A MONUMENT, to be known as the Vanderbilt Memorial Bronze, was erected in 1869 at the depot of the Hudson River Railroad (later part of the New York Central) in St. John’s Park (south of Canal Street near the Hudson River), a once fashionable address but by then given over to commerce. It was nothing short of colossal. The depot itself was a gigantic, ornate building, its huge pediment capped by a twelve-foot-high statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The New York Herald noted that while it was perhaps “not so prodigious as the Pyramid of Cheops, nor so lofty as the Colossus of Rhodes…it will do.” The Commodore’s fur-coated, stony likeness was surrounded by bas reliefs depicting his fabled career on land and sea. A fifty-ton cyclorama included carvings of steamships and locomotives, of Neptune and a sea monster, of boilers, birds, machinery, cows, pineapples, and railroad tracks.
The city of New York had contributed $500,000 to this truly imperial monument in honor of “old eighty millions.” People differed violently over whether that money had been well spent. Harper’s Weekly, which as much as any magazine gave voice to prevailing middle class opinion, found the statue wholly admirable; everything from the lushness of its panorama to the immensity of its construction struck the editors as appropriate to the formidable nature of the subject. The Herald—now run by James Gordon Bennett’s son, who identified with the same sorts of Wall Street tycoons his father had once chided—treated it as “a monument of the greatest material inventions and enterprises of the 19th century.” It proclaimed the bronze “beautiful,” a granite memorial to the “genius and progress of the age…” given flesh and bone in the heralded career of the Commodore. The unveiling unleashed a florid rhetoric in praise of Vanderbilt’s heroic rise, his energy, and his “luminous sagacity.” Above all, it expressed an oddly unquestioning conviction that it was precisely his Napoleonic aura that confirmed him as the epitome of the American self-made man.
Not everyone joined in this popular ovation, however. Circles of more genteel taste voiced a sophisticated disdain for this sort of grandiose memorializing of great wealth. E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation and the conscience of bourgeois rectitude, took note of a hilarious burlesque unveiling staged by some brokers of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. At this mock ceremony, an actor posing as a statue of Vanderbilt held a watering can labeled “207”—the price of the railroad’s stock established by the Commodore when he consolidated the system. The actor informed the audience that “the use of water, not as a beverage, but as an element of wealth” constituted Vanderbilt’s true achievement. “We may say of him not only that he commenced life as a waterman” (the Commodore moniker came from his youthful beginnings as a Staten Island ferryman carrying passengers across New York Harbor to Manhattan) “but that water has been the Central idea of his life.”
Like those who applauded the bronze, The Nation also found it appropriate to its subject, but perversely so. Its “brute utilitarianism,” in failing to achieve a noble effect instead “makes ridiculous what before was at worst only disagreeable.” It was a monumental mockery of everything about Vanderbilt’s life: his actual lack of interest in the arts and education, his miserliness, his callous indifference to the public interest. Godkin made fun of the bronze’s symbolism: the steamboat lines that were in fact unsafe and uncomfortable, the railroads that “bought whole legislatures, debauched courts, crushed out rivals.” All in all, he concluded, what was being memorialized here were the “trophies of the lineal successor of the medieval baron,” an execrable character lacking in learning, grace, moral integrity, and manners whose indifference to matters of civic honor was legendary. Furious that people like Horace Greeley and Bishop James had joined in the chorus of tribute, Godkin asked rhetorically why honor these “kings of the street,” these “giants of the stock exchange.”
Why indeed? Godkin’s jeremiad implicitly condemned a whole culture. Why were people like Vanderbilt admired rather than stigmatized? Why did people tolerate these displays of “unmitigated selfishness” and raise monuments to those “peculiarly American virtues” such as “audacity, push, unscrupulousness, and brazen disregard of others’ rights….” Godkin was a study in self-righteousness, smugly ensconced in the certitudes of his Brahmin liberalism. But his question was a good one, and he wasn’t the only one asking it. That even during an era of legendary rapaciousness Wall Street figures could elicit feelings of awe and reverence, that they could become exemplars of national achievement and prowess, is an enigma.1
IN THE HUSTLE and bustle of Jacksonian America, amid all its striving and conniving, Wall Street had seemed an Oz in the confabulatory land of the confidence man. But in the era of the Civil War and the gilded years that followed, the Street fostered a peculiarly American form of cultic idolatry. The confidence man had become a hero, or rather a heroic scoundrel or a hero of irreverence. The mountebank had become king. But bred in the strange, carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the Street, he was an irregular, eccentric sort of king. Freebooting, lawless, he was half aristocrat, half democrat, yet, like Napoleon, neither. He was a hybrid character in a raw, hybrid economy, half mercantilist, half laissez-faire. In a country obsessed with the infinite possibilities of uninhibited beginnings, he was a frontiersman and a mogul at one and the same time.
