BUCKET SHOP FIGHT 355 



put into effect. But, by hook or crook, the bucket shops were 

 ingenious enough to get the quotations mostly by theft. Presi- 

 dent Baker of the Board was re-elected to office in 1891 on the 

 issue of embargoing quotations. He denounced the Western 

 Union Telegraph Company as a secret enemy of the Board of 

 Trade. In 1892 a return to open quotations was made, the embargo 

 having proven ineffective. The bucket-shop fight now defined 

 itself as a question of the control of quotations. President Warren 

 of the Board of Trade called a convention of all leading grain 

 exchanges to discuss ways and means of fighting bucket shops, 

 and particularly the adoption of a national anti-bucket-shop law. 

 Finally, after spending many tens of thousands of dollars on the 

 fight, the Chicago Board of Trade evolved a successful plan. A 

 telegraph company (the Cleveland Telegraph Company) was 

 formed in 1900 to collect the quotations on the floor and to assume 

 control of all wires and instruments on the floor. The Western 

 Union Telegraph Company, now enjoying great revenue from the 

 sale of quotations, was ordered off the floor. Quotations from this 

 time on were furnished to the Western Union, or other companies, 

 only upon the signing of a contract not to furnish them to bucket 

 shops, and giving the Board itself the right to decide to what 

 applicants such quotations should be furnished, and from whom 

 they should be cut off. From this time on the Federal Department 

 of Justice and various State legal departments joined in with the 

 attorney of the Chicago Board of Trade, and a nation-wide cam- 

 paign was relentlessly pushed. In 1905 came the Christie decision 

 of the United States Supreme Court, giving the Board of Trade a 

 property right in its quotations, and hence full control over them. 

 By the year 1915 existing bucket shops had all been closed. Since 

 that date an occasional one shows its head under some disguise, but 

 the special agent of the Chicago Board of Trade or of the New York 

 Stock Exchange, or the two working together, soon eliminate it. 

 Much of the condemnation of grain exchanges as "gambling 

 places" come from the old bucket shops bastard exchanges 

 which were 100 per cent gambling places. These counterfeits 

 have hurt the standing of the genuine exchanges. The fact 

 remains, however, that the Board of Trade of Chicago and the 

 other great organized grain exchanges, as they are now developed, 

 are efficient pieces of market machinery, operating at a low margin 

 of cost per bushel, under democratic rules of self-government, and 

 managed by boards of directors responsive to the welfare and 

 interests of the general public. 



