Hon. Stephen V. White.
Hon. Stephen V. White is a short, compactly built, dark-complexioned man of 54. In manners he is courteous and unassuming; in business methods he is quick and straightforward. He is a Director in the Western Union and the Lackawanna road. He is a bold, dashing operator in stocks, and in Wall Street has met with considerable success. One of his greatest favorites is Lackawanna. He expects to see it some day go to 200. He has several times badly squeezed the shorts in that stock, and, now that he has practically demonstrated what they ought to have known before, namely, that the stock can easily be cornered, the bears are apt to fight shy of it. He has a large clientele, and, being a natural leader, he has plenty of followers in his speculative campaigns. He was born in North Carolina. He was graduated from Knox College at Galesburg, Illinois. He studied law in the office of the Hon. John J. Kasson, afterward United States Minister to Germany. He drifted to St. Louis, and there became a reporter for the Missouri Democrat. He went to Des Moines, practised law for nine years, and was elected a Judge. He came to New York, and for a time practised law, but soon became a stock broker as well. He still occasionally appears as counsel in the Federal Courts, and sometimes in the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a ready and forcible speaker, full of vim and fire. He was a warm personal friend of the late Henry Ward Beecher, the grand old Chrysostom of the nineteenth century, who has left the world brighter for his memory and darker for his absence. In the frank, keen, practical financier and lawyer, and the great, warm hearted preacher, glowing with fervid idealism and generous enthusiasm and high aspirations for the human race, there were kindred qualities that made them friends. Mr. White, in 1886, was elected to Congress from Brooklyn, where he resides. He is scholarly in his tastes, well versed in the classics, and is especially fond of astronomy, for the study of which he has a fine observatory in his palatial home. He is popular in Wall Street.
L. P. Morton