About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Jay Gould

Encyclopedia : J : JA : JAY : Jay Gould

You might be looking for Stephen Jay Gould, the American biologist and author.
Jay Gould (1836-1892)
Enlarge
Jay Gould (1836-1892)

Jason Gould (May 27, 1836 – December 2, 1892) was an American financier.

Contents

Birth and early career

Jason Gould, the son of John Burr Gould (1792–1866) and Mary Moore Gould (1798–1841), was born on a farm near Roxbury, New York. Contrary to the assumptions of Henry Ford and Henry Adams, Gould's father was of Scottish ancestry, not Jewish. He studied at the Hobart Academy, but left at age 16 to work for his father in the hardware business. He continued to devote himself to private study, emphasizing surveying and mathematics. Gould later went to work in the lumber and tanning business in western New York and then became involved with banking in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In 1856, he published the History of Delaware County, New York.

He married Helen Day Miller in 1863 and had five children:

Northeastern railroads

Through his wife's father, Daniel S. Miller, he was appointed a manager of the Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad. He purchased and reorganized the railroad. He also purchased the Rutland and Washington Railroad and sold it for a large profit. Gould's greatest coup was his acquisition of the Erie Railroad. In 1867, Jay Gould was elected to the board of the Railroad. Soon after, Cornelius Vanderbilt began to buy up shares of the Erie with the intention of owning the Railroad. Gould was determined to prevent Vanderbilt from accomplishing this goal. Cleverly, Gould found a loophole in bond law and practice that gave him the weapon he needed. Gould would convert newly printed railroad bonds into convertible stocks that were then sold on the open market. This way, Gould was constantly generating new available stock in the Erie Railroad and making it available on the market when legally the Railroad could not generate any more. Vanderbilt tried to fight Gould in the courts, and both men appealed to local legislators to change the laws. Eventually, Gould won. He bought out Vanderbilt's stocks at a greatly inflated price. In all, Gould gave $9 million to Vanderbilt. This amount bankrupted the Erie Railroad. Gould, however, soon resuscitated the Railroad. Falling short of his great ambitions, he was never able to make it the most used line between New York and the Midwest, but he did expand the line a great deal and became wealthier in the process.

The Tweed Ring

It was during the same period that Gould and James Fisk became involved with Tammany Hall; they made Boss Tweed a director of the Erie, and Tweed, in turn, arranged favorable legislation for them. Tweed and Gould became the subjects of political cartoons by Thomas Nast in 1869. In October 1871, when Tweed was held on $1 million bail, Gould was the chief bondsman.

Black Friday

Jay Gould in 1855
Enlarge
Jay Gould in 1855

In August 1869, Gould and Fisk began to buy gold in an attempt to corner the market, hoping that the increase in price of gold would increase the price of wheat such that western farmers would sell, causing a great amount of shipping of breadstuffs eastward, increasing freight business for the Erie railroad. During this time, Gould used contacts with President Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, to try to influence the president and his Secretary General Horace Porter. These speculations in gold culminated in the panic of Black Friday, on September 24, 1869, when the premium over face value on a gold Double Eagle fell from 62% to 35%. Gould made a nominal profit from this operation, but lost it in the subsequent lawsuits. The affair also cost him his reputation.

Late career

After being forced out of the Erie Railroad, Gould started, in 1879, to build up a system of railroads in the midwest by gaining control of a total of four western railroads, including the Union Pacific and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. In 1880, he was in control of 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of railway, about one-ninth of the length of rail in the United States at that time, and, by 1882, he had controlling interest in 15% of the country's tracks. Gould withdrew from the UP in 1883 amidst political controversy over its debts to the federal government, realizing a large profit for himself.

Gould also obtained a controlling interest in the Western Union telegraph company, and, after 1881, in the elevated railways in New York City. Ultimately, he was connected with many of the largest railway financial operations in the United States from 1868-1888.

Death and legacy

Gould died of tuberculosis and mental strain on December 2, 1892 and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. His fortune was estimated between $65 million and $120 million, and a year before at $250 million, making him the richest person in the country. He left his personal fortune to his family and his business holdings to various trustees.

In his lifetime and for a century after, Gould had a firm reputation as the most unethical of the 19th century American businessmen known as robber barons. Many times he allowed his rivals to believe that he was beaten, then sprang some legal or contractual loophole on them that completely reversed the situation and gave him the advantage. He pioneered the practice, now commonplace, of declaring bankruptcy as a strategic maneuver. He had no opposition to using stock manipulation and insider trading (which were then legal but frowned upon) to build capital and to execute or prevent hostile takeover attempts. As a result, many contemporary businessmen did not trust Gould and often expressed contempt for his approach to business. Even so, John D. Rockefeller named him as the most skilled businessman he ever encountered.

The New York City press published many rumors about Gould that biographers passed on as fact. For example, they alleged that Gould's dealings in the tanning business drove his partner Charles Leupp to suicide. In fact, Leupp had episodes of mania and depression that psychiatrists would now recognize as indications of bipolar disorder, and his family knew that this, not his business dealings, caused his death. These biographers portrayed Gould as a parasite who extracted money from businesses and took no interest in improving them. Anti-semitism in connection with Gould's name motivated some of this hostility, even though he was a lifelong Calvinist.

More recent biographers, including Maury Klein and Edward Renehan, have reexamined Gould's career with more attention to primary sources. They have concluded that fiction often overwhelmed fact in previous accounts, and that despite his methods, Gould's objectives were usually constructive.

At the time of his death, Gould was a benefactor in the reconstruction of the Reformed Church of Roxbury, now the Jay Gould Memorial Reformed Church.[link]

Timeline

See also

Further reading

Personalities of Wall Street

See List of personalities associated with Wall Street.

External links

References

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: