A NEW YORKER ON NEW YORK.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 November 1919, Page 11

A NEW YORKER ON NEW YORK.

HOW THE PRESIDENT BEAT THE PROFITEERS. Mr. William Wadman, well-known in moving picture circles, who went to America a few months ago to place the Denby fireproof spool (for kinematograph machines), returned to Wellington by the Moana. Mr. Wadman was born in New York, yet when he told his friends in San Francisco that lie was going through to New York they solemnly assured him that there was no such place. As they seemingly wished to he taken quite seriously, lie wondered if some awful cataclysm had engulfed the place of his nativity, and felt strangely upset that he should have been too late for the obsequies. "No. sir," said the Westerners, "there ain't no such place; there was. It is now called Jerusalem!" Then the stranger saw what the subtle Franciscan wished to convey—that New York was in the hands of the Jews. And lie found it to lie so. The Jews controlled the greater part of the theatrical business, and the theatres, not only in New York, but right through, and now they had the picture business—the controlling end —in their fists, and whey they gripped somebody had to jump. The Jews had got the clothing business of the States; they owned the big hotels and restaurants; .lews ran the delicatessen stores all over the country—but nowhere was it more noticeable than in New York. An Englishman might walk up and down Broadway all day without hearing his own language spoken. If it was not German, Polish, Roumanian, Serbian, Russian, Czech or Bulgarian, it was a polyglot of the lot, called Yiddish, which they all appeared to be able to understand owing to its Hebraic basis. The New Yorker of to-day was so changed from what he was' yesterday that Mr. Wadman. whose make-up is distinctly American to New Zealand eves, was mistaken for an Englishman. Tt was the Jews, who made or marred Hie success of any play on Broadway, for they - were all keen lovers of the the : aire, and keen first-nighters. A curious and somewhat puzzling feature was the astonishing loyaltv of these heterogeneous millions of New York in connection with the raising of the Liberty Loans. No one could do any business in any way without being an investor in the loan—it was the white badge of loyalty to buy Liberty bonds publiclv—in the street, the hotel, the theatre, and .even the little youngsters selling newspapers saved their pennies to buy war stamps.

"Profiteering, well I think so," said Mr. Wadman. "You don't have to pay to breathe, but someone will get a concession over the air yet. That's the only thing that's not a dollar a time at present. The cost of living is nhigh as anywhere in the world. The railway men went to President Wilson about it, and said that if the profiteering in the essentials of life did not cease they would stop every wheel in the country from running." So the President got busy, and his officials in New discovered that shameless profiteering was going on through food merchants and manufacturers deliberately hoarding hundreds of thousands of tons of goods in order to create an artificial shortage that would enable them to raise the prices. What did the President do but get hold of vast army stores of all sorts and dump thorn on the market at a trifle over cost, to the utter consternation of the inhuman profiteers, who shed tears at being let down 'on a good thing.'" fn business is a negligible factor in America," says Mr. Wadman. "The man who can 'put it over' another by fair means or otherwise is the fellow, so that you will realise that American novels and pictures that glorify the clever crook are not altogether a false reflex of conditions in America."