The Wizardry of George H. Earle, Jr.

WHENEVER a man used to know more about the secrets of nature than his neighbors knew and could accomplish things by methods they didn't understand, they thought he was in league with the devil and denounced him as a wizard. There is something of the same uncanny skill visible in the financial career of many a man. We account for his unvarying success by saying that "everything he touches turns into money." George H. Earle, Jr., the candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, whom Penrose succeeded in capturing for the regular Republican organization at a time of great need, seems to be that kind of a man. He is a sort of financial wizard. He takes a great financial institution that has gone to smash, looks at it a minute or two, wiggles his hands over it a little while, says presto once or twice, and lo, it straightway begins to declare dividends. Fourteen times he has taken hold of wrecked enterprizes in Philadelphia and worked this sort of a miracle upon them. Of course, if you are going to cross-examine us, we will have to admit that he takes more than a minute or two and does something else than say presto. All the same he is a wizard, and now he is receiving his punishment. Penrose has lassoed him and dragged him into Philadelphia politics. They may even make a mayor of him.

There is no telling, indeed, how far they may go with Earle in a political way. He is only fifty-five. He has wealth. He has a fine pedigree, reaching back to the Mayflower and taking in, on its way back, Israel Putnam and Anthony Wayne and James Otis. He combines legal and financial ability. He has a striking personality. And he dislikes speechmaking. If that isn't a winning political hand, then we don't know one. And—oh, yes,—he was in Roosevelt's class at Harvard.

They gave him up as a victim of tuberculosis when he had completed his second year at Harvard. But he went into the Adirondacks and took the open-air treatment and cheated the undertakers. He did more ; he invested some money in part of a wilderness up there and then said presto to the wilderness. It immediately began to develop into a paradise for out-door lovers, with millionaires rushing from all directions to buy parts of it. Then he went back to Philadelphia to practise law, for the Philadelphia bar wouldn't feel like a bar without one of the Earles as a member. He found that his family had a lot of stock in a warehouse company. They had paid $50 a share for it and it had become worth about $5.00. He suggested that he be made president and he was. He cut out a lot of deadwood and then bought a lot of dock property and said presto to it. They said he was crazy ; but lo and behold, two big railroad companies suddenly discovered at the same time that they wanted that property for a water terminal. When the warehouse company sold out it got a price that sent its stock to par.

Earle kept on at his law long enough to become, according to a writer in Munsey's, "one of the three or four best lawyers in Philadelphia." He was passionately fond of the law, too. But you can find fairly good lawyers anywhere, whereas financial wizards—real wizards—are scarce as hen's teeth. Having found out that Earle was a real wizard, they left him little time to practise law. They made a doctor out of him perforce—a financial doctor. The Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Company got sick and sent for him. So did the Finance Company of Philadelphia. So did the Tradesmen's Bank. So did the Market Street National. He passed his hands over them, muttered incantations, and to-day they are all flourishing like the bay tree,—or perhaps we should say the baystate tree. He was consulting physician when the Reading Railroad was sick. Then he figured in two sensational cases that gave him a national reputation. One was the smash of the Chestnut Street National Bank and the Chestnut Street Trust Company. They were both filled up with I O U's of the Philadelphia Record of Singerley, its proprietor. Earle, as receiver, was not allowed to protect these loans with the bank’s money, so he proceeded to use his own money to secure control of the Record, ran it for four years at a big profit, sold it then for millions, redeemed all its paper and paid his bank's creditors one hundred cents on the dollar with interest!

The other sensational case was the Real Estate Trust Company. Its president, Hipple, shot himself one day in his bath-room. The Trust Company was found to be in unsuspected trouble because of its heavy backing of Adolph Segal and his sugar mills. Earle was called to the rescue. He found practically nothing left but the bank's good-will. He called on the directors for two and a half millions. They gave it. They couldn't help it. He was a wizard. Then he sold four millions of preferred stock to the depositors. They bought it and even paid a small premium for it. They couldn't help it either. Wizards can do anything. The trust company's doors were reopened in sixty days and on the first day over a million dollars was received in new deposits! Then he resigned as receiver and was made president. In this capacity he brought the great Sugar Trust to time, and made it disgorge several millions.

Earle is now fifty-five, tall, angular, a little stoop-shouldered, heavy of frame and feature. John Kimberley Mumford, writing in Munsey's, says of him: "He sits humped over a little table in a gloomy little room in the big building in Broad Street which he saved for the Real Estate Trust Company. There are no frills about him. Anybody can go inside to see him. No lackeys frown outside the door. In the hot weather he peels down to suspenders, and his democracy pervades the whole establishment." He is a constant reader and yet is passionately fond of out-door sports—golf, for instance, and cricket and motoring. He has one of the best coin collections in the country. He has seven children—one newspaper man thinks he counted ten. At Bryn Mawr he owns a beautiful country place.

References

1. Read this article on Google Books