Clifford Browder's Blog, page 33

253. J.P. Morgan: Scheming Monopolist or Savior of the Nation?

         When not rescuing corporations and governments or making the national character more Christlike (see the previous post), J.P. Morgan was traveling abroad and adding to his collections.  Having little interest in art, his wife said he would buy anything from a pyramid to Mary Magdalene’s tooth.  By now they had drifted apart, she preferring a quiet life and plain living, whereas he wanted an exciting life in the company of a host of friends.  Nor did it help that both were subject to periodic depression.  In his frequent travels he enjoyed the company of handsome, self-possessed younger women who shared his love of society and self-indulged pleasures – women, in other words, very unlike his wife, whom he usually lodged on the other side of the ocean, or in a spa in France while he hobnobbed with affluent friends on his yacht in the Mediterranean. 




         In another age divorce might have been an option, but not in this late Victorian era.  There were those among the rich who did divorce, but disgrace and ostracism followed.  For Morgan, a pillar of the Anglican Church and an esteemed member of countless boards and clubs, it was out of the question, but how far his friendships with other women went can be debated.  Morgan’s attitude in such matters is well expressed by a story recounted by one of his biographers.  A young partner of his having been caught in an adulterous affair, Morgan summoned him into his office and upbraided him.  “But sir,” the young man protested, “you and the other partners do the same thing yourselves behind closed doors.”  “Young man,” said Morgan, eyes ablaze, “that is what doors are for!”  So Morgan endorsed the eleventh and supreme commandment: Thou shalt not be found out.           But found out he may have been, for the gossip sheet Town Topics of July 1895 asked, “Why does the wife of a certain wealthy man always go to Europe about the same time he returns home, and vice versa?”  Mentioned  on the preceding page were Mr. and Mrs. Pierpont Morgan and, in a separate article, Edith Randolph, a widow whom Pierpont Morgan had been seeing a lot of at the time.  The editor of Town Topics, Colonel William D’Alton Mann, was in the habit of reporting illicit behavior by an unnamed individual, while naming the transgressor in a paragraph nearby; alarmed, the offender was usually forthcoming with cash to buy Dalton’s silence.  When Dalton was sued for libel in 1906, the names of his victims and the amounts they paid came out, including Pierpont Morgan, $2500.  The defendant insisted that this and other such sums were simply unrepaid loans, but admitted approaching numerous men of wealth to ask them to “accommodate” him so as to avoid future criticism on his part.  Still, $2500 was a modest bit of accommodation, compared to the $25,000 forked over by William K. Vanderbilt, a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, for who knows what transgressions.  As for the lady in question, Mrs. Randolph, in 1896 she remarried, thus removing herself from the purview of Pierpont Morgan, who found solace in the company of another younger woman encumbered with a husband and two children, but not with too strict a concept of propriety.  As for Colonel Mann, he himself escaped prison, but his agent was convicted of extortion, and Dalton’s extortion business was thoroughly exposed.
         As long as business-friendly William McKinley was president, Morgan and the business community breathed easy, for they knew what to expect.  But when McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, he was succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, a rough-riding cowboy with novel and alarmingly progressive ideas.  Roosevelt had become a national hero by charging up San Juan Hill in the recent war with Spain, and now he had charged right into the White House, and for the business community this meant trouble.


Another moustached powerhouse, but this one was in the White House.
         Sure enough, in 1902, making use of the rarely enforced Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the president filed suit against the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company organized a year earlier by Morgan and the presidents of three railroads so as to limit ruinous competition.  The company was accused of illegal restraint of trade.            Morgan was stunned.  Why hadn’t the president consulted him?  He hurried to Washington to have a talk with Roosevelt.  “If we have done anything wrong,” he told the president, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”  Replied Roosevelt, “That can’t be done.”  Morgan was stunned again.  This wasn’t how gentlemen did business.  You didn’t make your differences public, you worked them out in private.  But this Rough Rider in the White House, though from an old New York family, had different ideas on the matter – wild ideas, and dangerous.  He wanted to subject businessmen – the very men who were making the country prosperous and a leader among nations – to the rule of government!            The case against Northern Securities went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1904 ruled that the company was an illegal combination and would have to be dissolved, which it promptly was.  Morgan had lost, Roosevelt had won.  But this didn’t make them irreconcilable foes, for each found the other useful – yet another example of how power respects power.  Roosevelt began distinguishing between “good” and “bad” trusts, put Morgan’s in the “good” category, and consulted the banker on matters of finance – the kind of behind-the-scenes conferring that old J.P. infinitely preferred.
         But more trouble was coming.  Seemingly out of nowhere, October 1907 brought a rude shock to Morgan and the nation, when a speculator’s misguided attempt to corner the stock of the United Copper Company failed, sending the company’s stock plunging.  Then the speculator’s brokerage house failed, and runs began on banks associated with him and his confederates.  Other banks tightened up on loans, interest rates on loans to brokers soared, stock prices plummeted, and more banks failed.  Suddenly  the whole financial system looked shaky, and the Panic of 1907 was well under way.         All eyes turned to J.P. Morgan, the city’s most prestigious and most well-connected financier, who had squelched financial crises before.  Out of the city attending an Episcopal convention in Richmond, Virginia, he received wires and messengers from his partners, who warned him not to rush back immediately, since that would only heighten the sense of panic.  As soon as the convention ended, Morgan hurried back to the city and summoned a host of bank and trust company presidents to his library on 36th Street, where he and his associates scanned the books of endangered corporations and decided which ones could be saved.  Secretary of the Treasury Cortelyou came from Washington to help, and John D. Rockefeller put up $10 million.  From then on the Morgan Library, a high-ceilinged treasure house of Gutenberg Bibles and Renaissance bronzes, would be the scene of one emergency meeting after another.         On October 24, when stock prices continued to plunge, and the Stock Exchange threatened to close early, Morgan, puffing on a cigar, sleep-deprived and fighting off a cold, summoned the presidents of the city’s banks to his office, and told them that as many as 50 brokerage houses would fail unless they raised $25 million in ten minutes.  The money was raised, disaster was averted.  When the panic resumed on the following day, Morgan got the banks to pledge more money to keep the exchange open, and brokers on the exchange floor cheered.           This calmed the panic on Wall Street, but on October 28 the mayor of New York came to Morgan and informed him in confidence that the city was verging on bankruptcy, whereupon Morgan and two allies quietly agreed to buy $30 million of city bonds.  And when yet another major brokerage house verged on failure, Morgan summoned a group of executives to yet another emergency meeting at his library and averted yet another collapse.          But the crisis was far from over, for the financial  system still looked shaky.  When runs threatened two more trust companies whose failure could not be risked, Morgan summoned some 50 bank and trust company presidents to his library on Friday, November 2, locked them in his sumptuous study, pocketed the key, and in what turned out to be an all-night session, demanded that they pool their resources to make a loan of $25 million to save the companies.  The financiers at first held back, but who could withstand Morgan’s imperious will and his piercing eyes, meeting whose gaze was said to be like looking into the lights of an oncoming express train?  Glaring fiercely, he held out a pen, gestured toward the relevant document, and said to one of them, “There’s the place, and here’s a pen.  Sign!”  The banker did, and so did all the others, one by one.  Only when he had obtained the last signature, did Morgan unlock the door at 4:45 a.m. on Sunday and let them wearily depart.           But that was not the end of it.  The approval of President Roosevelt was necessary, since part of the proposed solution involved U.S. Steel’s acquiring a troubled steel producer, so two bankers had rushed to Washington to see him.  But would the trust-busting president approve a deal allowing the biggest corporation in the world to get even bigger – a transaction that would arouse public criticism and invite antitrust proceedings?  Roosevelt heard them out, grasped the situation, and gave his assent.  Minutes before the Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning, November 4, a phone call from Washington reported the president’s decision -- news that, when relayed to the exchange, immediately restored confidence.  After two weeks of panic the crisis was finally resolved, and for the first time in days the exhausted old man got a good night’s sleep.
         The panic had affected the whole nation.  Throughout the country bankruptcies multiplied, production fell, unemployment rose, and immigration plunged.  When my maternal grandfather, a respected judge in Indianapolis, Indiana, suffered financial reverses, he had his eldest child, my mother, become a schoolteacher so as to bring in more money.  Barely eighteen, she taught in a little one-room rural schoolhouse for two years, a maturing experience made necessary by mysterious happenings on Wall Street in distant New York.  But not all families coped as well; many were ruined.
         In the wake of the panic J.P. Morgan was seen as a hero by many, but not by all, and suspicions arose at once.  Had the panic been engineered by the banks so they could profit from it?  Had Morgan (who in fact had lost $21 million in the panic) taken advantage of it?  And should the safety of the entire financial system depend on one man, however well-intentioned, and what would happen when this aging benefactor – if benefactor he was – departed this earth for celestial climes?  Debate raged.         Finally, in 1912, a special House of Representatives subcommittee, chaired by Representative Pujo of Louisiana, set out to investigate the “money trust,” the alleged monopoly whereby Morgan and other city bankers controlled major corporations, railroads, insurance companies, securities markets, and banks.  Morgan of course was subpoenaed, and his testimony would be the climax of the investigation.  Politicians, lawyers, clerks, journalists, and visitors awaited his arrival with the keenest interest. It would be the kind of public event that the Napoleon of Wall Street loathed, and an abrupt change from quietly professing his love at age 75 to Lady Victoria Sackville earlier that year in England, and sailing with Kaiser Wilhelm in a five-hour race at the Kiel regatta – a race that they won by twenty seconds, filling the emperor with joy.  Back home from these diversions, Morgan went to Washington with misgivings.         On December 18, 1912, he showed up at the hearing in a dark velvet-collared topcoat and the inevitable silk hat, accompanied by his daughter Louisa and his son Jack, plus partners and lawyers.  On that day and the next, in a room crammed with journalists, photographers, and spectators, the committee’s counsel, Samuel Untermyer, questioned him at length, establishing that officers of Morgan’s and four other banks held 341 directorships in 112 U.S. corporations, with the Morgan partners alone sitting on 72 boards.  Some questions Morgan said he couldn’t answer, and  some of his answers seemed enigmatic, for he and Untermyer were in different worlds, operating under different assumptions.  Asked if he wanted to control everything, Morgan said clearly enough that he wanted to control nothing.  And when asked if he was not a large shareholder in another major bank, he replied, “Oh no, only about a million dollars’ worth,” and was surprised when the spectators laughed.          Finally, in an exchange that would become famous, Untermyer asked, “Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?”         “No sir,” said Morgan.  “The first thing is character.”         “Before money or property?”         “Before money or property or anything else.  Money cannot buy it.”         Saying this, Morgan was quite sincere.  In the world of gentlemen bankers, one did business with people one knew and trusted; character – perceived character – did indeed count.
         Morgan, his family, and friends all thought that he done quite well before the committee, and much of the press agreed.  Two weeks later he left for Egypt with his daughter Louisa and several friends.  He seemed fine while crossing the Atlantic, but then became agitated and depressed.  On the Nile he fell into a delusional depression, had bad dreams, spoke of conspiracies and subpoenas and contempt of court, and told Louisa that the country was going to ruin, that his whole life work was going for naught.  As the party retreated to Cairo and then to the Grand Hotel in Rome, word of his condition got out, and messages of concern came from the pope, the king of Italy, and the Kaiser.  Flocking also to the hotel were art dealers and amateurs with bundles of items to sell to the great collector.  Morgan rallied, made some jaunts into the city, but then declined, became delirious, and died in his sleep on March 31, 1913, just shy of his 76th birthday, the cause of death never ascertained.         Flags on Wall Street immediately flew at half mast, and on April 14 the Stock Exchange closed for two hours while his body passed through New York City on its way to burial in Hartford.  The funeral at St. George’s Church in Manhattan displayed flowers from the Kaiser, the government of France, and the king of Italy; 1500 attended, with thousands more outside.  There were memorial services in London and Paris as well.         The total value of his estate was about $80 million (well over $230 million in 2016 dollars); most of it went to his son, with generous bequests to family and friends.  His son put most of his art collection on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and subsequently sold some of it to various collectors, but donated many works to the Met.
         Was John Pierpont Morgan’s death hastened by the Pujo committee’s treatment of him, and public skepticism about the values he held dear?  Probably.  The world was changing, and Morgan was too old and too fixed in his ways to change.  The era of the gentleman banker had passed.  In 2013 Congress created the Federal Reserve System to provide central control of the monetary system, issue currency, and create a stable financial system, which, with its powers expanded, it does to this day.  It took a complex system of twelve regional banks, each with branches and a board of directors, and a seven-member governing board appointed by the president, to fill the void left by the death of J.P. Morgan. 
          I confess I'm rather taken with old J.P. and his naiveté -- yes, naiveté! -- in thinking that gentlemen bankers of good character could still handle the affairs of the nation, and that in creating monopolies he had America's best interests at heart.  Both eulogists and critics of the man were correct.  John Pierpont Morgan was both a monopolist and a savior of the nation, an autocrat and a benefactor.  He truly believed that the wealth he had accumulated should be used for the good of the nation 
-- richesse oblige -- and acted accordingly.  Luckily, he died before the outbreak of World War I.  Having been a friend of both the king of England and the emperor of Germany, he could never have adjusted to a war-ravaged Europe and the catastrophic end of the world he had known.  He believed in order; war brought chaos.
         Source note: For information in this post, as in the preceding one, I am indebted to Jean Strouse’s magisterial biography, Morgan: American Financier (Random House, 1999). 
 *                   *                   *                    *                   *                  *
          My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
          My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon:  Katahdin: How, even with a governor against it, a nonprofit gets things done.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

