The Hellhound of Wall Street

Norbeck was hardly alone in the importance he placed on finding the right lawyer, but “right” had a different meaning depending on a senator’s goals for the investigation. Back in March 1932, conservative members of the committee who had lost the fight over the breadth of the authorizing resolution knew there were other ways to squelch the investigation. They could starve the inquiry by making sure that the Senate appropriated only a small amount of money to conduct it or discourage the best lawyers from taking the job with stingy compensation. That was a particularly big hurdle in the early 1930s, because in those austere fiscal times salaries for the committee’s employees were capped at $300 per month. As times got even tighter, that amount was reduced by another 15 percent, making for a princely salary of $255 per month.

Of course, some lawyers might do it for the prestige or to make a name for themselves. That was where a senator bent on restricting the investigation needed to be particularly cautious, because the committee’s lawyer had almost boundless discretion to shape how it would be conducted. The resolution was now sufficiently broad that a lawyer could look into pretty much any aspect of Wall Street operations. Norbeck, or any senator who was interested in a meaningful investigation of Wall Street, would want a smart lawyer who was willing to go anywhere the evidence led. Finding a lawyer to do the laborious legwork was crucial because without documentary evidence to pin down a recalcitrant witness, it was easy for almost any witness to evade the questions put to him. And, of course, lawyers who already represented or hoped to represent Wall Street firms might shy away from tackling the biggest players for fear of harming their careers.²

Other senators simply objected to investigations as a matter of general principle. Carter Glass thought little of this kind of political theater, believing it was simply a Roman holiday that took time and attention away from passing his carefully crafted banking legislation. John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic nominee for president and the founder of the prestigious Wall Street law firm that bore his name, shared Glass’s skepticism. Davis, himself a former congressman, generally thought investigations were a waste of time and good for little but generating publicity for the politicians who ran them. “[T]here will always be on committees,” he wrote around the time of Teapot Dome, the bribery investigation that rocked the Harding administration, “some persons whose daily prayer will be, ‘Lord, let the limelight shine on me, just for the day.’” Davis was even more passionate by 1932 because he represented some of the most powerful bankers in New York, including the most powerful private banking firm of all, J.P. Morgan.³

In March 1932, when the Senate first authorized the Wall Street investigation, debate focused on precisely these issues and, as the progressives and conservatives kicked around the possibilities, the investigation stalled. The key sticking point was how close a connection the lawyer could have to Wall Street. Some conservative members of the committee were actually pushing for Davis. There was little doubt that he was one of the best lawyers in the country, but with his jaundiced view of congressional investigations, his muscular notions of economic liberty and rights of privacy, and his absolute faith in his clients’ moral rectitude, he was clearly not the man to conduct a vigorous investigation. Other names were floated, but the senators were unable to reach a decision.

As the committee continued to dither for weeks, Norbeck was repeatedly forced to push back the start date for the hearings. “The bulls and bears,” he announced, “may rest a few days more.” At the end of March 1932, with the market continuing its downward dive, nothing had happened on the much ballyhooed investigation, and the press began to speculate that the senators had realized that they were in way over their heads. “Many Senators,” the New York Times reported, “have expressed privately the opinion that those responsible for instigating the investigation, aimed primarily at short selling, figuratively ‘have a bear by the tail,’ and are unable either to dispatch it or let it go.” Darker rumors swirled as well. The administration’s ardor for the investigation, it was said, had cooled substantially when it learned that prominent Republicans and at least one cabinet member were among the short sellers.⁴

The latter rumors don’t seem to have been true. If they were, President Hoover’s reticence was short-lived. As the market continued to swoon, Hoover was growing antsy for the committee to publicly lambaste some short sellers. “I want the shorts investigated,” he demanded on the last day of March, “and the quicker the better!” A week later, while Norbeck was in Chicago, Hoover called Senator Walcott, his confidant on the committee, and told him that George Barr Baker, a journalist and Hoover ally, had wired the president warning of a massive bear raid planned for the next day on the New York Stock Exchange. Hoover demanded the investigation commence immediately.

That same afternoon, Walcott called an impromptu committee meeting in the Senate Cloak Room. The Connecticut senator told the committee about the warning and his demand that the exchange’s president, Richard Whitney, turn over a list of all short sellers. In the face of Whitney’s refusal, Walcott convinced the committee to subpoena the exchange president, who was ordered to appear in Washington on Monday morning. The committee then named as its temporary counsel Claude R. Branch, a Republican lawyer who had worked in the Hoover Justice Department and was now a partner at a prominent Boston law firm.

