philosophized. Wilson bought a used Dodge. Fisher’s son noted that he moved up from Dodge (1916–1920) to Buick to the luxury of a Lincoln and a chauffeur.
As the productivity gains sank in, the Dow marched upward still more aggressively, from 155 in February of 1927 to 200 by the end of that year. Many investors were now wilder than Wilson. New investors had discovered that they could buy shares without the cash to pay for those shares—they simply borrowed on margin and hoped that the rise in the stock prices would cover their loans. The margin rule was not new, but the investors were. Whole households with very small resources speculated, the women as well as the men, though the women’s wagers were usually smaller. Stock pickers were borrowing so much from brokers to buy stocks that the amount—quantified later by the economist David Hale—was equivalent to a full 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The excitement over stocks was so high that stock exchange management—the children of Victorians, after all—decided, like Hoover, that it was time to forestall inappropriate behavior. Stock exchanges therefore created separate rooms for men and women investors.
There was even hope for farms, which had done much less well than the rest of the economy over the decade. Perhaps the same productivity gains that Henry Ford had achieved in industry might also be achieved in agriculture. In Montana a giant farming experiment, funded by J. P. Morgan, was under way. The idea was to bring to the farm all the economies of a Ford assembly line. The “farming factory,” as it was called, covered 95,000 acres; its head farmer, Thomas Campbell, was written up in Time.
The Gilded Age was generally proving to be gilded for the average, even the poor, man. Groups hoping to rise out of poverty also did well. Their general conviction was that individual effort was the key to advancement. In Muncie, a Russian Jew gave a speech that explained the immigrants’ hope and excitement: there was not gold paving the streets in the United States, he found, but the gold ofopportunity in the small towns, and gold “in the hearts of your citizens, the gold which, too, makes each of us able to go all over the world with respect and safety as American citizens.”
In New York, Italian Americans became symbols of success; one of these, the half-Jewish Fiorello LaGuardia, represented the state as a Republican in Congress. Another proud group were his cousins, the Jews, both the older German Jews and the newer East European Jews. Jews at the time had a general belief in charity and taking care of one another: “All Israel is responsible for one another.” In addition, they were aware of a specific history in New York; Peter Stuyvesant had asked the Dutch West India Company to ban Jewish settlement, but the company had allowed Jews to stay as long as the Jewish poor “be supported by their own nation.” The colonial Jews had pledged that they would, and the commitment was still alive. As late as the 1910s, philanthropist Jacob Schiff said that “a Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources.”
The paramount symbol of such immigrant independence was the Bank of United States, which served immigrants and within a few years was establishing sixty offices spread out around New York. The bank’s very name—Bank of United States, not Bank of the United States or Bank of America—was awkward. Its position was also awkward—while it was large, because immigrants were arriving fast and saving aggressively, it was not a member of the New York Clearing House, and therefore outside the established network of banks. Indeed, one likely reason for the bank’s official-sounding name was to signal that the bank was part of the American dream, and as close as a private bank could come to being as trustworthy as government.
The Bank of United States served the textile and clothing businesses—the rag trade and
As the productivity gains sank in, the Dow marched upward still more aggressively, from 155 in February of 1927 to 200 by the end of that year. Many investors were now wilder than Wilson. New investors had discovered that they could buy shares without the cash to pay for those shares—they simply borrowed on margin and hoped that the rise in the stock prices would cover their loans. The margin rule was not new, but the investors were. Whole households with very small resources speculated, the women as well as the men, though the women’s wagers were usually smaller. Stock pickers were borrowing so much from brokers to buy stocks that the amount—quantified later by the economist David Hale—was equivalent to a full 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The excitement over stocks was so high that stock exchange management—the children of Victorians, after all—decided, like Hoover, that it was time to forestall inappropriate behavior. Stock exchanges therefore created separate rooms for men and women investors.
There was even hope for farms, which had done much less well than the rest of the economy over the decade. Perhaps the same productivity gains that Henry Ford had achieved in industry might also be achieved in agriculture. In Montana a giant farming experiment, funded by J. P. Morgan, was under way. The idea was to bring to the farm all the economies of a Ford assembly line. The “farming factory,” as it was called, covered 95,000 acres; its head farmer, Thomas Campbell, was written up in Time.
The Gilded Age was generally proving to be gilded for the average, even the poor, man. Groups hoping to rise out of poverty also did well. Their general conviction was that individual effort was the key to advancement. In Muncie, a Russian Jew gave a speech that explained the immigrants’ hope and excitement: there was not gold paving the streets in the United States, he found, but the gold ofopportunity in the small towns, and gold “in the hearts of your citizens, the gold which, too, makes each of us able to go all over the world with respect and safety as American citizens.”
In New York, Italian Americans became symbols of success; one of these, the half-Jewish Fiorello LaGuardia, represented the state as a Republican in Congress. Another proud group were his cousins, the Jews, both the older German Jews and the newer East European Jews. Jews at the time had a general belief in charity and taking care of one another: “All Israel is responsible for one another.” In addition, they were aware of a specific history in New York; Peter Stuyvesant had asked the Dutch West India Company to ban Jewish settlement, but the company had allowed Jews to stay as long as the Jewish poor “be supported by their own nation.” The colonial Jews had pledged that they would, and the commitment was still alive. As late as the 1910s, philanthropist Jacob Schiff said that “a Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources.”
The paramount symbol of such immigrant independence was the Bank of United States, which served immigrants and within a few years was establishing sixty offices spread out around New York. The bank’s very name—Bank of United States, not Bank of the United States or Bank of America—was awkward. Its position was also awkward—while it was large, because immigrants were arriving fast and saving aggressively, it was not a member of the New York Clearing House, and therefore outside the established network of banks. Indeed, one likely reason for the bank’s official-sounding name was to signal that the bank was part of the American dream, and as close as a private bank could come to being as trustworthy as government.
The Bank of United States served the textile and clothing businesses—the rag trade and
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