by John Brooks
At first I thought throwing out money at the Stock Exchange was just a minor bit of theatre [Hoffman wrote later]. … We didn’t even bother to call the press. About eighteen of us showed up. When we went in the guards immediately confronted us. “You are hippies here to have a demonstration and we cannot allow that in the Stock Exchange.” “Who’s a hippie? I’m Jewish and besides we don’t do demonstrations, see we have no picket signs,” I shot back. The guards … agreed we could go in. We stood in line with all the other tourists, exchanging stories. When the line moved around the corner, we saw more newsmen than I’ve ever seen in such a small area. We started clowning. Eating money, kissing and hugging, that sort of stuff. … We were ushered in and immediately started throwing money over the railing. The big tickertape stopped and the brokers let out a mighty cheer. The guards started pushing us and the brokers booed. When I got out, I carried on in front of the press. … We danced in front of the Stock Exchange, celebrating the end of money. I burned a fiver.
The event was entirely without explicit antiwar content; but hippies were associated in Wall Street minds with the antiwar cause, and perhaps the summer day of 1967 when the ticker stopped and the brokers cheered for the hippies marked the moment when Wall Street began to reverse itself on the war. In any case, the change had been fully accomplished by the following spring. The astonishing market of the first two weeks of April 1968, when prices rose wildly on record volume to usher in the manic phase of the go-go era, was manifestly a peace market, in response to President Johnson’s abdication speech of March 31 and the accompanying prospect of Vietnam peace talks in Paris. The portents of peace were to prove false. But to one who happened, as I did, to be inside the Exchange on April 3—a day of all-time record volume, and incidentally a soul-stirring spring afternoon—Wall Street response was heartfelt and very nearly inspiring. By ten minutes before closing, the day’s trading volume had passed the 19-million share mark, easily breaking all previous records, and the Dow was up half a dozen points. The quotation figures were dancing a jig across the lighted screens above the floor. The brokers were giving vent at intervals to shouts and loud whistles. One of them had devised some sort of launcher from which, now and again, he sent a paper airplane rocketing almost to the room’s lofty ceiling. As the last five minutes of trading ticked off, the noise grew louder and more boisterous; in the last thirty seconds all of the brokers moving around the floor speeded up to just short of a run. When the closing gong sounded, the cheering almost drowned it out, and a corona of shredded paper flew up from each trading post to produce a festive semblance of fireworks. Everyone, it seemed, was happy.
If so, it seems fair to assume that the happiness was attributable not just to the prospect of peace but rather more to the fact that everyone was making money hand over fist. To be sure, a strain of genuine pacifist idealism is discernible in Wall Street in 1968. (For one example, a young fund manager named Fred Mates—third and last of the Freds—went so far as to decline to invest in companies making armaments because he did not choose to profit from the war.) But generally speaking, the coming of doveishness to Wall Street does not appear to have been causally related to the triumph of youth. For all of their sartorial flamboyance and other field marks of superficial rebelliousness, the young swingers as a group were apolitical, unsentimental, and unself-consciously single-minded in their devotion to profit. In this sense, as opposed to their investment techniques and their personal style, they were throwbacks to earlier American generations rather than exemplars of their own. Such antiwar idealism as Wall Street mustered came largely from their elders, an idealism that reached its peak on Moratorium Day, October 15, 1969, when Wall Street leaders by turns took part in a daylong reading of the names of forty thousand American soldiers killed in Vietnam from the two stone pulpits in Trinity Church; and the readers, with a few notable exceptions, were not the young Turks but rather the old pillars of respectability like J. Sinclair Armstrong, executive vice president of the U.S. Trust Company of New York and the former chairman of the S.E.C.; Robert V. Roosa, Brown Brothers partner and former Under Secretary of the Treasury; John R. Lehman, of Lehman Brothers; Amyas Ames, of Kidder Peabody; and Roswell Gilpatric, partner in the Cravath law firm and former Deputy Secretary of Defense.
The old cold war establishment had done a flip-flop and was now leading Wall Street toward peace; and the reasons were almost certainly chiefly practical. Just as Britain, back in 1910, led by the eloquent Norman Angell, had suddenly realized that the Empire was no longer a paying proposition, so the Wall Street leadership in 1967 and 1968 suddenly realized that wars like the one in Vietnam were simply no good for business. The practical considerations had changed; mounting labor costs and federal deficits had made government contracting far less profitable than it had formerly been (if profitable at all), and the mounting drain of dollars abroad put the dollar constantly in trouble on the international markets. Foreign wars, it suddenly became clear, were now a national liability.
Hard heads and a soft currency had made Wall Street doveish. Being soulless, the market cannot be congratulated on a spiritual conversion. Still, those wild days in April 1968 were a time and place when human self-interest appeared to be more than customarily enlightened. It was a time when Wall Street accordingly took on a new and unaccustomedly attractive aspect.
