Touch and Go by Studs Terkel Page A

president on a Progressive
Party ticket. Poetically enough, Burton K. Wheeler was his running mate. It seems I was interested in how major parties ran things. While my contemporaries were outside in the hot sun splashing cold water at one another, I was glued to the slightly worn easy chair, mesmerized by those orotund voices. Remember now, this had been going on for some time—in fact, for my whole vacation. It didn’t bother me at all. It was in the nature of relief. Were it not for that delegate from Alabama and Tom Walsh, I’d be splashing water at another twelve-year-old and listening to my elders discussing their disappointment with the lunch they had just ravished, demolished, and consigned to their insatiable guts.
    Intermittently, a well-appointed matron, for whom the least deadly of the seven sins was gluttony, would freight her way toward my throne. “You on a fast or something? If you don’t eat, you die.” I thanked her for her prescription as my attention wandered back to the Atwater-Kent and the prosecutorial voice of Tom Walsh.
    Why did the contest last so long? There was a deadlock: William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and the secretary of the treasury, versus Al Smith, the popular governor of New York. That Smith was the first Catholic ever put up for the presidency was the Roman candle that set off all those fireworks. The KKK was going crazy, white-sheeted all over the state of Indiana and a number of other border states.
    The Teapot Dome scandal didn’t amount to much in the campaign. It had happened during the administration of Warren Harding. 8

    Calvin Coolidge, VP under Harding, did not appear involved. He was, in fact, not involved in much of anything. Thus, he had nothing to say. He is best remembered in history for his memorable decision to distance himself from the 1928 race for his party’s nomination. What school child doesn’t remember Cal Coolidge’s proclamation: “I do not choose to run”?
    I shall always be that twelve-year-old remembering Tom Walsh, of the inflexible spine, who refused to “cool things down a bit.” He saw that the people who picked others’ pockets paid the price. Imagine how Tom Walsh as attorney general would have pinned down the Wall Street wise men, the Babsons, the others, and their waywardness—if not obtuseness—in impotently watching the free market fall so freely.
    After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: What had really caused the Depression? The hearings were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. You read a transcript today and find them so unaware. The leading industrialist and bankers . . . they hadn’t the foggiest notion.
    It was a mood of great bewilderment. No one had anticipated it, despite the fact that we had many severe panics in the past. The innocence of the business leaders was astonishing. There were groups at the time, arch-reactionary, almost Neolithic—the Liberty League, for instance. There was a bit of truth in it, but, by and large they were babes in the woods, or comedians . . . 9
    HOW CAN I FORGET an encounter with one of those Wall Street wise men? He was the Alan Greenspan of his day, though that may be going a bit too far. Sidney J. Weinberg, a senior partner of the Goldman Sachs Company, had served as an industrial adviser during the Truman and JFK administrations. Our conversation was in 1968.

    â€œOctober 29, 1929!—I remember that day very intimately. I stayed in the office a week without going home. The tape was running, I’ve forgotten how long that night. It must have been ten, eleven o’clock before we got the final reports. It was like a thunderclap. Everybody was stunned. Nobody knew what it was all about. The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be