Norbeck rushed back to Washington, convinced that the sudden urgency was a “well laid scheme” by Hoover and Walcott “to get a Wall Street attorney to do the investigating of Wall Street” while he was conveniently out of town. Walcott insisted to the press that the White House had nothing to do with the surprise start of the investigation, but Norbeck’s hunch seems to have been right. On the same day that Hoover demanded action to investigate short sellers, he met in the Oval Office with one “C. R. Branch.”⁵

Richard Whitney arrived at the appointed hour on Monday morning, the model of the Wall Street aristocrat, a man who seemed to stand far removed from the world of short sellers and market operators that the committee wanted to explore. For many, Whitney was the face of Wall Street. The Groton-and-Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin was the son of a bank president and traced his American lineage back to the Puritans who arrived on the Arabella in 1630. Whitney was tall, athletic, and perfectly attired (right down to the Porcellian Club gold pig dangling from his watch chain) and he played the roles of social elitist and country squire to a tee. On his five-hundred-acre estate in Far Hills, New Jersey, the Wall Street bond trader and broker to the House of Morgan raised prizewinning Ayrshire cattle and hunted foxes. Perhaps his most pronounced characteristic—and one that shone forth in all its glory that Monday morning—was his haughty noblesse oblige. According to his biographer, John Brooks, Whitney “had a toplofty way of being able to deal perfectly factually and equitably with people he considered his social inferiors—which meant most people—and at the same time leaving no doubt of just how he considered them.”⁶

Branch and the senators were no match for the imperious Whitney, and the hearing quickly descended into farce. Progressives on the committee had been champing at the bit, insisting that they would conduct a vigorous investigation. “We are going into this stock market from top to bottom,” said the Iowa Republican Smith Wildman Brookhart. “We are summoning Mr. Whitney because we think he knows the facts. We aren’t going to stop with the bears. We are going to find out about the bulls, too.” But the committee members had not conducted any investigation and were therefore forced to base their questions on hunch, rumor, and suspicion.

Whitney was able to deftly deflect their questions with little apparent effort, professing ignorance of wrongdoing at some points, at others gently lecturing the apparently baffled senators on the finer points of market operations. He had no knowledge of any planned bear raid, he told the five hundred reporters jammed into the hearing room, a room so crowded that spectators were sitting on file boxes and leaning against the back of Whitney’s chair. Indeed, the stock exchange president claimed under oath that bear raids didn’t exist, although he assured those assembled that “the New York Stock Exchange was doing its utmost as a body of men to prevent illegal practices.” The soft-spoken Branch was little help. He asked only a few questions about the data that the exchange had assembled and mostly left the questioning to the senators, who, in their frustration with Whitney’s unwillingness to concede anything, were left to posture and fulminate. By Tuesday, a committee member admitted that in two days the senators had learned “nothing at all.”⁷

Norbeck quickly began to ease out the ineffectual Branch in favor of Branch’s seemingly more aggressive assistant, William A. Gray, a Philadelphia lawyer who had a reputation for “bullyragging” witnesses. Gray took another crack at Whitney, with much the same results. Over the next several hearing days, Norbeck took out his frustrations on Whitney, complaining that the exchange leader was unwilling to “grant that anything in the market is illegal” and calling him “hopeless.” But Whitney didn’t have to admit to anything. Norbeck, the other senators, and their serial lawyers had absolutely no facts to back up their questions and therefore nothing with which to pin down the evasive Wall Streeter. At one point Norbeck lashed out at Whitney in frustration, “You make rules that are just paper rules.” Whitney calmly asked for Norbeck’s “proof” and the senator, who didn’t have any, responded, “You attend these hearings for a while and we will give you some proof.” The room erupted with laughter when Whitney replied resignedly, “I have.” The South Dakota senator was so taken aback that all he could do was shout, “Yes, but up to now you have been running them!”⁸

The Wall Street Journal rebuked the senator for his tirades. “Chairman Norbeck’s angry outbreaks while the president of the exchange was on the stand Thursday were nothing more or less than a confession of the committee’s failure to date to prove against the exchange its presumption of guilt.” The hearings, they concluded, were nothing more than a raw “abuse of inquisitorial power.” Political cartoons pictured Whitney as a teacher lecturing a group of ill-informed school-boys. Public interest quickly waned, in part, the New York Times surmised, “because of the somewhat foolish anticlimax that has been reached.”

