Fifty years in Wall Street

by Henry Clews

Philip D Armour

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

Austin Corbin.

Within a year Austin Corbin has become a prominent figure in the financial world, winning wide business celebrity by his identification with the reorganization of the Reading Railroad. He is by nature the reverse of an iconoclast, namely, a builder up. He would construct rather than destroy. He would save a property if it were at all possible, and in pulling that poor, tired, financial pilgrim Reading out of the slough of despond, and in directing its way toward a primrose path of prosperity, he is engaged in a congenial task. He is about 58 years of age, and was born in Newport, New Hampshire. He studied law, and was graduated from the Harvard Law School. For a time he practised law in his native town as a partner of Ex-Governor Metcalf, of New Hampshire, but in 1851 he went to Davenport, Iowa. There he really organized the first national bank under the new system, which was to prove of such incalculable financial benefit to the nation. Mr. Corbin made the first application under the new law, but it happened to be faulty in some minor technicalities, and before their trivialities could be corrected four other national banks were organized, so that his bank became number five under the new system. He came to New York in 1865, and established a banking-house here. He is President of the Reading, Long Island, Indiana, Bloomington & Western, Elmira, Cortland & Northern, and Manhattan Beach Railroads. He is a member of the Union League, Manhattan and Saturday Night Clubs of New York, the Somerset Club of Boston, and the Conservative Club of London. He is a man of strict probity, genial in his manners, and deservedly held in high esteem.

Philip D. Armour.

Philip D. Armour was born in a little village near Watertown in the interior of New York State, in 1832. He is powerfully built, with broad shoulders, a large head and firm, square features and light gray eyes, that never seem excited or disturbed. His manners are quiet, composed and courteous. In 1849, leaving his native village, he went to California. He crossed the plains with a six-mule team which he drove himself. He worked for a few years in the gold fields, accumulated a little capital, and in 1855 went to Milwaukee and engaged in the grain and warehouse business. He prospered moderately but steadily. Then he thought of going into the lumber business, but bought an interest in the pork packing establishment of Layton & Plankington, the former retiring. At this time he was worth half a million. He soon increased this three-fold. In the war, provisions were very high, but when Gen. Grant was closing in on the Confederacy for the final struggle that could only end in the triumph of the North, Mr. Armour saw that prices must come down with the Confederacy. He came at once to New York and began to sell pork short. He began to sell at $40 a barrel. He covered at $18 and netted, it is said, nearly two million dollars. He now enlarged his business, established new packing houses in Chicago and Kansas City as well as agencies all over the world. He has sold sixty million dollars’ worth of food products in a year. He has five thousand names on his pay roll. He has cornered pork three times within recent years, and in 1880 made, it is said, three millions in punishing bears who tried to sell the market down. A campaign against the bears in pork or meats he calls protecting his cellars. Those cellars are well protected. No bearish Ali Baba has the pass-word to go in and plunder them, and the number of cinnamons and grizzlies, big and little, who have licked their paws in rueful remembrance of the attempt are not a few. He has made millions in successful grain speculations. He invested four millions in St. Paul stock, buying it outright. He is now one of the recognized financial leaders of the country, as aggressive as a Wellington at the proper time and cautious as a Fabius when caution is the watchword of wisdom. He lives in a plain house on Prairie Avenue in Chicago, and is himself a man devoid of ostentation. He works from 7 A. M. till 6 P. M. His fortune is estimated at fifteen millions of dollars.

Hon. Levi P. Morton received his business training in the dry goods trade. Then he became a banker. He has a national reputation as a financier. He is shrewd, genial and successful. President Garfield made him Minister to France. He had previously done good service as a member of Congress. He is now in his sixty-third year. He is a lineal descendant of George Morton, one of the Pilgrim Fathers who came to this country in 1623. Mr. Morton was born in the State of New Hampshire. At 20 he became a clerk in a country store. He had to shift for himself. Necessity is the stimulus that men of real ability require. He stayed five years in the obscure New Hampshire village and then went to Boston, where he ultimately engaged in business. But New York attracted him. He embarked in the dry goods business here and went into banking afterwards, and soon laid the broad foundations for the successful firms of Morton, Bliss & Co., of New York, and Morton, Rose & Co., of London. His Congressional and diplomatic laurels followed. He filled the French Mission with great satisfaction to the French people as well as those of the American traveling public, as he was a free and generous entertainer. His large fortune has been amassed since he came to Wall Street. He has a fine villa at Newport and also one on the Hudson.