Sometimes history delivers up revolutionaries in deceptive packages. Take Richard Whitney.
Whitney was the pluperfect American aristocrat: boasting all the right connections; demonstrating a correct, gentlemanly bearing; and, as leader of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1930s, exemplifying all his fellow wealthy saw as proper and admirable in life.
But while pushing back against the forces of reform, he wrote checks he couldn’t cash and stole money from friends, thus setting up his financial establishment for a moral crisis that changed how Wall Street worked.
