The Panic of 1907, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15A City in Trouble

A millionaire is wicked, quite;

His doom should quick be knelled;

He should not be allowed to grow,

If grown he should be felled,

But when a city’s bonds fall flat

And no one cares for them,

Who is the man who saves the day?

It’s J.P.M.

 

When banks and trusts go crashing down

From credit’s sullied name,

While speechifying Greatness adds

More fuel to the flame,

When Titan strength is needed sore,

Black ruin’s tide to stem,

Who is the man who does the job?

It’s J.P.M.

—McLandburgh Wilson, New York Times, October 27, 1907

Criticism and Praise

During the early stage of the financial crisis, Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting expedition in the canebrakes of Louisiana. (Upon his return, the New York Times quipped that “he had added several deeper shades to the bronze acquired during the Summer months at Oyster Bay.”¹) The president’s first utterance about the Panic was on Tuesday, October 22, en route to Washington. He stopped in Nashville, Tennessee, where in an impromptu speech he insisted that his policies had not caused the panic. In his remarks, he made the stock speculator the focus of his ire, saying,

[The speculator] is doing all that he can to bring down in ruin the fabric of our institutions, and it is our business to set our faces like flint against his wrongdoing, to war to undo that wrongdoing in the interest of the people as a whole, and primarily in the interests of the honest man of means.²

Within two days of making that statement, ...