Financial History Issue 130 (Summer 2019) | Page 13
EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
3.
4.
5.
6.
Illustration from the January 17, 1903 installment of The Pit in The Saturday Evening Post.
Knight, Peter. Reading the Market: Genres of
Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2016.
Lambert, Emily. The Futures: The Rise of the
Speculator and the Origins of the World’s Big-
gest Markets. New York: Basic Books. 2011.
McElrath, Joseph R. and Douglas K. Burgess.
“Joseph Leiter: Frank Norris’s Model for
Curtis Jadwin in The Pit.” Frank Norris
Studies 2, 20–24. 2002.
McElrath, Joseph R. and Jesse S. Crisler. Frank
Norris: A Life. Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press. 2006.
Norris, Frank. The Pit: A Story of Chicago. New
York: Penguin. 1994.
Orbanes, Philip E. The Game Makers: The Story
of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to
Trivial Pursuit. Boston: Harvard Business
School Press. 2004.
Notes
1. The film can be viewed at https://www.loc
.gov/item/2012600307/?
2. Norris wasn’t able to graduate from Berke-
ley because he couldn’t pass the required
mathematics course. In a tribute to Nor-
ris, one of the professors who failed him
wrote, “There was very little about algebra
that attracted him. He was a keen observer
of men and women as he saw them and
interpreted their lives—their longings,
their foibles, their loves, their truthfulness
and their shams. It was thus he became a
mirror showing us to ourselves.”
According to Hull, “A futures contract is
an agreement to buy or sell an asset at
a certain time in the future for a certain
price … The investor … who has agreed
to buy [the asset] has what is termed a
long futures position; the investor … who
has agreed to sell [the asset] has what is
termed a short futures position.”
In the Preface, Norris wrote, “The author’s
most sincere thanks for assistance ren-
dered in the preparation of the following
novel are due to Mr. G.D. Moulson of
New York, whose unwearied patience and
untiring kindness helped him to better
understand the technical difficulties of a
very complicated subject.”
His father Levi Leiter, according to CBOT
historian Emily Lambert, was a business
partner with Marshall Field whose depart-
ment store in Chicago made both men
very wealthy.
Norris wrote: “By now his mind was upon
this one great fact—May Wheat—continu-
ally. It was with him the instant he woke in
the morning. It kept him company during
his hasty breakfast; in the rhythm of his
horses’ hoofs, as the team carried him down
town he heard, ‘Wheat—wheat—wheat,
wheat—wheat—wheat.’ No sooner did he
enter La Salle Street, than the roar of traffic
came to his ears as the roar of the torrent of
wheat which drove through Chicago from
the Western farms to the mills and bake-
shops of Europe. There at the foot of the
street the torrent swirled once upon itself,
forty million strong, in the eddy which he
told himself he mastered. The afternoon
waned, night came on. The day’s business
was to be gone over; the morrow’s cam-
paign was to be planned; little, unexpected
side issues, a score of them, a hundred of
them, cropped out from hour to hour; new
decisions had to be taken each minute. At
dinner time he left the office, and his horses
carried him home again, while again their
hoofs upon the asphalt beat out unceasingly
the monotone of the one refrain, ‘Wheat—
wheat—wheat, wheat—wheat—wheat.’ At
dinner table he could not eat. Between each
course he found himself going over the
day’s work, testing it, questioning himself,
‘Was this rightly done?’”
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