Norbeck tried to help his cause by taking to the national airwaves to excoriate the exchange, but it did little to sway public opinion. Those who already thought Wall Street was a den of thieves didn’t need convincing. For everyone else, the speech underscored Norbeck’s ignorance, and they dismissed him as a “vote-grabbing demagogue.” Norbeck’s poor radio delivery didn’t help. The medium amplified his broad accent, which one listener described as sounding like that of a Scandinavian servant girl. Readers of the New York Evening Post were dismissive, accusing Norbeck of destroying public confidence in the market and ridiculing him for his pronunciation of “manipulators,” which apparently came out “maniperlators.” Conservative newspapers called on Norbeck to apologize to the stock exchange for his unfounded claims. Norbeck, however, was feeling neither contrite nor apologetic, and he vowed to “carry this investigation through to the end.”¹⁰

By June, the hearings had produced no significant revelations, with only one exception. It came at the end of April 1932, shortly after the Whitney fiasco, and it was played up for all its dramatic possibilities. On Monday, Norbeck told reporters that a “surprise witness” would provide “sensational testimony” the next day. On Tuesday morning, the New York representative Fiorello La Guardia arrived at the jammed hearing room with two plainclothes policemen lugging a heavy brown trunk. The contents were apparently so explosive that La Guardia had kept the trunk in a police vault for the last three days. La Guardia directly contradicted Whitney’s claims that it was impossible to manipulate stock, and he said he had the evidence to prove it. From the trunk, La Guardia pulled canceled checks and other supporting documents showing that a New York publicist named A. Newton Plummer had paid some of the leading financial journalists in New York nearly $300,000 over a ten-year period. Plummer was working with the pools trying to drive up the prices of sixty-one separate stocks. In exchange for cash and options, Plummer wrote favorable and not entirely accurate stories about the companies and then paid the journalists to publish them in New York’s leading newspapers. It was all quite unseemly, but since everyone, even during the heyday of the stock market bubble, knew that pools did everything they could to rig the market, it is hard to say that anyone was all that surprised.¹¹

After those scintillating disclosures, however, the hearings droned on with little discernible progress, with Gray and the senators continuing to focus solely on short selling and other market operations. Norbeck convinced the Senate to appropriate $50,000 to continue the inquiry, but John Marrinan, a former journalist and one of Norbeck’s most trusted staffers, warned him that if he intended to continue he should do so without Gray. Gray, Marrinan told him, was too close to too many people on Wall Street. He accused Gray of trying “to divert the investigation away from the Stock Exchange and the insiders controlling its market operations” and of failing to follow up on Whitney’s “misleading statements.” He complained that Gray was a “personal friend” of Matt Brush, a famous short seller who had appeared before the committee, and that Gray “dined [with Brush] in the public dining room of the Willard Hotel and spent some time in his apartment on the day of the examination.” This was the kind of close connection that Norbeck had tried to avoid.

Marrinan left the senator with a final warning—unless a change was made, there would be dire consequences for the investigation and for Norbeck. Norbeck and the committee would be condemned for “protecting the Stock Exchange” and for “wasting the funds of the Committee.” Norbeck was convinced, and the committee abruptly dropped Gray without explanation at the end of June when it suspended the investigation for the summer and fall.¹²

Richard Whitney hated that the exchange was “being used as a political football,” but he was delighted with the outcome. He told stock exchange members that he did “not wish to appear to be too critical,” but it wasn’t really true. Given the haste with which the investigation commenced, he said, “it was literally impossible for counsel and the accountants of the Committee to examine each case thoroughly in the time available, and, besides, they were handicapped by their lack of familiarity with the routine of the brokerage business. It is not surprising, therefore, that the record contains many inaccurate statements, but it is none the less regrettable.” It was a polite way of saying that the committee and its counsel were ill-prepared, ignorant, and wrong. Reporters were equally unimpressed. Unless Norbeck could uncover “more sensational wrong-doings,” the Commercial & Financial Chronicle predicted, there would be no federal regulation of Wall Street.¹³

The obvious choice was Samuel Untermyer, the lawyer who had worked with Pecora to draft the bill to toughen New York’s securities laws. The seventy-four-year-old Untermyer was one of the highest-paid and best-known corporate lawyers in the country, but he was also a fierce critic of Wall Street. He had served as counsel to a Senate committee investigating the so-called “money trust” back in 1912. In those hearings, named after the Louisiana senator Arsène Pujo, Untermyer had famously cross-examined the elder J. P. Morgan, and the disclosures from those hearings laid the groundwork for the creation of the Federal Reserve.

