Renehan Jr. - Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons

In mid-December 1892, the banker Jesse Seligman gave an interview to a reporter from the New York Tribune. Seligmans friend Jay Gould had been buried a week earlier. He described the dead mogulwhose empire had included the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Missouri Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Manhattan Elevated Railroadas the most misunderstood, most important, and most complex entrepreneur of this century. Seligman said he found it ironic that Gould was always cast as the arch demon in any telling of the nations recent financial history. If Gould was a sinner, asked Seligman, exactly who were the saints?

Seligman ran down the list of contenders, starting with Cornelius Vanderbilt. The foulmouthed and brutal old Commodore never claimed to have any agenda other than his own aggrandizement. Was he really to be revered? (On one famous occasion, when asked to contribute to the poor, Vanderbilt cited his modest beginnings, pointed to a line of people waiting for bread, and said, without a hint of irony, Let them do what I have done.) Next Seligman called up the memory of Daniel Drew, the pious founder of the Drew Theological Seminary, with whom Gould and Jim Fisk had joined forces to defeat Vanderbilt and gain control of the Erie Railroad. The Bible-thumping Drew had started his career herding cattle across the Alleghenies in the late 1820s and then brought his habits as a drover to Wall Street, watering stocks just as hed always watered his beef. Was Mr. Drew really any better than Mr. Gould? Seligman asked. And what of John D. Rockefeller, the avid, Why, asked Seligman, is Rockefeller held in so much higher esteem than Gould in the public mind?

Certainly Gould was shady at times, said Seligman, mentioning in particular that lengthy experiment in stock manipulation dubbed the Erie Wars. Seligman also acknowledged Goulds infamous 1869 campaign to corner the gold market in collaboration with Fisk: an escapade that triggered the Black Friday panic and ruined many investors. The same event cemented Jays reputation as a financial vampire. This was an image that an energetic press continued to burnish thereafter, once it was realized that the crimes of Jay Gould, whether true or not, sold well on street corners. But Seligman did not see Gould as any more or less a criminal than most operators of his era: I cant say that Mr. Gould was, in his moral nature, much better, much worse, or much different than any other shrewd and sharp player of his generation, said Seligman. Ive known them all. Ive known Jay Gould better than most. And I can tell you he deserves no more notoriety than those against which, and with which, he played. If he was exceptional, it was as a strategist. He had a certain genius. Time and time again, Wall Street never saw him coming.

Ignoring Seligmans plea, three generations of biographers, taking their cues from the nearly uniform bad press Gould received in life, built him into an evil genius of almost Wagnerian proportions: dark, soulless, and unstoppable. In his