You can”t read a story on Joseph Kennedy, father of President
John F. Kennedy, without seeing words like “ambitious,”
“ruthless,” “competitor,” and “crook.” He is a very complex man
who, despite his many shortcomings, or, some would say because
of them, rose to his own special heights, including being tabbed
by President Franklin Roosevelt to become the first chairman of
the Securities Exchange Commission.
Over the next few weeks I will attempt to give you a sense of the
man. I must say up front, after reading from at least ten different
sources (not all of which I will be referring to each week), Joe
Kennedy is not a man to be admired.
Kennedy was born in Boston in September 1888. At the time,
big-city America was teeming with immigrants, in the case of
Boston, the Irish. Their game was politics.
Actually, the Irish had a genius for politics in a lot of big cities
back then and they quickly organized themselves to take hold of
City Hall.
Young Joe”s father was a saloon keeper who was also the
political boss of his ward and later became a state senator. At just
4 years of age, Joe remembered the presidential election of 1892
when his father”s campaign workers came in to report, “Pat, we
voted 128 times today.”
At an early age, Joe held a number of jobs, as did most kids
back then. He was known as a hustler, in a kind sense, taking
jobs selling newspapers, repairing clocks, running errands, raising
pigeons, selling candy and, as historian David Fromkin notes,
“invariably greeting the gang of children he led with: ”How can
we make some money?””
Kennedy wasn”t a good student but he graduated from the best
schools. He married the daughter of the mayor of Boston, even
though he wasn”t the first pick of the father-in-law. And while he
was an outsider in the “Brahmin” world of Boston, State Street
finance, he made a fortune in the investment game.
When World War I called, Joe Kennedy managed to avoid the
draft. [Later in life, he had a “twinge” of regret.] Instead, he
pulled strings to get a job as accountant and assistant general
manager at a Bethlehem Steel plant in Quincy, Mass. It was here
that he began to really prove that he was a tough businessman.
He earned a large salary for those days, $20,000, plus a bonus.
But the shrewd operator also profited from owning the cafeteria
where most of the 22,000 workers ate. His shipyards often broke
production records, though he sometimes claimed credit where
little was due.
Kennedy was drawn to finance and the money he so loved, even
as a child. He learned the art of stock speculation while at the
brokerage firm of Hayden, Stone in Boston, but in 1923 he set up
his own shop, “Joseph P. Kennedy, Banker.”
Now he was hardly a banker in the true sense of the word. But as
he said himself, Kennedy liked the sound of it. Joe also knew that
the only way to amass great wealth was to move to New York.
Historian Paul Johnson summarizes for us.
“(Moving to New York) also meant grabbing opportunities,
including criminal ones, as they arose. Kennedy created one of
the biggest cash piles this century through money-lending,
shipbuilding, Hollywood, stock-jobbing, and bootleg liquor..His
range of contacts and collaborators was enormous and included
the mob leader Frank Costello and Doc Stacher, lieutenant of
another leading Mafioso, Meyer Lansky.”
But we”re jumping ahead of ourselves. As one man noted, it is
also impossible to trace all of Joe Kennedy”s dealings.
Kennedy was well-positioned, however, for the Wall Street of the
1920s. David Fromkin notes that by the second half of the
decade, the U.S., “with about 3 percent of the world”s
population, accounted for 46% of its total industrial output.
During the same period it produced 70% of the world”s oil and
40% of its coal.”
But in doing the research for this piece, I came across an account
of an event that transpired on Wall Street on September 16, 1920
that only tangentially involves Joe Kennedy.and as you”ll soon
see, lucky for him.
John Steele Gordon in his book, “The Great Game,” describes the
scene.
“A few minutes before noon.a horse-drawn wagon pulled up on
Wall Street beside the Morgan Bank and exploded. Loaded with
five hundred pounds of sash weights cut into pieces as well as
explosives, the fragments turned into shrapnel, cutting through
the air like deadly, invisible flails. 30 people died instantly, 10
more would later died of wounds, and 130 were injured.”
Had the bomb gone off just a few minutes later, lunchtime, the
toll would have been far greater. And it also just so happens that
young Joe Kennedy, who wasn”t a power on Wall Street as yet,
was walking very near to where the explosion took place, so
close that he was knocked to the ground, but unhurt. As Gordon
describes, however, another leading figure of the area wasn”t as
fortunate.
“Edward Sweet, a millionaire who had owned Sweet”s restaurant
on the corner of Fulton and South Streets, was virtually
vaporized. All that was ever found of him was one finger,
encircled by his ring.(In another instance), a young runner,
gravely wounded, begged passersby to take the bundle of
securities he had been carrying so that he would not die with his
duty undone.”
Without modern day forensic expertise, it was virtually impossible
to figure out who was responsible, and no claim was ever made.
It was finally believed that the bomb was the work of anarchists, a
rather common fixture in world affairs back during those times.
And since we are about to enter the era of Joe Kennedy”s stock
speculation, it”s a good place to stop. We”ll pick up the tale next
week.
Sources:
“A History of the American People,” Paul Johnson
“The Great Game,” John Steele Gordon
“In the Time of the Americans,” David Fromkin
“Freedom From Fear,” David Kennedy
Brian Trumbore