As the grand old man of Wall Street critics, Untermyer considered himself, according to one biographer writing in the 1930s, “the stellar investigator of the age, if not of all history.” He was a ruthless cross-examiner who often shouted at hostile witnesses. For the particularly recalcitrant, his favorite prop was his tortoiseshell glasses, which he would dramatically snatch off his face to stare down a witness, although in truth he was nearly blind without them. Outside the courtroom, he was arrogant, humorless, dictatorial, patronizing, and, not surprisingly, almost universally disliked. He was also quirky. Untermyer was an avid gardener with a collection of more than 60,000 orchids in the greenhouses of his Westchester estate, Greystone. The dapper lawyer wore one in his lapel every day, making sure that it matched his tie. On court days, his assistant carried spares in a damp paper bag so that Untermyer could have a fresh one for the afternoon session.

The grandstanding Untermyer frequently tried his cases in the newspapers and, although others might be able to match his investigative skills, his biographer wrote, “there is not the slightest doubt that he surpasses all his contemporaries in the art of making the first page.” He knew how to work the press, usually by giving reporters the big, dramatic quotes they wanted. When Norbeck’s investigation first got under way, Untermyer told reporters that the New York Stock Exchange was “the most despotic institution on earth,” and that “its existence in its present form is . . . a menace and a disgrace....” He blasted Congress too, arguing that it was Congress’s failure to regulate the exchange as he had advocated that led to most of the market misdeeds: “The idea that such an institution should continue unregulated is repugnant to all conceptions of civilized government.”¹⁴

Norbeck offered Untermyer the job in December 1932, but Untermyer immediately turned it down. Roosevelt had already asked him to draft the stock exchange legislation the president-elect planned to introduce once he took office. Untermyer offered Norbeck a host of reasons for turning down the job—the authorizing resolution was too narrowly drawn and the current committee lacked the determination to carry out a meaningful investigation. The truth, however, was that Untermyer was hoping to become counsel for the investigation when the chairmanship passed from Norbeck. Taking the post now with so little time left in the investigation and so great a possibility that nothing meaningful would happen would do nothing to enhance his chances of landing the job once Roosevelt took over.¹⁵

Untermyer did, however, make sure to keep his name in the press. Although he was supposed to be drafting stock exchange legislation, he spent most of his time publicly lobbying to run the investigation when Roosevelt took office. Just a few weeks after meeting Norbeck, Untermyer released a statement calling for federal regulation of the stock exchanges, predicting that a special session of Congress would pass such legislation, and criticizing what Norbeck had thus far accomplished. Untermyer clearly wanted to leave little doubt that he was the only man for the job.¹⁶

Norbeck next turned to Harold L. Ickes. The thin-skinned Ickes reveled in his ornery, argumentative personality, even calling his memoirs The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon. In December 1932 he was little known outside Chicago, where he had waged a long battle against Samuel Insull’s control over Illinois and Chicago politics, urging Norbeck to open a full-scale Senate investigation of the wealthy utility magnate. Ickes thus made some sense as counsel for the committee, but only if it intended to wrap things up with Insull. Ickes knew Insull, but he was not an experienced courtroom lawyer. Ultimately, it did not matter, because Ickes, too, turned down the job.

True to form, Ickes responded angrily to Norbeck’s plan to conduct only eight hours of testimony concerning Insull. He called it totally inadequate and refused to participate unless the hearings were dramatically expanded. Or so he said. Ickes, like Untermyer, already had his sights set on the Roosevelt administration. The Chicagoan had broken with Republican ranks to support Roosevelt during the 1932 election. He was already angling for the Secretary of the Interior post as his reward, making it highly unlikely he would be willing to become the committee’s chief lawyer.¹⁷

In early January 1933, Norbeck reached the last name on his list, the white-haired, patrician judge Samuel Seabury. Seabury had just completed a series of high profile investigations of Tammany Hall that revealed massive corruption in New York City politics and led to the resignation of New York City’s flamboyant mayor Jimmy Walker. Pecora’s name never came up, and he was, not surprisingly, never linked to any Tammany corruption. He remained loyal to his Tammany friends, though, advising them on what to expect when they appeared before Seabury.¹⁸

