390 W. R. LAWSON 



There are, of course, a good many other influences com- 

 ing into play. Manipulation is in season all the year round. 

 It is generally spasmodic and short lived, but seldom a year 

 passes without an attempt at a grand corner. It almost in- 

 variably comes to grief, but next year is sure to produce 

 a new candidate for the questionable distinction. The latest 

 was Mr. John W. Gates of steel trust fame. During the sum- 

 mer of 1902 he had several big railroad deals pending, and, 

 apparently to amuse himself while they were maturing, he 

 tried a " squeeze" in corn. It may be worth describing, not 

 merely as the latest novelty of its kind, but for various pecul- 

 iar features it presented. Mr. Gates is an all-round plunger 

 to whom nothing comes amiss, from poker to a corner in pork 

 or corn. On this occasion he selected "July" corn as the 

 subject of his experiment. 



When he began buying is unknown, but it may have been 

 early in the year, very probably soon after he unloaded his 

 Louisville & Nashville stock on Mr. Pierpont Morgan. How 

 much he bought is also a secret, but the general estimate in 

 the "grain pit" was twenty million bushels. Mr. Gates and 

 his associates could not possibly have taken up and paid for 

 twenty million bushels of corn or anything like it. They cal- 

 culated on the sellers not being able to deliver. But, like the 

 youthful plunger Mr. Leiter, they had made one or two errors 

 in their calculations. No doubt they were all right as to the 

 1901 crop having been five hundred million bushels short, and 

 as to the consumption being much in excess of the current 

 supply. They may have been right, too, in their belief that 

 the visible stocks in Chicago and at other reporting points 

 were unusually small. But the invisible stocks — namely, 

 corn in the hands of farmers and elsewhere outside of reporting 

 centers — seem to have proved too much for them. 



It was a race against time to get the invisible stocks for- 

 ward during July, and if the duel had been fought out to the 

 bitter end the whole twenty million bushels could hardly have 

 been forthcoming. Still the "shorts" did wonderfully well, 

 considering. Early in the month they were bringing into 

 Chicago 500 carloads a day, and by the middle of the month 

 they had increased the number to a thousand a day. Very 