252. J.P. Morgan: The Man and His Nose

         For some, he was “the financial Moses of the New World” or “the Napoleon of Wall Street”; in conferring an honorary degree on him, a Yale professor had likened him to Alexander the Great, though one might just as well throw in Julius Caesar and Louis XIV.  But for others he was “a beefy, red-faced, thick-necked financial bully, drunk with wealth and power,” or “the boss croupier of Wall Street … a bullnecked  irascible man with small black magpie eyes,” or an “imperiously proud, rude and lonely, intensely undemocratic” robber baron.  Obviously, in his own lifetime and since, a divisive figure, inspiring diametrically opposite reactions.         His name comes to my mind daily, since my bank is J.P. Morgan Chase, the modern descendant of the J.P. Morgan & Company of his own time.  As I grew up, I was only vaguely aware of him as a historical figure, until I saw a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness, whose idealistic young protagonist, Richard Miller, wants to see old J.P. carted off to the guillotine for his crimes.  A somewhat biased introduction to the nation’s greatest banker of the early 1900s, and an impression somewhat modified when, years later, I read about how, singlehanded, he stopped the Panic of 1907.           No one would deny that, back in the late nineteenth and early  twentieth century, John Pierpont Morgan was a power to reckon with.  A heavyset man dressed in a black silk topper and dark coat, well mustached, and carrying a silver-topped mahogany walking stick, he looked the very image of the plutocrat.  But there was more to him than that.  A woman who knew him said that, when he entered a room, you felt “something electric,” and a woman employee who greatly respected him called him the most exhausting person she had ever known.  Similarly, his friend William Lawrence, the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, said that a visit from Morgan left him feeling as if a gale had blown through the house.           And his accomplishments matched his image.  He had “Morganized” (reorganized) the nation’s railroads, put together the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel, and helped create such industrial behemoths as International Harvester and General Electric.  He sat on the boards of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; gave substantial gifts to schools, hospitals, museums, and the Episcopal Church; and loved yachting, built a series of luxurious custom-made yachts, and was elected commodore of the New York Yacht Club.  Yet in spite of all these activities, he found time – lots of it – for collecting rare books and illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, portrait miniatures, tapestries, ivories, coins, armor, medieval reliquaries, Chinese porcelains, and Roman frescoes.  Indeed, what didn’t he collect? 
         How does one become a financial Alexander the Great?  It helps to have a moneyed father already well established in business.  One thinks of John Pierpont Morgan as the financial Titan of later years, a man who could never have been young, but of course he had a youth, an apprenticeship to what he became.  Born in 1837 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was the son of Junius Spencer Morgan, a successful American dry goods merchant who later became a banker based in London.  Since his mother, Juliet Pierpont, of an old New England family, was self-absorbed, demanding, and often depressed, it was his father who monitored his childhood.  From an early age Junius Morgan supervised his son’s every activity and groomed him for a career in international banking.  He helped the boy with his homework, supervised his reading, and sent him to a boarding school in Switzerland so he could learn French, and then to a university in Germany to learn German.           Returning to this country, young Pierpont did a two-year apprenticeship arranged by his father with a Wall Street firm, and then became the New York agent for his father’s London-based bank.  In this capacity he made a trip to the South in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, to give his father a report on the railroads, banks, and cotton merchants with whom Junius Morgan was doing business.  He talked with his father’s business connections in various cities and sent back the desired reports; surprisingly, he seems not to have said much about the looming threat of secession, and how Southerners viewed this young interloper from the North.         War soon came, but young Pierpont didn’t rush to enlist; instead, he exercised his patriotism by buying substandard carbines from the Army in the East for $3.50 each, and then selling them to the Army in the West for $22.00, thus realizing a tidy profit at the cost of involvement in a deal that, when later investigated, became highly controversial.  Right from the start he had a keen nose for moneymaking opportunities, and if the affair did him little credit, it was no worse than what many canny merchants in the North were doing to satisfy the nation’s sudden need for arms and supplies.         At the same time young Morgan was seeing to his father’s affairs in this country, but also courting the delicate young woman who in October 1861 became his wife.  The newlyweds honeymooned in Europe, but the trip was anything but idyllic, since the bride was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died in France in 1862, leaving Morgan stricken with grief.  Returning to this country, he paid $300 to a substitute to avoid the draft, and succumbed to the fever of the time by speculating in gold, the price of which was fluctuating wildly, reaping censure from his conservative father while netting $66,000 in profits.  Soon after the war ended, in May 1865 he married his second wife, Frances Louisa Tracy, by whom he would have a son and three daughters.         Well schooled and well traveled, with smooth manners, European clothes, and a command of two foreign languages, Pierpont Morgan showed no trace of Commodore Vanderbilt’s unlettered roughness or the flamboyance of Jim Fisk, and was accepted at once by New York society.  They knew a gentleman when they saw one, and young Morgan was fast becoming a gentleman banker, a species that he believed should rule the world of finance.         Over the next two decades he and his firm, Drexel, Morgan & Company at 23 Wall Street, loomed ever larger in that world, as he and his junior partner Anthony Drexel, a Philadelphia banker, sold bonds, negotiated deals, and raked in a fortune.  Working at the same time with his London-based father, Pierpont Morgan channeled British money into American enterprises, and by the 1890s had helped transform his nation and its agricultural economy into the greatest industrial power in the world.  The twentieth century, he was sure, would be an American century, and he was doing all he could to bring it about.         The Atlantic cable made communications between New York and London much easier, but the Morgans sent their messages in code, Pierpont being variously designated “Vienna,” “Charcoal,” “Flintlock,” or “Flitch.”  One of his messages to his father read in part, “amber despise maliciously fawn whisper shank plainness,” which meant that he hoped to open negotiations with the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company.  In his public as in his private life, he practiced discretion to the point of secrecy.         This was the Gilded  Age, and the wealthy dressed it and lived it.  In 1872 Morgan bought Cragston, a 386-acre farm in Highlands Fall, New York, overlooking the Hudson, and turned it into an English country estate, filling the house with paintings, Chippendale furniture, potted palms, and Persian rugs, and creating tennis courts, stables, gardens, greenhouses, and a carriage house.  And in 1880 he bought a brownstone at 219 Madison Avenue on the northeast corner of 36th Street and renovated the interior, installing Oriental rugs, ceramics, paintings, stained glass, and bric-a-brac.  His library had wainscoting of Santo Domingo mahogany, and featured allegorical figures representing History and Poetry in octagonal panels on the ceiling, though his interest in those subjects was slight.  In those days  ornamental clutter prevailed, yet both house and country estate were modest by comparison with the grandiose residences of many of Morgan’s  contemporaries, since he opted for patrician restraint.           But restraint was not his way when it came to the latest in technology.  His Manhattan home had an elevator, a two-story burglar-proof safe, and a private telegraph connecting it to his office at 23 Wall Street.  And it became the first private residence in the city entirely illuminated by Thomas Edison’s newfangled invention, the light bulb, whose development Morgan encouraged, making his firm the young inventor’s banker on both sides of the Atlantic.
         It was in the 1890s that Pierpont Morgan became, completely and definitively, the J.P. Morgan of legend.  When his father died of a carriage accident in 1890, he mourned the man who had dominated his life for decades, an exacting monitor who had viewed his son at first with reproach and finally with pride.  His estate was worth $23 million, and most of it went to Pierpont.  The son now took his father’s place as head of J.S. Morgan & Company in London.  And following the death of his longtime partner Anthony Drexel, in 1895 he renamed his Wall Street firm J.P. Morgan & Company, and became the head of a Drexel bank in Philadelphia as well, and another bank in Paris.  He would soon be rivaling the Rothschilds in financial eminence.         His subsequent accomplishments were impressive: he headed the corporation that would build the vast new Madison Square Garden in 1890; saved the Union Pacific Railroad from bankruptcy in 1891; in 1895 sold gold to the U.S. Treasury, which was almost out of it, thus preventing a government default; and in 1901 astonished Wall Street by organizing U.S. Steel, the biggest corporation in the world.  U.S. presidents routinely consulted him, and when his friend the Prince of Wales became Edward VII of Great Britain, Morgan was an invited guest at the coronation.  He also dined with King Leopold of Belgium and, to the dismay of his English friends, hobnobbed cordially with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.  John Pierpont Morgan had more royal connections than the president of the United States.         Another accomplishment was the building of the Morgan Library on East 36th Street to house his growing collections and a study where he could meet with business colleagues, art dealers, and friends.  For an architect he chose Charles Follen McKim, an eminent partner of Stanford White who today is less remembered than White because, unlike White, he was not so lucky as to be murdered in fashionable Madison Square Garden in front of hundreds of witnesses.  Closely supervised by Morgan, whom the architect referred to as Lorenzo the Magnificent, McKim created a sober classical structure in Italian Renaissance style that expressed its owner’s sense of grandeur and patrician taste.  Completed in 1906 with a private tunnel connecting it to Morgan’s nearby residence, the library’s vaulted rotunda, marble floors, and frescoed ceilings soon housed his vast collection of rare books and manuscripts, not to mention a sixteenth-century Brussels tapestry, The Triumph of Avarice, whose inclusion might imply a touch of irony, since its owner viewed himself as generous, not greedy.  Morgan’s favorite spot in the library was his private study, where he spent part of each day at his custom-made desk, surrounded by stained-glass windows and, flanking the desk on either side on the red damask walls, two panels of a Hans Memling altarpiece of the fifteenth century.  In such a setting he might well have thought himself, not a twentieth-century American banker, but a prince of the Renaissance.
          Pierpont the Magnificent had clerical connections as well.  He was active in the affairs of the Episcopal Church, even attending church conventions that most laymen would have found excruciatingly boring.  He was generous with funds as well, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new Episcopal cathedral to be located far north of the settled sections of the city in Morningside Heights, a cathedral to be named St. John the Divine.           Just how cozy Morgan and the Church could be is evidenced by his friend William Lawrence, Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, whose 1901 article “The Relation of Wealth to Morals” made these interesting observations:
·      In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes.·      Godliness is in league with riches.·      The search for material wealth is as natural and necessary to man as is the pushing out of its roots for more moisture and food to the oak.·      Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christlike.
Having been Morgan’s guest in his palatial residence and on his yacht, and having sailed with him up the Nile, the good bishop surely knew whereof he spoke, and with all these statements his host would have heartily agreed.
         Who exactly was this Titan of finance who advised presidents, socialized with monarchs, traveled widely, collected ravenously, and gave an abundance of time and money to his church?  Photographs show a burly gentleman of many years (he weighed 200 pounds by age 30), inevitably topped by a black silk hat and walking with a tapered walking stick, white-haired, with a prominent nose over a drooping, grayish mustache, and dark eyebrows over eyes whose piercing gaze is rendered well in portraits – a gaze that, if angry, could cut you to the quick.  No question, this man had the appearance not just of wealth and prosperity, but of willfulness and domination.         And behind all that?  A man of great reserve, opinionated, often intemperate, but capable of charm.  A victim of periodic bouts of depression that he fought off with hard work, ocean voyages, spa cures, and frenzied socializing.  No scholar and, in spite of his vast collection of rare books and manuscripts, no reader; a doer who had little time for reflection or contemplation.  A man who never doubted his own convictions, who was sure that what benefited him would benefit the nation as well.  A man who, surrounded on all sides by flattery and adulation, was not used to being challenged or contradicted.  Seated in his glass-walled office with an open door at 23 Wall Street, he was quite capable of letting someone who wished to speak with him stand there quietly, unnoticed, for ten minutes or more, while he studied a sheet with a list of figures; should the intruder address him and jolt him out of his trance, a verbal explosion would follow.  Decidedly, a man used to having things on his own terms, on routinely getting his way.
          And a man with a nose.  In his later years a nose that was bulbous and flagrantly purple, because of a skin condition called rhinophyma.  Self-conscious about it, he hated being photographed, was known to lunge in fury, walking stick upraised, at any photographer who dared to point a camera at him in public.  The story is told how the wife of a partner of his, wanting her daughter to meet the great man, invited Morgan for tea.  For weeks she coached the daughter how to behave on the occasion: the daughter would enter the room, greet him courteously, not look at his nose or mention it, then tactfully depart.  When the day came, the hostess and her guest were sitting on a sofa by the tea tray, when the daughter entered, greeted Mr. Morgan respectfully, did not look at or mention his nose, and after a few minutes left.  The mother was vastly relieved: it had all gone so well.  Turning to her guest, she asked, “Mr. Morgan, do you take one lump or two in your nose?”         Yet women found him attractive, nose and all.  The force of his personality overwhelmed them, and overwhelmed his male friends and colleagues as well, rendering his unsightly nose all but irrelevant.  He may even have gloried in its grotesqueness, being delighted to impose it on others and get them to accept him regardless.  His millions helped, but it was the force of character behind those savage eyes that overpowered others, subjecting them to his will.
         How this man with an imperious will and a purple nose stopped a panic singlehanded and was hailed as either a savior of the nation or a villainous plutocrat will be told in the next post. 


