John Brooks (writer)
Encyclopedia
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine, where he worked for many years as a staff writer, specializing in financial topics. Brooks was also the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, the best known of which was an examination of the financial shenanigans of the 1960s Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
bull market.
Early life
John Nixon Brooks was born on December 5, 1920, in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, but grew up in Trenton, New Jersey
Trenton, New Jersey
Trenton is the capital of the U.S. state of New Jersey and the county seat of Mercer County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Trenton had a population of 84,913...
. He later attended Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, where he graduated in 1942. After graduation Brooks joined the United States Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
, in which he served as a communications and radar officer from 1942 until 1945. He was aboard the First United States Army headquarters ship on D-Day
D-Day
D-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated. "D-Day" often represents a variable, designating the day upon which some significant event will occur or has occurred; see Military designation of days and hours for similar...
during the Allied invasion of Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
in 1944.
After leaving the military, Brooks went to work for TIME
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, where he became a contributing editor. He worked at TIME for only two years, pining for a chance to write at more length and in a looser style than that dictated by the newsweekly format. In 1949, Brooks got his break. That year he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer – a development he later called the lucky break that made his career. While working at The New Yorker, Brooks also began contributing book reviews to Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
and The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
.
Brooks was the author of three novels, one – The Big Wheel, published in 1949 – describing a newsmagazine much like TIME. He also published ten non-fiction books on business and finance, the subject in which he specialized for The New Yorker. Brooks's best-known books were "Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–1938," about the scandal surrounding Wall Street banker Richard Whitney; The Go-Go Years, on the speculative bubble of Wall Street in the 1960s; and The Takeover Game about the merger mania of the 1980s.
Career at The New Yorker
Brooks also wrote scores of articles and profiles for The New Yorker, many profiling well-known business figures, and written in an informal and erudite style that turned the accounts of bankers and traders into the stuff of drama. Brooks's best-known New Yorker article was The Fate of the EdselEdsel
The Edsel was an automobile manufactured by the Ford Motor Company during the 1958, 1959, and 1960 model years. The Edsel never gained popularity with contemporary American car buyers and sold poorly. Consequently, the Ford Motor Company lost millions of dollars on the Edsel's development,...
, exploring Henry Ford II and the ill-fated introduction of the most famous failed automotive gambit in history. Brooks also wrote widely on other subjects as well, including the government-guaranteed loans to Chrysler Corporation, the public television show Wall Street Week and its creator Louis Rukeyser
Louis Rukeyser
Louis Richard "Lou" Rukeyser was an American financial journalist, columnist, and commentator, through print, radio, and television....
, an examination of supply-side economics
Supply-side economics
Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering barriers for people to produce goods and services, such as lowering income tax and capital gains tax rates, and by allowing greater flexibility by reducing...
, the banking behemoth Citibank
Citibank
Citibank, a major international bank, is the consumer banking arm of financial services giant Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, later First National City Bank of New York...
, economist Arthur Laffer
Arthur Laffer
Arthur Betz Laffer is an American economist who first gained prominence during the Reagan administration as a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board . Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve, an illustration of the theory that there exists some tax rate between 0% and 100% that will...
and his Laffer curve
Laffer curve
In economics, the Laffer curve is a theoretical representation of the relationship between government revenue raised by taxation and all possible rates of taxation. It is used to illustrate the concept of taxable income elasticity . The curve is constructed by thought experiment...
, the development of New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
's Meadowlands
New Jersey Meadowlands
New Jersey Meadowlands, also known as the Hackensack Meadowlands after the primary river flowing through it, is a general name for the large ecosystem of wetlands in northeast New Jersey in the United States. The Meadowlands are known for being the site of large landfills and decades of...
, New York City urban planner Robert Moses
Robert Moses
Robert Moses was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, Rockland County, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of...
, and even the Southern grocery store chain Piggly Wiggly
Piggly Wiggly
Piggly Wiggly is a supermarket chain operating in the Midwestern and Southern regions of the United States, run by Piggly Wiggly, LLC, an affiliate of C&S Wholesale Grocers. The current company headquarters is in Keene, New Hampshire....
.
Brooks's writing on finance won him three Gerald Loeb Award
Gerald Loeb Award
The Gerald Loeb Award, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was established in 1957 by Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of...
s, and moved Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith , OC was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism...
to call Brooks's book The Go-Go Years "a small classic in the history of financial insanity".
"He was not a breaker of big stories, or a shaper of important journalistic institutions", wrote journalist Joseph Nocera
Joseph Nocera
Joseph "Joe" Nocera is an American business journalist and author. He became a business columnist for The New York Times in April 2005. In March 2011, Nocera became a regular opinion columnist for The Times' Op-Ed page, writing on Tuesdays and Saturdays...
, now of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
. "He was a wonderful writer, He was that rarest of birds, a gifted storyteller, with an enviable talent for summing up a character with a single, pithy anecdote or sentence."
Richard Whitney
Richard Whitney may refer to:* Richard Whitney , American financier, president of the New York Stock Exchange, convicted embezzler* Richard Whitney , American portrait and landscape artist...