5
At a more down-to-earth level, Wall Street’s conscience was, however, as bad as or worse than ever. And by the way this fact was identified hangs a tale.
In 1966, a young, vigorous, handsome clergyman, Francis C. Huntington, who in appearance and manner rather strikingly resembled New York City Mayor Lindsay, was working as a curate at Wall Street’s Trinity Church. He was not happy in his job; he conceived his mission there very specifically, as a means to explore the work-related moral problems of people employed at a professional level in Trinity’s immediate vicinity, the financial district. To this end, he began having discussions with brokers, bankers, financial lawyers, and the like, at which he encouraged them to tell, as Huntington put it, “What was bugging them about their jobs.” The program did not flourish, because Trinity at the time still adhered largely to its traditional policy of tending to its spiritual knitting and leaving the worldly marketplace outside to its own devices—of rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s and unto God what was God’s. Frustrated by lack of encouragement from his superiors, Huntington left Trinity and, in January 1967, with only himself and a secretary in a little office on Liberty Street, he set up an interdenominational organization called the Wall Street Ministry, to carry on the programs he had begun at Trinity.
Modest financing came from various financial firms and industrial corporations—and from Trinity itself, which, while unwilling to foster Huntington’s project as an in-house activity, was glad enough to encourage it as an independent project. The Wall Street Ministry immediately began holding regular luncheon seminars of Wall Street professionals at which they were urged to air their problems of conscience. In 1968, having acquired the services of the dropout executive John Faison, it conducted the survey of back-office life that I have described earlier; and in 1969 and 1970 it found itself in a unique position to study the effect on financial workers’ morale and morality of a full-scale market crash. As Huntington described his organization’s purpose, “We are aiming at a value-structure within the securities business.”
The seminars, at first, were disappointing. They did not attract the kind of people who are inclined to bring up what Huntington called the gutsy problems, and when those who came did present problems, the problems always seemed to be someone else’s rather than their own. Apart from this evasiveness, Huntington found anger and disappointment, particularly among the lawyers, when he would decline to give a clearcut moral answer to their questions. Why wouldn’t Huntington lay down God’s law the way the Supreme Court lays down man’s? Thus confronted, Huntington would smilingly deny his identity with God. But the lawyers remained unsatisfied.
How, for one thing, to answer the eternal question of where to draw the line between investment and speculation? Just when is a broker morally entitled to encourage a customer to buy a frankly risky stock, and when is he not? Is the old argument that speculation serves national goals by providing for economic growth a morally defensible one, or just a piece of hypocritical rationalization? Can the habit of speculation, like that of outright gambling, be morally corrupting for an investor who comes to make a habit of it—or for the broker who encourages him to do so in order to earn commissions? “The evidence,” Huntington reported later, “is that a sensitive and thoughtful salesman will have worked out answers to these questions.” But how many stock salesmen of 1967–1968 were sensitive and thoughtful, or indeed experienced enough to have had time to apply sensitivity or thought to the questions? “Many salesmen,” Huntington went on, “have not given these questions as much thought as they would like to give—and perhaps need to give for their own sanity.”
But the matter on which the Wall Street Ministry found the jumpiest conscience among brokers—and, concomitantly, struck the tenderest nerve among their employers—was that of the overtrading, or churning, of customers’ portfolios by brokers to increase commissions. Illegal though it was under S.E.C. rules, and unethical though it almost always was in terms of service to the customer, churning had become a brokerage way of life by the second half of the sixties. Nowhere in business is the choice between God and Mammon more cruelly evident than in stock brokerage. God’s broker sits at his desk, believing, after careful study, that he has invested his customers’ funds as well as they can be invested for the present. Out of conscience and professional ethics, he allows good portfolios to stand pat—and he thereby earns no commissions for himself or his firm. At the next desk sits Mammon’s man, perpetually on the phone persuading his customers, perhaps against his or their best judgment, that the time has come to switch from Zenith to Motorola, from Pan Am to Chrysler. His customers are persuaded; commissions are continuously generated. Mammon’s broker finishes the year with personal earnings in the $40,000 to $50,000 range and the reputation of being a man to know and cultivate; God’s broker finishes with earnings of $15,000 and the reputation of a decent man who’s a loser.
Put bluntly, Huntington found that many brokers felt they were under pressure to disserve their customers in order to increase their own and their firms’ profits. No amount of formal management caveats against speculation or investment without investigation could paper over the essential conflict of interest; it seemed to be built into the business as practiced. “If you really want to know what bugs me,” a broker told Huntington, “it’s the fact that I take a client out of General Motors and put him in Chrysler—when in my heart I feel that he probably shouldn’t be in any motors at all.”
