The Go-Go Years (16 page)

So it was, to some extent, a rebuilt Wall Street in the nineteen sixties—an old house nearly abandoned by its tenants, who had decided at the last minute to rehabilitate it instead. The new buildings were coldly and starkly modern, in contrast to the ornate palazzos and temples put up in the nineteen twenties and
earlier. But the new architecture did not immediately change the style of the place.

Lunch, for example—the only time of potential leisure in Wall Street life—was still a time of rush and push and bad temper for most people. The high and mighty—and many of the not-too-high and mighty, provided only that they were white, male, presentable, and doing well enough to pay dues—had their luncheon clubs: the Down Town Association for the remnants of the old Protestant élite; the Recess, more businesslike but quite respectable, frequented by investment bankers; the huge Bankers and Lawyers for almost anyone over thirty (banker, lawyer, whatnot) who worked in the area; the Lunch Club for young men on the way up; and so on. There were still the expensive restaurants like Whyte's on Fulton Street and Oscar's Delmonico, successor to the fabled Delmonico's where the robber barons once supped in splendor. And for just about everybody else there was a wait for a counter seat, followed by a hasty bite made more urgent by the impatient presence at one's back of someone else waiting in turn, at Chock Full o' Nuts.

Most astonishing, in view of the importance of private lunch clubs in Wall Street and their all-male character, was the fact that many of the public restaurants in the area did not take advantage of the situation by encouraging women, but rather fell in line with the clubs by banning them. Whyte's maintained male exclusivity in its taproom; some other restaurants declined to serve women anywhere on the premises. Without a reservation or a long wait, a woman could scarcely get a decent lunch anywhere in the area at any price. Professionally, prejudice against women in the financial business was wide, deep, and largely unquestioned. Although women made up slightly more than half of the total Wall Street work force, there was no woman member of the New York Stock Exchange and no woman officer of a major Wall Street bank. Of the thousands of partners in brokerage firms, some sixty were women—most of them in research, the one kind of work in which by common consent Wall Street women were allowed to rise above the secretarial
level. The explanation for the exception apparently lies in the fact that a research analyst works alone; that is, the ladies doing research didn't have to deal directly with men, either colleagues or customers. They could be kept hidden in a back room.

In sum, Wall Street in 1965 was still unblushingly—one might almost say innocently—male chauvinist in precisely the ways that were to be defined so acerbically later in the decade by women writers and politicians. It stood out as a last bastion of all-but-unchallenged male supremacy. It thought working women ought to be office drudges or sex objects, or both. One summer about that time, the Street took a collective notion to make a fuss over a young stenographer of exceptional physical endowments. By word of mouth it became known that she was in the habit of emerging from the subway stop at William and Wall at a certain time each day. Huge crowds began collecting to watch her appearance with cheers and whistles. Newspapers and television joined in the sport, and one day when she surfaced, there was a real mob and a near riot, as if the girl's arrival were some sort of highly charged political event. The girl herself, understandably enough, was first flattered, then abashed, and finally horrified. In a sense, this little episode
was
a political event; Wall Street was unconsciously demonstrating exactly what it thought of women and of what they were good for.

The question of why women in the United States have always been, and to a marked extent still are, considered incompetent to manage money or deal in it with men is probably one for psychology rather than for social history. The great Wall Street chronicler Henry Clews put the matter coolly: “Wall Street is not the place for a lady to find either fortune or character.” Hetty Green, the nineteenth-century shipping heiress who over some forty years ran a fortune of a few million dollars, most of it tied up in trust, to more than one hundred million—and who once threatened the notoriously ruthless Collis P. Huntington with a revolver when she thought he was cheating her in a deal—stands almost alone as an American woman of unquestioned financial genius; and she achieved this standing at the
cost of being generally considered a witch. Then there was the astonishing firm of Woodhull, Claflin and Company, of 44 Broad Street,
floruit circa
1870-1872, affectionately known as “the bewitching brokers,” consisting of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, free-love advocate and later free-lance Presidential candidate, and her almost equally astonishing sister Tennessee (later Tennie C.) Claflin. The sisters made a big stir and apparently even some money in the harsh post-Civil War Wall Street, but they were scarcely financial geniuses; they and their firm were protégés of the septuagenarian financier Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose mistress Tennie had briefly been. Perhaps the key, or one key, to the genesis of the lasting prejudice is to be found in the Hetty-Huntington episode: Americans of both sexes have always tended subconsciously to equate financial deals with physical fighting—the latter a form of competition in which the hardest-shelled feminist admits that women are usually ill-equipped to compete equally with men.

