"Flim-Flam Finance"

T.R. scrubs up one of those he called "malefactors of great wealth."

The stock market plummets. Credit is tight. Bankers quake. Then J.P. Morgan organizes a consortium of financial saviors to provide cash to banks and trusts to stave off their collapse.

Cartoon courtesy of The Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library

In the cartoon above, entitled “You Dirty Boy!” President Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880, LL.D. ’02, applies Honesty Soap to “Flim-Flam Finance.” The drawing—by Joseph Keppler, for his father’s weekly humor magazine, Puck—is one of 4,000 political cartoons in the vast Theodore Roosevelt Collection in the Harvard College Library. It appeared on September 4, 1907, when capital and confidence were both in short supply on Wall Street. Soon thereafter, Roosevelt went off to lunge after bear in the canebrakes of Louisiana, but he returned to his desk in time to appear interested in the prospectively devastating run on banks that October. The Panic of 1907 was one of the nation’s most severe financial crises ever and led ultimately to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

Whose faces did Keppler put in his suds? By rights, says the collection’s curator, Wallace F. Dailey, they should include that of flimflammer F. Augustus Heinze, but he was then only in his thirties. His failed scheme to corner the stock of United Copper Company touched off the panic.

One of the faces might be John D. Rockefeller’s, Dailey suggests. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had fined Rockefeller’s Standard Oil more than $29 million in August, in an anti-rebate case. (But note that Rockefeller, as good guy, was hugely helpful in October’s bailout of banks.)

“Conservatives blamed Roosevelt…for jamming regulatory levers into the American economic machine,” Edmund Morris writes in his biography Theodore Rex. And they doubted that he knew what he was doing. “Radiant and purified from his hunt,” writes Morris, “he patrolled the Executive Office with his hands behind his back, regaling all comers with his exploits in the canebrakes.

“‘Do I look as though those Wall Street fellows were really worrying me?’

“‘No, Mr. President, you certainly do not.’

“‘I’ve got them,’ he said through his teeth, ‘on the run.’

“It was exchanges such as this that persuaded some men that Roosevelt was fiscally retarded.”

Click here for the January-February 2008 issue table of contents

You might also like

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Doctors for Change

Countway Library exhibit explores historic anti-nuclear activism

Miniature Worlds

How “paper peepshows” brought distant realms to life

Most popular

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

Danielle Allen Debates Far-Right Blogger Curtis Yarvin

Popular monarchist debates Allen on democracy.

Harvard President Responds to Secretary of Education

Alan Garber outlines steps the University has taken, and emphasizes compliance with the law.

Explore More From Current Issue

Alice Hamilton at Harvard—Pioneer for Women in Medicine

Brief life of a public-health pioneer and reformer: 1869-1970

Lawrence Bacow on the Auschwitz Memorial

President Lawrence S. Bacow reflects on the liberation of Auschwitz

A Harvard Love Story in Poetry

Young love: the poem, plus enduring lessons from a public-health pioneer