January 2011

It is easy to make money in a bull market. Just look at the thousands of Wall Streeters who have done so in recent years, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average has broken through thousand mark after thousand mark. But, as they drive around in their Range Rovers, smoke their fifteen-dollar cigars, and discreetly pull back their shirt cuffs to reveal a glimpse of a Rolex, these beneficiaries of the greatest bull market in the history of Wall Street might spare a moment to think about Samuel Insull.

In the summer of 1929, securities in Insull’s companies were appreciating at the rate of $7000 a minute. His utilities empire, centered in Chicago, extended into thirty-nine states. With his cookie-duster mustache, velvet-collared overcoat, neatly turned Homburg, spats, and elegant walking stick, he was, for the 1920s, the very model of the modern major capitalist.

Conley Kidd, of
Fruitland Park,
Florida, has put in
thirty-eight years
with United Telephone of
Florida. Telephones are clearly
in his blood, and he casts a
professional eye on the
bravura photograph he sent
us. “Follow the pole to the
top,” Kidd writes, “and you
will see three young fellows
posing with nonchalance as if
they climbed like this every day
—which they probably did.

The only complaint Martha Dodd had about her father as she grew up was that, sometimes, he’d start going on and on to the family about the Bible and history and economics, politics, and social problems. Too boring. She wanted to be a poet and writer, and such discussions held no interest for her. At the University of Chicago, where her father taught history and she majored in English, she ran with a crowd talking literature and art, poetry and painting.

On July 12, in Miami Beach, Sen.
George McGovern of South Dakota
won the Democratic nomination for
President after a prolonged struggle.
With the nomination finally wrapped
up, McGovern began a deliberate,
painstaking search for a running mate.
The next day he announced his choice:
Thomas Eagleton, a freshman senator from Missouri who might have qualified to be called obscure if he had been a bit better known.

Pundits expressed surprise at the
selection, but it would have been an
even bigger surprise if anyone important had taken the job. With President
Nixon’s popularity soaring and much
of McGovern’s own party only half-
heartedly behind him, the campaign was a sinking ship that no ambitious politician would knowingly board.

The alarm bells are ringing for Social Security again. That’s not exactly news; predictions of the exhaustion of its trust fund have been made before. Earlier this year some members of yet another panel of experts proposed a new remedy: to wit, the investment of a part of those reserved billions in private securities instead of lesser-yielding but safer government bonds. That, of course, would make the United States of America a direct player in the market. Nobody knows exactly what consequences would flow from such a step, but it is a fact that early in the history of the Republic, the government of the United States was formally and actively a player in the banking business and therefore in the capital market. Indeed, it ran its financial affairs through a bank primarily owned by private investors. That curious marriage ended in a tempestuous and consequential divorce.

To Horace Albert (“bones”) McKinney, listening over the phone in his parlor on Fourth Street in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the words of Arthur Morse sounded just fine. Morse, who was part owner of the Chicago Stags franchise in the brand-new Basketball Association of America (B.A.A.), was saying, “My friend, if Yankee Stadium was built for Babe Ruth, then Chicago Stadium was built for Bones McKinney.”

The Babe and Bones in one mouthful. Not bad, even if Morse was laying it on a bit thick. But in this autumn of 1946 McKinney didn’t mind the blarney. Working as he was in the personnel department of Hanes Hosiery and in off-hours playing for the company basketball team, he found the idea of a pro game appealing. But the prospect of flying to Chicago to wrap the deal—that was another story. If the good Lord had wanted him to fly, Bones liked to say, he’d have provided wings. So McKinney left by train, stopping en route in Washington, D.C.

What a delight the Roycroft Renaissance (“History Happened Here,” October 1996) must have been to all those who worked so long to see it come to be. And what a source of joy it is to all of us who call the Buffalo area our home.

The review was thorough and revealing, and we can hope it will give the readers of American Heritage one more reason to visit our history-laden region.

While Elbert Hubbard did sell soap, he was a great deal more than a soap salesman. His creation of the premium sales-incentive—first packing a dish towel and later cups, saucers, dishes, and other china into soap boxes—made the Larkin Soap Company a leader. Later, coupons in the soap boxes earned you furniture by mail.

Hubbard was a master advertising copywriter as well. A talent that honed his writing skills and also contributed to the sale of Roycroft goods through the advertisements in his publications.

Richard Reeves’s apologia brings to mind the poet Robert Lowel’s observation that “one has a thousand opportunities to misrevise. A little ground is gained for the more that is lost.”

Mr. Reeves had it right the first time he wrote on the subject of the pardon: The episode served to symbolize to the American public the ultimate escape route from the criminal justice system available to an imperial President bent on avoiding personal responsibility for his actions—if he could enlist the allegiance of his chosen successor. Thanks to Gerald Ford, the scheme worked.

It was distressing to read in the December 1996 issue that the distinguished columnist and political writer Richard Reeves felt compelled to make a public apology to former President Gerald Ford (“I’m Sorry, Mr. President”). Mr. Reeves thinks he was “too tough” on Ford when he criticized him for pardoning Richard Nixon. He now accepts Ford’s excuse for the pardon—“that it would have been impossible to govern the country if there had been open charges against Nixon”—and somewhat shamefacedly praises Ford for having the guts “to take the hit.”

Mr. Reeves goes further to blame himself for starting the present trend in the media and among the public to be cynical about politics and to trash all politicians as bums.