$1,000 Comeback

"We bank on the South" was the slogan with which Rogers Clark Caldwell reared his dreams of economic empire. In Caldwell & Co., his Nashville banking house, his dreams achieved the reality of a $100,000,000-a-year-investment business and the control of a complex, pyramided financial structure which embraced $600,000,000 of banks, insurance companies, newspapers, realty and industrial concerns. When the whole enterprise crashed (TIME, Nov. 24, 1930) the reverberations sent banks toppling, stripped thousands of depositors of their money, brought grief and ruin to investors from Kentucky to Arkansas, even rumbled into Tennessee's capital.

Self-confident, ambitious, the young promoter found no financial scheme too big. With his potent friend Publisher Luke Lea of the Nashville Tennessean (the man who tried to kidnap the Kaiser from Holland as a Christmas present for

President Wilson), Bankster Caldwell gained favorable political ears. Because $6.400,000 of State funds were tied up in Caldwell banks when they closed, an angry legislature talked of impeaching Governor Horton. Bankster Caldwell was convicted of fraudulent breach of trust in substituting collateral securities of less than specified value. Higher courts reversed the conviction, however, and Bankster Caldwell has spent not one day in jail. Following this reversal, indictments were quashed. Bankster Caldwell considered himself vindicated.

After he was shorn of fame & fortune he announced he would become a farmer. But old dreams returned. Last week with three of his old associates the forty-year-old financier incorporated Rogers Caldwell & Co., investment bankers, and opened for business at his old stand in the eight-story Harry Nichol building at the corner of Nashville's Union Street and Fourth Avenue. The new concern has capital of $1,000. Said he: "Fifteen years ago when

I started my first company, I had less than ... we have with our new company. I have always hoped, since my difficulties began, to re-enter the banking business. I feel the time is now ripe. Tremendous fortunes will be made within the next few years by those businessmen who are foresighted enough. . . ." New Rogers Caldwell & Co. expects to have for its slogan: "We bank on the South."

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