The four horsemen of this Gilded Age financial bacchanalia included Vanderbilt himself along with Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and James Fisk. Each sounded a distinctive note that together comprised the ensemble of this new social type. “The Commodore” took on an imperial absolutism. “Uncle Dan’l” Drew assumed the plebeian position. Jay, the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” Gould seemed utterly demonic. “Jubilee Jim Fisk” played the ribald fool. Moreover, they and men like them were drawn to outlandish forms of sumptuary display that marked them as a kind of faux aristocracy. With the grime and slime of farms and fishing boats and circuses still clinging to them, they built themselves grandiose palaces staffed by liveried servants and paraded about in the finest equipage. But they fooled no one. Beneath that papery veneer they remained the ruffians they started out as…and that was part of their charm.
This odd conjoining of aristocratic and plebian traits fascinated the generation that straddled the Civil War and left a legacy that still colors our sense of Wall Street. “Diamond Jim” Brady, Charles Yerkes, Joseph Kennedy, Samuel Insull, Michael Milken, all belong to a larger rogues gallery of Wall Street napoleons stretching from the Civil War to the age of the dot.com millionaire. In one way or another, all confirm a cultural stereotype of the freebooting financier as imperious, self-made, ruthlessly ambitious, and full of masculine audacity. They were and are perceived as outlanders: outside the law, outside established institutions, outside the conventions of normal social behavior. Indeed, it is just because they were not to the manor born that their rise and mastery has trailed behind it the aura of democratic adventure, turning roguishness into heroism.
Two cataclysmic events cleared the stage for the opening scene of this Napoleonic romance. The panic of 1857, the less momentous one, marked the end of Wall Street’s dependency on the rhythms of commercial agriculture. It also disassembled the prevailing pecking order on the Street, opening up room for new men. Then of course there was the Civil War. Its idealism and blood sacrifice notwithstanding, the war presented undreamed of opportunities for speculative moneymaking. And its aftermath left republican government at the mercy of financial gamesmen with imperial appetites.
WALL STREET panicked once again in the fall of 1857, and the country quickly fell into depression. As severe hardship spread, so, too, did public denunciations of the rich for their extravagance. Some of the newly wealthy found an odd way to express their remorse. At “poverty parties” attended by New York’s most affluent, guests dressed in calico and homespun, imbibed cold water and bread and butter, and raised money for the relief of the poor. They sought to separate themselves from “the annoyance of snobs who go only to guzzle champagne and to stuff themselves with oysters.” The panic and the depression made everyone acutely sensitive to the presence of an aristocracy in their midst whose special breeding ground seemed to be Wall Street.
The collapse of 1857 had its roots in the Crimean War and in the decade’s railroad boom. The decade had begun with rampant speculation in everything from guano to real estate fed by the discovery of gold in California. Then the war in the Crimea, by shutting down the supply of Russian wheat, led to a sizable expansion of American farming, which in turn fed the craze for new railroad lines to get the grain to market. A billion dollars was poured into railroad construction before the Civil War. The United States led the world in miles of track. A bull market in railroad shares naturally followed. While Boston had enjoyed a brief season during the 1840s as the center of railroad finance, the center of gravity had clearly shifted to Wall Street by the 1850s. At least one-quarter of the total active capital of the country was invested in railroads.2
When the Crimean War ended in 1856, the American wheat market was glutted, thanks to a bumper crop in the Midwest and the resumption of supplies from the Russian steppes. Farmers were caught short. Banks couldn’t collect their debts. Railroad shares plummeted, and major lines stopped running. Bubbles of land speculation burst. Wall Street immediately felt the pain since most of what it did business in—government bonds, railroad securities, commodity trading and speculation—were captives of what happened on the land. Overextended brokers broke into fistfights on the floor of the New York Exchange. The whole mercantile economy imploded. Shipbuilding ground to a halt, merchants went under in droves, foundries and textile factories closed, railroads went bankrupt, construction sites stood deserted. Over fourteen hundred banks failed in the month of October alone. In New York, Fourth Street between Avenues A and B became known as “Ragpickers Row,” and ten thousand squatters settled above Forty-second Street where they lived off pigs, fattened on dead horses, dogs, cats, and rats…or else ate the carcasses of these animals themselves. Homelessness and destitution spread throughout the country as mass prayer meetings assembled pleading for divine relief. As the crisis ricocheted around from the United States to Europe and back to South America, Friedrich Engels confided to Karl Marx that he found the whole situation “delicious,” while his fellow members of the Manchester Exchange “grow black in the face with rage at my suddenly rising good spirits.” At least somebody was happy.3
Tempers flared and blameworthy candidates were not hard to find. The South, which until then prided itself on immunity from the vicissitudes of Northern capitalism, was particularly enraged. The New Orleans Crescent decried New York as the “center of reckless speculation, unflinching fraud and downright robbery” responsible for “injuring almost every solvent community in the Union.” George Fitzhugh, impassioned ideologue of Southern extremism, denounced the “fugitive” and “cosmopolitan” capital of the North and especially stocks that “by means of the idleness and luxury which they beget, are the most alarming evil of modern times.” De Bows Review, a journal of more sober Southern opinion, blamed the crisis on “the abstraction of a large amount of capital from the uses of commerce” into speculation in inflated railroad securities. The editors, not alone among the region’s journalists, held up the depression as exhibit number one in the case for Southern independence, at least for independence from “commercial vassalage” to the North.4
