Free The Go-Go Years by John Brooks Page B

proposed for election, you may express your objections through petitions.
    At this time your Chairman wishes to state that he is very tired and, as you know, he has had quite a rough time for the last two years. It has been difficult enough to handle the routine duties of my office and at the same time devote the time necessary to fight brush-fires created by the Re and Re case. I should not have to dissipate my strength to fight for our Exchange over arguments born of dissension by minority groups aired in the newspapers which add so greatly to my burden. …
    I am proud to represent the American Stock Exchange. … I am firmly convinced your officials and our members, through self-discipline, have enforced the rules. …
    I conclude by saying, “What has been done, let it be done!”
    I must insist that no member or group of members in the future turn this Exchange into a public battleground. I am going on record as your Chairman that I will no longer tolerate it.
    At the end of this unusual oration—the only public attack in history by one member of a leading United States stock exchange upon another, unless one is to count the minor dust-ups with fists that used to occur from time to time on the outdoor Curb—there was a rousing ovation for Reilly. It is ironical, though not entirely accidental, that neither Jackson nor Segal was there to hear it. Segal was at home for his normal day off; no one had notified him in advance that the chairman was to speak on the floor that day. Jackson had indeed been on the floor during trading hours, and had been notified of Reilly’s plans along with everyone else; but he was booked to sail for a Paris vacation two days later, and he had decided that no matter what Reilly had to say he would go ahead with his plans to get home early and get packed.
    So neither of the stated targets of the attack knew its contents, and neither, one way and another, would know them precisely for more than a month to come. That evening, by which time the Reilly speech had naturally become the talk of Wall Street, a reporter called Ted McCormick to ask for a comment. As an example of Wall Street understatement, McCormick’s answer was a classic. He described Reilly’s speech as “a routine report to the membership by the chairman of the board.”
    Next day Jackson, at his Sixty-eighth Street apartment, was asked for a comment on the speech, the contents of which he knew only by hearsay. He said only, “Mr. Reilly must live with his conscience and I must live with mine.” Then he sailed for Europe with his wife.
    During his absence, Segal held the besieged fort at the Amex. Long afterward he said of the subsequent weeks that every single day had been torture for him. He was systematically ostracized; in place of the Amex floor’s usual joking andbackslapping he met with cold silence almost everywhere. For a month no more than six or eight members spoke to him except in the business of making trades. He was pointedly given the maximum fine allowed under the Amex rules for a minor offense against them, and was kept under daily hostile surveillance by a staff man sent by Mann’s committee on floor transactions. Finally this got to be too much for him; when Mann’s representative sauntered up to the Jackson-Segal post one morning, Segal angrily asked him to leave. The representative did not reappear; instead, Mann himself came over, threw an ingratiating arm around Segal in the best Amex style, and said, “You know, Andy, we wouldn’t harass you!”
    But still the freeze went on. And meanwhile, Jackson and Segal were in the strange position of finding themselves unable to get a transcript of the speech in which they had been attacked. On Jackson’s return from Europe late in November, he found that Segal had failed in several attempts to obtain a copy through informal requests to the Amex management. Accordingly, he and Segal wrote