Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel

by Thomas William Lawson

“All those opposed, ‘No.’”

There was a deathly hush.

“Mr. Brownley will please speak from this platform, and remember, in thirty minutes to the second, I will sound the gavel for the resumption of business.”

Bob Brownley strode to the place just vacated by the president. The crowd was growing larger every minute. The ticker was already hissing a tape biograph of this extraordinary situation in brokerage shops, hotels, and banks throughout the country, and in a few minutes the news of it would be in the capitals of Europe. Never before in history did man have such an audience—the whole civilised world. Already arose from Wall, Broad, and New Streets, which surround the Exchange, the hoarse bellow of the gathering hordes. Before the ticker should announce the resumption of business these would number hundreds of thousands, for the financial district for more than an hour had been a surging mob.

For once at least the much-abused phrase, “He looked the part,” could be used in all truthfulness. As Robert Brownley threw back his head and shoulders and faced that crowd of men, some of whom he had hurt, many of whom he had beggared, and all of whom he had tortured, he presented a picture such as a royal lion recently from the jungles and just freed from his cage might have made. Defiance, deference, contempt, and pity all blended in his mien, but over all was an I-am-the-one-you-are-the-many atmosphere of confidence that turned my spinal column into a mercury tube. He began to speak:

“Men of Wall Street:

“You have just witnessed a record-breaking slaughter. I have asked permission to talk to you for the purpose of showing you how any member of a great Stock Exchange may at any time do what I have done to-day. Weigh well what I am about to say to you. During the last quarter of a century there has grown up in this free and fair land of ours a system by which the few take from the many the results of their labours. The men who take have no more license, from God or man, to take, than have those from whom they filch. They are not endowed by God with superior wisdom, nor have they performed for their fellow-men any labour or given to them anything of value that entitles them to what they take. Their only license to plunder is their knowledge of the system of trickery and fraud that they themselves have created. No man can gainsay this, for on every side is the evidence. Men come into Wall Street at sunrise without dollars; before that same sun sets they depart with millions. So all-powerful has grown the system of oppression that single men take in a single lifetime all the savings of a million of their fellows. To-day the people, eighty millions strong, are slaving for the few, and their pay is their board and keep. I saw this robbery. I felt the robbers’ scourge. I sought the secret. I found it here, here in this gambling-hell. I found that the stocks we bought and sold were mere gambling chips; that the man who had the biggest stack could beat his opponent off the board; that his opponent was the world, because all men directly or indirectly played the stock-gambling game. To win, it was but necessary to have unlimited chips. If chips were bought and sold, on equal terms, by all, no one could buy more than he could pay for, and the game, although still a gambling one, would be fair. A few master tricksters, dollar magicians, long ago seeing this condition, invented the system by which the people are ruthlessly plundered. The system they invented was simple, so simple that for a quarter of a century it has remained undiscovered by the world at large—and even by you, who profess to be experts. No man thought that a free people who had intended to allow all the equal use of every avenue for the attainment of wealth, and who intended to provide for the safeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as to allow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a device as simple as that by which children play at blindman’s buff. The process was no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took the pebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money bought the labour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and by turning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money which he had paid them for the labour until all in the land were slaves of the moneymaker. These few tricksters said: We will arbitrarily manufacture these chips—stocks. After we have manufactured them, we will sell the world what the world can pay for, and then by the use of the unlimited supply we still have we will win away from the world what it has bought, and repeat the operation, until we have all the wealth, and the people are enslaved. To do this there was one thing besides the manufacturing of the chips—stocks—that was absolutely necessary—a gambling-hell, the working of whose machinery would place a selling value upon such chips; a hell where, after selling the chips, they could be won back. I saw that if these tricksters were to be routed and their ‘System’ was to be destroyed, it must be through the machinery of this Stock Exchange. I studied the machinery, and presently I marvelled that men could for so long have been asses.

“From the very nature of stock-gambling it is necessary, absolutely necessary, that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable, unbreakable rules, to attempt to change or break which would destroy stock-gambling. The foundation rule, the rule absolutely necessary for the existence of stock-gambling is: Any member of the Stock Exchange can buy, or sell, between the opening and the closing of the Exchange as many shares of stock as he cares to. With this rule in force his buying and selling cannot be restricted to the amount he can take and pay for, or deliver and receive pay for, because there is not money enough in the world to pay for what under this same rule can be bought and sold in a single session. This is because there have been arbitrarily created by these few tricksters many times more stocks than there is money in existence. The amount of stock that any man can sell in one session of the Exchange is limited only by the amount that he can offer for sale, and he can offer any amount his tongue can utter; and he is not compelled and cannot be compelled to show his ability to deliver what he has offered for sale until after he has finished selling, which is the following day. You will ask as I did: Can this be possible? You will find the answer I found. It is so, and must continue to be so, or there will be no stock-gambling. Mark me, for this statement is weighted with the greatest import to you all. A member of this Exchange can sell as many shares of stock at one session as he cares to offer. If any attempt is made at the session he sells at to compel him either before or after he offers to sell to show his ability to deliver, away goes the stock-gambling structure, because from the very nature of the whole structure of stock-gambling the same shares are sold and resold many times in each session and the seller cannot know, much less show, that he can deliver until he first adjusts with the buyer and the buyer cannot adjust until after he has become such by buying. If a rule were made compelling a seller to show his responsibility before selling, every member would have every other member at his mercy and there could be no stock-gambling. When I had worked this out, I saw that while the few tricksters of the ‘System’ had a perfect device for taking from the people their wealth, I had discovered as perfect a means of taking away from the few the wealth they had secured from the many. With this knowledge came a conviction that my way was as honest as the ‘System’s,’ in fact more honest than theirs. They took from the innocent, I took from the guilty what had already been dishonestly secured. I determined to put my discovery into practice.

