by Carter G. Baker.
In the 1920s Nashville’s Union Street was called the “Wall Street of the South” because of the many banks and brokerage houses had located there. The most famous of these was Caldwell & Company, founded by Rogers Clark Caldwell in 1917 to help Southern municipalities sell bonds. By the time of the Great Crash in 1929, Caldwell & Company was a regional investment banking powerhouse doing $100,000,000 a year in securities sales alone.
Soon Caldwell was involved in investment banking, hotel and newspaper ownership, and the sale of municipal bonds. With the end of World War I the Federal government ceased monopolizing the bond market and the states were able to move in to the market. The South, meanwhile, enjoyed a boom not seen since before the Civil War. Agricultural prices increased every year from 1920 to 1927 and infrastructure that had been untouched for sixty years could now be improved. In short, for most of the “Roaring Twenties” Caldwell & Company enjoyed ideal conditions for profitable expansion. By 1925 most buyers of Southern bonds knew the House of Caldwell and its slogan, “We Bank on the South.”
The next expansion of Caldwell was into bank and industrial ownership. Two Nashville banks, the American National and the First and Fourth National, came under his control. Other banks in Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, and various small towns in Tennessee also came under the aegis of Caldwell.
Soon the House of Caldwell controlled department stores, manufacturing and mining companies, and a Nashville baseball team, among many other businesses. Two newspapers, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis and the Knoxville Journal, were under his ownership and an unsuccessful attempt was underway to gain control of the Atlanta Constitution.
The Nashville Tennessean was owned by Colonel Luke Lea, Caldwell’s partner in many of these deals. Lea was a colorful character who had been a U.S. Senator and a World War I colonel who had led an unauthorized attempt to capture Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who was in exile in The Netherlands. He was instrumental in donating the land for Percy Warner Park, which is named for his father-in-law. In the 1930s Lea and his son were both jailed for fraud in connection with the failure of Caldwell & Co.
Long before the company’s collapse, there were many signs that all was not well. In 1925 the loosely managed accounting department was in trouble. Customers were complaining of not receiving bonds and payments, and a trial balance hadn’t been made in years. Timothy Donovan was hired to sort out the mess and by the time of its bankruptcy the Caldwell & Co. books were straight, but the business wasn’t.
In a short article, it is impossible to describe all the interlocking directorates and movement of money that went on. Thanks to Luke Lea and the demand for bond sales, the company had excellent political connections. In fact, when the failure came, the State of Tennessee lost about 50% of the money it had deposited in various Caldwell banks. Municipalities all over the South lost deposits and individual depositors faced serious losses in those days before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
A good example of the chicanery that went on was the series of road contracts given to the Kentucky Rock Asphalt Company, known as Kyrock. Pressure was put on the state road commissioner to award the company contracts outside of the bidding process. When the commissioner refused, Lea was able to influence the governor to replace him with someone more amenable to seeing things Lea and Caldwell’s way. After that, Kyrock received many contracts for road construction without having to go through the inconvenience of bidding.
After the failure, reported in two Time magazine articles in November 1930, there were many cries for the impeachment of Governor Henry Horton (which did not happen) and jail time for Lea and Caldwell. As mentioned, Luke Lea did go to jail in North Carolina, but he was fully pardoned in 1937.
Caldwell had built a house called Brentwood Stables in 1928. Designed to look like The Hermitage, the building was owned by one of his companies. The State of Tennessee went to court to gain title to the house in partial payment for money Rogers Caldwell owed the state. The process took years of litigation, and it was not until 1945 that Caldwell finally relinquished his home. The State had intended to sell it, but, since the title was not clear, chose to keep it. The property is now the 207-acre Ellington Agricultural Center on Edmondson Pike.
Sorting out the various body parts of Caldwell & Co. and its related company, The Bank of Tennessee, was a long process not completed for nearly 20 years. Many of the related firms were salvaged and continue to exist today, though often as subsidiaries of other corporations. Caldwell & Co. was Tennessee’s first major financial bankruptcy, but it was certainly not to be its last.
Bibliography
McFerrin, John Berry. Caldwell and Company: A Southern Financial Empire. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 1969.
Time magazine: “More Aftermath,” November 17, 1930, and “Caldwell Crash,” November 24, 1930. From www.time.com
“Luke Lea (1879-1945). Wikipedia.
My personal recollections of conversations with John Donovan, Vice-President of First American National Bank in the 1970s. John, the son of Timothy Donovan, mentioned in the article, was also my boss at First American.
Two novels also touch on the Caldwell story. These are At Heaven’s Gate by Robert Penn Warren and A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor. I read both for background on this article. Peter Taylor’s father was Hillsman Taylor, an executive at Caldwell & Co.
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