The Go-Go Years (31 page)

It was on the conscientious problems of stockbrokers that the Ministry's seminars and interviews were most productive. Brokers, unlike lawyers, proved to be quite anxious to unburden, and the picture that emerged from their talks, in 1967 and 1968, was of a brokerage industry ridden with guilt and frustration. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that between the years 1377 and 1694 the word “broker” meant, among other things, “a procurer, pimp, bawd; a pander generally.” To judge from what Huntington and his colleagues heard, many brokers in Wall Street in the late nineteen sixties felt its meaning hadn't changed very much.

How, for one thing, to answer the eternal question of where to draw the line between investment and speculation? Just when is a broker morally entitled to encourage a customer to buy a frankly risky stock, and when is he not? Is the old argument that speculation serves national goals by providing for economic growth a morally defensible one, or just a piece of hypocritical rationalization? Can the habit of speculation, like that of outright gambling, be morally corrupting for an investor who comes to make a habit of it—or for the broker who encourages
him to do so in order to earn commissions? “The evidence,” Huntington reported later, “is that a sensitive and thoughtful salesman will have worked out answers to these questions.” But how many stock salesmen of 1967–1968 were sensitive and thoughtful, or indeed experienced enough to have had time to apply sensitivity or thought to the questions? “Many salesmen,” Huntington went on, “have not given these questions as much thought as they would like to give—and perhaps need to give for their own sanity.”

But the matter on which the Wall Street Ministry found the jumpiest conscience among brokers—and, concomitantly, struck the tenderest nerve among their employers—was that of the overtrading, or churning, of customers' portfolios by brokers to increase commissions. Illegal though it was under S.E.C. rules, and unethical though it almost always was in terms of service to the customer, churning had become a brokerage way of life by the second half of the sixties. Nowhere in business is the choice between God and Mammon more cruelly evident than in stock brokerage. God's broker sits at his desk, believing, after careful study, that he has invested his customers' funds as well as they can be invested for the present. Out of conscience and professional ethics, he allows good portfolios to stand pat—and he thereby earns no commissions for himself or his firm. At the next desk sits Mammon's man, perpetually on the phone persuading
his
customers, perhaps against his or their best judgment, that the time has come to switch from Zenith to Motorola, from Pan Am to Chrysler. His customers are persuaded; commissions are continuously generated. Mammon's broker finishes the year with personal earnings in the $40,000 to $50,000 range and the reputation of being a man to know and cultivate; God's broker finishes with earnings of $15,000 and the reputation of a decent man who's a loser.

Put bluntly, Huntington found that many brokers felt they were under pressure to disserve their customers in order to increase their own and their firms' profits. No amount of formal management caveats against speculation or investment without
investigation could paper over the essential conflict of interest; it seemed to be built into the business as practiced. “If you really want to know what bugs me,” a broker told Huntington, “it's the fact that I take a client out of General Motors and put him in Chrysler—when in my heart I feel that he probably shouldn't be in any motors at all.”

Another moral, or perhaps psychological, problem of brokers—what Huntington called an occupational hazard of the business—was their susceptibility to drastic overnight changes in financial status. It was in the nature of stock brokerage as practiced in the sixties that a man, without changing either his job or his way of doing it, might earn $25,000 one year, $80,000 or $100,000 the next, and then perhaps only $15,000 the third. Practical considerations aside, these fluctuations often left him confused and unhappy. In a bonanza year he would feel grossly over-rewarded and consequently guilty. Schooled to believe in financial success as the direct and measured reward of hard work, he would find the annual fluctuations profoundly unnerving. The money and status rollercoaster was unsettling to the spiritual stomachs of many of the strongest; the ride, Huntington found, often left the riders with shattered lives and marriages.

So the Wall Street Ministry—fulfilling in its modest way a function that fell to it by default—saw the spiritual malaise behind the general euphoria of the bull market. Its work was by no means universally popular. After distribution of a report that referred to the findings about brokers' guilt, a senior partner of a firm that had previously backed the enterprise called Huntington to say, “If that's the kind of thing you're up to, you can get along without my support.” There were similar complaints from similar sources. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Ministry—its name watered down in 1971 to the Wall Street Center, because the word “ministry” had been found to have too sulphurous a ring in many Wall Street ears—did continue to find enough backers to get along: a still, small voice amid the clamor of the marketplace.

