DRAMAS IN GOLD

Evening Star, Issue 23373, 16 September 1939, Page 10

DRAMAS IN GOLD

By Paul Neumann >

The picture play, ‘ David Harum,’ while diverting a little from the original hook version, drew a pretty fair characterisation of the deacon who was not above acquiring this world’s goods and chattels by any and every means. The counterpart of that deacon predated him by half a century. His name was Russell Sage. He eased himself into New York from up-State way back in the ’7o’s of the last century, and started making money by the sage and profitable method of lending to Wall Street traders, provided the security was about 10 times the amount borrowed. Sage was never a gambler. The old saw, “Buy them low and sell them high,” was often cited as his motto for getting rich. He never said it._ He didn’t care’whether they were high or low, provided the margin of security of stocks was sufficient to lend money on with safety.

A cagey bird was Russell Sage. He played a lone'hand. So lone that nobody knew him until he died. Then they found out he was as hidebound a money “conservator” as Andrew Mellon.

He saw Wall Street through 100 panics, small and large. Whenever they occurred, there was Russell, ready to lend the losing “ short ” or the winning “ long.” provided the stocks they put up could be realised on the minute his “ calls ” for loans were not met. On more than one occasion Sago, with his hidden bank affiliations, was the real impulse behind call money interest when it rose to 120 per cent, per annum—and higher. The modern loan shark wasn’t a circumstance to Russell Sage when a good profit was in sight. He lived the quietest of lives. Wall Street said he slept only after the day’s gains had carefully been computed and

No. 30— RUSSELL SAGE

THE MAN THRIFT KILLED

stowed away in gilt-edged/securities or in Sage’s strong boxes. If he had any friends, nobody knew-them. His was a lonely and taciturn existence. He might have had some joy of the millions he rolled up, but, if so, nobody ever found it out.

His name was the byword of bitter jest and downright nasty jabs. The star’s song in the internationally famous ‘ Belle of New York ’ ended “ And Russell Sage would drop down dead if he had to pay my salary.”

Thrift made of him a hermit. His own nephew. Charles Chapin, city editor of the ‘Evening World,’ found out later that something like a curse was attached to Sage’s millions. When Sage died and Chapin inherited a goodly-' share of the millions, his exuberance drove him to a point of insanity where he killed his wife.

It’s only a hazard, but isn’t it likely that if Sage had seen that this genius nephew of his had known the better things of life a little earlier there would have been no such tragedy ? Late in life Sage continued daily_ to visit his office in the financial district. They said he suffered acute agony when he found himself likely to lose even a groat on a day’s transactions. _ His parsimony finally brought on a series of internal disorders of which he died. Surely, he lived to a ripe old age. The last years, however, were nothing but mental and physical misery. His will provided for the Sage Foundation and some charities, and its omissions ■gave many relatives a chance to obtain some part of his immense fortune. Money was his fetish, his life, his death. His epitaph, however, was never written. The world, financial and otherwise, jsst forgot him. (Copyright by Watkins Syndicate, Inc.)