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Wall Street's AL. It is part of a Wall Street runner's ABC that Albert Henry Wiggin is the head of the biggest bank in the world and that he is known as Al, "the man with a million friends." Innumerable people ''Al" Mr. Wiggin.
Tall, heavy, slightly pop-eyed Mr. Wiggin belongs to many clubs, has a modest collection of etchings, a wife who sculps from time to time in a MacDougall Alley studio. He is jovial with acquaintances. He plays excellent poker with fierce intensity. As a golfer, he is never more dangerous to his opponent than when behind. He has a large collection of locker-room anecdotes.
But as the biggest banker in the U. S. he is usually the quietest. He makes few pronunciamentos. When he does speak as a banker his words carry world weight. Banker Wiggin's address to Chase stock holders last January was front-page news round the world. Said he :
"The most serious of the adverse factors affecting business is the inability of foreign countries to obtain dollars in amounts sufficient both to make interest and amortization payments on their debts to us and to buy our exports in adequate volume. From the middle of 1924 to 1929 we delayed the adverse effect of our high tariffs upon our exports by heavy buying of foreign bonds. . . . Our alternative today is therefore either a reduction of our tariffs, or readjustment to our greatly reduced volume of exports.
"Cancellation or reduction of the interallied debts has been increasingly discussed throughout the world. ... I am firmly convinced it would be good business to initiate a reduction of these debts at this time." The attack on the tariff did Mr. Wiggin no good with the Hoover Administration. Since his remarks on the War debts, France has viewed him with suspicion as a probable believer in revision of the Treaty of Versailles.
Banking has always been Al Wiggin's trade. The son of a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts, he went to work in the local bank at 17. At 26 he could really call himself a banker: he was made assistant cashier. In 1899 ne went to New York and became vice president of National Park Bank. In 1904 he went to the Chase as a vice president, became its president seven years later.
The panic of 1907 showed his mettle. In those steep days the elder J. P. Morgan discovered two young bankers on whom he could rely: Henry Pomeroy Davison and Albert Henry Wiggin. Morgan's friend, old George Fisher Baker, agreed that they were mighty useful fellows. Davison, as the world knows, was received into the Morgan fold. Wiggin acquired a rarer distinction. True or false, legend in New York calls him the only man who ever refused a Morgan partnership.
In Basle last week several U. S. bankers assisted him, but they were Chase men, not Morgan men.* Two of Chase's 79 vice presidents, James H. Gannon and Joseph C. Rosensky, traveled to Basle with him. Shepard Morgan, another Chase vice president and an expert on Reparations (he was Seymour Parker Gilbert's assistant during the operation of the Dawes Plan) was in Germany, reporting to Mr. Wiggin separately.