Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 62, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 March 1904 — COTTON KING IS DOWN. [ARTICLE]

COTTON KING IS DOWN.

Failure of Sully Causes Wild Panic iu New York Market. Cotton King Sully has fallen. The man who emerged from obscurity fifteen months ago and brought the markets of two continents to his feet announced Friday afternoon his inability to meet his engagements on the New York Cotton Exchange, With his fall the bottom dropped out of the greatest bull market ever known. Anarchy displaced the monarchy of the spectacular Daniel J. Sully’s building. “Sully suspends!” Those were the words that turned the New York Cotton Exchange into a bedlam, that carried ruin over the tickers to thousands of men dreaming of sudden wealth, that shot consternation to New Orleans and other cities of the South, and, speeding under the ocean, made their vibrations felt in the marts Of Liverpool. In the New York Cotton Exchange frenzied men fought until their clothes literally were torn from their backs. On the floor of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, a thousand miles away, the scene was being repeated. The man responsible for these simultaneous scenes of disorder was self-imprisoned in a room on the twenty-third floor of a Wall street office building. “My suspension is only temporary,” said Mr. Sully, when seen at his residence at night. “I don’t care to add anything to that simple statement, and I shall not have any further statement to make.” The man who has been such a conspicuous figure in the world’s cotton market for many months did not appear to be in the least perturbed over his firm’s suspension. He was apparently no more downcast than he was exultant not long ago when the report was that he had made several millions through unprecedentedly high prices for cotton. Apparently Mr. Sully still holds to the belief that his theory about the shortage of cotton and resultant high prices has not been overthrown. He would not discuss the intimations that there might have been treachery at some point, nor would he indicate how soon he expected to resume operations. The crash came with the suddenness and fury of a tornado, for the meteorologists of the cotton market were unable to read the premonitions of disaster in the strange barometric conditions of the forenoon. Ten minutes after the opening the market went off half a cenL Prices went down—ten, twenty, thirty points in two minutes. A minute later they were back where they started.