Anaconda IPO

I may as well stay on the subject of historical accuracy.  When I began writing the stories for "Stones from the Creek" it was fall of 2008.  The big banks were failing and the economy appeared to be accelerating downward.  I was immediately struck by the similarities to the Panic of 1907, and therefore with a connection with my stories, which mainly take place in 1906.  Even though my working theme was resistance to oppression, I decided I had to include a story about the onset of the bankers' panic one hundred years before.

In 2007 and 2008 I was repeatedly astonished by the number of financial professionals who insisted that real estate values could only go up.  It is the classic song of the bubble.  I had a gentleman serve as my principal-for-a-day who insisted that this was true and that it was good advice for our students.  This was in the spring of 2008, when it didn't take a genius to see what was happening.  And I kept wondering whether there was any adult supervision at all in the big Wall Street houses.  It seemed to me that anybody over the age of thirty would know that markets that can go up can also go down.

The Panic of 1907 began in a big bull market when one of the Butte, Montana copper kings decided that, with a little bank backing, he could corner his own stock, United Copper.  This is not the place for a discussion of corners and shorts.  Suffice it to say, two banks were dramatically overextended and suffered runs, which triggered runs on the other banks, too.

But in reading about the panic and about copper stocks I discovered the story of the Amalgamated Copper IPO of a few years earlier.  It involved the Butte copper kings, but the main actors were from Standard Oil.  William Rockefeller and Henry Huttleston Rogers made a public offering of stock for what was later renamed Anaconda Copper and made a huge personal killing.  The broker who handled this IPO, Thomas Lawson, was scandalized by their willingness to lie to him and to keep putting more stock onto the market as the price went up the first day.  He serialized his account of events, and later released it as a book.

In my story "Who Could Have Foreseen It?" I conflated these separate events.  They were, after all, related.  The cast of characters was mostly the same.  The greed and disregard for everyday investors and the public at large was the same.  And the commodity, copper, was the same.  At the turn of the twentieth century electricity was an exciting growth industry.  Niagara Falls became an electric generating station.  The IRT (now the #1 train) opened in 1904 from City Hall to 145 St.  Think of a copper IPO as analogous in its larger excitement to the IPO in 2012 of Facebook.

I also chose to include a personal scandal affecting one of the bankers broken by the 1907 panic.  Again, this was not directly related at all, but it gave me the opportunity to continue with the theme of "sure things."  In the language of the story, a "law of nature."

On these events, I am reasonably confident that any reader of mine who is intrigued by the story will pursue further investigation.  The titles I include here are a reasonable start.