, the aristocratic Morgan broker who headed the New York Stock Exchange
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at 13.39 trillion as of Dec 2010...
, but ended up in Sing Sing
Sing Sing
Sing Sing Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison operated by the New York State Department of Correctional Services in the town of Ossining, New York...
Prison for his misdeeds.
"Mr. Brooks has convinced me, absolutely, that Richard Whitney ranks in the highest pantheon of American symbols – like Lincoln and Bryan and Melville and Hemingway and Yellow Kid Weil, Buffalo Bill, Horatio Alger, and even Babe Ruth", wrote TK in Harper's
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
magazine, "In him, the upper-class con crested – and America's last chance to do it right the first time ended."
Brooks's tale of easy credit, inflated egos, financial greed and the end of an era – symbolized by broker Whitney – came to be seen as one of the best accounts of the conditions which led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929
Wall Street Crash of 1929
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 , also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout...
. "As Mr. Brooks tells this tale of dishonor, desperation, and the fall of the mighty, it takes on overtones of Greek tragedy, a king brought down by pride. Whitney's sordid history has been told before", said The Wall Street Journal in its review. "But in Mr. Brooks's hands, the drama becomes freshly shocking."
Brooks's account of the bull market of the 1960s in The Go-Go Years similarly delineated the personalities at the center of the action, like high-flying portfolio manager
Portfolio manager
A portfolio manager is either a person who makes investment decisions using money other people have placed under his or her control or a person who manages a financial institution's asset and liability portfolios....
Gerald Tsai
Gerald Tsai
Gerald Tsai Jr. was a financier and fund manager who pioneered the use of performance funds in money management during the 1950s and 1960s, and later turned a canning company into financial services giant Primerica...
. In Brooks's retelling of the decade's events, Tsai and others correctly intuited that the ways of the Street were changing, and adjusted their trading strategies accordingly. Speculation was on the rise, Brooks noted, made easier by the new casino mentality. Writer Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis (author)
Michael Lewis is an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic and Home Game: An...
noted that Brooks's outrage at the new speculative excesses of the 1960s marked the end of an era.
"The reader Brooks imagines himself to be speaking to is the same shockable character who has vanished from the financial world over the past thirty years", writes Lewis in his preface to a later edition of The Go-Go Years. "Who on Wall Street these days thinks twice about speculation? Who disapproves of such large corporate takeovers? No such person exists, or if he does he's living on some island so remote that no word of the market will ever reach him."
As with previous market booms and busts, much of the new sober hindsight emerged from the rubble of the previous boom. Written during the recession of 1973, TIME
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine's review has an eerily familiar ring. "But now that mutual funds are hemorrhaging cash and conglomerate has become a dirty word", opined TIME reviewer George Church on October 29, 1973, "the story of the 1960s on Wall Street has the faraway quality of tales from 1929. As New Yorker writer John Brooks points out, the speculative excesses of the decade bore a haunting resemblance to those of the '20s, and they, too, led to a resounding market crash (in 1970) that wiped out fortunes and nearly destroyed Wall Street itself by threatening to bankrupt its biggest brokerage houses."
Brooks's subsequent work, The Takeover Game, limned the precincts of the greenmail
Greenmail
Greenmail or greenmailing is the practice of purchasing enough shares in a firm to threaten a takeover and thereby forcing the target firm to buy those shares back at a premium in order to suspend the takeover....
ers and junk bond pioneers of the 1980s. The book, noted Business Weeks editor-in-chief Stephen B. Shepard in his New York Times review, managed "to be both scholarly and provocative." With his facile explanations of complex financial terms and invigorating portraits of market speculators, The Takeover Game "argues that the investment banks, motivated by huge fees, are the driving force behind the current merger mania – usually to the detriment of the commonweal. It is little more than a speculative frenzy reminiscent of the 1920s, Mr. Brooks believes, built on high-risk debt euphemistically called leverage."
"Come the next recession", Business Week editor Shepard wrote prophetically, "the debtors will default, throwing both the stock market and the economy into a tailspin."
In a field known for bone-dry adjectives, writer Brooks lent his business writing a new panache. In describing Ford's Edsel
Edsel
The Edsel was an automobile manufactured by the Ford Motor Company during the 1958, 1959, and 1960 model years. The Edsel never gained popularity with contemporary American car buyers and sold poorly. Consequently, the Ford Motor Company lost millions of dollars on the Edsel's development,...
, for instance, Brooks wrote in his best-known New Yorker essay that the newly-engineered vehicle was "clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning – a deKooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
woman."
In a field starved for vigorous writing, colorful characters and invigorating plot lines, Brooks's prose was seen by contemporary critics as a long-overdue tonic. But seen from today's vantage, many of Brooks's assumptions seem almost quaint, writes The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
s current financial writer James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki
James Michael Surowiecki is an American journalist. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page".-Background:...
