Journalist Thomas McConville from Portadown (my great grandfather) wrote a column from Wall Street for the Ulster Observer of December 12th, 1862. He described the brokers and dealers he encountered there as "attenuated Yankees with compressed lips, and cold sharp noses, and dyed beards, [who] flit along this noted street from ten o'clock in the morning till five in the evening".
"Yankee" was the Dutch nickname for English settlers and in those days referred mainly to the WASP establishment, which included figures like Andrew Carnegie, J P Morgan, William Duer, Alexander Hamilton and Jay Gould who controlled the big securities houses and merchant banks.
If Thomas McConville were to visit Wall Street today he would find that while the compressed lips and cold sharp noses of the old "robber barons" are still in evidence, there are now many Celtic faces and a good sprinkling of Irish surnames among the movers and shakers.
It is well known how the Irish in America started at the bottom and worked their way up from the building sites to Tammany Hall and into the boardrooms, but it is less appreciated just how successful they have been of late in the banks and brokerage houses.
"It's almost an oxymoron, Wall Street Irish," said Christopher "Kip" Condron, president and chief executive of AXA Financial Inc, in a keynote speech as the main recipient of Irish America's Wall Street Top 50 Awards last year.
"If we were recognising the 50 top Irish poets in New York or the 50 top Irish tenors, it would feel more comfortable. It's out of character for the Irish to be successful at money-making ventures." Most of the top 50 Irish on Wall Street 75 years ago "would have been runners or clerks", he added. That is true, but a small number of brash, risk-taking Irish did make it big early on in the bastion of the Yankees.
One was Edmund Lynch, a seller of soda fountain equipment, who joined Charles Merrill in 1914 to set up Merrill Lynch, today the largest securities firm on Wall Street.
Then there was Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK and a prominent bear market operator who was famously snubbed as an Irish upstart by the most prominent Brahmin banker of them all, J P Morgan Jr. Despite his reputation as a stock manipulator, President Franklin Roosevelt made Kennedy first chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission in 1933, with a mandate to police the very behaviour that made him wealthy.
This was "sort of like putting a vampire in charge of a bloodbank", said Mr Condron, though Kennedy's administration of the SEC turned out to be highly successful, according to Charles Geisst in his Wall Street, a History (Oxford, 1997).
Another famous Irish character on Wall Street in the 1920s was Mike Meehan, a flamboyant speculator who was eventually expelled from the New York Stock Exchange for rigging share prices. And people still recall "Sell 'em Ben Smith", an overbearing and aggressive Irish-American trader who ran through a brokerage house in the crash of '29 yelling "Sell 'em all, they're not worth anything", hence the name which stuck to him ever afterwards.
The Irish on Wall Street today are an altogether more civilised crowd, to judge from the highly respectable turnout on the top floor restaurant of the World Trade Centre last Wednesday for the fourth annual Top 50 Wall Street awards, organised by the founding publishers of Irish America, Niall O'Dowd and Patricia Harty.
The fact that the Irish, from North and South, have arrived on Wall Street was evident from the executive titles of the award winners, with names like Dunn, Keating, McDonough, Meehan, Morrissy, Murray, O'Neill, Tatlock and Wyant - and those were just the women of Irish origin among the city's top financiers being honoured (see below).
The main honouree this year was Denis Kelleher, who joined Merrill Lynch as a messenger boy on the first day he arrived as a penniless immigrant from Co Kerry in 1958, and went on to found Wall Street Access, a major discount brokerage for investment professionals.
Thomas McConville would find today that being Irish on Wall Street is in fact a positive advantage, as the Irish have acquired an aura of business confidence and ambition, thanks to the Celtic Tiger, to add to their much-trumpeted qualities as patriots, playwrights and poets.
"The secret of Denis Kelleher's success," said Kip Condron as he introduced the Kerrymanm last week, "is that he came with a brogue and conned everyone into thinking he was intelligent and exciting".
Patricia Dunn, global chief executive, Barclay's Global Investors; Susan Keating, president and chief executive, Allfirst Financial; Kathleen McDonough, managing director, Ambrac Assurance; Colleen Ann Meehan, senior portfolio manager, Dreyfus Corporation; Dolores Morrissey, chairwoman, chief executive, Mutual of America Investment Corporation; Eileen Murray, managing director, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter; Mary Lynn O'Neill, managing director, Bear Stearns; Ann Tatlock, chairman, chief executive, Fiduciary Trust, and Margaret Wyant, founder and managing director, Isabella Capital.
