The Senate Committee on Banking & Currency last week began the fifth chapter of its own book of revelations, a chapter which impertinent wags called "Mr. Wiggin and the Chase National Cabbage Patch." The particular efforts of Mr. Pecora were first directed to finding out what ravages the blight of Depression had wreaked in the cabbage patch and how many cabbages had constituted Mr. Wiggin's perquisite as head gardener.
When Albert Henry Wiggin sat down, the witness chair held the biggest load of banking ability which it had supported since the days when J. P. Morgan and certain of his partners occupied it. When Mr. Wiggin was a New England boy of 17 he became a bank clerk. When he was 23 he became an assistant bank examiner. When he was 29 he became vice president of a bank in Boston. In 1904 at 36 he joined Manhattan's Chase National as vice president. Seven years later he became its president. At that time it had $5,000,000 capital, $5,000,000 surplus, $100,000,000 deposits. In those days the Chase was a bankers' bank, and George F. Baker's First National owned a controlling interest in it. Two years later Mr. Baker sold this interest—15,000 shares for a price of $11,000,000—to bright young Mr. Wiggin & associates. Thus the Chase became Mr. Wiggin's bank, and it remained so practically until last January.
The formation of the Federal Reserve System in 1914 took away from the Chase some of its job as a bank for bankers, but Mr. Wiggin was already off on a new tack—building up the Chase as a great commercial bank. It grew, partly by merger, to be the biggest bank in the U. S. Mr. Wiggin was never thrown off his great ground-covering stride. His bank was not rated an archly conservative institution— no bank which grew so fast could be— but it was an immensely successful (i. e. well run) commercial bank with a finger in many deep-dish pies. Mr. Wiggin (with his family) was its biggest stockholder, he ran it in person, and consequently he rated by some standards at least the title of No. 1 U. S banker.