ONCE IN GOLCONDA: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938

by John Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 1969

Ever since the first storyteller told of a poor but shrewd peasant finagling a royal fortune away from an overconfident king and his negligent Viziers, people everywhere have been willing to listen or read variations of the archetype. Mr. Brooks, a superb anecdotalist, has made just such a story of Wall Street between the World Wars. He's personalized the story that economists have tried to tell through obscure figures and more formal historians have outlined in terms of political/financial-action/reaction. Adroit sketches of the men behind the unbridled manipulation of the nation's money during this period allow Brooks to show the social, as well as the political and economic, aspects of the N. Y. Stock Exchange. This story's shrewd peasants are the emerging Irish-American plungers and those from the German Jewish-American investment houses, who were permitted to play but carefully kept off the clubby committees through which the government allowed Exchange members to regulate themselves. The king is Morgan and the viziers are the ""fine old American stock"" brokers and lawyers who saw themselves as the natural equals (and perhaps betters) of statesmen. And, the grandest, gaudiest vizier of all was Richard Whitney, whose rise to the presidency of the Exchange and fall to prison for dealing-and-stealing rivals a fable for poetic justice. His career is traced throughout the eighteen years; its end signalled the government's searchlights and brooms in our Golconda (the diamond center of old India where all men were said to be able to get rich). Big Board nonfiction headed for a big, non-bored readership.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1969

ISBN: 0471357529

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION