Those Damned Jeffersonians Wall Street is a fine place for
bringing a man down to earth. A few clays ago an earnest ac- quaintance in Greenwich Village was informing me that beyond any shadow of doubt the plunge in the stock market had been cunningly and care- fully engineered by Big Bad Business to teach the President a lesson. 'But—"No buts,' he said; 'don't ask me how, but They certainly fixed it.' Twenty minutes later I was toying with this latest variant of the Great Conspiracy Theory as a broker took me on a conducted tour of his offices downtown. His offices, I said: his labora- taries, rather, full of electronic marvels tended by nine hundred technicians, technologists, and a bunch of pure mathematicians, too, I've no doubt. Al length we came to an ordinary sweating man who did some actual handling of actual record cards. 'How's it going, Joe?' said the boss. 'I've gotten as far as a week ago,' said Joe, wiping his forehead;lhat's how it's going.' I gave three silent cheers for the human factor as I looked round at the television screens, hearkened to the humming of innumerable machines, and pressed my nose against the plate glass which protects the vast computers from such atmospheric im- purities as survive theair-conditioning. 'What was it like on The Day?' I asked the boss. 'Busy,' he said in his laconic way and took me off to lunch on the umpteenth storey of the new Chase-Man- hattan building which gazes glassily over dwarfed towers and diminished waters towards the Nar- rows and the ocean. 'Don't be misled,' he said; 'the economy's in good shape basically although it's slow to move. This shake-out was overdue. Blough triggered it off with his damfool hand- ling of the steel increase. That would have forced any President, even Eisenhower, to take a tough line. He certainly played it rough, though,' he added, looking into the distance. 'Yes, he played it too rough.' He peered into the haze over New Jersey as if he could see an apparition rising above the southern skyline. 'And, you know, effects can turn into causes. Those damned Jeffersonians running .around in Washington !'
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