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?’” www.MoAF.org  |  Summer 2019  |  FINANCIAL HISTORY  11