Category: Chicago

• The "Wheat" Corner

  This theory held that a single speculator in Chicago could use hidden communications, coded telegrams, and control of grain supply to determine the price of bread worldwide. It was especially associated with the great wheat corners of the late nineteenth century, above all Joseph Leiter's 1897-1898 campaign in Chicago. The historical record confirms that major speculators could influence wheat prices dramatically and that telegraph codes were widely used in finance, but the notion that one man permanently commanded the "hunger of the world" belongs to the rhetoric of anti-speculation rather than to a stable global system of control.