Northern critics sounded similar themes. Like Fitzhugh, crusading journalist Horace Greeley laid out a causal chain that ended at the Stock Market. The country’s imports had vastly exceeded its exports; that was due to the cravings of a new parvenu class of luxury lovers. They, in turn, were reproducing like rabbits thanks to the reckless boom in railroad and other securities, in “paper bubbles of all descriptions.” Boston’s mercantile elite deplored New York’s financial irresponsibility. Newspapers around the country warned their readers, especially the commercial-minded among them, not to become “the football of Wall Street stock jobbers.” President James Buchanan joined the chorus condemning “wild speculations and gambling in stocks.” Even the Journal of Commerce, the voice of mercantile New York, advised people to “steal a while away from Wall Street and every worldly care, and spend an hour about mid-day in humble, hopeful prayer.”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, one of the first to cater to the tastes of the new urban middle classes, normally assumed the prevailing optimism of its readers. When the panic hit, the editors expected it to blow over quickly, thanks to the country’s wonderful “recuperative powers.” But soon enough the magazine had to take stock of the darker side of the country’s joie de vivre. So much “youthful leaping of the blood in the hearts of our people” led to “injudicious indulgence.” A cartoon depicting the whole fraternity of Wall Street brokers and bankers as a band of inebriates reeling down the Street, empty liquor bottles labeled “bull” and “bear” trailing behind them, illustrated the moral of the story. Fearing above all the return of 1837, but persistently upbeat about the long-term future, Leslie’s Illustrated nonetheless singled out “the moneyed aristocracy” in their “brownstone and marble palaces” who “strut their brief existence…. From nothing they come, to nothing they return.”5
Criticism moved off the editorial page and into the streets when five thousand of the unemployed demonstrated in Wall Street chanting, “We want work,” and demanding that banks open up credit lines to businesses promising work. There was loose talk of storming the banks. When these “hunger meetings” persisted, federal troops under Mexican War hero General Winfield Scott were sent to guard the Customs House and SubTreasury. Populist mayor Fernando Wood demagogically denounced Wall Street, declaiming that “those who produce everything get nothing, and those who produce nothing get everything.” He was instantly abandoned by his onetime conservative backers in the business community. The New York Times accused him of raising the banner of “the most fiery communism.” Brokers and bankers congregated in Wall Street to rescue a city they described as “the worst governed city in Christendom.” When Wood was unceremoniously dumped from the Democratic Party ticket, his friends blamed it on “Wall Street Democrats” who were more than ready to see the government bail out failing banks, but not destitute workers.
All the devastation notwithstanding, the crisis passed quickly, just as Leslie’s Illustrated had predicted. But it left behind a growing skeptical preoccupation with Wall Street’s moral as well as its economic impact on the country’s well-being. Some saw the panic as a purgative ridding the economy of a cancerous growth. Speculators had fostered a delusory prosperity. Thanks to the crash, “Much, very much, will be swept away that was rotten and unhealthy, but all that is worth preserving will remain.” The moral of the story was “to live slower and be more respectable.”
For Henry Varnum Poor, the creator of the first investors guide to railroad securities, the panic of 1857 was confirming evidence of the need for reliable information about railroad operations and finance. Of New England stock, a transcendentalist and friend of Emerson’s, Poor was gripped by a not-uncommon messianic faith in industrial progress as the key to universal enlightenment. Railroads were the royal highway to that happy end, and Poor advised their management on how to raise money on the Street to meet their enormous need for capital. He was aware that early rail stock issues were often purchased by local merchants and farmers who hoped not only to profit personally, but felt themselves engaged as well in a communal undertaking aimed at local development. But the stock soon passed into the hands of speculators. There its social usefulness was perverted, producing the calamity of 1857 and sending Poor off to do the work that would make him famous.6
The “story papers” that circulated widely among the working and lower middle classes drew their own lessons from the panic. Asserting the essential egalitarianism of American society, they insisted that even a chimney sweep could be “as independent and haughty, if need be, as the Wall Street shaver with his bonds and coupons.” The panic was a welcome astringent, reigning in a deplorable tendency to wild extravagance and indebtedness. One “cheering fact” was that at least the violence of the crash had hit hardest at those most responsible: “The overtraders and speculators must bear the scorch of the sirocco.” This was only just as “nine-tenths of all the hardship and sufferings have been caused by the men who gamble in stocks and railway shares…a despicable party of rash, unprincipled speculators…” control capital, using part for their own aggrandizement, to lavish on their dependents, and the rest they “buried in worthless railroads, mining companies, banks and other dismal swamps…” Story papers like the New York Ledger editorialized in favor of a system of combined moral and economic regulation, calling for enforcement of the laws against gambling, defamation of character, and conspiracy to defraud.7
NO MATTER from what point on the social compass it originated, criticism tended to orbit around a deeply felt anxiety about the emergence of a presumptuous financial and social aristocracy. The very notion of aristocracy was in flux. It still carried with it its preindustrial signifiers: inherited dynastic titles and estates, political privileges, sumptuary codes, strategic matrimonial alliances, sanctuaries of good breeding and exclusivity. All that, however, was now diluted in a solution of liquid money. A mercantile aristocracy, dressed in Old World costume, still a creature of the country’s state-subsidized economy, was mutating into the industrial plutocracy that would lord it over Gilded Age America.