         Source note:  For information in this post I am indebted to Jean Strouse’s exhaustive and exhausting biography, Morgan: American Financier (Random House, 1999), a book that for most readers is too long by half, but that is based on thorough research, leaves very little out, and richly conveys the man and his times.

     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




     Coming soon:  J.P. Morgan: Villainous Plutocrat or Savior of the Nation?

      ©   2016   Clifford Browder

251. Sailors' Snug Harbor, Staten Island

     Imagine five temple-like Greek Revival buildings set side by side, their façades perfectly aligned, with an eight-columned portico in the center, flanked on either side by another impressive classical façade and, at either end, a six-columned portico.  Is this a college campus?  A small-town square?  Certainly the façades suggest college buildings or government administrative centers, or maybe Carnegie libraries of another era, or churches, but five of them in a row is impressive … and surprising.  And these structures aren’t in an urban setting, having spacious grounds around them.  When I first saw them it was a mild autumn day, and from where I stood, contemplating them, I could also see the broad lawn in front with a stand of oak trees that were gently shedding their leaves, and a view down the sloping grounds past a shoreline boulevard to the wide expanse of New York harbor and, somewhere off in the distance, the faint silhouette of the skyline of Manhattan.  I was charmed and impressed, for never before had I seen such an alignment of handsome Greek Revival buildings – not row houses like you see in Greenwich Village and other older parts of Manhattan, but free-standing structures of magnitude.
     So welcome to Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, located on the north shore of Staten Island, which I was visiting with a friend who had piqued my interest by saying, “If you don’t know Snug Harbor, you don’t know Staten Island.”  I had hiked for years in the Greenbelt, the chain of parks running through the center of Staten Island, but I had never seen anything like this.  The two structures on the right constitute the Staten Island Museum; the magnificent central building with the eight-columned portico is the Visitor Center and Galleries; the building immediately to the left of the central building is the Noble Maritime Collection; and the last building on the left is at present not in use.  Except for the latter, on that idyllic autumn day I and my friend visited all these buildings.
     The central building has an impressive two-story main hall that serves as the Visitor Center, with stained-glass transoms by Tiffany and, topping the ceiling’s murals, a towering sky-lit dome.  The Staten Island Museum offers art work from the past and present, and natural history collections that include fossils of prehistoric creatures --  the kind of thing that bores some people but fired up my imagination as a kid, letting me dream of raging Tyrannosaurs and spike-backed Stegosaurs, and lumbering Mastodons and lowly Trilobites, images that haunt me to this day.  Also in the museum is a series of panoramic paintings showing the successive stages of Staten Island’s history, ranging from idyllic rural through industrialization (yes, once there was heavy industry on Staten Island), to the modern landscape with clusters of suburban homes that shelter good Republicans (this is the one Republican borough in the city), plus commuter bridges, high-rises, and shopping malls – an exhibit that instilled in me a deep yearning for the rural setting that once was, and never will be again.  The Noble Maritime Collection focuses on the work of artist John A. Noble (1913-1983), who often sketched derelict ships in the harbor.  Especially featured is his houseboat studio, originally the teak saloon of an abandoned yacht where he created his lithographs, paintings, and photographs: a unique exhibit that lets you play voyeur by peeking into the studio and its contents, which include  an easel, a drawing table, a ship’s bed, and several jars crammed with paintbrushes.
     So much for what’s inside these handsome Greek Revival buildings, and I haven’t covered it all by a long shot.  But why is the whole shebang called “Snug Harbor”?  Because it was originally founded through a bequest by merchant and ship master Robert Richard Randall, who when he died in 1801 left his 21-acre Manhattan farm, located in what is now Greenwich Village, to be the site of an institution, governed by eight trustees, to care for “aged, decrepit, and worn-out seamen.”  His heirs contested the will, delaying the opening of the home for decades.  By the time the matter was settled, his once rural Manhattan estate had been overtaken by development and acquired great value.  So the trustees appointed by Randall’s will, wishing to maximize profits on the Manhattan estate, changed the site of the proposed institution to a 130-acre farm that they purchased on the north shore of Staten Island.  The first U.S. home for retired merchant seamen, Sailors’ Snug Harbor opened at last in 1833, when Greek Revival architecture was all the rage, with the cost of its operation amply covered by revenue from the property in Manhattan.
     At first the home consisted of a single building, the central building with the eight-columned portico, but in time other buildings were added.  The five adjacent temple-like structures housed dormitories, the kitchen, the dining hall, a reading room, and other facilities; other buildings in Greek Revival, Beaux Arts, Italianate, and Victorian style were added elsewhere on the property, which became a completely self-sustaining operation, including a farm that let the residents provide their own food, and a cemetery.  All were welcome there, except for alcoholics and those with a contagious disease or immoral character.  The home began with 37 retired seamen, but over time it grew to house a thousand, including American, English, Irish, Scotch, Dutch, Prussian, and French residents, each of whom got a two suits a year from Brooks Brothers.  And if a resident was too feeble to walk to a nearby brewery, he could have his grog delivered to the home.  But neatness was the rule: each dormitory had a “captain” who kept things orderly.
     All was well until the mid-twentieth century, when Social Security and Medicare diminished the need for accommodations for aging seamen, and declining revenues led to the structures’ falling into disrepair and even to the demolition of some of them.  In the 1960s the trustees proposed to redevelop the site with high-rise buildings, but the city’s Landmarks Commission intervened to save the five Greek Revival buildings by declaring them landmarks.  In 1976 the trustees moved the institution to North Carolina and sold the site to the city.  In June of that year 30 seamen, a physician, a nurse, and three aides took a 14-hour bus ride to their new 8,000-acre home in North Carolina, joined later by 75 more seamen who got there by plane.  The Snug Harbor Cultural Center opened that same year, and in 2008 it merged with the Staten Island Botanical Garden to become the nonprofit Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden.  Meanwhile the Snug Harbor trustees, headquartered in Manhattan, continue to give financial aid to seamen throughout the country.
     Since on my first visit my friend and I explored only the Greek Revival buildings and a bit of the nearby grounds, we vowed to return in another season and explore the outlying grounds, some of whose features were installed after Snug Harbor ceased being a home for seamen.  Among them is the Connie Gretz Secret Garden with a labyrinth that she had never visited, which was financed by a stockbroker in memory of his deceased wife, and inspired by the garden in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s book, The Secret Garden.  Given my lifelong fascination with gardens, especially secret or forbidden ones (see chapter 42 in my book), at the mere mention of this one I was hooked at once.
     But what enticed us even more was the one-acre Chinese Scholar’s Garden.  Described as the only authentic classical Chinese garden in the U.S., it was built, without nails, by a team of forty Chinese craftsmen who spent a year in China assembling the components, and six months here installing them.  It is said to include magnificent rockery suggesting the mountains that inspired ancient poetry and paintings; a bamboo forest path; Chinese calligraphy; and a waterfall and pond.  Snug Harbor partnered with the city of New York, the Landscape Architecture Company of China, the local Chinese community, and volunteers to build the garden, which opened in 1999.
     The thought of this attraction reminded me of a smaller Chinese scholar’s garden at the Metropolitan Museum that I love, and conjured up fantasies of poet scholars communing in a most civilized manner in a place of solitude and calm.  My guide and I had hoped to visit this and other marvels in the spring, but schedule problems made us postpone our second trip until July, when we went on a fine, mild day, prepared to trek a bit and be enchanted by the secret garden as a prelude to the Chinese garden’s magic.
So what did we then see and do?  A host of things:
·      An herb garden where I saw lovage and other herbs·      A picturesque gazebo that we couldn’t enter but could view from the outside·      An esplanade that we walked the length of, enclosed by vegetation arching overhead·      A rose garden, though it was past the time to see roses at their peak·      A big lawn that we crossed as a shortcut, giving me the delicious experience of walking over an uneven grassy surface, which I hadn’t done in years·      A plant called acanthus with a long name I couldn’t pronounce, but that my companion, a gardener, recognized·      A plant called elephant ear, whose leaves, when fully grown, are the size and shape of an elephant’s ear·      The Connie Gretz Secret Garden, which loomed in the distance like a castle.
     The Secret Garden was meant above all as an attraction for children, but the inner child in both of us responded.  We entered through a monumental entrance resembling the tower of a castle, and then made our way through a labyrinth formed by hedges that was designed to teach children patience and perseverance in pursuit of a goal.  Patience and perseverance we showed plenty of, as we negotiated the maze, finally arriving at the center, where we sat for a few minutes on benches in a spot enclosed by boxwood, before making our way out.      Some parts of the park were nicely kept up by gardeners whom we saw busily (and sometimes noisily) at work, but other parts looked uncared-for and weedy – the result of a shortage of funds, my companion explained, and the lack of a central authority, different features being managed by different organizations.     And the supreme goal of our visit, the Chinese Scholar’s Garden, with a promise of “soothing waterfalls and quiet walkways”?  After a long trek we got there keen with anticipation and found it … shut.  Locked up, keep out, closed, and no date for reopening posted, probably because of a lack of funds.  This might have spoiled the visit, but there was too much else to see, for us to be downcast.  Maybe another time, if weather and funding permit, meaning the garden’s funding, not ours.  Even so, this trip was an idyllic excursion into a vast parkland full of attractions, some of which even on this second visit we never got to, on a perfect summer day.  And even if the Chinese Garden proved to be indeed forbidden, we did walk the esplanade, see elephant ear, and visit the Secret Garden and its labyrinth.  I recommend Snug Harbor to anyone interested in New York City history, Greek Revival architecture, or a quiet stroll through a vast parkland full of unusual attractions.  I got there by car, but it is readily accessible by a short bus ride from the ferry terminal at St. George.

     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



     Coming soon:  Who knows?
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder


     

250. Forbidden Zones: The Old Brewery, Trump Tower, and the Weeds

     There have always been forbidden zones in New York City – places of danger or places where you aren’t supposed to go.  Today they are ribboned off with yellow tape marked “caution … cuidado … caution …cuidado,” usually to keep us out of construction zones.  Or they are blocked off by wooden barricades to protect the path of a parade, or by signs saying HARD HAT AREA, DANGER, NO TRESPASSING, or by orange cones in front of sidewalk stairs leading down into the dark confines of a basement.  But these are a part of our daily existence as New Yorkers, and therefore not remarkable.  There have been other forbidden zones, more mysterious, more dangerous.
     In the mid-nineteenth century, when the gentile middle class lived in brownstones and Greek Revival homes not far removed from the slums where the “dangerous classes” wallowed in poverty and degradation, the Five Points district, named for the convergence of five streets in Lower Manhattan just a short walk east of Broadway, was considered the worst slum in the city, and in it, the Old Brewery was deemed the worst tenement. The neighborhood had a grog shop on every corner, while from the upstairs windows whores with painted faces called down to drunken sailors in the street.  Pigs ranged, dogs snarled, gangs lurked, children screamed.  Certainly it was no place for respectable citizens.
     The chipped walls of the Old Brewery loomed up like a huge toad splotched with warts across from Paradise Square, a triangle with six stunted trees, bricks and rubble, corncobs and manure, broken glass.  Running beside the building was a dark lane three feet wide known as Murderers’ Alley; another lane led to a large room known as the Den of Thieves, where some 75 men and women lived, crammed in together.  The Brewery was thought to harbor drunks and harlots, real and fake crippled beggars, and thugs for hire.  Into its maze of dark passageways burglars and their loot vanished, while the police feared to follow.  Rumors abounded of nightly killings there, of tunnels and hidden rooms, buried treasures, buried bodies.  If ever, for honest citizens, there was a forbidden zone, it was the Old Brewery.
     Which was why, in the early 1850s, the Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church decided not just to visit this district, but to establish a sabbath school for its ragged and unruly children, and to hold weekly temperance meetings in a mission room.  But this was not enough; a committee of visitation, composed of two respectable and very determined Methodist ladies, began visiting every house and family in the area, and even penetrated the Old Brewery, negotiating its creaky stairs to explore its dark cellars and passageways and attics, where they found prostitutes and drunks aplenty, and families living in squalor, but no nests of thieves, no murderers, no hints of buried bodies.  This was a gutsy undertaking for respectable ladies of that time, for whom good works through a church were the one adventure allowed, and the Methodist ladies were heeding the Biblical command to "go out into the highways and hedges" (Luke14:23), which for them meant the Old Brewery.

     And this was but a prelude to the ladies' real undertaking.  In 1852 they managed to buy the building and demolish it, so they could replace it with the Five Points Mission, a five-story brick building with a chapel, a schoolroom, and low-rent rooms for deserving families -- an enterprise that would be expanded in time and continue until the 1890s.  The Methodists had come to stay, and the forbidden zone was forbidden no more.