6

Trinity Church itself, which in 1966 had turned its own fishy clerical eye on Huntington's efforts, was changing with the times. More, it was speeding ahead of the times by seeking to change the outward mood of Wall Street; and it was succeeding to a startling extent.

The change began with a change of administration. The rector since 1952, John Heuss, was a man cast in the old Trinity mold: a pious man by his and his church's lights, and a social and ecclesiastical conservative, inclined toward the continuance of old ways and values rather than the inauguration of new directions and programs; an Anglophile; a worldly rector out of Trollope, with his port and clubs and love of outdoor life. In his
Who's Who
entry, Heuss listed ten different clubs: British Luncheon, Century, Downtown Athletic, Down Town Association, University, Pilgrims of America, Newcomen Society, St. George's Society, Stage Harbor Yacht, Chatham Beach (Mass.). Trinity in his regime—as, generally, in those that had preceded his—often seemed an all-too-worldly church, conscious of its wealth and rank and prestige, anxious to maintain its position with the secular leaders of society, and only casually interested in the life of the masses of men and women of various faiths, or of no faith, who worked in the shadow of its spire.

Superficially, John V. Butler, the man who succeeded Heuss after his death in March 1966, was cut from the same clerical cloth. True, he was only a four-club man at the time (British Luncheon, Columbia Men's Faculty, Pilgrims of America, St. George's Society), but he was straight out of the Episcopal establishment, having graduated from General Theological Seminary and served, since 1960, as dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine up on 111th Street. Nor was he any wild-eyed youngster; on assuming the rectorship of Trinity he had turned sixty. He was, however, a man sensitive to social change and to
the need for society's institutions to change. In 1968, he brought in Donald Woodward, the doughty vicar who would stand exposed at the church's front gate during the riot of May 8, 1970; and with Woodward came John Wallace Moody, a clergyman in his thirties who had spent fourteen years as a pastor in Columbus, Ohio, and had taken time off to get a master's degree in painting and sculpture at New York University; a man with an air of clean-cut enthusiasm, medium long hair, and an esthetic manner, who was fond of expressing his enthusiasm with the quintessentially square adjective “neat.”

Moody, as Trinity's curate in charge of “special ministries,” was assigned to set up lunch-hour weekday programs to serve local financial workers, especially at the lower levels, not so much to involve them in the life of the church and thereby make converts of them—that was the traditional approach—as to enrich their lives for the sake of enriching their lives. Moody took it as his premise that Wall Street, for all of its wealth, was a sort of ghetto, a place that, because it was devoted to work to the exclusion of all other aspects of life, was as much in need of cultural enrichment as any other deprived area. Given a free hand by Butler and Woodward—and provided with a liberal supply of Trinity's treasure from real-estate holdings for the signing up of talent—Moody and his mixed lay and clerical committee on the lunchtime program promptly went wild. What they set out to do was as far as possible from trying to convert the heathen. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than an attempt to change Wall Street's classic noontime scowl to a smile.

The new program burst on Wall Street at the beginning of June 1969, with the inauguration of the first Trinity summer festival. On the opening day, a rock-and-roll band called the Communication Workshop performed to a large gathering in Trinity's front yard. During the following noontimes, well-known folksingers sang, there were classical concerts and free juggling lessons, balloons flew from the old church's soot-blackened turrets, and signs on the surrounding fences proclaimed, “Trinity is alive and celebrating!”

