Life Among the Brokers

A procession of grimy trucks and creaky wagons bearing big placards wound slowly through the deep, dim streets of downtown Manhattan one lunch hour last week. Wastepaper dealers were holding a parade against their luckless lot. Under contract at 15-c- per cwt. to empty the trash baskets of Wall Street's tall towers, they were unable to sell their wares for any price at all. Whereas a year ago they could get as much as 70-c- per cwt. for this waste they were now having to pay a big incinerator a fee to dispose of it.

Wall Street could sympathize with the wastepaper dealers. Losses and burdensome contracts were an old story to its brokers. Month after month the New York Stock Exchange has dragged through one dreary day after another. A million-share session makes front-page news. With many a membership pressing for sale, Stock Exchange seats last week sold down to $70,000--only $2,000 above the 1932 low.

Sorry though their plight may be, the brokers can point with pride to one notable fact: They came under Federal regulation and lived to tell the tale. There are today 616 Stock Exchange firms, only five less than on Jan. 1, only 49 less than at the 1930 peak. There are still 1,375 members of the Exchange, and they still like to bet on football games.*

Shuffling and reshuffling of partners pad the financial pages of the Press with personnel notices on the first day of every month but the same old firms continue to do business at the same old stands. One of the few big mergers of the year occurred last week when Theodore Prince & Co., bond brokerage specialists, was absorbed by Redmond & Co., whose senior partner is husky, hardworking, longheaded Henry Mason Day.

Only real deflation has been in the plant built up by Stock Exchange firms during the 1920s. Gone are the swank shipboard branches. Gone are all branches from many a U. S. city. Gone are one-half the boomtime customers' men. Gone are one-half the 10,000 tickers that tapped out the bad news five years ago this week.

Many a broker feels that retrenchment, by eliminating a large amount of direct brokerage advertising, is one good reason for the decline in security trading. Yet the New York Stock Exchange gets more free publicity than any other business institution in the land. Every big newspaper in the land devotes pages to daily stock-.market news and quotations. But the Exchange also gets more space in the Congressional Record than any other business institution. Therefore last week its Governors came to an unprecedented decision: the Stock Exchange itself would drum up business.

That historic event was foreshadowed last spring when the venerable Committee on Publicity was uprooted and a onetime managing editor of the Wall Street Journal was made a member. Not until last week, however, did the Governors hire a pressagent. He was Joseph Stagg Lawrence, 38, author, economist and an associate editor of the Review of Reviews.

Born in Budapest, Pressagent Lawrence was brought to the U. S. as a child, learned football at a Buffalo high school, went to Princeton. There he won his P at guard and a Phi Beta Kappa key in the class of 1923. After a short turn as an instructor in economics, he left Princeton for various Manhattan editorial jobs. No foe of the Stock Exchange, he defended short selling before a bear-hungry Congressional committee two years ago.

No sooner had Pressagent Lawrence stepped into his new job last week than President Richard Whitney mailed a letter to 9,000 members, partners, branch managers and correspondent firms. Wrote President Whitney:

"Accurate knowledge concerning the Stock Exchange, its history, functions, practices, and the economic force it exerts in the affairs of the country is surprisingly small among those persons not in some way connected with the business itself. . . . There is only one cure for such a condition and that is the nation-wide dis- semination of facts and information-- facts and information obviously accurate. . . .

"Will you write frankly and tell me, in as much detail as possible, the conditions in your locality and the things which beget criticism and antagonism in our business."

Mr. Whitney appended a dozen specific questions. Some of them:

"What is the public attitude in your district towards stock exchanges?"

"What is the attitude of the Press?"

"What is the attitude of your public men--Senators, Congressmen, State Legislators?"

"What, specifically, is the attitude of the farmers; of labor; of businessmen; of professional men; of women; of the Clergy?"

"Are your newspapers willing to take specific articles giving the facts, so that the truth may be known?"

"Have the writings or speeches of any particular persons influenced this misunderstanding? Who are they?"

*Last week the Exchange started an investigation into the use of its floor employes as runners for a big football pool.

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