     Or was it?  When the demolition of the Old Brewery was under way in 1852, human bones were found in the cellars and within the walls, and some intruders managed to gain entrance into one cellar and dig up something buried there and make off with it.  So maybe the rumors of dark doings in the Old Brewery were not without foundation.
      And what forbidden zones are there today?  What if one looks upward?  That’s exactly what hundreds of passersby were doing on Wednesday afternoon, August 10, on Fifth Avenue in front of the 68-story Trump Tower at 56th Street, which contains luxury shops and apartments, including the Donald’s very own residence.  And what were they straining their necks to see?  The same thing that millions were watching on TV and in videos posted on Facebook and elsewhere: a young man in shorts and a T-shirt climbing up the façade of the towering edifice, evidently using suction cups and a harness to accomplish this amazing feat in broad daylight.  Which is, of course, a no-no; one isn’t supposed to go climbing up towers in mid-Manhattan.  But the climber was already up five stories before the police got a 911 call alerting them, and only when he had climbed 21 stories in all were two of New York’s Finest able to remove a glass panel and reach out, grab him, and pull him into the building, ending what had become a three-hour social media sensation.  
     And who was this intrepid climber?  Stephen Rogata, age 19, of Great Falls, Virginia, who had driven all the way from Virginia, checked into a cheap hotel on the Bowery the night before, then walked into the tower’s atrium, sneaked into a fenced-off area, and began his climb.  And why had he undertaken this stunt?  To get a personal meeting with Mr. Trump.  On Tuesday, August 9, he had explained his motives in a YouTube video in which he said he was an “independent researcher” willing to risk his life for a significant purpose; later he told police he wanted to give the Donald “secret information” relating to how he will govern, if elected.  Once secured, he was charged with felony reckless endangerment and misdemeanor trespassing, and taken to Bellevue Hospital Center for psychological evaluation.  He endangered not only himself but others, an assistant D.A. insisted at the time of his arraignment on August 17, since during his climb several items fell out of his backpack, including a laptop computer, which might have injured bystanders on the sidewalk below and emergency responders.  At the arraignment Mr. Rogata appeared through a video link to Bellevue, where he is still under psychiatric care, and where his parents have visited him.  The judge set his bail at $10,000 cash or $5,000 bond.
      This stunt recalls the 25-year-old Frenchman Philippe Petit’s amazing high-wire walk with a balancing pole between the Twin Towers in 1974, when he did eight passes on the wire to the astonishment of the onlookers on the street a quarter of a mile below.  This feat led to his immediate arrest and then his release in exchange for doing a free performance for children in Central Park, where he did a high-wire walk over the Turtle Pond.  An overnight celebrity, M. Petit stuck around over the years to do other less astonishing performances; I saw him several times performing as a mime at Sheridan Square, where he competed for attention with a mixed-race tap-dancing couple, and a woman who sang opera to recorded music.  Whether Mr. Rogata will likewise become a celebrity remains to be seen.  My first impression is less of a death-defying performer than a young man harboring delusions, but time will tell.
     As for the Donald, he was away campaigning to save the nation.  Hearing of the incident, he tweeted, “Great job today by the NYPD in protecting the people and saving the climber.”  But he is no stranger to lawsuits.  Will he sue?  One hopes not.  Mr. Rogata seems like a rather trivial target, and harmless; he should be let alone.
     A forbidden zone of a very different kind has emerged in the reed-choked interior of Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach, Queens, where Karina Vetrano, an attractive 30-year-old woman, went for an evening jog along a three-mile fire trail on Tuesday, August 2, and never came out.  Her parents reported her missing, and her father and the police began searching the area.  That evening her father found her body face down near the trail.  She had been sexually assaulted, and strangled with such ferocity that the killer’s hand prints were visible on her neck.
     The region is known to local residents as the Weeds, an isolated area where homeless people camp, and teen-agers ride illegal all-terrain vehicles and party.  It has long been said in Howard Beach, “You don’t go in the Weeds by yourself.”  The police have offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the killer, and the victim’s family have made a novel offer to the killer himself: if he surrenders and confesses, the more than $250,000 they have raised through donations to a reward fund will go to anyone he chooses.  Meanwhile the police have asked men frequenting the area to voluntarily provide oral DNA swabs, so they can compare them with DNA evidence left by the killer and eliminate suspects.  They have received many tips and are following up on several, but so far no arrest has been made.
     The fire trail is lined by tall invasive reeds known as phragmites, which I know well from the nearby Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where it grows thick like a jungle and can attain a height of 16 feet.  It is almost impenetrable; to clear it so as to create or maintain a fire trail, requires machetes.  Until now, I thought phragmites posed a danger only if, in a dry season, it caught fire; at Jamaica Bay I have seen acres of blackened stubble, and once, in the distance, smoke from a spreading fire.  I have seen phragmites also in a damp area at Van Cortland Park, where there are narrow paths leading deep into it – paths I would just as soon not follow.
     Even before the recent murder, the Weeds at Howard Beach seemed dangerous, for last summer a local resident was found there hanging from a tree, a suicide.   Dog walkers now avoid the area, not to mention runners.  Truly, a forbidden zone, and for good reason.
     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




     Coming soon:  Maybe Rose, the quintessential Brooklynite.  Maybe Sailors' Snug Harbor, Staten Island.  Maybe both, but separately, in time.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

249. Wall Street: A Roman Orgy, Greed, and "Bro Talk"

     Wall Street, that citadel of wealth, has always had a bad press.  Back in 1849 George G. Foster, a New York Tribune journalist, in his anonymously published New York in Slices, hailed it as the great purse-string of America, but went on to decry “the million deceits and degradations and hypocrisies played off there as in some ghostly farce.” 
Wall Street!  Who shall fathom the depth and the rottenness of thy mysteries?  Has Gorgon passed through thy winding labyrinth, turning with his smile every thing to stone – hearts as well as houses?  Art thou not the valley of riches told of by the veracious Sinbad, where millions of diamonds lay glistening like fiery snow, but which was guarded on all sides by poisonous serpents, whose bite was death and whose contact was pollution?
Foster knew his Greek mythology and Arabian Nights, but he also knew Wall Street.  And this was in 1849, before the likes of Daniel Drew and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould – remembered today as robber barons – had hit their manly stride, manipulating and convulsing markets in their lust for riches and their delight in turning Wall Street and foreign markets upside down.
     Of course all that was back in the nineteenth century, before even a hint of government regulation, back when laissez-faire was played to the absolute limit.  And today?  Let’s have a look.
     By “Wall Street,” as I explained in the previous post, I don’t mean just the street itself, but the whole financial community, whether headquartered literally on Wall Street or in some more remote location, including even—to the indignation of New Yorkers – the barrens of New Jersey, that decidedly unimperial hinterland across the Hudson that constantly schemes to entice businesses away from the Empire State, even while insidiously laying claim to the Statue of Liberty and sending us its hordes not of immigrants but mosquitoes.
     So what about Wall Street, in this larger sense, today?  Let’s begin with Tyco International, a security systems company whose CEO and CFO (chief financial officer) were found guilty here in 2005 of stealing more than $150 million from the firm.  And what had Dennis Kozlowski, the CEO, done with these ill-gotten funds?  Here’s a sampling that came to light at his trial:
·      A $30 million Fifth Avenue apartment·      A $6,000 gold-and-burgundy shower curtain·      A $15,000 dog umbrella stand·      Paintings by Renoir and Monet worth millions·      A multimillion-dollar oceanfront estate on Nantucket·      $1 million in 2001 to pay half the cost of the 40thbirthday party for the second Mrs. Kozlowski on the island of Sardinia, a party featuring helmeted gladiators to welcome arriving guests, toga-clad waiters crowned with fig wreaths, wine served in chalices, and an ice statue of Michelangelo’s David pissing vodka.  (Mrs. Kozlowski later filed for divorce.)
     Born in Newark, N.J., in 1946 to second-generation Polish-Americans who worked for the city, Mr. Kozlowski was a good example, if not of rags to riches, at least of a rise from modest beginnings to dazzling financial success.  Photos of him show a man in his sixties with an oval-shaped head, quite bald, and a hearty grin.  His lavish life style came to symbolize the decadent luxury of high-living Wall Street and hastened his downfall, since videos of the party were shown to jurors, who saw dancing women and near-naked male models cavorting with guests, and a beaming Kozlowski promising guests a “fun week” with “eating, drinking, whatever.  All the things we’re best known for.” 
     Mr. Kozlowsi’s celebrated “Roman orgy” recalls impresario and financier Jim Fisk’s reputed revels with scantily clad Opera House dancers and free-flowing champagne in the late 1860s, except that those revels may never have happened, whereas Mr. Kozlowski’s are well documented.  The famous shower curtain landed him on the cover of the New York Post under the headline “OINK, OINK.” 
     In a 2007 interview he maintained his innocence, arguing that jurors, hearing that he was making $100,000 a year, must have thought, “ ‘All that money?  He must have done something wrong.’ I think it’s as simple as that.”  After serving eight years, he was paroled in January 2014 and now lives modestly in a two-bedroom rental overlooking the East River with a nondescript white shower curtain and wife #3. 
     But there’s more to Wall Street than living high on the hog.  Cliché though it is, how about greed?  In our capitalist economy, it can take you very far.  My post #150, “Wall Street Greed and Addiction” (October 26, 2014), draws on reminiscences of former hedge-fund trader Sam Polk, published as the article “For the Love of Money” in the New York Times of January 19, 2014.  When, at 22, Polk first walked onto a trading floor in Boston to begin a summer internship, he was dazzled – not by a floor of screaming, frenzied traders, as it was not so long ago – but by the glowing TV screens, high-tech computer monitors, and phone turrets of today.  Instantly he knew that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
     Three weeks after his internship ended, his girlfriend dumped him, saying, “I don’t like what you’ve become.”  But when, now a trader, he got his first end-of-the-year bonus of $40,000, he was thrilled until, one week later, another trader only four years his senior was hired away by another outfit for $900,000 a year, 22 times the size of his bonus.  Envy consumed him, and the thought of how much money was available.  Four years later, at 25, he was making $1.75 million a year, but he began to notice the greed and selfishness of most traders, and realized that, for all his outsized salary, he wasn’t doing anything useful or necessary to society.  So he got out.
     But he was addicted to greed.  He would wake up in the middle of the night, terrified by the thought of running out of money, of later regretting his giving up his one chance to be someone important.  But in time he overcame his addiction and began speaking in jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, and doing other public services to help the underprivileged.  The implied conclusion of his story:  Can Wall Street greed become an addiction?  The answer: yes!
     And from the same reformed hedge-fund trader, Sam Polk, came a more recent article in the Times of July 10, 2016, entitled “How Wall Street Bro Talk Keeps Women Down.”  If the previous post on the difficulties of women wanting a Wall Street career needs confirmation, here it is.  Polk tells of going to dinner with a director and client when he was a bond trader at Bank of America, and hearing the client announce, once the waitress was out of earshot, “I’d like to bend her over the table and give her some meat.”  Polk forced a smile, later fumed because he hadn’t said anything about the comment.  Having heard men objectify women all his life, Polk asserts that this everyday sexism was nothing compared to the “bro talk” he witnessed on Wall Street.  Women have written articles and challenged the norms, but the men have done little or nothing, preferring to be in the “in” crowd, to enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded males.  Success on Wall Street depends on “fitting in,” on becoming one of the guys.  For Polk, Wall Street is not a swashbuckling, take-no-prisoners culture, but a culture of brutal conformity; not to conform is to throw away millions of dollars in future earnings.  Which means, I suspect, that the culture won’t change easily, or soon.

      A personal aside:  I have known since grade school that men talk differently among themselves, broaching matters not mentioned in mixed company.  I learned this when my father took me to his gun club, where sportsmen gathered for trap shooting.  Every once in a while my father would announce to some of his acquaintances there, "I heard a good one the other day."  Then, in a lowered voice so I couldn't hear, he would tell his story to a circle of listeners, who would soon erupt in laughter.  Yes, men at all ages talk differently among themselves.  By my early teens I knew that I could talk books and theater with my mother, and crime, sex, and politics with my father.  But what Sam Polk reports about the "bro talk" of Wall Street seems to cross some hidden line.