. On reading Brooks's The Seven Fat Years several decades later, Brooks's account of the managing of General Motors
General Motors
General Motors Company , commonly known as GM, formerly incorporated as General Motors Corporation, is an American multinational automotive corporation headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and the world's second-largest automaker in 2010...
's first-ever secondary offering in 1955, "the business world Brooks describes seems so oddly innocent, so unvoracious that he could just as well be talking about children playing Monopoly
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
."
In his New Yorker portrait of Public Television's groundbreaking business host Louis Rukeyser
Louis Rukeyser
Louis Richard "Lou" Rukeyser was an American financial journalist, columnist, and commentator, through print, radio, and television....
, Brooks paid tribute to another gimlet-eyed observer of Wall Street's follies. "His airy and adroit handling of his big-shot guests is a pleasure to watch", wrote Brooks in his revealing portrait of Rukeyser, who had a "knack for providing entertainment unrivaled by any other television commentator on economic matters, past or present."
Ironically, some of Brooks's most telling observations were about his own employer: The New Yorker, a magazine which guarded its privacy so zealously that it did not publish its telephone number. Such quaint business practices were bound to endear it to writer Brooks, who called The New Yorkers business model "so bad it's good."
When it came to the Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The automaker was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. In addition to the Ford and Lincoln brands, Ford also owns a small stake in Mazda in Japan and Aston Martin in the UK...
's hapless Edsel
Edsel
The Edsel was an automobile manufactured by the Ford Motor Company during the 1958, 1959, and 1960 model years. The Edsel never gained popularity with contemporary American car buyers and sold poorly. Consequently, the Ford Motor Company lost millions of dollars on the Edsel's development,...
, Brooks revealed in his two-part series in The New Yorker that the Dearborn-based eponymous auto company had introduced the new model without much research. The only research done on the brand before its splashy introduction, Brooks noted, was simply on its name—which the Ford Executive Committee then proceeded to ignore. The naming of the brand, in Brooks's trademark trenchant style, carried echoes of the patent medicine salesmen of the nineteenth century.
"Science was curtly discarded at the last minute and the Edsel was named for the father of the Company's president, like a nineteenth-century brand of cough drops or saddle soap. As for the design, it was arrived at without even a pretense of consulting the polls, and by the method that has been standard for years in the designing of automobiles -- that of simply pooling the hunches of sundry company committees."
"Instead of spending millions on listening and learning about the market," Brooks wrote of Ford's executives, "it spent millions on a campaign to launch the product it had developed in isolation. In this sense, the Edsel story is a classic of what so often goes wrong in a silo-based enterprise: Organization and ego got in the way of sound decision making."
Brooks did not limit his writing to business topics. In a 1983 book review in The New York Times, Brooks wrote that author David Burnham, in his The Rise of the Computer State, noted that the "apocalyptic vision" painted by writer Burnham was nearly at hand. The rise of the state's technological prowess was such, wrote Brooks, that "it is because one feels powerless against the advance of the national electronic eye and ear."
In his interviews of his subjects, and in his writing, Brooks sometimes dropped in passages from Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, or alluded to paintings by Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
or theater reviews by English critic Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
. In 1950, the former newsweekly writer and aspiring novelist Brooks reviewed Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
's The Town and the City in The New York Times. Brooks subsequently reviewed The Deer Park, the new novel by writer Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
that was rejected for publication by Mailer's original publisher for obscenity. Thanks to his wide-ranging style and eclectic mind, Brooks emerged as "the only writer of business books and articles with a large and assured readership of nonprofessionals."
Part of Brooks's appeal to the readers of The New Yorker, accustomed to prose by the likes of John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
, may have been his singular voice and contrarian nature. Writing about the paucity of women on Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
, for instance, Brooks noted the dining policies of the Street's stuffier precincts barred women from dining there, and "even more astonishing... was the fact that many of the public restaurants in the area did not take advantage of the situation by encouraging women, but rather fell in line with the clubs by banning them.... Without a reservation or a long wait, a woman could scarcely get a decent lunch anywhere in the area at any price."
Professional organizations and later years
The New Yorker author also used his knowledge of business and finance to help other authors. He served as president of the Authors Guild for four years, from 1975 until 1979, and along with fellow New Yorker writer John HerseyJohn Hersey
John Richard Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage...
was instrumental in creating a recommended book contract for authors. Brooks also served as vice president of PEN
International PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
for four years, a vice president of the Society of American Historians and a trustee of the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
from 1978 until 1993.
John Brooks was married for the last ten years of his life to the former Barbara Mahoney. He was previously married to the former Rae Everitt, with whom he had two children. He died in East Hampton
East Hampton (town), New York
The Town of East Hampton is located in southeastern Suffolk County, New York, at the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. It is the easternmost town in the state of New York...
, Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, on July 27, 1993 of complications from a stroke.
External links
- Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920–1938, John Brooks, Reissued by John Wiley and Sons, 1999, ISBN 0471357537
- John Brooks, Archive, The New Yorker
See also
- The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Gerald Loeb AwardGerald Loeb AwardThe Gerald Loeb Award, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was established in 1957 by Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of...