presidency? Or does but is not elected?’
‘Nothing. The Foundation would be no worse off. But have you lost confidence in Ted?
On his advice we rode the market up, and then cashed out before it crashed, and now
the Foundation is about six times as wealthy as it was a year ago, all through
depending on Ted’s predictions.’
`Oh, I believe in Theodore! I was just wondering.’
Mr Roosevelt was elected and he did indeed devalue the dollar and made it illegal
for Americans to possess gold. But the assets of the Foundation had been placed out
of reach of this confiscation. As was my own numbered bank account. I never touched
it but Briney told me that it was not simply lying idle; he was using `my’ money to
make more money.
Brian was now a trustee of the Foundation, vice Mr Chapman, who had been removed
from the board for having lost his own money in the stock market. A trustee of the
Foundation had himself to be qualified for Howard benefits (four living grandparents
at time of marriage) and a money-maker. If there were other requirements, I do not
know what they were.
Justin was now chairman of the board and chief executive, vice judge Sperling, who
was still a trustee but was past ninety and had elected not to work quite so hard.
When we got back to Kansas City, Justin and Brian set up offices in the Scarritt
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Building as ‘Weatheral and Smith, Investments’ while `Brian Smith Associates’ took
an office on the same floor.
We never again had money worries but the decade of the Depression was not a time
when it was fine to be rich. We strove to avoid the appearance of being rich.
Instead of buying a fancy house in the Country Club district we bought that
farmhouse at a bargain price, then rebuilt it into a more satisfactory structure. It
was a period when skilled craftsmen were eager to get work at wages they would have
sneered at in 1929.
The nation’s economy was stuck on dead centre and no one seemed to know why and
everyone from bootblack to banker had a solution he wanted to see tried. Mr Franklin
Roosevelt took office in 1933 and, yes, the banks did close but the Smiths and the
Weatherals had cash under the mattress and groceries squirrelled away; the bank
holiday did us no harm. The country seemed invigorated by the energetic actions of
‘The New Deal’, the new President’s name for a series of nostrums that came pouring
out of Washington.
In retrospect it seems that the ‘reforms’ that constituted the New Deal did nothing
to correct the economy – yet it is hard to fault emergency measures that put food
into the mouths of the destitute. The WPA and the MA and the CCC and the NRA and the
endless make-work programmes did not cure the economy and may well have done
damage… but in Kansas City in the 1930s they almost certainly served to avoid food
riots by desperate people.
On 1 September 1939, ten years after Black Tuesday, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two
days later Britain and France declared war against Germany. World War Two had
started.
Chapter 16 – The Frantic Forties
In the summer of 1940 Brian and I were living in Chicago at 6105 Woodlawn, an
address just south of the Midway. It was a large apartment building, eighty units,
owned by the Howard Foundation through a dummy. We occupied what was called ‘the
Penthouse’ – the west end of the top floor, a living room and balcony, a kitchen,
four bedrooms, two baths.
We needed the extra bedrooms, especially in July during the Democratic National
Convention. For two weeks we had from twelve to fifteen people sleeping in an
apartment intended for a maximum of eight. I do not recommend this. The apartment
did not have air-conditioning, it was an exceptionally hot summer, and Lake Michigan
a few hundred yards away turned our flat into a Turkish bath. At home I would have
coped with it by walking around in my skin. But I could not do so in the presence of