(See front cover)
The first term of the first U. S. President was just ending when the New York Stock Exchange was founded under the buttonwood tree in Wall Street in 1792. No broker ever became President and few much of anything else. But in the last 142 years the members of the Stock Exchange have perfected a method of buying & selling securities which functions with mathematical precision and a code of financial conduct which is the highest in the world. Its 1,375 members, the best-dressed group of men in the U. S., have conferred on their officials absolute and arbitrary powers. The governors of the New York Stock Exchange can do anything they want, and from their decision there is no appeal. No rule or regulation can surpass the finality of the Exchange's famed blanket clause: "A member who shall have been adjudged . . . guilty of conduct or proceeding inconsistent with just and equitable principles of trade, may be suspended or expelled." Its only peer is the 95th Article of War, with its famed phrase "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman."
To defend the adequacy of rule by gentleman's thumb has been during the recent year of recrimination the duty of Richard Whitney, himself unmistakably a gentleman. That duty he prepared to perform in Washington this week for possibly the last time. For the Senate of the United States, snobbish though it is concerning itself, refuses to recognize gentleman-as-such and is about to entertain a bill which would give the Government more actual rule than any previous bill over not only the New York Stock Exchange and the dozens of other exchanges throughout the land but also over all incorporated business, big or little.
Richard Whitney became a public figure on the day that the roaring 1920s came to an historic end—Oct. 24, 1929. More precisely, his fame dates from 1:30 of that dark Thursday afternoon when he strode across the floor of the Stock Exchange and bid $205 per share for 25,000 shares of Steel, presumably for the account of J. P. Morgan & Co. By evening the story of his attempt to rally the market had become the first Depression legend.
Born in Beverly, Mass. of an old New England family which had prospered in the East India trade, he went to Groton, where he was a Big Man, and to Harvard where he got his degree in three years. His muscular 6-ft.-2-in. frame bent an oar in the varsity crew and he became a member of the exclusive Porcellain Club. After graduation he went to work for the conservative old Boston banking house of Kidder, Peabody & Co.
"Dick" Whitney's uncle, Edward F. Whitney, was a Morgan Partner, his elder brother George married the daughter of the late Morgan Partner Robert Bacon, later became a Morgan Partner himself. "Dick" married a daughter of a president of the Union League Club. By the time that "Dick'' Whitney formed his own firm, Richard Whitney & Co., in 1916, he could pass the portal of the House of Morgan without a trace of awe.
Still vastly athletic, the owner of an estate in Far Hills, N. J. and a stable of thoroughbreds, he is president of the Essex Fox Hounds and a faithful huntsman. Last week he was re-named head of the hunts committee of the National Steeplechase & Hunt Association.