Wall Street 1929 Part 5
IF ONE REALLY needed proof of the enormous participation of the public in the stock market, there is no end to the statistics that may be conjured up. Let us contemplate the physical membership of the Stock Exchange itself. In 1895, out of the 112 branch offices which its 1, 100 members then maintained, only sixty-seven were outside New York City. By the end of 1928, these out-of-town branches liad increased to 966. At this writing they number well over a thousand.
Nor are they restricted to the supposedly more speculative East. Not at all. Go anywhere in the country, look east or west, and you will observe, wherever there is a city of respectable proportions, there is at least one brokerage house privileged to deal, by direct membership or affiliation, on the floors of the great exchanges of Chicago and New York.
Pennsylvania has 599 New York Stock Exchange bond and stock tickers, Illinois has 428, Virginia has 46, Ohio has 155, Oklahoma has 15, Texas has 38, California has 155, and Michigan, with 110, has only 59 less than Massachusetts, which has always been a next door neighbor of the Stock Market.
An enormous intricate system of communication binds up these scattered elements into a cohesive machine keyed to the tick of the instant. Thousands of direct wires link these brokerage houses to the floor of the Exchange in New York.
A few minutes after a man in San Francisco asks his broker to buy 100 shares of General Motors the order is executed at the post on the New York Stock Exchange. And a few seconds later—if the ticker is abreast of business—Bishop Cannon (I can’t easily escape identifying him, for he is a handy symbol of the new attitude toward Wall Street) may be reading the sale in North Carolina.
Source: The Outlook, 18 September 1929
Related posts:
- Wall Street 1929 Part 3
- Wall Street 1929 Part 7
- Wall Street 1929 Part 6
- Wall Street 1929 Part 8
- Wall Street 1929 Part 11
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