George Francis Train, whose series of extended “letters” were published, more or less coincident with the panic, as Young America in Wall Street, acidly decried the “silks and satins, laces and crinoline, hoops and diamonds, fast horses, clubs, and brandy smashes” that seemed to accompany “the brandy of bubbling speculation” that had come to stupefy reason so that a sort of “delirium tremens” had overtaken the country. In Train’s opinion New York’s financial elite, try as it might, could not refute the charge that its “luxurious living, extravagant dressing, splendid turn-outs, and fine horses, are the causes of distress to the nation.”8
New York’s explosive growth since the completion of the Erie Canal had incubated this nouveau aristocracy. Home to nearly a million people by 1860, the city was already displaying in its architectural presence, geographic expansion, commercial energy, and cultural diversity the early signs of its imperial career. Already by the 1840s, New York was handling half the country’s imports and a third of its exports. Ships from 150 foreign countries entered New York Harbor in 1835. Carried away, a British visitor described Wall Street, Manhattan’s “golden toe,” as the most “concentrated focus of commercial transactions in the world.” In fact, bank capital doubled during the 1850s, and Wall Street was clearly emerging as second only to London as a world financial center.
Newly constructed commercial buildings on Wall Street inspired by the style of the Italian Renaissance exuded the swelling confidence of that world of fast horses and brandy smashes Train excoriated. It was a noticeably nonbourgeois architectural presence that abandoned the clean lines of self-conscious modesty in favor of gaudy ornamentation and sculpted flourishes. All this fresh monumentality and flash began to lend the Street that dense physicality that would become a vital element of its storied metaphorical power. From inside these Renaissance palazzi the Street’s financiers exercised a dominating influence that by the time of the Civil War extended well beyond the northeast region. Mobilizing domestic capital resources as well as serving as conduits for European, especially British investors, Wall Street houses affected not only the pace of trade but also the state of agriculture and land development, and through their railroad dealings, the rate of industrial development.9
Millionaire was a term coined in about 1845 to describe the wealth of John Jacob Astor and about ten others who qualified. By 1860, there were over a hundred persons deserving the title. An “upper tendom” or “upper ten thousand,” much of it quartered in Wall Street and defined by its style of dress, residential exclusiveness, boxes at the opera, and pricey pews at Grace Church, had become part of the spectacle of city life. Whatever reservations this engendered, there was also something undeniably bewitching about the Street’s splendor. “Wealth in Wall Street does not choose to dwell in humble mansions. There is little of log-cabinism in the tastes and habitudes of our merchant and banker princes,” editorialized the New York Daily Mirror in its boast that no business street anywhere in the country, perhaps in the world, could outshine Wall Street’s “architectural elegance.”10
August Belmont, who had arrived in New York as an agent of the Rothschilds on the eve of the panic of 1837, became, thanks to his European background and breeding, cultural missionary to this world of the arriviste: “He taught New Yorkers how to eat, how to drink, how to dress, how to drive four-in-hands, how to furnish their houses, how to live generally according to the rules of the possibly somewhat effete, but unquestionably refined society of the Old World….” It was a material education that found its inflection in architecture where the brick and wood of Knickerbocker days gave way to costly marble and sandstone; in interiors of mahogany, rosewood, imported silk or satin draperies, gilt-edged furniture, and private libraries; and outdoors in carriages with heraldic crests and liveried footmen. With some strain, the self-consciously private and studiously modest Knickerbocker ascendancy began dissolving into the newer, showier financial one. Belmont deftly combined Old World refinement with New World flash; he was an avid pioneer of the new sport of thoroughbred horse racing and staged the sort of opulent balls that would have scandalized the city’s old Anglo-Dutch patricians.11
Belmont’s civilizing mission notwithstanding, beneath this veneer of heraldic pomp and clubby exclusivity something irreducibly fake shone through, leaving these nouveaux riches ripe for ridicule. An artist’s rendering of One of the Upper Ten Thousand, done in the mid-1840s, sketches a risible image of a strutting, pouting, pompous, top-hatted New York swell. And after all, it was an American birthright to distrust aristocracy. This rising one was not only privileged like the old one, not only arrogant, like the old one, but carried with it as well newer attributes of financial jobbery and reckless speculation peculiarly associated with a Wall Street that had become in the eyes of one Jacksonian reformer, a “Street of Palaces.” Referred to over and over again as a “shoddy aristocracy”—the intent was to compare these parvenus to the cheap fabric made from reclaimed wool—it was a milieu whose bona fides were forever under inspection. Even those who’d trafficked in the Street themselves could be appalled. William Fowler’s insider’s exposé described the typical Wall Streeter dressed in purple and fine linen, gorging on delicacies and “wines of the vintage of Waterloo,” drinking out of cut Bohemian glass; a creature who “produces nothing, he drives no plough, plies no hammer, sends no ’shuttle flashing through the loom.” Instead he compelled whatever of value passed through his hands to “perspire golden drops, just as the Jews clip and sweat the coin they handle.”12
This was a world not only to be gazed at but to be seen through. George Foster’s revelations of urban mystery and exoticism included Wall Street as a ripe allegorical locale. His high-toned tales of vice and virtue, of sin and redemption included “true-to-life” depictions of hypocritical and avaricious stockbrokers preying on the working poor. Here, too, was a mockery of an aristocracy, an “old fogy class” or the “shaving cream of our financial aristocracy. Heaven help those who are so unlucky as to be shaved by them.” All this was boilerplate anti-aristocratic melodrama. American folk culture had been steeped in it since the Revolution. But Foster noticed something more mysterious as well. Lamentably, he told his readers, no one dared dispute their claims to social or aesthetic eminence. “No one dares question them as they stride indecently through the temple of fashion and good society.” The people were overawed. They fawned in hope of a favoring smile from “these misshapen images that the demon of snob democracy sets up in the beautiful and the great.” And so in the teeth of their many sins, notwithstanding their oppression of the poor, “no matter how many they may have driven to hunger or into acts of criminal desperation…” these soulless aristocrats retained their unblemished respectability. They prevailed.
