It is not often, however, that newcomers in the Street fare as well as this in the end. For a time they will go on merrily enough, and send things booming, but in the end most of them get the worst of it. At the risk of repeating myself, I will say here:
Mr. A. B. Stockwell is a good illustration of the truth of this. At one time he was worth many millions of dollars. His start in life was as a purser on a Lake Erie steamboat; his father, it is said, kept a livery stable in Cleveland. On one of his trips Stockwell was in a position to show considerable attention to Elias Howe, the inventor of the eye at the top end of the sewing-machine needle. Mr. Howe was accompanied by his daughter. Stockwell made himself agreeable to Miss Howe also, and with such good effect that he managed to win her affections, and soon thereafter married her.
When Mr. Howe died, Mrs. Stockwell came into possession of her father’s millions. With this nest egg Stockwell started in Wall Street, and before anyone realized what had happened he was the most talked-of man in the district. He put all his wife’s millions in Pacific Mail stock, secured entire control of the company and elected himself its president. He came into the Street as plain Stockwell. Then, as the news of his liberality and good-fellowship spread, he became Mr. Stockwell. After he got hold of the Pacific Mail he was Commodore Stockwell by common consent. Everybody bowed and scraped to him, and no man was so high and mighty that he was not proud to shake his hand.
Stockwell took hold of Pacific Mail at about 40 and sent it up to 107. It was at this period that he was worth on paper over $15,000,000. But he found, unfortunately, when it was too late to retreat, that though Pacific Mail was up to 107 it was not worth that figure when the unloading commenced.
He was landed high and dry with it all, and the Street told him he was welcome to it. He tried to sell, and found that there was no market. Then came violent demands on him to pay up his numerous call loans, and in order to respond he had to sell regardless of price, and thus a whirlpool was created which finally sent the stock down to the price at which he had begun his original purchases. In this one upset he lost all his paper profits and his wife’s millions besides. That was the most famous boom in the history of Pacific Mail, notwithstanding Leonard Jerome’s previous brilliant ups and downs in that property.
Leonard Jerome and his brother Addison had a good time with Pacific Mail for a while. They ran it up to high figures several times, but finally met with the same experience that Stockwell did. The two Jeromes, from being among the wealthiest and most dazzling operators in the Street, were in the end practically wiped out. Leonard Jerome, who was the father of Lady Randolph Churchill, had nothing left to bequeath his daughter except an equity in the house now occupied by the Manhattan Club on Madison Avenue, which yields an income of about $15,000 a year, of which Lady Churchill gets $10,000.
These are a few of the booms that have stirred up things in Wall Street at one time or another, as did the Keene, the Gould, and the Vanderbilt booms, and the rest I have mentioned.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
WALL STREET’S WILD SPECULATION, 1900-1904.
McKinley’s Reëlection and the Defeat of Bryanism Set the Big Ball of Speculation Rolling on the Stock Exchange.—The Tremendous Volume of Speculation by both Large and Small Capitalists.—The Rush to Incorporate New Companies and Create Industrial Trusts and Railway Combinations.—The Enormous Capitalization of the United States Steel Corporation and Other Companies in Excess of Real Values.—The Rapid Growth and Popularity of New and Old Trust Companies and the Effect of Their Competition in Forcing Bank Consolidations.—The Bold and Reckless Speculations in Railway Stocks of the Newly Enriched Western Capitalists.—The Great Northern Pacific Panic of May 9, 1901.—The Capture of Control of the Louisville & Nashville Railway by John W. Gates, and Its Redemption by J. P. Morgan & Co., Acting in the Interest of the Louisville & Nashville and Southern Railway.—The Slowing Down of Wild and Reckless Speculation in Stocks after September, 1902, through the Influence of the Banks and Conservative Bankers, thus Averting Further Inflation and a Great Convulsion.—The Liquidation and Depression of 1903 a Natural Reaction from the Intoxication of the Preceding Prolonged Boom.—The Great Rise in Cotton and the Collapse of the Tremendous Bull Speculation Led by Daniel J. Sully when He Failed.—The Sudden Fall in the Iron Barometer in 1903, and the General Situation in 1904.