1865-1872
Barons of Wall Street
"Jay Gould and Jim Fisk were typical of thousands of smart young Northerners who stayed home and made a lot of money instead of fighting in the Civil War. Foxy, whispery little Jay Gould began his career by cheating two partners out of a leather factory, and then became an expert manipulator of railroad stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Big, brassy Jim Fisk was a former circus barker who bought and sold war contracts, went south after the war, and made a fortune in confiscated cotton.
In 1867 this up-and-coming pair was befriended by old Daniel Drew, the onetime cattle drover, who had become a great figure in Wall Street. Drew made them directors of the Erie Railroad, which Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the steamboat king and principal owner of the New York Central railroad, was also trying to acquire. Gould and Fisk secretly printed large blocks of illegal Erie stock and put them on the market, where Vanderbilt kept buying them in the hope of getting control. "If this printing press don"t break down, I"ll be damned if I don"t give the old hog all he wants of Erie!" Fish said one day. When Vanderbilt discovered the fraud and got an order for their arrest they fled to New Jersey with the Erie books and $6 million in greenbacks. Gould went to Albany and bribed the legislature into legalizing all the Erie stock unloaded on Vanderbilt, plus a lot more. Then the partners came back to New York in triumph and opened luxurious offices in Pike"s Grand Opera Palace, where Fisk also supported a bevy of actresses and staged rowdy musical shows.
The next year, at the age of 33, Gould bribed President Grant"s brother-in-law to act as his spy in the White House while he cornered the $15 million worth of gold which was in circulation, and squeezed up its price. Fisk tried to involve Grant himself in this coup, but the President stayed out. The gold corner violently disturbed the whole currency structure of the country, and ended only when the Treasury stepped in and sold government gold. Gould"s government contacts tipped him off in time, and he sold out at a profit betraying his own partners."
The American Past, Roger Butterfield, 1947, Simon and Schuster, New York.
"How could this happen?" Trust me, people knew.