A Viennese nobleman, Francis Grund, who emigrated and took up U.S. citizenship in 1827 was fascinated by this American flirtation with aristocracy. Mimicking Tocqueville, he published Aristocracy in America, in which he sketched the strenuous and sometimes uproarious efforts of the newly rich to act as if their elevation was carried in the blood and not in their pocketbooks, falling all over themselves in pathetic attempts to ape and curry favor with European nobility. What particularly struck Grund, who was a committed Jacksonian Democrat, was the way the “laboring classes,” free for perhaps the first time in human history to “legislate for themselves,” nevertheless could be found “worshipping wealth in it most hideous colors.” Grund was deeply disturbed. It seemed to suggest that despite, or perhaps even because of the strong current of egalitarian ambitiousness running through the heart of American culture, there was an amazing tolerance, an adoration even, for the amassing of great wealth, especially if those amassing it came from properly humble backgrounds. In the blink of an eye, resentment of the rich could transform into a burning desire to be as rich as the rich.
Another European visitor to America, Harriet Martineau, observed that precisely because of the deep cultural antipathy to any ascribed status, the only kind of aristocracy the country could abide was one based solely on wealth. For the chance to get rich inspired an insistent egalitarianism. While it applauded every man’s right to the main chance, it far less commonly trafficked in the instinct for social leveling. It was precisely this ambivalence that would mark popular attitudes about Wall Street during the years of financial wilding that soon followed the panic of 1857. And it was this odd popular instinct to revere what it was bred to despise that for some at least would, in the years following the Civil War, transform unsavory financiers into Napoleonic heroes.13
LESS THAN A YEAR before the Civil War began a piece of sentimental poetry appeared in an illustrated weekly magazine. Entitled “The Lone Tree in Wall Street,” it was an ode to the sycamore or buttonwood tree under which, so legend had it, the Stock Exchange was born. The poet lamented the vanished days of a bucolic New York, a city less single-mindedly intent on gain. All that was left was this one “gray sycamore” standing silent vigil:
How many runs upon the banks,
Hast thou, old tree, beheld.
Forced and bathetic, the poet’s sense of something having passed away was nonetheless shared by many.14
Insiders were particularly sensitive to the change. Daniel Drew scented the shift in the wind early in the 1857 panic which, he allegedly observed, “…put old fogeyism out of date forever more…the think-of-the-other-fellow methods—were swept away or at least so crippled that they didn’t figure much in the world of affairs afterwards.” William Fowler’s Ten Years in Wall Street was published in 1870 and took stock of what the decade had wrought. Out of the primal ooze of Darwinian evolution “titanic” figures had emerged, “nimrods of the market” like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, who swept away the Street’s old guard and its cliquish exclusion of those younger and bolder if less polished than they. Fowler exaggerated; the “old guard,” which itself was hardly old, had certainly not vanished, even if some ruinations of former “titans” like Jacob Little now haunted the exchange in pathetic penury. But Fowler’s sense that “the ground shook” as a “new race of financiers” trod the earth signaled that something awesome and, in his view, frighteningly lawless, had been born amidst the chaos of the war. Henry Clews, another insider but one devoted to defending rather than condemning the Street, echoed Fowler. Writing many years later, he remembered the 1857 panic as the “western blizzard” (bad news had blown in from the agrarian West where defaulting farmers brought down eastern banks) that had sounded the death knell of the Wall Street establishment, allowing room for a new breed of “young Turks,” more innovative and less risk averse than their elders, to take over.15
Less risk averse indeed! At first, Wall Street shuddered at the prospect of war. Just before Lincoln’s election, railroad shares and the bonds of Southern state governments had collapsed. The whole mercantile community of the North was profoundly worried about the disruption of the intricate and lucrative relations that bound them to Southern cotton. Union patriots looked on suspiciously as merchants and bankers cast about for some solution short of war. One constituent wrote to Senator Washburn of Wisconsin worrying that “artful politicians, rich merchants, and speculators whose god is money will counsel peace regardless of principle.” Wall Street in particular was singled out as a haven of a pusillanimous “Dry Goods Party” conspiring to surrender to the slavocracy.16
The outbreak of war, however, put an end to the economics of peace and incited instead a ghoulish speculation in death. As the carnage spread over the land, young enterprising Wall Street brokers sent agents to accompany the clashing armies and even planted spies in military headquarters hoping to secure advance notice of battle plans that would inevitably impact the speculative wars on the trading floor. Often enough news of victories and defeats would reach the Exchange even before they made it to the president and the press. Many were betting on Union defeats.