While the New York probe had made the upright Seabury the country’s best-known investigator, it wasn’t entirely clear that he was the right man for the Banking and Currency Committee investigation. He was a stalwart reformer who had dedicated nearly forty years to the cause of good government, but, unlike Untermyer, he seemed to know little about the inner workings of Wall Street. In any event, Seabury didn’t want any part of the assignment, either. He did suggest, however, that Norbeck hire one of his “boys” from the investigation, a young lawyer named Irving Ben Cooper. Although Cooper was then a few weeks shy of his thirty-first birthday, he was already a tenacious investigator, having worked two years for Seabury and, before that, on an investigation of ambulance-chasing lawyers. Cooper had a self-confident swagger, sported a pencil-thin mustache, carried a walking cane, and wore flashy suits that rivaled those of the New York mayor he helped to chase from office.

Cooper’s élan didn’t seem to bother the decidedly unflamboyant Norbeck, who thought he was “brilliant.” To entice Cooper, Norbeck assured him that the $255-per-month salary limit would not apply to his work as counsel. Norbeck would try to get him $5,000 for the less than two months remaining in the investigation. Cooper accepted the job and his appointment was announced on January 10. He was noncommittal about his plans for proceeding with the investigation, but what he said suggested both nonchalance about the rapidly approaching deadline and an independence from the committee that might prove problematic. Cooper planned to read through testimony, and then he would “take up such phases of the inquiry as he deem[ed] necessary.”¹⁹

Editorial writers saw Cooper’s appointment as a hopeful sign that the Wall Street investigation would emerge from “lull and oblivion.” Cooper had a chance to perform a “rare service” for the country. “A thorough investigation into the methods of high finance during the wild days,” the New York World-Telegram declared, “will help defend future investors, and it ought to be highly useful to students of modern industrial economy and to the legislators alike in their efforts to help chart the country’s progress out of its present travail.”²⁰

Norbeck must have welcomed that optimism. He was more and more distraught over the country’s economic woes, which he pinned on the “destruction of public confidence” following the stock market crash. “People have no faith in the Government,” Norbeck wrote, “and no faith in industrial leaders or bankers, in economists, statisticians, or even in themselves.” Society was past fraying; now it was rending, and Norbeck was hardly alone in seeing it. A Youngstown, Ohio, lawyer noted in his diary that winter a rise in “begging and holdups and murder,” not to mention lawyers who were disbarred for stealing client trust funds. “It seems,” he wrote, “that all misdeeds and grievances are coming to the surface during this time of depression.”

Property rights and the rule of law, once nearly universally respected, were flagrantly ignored. In coal country, out-of-work miners dug their own shafts on company property and sold whatever they could. When they were arrested for theft, juries refused to convict them, despite overwhelming evidence of guilt. The unemployed in Virginia and Detroit walked into company stores and simply took food off the shelves. One businessman expressed alarm “at the increasing undercurrent of hate directed against our bankers and big industrial leaders. The mention of revolution is becoming quite common.”²¹

Norbeck saw federal banking and securities legislation as a small step that might help restore Americans’ confidence. The New York Times and other newspapers, however, continued to criticize the idea that more laws might deter fraudulent behavior. Norbeck himself provided the impetus for one of the Times’ editorials. As a way to jump-start the investigation, Norbeck had abruptly announced that the committee would hold hearings on the massive fraud perpetrated by the so-called Swedish Match King, Ivar Kreuger. Before his suicide in his Paris apartment, in March 1932, Kreuger was almost universally hailed as a financial genius; the securities of his companies were among the most widely held in the world. Within weeks of his death, Kreuger was reviled as the mastermind behind what was perhaps the world’s greatest financial fraud. His companies—which had negotiated a series of match monopolies throughout Europe—proved to be nothing more than a massive accounting hoax. The shocking news further unnerved an already jittery public. Along with the British Insull, the Swedish Kreuger became the face of financial fraud, the poster boy for unscrupulous foreign businessmen who duped honest Americans out of hard-earned savings.

