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In Seattle President Campbell's brother Roy saw to it that no Chaseling had a moment to himself. There were breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, a visit to a great Weyerhaeuser lumber camp near Snoqualmie Falls. Once when President Morris Allen Arnold of Seattle's First National was entertaining the party privately, Nelson Rockefeller sneaked off to a prize fight with Roy Campbell, whose regular job is executive vice president of Western Dairy Products.
Uncle Winthrop's chief complaint about Seattle was a fog which prevented him from seeing Mt. Rainier. By the time the Amundsen pulled into Portland, Ore. to be welcomed by a platoon of local bankers, there was a downpouring rain. All that afternoon the New Yorkers sludged-trudged through the mud inspecting Bonneville Dam.
In San Francisco the Chaselings abandoned the Amundsen for five days and moved into the swank Hotel Mark Hopkins atop Nob Hill. Up from Montgomery Street marched the great bankers of the third banking city of the land, Herbert Fleishhacker, Amadeo Peter Giannini, William Henry Crocker, many another. Newshawks who visited the Chase suites, well aware of the abstemious traditions of the pious Rockefellers, were pleasantly surprised to find that excellent liquor was being served.
From Manhattan west Mr. Aldrich had been orating at every stop but he reserved his major speech for San Francisco. At a Commonwealth Club luncheon in the St. Francis Hotel, after solemnly reporting that business and sentiment were markedly improved, he made an earnest plea for cheaper unemployment relief. Declaring that unemployment must be considered as something more than temporary, he urged that direct home relief be substituted for costly made-work relief.
Simultaneously in Manhattan the Chase Bank released thousands of copies of the Aldrich relief speech. Few days later the New York Herald Tribune headlined: NEW YORK BANKERS WOO BROTHERS ACROSS NATION.
What the Herald Tribune newshawk had done was to link the leisurely Chase tour with a hurried trip to the West Coast made ten days before by Chairman James Handasyd Perkins of Manhattan's huge National City Bank. The chief difference between the two tours was that Mr. Perkins traveled in an ordinary Pullman unaccompanied by even a single secretary. Since it was no secret that most western bankers felt that their truce with the President was something of a Wall Street sellout, it did indeed look as if Messrs. Perkins & Aldrich were "wooing" their little brothers into the Administration fold. But best opinion was that the purpose of both tours was simply to tighten friendships with correspondents, drum up business and obtain from first-hand sources information on the state of the union.
With the Amundsen coupled on to the end of Southern Pacific's Lark, Mr. Aldrich & party went from San Francisco to Los Angeles, there to inspect, among other things, a whopping if unwanted Chase investment. Fox Film Corp. Funnyman Will Rogers reported:
"One of New York's very leading bankers was visiting our studio (and incidentally his studio). . . . This fellow had an economist with him. Pretty near everybody's got one. Either that or a police dog. The more wealthy have got both."