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Column: Good Friday vs. Wall Street Good Friday Won!

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By Patricia W. Chadwick

It is Good Friday today – the most somber of Christian holy days – a day when Christians of all denominations around the world honor the death of Christ by attending church services that are devoid of music, bells or any semblance of joy. It is very much a “holy day” in contrast to a “holiday” and therein lies the dilemma I have pondered for years.

I hearken back to my first job – as a receptionist in the Boston office of Ladenburg, Thalmann, a stock brokerage firm. The year was 1968 and I had been in the position for less than three weeks when the partner in charge, a WASP Yankee named George Burden, shuffled out of his office and down the corridor to the front desk where I was sitting.

“I almost forgot to tell you,” he began, “You have the day off tomorrow because it’s Good Friday and the market is closed.” The lilt in his voice and the pleased look on his face were evidence that he enjoyed giving me this tidbit of good news. He headed back to his office, and I pondered his words – befuddled. The market is closed on Good Friday?  Why?

Over the next decade, as I moved from one job to another on Wall Street, I found this holiday an enigma – why would an industry whose titans were comprised mostly of Jewish men (for whom Good Friday had no religious significance) or WASP men (who seemed to me more likely to gravitate to Easter than Good Friday) forego a lucrative day of business?

Long before the internet became a tool for research, I developed my own theory about the genesis of this “holiday”, one I continue firmly to hold today, despite having more recently “Googled” an array of search words that might have provided concrete evidence as to why the stock market is closed on Good Friday.  What I did discover on the internet is that the NYSE has been closed on this day at least since 1864 when such records were first kept, as well as the fact that of the nine holidays on which the Exchange is closed, all but Good Friday are also federal holidays.

Enough backstory and groundwork – here’s my reasoning.  First the facts:

Once upon a time, and even for some period after the creation of electronic trading in the early 1970s, every brokerage firm had its “cage”, a secured area where clerks would receive and distribute shares that the brokers transacted for their clients. If someone worked “in the cage”, it meant he was part of that back-office team. While the high-powered jobs were held by educated and wealthy men, the cage was run by the less educated and certainly less wealthy. Who exactly were those men in the cage?

During the mid-19th century, Irish immigration soared and many of those arriving settled in New York, unable to afford destinations beyond that entry point. Some were illiterate – farmers from the potato famine – while others had modest education and means. Nearly all were Roman Catholic.

Now the theory:

A number of those immigrants who were literate likely found jobs as clerks in the “cages” at brokerage firms. In fact, it is logical to assume that the preponderance of employees in the cage department were just such immigrants, as one fellow told another about a job that wasn’t too bad – better than digging ditches or heading west to work on the railroads. In time, the smarter ones probably rose to be the managers of the “cage”.  To a man, they knew that on Good Friday it was their duty to God to be in Church from noon till 3pm, to commemorate the time that Christ hung on the cross. They told their manager that they would have to be out for three hours and their manager, a good Catholic himself, had to relay to the partners at the top of the firm that all his men would be at church for three hours during the height of the trading day.  What were the partners to do? Fire all the employees in the “cage”? That would leave them finding replacements, most likely more of the same Catholic Irishmen. The partners had no choice – they had to capitulate. God won the day over Mammon!

There is a rumor that at some point in the late 1950s, when New York City was run by a band of Irishmen who had risen through the ranks of both power and wealth – including surnames of Shea, Wagner and Coleman – the Good Friday close was enshrined in the constitution of the NYSE.

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