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Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1928 (Paperback)

~ (Author) "On Thursday, September 16, 1920, a few second after the Trinity Church bell had finished tolling noon, the pleasant fall air of downtown Manhattan (weather..." (more)
Key Phrases: bear raid, short sellers, pool manager, Wall Street, New York, Richard Whitney (more...)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Once in Golconda "In this book, John Brooks—who was one of the most elegant of all business writers—perfectly catches the flavor of one of history’s best-known financial dramas: the 1929 crash and its aftershocks. It’s packed with parallels and parables for the modern reader." —From the Foreword by Richard Lambert Editor-in-Chief, The Financial Times Once in Golconda is a dramatic chronicle of the breathtaking rise, devastating fall, and painstaking rebirth of Wall Street in the years between the wars. Focusing on the lives and fortunes of some of the era’s most memorable traders, bankers, boosters, and frauds, John Brooks brings to vivid life all the ruthlessness, greed, and reckless euphoria of the ’20s bull market, the desperation of the days leading up to the crash of ’29, and the bitterness of the years that followed. Praise for Once in Golconda "A fast-moving, sophisticated account…embracing the stock-market boom of the twenties, the crash of 1929, the Depression, and the coming of the New Deal. Its leitmotif is the truly tragic personal history of Richard Whitney, the aristocrat Morgan broker and head of the Stock Exchange, who ended up in Sing Sing." —Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker "As Mr. Brooks tells this tale of dishonor, desperation, and the fall of the mighty, it takes on overtones of Greek tragedy, a king brought down by pride. Whitney’s sordid history has been told before….But in Mr. Brooks’s hands, the drama becomes freshly shocking." —Wall Street Journal "It’s all there in Once in Golconda—the avarice of an era that favored the rich; and the later anguish of myriads of speculators doomed by a bloated market, easy credit, and their own cupidity and stupidity." —Saturday Review

From the Inside Flap

Once in Golconda At noon, on September 16, 1920, a horrendous explosion rocked Wall Street, instantly claiming the lives of thirty pedestrians and seriously injuring hundreds more. Yet, for all of its awesome force, that bomb was a firecracker compared to another, much more spectacular one, several years later—the great stock market crash of 1929. Once in Golconda is a dramatic chronicle of the breathtaking rise, devastating fall, and painstaking rebirth of Wall Street in the years between the wars. Focusing on the lives and fortunes of some of the era’s most memorable traders, bankers, boosters, and frauds, award-winning author John Brooks brings to vivid life all the ruthlessness, greed, derring-do, and reckless euphoria of the ’20s bull market, the desperation of the days leading up to the crash of ’29, and the bitterness of the years that followed. Writing with authority, verve, and considerable humor, Brooks introduces us to a bygone world in which the likes of Junius Morgan and fellow members of the Yankee "aristocracy" jealously controlled Wall Street as if it were their private hunting preserve. He also offers striking portraits of the generation of rawly ambitious newcomers who rose up to topple the old regime, including Irish Catholic "counter jumpers" such as "Sell ’em" Ben Smith and the mercurial Joseph Kennedy who clawed his way up from being one of the most cunning of shady speculators, to first head of the SEC, to king-maker. At the center of this colorful whirlwind of a tale is the magnificently hubristic Richard Whitney. The story of his rise to the presidency of the New York Stock Exchange and his eventual downfall and imprisonment for stock fraud and embezzlement characterizes the play of monumental forces that transformed Wall Street from WASP Camelot to public institution. Though it was first published in 1969, this riveting tale explores timeless themes of profound significance for today’s investors—from the corruption that led to the creation of today’s securities laws to the folly of investor hubris in a bull market. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

Paperback: 307 pages
Publisher: Wiley (September 7, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0471357529
ISBN-13: 978-0471357520
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #327,555 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
On Thursday, September 16, 1920, a few second after the Trinity Church bell had finished tolling noon, the pleasant fall air of downtown Manhattan (weather clear, temperature sixty-nine degrees, market up slightly) was rent by an enormous and devastating explosion. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bear raid, short sellers, pool manager, stock speculation

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Wall Street, New York, Richard Whitney, George Whitney, United States, Federal Reserve, New Deal, Governing Committee, Dick Whitney, White House, House of Morgan, Gratuity Fund, Distilled Liquors, Thomas Lamont, Old Guard, General Motors, New Jersey, Business Conduct Committee, National City, Ben Smith, Liberty League, Pierpont Morgan, Securities Exchange Act, Broad Street, Law Committee

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 38 books:

The Road Home: The Story of the Prodigal Son by J. John on 4 pages
Dwight Morrow (Wall Street and the Security Markets Ser.) by Harold Nicolson on page 49, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
The Old Guard by Greg Wurth on page 222, page 268, and page 269
Lords of Creation by Frederick Lewis Allen in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy by Richard J. Whalen in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)

See all 38 books this book cites

35 books cite this book:

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City by Neal Bascomb on 6 pages
The Transformation of Wall Street by Joel Seligman on 5 pages
Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929 (Pivotal Moments in American History) by Maury Klein on 4 pages
Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith on page 110, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend (Trailblazers, Rediscovering the Pioneers of Business) by James Grant in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)

See all 35 books citing this book

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	78% buy the item featured on this page: Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1928 4.7 out of 5 stars (10) $23.04
	9% buy Where Are the Customers' Yachts: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street (Wiley Investment Classics) 4.5 out of 5 stars (33) $13.57
	5% buy Once in Golconda: The Great Crash of 1929 and its aftershocks $17.59
	4% buy The Great Crash 1929 4.0 out of 5 stars (74) $10.17

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Customer Reviews

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4.7 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Somehow you wind up siding with the thiefs and charlatans, July 20, 1998

By	John Hempton "jhempton@bigfoot.com" (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Once in Golconda (Hardcover)

This is a very good book.