In his typical scattershot fashion, Norbeck left no time for investigation. As with Insull, he was just trying to cash in on a prominent scandal. Marrinan and Norbeck handled most of the questioning at the Kreuger hearing, which was just finishing as Norbeck was hiring Cooper. Naturally, without any investigation the two men relied solely on previously reported information. The picture they painted over two days of testimony was of foolish American investment bankers from the Boston firm of Lee Higginson who allowed themselves to be duped by this criminal mastermind. Norbeck and Marrinan saw the accountants as the heroes for uncovering the fraud, although in reality Kreuger lulled them into a lethargic stupor with fat auditing and consulting fees and lavish European trips. In any event, for the Times the real lesson of these hearings was that Kreuger was a “unique phenomenon,” a criminal not unlike Al Capone. Kreuger was successful because he preyed on the trust inherent in modern business transactions. The Times’ editorial writers warned the South Dakota senator: “You cannot legislate for business on the basis of a monstrous exception.” Federal legislation might protect investors, but perhaps at the cost of killing the entire securities industry.²²

If Norbeck was buoyed by the initial reaction to Cooper, his happiness was short-lived. Just a week after he was hired, Cooper quit in a huff, claiming that Norbeck had denied him a “free hand” in his investigation. Despite his laid-back initial response, Cooper had forged ahead aggressively. He hired seven lawyers to assist him, all former members of Judge Seabury’s staff, apparently without consulting Norbeck. He then demanded five hundred blank subpoenas from the senator, which Cooper would then be free to serve on anyone he chose, without any input from the committee. Although the committee had issued only twenty-seven subpoenas over the previous nine months, Norbeck seemed initially inclined to issue them. But the senator quickly thought better of the idea. In fact, he suggested that Marrinan, the former journalist, should go to the New York office to supervise Cooper’s activities until the lawyer had familiarized himself with how the committee had been conducting the inquiry.²³

Cooper bristled; apparently, he was having trouble seeing that he was working for a Senate committee and that he was not some free-floating investigator. The enraged lawyer lashed out angrily at Norbeck, suggesting that Marrinan was really there to “sit on the lid” of the investigation. It wasn’t true, of course. It had been Marrinan, after all, who had urged Norbeck to dump Gray lest the committee be accused of “protecting the Stock Exchange.” Norbeck didn’t know it at the time, but Cooper’s reaction was perfectly in character. Cooper would go on to make a career of petulance and irascibility. Thirty years later, President Kennedy nominated Cooper for a federal judgeship, but most bar groups opposed his confirmation, not because of his legal qualifications but because of his volatile disposition and “persecution complex.”²⁴

Norbeck tried to make the best of a bad situation. He told reporters that it would have been “dangerous and unsound” to delegate that kind of unchecked subpoena power to one man. “By granting Mr. Cooper’s demands for unlimited authority, the committee would have lost control of the investigation,” Norbeck told them. “The resignation is not important,” he assured the press. “The investigation will proceed.”²⁵

The damage, however, was done. Cooper came with Seabury’s imprimatur, and so most seemed to believe Cooper and not Norbeck. That was particularly true of the New York World-Telegram. The paper’s editorial page was a big Seabury booster and they seemed to view the Cooper debacle as a direct affront to the judge’s integrity. Over the next three days, they blasted Norbeck for his efforts to “censor” Cooper. His “hamstringing,” the editors wrote, “suggests that Senator Norbeck and his committee have no intention of going thoroughly into the devices by which huge pools and market manipulators have defrauded millions of people who assumed they were trading in an honest market.” The paper concluded “that the investigation is dead as far as this session is concerned. Whether it will be pressed will depend on the Democrats and the Roosevelt administration.”²⁶

The public, or in any event those who wrote to Norbeck, were equally furious. One writer told Norbeck that it was “pathetic” that the country was so lacking in “honorable and patriotic leadership.” Why, he asked, “should Mr. Cooper or any other investigator of honest character be hindered in bringing to light fraudulent and unethical practices whereby certain small groups are allowed to prey relentlessly upon the public in enriching themselves?” A concerned citizen named Sidney May wanted to know how Norbeck could expect any “self-respecting honorable man the type of Irving Ben Cooper to serve . . . under terms and restrictions laid down by you!” May “questioned the sincerity of the stock market investigation from its inception” and “this latest explosion is concrete evidence you have not venture[d] a genuine investigation, fearing to involve influential friends and possibly many affiliated with the present administration.”²⁷

Norbeck was in an enormous bind. Cooper’s resignation had left him, with little more than six weeks left in the congressional term, with no lawyer, and with a public that seemed to believe that the whole effort was a sham. It was at this point that Norbeck nearly gave up. He reached out once more, this time to the former secretary of state Bainbridge Colby, who, like Norbeck, was a progressive and a former Theodore Roosevelt Bull Mooser. But now the task had changed. Norbeck didn’t ask Colby to conduct new hearings but instead to prepare the committee’s report, the summary of its investigative efforts over the previous year. The World-Telegram seemed to be right—the investigation was over.²⁸