hold—the rising national economic crisis culminating in a day when the dollar was unredeemable in Paris, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the shame of the Chicago Democratic convention, the rising tempo of student riots—the silly market had gone its merry way, heedlessly soaring upward as if everything were O.K. or would surely come out O.K., as mindlessly, maniacally euphoric as a Japanese beetle in July. Or as a doomed man enjoying his last meal. One could only ask: Did Wall Street, for all its gutter shrewdness, have the slightest idea what was really going on?
Beyond that, wasn’t Wall Street the very living symbol and embodiment of everything—the Protestant work ethic, Social Darwinism, market orientation, money-madness—that America was only now learning, if not to reject, at least to get into a new and lesser perspective? Wasn’t Wall Street backward-looking, a kind of simplified, idealized version of the older and now largely discredited America, unrelated or even antipathetic to the new America that was struggling now to come into being?
Of course, Wall Street itself claimed to be more broadly American than ever before. Even at the height of the 1929 boom, Wall Street could and did point out, there were only 4 or 5 million Americans in the stock market. In the summer of 1970 the Stock Exchange proudly unveiled a survey showing that the country now held over 30 million shareowners. “People’s capitalism” had arrived, then, and there were figures to prove it. Yet in another and perhaps more important perspective, the stock market was not more closely related to American life in 1970 than in 1929; in fact, the contrary was true. In 1929, America— the America of history, the one described in books and newspapers and popular magazines and even in the intellectual journals—had been essentially still a small country consisting of people possessing either land or money. Everybody else had been simply considered beneath notice. As the majority consisting of slaves is ignored in the idyllic histories of the democracy of ancient Greece, so the majority of the poor was ignored in the social histories of America circa 1929. By 1970, social commentary at all levels had become democratic; minorities, black and other, had become consequently self-conscious, aware of their right to be included and noticed even though they remain as they are rather than remolding themselves in the white Protestant image, as the Jews and the Irish had so largely done in earlier times. Even among the affluent, discussing the stock market at social occasions—a custom not just sanctioned but approved in 1929—had come to be considered generally dull or boorish. In the national context, the 4 or 5 million stockholders of 1929 loomed far larger than the 30 million of 1970. And in 1970, people’s capitalism—as almost any black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Appalachian poor white, unemployed laborer, or hardscrabble farmer would tell you—was still largely a myth.
Wall Street—sometimes so beautifully, so patly metaphorical that it could break a poet’s heart—was not only a place sorely in need of physical and spiritual “greening,” but had been almost the first place in the nation to be literally ungreened. A print made in 1847, long before the coming of large-scale industrialization, the age of asphalt, hangs in the famous old restaurant Sweets in Fulton Street. It shows almost the whole six-hundred-yard stretch of Wall Street looking toward Trinity Church, and the scene contains exactly one tree. With the physical ungreening went—and goes—the spiritual concomitant, a certain dehumanization. For generations, Wall Street as a social ambiance has tended to represent what is hardest, coldest, and meanest in America. Sneaky, parsimonious, hypocritical old Daniel Drew is not a Wall Street legend for nothing. This is not to say that life there has been (or is) all mean and inhuman. Along with Drew’s unprepossessing qualities, in Wall Street there has always been extraordinary enterprise, generosity, courage, villainy on a grand scale, the drama of success and failure, even now and again a certain nobility. In the nineteen sixties Wall Street still had a stimulating tendency, as it had had for a century and more, to project humanity (and specifically American humanity) on a wide screen, larger than life; to be a stage, perhaps one of the last, for high, pure, moral melodrama on the themes of possession, domination, and belonging.
But at a cost. As few plants bloom there, so do few people. While the Wall Street kings play out their classic dramas in the filtered air behind the high windows, the vassals, footmen, and ladies-in-waiting of the Street are short of the little satisfactions that make life bearable. Numbers and machines that they don’t understand benumb them. One gets off the subway at Broadway and Wall and begins to feel depressed. Men’s faces seem pinched and preoccupied. Pretty women seem flesh without magic. In winter a savage wind curls around the corners of those canyons; in summer the air lies heavy, dank, and sunless. The debaters of theology who cluster outside the Bankers Trust seem disturbingly psychotic, not engagingly zany. Not greed nor avarice, but footling bad temper, is too often the prevailing mood.
