My Amazon Review of Greg Steinmetz's "American Rascal: How Jay Gould............"

Robber Baron

 

Greg Steinmetz has written a biography of one of Matthew Josephson’s robber barons. I must confess I read Josephson’s “The Robber Barons” in junior high and to me they were heroes in the sense that these mostly self-made men built America in the latter half of the 1800’s. We cannot look at the life of Jay Gould through 21^st Century eyes, but rather we have to look at his life in the context of America being an emerging market with all of the corruption that entails.

 

To be sure much of what Gould did in markets would be illegal today, but was not in the 1860’s. Nevertheless, his collusion with New York City Boss Tweed was illegal then and Gould got away with it.

 

We see Gould rising from humble beginning to running a tannery operation to becoming a major factor on the New York Stock and Gold exchanges. We see him puling off a corner in the gold market in 1869 that unfairly implicated President Grant. To me the most interesting factoid in that development was that the young Thomas Edison was the telegraph operator who telegraphed the changing price of gold throughout the Nation.

 

We next see Gould becoming a railroad baron where he ended up controlling 16% of the nation’s track mileage through strategic stock purchases. Far from being only a stock jobber, Gould was responsible for laying 4,000 miles of new track throughout the country. Too many of his contemporaries, Gould was the smartest person in the room.

 

Steinmetz highlights the role of reformer and Adams family scion Charles Francis Adams in pushing for railroad regulation, yet we see him later running the Union Pacific Railroad for a decade. He too wanted to make a buck. We also learn contrary to the populist myth American railroads suffered from too much competition, rather than too little.

 

Through it all Gould was a family man who loved his wife and six children who died to young in his mid-fifties. In this brief biography Steinmetz tells a riveting story about Jay Gould and his times.

For the full amazon URL see: Robber Baron (amazon.com)