Another moral, or perhaps psychological, problem of brokers—what Huntington called an occupational hazard of the business—was their susceptibility to drastic overnight changes in financial status. It was in the nature of stock brokerage as practiced in the sixties that a man, without changing either his job or his way of doing it, might earn $25,000 one year, $80,000 or $100,000 the next, and then perhaps only $15,000 the third. Practical considerations aside, these fluctuations often left him confused and unhappy. In a bonanza year he would feel grossly over-rewarded and consequently guilty. Schooled to believe in financial success as the direct and measured reward of hard work, he would find the annual fluctuations profoundly unnerving. The money and status rollercoaster was unsettling to the spiritual stomachs of many of the strongest; the ride, Huntington found, often left the riders with shattered lives and marriages.
So the Wall Street Ministry—fulfilling in its modest way a function that fell to it by default—saw the spiritual malaise behind the general euphoria of the bull market. Its work was by no means universally popular. After distribution of a report that referred to the findings about brokers’ guilt, a senior partner of a firm that had previously backed the enterprise called Huntington to say, “If that’s the kind of thing you’re up to, you can get along without my support.” There were similar complaints from similar sources. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Ministry—its name watered down in 1971 to the Wall Street Center, because the word “ministry” had been found to have too sulphurous a ring in many Wall Street ears—did continue to find enough backers to get along: a still, small voice amid the clamor of the marketplace.
6
Trinity Church itself, which in 1966 had turned its own fishy clerical eye on Huntington’s efforts, was changing with the times. More, it was speeding ahead of the times by seeking to change the outward mood of Wall Street; and it was succeeding to a startling extent.
The change began with a change of administration. The rector since 1952, John Heuss, was a man cast in the old Trinity mold: a pious man by his and his church’s lights, and a social and ecclesiastical conservative, inclined toward the continuance of old ways and values rather than the inauguration of new directions and programs; an Anglophile; a worldly rector out of Trollope, with his port and clubs and love of outdoor life. In his Who’s Who entry, Heuss listed ten different clubs: British Luncheon, Century, Downtown Athletic, Down Town Association, University, Pilgrims of America, Newcomen Society, St. George’s Society, Stage Harbor Yacht, Chatham Beach (Mass.). Trinity in his regime—as, generally, in those that had preceded his—often seemed an all-too-worldly church, conscious of its wealth and rank and prestige, anxious to maintain its position with the secular leaders of society, and only casually interested in the life of the masses of men and women of various faiths, or of no faith, who worked in the shadow of its spire.
Superficially, John V. Butler, the man who succeeded Heuss after his death in March 1966, was cut from the same clerical cloth. True, he was only a four-club man at the time (British Luncheon, Columbia Men’s Faculty, Pilgrims of America, St. George’s Society), but he was straight out of the Episcopal establishment, having graduated from General Theological Seminary and served, since 1960, as dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine up on 111th Street. Nor was he any wild-eyed youngster; on assuming the rectorship of Trinity he had turned sixty. He was, however, a man sensitive to social change and to the need for society’s institutions to change. In 1968, he brought in Donald Woodward, the doughty vicar who would stand exposed at the church’s front gate during the riot of May 8, 1970; and with Woodward came John Wallace Moody, a clergyman in his thirties who had spent fourteen years as a pastor in Columbus, Ohio, and had taken time off to get a master’s degree in painting and sculpture at New York University; a man with an air of clean-cut enthusiasm, medium long hair, and an esthetic manner, who was fond of expressing his enthusiasm with the quintessentially square adjective “neat.”
Moody, as Trinity’s curate in charge of “special ministries,” was assigned to set up lunch-hour weekday programs to serve local financial workers, especially at the lower levels, not so much to involve them in the life of the church and thereby make converts of them—that was the traditional approach—as to enrich their lives for the sake of enriching their lives. Moody took it as his premise that Wall Street, for all of its wealth, was a sort of ghetto, a place that, because it was devoted to work to the exclusion of all other aspects of life, was as much in need of cultural enrichment as any other deprived area. Given a free hand by Butler and Woodward—and provided with a liberal supply of
Trinity’s treasure from real-estate holdings for the signing up of talent—Moody and his mixed lay and clerical committee on the lunchtime program promptly went wild. What they set out to do was as far as possible from trying to convert the heathen. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than an attempt to change Wall Street’s classic noontime scowl to a smile.
The new program burst on Wall Street at the beginning of June 1969, with the inauguration of the first Trinity summer festival. On the opening day, a rock-and-roll band called the Communication Workshop performed to a large gathering in Trinity’s front yard. During the following noontimes, well-known folksingers sang, there were classical concerts and free juggling lessons, balloons flew from the old church’s soot-blackened turrets, and signs on the surrounding fences proclaimed, “Trinity is alive and celebrating!”