     Does the Donald pay taxes?  This is the question posed by the lead article of the Business Section of the New York Times of August 12, 2016.  Of course we don't know, since he hasn't released his tax returns, but the article makes it clear that, as a big-time real estate operator, he could quite legally pay little or no taxes.  Why?  Because the tax code is full of overly generous tax breaks for developers, and he'd be a fool not to take advantage of them.  Which simply supplements my post #157 of December 14, 2014, "Taxes: Who Pays Them and Who Doesn't."  As for who doesn't (mentioned at the end of the post), you might be surprised.
     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
 



     Coming soon:  Forbidden Zones.  What places, past and present, have been denied to New Yorkers, and why.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder






     

248. Women of Wall Street

     What I meant to be a single post on Wall Street (again!) got longer and longer, and finally split in two.  So this post is about women on Wall Street.  The next one will be about Wall Street otherwise – not a history, just a quick take on my impression of it today.  It might be more logical to do them in reverse, but let’s face it, these girls kind of grabbed me.  Have you heard of Abby Joseph Cohen?  Or Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin (whom I’ve covered before)?  Or Hetty Green, the “Witch of Wall Street”?  Hang on, here they come. 
     Wall Street is thought to be mostly a male world where financial Titans, or would-be financial Titans, maneuver, scheme, or claw their way to success, “success” meaning a vast fortune, two or three beautiful wives (sequentially), and national or international repute.  But there are women on Wall Street, too, as this post will make clear.  But first, a word of caution: by “Wall Street” I don’t mean just that little street that begins on the west across Broadway from Trinity Church, whose pious chimes sound futilely on the financial brouhaha, and then runs east a few blocks to the East River, where sailing ships once thrust their prows over a busy waterfront jammed with carts and piles of merchandise being received from or shipped abroad.  By “Wall Street” I mean the whole financial community, whether headquartered on Wall Street or not.
     And the women of Wall Street?  Years ago I used to read, in Barron’s, the self-proclaimed leading source for market news and analysis, the semiannual survey of a dozen or so leading analysts of the day, who gave their views on the current and future state of the markets, what securities to buy or sell, and so forth.  To be among the dozen so chosen was certainly an honor, and usually there were two or three women at the top of their field, and often fairly young and attractive.  But my favorite was Abby Joseph Cohen, who is now a partner and senior U.S. investment strategist at – of all places – Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid of my post      Abby was no glamour puss; photos showed a woman in her early forties, New York-born and obviously Jewish, with short, curly hair and glasses, a Brooklyn mama (she was in fact from Queens), married, with two daughters.  Nothing stylish about her; she seemed like one of us.  Except, of course, for her Street smarts, meaning Wall Street smarts: her uncanny ability to predict the raging bull market of the 1990s, which won her national, if not international, acclaim.  Alas she was a perennial optimist and bull, and as such failed to predict the disastrous bear market of 2000, and the even more disastrous crash of 2008. 
     Well, who’s perfect?  I liked her anyway; she struck me as being for real, down-to-earth, a sort of Bella Abzug of finance.   And Ladies Home Journal likes her, too; in 2001 it named her as one of the thirty most powerful women in America.  And Abby’s advice today, at age 63?  U.S. stocks are the best place to be; the S&P 500, widely seen as the best indicator of the general market, should end the year at 2100.  That prediction was made in January 2016, with the S&P around 1800; the S&P 500 is now at 2166.  Not bad, Abby; but the end of the year is still far off, and in an election year at that.
     Wall Street has always been male-dominated, but even in Victorian times some women invested on their own.  During the Civil War boom in the North, when the public flocked to Wall Street to speculate in stocks and gold, fancy carriages were seen there with affluent women reclining on cushions inside, while sending a servant to fetch the latest prices.  (No Internet in those days, and no telephone either.)  One wonders how their spouses felt, when they reported dramatic gains in the market.  And one wonders how they fared when the boom, as all booms must, went bust.
     Those women were only investors, but in 1870 Wall Street was astonished when Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, two fiery feminist reformers of the day, opened a brokerage office and began trading stocks; gentlemen flocked to get a close look at what the press labeled “the bewitching brokers” (they were, in fact, young and attractive).  But how, many wondered, could these two young women do so well on the Street, where so many males went bust?  The answer came when a reporter interviewed them in their suite at the fashionable Hoffman House and noticed a portrait on the parlor wall of Commodore Vanderbilt, the richest man in the country, and under it a framed motto: “To Thy Cross I Cling.”   Old Eighty Millions was obviously giving them tips and advice, until their shenanigans caused him to distance himself, at which point their income plunged, and they moved to less stylish quarters and ceased to be a wonder on Wall Street.  (For the full story of the fiery twosome, see posts #39 and #40, December 23 and 30, 2012, or chapter 14 in my book.)  Hardly an encouraging sign for the future of women on Wall Street.
     But then came Hetty Green (1834-1916), the so-called “Witch of Wall Street,” who was born Henrietta Robinson of a wealthy Quaker whaling family in New Bedford, Massachusetts, from whom she inherited a large fortune.  An only child, in her early years her father and grandfather taught her to invest shrewdly, reading her stock market prices the way other parents read their children bedtime stories.  Suspicious of men eager to marry her because of her growing wealth, in 1867, at age 33, she married Edward Henry Green of a wealthy Vermont family, but only after making him sign a prenuptial agreement renouncing all rights to her money, which shows that she was one smart cookie.  They would have a son and a daughter.
     Moving into her husband’s home in Manhattan, Hetty began investing on her own, devising a strategy she stuck to all her life: conservative investments cash reserves to see her through market fluctuations a cool head during market turmoilThe result: she engaged in real estate deals, bought and sold railroads, in bad times made loans to banks and municipalities, raked in millions.  Had our big banks followed her strategy, the financial convulsion of 2009 would have been much less severe, or maybe wouldn’t have happened at all.
     But what kind of a woman was Hetty Green?  Photographs show a hefty older woman, full-faced with a solemn look, no frills whatsoever (she was raised a Quaker), always dressed in black, which helps account for her name “the Witch of Wall Street.”  She was stingy too, and it became legendary.  Worth millions, she rode in an old carriage, wore a ragged old black dress and underclothes until they were worn out, lunched on graham crackers or dry oatmeal, never turned on the heat or hot water.  It is said that she once spent half the night searching her carriage for a lost postage stamp worth two cents.  But when, during the Panic of 1907, the city of New York appealed to her for a loan, she wrote a check for $1.1 million and took her payments in short-term bonds.  A widow, in her later years she moved about from one small unheated apartment to another in Brooklyn Heights and Hoboken, New Jersey, hoping to escape the notice of the press and tax collectors.  But in a rare interview she said,
              “I am not a hard woman.  But because I do not have a secretary to announce every kind act I perform, I am called close and mean and stingy.  I am a Quaker, and I am trying to live up to the tenets of my of my faith.  That is why I dress plainly and live quietly.  No other kind of life would please me.”
What kind acts she ever performed has escaped the scrutiny of historians.
     In 1916, at age 81, Hetty Green died at her son’s home in New York, reputedly of apoplexy or stroke after arguing with a maid about the virtues of skimmed milk.  Estimates of her wealth ranged from $100 to $200 million ($2.17 to $4.35 billion in 2016 dollars), making her the richest woman of the Gilded Age.  She is buried with her husband in Vermont.
     Yes, there have been women on Wall Street, and some of them, then and now, have done remarkably well.  On July 29 of this year a financial thriller film entitled Equity opened, showing women not as demeaned assistants or hookers, but as female executives on Wall Street, including a heroine who announces early on, “I like money.”  And who invested in the film, so that it could be made?  Some 25 female investors, many of whom appeared in a photo in a New York Times article of July 24, some of them youngish and attractive, some of them older (it takes time to accumulate money); none of them an Abby Joseph Cohen, much less a Hetty Green, all of them well dressed and stylish. 
     These investors told of what an uphill fight it was for them to succeed on Wall Street.  They had to prove they could do the job before being hired, whereas male applicants got the job so they could prove they could do it.  And there was always the thought that they would marry one of the partners and be gone.  Just as in politics, a woman on Wall Street has to be tough … but not too tough.  And in the 1990s it was understood that, if married, you wouldn’t have a child until you were managing director; today, younger female associates have children, but it may diminish their chances for promotion.  The heroine of Equity is single and childless, but some of the other women in the film have to deal with the problem.  The status of women on Wall Street has improved, said one female investor, but “it still has a long way to go.”
     As for the film, I haven’t seen it, but reviews vary.  Says one, it “proves that the women of Wall Street can be just as cold-heartedly corrupt as the boys.”  Says another: it “invites us to slot its characters into stereotypical frames and then breaks the glass.”  And another: it “tries to draw attention to the struggles unique to being a woman working in the cutthroat financial industry.” 
     So what kind of woman wants to make it big on Wall Street today?  Will she become addicted to money and greed, like so many of the males in the field?  Time will tell.


     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.






The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



 



     Coming soon: Wall Street, its bad press, greed and addiction, "bro talk," etc.
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

247. Robert Morgenthau: Crime in the Suites and the Streets

     A New York Times article of July 17, 2016, interviewed Ida van Lindt, a Brooklyn-born secretary of a prominent New York attorney.  The accompanying photograph shows Ms. Van Lindt to be a remarkably youthful woman of 77 with a winning smile and long blond hair, wearing an attractive black dress revealing shapely arms.  She has worked for her present employer for 41 years, occupying a small office outside his much larger one, currently with a law firm on West 52nd Street in Manhattan.  “I’m his office wife,” she says with a laugh, for she organizes his private and public lives, keeping track of doctors’ appointments, lunch dates, and everything else.  She knows what to order him for lunch, signs his checks and, since he doesn’t mess with computers, prints his e-mails out for him.  Clearly, her employer is of another era, wanting everything on hard copy, so she keeps an electric typewriter handy for checks and other tasks. 
     Miss Van Lindt married twice, both times to lawyers, and her current spouse is now in private practice and glad to have her working as well.  She’ll stick to her job as long as she can, for she doubts if her boss could get used to another secretary.  And who is that boss?  Robert M. Morgenthau, the perennially reelected and almost legendary district attorney of New York County from 1975 until his retirement in 2009, and who now, at age 97, still works for a private law firm, sitting on boards and working on special cases.
     Robert M. Morgenthau was born in New York City in 1919 to a prominent Jewish family that had emigrated here from Germany in 1866.  His father was none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a name that I grew up hearing almost as often as the President’s.  The family home was near FDR’s Hyde Park estate, and Robert Morgenthau grew up knowing the President himself.  Needless to say, he was destined to great things.  After a wartime stint in the Navy and graduating from Yale Law School, he came to New York and practiced corporate law. 
     His family’s connections paid off repeatedly.  Appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, he resigned this federal office to run as the Democratic candidate for governor in 1962, only to be defeated by the Republican incumbent, Nelson Rockefeller.  He was then reappointed U.S. Attorney and served throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, until forced out by Richard Nixon in 1969.  After that he continued in private practice until 1974, when, at age 55, he was elected District Attorney of New York County, following the death of Frank Hogan, who had held the job for 30 years, ever since Thomas Dewey’s reign as a prosecutor of organized crime.  Elected to a full term in 1977, Morgenthau was re-elected seven times, and not opposed in a general election from 1985 until 2005.  He had found his niche.  And with him from then on, as secretary, was Ms. Van Lindt, who had served Hogan for 17 years and enjoyed a father/daughter relationship with him. 
     Building a loyal team of subordinates was essential to Morgenthau’s success, though there was a steady turnover.  Every year, when some 60 assistant prosecutors left for fairer pastures, some 2,000 applicants would hope to become one of the 554 attorneys employed by his $68-million office.  Each prospective hire was interviewed by Morgenthau himself.  He was open to graduates of schools other than the Ivy League, but was willing to hire the sons of well-connected families as well, since he himself had a father who was famous.  After a stint with him, his assistants went on to become at least 25 criminal-court judges, four federal judges in the Southern District, three U.S. attorneys, and most of the top criminal defense attorneys of the time.
     Though he held what was technically a local office, he became known nationwide for his determination to prosecute “crime in the suites,” meaning white-collar crime, as well as crime in the streets.   When, early in his career, he convicted three accountants who had certified misleading financial reports for Continental Vending Machines, it shook up the financial world, for until then it was a common practice to go easy on accountants and lawyers; prosecution was considered too harsh.  But the case established a precedent that accountants could be held criminally liable for such actions, even if their reports technically satisfied accounting standards.  And the case was no fluke; he would be going after white-collar offenders throughout his lengthy career.  Many sensitive toes would be stepped on, but he told his prosecutors, “Just follow the case wherever it goes.”  Numerous prosecutions followed, though not always with convictions; critics said he focused too much on white-collar crime, letting it eat up a disproportionate amount of his budget.  But he was determined not to go primarily after poor minority youths, while bankers and executives wallowed in ill-gotten wealth.
     But it was crime in the streets that obsessed the public.  I remember those dark days of the 1970s, when apartment dwellers had bars on their windows and a police lock on their doors.  My partner Bob, coming home late at night from an opera, was nearly mugged in the vestibule of our building; having his key to the inner door handy, he was through that door as the mugger, carrying some object in his hand, entered the vestibule, too late by seconds to catch his intended victim. 
     I served as a juror on a number of criminal cases in those days and can state that, while defense attorneys might get flamboyant and dramatic, Morgenthau’s young assistant D.A.s did not.  Instead, they presented their case with quiet efficiency, marshaling facts that forced the jury to convict, regardless of their sympathy for the defendant, or their frustration at not knowing more about all those involved in or witnessing the crime.  Which was indicative of Morgenthau’s whole operation.  The city might be turbulent, but he himself was not.  His massive operation proceeded with machinelike efficiency and got results.  No wonder he got re-elected time after time.
     Many of the cases prosecuted by his office were highly publicized nationwide, as for instance these three, which I vividly recall:
·      Mark David Chapman, 1981.  Arrested for the murder of John Lennon, whom he shot outside the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of 20 years to life.  He has since been denied parole many times.·      Bernhard Goetz, 1987.  I remember clearly how in December 1984 the city was electrified by the news that a white man being mugged by four young black men on a subway car had whipped out a .38 revolver and shot all four, then fled the scene.  “They picked on the wrong guy,” was the common reaction, jubilant, of New Yorkers obsessed with crime.  It wasn’t a question of white vs. black, but victim vs. assailants, and this victim had done what others only dreamed of.  Nine days later Bernhard Goetz, age 37, surrendered to the police and in time was charged with attempted murder, assault, and other offenses.  A jury found him not guilty of all charges except carrying an unlicensed firearm, for which he served eight months.·      The Central Park jogger, 1989.  A young investment banker, she was assaulted and raped while jogging in the park; left in a coma, she was unable to identify her attacker.  That night a gang of teenagers had engaged in what they called “wilding,” assaulting anyone they encountered in the park.  Five young men, four blacks and one Hispanic, were arrested and confessed to a number of assaults and being accomplices in the rape, but denied themselves committing the rape.  Charged with assault, rape, and attempted murder, they were convicted on most of the charges and sentenced to from 5 to 15 years in prison.  The crime had shocked the public, and the convictions were generally applauded.
These were crimes of violence and were widely reported.  And what do I remember of the white-collar crimes pursued by Robert M. Morgenthau?  Nothing, nothing at all.
     But there is more to say about Goetz and the jogger case.  Goetz insisted that the four young men were trying to mug him, so he shot them in self-defense; they said they were only panhandling.  Who to believe?  Goetz garnered more sympathy when he told of being attacked by three teenagers in a subway station in 1981, two of whom escaped.  Arrested, the other one was quickly bailed and blithely departed, while Goetz and the arresting officer were stuck in the stationhouse, waiting while the wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly. 
     When he shot the four young men in 1984, Goetz noticed that one of the four, seated nearby, seemed free of injuries. “You don’t look so bad, here’s another,” he said and fired a fifth shot that severed the young man’s spinal cord and left him paralyzed.  The public were all trying Goetz in the court of their mind, and in my court that fifth bullet was critical; with it, Goetz ceased to be on the defensive and himself became an assailant.  Years later, after Goetz’s release, the paralyzed young man sued Goetz and won $43 million in damages, at which point Goetz declared bankruptcy.  After that he dropped from sight for a while, ran for mayor in 2001 and lost badly, and  reappeared in the news in November 2013, arrested for selling an undercover police officer $30 worth of marijuana, charges that were later dropped.
     The aftermath of the Central Park jogger case was more troubled and controversial.  In 2002 another Hispanic male, a convicted serial rapist and murderer serving a life sentence, confessed to raping the jogger, and his DNA confirmed his guilt.  It turned out that the DNA of the five convicted men had not matched the rapist’s DNA, which implied a single attacker.  Learning of the confession, Morgenthau urged the court to vacate the convictions of the five, which it did.  Once freed, the five convicted men sued the city for malicious prosecution and other charges, but under Mayor Bloomberg the city – quite shamelessly, in my opinion – refused to settle.  When Bill de Blasio became mayor, he supported the settlement, and the city settled the case in 2014 for $41 million.  But the five men then sought another $52 million from the city.  Meanwhile none other than Donald Trump called the settlement a disgrace and opined that the five were probably guilty.
     In the face of these controversies, it’s easy to forget that Morgenthau was prosecuting white-collar crime as well, as for instance:
·      BCCI, 1991.  The Bank of Credit and Commerce International, an international bank with head offices in Karachi, Pakistan, and London, was indicted on charges of fraud, money laundering, and larceny.  The bank’s liquidators pleaded guilty to all charges and forfeited all the bank’s U.S. assets.·      Tyco International, 2005.  The CEO and chief financial officer of this security systems company were found guilty of stealing more than $150 million from the company.  The CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, became a symbol of corporate greed for using Tyco money to buy a $30 million Fifth Avenue apartment with a $6,000 shower curtain, a $15,000 umbrella stand, and paintings by Monet and Renoir.  Sentenced in 2005, Kozlowski was granted parole in January 2014 and still insisted he was innocent.  The CFO, Mark Swartz, was also granted parole and released in January 2014.
     The man behind all these headline-grabbing cases lived quietly – an almost boring life, being devoid of scandal.  By his first wife, whom he met in college, he had five children.  She died of cancer in 1972, and five years later he married Lucinda Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist 27 years his junior.  They were opposites.  Raised as a middle-class Christian, she has described herself as “in hippie mode, and a radical and a war protester,” convinced that money corrupted the rich.  She had interviewed him and at first was a bit intimidated, but this patrician lawyer with a slight smile also fascinated her.  When they dated, his broadmindedness was apparent, though once, when they visited some hippie friends of hers, he insisted on leaving because their hosts’ shower curtain was an authentic American flag – in poor taste, he thought, and she agreed. 
     Morgenthau’s children by his previous marriage resented his second wife’s taking him away from them, though in time the tensions eased.  And with her new husband the “hippie” wife was soon meeting notables like President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan, socialite philanthropist Brooke Astor, Senator Ted Kennedy, New York Mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani, and a host of others.  But in spite of the socializing, and her continuing to work as a journalist, she bore her new husband, now in his sixties, two children.  When not in their residence on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, they retreat to a home in Martha’s Vineyard, or to Fishkills Farm in Dutchess County, a commercial farm owned by the Morgenthau clan and now run by his youngest son, Josh.
     By the time he was in his eighties, the prosecutor needed a hearing aid and walked with a shuffle.  “Is he past his prime?” some of the staff would whisper, when his office lost a significant case.  But the white-haired prosecutor remained immersed in major cases and showed no signs of slowing down.  And when he won his eighth term in 2001, his staff that year got convictions in two-thirds of the 577 criminal cases that went to jury trials.  In 2005 the Times reluctantly declined to endorse him for re-election, feeling he was too stuck in his ways, but he was re-elected anyway.  “I’m too old to retire,” he quipped.  Said his daughter Jenny, “The man has a steel-trap mind.” 
     In his later years he was up at 6:45 a.m. to have breakfast with his youngest daughter.  Then he would walk around the reservoir in Central Park or, in bad weather, do a treadmill at home.  One day a week a trainer would come to his East Side apartment; the other six, he lifted weights on his own.  Then to the office, where he worked until 6:30 or 7:00 p.m.  If he didn’t go out in the evening, he would read voraciously, usually books about the Holocaust and World War II, or watch Law & Order on TV.  By 11:00 p.m. he was usually in bed.