The book follows the 1920s and 30s stock market from the corner in Stutz stock (on which only people who were long originally gained) to the demise of the aristocratic Richard Whitney.

It could be fiction except that you see the similarities all around.

The description of 1929 is the best I have read. I wish I was there to see Whitney make the most famous bid in all stock exchange history (10 thousand US Steel at 205). I too would have fallen under his spell. And I too would have been shocked and scandalised by his eventual downfall.

Read this and make your judgement. Are you too taken in by the image of today's high flier? Or are you above that? Some people are. I am not sure I am

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wall Street Lays An Egg...And You Are There, April 28, 2004

By	Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

If ego is a drug, Richard Whitney was Wall Street's Tony "Scarface" Montana. More than $27 million in debt and trying to conceal bald-faced embezzlement, the broke stockbroker and former New York Stock Exchange president still managed to carry himself with a smug hauteur as he drew up new IOUs.

Approaching one broker with whom he was on a bad footing, Whitney "made no lame effort to ingratiate himself. Rather he announced brusquely that he 'wanted to get this over with quickly'...Then he said he wanted to borrow $250,000 'on my face.'"

He was denied that time, at least, but Whitney's arrogance was rewarded in other instances. When you were one of Wall Street's aristocrats of the 1920s and 1930s, life was like that.

Whitney is the central character in John Brooks' "Once In Golconda," an absorbing, picaresque account of the New York Stock Exchange's painful coming of age during the Jazz Age and Great Depression. Though there are some patterns watchers of today's stock markets may recognize in this account of the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath, some things are probably never to be repeated, probably for the best.

Wall Street in 1929 was a plutocratic fiefdom where might meant right and no one was righter than J.P. Morgan & Co., known by many as "23" for its Wall Street address. But the crash brought anger as it took the rest of the national economy down with it, and in time, calls for reform that the stockbroking elite ignored at their peril. Leading the resistance to change was NYSE President Whitney, who showed great bravery on Black Thursday by placing some stabilizing bids but remained inflexible despite growing demands for needful change.

"Once In Golconda" is a financial history anyone can pick up and enjoy. The terminology is not too technical, and Brooks writes with a real zest for the human equation. At the same time, you get a deeper appreciation for the market forces that dictated what happened on the Street; how the market was democratized, first by the influx of middle-class investors before the bubble burst, and then after, by the formation of the Securities And Exchange Commission; and how J.P. Morgan lost its supremacy to new-money upstarts like Merrill Lynch.

Brooks, writing in the late 1960s, clearly favored a closely regulated market, but he avoids coming off shrill by presenting both sides of the argument at all times. Not completely in the New Deal camp, he describes the theory of an early FDR economic adviser as amounting to populist voodoo economics. "To reverse the roles by trying to make gold prices affect commodity prices was like a man in a building lobby trying to move an elevator from floor to floor by pushing the indicator dial from place to place: it wouldn't work, and it could easily end up ruining the whole mechanism."

This is an excellent companion volume to Brooks' other classic, "The Go-Go Years," a contemporary account about the market's rise in the 1960s. It has the same elegant prose, the same attention to nuance and detail, perhaps an even larger-than-life cast of characters, and a wry wit that pierces through even the driest sensibility. Of one fabled stockbroker, he writes: "He published a book explaining his stock-market techniques - a tip-off that they were no longer working for him."

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!, March 5, 2006

By	Michael F. McPartlan (Buffalo, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Once in Golconda is a well-written financial history book. The setting is 1920s and 30s Wall Street. The drama centers around Richard Whitney, who falls from grace like the hero in a Greek tragedy. During the '29 crash, Whitney himself (he was president of the NYSE at the time) strode onto the floor of the exchange and bought U.S. Steel (and other blue chips) to temporarily halt the slide. In the aftermath, Whitney literally stole from widows and orphans and was sent to prison. An excellent example of a financial history book that is not dry and unreadable.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars highly reccomended
"Once In Golconda" is an absorbing narrative about Wall Street and her famous persons and their taciturn to bizarre personalities, trades, techniques (the infamous "pools") and... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Bachelier

4.0 out of 5 stars Great info, diseased with run-on sentences
Very good story based around a person named Richard Whitney who was a prominent figure on Wall Street. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Stephen Samperi

4.0 out of 5 stars An important read for regulators
This book documents exactly how lack of regulation and lack of protection from shortsellers was such a serios contributor to the stock market crash. Read more

Published 11 months ago by robbieandrose

5.0 out of 5 stars Once in Golconda
This book was first published in 1969, but remains particularly topical today, in the world of hedge funds and private equity pools. Read more

Published 12 months ago by Roland Machold

5.0 out of 5 stars Timeless, and Timely
Times may change, but human nature does not. "Once in Golconda" is a play-by-play of the worst financial disaster ever to befall the U.S.-- at least until now. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Zeno

5.0 out of 5 stars History with a personal touch...
This book brings the Depression to life. The writing is erudite and the author's decision to tell the story through the life of one individual makes it personal, more than a... Read more

Published on November 10, 2006 by Curtis Chambers

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book about the 1929 stock market crash...
The book really placed you back in that era. The information was like spying on the "old guards" of Wall Street. Read more

Published on November 6, 2005 by Anya K. Sherwood

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