“I might never have done so but for that Sugar panic in which I was robbed of millions by the ‘System’ through Barry Conant. In that panic the ‘System,’ with its unlimited resources, filched from the people by the arbitrary manufacture of stocks, and by their manipulation did to me what I afterward discovered I could do to them, without any resources other than my right to do business on the floor of this Exchange. You saw the outcome, in the second Sugar panic, of my first experiment. In a few minutes I cleared a profit of ten million dollars. I could have made it fifty millions, or one hundred and fifty, but I was not then on familiar terms with my new robber-robbing device, and I had yet a heart. To make this ten millions of money, all that was necessary for me to do was to sell more Sugar than Barry Conant could buy. This was easy, because Barry Conant, not knowing of my newly invented trick, could buy only what he could pay for on the morrow, or, at least, what he believed his clients could pay for; while I, not intending to deliver what I sold—unless by smashing the price to a point where I could compel those who had bought to resell to me at millions less than I sold at—could sell unlimited amounts—literally unlimited amounts. When Barry Conant had bought all that he thought he could pay for, he was obliged to beat a retreat in front of my offerings, and I was able to smash, and smash, until the price was so low that he could not by the use of what he had bought, as collateral, borrow sufficient to pay me for what I had sold him. Then he was compelled to turn about and sell what he had bought from me, and when I had rebought it, for ten millions less than I had sold it for, the trick had been turned. I had sold him 100,000 shares say at 220. He had sold them back to me say at 120, and he stood where he had stood at the beginning. He had none of the 100,000 shares. Both of us stood, so far as stock was concerned, where we had stood at the beginning, but as to profits and losses there was this difference: I had ten millions of dollars profits, while Barry Conant’s clients, the ‘System,’ were ten millions losers—and all by a trick. The trick did not differ in principle from the one in constant practice by the ‘System.’ When the ‘System,’ after manufacturing Sugar stock, sell 100,000 shares to the people for $10,000,000, they so manipulate the market by the use of the $10,000,000 that they have taken from the people as to scare them into selling the 100,000 shares back to them for $5,000,000. After they have bought they again manipulate the market until the people buy back for $10,000,000 what they sold for $5,000,000. The ‘System’ commits no legal crime. I committed no legal crime. I had not even infringed any rule of the Exchange, any more than had the ‘System’ when they performed their trick. Since my experimental panic I have repeatedly put the trick in operation, and each time I have taken millions, until to-day I have in my control, as absolutely as though I had honestly earned them, as the labourer earns his week’s wages, or the farmer the price of his crops, over $1,000,000,000, or sufficient to keep enslaved the rest of their lives a million people.

“What do you intelligent men think of this situation? You know, because you know the stock-gambling game, that the American people, with their boasted brains and courage, come year after year with their bags of gold, the result of their prosperous labours, and dump them, hundreds of millions, into this gambling-inferno of yours. You know that they are fools, these silly millions of people whom you term lambs and suckers. You chuckle as, year after year, having been sent away shorn, they return for new shearing. You marvel that the merchants, manufacturers, miners, lawyers, farmers, who have sufficient intelligence to gather such surplus legitimately, would bring it to our gambling-hell, where upon all sides is plain proof that we who conduct the gambling, and who produce nothing, are obliged to take from those who do produce, hundreds of millions each year for expenses, and hundreds of millions each year for profits—for you know that we have nothing to give them in return for what they bring to us. You know that every dollar of the billions lost in Wall Street means higher prices for steel rails, for lumber and cars, and that this means higher passenger and freight rates to the people. You know that when the manufacturer brings his wealth to Wall Street and is robbed of it, he will add something to the price of boots and shoes, cotton and woollen clothes, and other necessities that he makes and that he sells to the people. You know that when the copper, lead, tin, and iron miners part with their surplus to the ‘System,’ it means higher prices to the people for their copper pots and gutters, for the water that comes through lead pipes, for their tin dippers and wash boilers, and for their rents, and all those necessities into which machinery, lumber, and other raw and finished material enters. You know that every hundred millions dropped by real producers to the brigands of our world means lower wages or less of the necessities and luxuries for all the people, and especially for the farmer. You know that it is habit with us of Wall Street to gloat over the doctrine of the ‘System,’ which the people parrot among themselves, the doctrine that the people at large are not affected by our gambling, because they, the people, having no surplus to gamble with, never come into Wall Street. And yet, knowing all this, you never thought, with all your wisdom and cynicism, that right here in this institution, which you own and control, was the open sesame, for each or all of you, to those great chests of gold that your clients, the ‘System,’ have filled to bursting from the stores of the people. What, I ask, do you wise men think of the situation as you now see it?”