At any rate, women in the middle nineteen sixties still tended to accede to the view that they could not or should not compete with men in financial affairs. Emancipated, highly competent and successful women in other fields—the arts, publishing, real estate, retail trade—still found it consistent with their self-esteem to affect a coy bewilderment when conversation turned to the stock market or the intricacies of finance. In Wall Street, women analysts accepted with little protest being excluded or jostled at lunch, and signed their research reports “Jones” or “Smith” rather than “Mary Jones” or “Susan Smith,” so that their readers would not discount the reports. Wall Street feminists discussed their views only in private. “Up against the Wall Street!” a women's-lib group would snarl later in the decade, but not yet in 1965.

Blacks simply did not exist. The notion of applying for professional-level jobs in Wall Street did not even occur to them, and the concept of business firms conducting professional training programs as a social duty had not yet gained a foothold, either in Wall Street or in the nation. Even as messengers bearing securities, blacks were not much to be seen; the financial
district had no “race problem” just because, like so many Northern cities a century before, it still had hardly any blacks.

3

In political ideology, by contrast, Wall Street was now somewhat more liberal—or less reactionary—than previously. The day of the Liberty League was over; there were no more J.P. Morgans requiring aides to screen from their eyes all newspapers containing photographs of Roosevelt so as to protect the master's blood pressure. Liberal Democrats, many of them Jewish, were about as common as conservative Republicans in the positions of power; now, one of them, Howard Stein of Dreyfus Corporation, would be the chief fund-raiser for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 Presidential campaign. This was not entirely a matter of high-mindedness, however. With the federal government in generally liberal Democratic hands there was little to be gained by conservative intransigence on the old issues—balancing the budget, federal meddling in business, high costs of welfare and social security. Such intransigence now led only to nasty rows with Washington officials, and those, in turn, could lead only to more regulation, bad publicity, and loss of the confidence of customers. Downtown, Colonel Blimpism no longer paid.

Many of the men putting together the stock market's new darlings, the conglomerates, were liberals—and, of course, it didn't hurt a Wall Street analyst or salesman to be on close and sympathetic terms with such men. There were even former Communists high in the financial game. Much of Wall Street had long had a surprisingly tolerant attitude toward Communism, derived from a perspective that put any alien ideology so far beyond the pale as to make it an object of exotic interest. In the early postwar years a young man out of Columbia and the Army went to work for a long-established Wall Street firm; assigned to the library, he took to browsing in the firm's extensive
collection of books on Marxism and Communism; an unscheduled conversion took place, and the young man left the library, and Wall Street, presumably intending to join the Party.

Bart Lytton, born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in upper middle-class circumstances, came of age in the Depression, joined the W.P.A. Federal Theatre Project, and became a Communist. His proper mother wrote him, “You who were raised in country clubs, you who used to buy a dozen golf balls and two tennis racquets at a time, you who could have been governor of Pennsylvania—you want to run off and join the radicals. Well, go eat bread with your comrades then.” After a time he left the Party, but without totally and violently rejecting its beliefs as so many renegades did. In 1939 he went to California to become a screenwriter and public-relations man, and in 1948 he moved into the savings-and-loan business. By 1965 his Lytton Financial Corporation had grown so fantastically that it was among the five biggest savings-and-loan companies in the country; and Bart Lytton, with hundreds of millions of his own, was describing himself without refutation as “the most successful businessman in this decade in the United States.” He served for four years as finance chairman of the California Democratic Central Committee, backed John F. Kennedy with a $200,000 contribution in 1960, was a major benefactor of local art museums and a founder of one, and decorated his company's annual reports with pictures of himself with Elizabeth Taylor, Levi Eshkol, and Hubert Humphrey. He boasted that he considered a morning wasted when he didn't wake up $500,000 to $1,000,000 richer than the night before. The very next year, 1966, his headlong business style would backfire and his company collapse into reorganization; meanwhile, though, the Communist Party of the United States had apparently been for him a far more effective academy of commerce than the Harvard School of Business Administration is for most.

