Uproar

Wall Street has the reputation of having a shrewd idea as how much most leading U. S. business men are worth. Indeed, this is in a way a necessary part of Wall Street's regular business in credit. Accordingly, when the Treasury Department allowed the publication of tax returns of large tax-payers,* no small interest was shown in them along the famed thoroughfare "between the graveyard [Trinity] and the river [East]." The first reaction of the financial district was astonishment and indignation, and expended itself in heated conversations about individual rights, etc. This word was, however, soon succeeded by a not ungleeful curiosity. A closer inspection of the published lists, however, raised new questions rather than settled old ones. Men known to be very wealthy appeared in the relatively small returns, while unknown names stood opposite large assessments. Accordingly, the judgment of the financial centre on the whole episode was in the main that the returns published had borne out what it had claimed right along were gross discriminations and irregularities in the income-tax law itself. The individuals shrewd enough to have put their fortune into tax-exempt securities, or to have diverted their income into increased corporate surpluses or appreciated land values, escaped lightly. The blunderers who accepted large cash profits directly paid through the nose. The result was what everyone (except perhaps the farm bloc) had predicted. Meanwhile, publication of the returns created so much uproar as to constitute a public nuisance.

*For an account of the political aspects of the income tax publicity, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS. For an account of the newspapers' reactions, see PRESS.