The Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge are two of the greatest beauties of the South. A third is Mona Strader Schlesinger Bush Williams. Last week Harrison Williams, multi-millionaire utility tycoon, gave up active management of his two investment trusts named for the valley and the mountains. Thus does a New Deal succeed a New Era.
New Era. Harrison Williams, Ohio-born, now turned 60, was ten years ago a great utility man, master of Central States Electric Corp. and North American Co. The degree of his mastery is evident from the fact that in 1931 he controlled of North American. Naturally he was rich. As an interesting gesture he with Vincent Astor, Marshall Field and the late Henry Devereaux Whiton financed William Beebe's expeditions to the Sargasso Sea and the Galapagos Islands—with the result that there is today a Harrison Williams Volcano in the islands. He also bought the Krupp-built Vanados, then largest yacht afloat, with a cruising radius of 12,000 mi., renamed her Warrior and refitted her for his own oceanographic and pleasure purposes. In 1926, having been a widower for eleven years, he suddenly married Mona Bush, beauteous divorced wife of James Irving Bush of Winthrop, Mitchell & Co.
It was a socially celebrated love match. They departed on a round-the-world cruise in the Warrior. They returned and bought Elbert H. Gary's mansion at 94th Street & Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. He bought her more expensive clothes and jewels (including one of the world's finest emerald necklaces) than are worn by any other woman in Manhattan. He provided her with a house at Palm Beach, built her a magnificent house on Long Island.
But there was one more thing he was to do for her. The old commercial paper house of Goldman, Sachs had grown wealthy and mighty during 30 years, floating the securities of companies that became great—Sears, Roebuck, General Cigar, Studebaker, Cluett Peabody, Woolworth, Endicott Johnson, Postum, Continental Can, May Department Stores, Pillsbury Flour, National Dairy Products, Goodrich Rubber, Lambert Pharmacal, Gimbel Brothers, Warner Brothers. Goldman Sachs had a bright partner named Waddill Catchings, Tennessee-born Harvard graduate who had been by successive and increasing turns lawyer, steelman and J. P. Morgan assistant in purchasing supplies for the Allies during the War. In December 1928 Mr. Catchings made history by launching for his firm, Goldman Sachs Trading Corp.
In the summer of 1929 Mr. Williams and Mr. Catchings joined forces and raised a shower of fireworks over Wall Street. Goldman Sachs Trading Corp. had (besides ventures in Chicago's Foreman Bank and the Detroit banking situation) acquired a stake in Pacific Coast utilities. Turning eastward Mr. Catchings cast his eye on the great North American Co.
Mr. Catchings was classed in 1929 as an Economist, and he expounded many arresting theories, among them the theory of the New Era: that profits and prices were going on & on and up & up. He was joint author of several books showing how depressions could be ended forever by just buying and buying. President Hoover read his book, The Road to Plenty.