Substantial segments of Wall Street were in fact hostile to the Lincoln government from the get-go. Even before the election of 1860 the Street’s anxiety about the prospect of Republican victory sent stocks plummeting by 20 percent in two weeks while prices for state and federal government bonds collapsed as well. A great deal of Southern money invested in the Street was withdrawn instantly upon the outbreak of hostilities. Moreover, there soon developed a feverish speculation in gold; the fortunes of the metal rose and those of the federal “greenback” dollar fell with each actual or anticipated battlefield loss by the army in blue. The very creation of “greenbacks” in 1862 was designed by leaders of the Republican Party to free the government of its dependency on the bond markets to finance the war. Patriot lawmakers objected to “any and every form of ‘shinning’ by Government through Wall Street or State Street….” Later on Congress tried but failed to banish the bloody speculation in gold. The president found it horrific. He wrote the governor of Pennsylvania to say: “What do you think of those fellows in Wall Street who are gambling in gold at such a time as this? For my part, I wish every one of them had his devilish head shot off.” The country’s most distinguished and celebrated financier, Jay Cooke, who successfully marketed the federal government’s war bonds to a mass clientele of farmers and small-town businessmen, was himself scandalized and called New York’s gold traders “General Lee’s left flank.” Speculators were colloquially referred to as “Jefferson Davis speculators.”
During the 1864 presidential campaign, unionist newspapers attacked General George McClellan, the Democratic candidate, by associating him with August Belmont, chairman of the Democratic Party. The general’s candidacy was a “sell-out to Wall Street and the Rothschild interests”; worse than that, his victory would only enrich “…the whole tribe of Jews, who have been buying up Confederate bonds….” Republican Party orators, including the crowd-pleaser Edward Everett traveled the country trailing behind them a cloud of anti-Semitic rhetoric, speaking in mock Yiddish accents about German Jewish money dishonoring the country. Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman engaged in casual accusations of Jewish war profiteering, and Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts reduced the bloody conflict to one between “the curbstone Jew Broker” and the “productive, toiling men of the country.” It made no difference that as a matter of fact Belmont was entirely loyal to the Union cause, that he was an apostate to his ancestral Judaism, and that stories about Jewish speculators buying up Confederate securities were nothing more than groundless rumors. When Atlanta fell to Sherman, one magazine expressed deep satisfaction that Wall Street’s days of unpatriotic reveling were finally over.17
As the war-induced appetite for speculation grew, collateral exchanges sprang up to handle specialized business in mining or petroleum stocks. “Bubble companies” with little or no real capital resources were magically floated on the market and then quickly burst. Trading on the Stock Exchange was no longer limited to two regularly scheduled daily episodes, but took place at all hours of the day and night. Part of the mystique of the Street has always derived from the antic pace at which it reportedly conducts its wheelings and dealings. It first earned that reputation, and the popular fascination that went with it, during these years of wartime and postwar abandon. E. C. Steadman, a broker and writer, described the scene where men no longer worked normal hours, but “rushed into the arena from a hurriedly snatched breakfast and shouted and wrestled throughout the day, stealing a few moments to sustain vitality and encourage indigestion at a lunch counter or restaurant, and renewed the desperate tension in the evening, prolonging it till long past the hour when wearied bodies and shocked nerves demanded respite…. It was a killing pace.”
The mood was contagious and infected improbable quarters. Leslie’s Illustrated, which catered particularly to a female audience, took note that “in fact the ladies have been the wildest speculators.” The magazine cautioned that more than one wife or daughter had gone to “ruin” as a result, and included reproving sketches of the miser, the “gold gambler in luck,” and the ruined man to illustrate the dangerous consequences of all this “vanity.”18
Alongside these cautionary words a more alluring prospect opened up. Magazines read by a prospering middle class pioneered an association between the Street and a budding culture of conspicuous consumption. For generations it would provide a form of mass entertainment, a spectacle first gazed at with awe and envy and later emulated. With some hyperbole a contemporary observer noted, “The entire population of the country entered the field. Offices were besieged by crowds of customers…. Broadway was lined with carriages. The fashionable milliners, dress-makers, and jewelers reaped golden harvests. The pageant of Fifth Avenue on Sunday and of Central Park during the week-days was bizarre, gorgeous, wonderful! Never were such dinners, such receptions, such balls…. Vanity Fair was no longer a dream.” The Street itself underwent an airing-out to make it a more welcoming place. The sketch A Broker’s Office in the 1860s displayed a real cross section of clients in all states of social dress from the most lavishly attired dandy to the workingman in overalls. Horace Greeley’s Tribune commented, “The intense desire to buy almost any kind of security amounted almost to insanity.”