     And today?  Having finally retired in 2009, thinking he was indeed too old, he goes daily to his office at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz at 51 West 52ndStreet, a prestigious law firm known for its skill in mergers and acquisitions and in business litigation.  There he is an “of counsel,” meaning he is connected with the firm without being a partner or associate.  “He’s the type of person who has to work to live,” his wife Lucinda explained, when, soon after retirement as prosecutor, he joined the firm.  He was welcomed there for his wealth of experience, contacts, and judgment, though he promised to bring something else as well: tomatoes and eggs at wholesale prices, from the Fishkills Farm upstate. 

     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.






The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


 


     Coming soon:  Probably Wall Street -- again!  Greed, addiction, flamboyant overspending -- you name it.  Because Wall Street is always with us.  After that, maybe the Four Seasons, where I never set foot, feeling no need of a "power lunch."
     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

246. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Feminist Romantic

This post will begin with a limerick that I encountered recently:
Edna St. Vincent MillayWas the night-burning flame of her day;She lured all her loversAnd significant others                      To bed, and then tossed them away.
     Limericks aren’t the greatest poetry, but this one is an appropriate introduction to Edna, whose personal life was, to put it mildly, irregular.  Born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892, she and her two younger sisters were raised in poverty by their mother, a nurse, who divorced her schoolteacher husband for financial irresponsibility.  Edna was given the middle name “St. Vincent” because, shortly before her birth, an uncle’s life had been saved at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York.  So there she was, right from birth, linked to Greenwich Village, where she would later migrate and achieve fame. 
     The family moved about in Maine and finally settled on the property of the mother’s aunt in Camden, just up the coast from Rockland.  I know Rockland, where I always stayed en route to vacations on Monhegan Island, off midcoast Maine, and was made aware that one of its few claims to fame is as the birthplace of Edna St. Vincent.  But she didn’t stay there long, and to my knowledge never went back. Today Rockland has an incipient glimmer of sophistication, and Camden certainly does as well, but for a restless young talent like hers, those towns back then were less than stimulating; they never could have held Edna long.
     Neither did Maine.  Already noted for her outspoken ways in high school, she went on to Vassar, where her budding literary talent, which her mother had encouraged from the start, was accompanied by a number of sexual relationships with other girls.  (Which, in a girls’ school, is about all that’s available.)  Older than the other girls and a born rule-breaker, she was often summoned to the office of President Henry Noble MacCracken, who reprimanded her and limited her privileges for infractions.  Once, an hour after she had reported sick, he looked out his office window and saw her trying to kick out the light in a chandelier on top of an arch, a rather lively exercise, he informed her, for one so taken with illness.  “Prexy,” she said with a solemn look, “at the moment of your class, I was in pain with a poem.”  Infractions continued, but he never expelled her because, as he explained to her, he didn’t want a “banished Shelley” on his record.  (The poet Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for promoting atheism.)  “On those terms,” Millay replied, “I think I will continue to live in this hell-hole.” 
     Even so she was finally suspended, which meant that, with graduation approaching, she couldn’t receive her degree.  When the faculty signed a petition urging that she be allowed to receive her degree, the president relented, but forbade her to participate in any commencement exercises, including the singing of a hymn she had composed for the occasion.
     Graduating in 1917, she made a beeline for Greenwich Village – not the high-rent Village of today, a citadel of middle-class professionals with a sprinkling of richies in luxury apartments, but the low-rent Village of yore, a picturesque mix of Italian working-class immigrants, would-be anarchists, joyous mifits, budding writers, starving hopeful artists, shocking specimens of the New Woman, other challengers of the status quo, and weekend tourists who came to have a look at the crazies.
     Soon after arriving and being desperate for money, she got a part in a one-act farce being staged by one of the Village’s small experimental theaters, and fell into the arms of the author/director, who found her part chorus girl, part nun, part Botticelli Venus.  The chorus girl and Venus won out, and soon his protégée was having sex with every man in sight.  There was something about this freckled redhead from midcoast Maine via Vassar that made every man who laid eyes on her fall rapturously in love.  Her attractiveness is indisputable, but photographs give no hint of it.  Maybe it was her luminous green eyes, maybe the glint of her copper-toned, short, bobbed hair. 
     Settled with her sister Norma in rooms on Waverly Place, she set out to be the Newest of New Women, that shocking breed avidly chronicled by the press, who caroused with men in bars, talked foully, and even smoked.  The transition took a bit of effort.  Years later Norma told how the two of them practiced profanity, reciting a litany of words that scraped their genteel ears, as they sat darning socks (yes, these free-spirited damsels darned socks): “Needle in, shit.  Needle out, piss.  Needle in, fuck.  Needle out, cunt.”  Soon they had a rich four-letter vocabulary and, with effort, grew easy with its use.  Their life in the Village thereafter was, in Edna’s own words, “very, very poor and very, very merry.”
     What was she like in those days?  Her friend Dorothy Thompson, a noted journalist, described her as mercurial: whimsical sometimes, sometimes petulant and imperious, sometimes stormy, sometimes “a lost and tragic soul,” but always intelligent and able to evoke “the most passionate and tender love.”  Not one easy to live with, it would seem, which was just as well, since she had no intention of settling down for long with anyone.
     When not wreaking amorous havoc among Villagers, Edna St. Vincent was writing plays and poetry.  While still in school she had won acclaim for her poem “Renascence,” written when she was only nineteen.  In rhymed octosyllables, it describes a succession of moods that the narrator experiences while standing on a mountaintop and looking out from there, moods that include an evocation of death and burial, followed by rebirth or “renascence.”  Recently I have reread it several times and think it her finest work.  The volume I have is my partner Bob’s first edition, dated 1917, containing “Renascence” and other poems, which his free-thinking father gave Bob when he was still in high school.
     Her next volume brought her notoriety:
                           My candle burns at both ends;                           It will not last the night;
                           But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—                           It gives a lovely light!
Published in 1920, A Few Figs from Thistles candidly expressed female sexuality and what today we call “feminism.”  Hailed by the press as a shining example of the liberated Village woman, Edna St. Vincent gloried in it; more lovers flocked, some of whom even proposed, only to be resolutely rejected.  It was the field she wanted to play, not a closeted twosome, and women were welcome, too.  A tomboy, she had been called “Vincent” by her family when she was growing up.
     In December 1919 her experimental play Aria da Capo played to sold-out audiences at the Provincetown Playhouse.  A comedic harlequinade with Edna directing and Norma in the lead, it then darkened into an anti-war commentary, and was praised by the New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott as the best play currently running in the city – praise indeed, given Woollcott’s reputation for vitriolic reviews, though he knew the author only as Nancy Boyd, the nom de plume she adopted so she could earn a few bucks writing pop fiction for magazines without compromising her career as a serious poet.
     Even the Village couldn’t hold her.  Writing satirical sketches for Vanity Fair, in January 1921 she took off for that mecca of American expatriates, Paris, where one could love freely, live cheaply, do the drugs of your choice, and imbibe liquor that didn’t come to you courtesy of gangsters – in short, a place that for wild, free living topped even Greenwich Village.  She settled for a string of affairs, including a brief one with the mannish American sculptor Thelma Wood. 
     After gadding about in Europe for a couple of years, she returned to New York in 1923, the year when her volume won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, being the third woman to win the award.  In that same year she married the middle-aged Dutch businessman and playboy Eugen Boissevain in what must have been a wide-open marriage, since both continued to have numerous affairs.  So the Village wanton, while still wanton, felt the need of marital support.  And she got it.  Boissevain, a source of quiet strength, also provided financial security, nursed her through illnesses and breakdowns (of which there were many), and managed her career, arranging readings and public appearances that further advanced her reputation as a poet.  They settled down in a three-story brick row house at 75½ Bedford Street, a house that I have walked past often, whose “1/2” indicates its status, beloved of tour guides, as the narrowest house in New York City (less than ten feet wide). 
     “Settled down” is hardly appropriate, since the newlyweds rarely graced the house’s narrow confines.  After a honeymoon that took them around the world, in 1925 Boissevain bought Steepletop, a 600-acre blueberry farm in Columbia County in upstate New York, where they lived in an old frame farmhouse, built a barn, a writing cabin, and a tennis court, and the poet grew her own vegetables in a small garden.  Though they refused for years to install a telephone, she was not a total recluse; from this refuge she occasionally made forays to give poetry readings, including on the radio.  Many a male, upon hearing her read, was smitten.  Then in 1933 she and her husband also acquired Ragged Island in Casco Bay, Maine, where they retreated for the summer. 
     Hailed by some as the greatest woman poet since Sappho, she continued to publish volumes of poetry, often including sonnets that reviewers gushed over, hailing them as on a par with the sonnets of Browning, Rossetti, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and other luminaries of the poetic universe, while a few detractors found them manufactured, with inflated rhetoric lacking in true feeling.  Consider the first eight lines of this well-known sonnet:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
     That this flaming redhead of the Village, this promiscuous New Woman, should write sonnets, and lots of them at that, is significant, for this is the most traditional, rhyme-laden, and strictest of old-hat genres, and one that, as her talent matured, she might have jettisoned with contempt.  On the contrary, her reputation rests in large part on the genre.  If it was good enough for Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, and company (though maybe we’d better leave out Milton), she presumably opined, it was good enough for her.  But personally I’m inclined to agree with the critic who viewed her as a twentieth-century romantic expressing herself in a nineteenth-century vehicle.  There is nothing gutsy or raw in her poetry, nothing to compare, for example, with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
     Still, in her heyday she was widely read, almost a cult figure on a par with Sylvia Plath at a later date.  My mother, a young college-educated and quite respectable professional in Chicago, still unmarried, was of Millay’s generation, loved poetry, had herself written poetry in college, and read Millay avidly, which for me is the clincher.  My mother’s taste was formed by the Victorians and Romantics she had absorbed in school – Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth, and the lot.  She knew little of Whitman or Dickenson, and nothing of Pound or Eliot, but took to Millay’s poetry with abandon; as I recall, she even had a first edition of one of Millay’s early volumes (one that, in spite of a diligent search, I have failed to locate among my many dusty books).  If my respectable mother was a fan of this wanton, then Edna St. Vincent the poet, in spite of her lurid private life, was “safe”: a twentieth-century poet (and often a good one) in uncontroversial nineteenth-century garb.
     A dedicated pacifist during Word War I, Millay was a vigorous supporter of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and got arrested in Boston while protesting their execution for a murder they claimed they had not committed.  In the 1930s she turned away from personal lyricism and more and more toward social consciousness, and devoted herself to the war effort in World War II.  For this she reaped much scorn, her patriotic poetry being disparaged by literary critics who, like her readers, preferred the daring young poet of Greenwich Village who burned her candle at both ends.  A has-been?  Alas, for many, yes. 
     Her husband – he was still around, and they were still living in the  farmhouse at Steepletop – died of lung cancer in 1949; his loss devastated her.  Our final impression of her in the last year of her life shows the woman who once was the toast of Greenwich Village, and who had had more lovers than she could count, living on alone in the isolated house, suffering from mental and physical afflictions, drinking too much, but determinedly working on yet another manuscript of poetry.  On October 19, 1950, a caretaker found her collapsed at the foot of a stairway; she had died some eight hours before of a heart attack, age 58.  Today a death at 58 seems premature, but the intensity of her living and her passionate commitment to writing may have had a hand in it.
     After her death Millay’s sister Norma and her husband moved into the farmhouse and in 1973 established the Millay Colony for the Arts; when Norma became a widow in 1976, she continued to run the program until she died in 1986.  Farmhouse and grounds have since become a museum open to the public, and Edna and Norma and their husbands are buried on its grounds.  So ended two women who in their youth had been vibrant participants in the wild scene of Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties. 

