Part 23

My friend’s partner was as bearish as I was. The firm therefore did not have to borrow, but my friend, the broker I told you about, fresh from seeing the haggard faces around the Money Post, came to me. He knew I was heavily short of the entire market.

He said, “My God, Larry! I don’t know what’s going to happen. I never saw anything like it. It can’t go on. Something has got to give. It looks to me as if everybody is busted right now. You can’t sell stocks, and there is absolutely no money in there.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

But what he answered was, “Did you ever hear of the classroom experiment of the mouse in a glass-bell when they begin to pump the air out of the bell? You can see the poor mouse breathe faster and faster, its sides heaving like over-worked bellows, trying to get enough oxygen out of the decreasing supply in the bell. You watch it suffocate till its eyes almost pop out of their sockets, gasping, dying. Well, that is what I think of when I see the crowd at the Money Post! No money anywhere, and you can’t liquidate stocks because there is nobody to buy them. The whole Street is broke at this very moment, if you ask me!”

It made me think. I had seen a smash coming, but not, I admit, the worst panic in our history. It might not be profitable to anybody--if it went much further.

Finally it became plain that there was no use in waiting at the Post for money. There wasn’t going to be any. Then hell broke loose.

The president of the Stock Exchange, Mr. R. H. Thomas, so I heard later in the day, knowing that every house in the Street was headed for disaster, went out in search of succour. He called on James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, the richest bank in the United States. Its boast was that it never loaned money at a higher rate than 6 per cent.

Stillman heard what the president of the New York Stock Exchange had to say. Then he said, “Mr. Thomas, we’ll have to go and see Mr. Morgan about this.”

The two men, hoping to stave off the most disastrous panic in our financial history, went together to the office of J. P. Morgan & Co. and saw Mr. Morgan, Mr. Thomas laid the case before him. The moment he got through speaking Mr. Morgan said, “Go back to the Exchange and tell them that there will be money for them.”

“Where?”

“At the banks!”

So strong was the faith of all men in Mr. Morgan in those critical times that Thomas didn’t wait for further details but rushed back to the floor of the Exchange to announce the reprieve to his death-sentenced fellow members.

Then, before half past two in the afternoon, J. P. Morgan sent John T. Atterbury, of Van Emburgh & Atterbury, who was known to have close relations with J. P. Morgan & Co., into the money crowd. My friend said that the old broker walked quickly to the Money Post. He raised his hand like an exhorter at a revival meeting. The crowd, that at first had been calmed down somewhat by President Thomas’ announcement, was beginning to fear that the relief plans had miscarried and the worst was still to come. But when they looked at Mr. Atterbury’s face and saw him raise his hand they promptly petrified themselves.

In the dead silence that followed, Mr. Atterbury said, “I am authorized to lend ten million dollars. Take it easy! There will be enough for everybody!”

Then he began. Instead of giving to each borrower the name of the lender he simply jotted down the name of the borrower and the amount of the loan and told the borrower, “You will be told where your money is.” He meant the name of the bank from which the borrower would get the money later.

I heard a day or two later that Mr. Morgan simply sent word to the frightened bankers of New York that they must provide the money the Stock Exchange needed.

“But we haven’t got any. We’re loaned up to the hilt,” the banks protested.

“You’ve got your reserves,” snapped J. P.

“But we’re already below the legal limit,” they howled.

“Use them! That’s what reserves are for!” And the banks obeyed and invaded the reserves to the extent of about twenty million dollars. It saved the stock market. The bank panic didn’t come until the following week. He was a man, J. P. Morgan was. They don’t come much bigger.

That was the day I remember most vividly of all the days of my life as a stock operator. It was the day when my winnings exceeded one million dollars. It marked the successful ending of my first deliberately planned trading campaign. What I had foreseen had come to pass. But more than all these things was this: a wild dream of mine had been realised. I had been king for a day!

I’ll explain, of course. After I had been in New York a couple of years I used to cudgel my brains trying to determine the exact reason why I couldn’t beat in a Stock Exchange house in New York the game that I had beaten as a kid of fifteen in a bucket shop in Boston. I knew that some day I would find out what was wrong and I would stop being wrong. I would then have not alone the will to be right but the knowledge to insure my being right. And that would mean power.

Please do not misunderstand me. It was not a deliberate dream of grandeur or a futile desire born of overweening vanity. It was rather a sort of feeling that the same old stock market that so baffled me in Fullerton’s office and in Harding’s would one day eat out of my hand. I just felt that such a day would come. And it did--October 24, 1907.

The reason why I say it is this: That morning a broker who had done a lot of business for my brokers and knew that I had been plunging on the bear side rode down in the company of one of the partners of the foremost banking house in the Street. My friend told the banker how heavily I had been trading, for I certainly pushed my luck to the limit. What is the use of being right unless you get all the good possible out of it.

Perhaps the broker exaggerated to make his story sound important. Perhaps I had more of a following than I knew. Perhaps the banker knew far better than I how critical the situation was. At all events, my friend said to me: “He listened with great interest to what I told him you said the market was going to do when the real selling began, after another push or two. When I got through he said he might have something for me to do later in the day.”

When the commission houses found out there was not a cent to be had at any price I knew the time had come. I sent brokers into the various crowds. Why, at one time there wasn’t a single bid for Union Pacific. Not at any price! Think of it! And in other stocks the same thing. No money to hold stocks and nobody to buy them.

I had enormous paper profits and the certainty that all that I had to do to smash prices still more was to send in orders to sell ten thousand shares each of Union Pacific and of a half dozen other good dividend-paying stocks and what would follow would be simply hell. It seemed to me that the panic that would be precipitated would be of such an intensity and character that the board of governors would deem it advisable to close the Exchange, as was done in August, 1914, when the World War broke out.

It would mean greatly increased profits on paper. It might also mean an inability to convert those profits into actual cash. But there were other things to consider, and one was that a further break would retard the recovery that I was beginning to figure on, the compensating improvement after all that blood-letting. Such a panic would do much harm to the country generally.