All this luxe could arouse feelings of revulsion. Harper’s Weekly scathingly noted that the price of single act of gluttony at Delmonico’s or La Maison Doree could support a soldier and his family for much of a year. Decry it or not, it was duly noted that rich women staked their jewels, clergymen their salaries, as the rage for speculation was the talk of the town: “at clubs, in the streets, at the theaters, in drawing rooms.”
While it would be a mistake to conclude that dabbling in the Street had become the pastime of the masses—that wasn’t even true in the 1920s and only became so well after World War II—still this post–Civil War euphoria was real. One observer noted, “The war, which made us a great people, made us also a nation in whom speculative ideas are predominant.” And this air of psychological and moral abandonment provided the atmosphere in which the cult of the Wall Street titan would thrive once the war was over.19
When the country exhaled after Appomattox, Daniel Drew, always renowned for his candor, summed up the prevailing mood: “We fellows in Wall Street had the fortunes of war to speculate about and that always makes great doings on a stock exchange. It’s good fishing in troubled waters.” In Drew’s case, it is always wise to take with a grain of salt what he’s alleged to have said about almost anything. But, after all, Wall Street was hardly the only commercial mercenary. Fortunes had been made by businessmen, some of great renown, supplying the army with uniforms made of shoddy, shoes out of paper, meat from diseased cattle and hogs, guns unlikely to fire.20
If even during the war people had managed to gratify their more selfish appetites, then the outbreak of peace relaxed all remaining restraints among social circles affluent enough to indulge. The “universal stock ticker,” invented by Edward A. Calahan in 1867 and improved upon a few years later by Thomas Edison, excited investors and spectators alike. Stock Market slang found its way into refined drawing rooms where speculative ventures were avidly compared. “Gold was the favorites of the ladies. Clergymen rather affected mining-stock and Petroleum. Lawyers had a penchant for Erie….” The lavishness of the social scene bordered on the bizarre. Mrs. Hamilton Fish hosted a party for her friends’ dogs where the “guests” were presented with diamond necklace party favors and a place of honor at the table was reserved for an ape. Financier Leonard Jerome erected a palace on Madison Avenue equipped with a theater to seat six hundred and carpeted horse stables paneled in black walnut. The “flash age” had arrived, its gaudy show presided over by Belmont and his Wall Street cronies.
Contemporary observers, sometimes mistaking the peculiar habits of the upper classes for the behavior of “the whole population of the North,” worried that “salaried men” and “small merchants” considered it safe to divert their small surplus to “the chances of the market.” But they had reason to worry. All along the radiating railroad lines, local citizens bought up stocks and bonds and a world of dispersed, small-time speculators took shape. “Villages whose names are scarcely known beyond the boundary of their counties have their own rustic Fisks and Vanderbilts.” A poem appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, “Pan in Wall Street,” announced that “Pan is dead,” the god’s sweet music no longer able to silence “the cries of greed and gain.” The Erie Railroad emerged, after the war, as the “scarlet woman of Wall Street” because its stock price bore little if any connection to the value of the company but seesawed erratically in response to the backdoor manipulations of operators like Daniel Drew. But while Drew was indubitably the master puppeteer, what also struck observers was how many others from diverse walks of life responded to his promptings. Aghast, a British magazine observed that all the prudent financial principles of a lifetime had been thrown overboard: “Professional men tired of their slow gains; clerks sick of starvation salaries; clergymen, dissatisfied with a niggardly stipend…even the fair sex, practically asserting women’s rights under the cover of a broker, dabbled in Erie shares.”
The game might produce hundreds of “human wrecks scattered through towns and cities, some shut up in asylums, others living out aimless lives—mental paralytics, dazed or crazed by the swift shock of ruin.” The market might be likened to a “withered old harridan, enameled, painted, and decked in the latest mode which leers on the speculator and points to golden prizes, that, like the desert mirage, fades away and leaves him to his ruin.” But no matter the consequences, it was inspiring delusions of grandeur. In the overheated imaginations of some, Wall Street was becoming the “greatest money-making and money-losing spot on the globe”—even though it was still a generation removed from achieving such stature.21
IT WAS MORE than that, however. It was also a lightening rod for the cultural crisis that gripped the country once the Civil War was over. Hopes that as a great moral crusade the war would act like a purgative, cleansing the nation of its self-seeking materialism, were sorely disappointed. They were drowned in the sea of avarice and shabby dealings that began during the war and reached flood tide afterward. Wall Street seemed to stand at the headwaters of this deluge. No aspect of the country’s political, moral, social, and cultural life escaped unaffected.
Walt Whitman lamented the hypocrisy, crudity, and shallowness that seemed to characterize postwar American culture. The depravity of the business classes was “infinitely greater” than supposed, and all levels of the government were “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration…. The best class we show is but a mob of fashionably dressed speculators and vulgarians.” Yet the poet was at the same time thrilled by the country’s electric vitality, its material powers, its ingenuity, “this many-threaded wealth and industry.”22
Whitman was a mystic democrat, his poetry often a beatification of the multitudes. But the urge to celebrate the nation’s “many-threaded wealth and industry” could also express an imperial instinct that was just as much in the American grain. Wall Street shared in the glory. It was so associated in the public mind with the country’s industrial coming of age, with its growing economic independence from the Old World, that some people, at least some of the time, were more than willing to avert their gaze from the black cloud of scandal and piracy that perpetually hovered over the Street.