     Millay’s reputation had been in tatters since the 1930s for a romanticism that seemed passé in the age of Modernism (think Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Auden), but it came into its own again with the rise of feminism.  Romantic though she was, in her amorous escapades she expressed a decidedly female point of view, and that wasn’t passé at all; it was a welcome blast of the New.
     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.
     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.






The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


 



     Coming soon:  Robert M. Morgenthau, the legendary prosecutor who pursued both crime in the streets and crime in the suites (meaning white-collar crime), with memories of John Lennon's murder; Bernhard Goetz, the subway vigilante; and the Central Park jogger case.

     ©   2016   Clifford Browder

245. Who Really Runs America? David Rockefeller?

This post is a reblog of post #89, originally published on September 29, 2013.  It is the second most visited post since the blog began in 2012, topped only by post #136 on Cardinal Spellman, which was reblogged recently as post #241.  Be sure to read the three comments at the end.  A note on some recently published poems and two of my books conclude the post.
     On WBAI recently (where else?) I heard nutritionist Gary Null, who also comments on current affairs, expound seriously on a vast conspiracy of corporate and military powers who constitute a shadowy permanent government of this country and really rule it, our elected officials being their pawns or dupes.  Prominent among these sinister figures he named David Rockefeller, the aging patriarch of that clan, whom I and many know only as the banker brother of the late Nelson Rockefeller, the forty-ninth governor of New York State (1959-1973) and the forty-first vice president of the U.S. (1974-1977) under President Gerald Ford. 

     Having heard vaguely of such theories before, I decided to look into David Rockefeller and his possible implication in such a conspiracy.  I am no friend of conspiracy theories but cannot deny that important things happen that we ordinary citizens only learn about later, if even then.  So who is David Rockefeller and what has he been up to?  I launch my little investigation with no expertise whatsoever and with access only to information available to the public.
     He was of course a banker, and this makes him suspect at once.  We Americans profess to dislike bankers, since we think of them as fat cats with too much money who are not inclined to share it with the rest of us who have too little.  This prejudice – and it is a prejudice – has seeped deep into our popular entertainments.  Long ago, when the soaps were making their last stand on radio, I recall how, when the writers of Ma Perkins needed a villain in the little town of Rushville Center, they trotted out the local banker, who was referred to not as Mr. So-and-So, but Banker So-and-So.  And our recent financial convulsion and its ongoing aftermath, brought on in large part by misbehaving banks, haven’t exactly enhanced the profession’s reputation.  Still, with noble intent I shall push this bias to one side and proceed as objectively as possible.  So what kind of a guy is David Rockefeller, and what are his connections to this alleged conspiracy?
A sitting room at 10 West 54th Street.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
     He is a son of John D., Jr., who, as I mentioned in a recent post, built Rockefeller Center at his own expense, and a grandson of old John D., the Standard Oil mogul and founder of the family fortune.  David was born in New York City in 1915 in his father’s sumptuous residence at 10 West 54th Street, then the largest private residence in the city, and one full of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art collected by his father, not to mention a whole floor devoted to his mother’s private modern art gallery.  In his bedroom at one time were the famous Unicorn Tapestries now at the Cloisters museum in Fort Tryon Park, near the northern tip of Manhattan. 
     Much of David Rockefeller’s childhood was spent at Kykuit, a 40-room neoclassical mansion on a 250-acre family estate near Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County, N.Y., where he recalls visits by General George C. Marshall, Admiral Byrd, and Charles Lindbergh.  And for summer vacations there was the family’s 100-room house on Mount Desert Island, Maine.  Yes, a privileged childhood with wealth and connections right from the start, though he and his siblings were raised strictly, as his father had been before him.

Kykuit, seen from the south.
Gryffindor
     The Rockefellers and art:  David Rockefeller’s father, John D., Jr., was a passionate collector of traditional art of the past, while his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (David’s mother), was just as passionate a collector of modern art, which her husband professed to despise.  She was one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1929, and persuaded her husband to donate land on 53rd and 54th Street for the present MOMA, which opened in 1939.  To make room for the new museum, John D., Jr., demolished both his sumptuous residence at 10 West 54th Street, and his deceased father’s palatial mansion at 4 West 54thStreet; in their place today is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.  The Rockefellers have been affiliated with MOMA ever since.  But if Abby’s modern art collection found a home at MOMA, her husband’s medieval collection went to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
     His education:  He graduated cum laude from Harvard, did postgraduate work in economics there and at the London School of Economics, and got a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, his dissertation entitled “Unused Resources and Economic Waste.”  My take so far: this was no playboy, and no slouch either.  He had a mind and put it to good use.
     For eighteen months he served as secretary to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at a dollar a year, and then worked for the U.S. Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare Services.  When we entered the war he attended Officer Candidate School and became an officer in the Army, working in North Africa and France (he spoke fluent French) for military intelligence.  Serving as well for seven months as an assistant military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Paris, he made use of family and Standard Oil contacts and established contacts of his own that proved useful thereafter.  Even so, an exemplary career and nothing that I find objectionable.  In the military as in business, there’s nothing inherently wrong with developing a network of contacts.
     In 1946 he went to work for the Chase National Bank, with which his family had long been associated.  Beginning as a lowly assistant manager, he worked his way up through the ranks, developing relationships with correspondent banks throughout the world, and finally became president and CEO.  In 1955 he persuaded the bank to erect its new headquarters in the Wall Street area, thus helping revitalize the downtown financial district, which other companies had deserted for locations farther uptown.  In 1960 the new sixty-story building opened at One Chase Manhattan Plaza on Liberty Street, then the biggest bank building in the world.



     Under David Rockefeller’s leadership Chase spread internationally and became a major force in the world’s financial system, with some fifty thousand correspondent banks, more than any other bank in the world.  He even opened a branch at One Karl Marx Square near the Kremlin and established relations with the National Bank of China.  Trouble came in 1979 when, along with his friend Henry Kissinger and others, he persuaded President Jimmy Carter to admit the deposed Shah of Iran for hospital treatment in the U.S., an action that precipitated the Iran hostage crisis and brought him under media scrutiny for the first time in his life.
     Now a major political and financial figure and a moderate Republican, he had relations with every U.S. President from Eisenhower on, and at times served as an unofficial emissary on high-level diplomatic missions.  In 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, his brother Nelson, then Governor of New York, wanted to appoint David Rockefeller to the vacant senate seat, but he turned the offer down.  Subsequently  President Carter offered to make him Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman, but he turned those offers down as well.  Clearly, with all his worldwide contacts he preferred a private role, well removed from the publicity and brouhaha of politics.  Which of course has made him a natural target for conspiracy theorists of every stripe and hue.
A young David Rockefeller with Eleanor Roosevelt,
Trygvie Lie, the first Secretary General of the U.N.,
and IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, 1953.
     His contacts over the years included Henry Kissinger, a personal friend; Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles; former CIA director Richard Helms; Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., and his cousin Kermit Roosevelt, both involved with the CIA; and countless others.  Who, indeed, didn’t he know among the rich and powerful?  All of which, again, has made him a natural and inevitable target for conspiracy theorists.
     Throughout his life he was involved with numerous policy groups that were concerned with domestic and international problems: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the International Executive Service Corps, promoting prosperity and stability through private enterprise in underdeveloped regions of the world; the Partnership for New York City, a group of CEOs seeking to promote the city as a global center of commerce, culture, and innovation; the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential foreign-policy think tank with some 4700 members; the Trilateral Commission, an organization of leaders in the private sector founded by him and committed to discussion of issues of global concern; and the Bilderberg Group, an annual conference of political leaders and experts from various fields to discuss major issues facing the world.  All this, while becoming the family patriarch and looking after a fortune that came to him mostly through trusts set up by his father, and that is estimated at $2.8 billion, which makes him #193 in the current Forbes 400 List of the richest people in America.
On a visit to Abu Dhabi in 1980, shaking hands with Jawad 
Hashim, President of the Arab Monetary Fund.
Hashmoder
     If one goes online, where conspiracy theories run wild, one can easily find websites warning that so-called Globalists are working secretly to establish a one-world government that will suppress national sovereignty and individual liberties and rule the world.  Who are these nefarious individuals?  International bankers, the super rich, the elite, members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and other mysterious, secretive, suspect organizations, including the Illuminati, an 18th-century secret society in Bavaria that opposed superstition, prejudice, and the influence of religion in public life, and that supposedly survives to this day.  Among today’s suspect elite, obviously, David Rockefeller looms large, albeit at the age of 98.  These power mongers, these “banksters” are everywhere, theorists assert; they manipulate everything, they will destroy the world as we know it. 
     And what does David Rockefeller say to these charges?  In his autobiography Memoirs, published in 2002, he observes:  “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with [Fidel] Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions.  Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing me and my family as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.  If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it” (Memoirs, p. 405).
     “Aha!” cry many conspiracy theorists, seeing this statement as a brazen confirmation of their charges.  But Rockefeller has in no way confessed to participation in a conspiracy, only to advocating a “more integrated global political and economic structure.”  He then goes on to see his critics as influenced by Populism, and observes that Populists believe in conspiracies and consider him the “conspirator in chief.”  He insists that the Rockefellers’ international role during the past half century has produced tangible benefits like the defeat of Soviet Communism, and improvements in societies around the world as a result of global trade, improved communications, and greater interaction of people from different countries. 
     So far, I think the defense of this “proud internationalist” sounds valid.  David Rockefeller one of the Illuminati?  Why not throw in the Hitlerjungen and the Ku Klux Klan as well?  Except that, so far as I know, those groups lacked international connections and therefore might be allies of the conspiracy crowd.  Rockefeller was certainly a lord of think tanks, but that doesn’t make him and them a clutch of conspirators.  The conspiracy gang  whom I have encountered online – and they are legion – strike me as paranoid; frankly, they are just plain nuts.
     So let’s escape from cloud cuckoo land and enter the realm of possibility.  Not all Rockefeller’s critics allege a worldwide conspiracy; rather, they see a shadowy permanent government that really runs this country, with whom our elected Presidents have to come to terms.  Gary Null seems to be one of this tribe, though I’d need to know more about his views to be certain.  But there are other voices of the Progressive Left whom I have to take seriously.  Noam Chomsky has argued that the Trilateral Commission’s report The Crisis of Democracy, proposing solutions for the “excess of democracy” characteristic of the 1960s, embodies “the ideology of the liberal wing of the state capitalist ruling elite.”  He sees the Commission as advocating “more moderation in democracy,” a more passive and obedient citizenry less inclined to put undue restraints on government.  He also asserts that the Commission had an undue influence on the administration of President Jimmy Carter. 
President Carter hosting the Trilateral Commission, 1978.
Rockefeller must have been there, probably in the first row.
     Whether I fully agree with Chomsky I’m not sure, but I listen to him.  The Trilateral Commission is a creation of David Rockefeller, so any criticism of it implies criticism of its founder.  Chomsky’s assertions aren’t all over the place, sniffing out conspirators everywhere; he is focused in his attack and raises questions well worth pondering. 
     So where do I end up?  David Rockefeller has had a vast network of connections and has no doubt wielded tons of influence, perhaps at times too much.  He has shunned the public arena, prefers quiet private conferences, is never flamboyant, eschews attention-getting gestures, is really quite quiet, even colorless.  (Eschew: I love this word, even if it sounds like a sneeze.)  But that doesn’t make him a conspirator or a nefarious person.  He’s only one of many of the elite exerting influence on our government and society.  Confirming my impression of him as an individual are reminiscences of him by my partner Bob’s doctor, who long ago met Rockefeller and conversed with him on several occasions.  He found him very knowledgeable, very personable, unassuming, and easy to relate to, which is remarkable, given his privileged childhood.
    Yet if Rockefeller or his associates are promoting the free-trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is being secretly negotiated now, then I have to agree that they are potentially eroding our national sovereignty.  According to certain leaked documents, the TPP would exempt foreign corporations from our laws and regulations, and let them challenge those laws and regulations as being unfair practices in restraint of trade.  Our hard-won regulations on clean air and clean water, for instance, could be imperiled, not to mention countless other measures, and this worries me a lot.  And if Rockefeller isn’t personally involved in promotion of the TPP (he is, after all, 98), like-minded people of great influence certainly are.  And the general public is barely aware, if at all, of what is going on.  Whether it involves a conspiracy or not, the TPP merits scrutiny and should be fought tooth and nail, unless its proposed provisions are radically revised.  So score one – and a big one – for David Rockefeller’s more responsible critics, among them Gary Null.

Leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership member states, 2010.  Guess who's beaming, right smack
 in the middle?  No, it's not David Rockefeller.
Gobierno de Chile
     Even so, my impression of the Rockefeller clan is favorable.  They have long since risen above their robber baron origins, which were tainted with labor strife, to become philanthropists and patrons of the arts on a grand scale.  John D., Sr., gave millions to worthy causes and created the Rockefeller and other foundations; John D., Jr., created Rockefeller Center at his own expense, and with his wife helped launch the Museum of Modern Art; and David’s brother Nelson, as Governor, built the magnificent Empire State Plaza in Albany, and in his will left his interest in Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, so that it is now open to the public.  (For Rockefeller Center, see post #87, From Ghosts to Grandeur: Fifth Avenue; for the Empire State Plaza, see post #18, Upstate vs. Downstate: The Great Dichotomy.)  All in all, this city, state, and nation owe them a lot.
3 comments:AnonymousJanuary 27, 2014 at 5:15 AMSorry to say, but you're too naive. This family has oppressed everything in sight for decades, centuries in fact. You think if they gave some dozens of millions to 'charitable causes', that evens the score? They are the Illuminati! They literally 'manufacture' money for Christ's sake! And the list of 'Richest People In The World' isn't even true at all. It's a giant lie. This Circle is tremendously influential and cover up their tracks effortlessly.Delete Clifford BrowderJanuary 28, 2014 at 1:56 PMI understand where you're coming from, Anonymous, and I welcome your comment, but I hold to my approval of the clan's later doings, which benefit the public. If you look closely at the most enlightened benefactors, you'll always find plenty of warts. I give the Rockefellers some slack, that's all. Well, at least we agree about trees. And you're from my home town, Evanston. Did you go to ETHS? I attended a gathering of graduates last fall right here in New York.DeleteAnonymousDecember 18, 2014 at 1:03 PMbro you are CLUELESS. we know this EVIL demonic clan supported hitler during the war indirectly supplying him oil, we know that they funded the US neo-con movement birthed from socialism, supported the federal reserve, they funded bolshevik communism, their oil company(ies) have funded missionaries to latin america to remove natives from land they wanted ("thy will be done"), they've supported tyrants and genocide the world over for power and profit, along with many other american and international elitists, working with and through CIA and other fascist entities/secret societies. at least do some research what the Promethean torch at 1 rockefeller plaza actually means, along with the art surrounding it. someone who has a clue:

http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?A...

deuces

     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down. To avoid five terrible poems, don't, for God's sake, don't click here.

      My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


 



       Coming soon:  The New Woman who became the toast of free-living Greenwich Village in the 1920s, lured men by the dozen to her bed, and got a Pulitzer for Poetry.  The post will start with a limerick.  
       ©   2016  Clifford Browder

244. Tammany, the Tiger Whose Claws Got Clipped

     The July 5 edition of the New York Times, that infallible newspaper of record, informs me that Tammany Hall on Union Square in Manhattan is undergoing reconstruction.  Tammany Hall on Union Square?  This amazed me.  I’ve long known of Tammany Hall as the onetime headquarters of the Tammany Society, the Democratic political machine that dominated New York City politics for decades, from even before Boss Tweed in the 1860s right down to the 1920s, but never did I suspect that some later version of the hall itself existed on Union Square, which I visit every Wednesday to patronize the greenmarket.  So on a recent Wednesday when I went there, even while buying blueberries and goat cheese and an organic raisin walnut cookie (very tasty), I kept my eye peeled for what the Times described as a neo-Georgian façade “intended to conjure (misleadingly or not) the rectitude of the early republic, when the society was founded.” 
     Rectitude was hardly Tammany’s specialty, but neo-Georgian should stand out, and sure enough, looming there on the corner of Union Square East and 17th Street, was a monument in the aforementioned style, an impressive red-brick and limestone structure with two soaring columns and two pilasters topped by a pediment.  Owned today by Liberty Theaters L.L.C., it functioned until last January as the Union Square Theater, in whose noble interior I have never set foot.  Now, however, the four-story building is going to be reconstructed as a six-story office building.  The exterior has landmark status and therefore will be preserved, but not the interior, so the handsome auditorium and its grand coffered ceiling dome will be totally demolished – a great loss, to judge by a photo in the Times.  But decorative details on the exterior will be preserved, including a limestone medallion depicting Chief Tamanend, for whom the Society was named, and a terra-cotta red, blue, and gold liberty cap on the front pediment.
     The Times tells of how, on July 4, 1929, the day of the building’s opening, the auditorium was jammed with spectators, and “ablaze with color” because of the many flags on display.  Sharing the stage were a trio of notables: New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who already had his eye on the White House; former Governor Al Smith, “who represented the best of Tammany”; and Major Jimmy Walker, “who symbolized just about the worst – if you do not count Boss Tweed.” 
     This last comment annoyed me just a bit, mentioning the heavyset Boss, a mountain of a man and a symbol of massive corruption, with “Beau James” Walker, a slim and lovable scamp who presided over the city back in the Roaring Twenties, a dapper fellow with an ingratiating smile who loved to lead parades in his pin-striped trousers and a topper, but rarely showed up in City Hall before noon, being somewhat hungover from his fun-filled nights in speakeasies with his chorus girl lady friend: the perfect guardian of the city’s morals, or lack of them, in that fun-loving age, doubtless a crook but an endearing one, the kind you hate to hate but love to love. 
     We all identify the name “Tammany” with corruption, but often don’t know that there were, in a sense, two Tammanys, Tammany Society and Tammany Hall, the latter being the Society’s headquarters.  And few of us know why the Tammany leaders were called “sachems,” the members “braves,” and the hall itself the “wigwam.”  So let’s take a quick look at the history of Tammany.
     The Tammany Society was a political organization founded in New York City in 1788, its members being mostly craftsmen who felt excluded by the city’s more exclusive clubs.  As their patron they adopted Tamanend, a legendary Delaware chief, and therefore designated members “braves” and the leaders “sachems,” meaning chiefs – a terminology that they adopted, needless to say, without consulting the Delawares or any other Native American tribe. 
     In the nineteenth century the Society advocated progressive policies such as universal male suffrage (not female – heaven forfend!), and abolition of imprisonment for debt (now increasingly common in some of our states), while welcoming immigrants – especially the Irish – and opposing the nativist, anti-Catholic movements that the influx of Irish immigrants provoked.  But at the same time Tammany was afflicted with little indiscretions like graft, scandals, the theft of ballot boxes, and internal conflicts.  “Vote early and often” was the advice tendered by old timers to new immigrants just off the boat who, with the connivance of certain judges, had been rushed into citizenship on the eve of an election.  Boss Tweed ruled Tammany in the 1860s, and the tiger insignia of his volunteer fire company became a symbol of the Society.   Tweed himself was brought down by reformers, but the Society survived and under a succession of Irish-American bosses from the 1870s on became a disciplined political machine to be reckoned with.  In time, Jews and Germans were welcomed, but the Irish still ruled it well into the twentieth century. 
     To get a feel of how Tammany operated, one can’t do better than consult the wisdom of George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924), a Tammany sachem who died a millionaire.  In his later years, topped by a shiny black silk hat, he held forth on the bootblack stand of the New York County Courthouse, expounding on public matters to all who would listen.  Among his recorded observations:
·      There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works.  I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.·      The civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age.  It is the curse of the nation.·      Reform committees were mornin’ glories – withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.·      This city is ruled entirely by the hayseed legislators at Albany.  New York is their pie.·      There’s only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin’.  Books is a hindrance.  If you have been to college, you’ll have to unlearn all you learned.·      The Irish was born to rule, and they’re the  honestest people in the world.
     Such was Tammany.  When the new hall opened with great fanfare in 1929, the Society was at its peak, but its decline soon followed.  Investigations by Judge Samuel Seabury revealed massive civic corruption and forced Jimmy Walker to resign as mayor and, fearing prosecution, to decamp for fairer pastures abroad.  Elected by reformers in 1933, incoming Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, an independent, worked energetically with President Elect Roosevelt to cut Tammany off from the patronage jobs it doled out, thus assuring its demise.  Unable to meet mortgage payments, Tammany sold its headquarters to Local 91 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1943.  When, after La Guardia’s three terms, the Democrats reclaimed the mayor’s office in 1945, the old Tammany had ceased to exist, though Tammany-influenced politicians like Carmine DeSapio (see post #135) would try to prevail against the reformers, only to fail in the end and fade from the scene.  Once powerful, the Tammany tiger’s claws had been definitively clipped.  That its last hall should become a union headquarters, then a theater, and finally an office building seems only fitting, though a few decorative vestiges will be preserved.
     Mr. Dimon again:  Viewers of this blog know the infinite respect that I pay to Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, my bank, whose services at a branch near my home I regularly make use of, while eschewing (that word again!) the candy they dispense freely.  My respect for Mr. Dimon vaulted to new heights when, on the op-ed page of the New York Times of July 12, 2016, I encountered an article by him, entitled “Higher Wage Wisdom,” in which he announced that his bank is giving thousands of employees a raise.  The minimum for Chase’s U.S. employees today is $10.15 an hour (plus benefits), almost $3.00 above the current national minimum wage.  Over the next three years Chase will raise the minimum for 18,000 workers to between $12 and $16.50 an hour.  Insists Mr. Dimon, “A pay increase is the right thing to do.”  So bravo, Mr. Dimon, and take that – POW! -- wage stagnation.  (According to an article in Bloomberg.com posted on January 21, 2016, Chase  boosted Mr. Dimon’s pay for 2015  to $27 million, up from $20 million a year earlier, an increase of 35%.  The package includes $20.5 million in performance share units, which are tied to future targets.  He also got a $5 million cash bonus and a $1.5 million salary.)

     My books:  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received two awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards.  For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here.  (It also got an honorable mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, but that hardly counts.)  As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


 



     My poems:  For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't, for God's sake, don't click here.


     Coming soon:  The New Woman who became the toast of free-living Greenwich Village in the 1920s, lured men by the dozen to her bed, and got a Pulitzer for Poetry.  The post will start with a limerick.  Before that, I may – or may not – reblog another much-viewed post.

     ©   2016   Clifford Browder