“Miracles are laughed at by a nation that reads
thirty million newspapers a day an’ supports Wall Street.”—Irish-American journalist
and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Mr. Dooley's Philosophy
(1900)
I wish Finley Peter Dunne had tried a lighter touch
in his use of dialect. Between all the exaggerated misspellings and
contractions, it becomes difficult to read his pieces at any length. In the
case of this quote, for instance, the auto-correct function of my word
processing program kept changing what I typed so much that I finally gave up.
Maybe it did you a favor, Faithful Reader. At his
best, this Chicago newspaper columnist could be among the most bitingly funny
of American writers. Assessing Theodore Roosevelt’s memoir The Rough Riders, for instance, Martin Dooley, the bartender and
mouthpiece for Dunne’s jibes, noted that it might have better called Alone in Cuba. More than a few people have quoted his phrases
while being blissfully unaware of the original source (e.g., “Politics ain’t
beanbag” and “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”).
But the quote above really made me nod in agreement.
More than a century removed from the robber barons—the fat cats that T.R.
lambasted as “malefactors of great wealth”—America is still trying to make
sense of Wall Street.
One American who tried but failed was H.R. Haldeman,
best known to history as among the palace guard who abetted Richard Nixon in
covering up Watergate—and who went to jail for the offense. As the President’s
Chief of Staff and a former ad man, Haldeman had zero sympathy for
anti-capitalist sentiments. But even he threw up his hands at the bipolar
tendencies of The Street.
Fifty years ago this week, for instance, the
nation’s weak economy, combined with growing unrest of the Vietnam War, led to
a market crash, from a prior high of around 1,000 to 630. (How quaint, those
numbers seem now!) Then, just the mere announcement
of a dinner at the White House, in which the President and his economic
advisers explained administration policy to Wall Street and industry leaders,
was enough to produce a 31-point gain, the largest in history to that point.
You can practically see Haldeman shake his head as
his notes in the diary he faithfully kept as Nixon’s Chief of Staff, “Really neurotic.”
And don’t even get me started on how the market has
performed since the pandemic outbreak. I don’t think I understood Missouri
Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s great quote in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage—“I despise the
bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime”—until I
understood how much “bubble,” in all its irrationality, has been associated
with Wall Street. Nearly two months ago, for instance, U.S. stocks rallied at
the thought that the pandemic might be slowing.
You might think, as the death toll reaches 100,000,
that investors might be a bit more careful this time. No such luck. With an
announcement looming that U.S. jobless claims would pass 40 million, Wall
Street rallied again over the belief that reopened markets would set everything
right again.
Well, let’s see how that turns out, okay?
(The image accompanying this post is a cartoon, “Wall
Street bubbles - Always the same," which appeared in the May 22, 1901
issue of the British satirical magazine Puck.
The cartoon shows American financier J. P. Morgan as a bull, blowing soap
bubbles for eager investors. Several bubbles are labeled, "Inflated
values." The image is available from the United States Library of
Congress's Prints and Photographs division, under the digital ID cph.3g07880)
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