As one crosses Broadway and descends to Broad Street, the impression deepens, stirs, until you realize you are standing in a place of strength and power, in the very heart of the nation’s financial life. The crowd of curb brokers yelling out quotations before the Stock Exchange seems merely a casual and ludicrous episode, and the Stock Exchange itself but a factor in this tremendous neighborhood.
Here is a world force which expresses itself on land and sea, and in the heaven above; which has built itself an abode that is the wonder of man; which bids fleets go forth, transports armies, and commands in foreign senates; which restrains kings in their wrath; which feeds the peasant on the banks of the Gloire, and clothes the coolie toiling in the rice fields of Honan.
You stand there, I say, and recognize that you are in the presence of the creative energy of millions of men and machines building, hauling, planting, laboring, all over the world; and then you go into your broker’s office and hear slim young gentlemen talk of “playing the market,” and you don’t wonder the broker is cynical and careful.
This serious, solid, fundamental character of Wall Street, performing amid its colossal setting, an important and essential office in the world’s work, must be conscientiously painted in and emphasized in any portrait, however gay and frolicsome, which attempts to depict its spirit.
This sense of drama, indeed, this consciousness that tremendous things are happening while we amuse ourselves, is one of the causes which make Wall Street so fascinating. You can take it as seriously or as frivolously as you please. You can operate with all the statistics of “Poor’s Manual” and “The Financial Chronicle” packed into your head, or you can trade with the gay abandon of M. D’Artagnan breakfasting under the walls of La Rochelle.
I have said all the world comes here, and the more I reflect upon it, as a man of twenty years’ experience, the less I wonder. The wonder is that anybody stays away. It is so tempting, so amusing, so respectable, so reckless or cautious, as you choose.
In appearance, a broker’s office is something between a club parlor and a bank, and it unconsciously represents its business. The room is spacious and richly carpeted. The great quotation board, with that jumping jack of a boy bobbing up and down on the platform before it, is of solid mahogany. The chairs are large and comfortable. From the great windows you can look out on the varied and beautiful panorama of the Hudson and the harbor, the water flashing in the sunlight and lively with tugs, schooners, steamers, yachts. On the table are all sorts of stock reports, newsfiles, financial statements.
The daily papers are in a rack, and over the mantel are bound volumes of the “Chronicle,” and copies of “Poor’s Manual.” Here is a commodious desk with note paper, order pads and so forth for your use. By the quotation board the ticker is clicking busily, and next it Dow-Jones’ news machine is clacking out printed copy that the newsboy will be howling “Extra” over an hour afterward. Cigars in the table drawer await your acceptance.
A knot of gentlemen are chatting about the ticker; some more are watching the board. An old man with a white beard is dozing in a corner with a “Reading Annual Report” on his knee. If you are a quick and accurate judge of values, here is a means of livelihood under the most agreeable, gentlemanly and easy auspices. You are making your fortune seated comfortably among your friends, so to speak, smoking and chatting pleasantly.
Every minute something happens, and every other event is a financial opportunity. A boy rushes in with a news slip that Russia is to coerce China—wheat rises. Chicago unloads stocks to buy grain—shares decline a point all round. A money broker in to offer a million dollars, and he knows the City Bank people are buying Amalgamated Copper. There is a sudden chorus of greetings and smiles; the popular man of the office has arrived unexpectedly from London. The telephone rings; the board member sends word the market looks like a buy.