Henry Clews

History of Financial Advice Collection. Born in Britain, Clews emigrated to the US in 1853, and by 1859 he had established a firm that specialized in marketing government bonds during the Civil War. He had a long and distinguished career as a financier, although at times he fell foul of the New York Stock Exchange’s rule against self-promotion through advertising. One source of popular knowledge about Wall Street was autobiographical writing by stock brokers, such as William Worthington Fowler’s Ten Years on Wall Street (1870), Matthew Hale Smith’s Twenty Years among the Bulls and Bears of Wall Street (1871), and Henry Clews’s Twenty-Eight Years on Wall Street (1887), later expanded to become Fifty Years on Wall Street (1908).
These memoirs provided a far less judgmental portrait of Wall Street than earlier accounts. Although they condemned some sharp practices of the “king operators,” they indulged their readers’ appetites for dramatic tales of the legendary corners and pools organized by the “celebrities of Wall Street.” Despite seeming to provide ammunition for those reformers who felt that the protection of vulnerable investors is best achieved by educating the public in the specifics of stock market activity, these compendia of Wall Street lore nonetheless tended—in part by sheer repetition—to legitimize the stock market by lionizing its larger-than-life “characters.”… (meer)