AMERICAN RASCAL

The infamous robber baron receives a new assessment.

Steinmetz, a money manager and former business reporter for the Wall Street Journal, emphasizes that most Americans admire wealthy business owners provided they build something (Ford, Jobs, etc.) but have less respect for those who make money dealing with money. Jay Gould (1836-1892) remains the epitome of the evil financier, a “champion cheater” who “showed that no act of financial villainy was too bold.” Keeping business free of government oversight has always been popular, but many of Gould’s contemporaries complained that too many business owners engaged in disreputable and even illegal behavior. Many believed that Gould carried this to a new level, inspiring the first popular demands for reform. The son of a farmer, Gould was intelligent and hardworking. He taught himself surveying and accounting and had established a successful business when barely out of his teens. Contact with other entrepreneurs taught him the ways of the business world, and at age 24, he moved to New York City to start building his fortune. Though Gould’s fellow industrialists certainly loved making money and had no objection to bribery and other chicanery, they built entire industries: Rockefeller in oil, Carnegie in steel, Vanderbilt in railroads. Gould, on the other hand, had little interest in operating a business; he just wanted to make money. Steinmetz offers entertaining descriptions of Gould’s gutting of the Erie Railroad, the financial panic produced by his effort to control the gold market, and his failed attempt to combine American railroads into a single continental system. Much duplicity involved short selling, bear raids, options, and other technical Wall Street activities, most of which Steinmetz explains in accessible language—though he seems to admire his subject more than he deserves. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt spent some of their wealth on exemplary American institutions, but there is no Gould University or foundation.

A sturdy biography of an American businessman who cared about one thing: money.