The sudden youth explosion that was to overtake Wall Street life, and most particularly the management of money, had not occurred yet, but its fuse was burning short. It had an easily
found sociological cause. For almost a generation, from the 1929 crash to the bull market of the nineteen fifties, young men of talent and ambition grew up thinking of Wall Street as anathema and did not go to work there, leaving a vacuum when the Wall Street leaders who had started before 1929 began to retire and the positions of power and responsibility to fall open. (Between 1930 and 1951, for example, only eight persons were hired to work on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor.) The positions were being filled,
faute de mieux,
by the soon-to-be-celebrated sideburned young hotshots of the late nineteen sixties, most of whom had started working in Wall Street after 1960.

Indeed, by 1969 half of Wall Street's salesmen and analysts would be persons who had come into the business since 1962, and consequently had never seen a bad market break. Probably the prototypical portfolio hotshot of 1968 entered Wall Street precisely in 1965. Of course, he was no hotshot in 1965. He was a young man with conservative clothes and neatly trimmed hair who had a degree from a business school or perhaps only a liberal arts college, and who, assessing his chances for a quick fortune, had hit on the business of picking stocks for mutual funds as a good bet and accepted a starting salary of perhaps $7,500. Portfolio management had the appeal of sports—that one cleanly wins or loses, the results are measurable in numbers; if one's portfolio was up 30 or 50 percent for a given year one was a certified winner, so recognized and so compensated regardless of whether he was popular with his colleagues or had come from the right ancestry or the right side of the tracks. Again as in sports, the winner became an instant star, his name known and revered in Wall Street. In 1965 the gunslinger-to-be was only a brisk young man poring over reports in a bullpen or a tiny back office. In three years his salary might quintuple or he might be raking off a fat percentage of his portfolio gains; his sideburns would be longer and his shirts louder, and he would be the new characteristic figure in a new Wall Street. But not yet.

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The loss of power and influence of the Old Establishment was partly its own fault. Morally and intellectually, it seemed to be in decline. That keen observer of Anglo-Saxon Protestant manners and morals, the writer Louis Auchincloss—who kept in touch with his fictional material by maintaining a lively Wall Street law practice—found in the nineteen sixties that the attitude of the standard bearers downtown toward ethical niceties was largely one of indifference—of “everybody else is cutting corners, why not us?” A young financial lawyer in Wall Street then was making his way rapidly upward in the hierarchy of respected firms while leaving behind him a trail of court judgments resulting from passing bad checks. Apart from the victims, nobody—including the eminent and unassailably respectable chiefs of the young man's firms—cared to blow the whistle. In the crush of business resulting from the stock-market boom, the pressure for legal manpower was such that the chiefs needed to hang onto a young man of talent, and to promote him, even though he happened to be a bit of a fraud.

Again, there is a sad and illuminating story of a Wall Streeter of those years—a man so strictly and traditionally conscientious that, after his father's death, he had paid off his father's debts even though he was not legally responsible for them and had received no inheritance out of which to pay them. This paragon of Puritan morality, having learned that another member of his firm had done something dishonest, was so disturbed by the discovery and its implications that he landed on a psychiatrist's couch. The psychiatrist's treatment consisted of pragmatic reassurance: “Don't worry,” he told the troubled patient, “it doesn't matter. Nobody will say anything.” And nobody did—to the painful disappointment of the patient, whose cure consisted of becoming disillusioned with his class.