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October022008

Say Goodbye to Chuck (and Bucks): Merrill Lynch in the New Yorker Archive

Filed under: The Catbird Seat: Friends & Guests   Tagged: , , , , ,

Jonathan Taylor, who previously revisited John McPhee on New York City's greenmarkets and strongly suggested that the city install skybridges, writes:

If it's really the end of an era for Wall Street, it will also be the end of a perennial New Yorker trope.

Recently subsumed brokerage Merrill Lynch, a metonym for Wall Street (itself a metonym!), was for decades an absurdly frequent subject of New Yorker Talk pieces and cartoons, which exhibited an inexhaustible fascination with the length and euphony of its name in its various iterations, particularly "Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner & Beane."

Should that not be "Merrill, Lynch, Pierce...."? It should not, and an amusing December 27, 1947, Talk piece, "Fine Point," settled it. The erroneous placement of a comma where it didn't belong had led to a "warm discussion" among magazine proofreaders. (Most likely it was in a September 13, 1947, cartoon, in which a woman asks her investment counselor, "When you say Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Beane recommend a certain stock, do you mean it's unanimous or just a simple majority?")

"The situation set us to worrying," wrote Talk, "and since, with us, to worry is to act, we sent a man downtown to investigate." This man soon enough got co-founder (or "lead-off man," as it was put) Charles Merrill on the horn. Merrill told him that when he and Edmund Lynch founded Merrill Lynch & Co. in 1914, they simply took after the ethereal example of J.P. Morgan affiliates (Morgan Grenfell, Drexel Morgan & Co.) that had no need for the workaday comma.

And in the discreet banking world, it seems that it can be wiser not to tip one's hand punctuationally. "Fine Point" goes on to explain that when Merrill Lynch & Co. merged with another firm in 1940, there was a New York law forbidding a partnership from including a dead person in its name. This was initially thought to mean that the new company could not retain Lynch, who had died in 1938, in its name. But another law did permit the name of a firm to be a component of a name of a partnership; some syntactically wise lawyers surmised that, without a comma, "Merrill Lynch" could be construed as the name of a firm, rather than simply the names of two partners. "Otherwise, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane would be called something else today, maybe Chuck," the mag quipped.

The next name change, to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, prompted another investigation, in the February 15, 1958, issue. It was a small loss to the culture: "The explosive, easily rhymed climax provided by 'Beane' has long been a boon to writers of songs and gags." A year later a 1959 piece titled "& Beane?" looked in on the departed partner, Alph Beane, who had co-founded a new firm, J.R. Williston & Beane Inc.

I wondered if Beane had perhaps shown superhuman prudence in bailing out of Merrill Lynch a whole half century before Merrill's demise. But his 1994 Times obit notes, "In the fall of 1963, Williston & Beane began to have financial difficulties when it failed to meet capital requirements at the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange after the bankruptcy of a client, the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil and Refining Company, which was unable to meet margin calls on soybean and cottonseed futures clients"; it was absorbed by another brokerage.

2 comments

Comments

I love the idea of a "warm discussion" about punctuation! Of course, the joke requires a comma, even if the name does not. Right?

MartinOctober 02, 2008

Yes, the joke certainly works better with the comma, even if it does not strictly require it.

See the CNY for the many other cartoons along these lines!

JonathanOctober 02, 2008

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