In a revolutionary time like 1970, could it be that Wall Street, that summary of so much that is least engaging about our national tradition, was coming to be—in the cliché of the moment—irrelevant?
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Not to Ross Perot. To him, Wall Street was a Puritan’s Hell, dangerous and fascinating, and also, as he well knew, the source of his almost incredible riches. He had entered Hell, conquered it, and remained pure. By environment and temperament he was a perfect Western populist, feeling toward “city slickers,” including those in Wall Street, a fear and suspicion not unmixed with envy and contempt. His boyhood in East Texas, as the son of a depression-ridden small-town cotton broker and horse-trader, had set the pattern of his life: he had broken horses for pay before he was ten (and repeatedly broken his nose in the process), become an Eagle Scout, learned the cult of self-reliance and learned to make a holy Calvinist doctrine of the pursuit of the honest dollar by honest effort. In some senses he was an anachronism. He had grown up, before and during World War II, believing that the frontier not only existed but still dominated American life. What had been physically extinct long before his birth summed up his spiritual reality. He believed that all things were possible in America for the man of enterprise and that the natural habitat of the man of enterprise was the “frontier.” Even now, when he had turned the tables and was admired, envied, perhaps hated in Wall Street itself, he instinctively equated “West” with “good” and “East” with “bad”; traveling on airliners—as I learned when I spent three days traveling with him on them, late in 1970—he found that his fellow passengers became more pinched, constricted, snobbish, close-mouthed as a plane moved eastward over the nation, a
nd more generous, open-hearted, and free-thinking as it moved westward.
He was of pioneer stock; his grandfather Perot, son of an immigrant from France to Louisiana before the Civil War, in the true frontier days, had made his way upriver and overland to New Boston, Texas, where he had hacked out a clearing, hewed timber, and built a trading post and general store. Ross Perot, after high school and two years of junior college in nearby Texarkana, had wangled an appointment to the Naval Academy, where he had graduated in 1953 with an average academic record but had been recognized for leadership through election as class president. Already he showed promise as a supersalesman. After four years of active Navy duty he had taken a job as a computer drummer, on commission, for I.B.M. in Dallas. He had soon turned out to be such an overachiever that any promotion to a salaried job would have involved a cut in pay, so the company had taken drastic steps to control his income. It had cut his commission on sales by four-fifths and assigned him an annual sales quota beyond which he would get no commission. For the year 1962, he had made his annual quota by January 19, thus putting himself effectively out of business for the next eleven months and twelve days. After brooding on his dilemma, he quit I.B.M. that June and incorporated his own company—Electronic Data Systems Corp., designers, installers, and operators of computer systems—taking with him a couple of brilliant young I.B.M. colleagues, Milledge A. Hart, III, and Thomas Marquez. He had no investors or backers; his initial investment was $1,000, the minimum required for incorporation under Texas law; his directors, apart from himself, were his wife, his mother, and his sister. Hard times followed for a while. (When E.D.S. put up its own building in Dallas and decorated it with the firm’s initials, some local people took the place for a restaurant called “Ed’s.”) But persistence and salesmanship paid off. In 1965, opportunity knocked for E.D.S. when federal Medicare legislation was passed and E.D.S. quickly got in on the ground floor. Perot actually spent a spell working part-time for Texas Blue Shield, which had a contract with the Social Security Administration to develop a computerized system for paying Medicare bills. Out of this association came a subcontract from Texas Blue Shield to E.D.S. That was only the beginning. Eventually E.D.S. had subcontracts to administer Medicare or Medicaid in eleven states, including Texas, California, and Indiana; the firm derived the major portion of its revenue from these contracts, and was, as Ramparts remarked scathingly in 1971, “America’s first welfare billionaire.” All told, by 1968 E.D.S. had twenty-three contracts for computer systems, 323 full-time employees, about $10 million in assets, annual net profits of over $1.5 million, and a growth curve so fantastic as to make investment bankers’ mouths water.