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NOTE: I GAVE THE PREVIOUS POST TO AI AS ANOTHER TEST OF ITS POWERS. I ASKED IT TO MAKE IT COHERENT AND FRANKLY IT BUILT A SUPERLATIVE IF NOT QUITE PERFECT POST. IT DID NOT PLACE THE URLS OF THE PHOTOS BUT YOU CAN PAGE BACK TO THE ORIGINAL TO SEE THEM Harry Welty (not AI)
## A Photograph, a Crash, and the Long Shadow of Power
The photograph at the top of this post shows J. P. Morgan in 1933, waiting to appear before the United States Senate Banking Committee. Its deeper meaning only emerged for me while rereading old books and chasing half-forgotten political threads—threads that run from Wall Street’s greatest collapse, through Cold War politics in Minnesota, and into the present moment.
### Once in Golconda and the Crash of 1929
The image is described in *Once in Golconda*, John Brooks’s classic account of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Brooks’s book has aged remarkably well; it is still treated as a benchmark, including by Andrew Ross Sorkin in his recent bestseller *1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation*. Sorkin spent a decade researching that book, following his earlier *Too Big to Fail* about the 2008 financial crisis.
I had just read the opening pages of Sorkin’s *1929*, where he lavishes praise on Brooks. The unusual title—*Once in Golconda*—stuck in my head. I thought I owned it but couldn’t find it on my shelves. That sent me digging for something else entirely.
### Hubert Humphrey, the Popular Front, and a Forgotten Ending
What I was actually looking for was a detail I’d forgotten: the end of Minnesota’s so-called “Popular Front” in 1947. I had first read about it in 2006 while unraveling a scandal that crippled Minnesota Democrats in 1978. The Popular Front was tied to Stalinists who had supported the U.S.–Soviet alliance against Hitler. Many participants were outright communists, and they never recovered politically once the Soviet Union revealed itself as anything but benign—swallowing up Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war.
Hubert Humphrey drove the final nails into that coffin in 1947. It was part of his rise, just before he famously defended President Truman at the Democratic convention with the exhortation that the party should “walk out of the shadow of states’ rights and into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
Republicans—my grandfather Robb among them—were gleeful, hoping this internal Democratic turmoil would finally end fifteen years of New Deal dominance. Instead, Humphrey’s speech fractured the party in a different way. Dixiecrats bolted, Strom Thurmond carried four Deep South states and 37 electoral votes, while Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party siphoned off liberal votes without winning a single electoral vote.
### Finding the Book Again
So I spent twenty minutes tracking down the Humphrey biography I needed: Carl Solberg’s *Hubert Humphrey*. I still have it bristling with post-it tabs—at least thirty-three—marking passages I wanted to be able to retrieve quickly.
While searching for it, my eyes landed on another spine: *Once in Golconda*. There it was all along. I pulled it down for a quick look. There were no yellow marker stains, but I found an old bookmark describing the photograph of J. P. Morgan. That sent me down another rabbit hole.
### J. P. Morgan and the Circus Photograph
In 1933, the notoriously publicity-shy Morgan was called to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, as lawmakers tried to understand how the 1929 crash had triggered the Great Depression. While Morgan waited in a side room, a publicist for the Ringling Brothers Circus pulled a grotesque stunt: he placed a circus midget on Morgan’s lap and urged the assembled photographers to snap what they hoped would be a humiliating picture.
Morgan, despised by many as the embodiment of financial power, surprised everyone. He remained composed, spoke politely with the young woman, asked her a few questions, and then gently helped her off his lap. The result was an unexpected image boost for Morgan—a moment of dignity under provocation.
For the woman, the outcome was tragically different. She became an object of lurid public curiosity. Half Jewish, she eventually returned to Germany, where she was later arrested as both Jewish and “faulty.” She was deported to Auschwitz.
### Crashes, Regulation, and Repetition
Sorkin’s *1929* was what led me back to Brooks in the first place. For investors, there is an uncomfortable through-line here. Anti-regulation Republicans presided over the 1929 crash and again over the 2008 financial crisis. Under Donald Trump, similar forces have been at work, now flirting with another speculative bubble—this time fueled by AI hype and crypto enthusiasm.
### Unfinished Claims and Loose Threads
As I tried to explain all this, I realized I was making several claims that deserve fuller treatment. Among them:
* I think a federal judge—namesake of a federal courthouse—worked behind the scenes to silence Don Boyd by sending him to prison despite his innocence, in order to protect Hubert Humphrey and other Democratic power brokers.
* I’m certain that Humphrey tried to prove he could be as ruthless as the ethically challenged Lyndon Johnson by orchestrating a phony scandal to defeat an extremely liberal Republican governor in the early 1960s.
* I’ve learned just how noxious the Stalinist wing of the Democratic Party was during the years when Humphrey and his later betrayer, Eugene McCarthy, were reshaping Minnesota’s DFL, even as the FBI tightened the screws on communists.
* I’ve better understood the political currents flowing north from Kansas and Missouri into Minnesota—toward what once seemed a Scandinavian social-democratic ideal—during the long era between the Cold War and the eventual collapse of the old Republican Party under Donald Trump.
Those are arguments for another post—or several. For now, they remain notes in the margin, waiting to be fully unpacked.