Celebrating what? Why, life itself, the thing least often
celebrated along Wall Street. More startlingly, by traditional church standards, the celebrating went on in hardly more subdued form within the church itself. Exhibits were shown, and coffee and sandwiches served, in the clergy vesting room off the south side of the transept. Pamphlets on drug abuse began to appear on the racks at the back of the church formerly reserved for programs on church activities. One day a week, in the narthex of the chapel, there was “informal worship”—featuring someone reading poetry or playing a guitar, in what Moody described as a “prayerful” way. Some days there were distinctly unprayerful music or dance performances in the church proper, following the regular noonday service; and on one of those early days, two scantily clothed professional modern dancers named Lynn Levine and Raymond Johnson performed to an astonished congregation from the sanctuary itself, with the altar moved back from its regular place to allow more room.

The noonday programs' novelty and visibility alone were enough to attract crowds. Within a week, between four and five hundred Wall Streeters were flocking daily into the church and its graveyard. Determined that participation be active, Moody and his staff set up in the courts at the edge of the graveyard graffiti and mural boards designed to permit Wall Streeters, were the spirit to move them, to express themselves in ways less constricted than are possible through office machines or stock transfer slips.

At first, the mural and graffiti boards were used sparsely and cautiously. Seeking to help break the ice, Trinity staff members took to chalking up provocatively incomplete sentences each morning, to be completed by the noontime visitors: “What are you afraid of?—————” “Life in the city today is—————” It worked; the spaces were filled in at noon, and soon the visitors were going on to chalk up whole sentences of their own. The magazine writer Mary Cole Hanna copied off some of them:

Love is the only power man hasn't pursued—and the lack of it may cause his downfall.

Peace is the ultimate end of love.

Wall Street, its hands run to the sound of money.

You have a fiend at Chase Manhattan.

Not masterpieces of thought or expression, but something new in tongue-tied, routinized, single-minded Wall Street. Hardly more original but equally heartfelt sentiments were expressed on the mural board through faces, flowers, trees, flags, peace symbols, and boldly painted slogans like “Just live!”

In the first flush of novelty, the program went almost uncriticized, apart from an occasional hard-faced man leaning out of an overlooking building across Broadway and shouting imprecations against the new goings-on. “God would roll over in his grave,” a man told Moody in the first week, after hearing of the modern dancing in the sanctuary; but the man was smiling. By the end of the second week, though, the smiles were fading, and a serious, concerted counterattack was under way. Some noontime visitors were talking loudly about sacrilege; others were complaining quietly to the church authorities. One day, a man walked up to the mural board and, without a word, took a paintbrush from the rack and broke it; on another occasion a young Wall Streeter stood in the courtyard for a while listening to an earnest discussion between two young girls about love, peace, and involvement in human affairs, and then suddenly shouted, “You're disgusting! If you want my opinion, you should be killed!” Meanwhile, the vestrymen who determined Trinity policy were being deluged with calls from businessmen attacking the new program. Thus under pressure, they yielded somewhat. By July 1, when the program was one month old, church officials had decided that all noontime activities must be previewed before presentation. As the result of this edict, performances by the Yale Theatre Ensemble of a play called “Wall Suite” were cancelled because the dialogue was found to include a four-letter word, and this in turn led one of the leaders of the program staff to resign in protest. As for the graffiti board, it survived under a form of censorship. Hereafter, it was decreed, it would be allowed to operate only with a Trinity staff member
constantly nearby, eraser in hand to expunge on the spot any outpourings of the Wall Street psyche that were thought to transcend conventionality or good taste.

In time, the counterattack ran out of steam, and the Trinity noontime program survived to take leadership in the planning of the November 1969 peace demonstrations; to flourish and expand during the next two summers; and in 1971, to add a program of drug counselling and methadone rehabilitation in cooperation with Beekman Downtown Hospital. But more and more, as time went on, it became evident that the sudden introduction in 1969 of two hours a day of joy, color, and fun into the heart of number-benumbed Wall Street had exposed the rawest of raw nerves, and attacked Wall Street's serious if not sententious way of life head-on. Two hours a day of singing, dancing, writing and drawing, touching and smiling and talking: kindergarten stuff, to be sure. “When I was a child, I liked things like that,” an investment-firm vice president said of the program. “But now that I am a man,” he went on, gravely paraphrasing Scripture, “I have put away childish things.” Indeed he had—but to what purpose?