Almost everyone knows that Bank of the Manhattan Co. was founded 136 years ago to supply the City of New York with "pure & wholesome water." Not so well known is the fact that Manhattan's $575,000,000 Chemical Bank & Trust was originally chartered 112 years ago to manufacture "blue vitriol, alum, alcohol, tartar emetic, refined camphor, borax, copperas, drugs, medicines, paints and dyers' colors." Like its elder rival, Chemical got into banking by opening an office of ''Discount & Deposit."
The trustees abandoned pure chemicals for pure banking in 1832 after the bank was well on the road to one of the most amazing dividend records in U. S. history. First dividend was declared in 1827. Since then it has not only never missed a dividend but if has never changed the regular rate except to up it.
During the panic of 1857, when nearly every bank in the land suspended specie payments at least temporarily. Chemical continued to pay out cash on demand, much of it in good hard gold. Even today the bank is affectionately known to Wall Street oldsters as "Old Bullion."
Last week "Old Bullion" had its annual meeting along with other New York State trust companies, but there was nothing in its vaults to justify its nickname. Super-solvent though it was, a distant relative of Chemical's onetime Acting President James A. Roosevelt had commandeered every dollar of gold coin and bullion it possessed.
For the past year President Percy Hampton Johnston reported earnings of $7,700,000 as against $8,300,000 in 1933. He introduced to little Chemical stockholders the biggest Chemical stockholder (Robert Walton Goelet) and the second biggest (John Mortimer Schiff). And like the old-school banker and Southern gentleman that he is, Mr. Johnston grumbled considerably about the current scene. Samples:
"The nation has tried to accomplish in one generation that which under ordinary and prudent circumstances should take a country 100 years to bring about. The result has been to plunge us head-over-heels into debt, and we are not going to right our condition by going deeper. . . .
"Unless we change our course ... we will unquestionably bring ruin upon the entire body politic.
"A wave has swept over our legislative halls to cure all ills by the enactment of more laws. In our judgment this course hamstrings business and slows down general progress."
Few days later Chemical got a new president—the tenth in its 112 years. First Vice President Frank K. Houston was upped one notch, and Mr. Johnston became chairman. But there was no doubt in anyone's mind that Percy Johnston was still Old Bullion's boss.