Word: whitney
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...Sing Sing the prison barker called out "All men who came Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Mr. Whitney please step out of their cells!" and fellow convicts as well as guards asked for his autograph. He distinguished himself on the baseball and football teams and the prison psychiatrist reported that Whitney never showed the slightest signs of self-criticism. His brother made good on all his debts and after his release from prison in 1941, Whitney lived a comfortable, secluded life...
...TEMPTING to see in Whitney's personal failings some reflection of the failings of the system he represented in the press and in the public mind. Whitney's image as the White Knight of American capitalism was so ingrained that members of the SEC seriously considered letting him replace the embezzled money quietly and resign, in order to preserve public confidence. And, after an initial orgy of gloating in the press, public reaction swung sharply to Whitney's side, and began to see a stoic martyr where there was really only a self-deluded man who believed--until the last...
...also instructive to remember that, in the end, Whitney got sent to jail not for any of the shady speculative devices he sanctioned as President of the Exchange during the early thirties, which may have ruined nearly as many small investors as the Great Crash itself, but for stealing money from the New York Yacht Club. The closed circle of the financial elite were willing to forgive Whitney almost anything but stealing from the Yacht Club meant Sing Sing and an end to his membership on Harvard's Ec department Visiting Committee...
...silly to condemn Whitney's stealing, compared to the huge size of the kind of "legal" stealing that goes on all the time; silly to laugh at or pity Whitney's faith in his worthless distilleries when this is the kind of faith so many successful capitalist ventures have been built on. It's only that Whitney demonstrates the last stages of personal disintegration for the capitalist, and may warn us, on a larger scale, of the no-holds-barred rapaciousness combined with childlike faith in the impossible that may surface in American capitalism's coming death-rattle...
...NATION'S prosperous scent another Depression in the wind, people like Whitney, the golden boys of the financial world who've always had it easy, are beginning, again, to jump from high windows along Wall Street, and when they do, they take pension funds and life savings with them. If their demise meant the demise of the system in which they've failed, that would be one thing--and might be applauded as leading to genuine change. But even after the fall of a capstone as central, as public, as Whitney, the system managed to regroup and restore its shattered...