A lesson unlearned: Battling Wall Street in 1933
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Sen. Duncan U. Fletcher of Florida, left, Ferdinand Pecora, counsel of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, center, and Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia are seen during the re-opening of the Senate investigation of the J.P. Morgan Co. in 1933.
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What is it they say? That history repeats itself, or that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?
Doesn't matter. There is plenty of support for both statements in Michael Perino's admirable study of the U.S. banking world after the Wall Street crash of 1929.
In reading it you may ask yourself more than once, "Have we learned nothing?," for, as Mr. Perino says, in today's financial difficulties there are echoes, so distinct as to be uncanny, of congressional hearings held 77 years ago.
Forgotten now, Ferdinand Pecora was once a media superstar. The author, a law professor at St. John's University, says the hearings he led for the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in February 1933, during the last few days of the Hoover administration, "fundamentally changed the relationship between Washington and Wall Street.
Before 1933 the federal government had taken a hands-off approach to the stock market."
But the hearings, and the headlines his revelations generated, altered all that by galvanizing public opinion for reform.
The hearings into the Wall Street crash had dragged on for nearly a year with no results and were due to expire with the looming end of the congressional session.
The committee chairman, Republican Peter Norbeck of South Dakota, desperately seeking someone to keep the spark lighted, came almost by accident across Ferdinand Pecora.
He was a most unlikely candidate to become "The Hellhound of Wall Street." Outside New York he was all but unknown, a Sicilian immigrant shouldering the casual bigotry and stereotypes of his day.
Through efforts barely short of Herculean, he had risen from grinding poverty to become a lawyer -- a brilliant cross-examiner, eminently honest and fair. Formerly an assistant district attorney, he lived modestly on his income from an obscure law firm and had savings of a few hundred dollars.
And in 10 days of questioning the biggest shots of American finance -- Ten Days That Shook the Nation -- Pecora succeeded where others had failed, becoming in the process the darling of the press.
First Published December 8, 2010 12:00 am
