Business: Wiggin Out

“I shall be 65 years old on Feb. 21 next. The annual meeting of the bank will take place Jan. 10. I think it appropriate, and I accordingly request, that … I be not re-elected as chairman of the governing board. . . .” Thus did the head of the world’s largest bank tender his resignation last week.

Albert Henry Wiggin went to Chase National Bank as a vice president & director nearly 29 years ago. Tall, heavy, slightly popeyed, he entered banking without benefit of college at 17. At 23 he was an assistant bank examiner in Boston, a bank vice president at 29. At the turn of the century he marched down to Manhattan as an officer in a small bank that he later absorbed. When he was picked for president in 1911 Chase National Bank boasted total assets of $106.000,000. At the peak of its prosperity two years ago the total was $2,697,000,000 —a record.

Albert Wiggin has been a quiet banker. His pronunciamentos have been singularly few. Famed for joviality, hard work, long hours, he is a director in more than 40 corporations, often attends 16 meetings in one day, keeps four secretaries on the jump. His favorite game is poker, which he plays with a fierce intensity. His good golf is best when he is behind. For the locker-room he has a vast fund of anecdotes. Innumerable people “Al” Mr. Wiggin. Even usually sardonic Financial Editor Carlton A. Shively of the New York Sun confessed last week: “The grief shared by the staff of the Chase Bank at the decision of Albert H. Wiggin to rest from his labors … is understood by hundreds of persons who know Mr. Wiggin. … It is his part in emergency measures that Wall Street likes to remember most about Mr. Wiggin. The day the Bank of U. S. failed . . . Mr. Wiggin, after being up most of the night, was at his desk before 9 a. m., radiating good cheer when nobody knew just what might happen.”

Al Wiggin has never been known as a hard banker like President William Chapman Potter of Guaranty Trust Co., but he saw to it that his bank was ready for the 1929 stockmarket crash. Last week, in acknowledging Mr. Wiggin’s letter, the executive committee revealed that in October 1929, Chase had less than $1,000,000 in brokers’ loans. In the week of the panic, while frightened outside lenders were scrambling to call their Stock Exchange loans, Chase expanded its loans $373,000,000. It was National City Bank’s Charles Edwin Mitchell, a rampant, bull, who became the popular scapegoat of the Crash with his insistence that conditions were fundamentally sound. Rumors that Banker Mitchell was about to quit National City persisted for a year afterward, then faded out. Currently he is in the ascendant, dictating economy to Tammany Hall. Banker Wiggin’s troubles came in 1930 and 1931.

Trouble first came to Banker Wiggin when he tried to see defunct Pynchon & Co. through the storm. Hard on the heels of the Pynchon failure came Chase’s great effort to stave off the collapse of Fox Film Corp. and General Theatres Equipment, Inc. And then Banker Wiggin’s large short-term German credits froze up tight. Early next month he will sail for Europe to negotiate for the fourth time with the German creditors of Chase and other U. S. banks. Dr. Alfred Hugenberg, head of the German Nationalist party, last week shocked U. S. bankers and not a few Germans by announcing that interest on private loans from the U. S. should be cut from 5% to 1½%.

Though Banker Wiggin’s desire to “be not reelected” caught Wall street napping, it has been known for more than a year that he has had it in the back of his head. Last week he stated that Chase, following the lead of U. S. Steel and many another big corporation, was planning to install a pension system with compulsory retirement at 65, that he was merely anticipating its action. He will continue as a director and member of the executive committee.

In his “do not choose” letter last week Banker Wiggin said he had been the biggest Chase stockholder until the merger with Equitable Trust and Interstate Trust in 1930. By the exchange of his Equitable stock for Chase stock, John Davison Rockefeller Jr. then became the biggest stockholder, and his wife’s brother, Winthrop Williams Aldrich, president of Equitable, stepped into the presidency of Chase. With the election of Brother-in-law Aldrich as chairman of the governing board almost a foregone conclusion, Chase now lines up definitely as a Rockefeller institution. Wall Street has believed for some time that the Rockefellers had disposed of their traditional interest in National City Bank, that Chase was becoming the Rockefeller bank. But whether the Rockefellers were behind Mr. Wiggin’s resignation was still a moot question last week.

An ardent yachtsman, past Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, Banker Aldrich was longtime counsel to Equitable Trust, became president three months before the merger. He it was who led the fight to oust Robert Wright Stewart from Standard Oil of Indiana. Son of Rhode Island’s late Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, he is now 47, makes no bones about representing the interests of his in-laws.