Digital Collections and Archives Editor's note: This speech includes labels for slides, however, the accompanying slides were not donated with the text. The slides were treated as footnotes. The footnote number is inserted where the slide would go. There are labels for the slides and some slides are labeled "blank."

When they told me that the purpose of this panel was to get "The Boys from Wisconsin" together on the same platform, I had certain misgivings. If we were going to be presented as Wisconsin's gifts to the banking industry, I presumed we would be called upon to explain just what we claim to have accomplished over the past two or three decades. And that, I thought, just might raise the question of how any of us got into this business in the first place.

In grammar school, you may remember this is the kind of session we used to call "show and tell." The thought occurred to me that it might provide a small change of pace to approach the subject in that vein. So I brought along a few pictures.

The first deals with the question of how simple Wisconsin boys like Bill Proxmire, Henry Reuss, Lee Gundersen, and myself ever ended up in such faraway political and financial centers as Washington and New York.

Perhaps it can be best explained by studying with care the works of a famous mathematics professor at Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson author of "Euclid and His Modern Rivals" and other revealing works. By reading closely one of his other books many things are made clear.

It is not at all hard to see us all sitting innocently by the Banks of the Fox River when ...[1] ...a white rabbit with pink eyes appears, pulls a watch from his waistcoat, and leads us all, into a Wonderland.

[2] In Wonderland, you will recall, logic never seems to work quite the same way as it does in Wisconsin and things are never quite what they seem.

For example, it is an article of political faith in Wonderland that American banks do not compete across state lines. However, upon opening a magazine with the decidedly geographic title , we find ... [3]  ...this colorful ad proclaiming, "We Love New York so much we have over 1100 people here," and describing the catalog of banking services provided out of Mid-Manhattan and Wall Street offices by a regiment of bankers from--of all places--a well known California bank, which, as we all know, is barred from competing with New York banks.

Now if we were not prepared for this... [4]  ... by the March Hare and Mad Hatter--I think their names were Glass and Steagall -- shouting "no room! no room!"-- at the tea party, when in fact there was clearly room for everybody, we would be perplexed. But like Alice, we have "got so much in the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seems quite dull for life to go on in the common way."

[5] Then there is a traditional wisdom, upheld by the Supreme Court that thrift institutions do not compete with commercial banks.

But when we turn on our television sets, we discover to our astonishment that... [6]  ... the major New York commercial banks are being taken on in head on competition by ... [7]  ... The New York Bank for Savings, one of those thrift institutions which the courts and the regulators assure us don't ... [8] ...compete with commercial banks but one which apparently hasn't yet been enlightened to that fact.

[9] It is also well known by every right-thinking American in this age of deregulation, that all banks are regulated, by the Federal Reserve Board, the Controller of the Currency, the FDIC, by State Banking Commissioners, or by some combination of them all.

Except has detected... [10] ...that there exist in these United States of America any number of financial institutions with a remarkable resemblance to banks, that are, fortunately from the consumers' point of view, not regulated by of these agencies that so zealously oversee our banking services.

Brokers, retailers, piano companies, cable television ... it seems as though ...[11] ...every non-bank in our society is flying into the banking business with us, but without our policemen. They are invisible only to those in official positions.

Lewis Carrol explains that, "Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare laugh ... she simply bowed...looking as solemn as she could."

[12] It gets, as Alice said, curiouser and curiouser.

This year Congress passed the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act. After the curiosity of juxaposing the words "Deregulation" and "Control" in the title, comes the next step, which was putting the job of dismantling regulation in the hands of a committee of ...[13] ...lifelong regulators. Not surprisingly, their first step toward eliminating regulation was to establish a slate of new regulations, adding to instead of reducing the problem.

[14] There is concern in Wonderland that nobody in the private sector be deceived. To insure that everybody knows the exact, precise rate of interest he or she is paying for a loan, the Truth in Lending Act requires banks to publish that rate as a simple, clear number. That simple, clear number is of course, derived from ...[15] ... these formulas, which the Act provides to help the bankers make things perfectly clear.

This simple, clear explanation...[16] ... of interest rates would surely fit comfortably into the world of the author of Alice, who I mentioned was in real life a mathematics professor at Oxford.

If you asked me to explain this, since I am not an Oxford mathematician, I would have to say, as Alice did to the caterpillar, "I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly, for I can't understand it myself to begin with."

[17] Running like a Mad Hatter ...[18] ...through our mutual adventure in Wonderland is a single word that seems to have a different meaning to everyone who uses it--and worse, often means different things at different times to the same persons. It is what Humpty Dumpty called a portmanteau word.

The word is competition.

Competition is, rightly, lauded as the foundation of America's strength and wealth. It's a motherhood issue, in theory, but an abandoned child in practice. We keep looking for it, but nobody seems to know whether we are supposed to encourage it, or stamp it out. The poor banker usually finds himself like Alice...[19]  ...addressing the Cheshire Cat, and asking, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

[20] And the grinning cat replies, "If you don't much care where you want to get, then it doesn't matter which way you go."

That's about where we Wisconsin boys are today: trying to identify where we want to go; where we want our country to go; and how to get there. That's not easy, in the Washington Wonderland, as we all appreciate.

[21] But I like to think, to extend the analogy, that we are not unlike Alice and her companion, knocking on a door in Wonderland.

[22] "There's no sort of use in knocking," the footman told Alice, "because I'm on the same side of the door as you are. There might be some sense in your knocking if we had the door between us."

We've spent a lot of time debating one another, but I often feel that we are all knocking on doors to try to find one that will get out of this Wonderland, back into the clearer, simpler logic that we all enjoyed those early days in Wisconsin, before we started following that pink-eyed rabbit in the three-piece suit.

[23] Maybe this trip will be the lucky one.

Thank you.

[1] Slide #1 -- WHITE RABBIT

[2] Slide #2 -- BLANK

[3] Slide #3 -- BANK OF AMERICA AD

[4] Slide #4 -- MAD TEA PARTY

[5] Slide #5 -- BLANK

[6] Slide #6 -- CHASE, ETC STORYBOARD

[7] Slide #7 -- NY BANK FOR SAVINGS STORYBOARD

[8] Slide #8 -- TWEEDLES IN ARMOUR

[9] Slide #9 -- BLANK

[10] Slide #10 -- QUACKS LIKE A BANK

[11] Slide #11-- CARDS FLYING

[12] Slide #12 -- BLANK

[13] Slide #13 -- KING & QUEEN OF HEARTS

[14] Slide #14 -- BLANK

[15] Slide #15 -- FORMULAS

[16] Slide #16 -- CIRCLE OF ANIMALS

[17] Slide #17 -- BLANK

[18] Slide #18 -- MAD HATTER

[19] Slide #19 -- CHESHIRE CAT

[20] Slide #20 -- CAT

[21] Slide #21 -- BLANK

[22] Slide #22 -- DOOR

[23] Slide #23 -- BLANK