Jefferson foresaw an “empire of liberty” and had Cuba and Spanish Florida particularly in mind. Jacksonian publicists rallied to the nation’s “manifest destiny” in rolling waves of territorial expansion. New York’s antebellum merchant elite, its civic promoters and literary luminaries were predicting the city someday soon would contend with London for commercial supremacy. Daniel Webster anointed New York the “Imperial city of the American continent” a generation before it emerged as the engine of the country’s transcontinental industrial explosion. In the aftermath of the Civil War that great leap forward inspired a similar triumphalism. Even people sensitive to its grievous faults credited Wall Street for this national coming of age.
Junius Henri Browne, for example, hailed from a distinguished banking family before becoming a war reporter. His Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York was a widely read piece of postwar urban storytelling, full of piquant illustrations of the pastimes, privations, and criminal misadventures of the upper classes and the lower orders. His chapter on Wall Street called it the “banking house of the continent,” its power felt from Bangor to San Francisco, “even across the sea and round the sphere.” Despite all its transgressions Browne couldn’t despise the Street because it “holds the levers that move the American world.” In his view the whole country benefited from Wall Street’s energy, enterprise, and financial daring-do: “The North, the South, the East, and the West go there for aid to hew and build and mine.”
Native resentment of the Old World fed this pride in Wall Street’s new muscularity. The New York Herald lost its sense of perspective, claiming decades before it became true that the Street was now the favored asylum for “capital and substantial money interests. Paris has gone into total eclipse and London trembles toward her sunset. The westward story of empire is in the zenith of New York.” Spectators from all over the country came to view the Street as a great battlefield where the struggle for independence from European capital would be won or lost. Here was living proof of the nation’s pluck and nerve, its inventiveness, stature, and power.23
Evidence to support this imperial chest thumping was everywhere. The architectural transformation of lower Manhattan was a stunning case in point. Lithographs and other pictorial representations marked the receding of the city’s waterfront as its geographical axis. Instead, steel massed in downtown skyscrapers—made possible by the invention of the elevator, new iron shell framing, and improved load-bearing techniques—imparted a kind of physical bravado to the cityscape, to Wall Street in particular. There men conducted their worldly affairs at altitudes far removed from ordinary life on the street. Working in this airborne seclusion in buildings capped with watchtowers, ornamental pediments, statues, and domes their recondite labors took on a certain grandeur and mystery. Thanks especially to Wall Street, New York began to assume the unofficial title of the nation’s other capital city.
Architectural metaphors for the Street’s national omnipotence rested on foundations of impressive material achievement. Expansion of the national rail network was astonishing. Railroad mileage doubled in the eight years between 1865 and 1873. More track was laid in 1872 than in any other year of the nineteenth century. By 1893, there were 150,000 miles of track that hadn’t been there at the time of the Civil War. As the iron horse crisscrossed the country its appetite for coal, steel, and heavy machinery helped make those industries into world leaders in size and technical sophistication.24
Financier Jay Cooke’s grandest undertaking—the creation of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which promised to blaze a path through the vast untracked wilderness of the American northwest—was exemplary. It promised to cap a reputation already securely anchored in the national mythos. Cooke was heralded as a special kind of patriot for keeping the Union solvent by single-handedly disposing of the government’s war bonds. It would be hard to exaggerate the high regard for Jay Cooke at the end of the Civil War. When the rest of the New York banking world proved skittish about financing the Union’s cause (and Europe’s “haute banques” were withdrawing their capital from the imperiled nation), Philadelphia’s “modern Midas” stepped forward and staged the first hugely successful effort to mass market a financial security. It was a spectacular campaign. Cooke took out full-page ads and deployed brass bands, top-draw orators, handbills, posters, and hundreds of thousands of flags. He contracted with publicity flaks to inundate the editorial and financial pages with prepackaged material that often appeared in the guise of legitimate news or independent editorial opinion. He hired twenty-five hundred “minute man” agents, highly trained and prepped salesmen, to peddle the government’s war bonds direct to the consumer. Cooke was a war hero, a patriot-financier, whose sense of duty and fiduciary integrity were universally praised. Encomiums poured in from statesmen, religious leaders, and opinion shapers. He became a confidant of the president and continued that role through the first Grant administration, in effect serving as an unofficial secretary of the treasury. During the gold panic of 1869, he denounced Fisk and Gould and called upon the government to intervene because “the business people of this land must have stability or we will become a nation of gamblers.” Cooke was endlessly fascinating to the reading public who fed its craving with stories about his homes, his fishing expeditions, his art collection, his game parks, even wild rumors about the extravagant costs of his dental care. His fifty-two-room palace, Ogontz, with its theater, fountains, and vast collection of paintings, sculpture, and assorted bric-a-brac of ancient European lineage, was perceived not so much as vulgar as a fitting monument to his gravitas and rectitude. Indeed, Cooke was compared favorably to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant.25
War hero, railroad pathfinder, financial tycoon: It was an exhilarating portrait of the nation’s genius in full sprint. And Wall Street kept pace. By the middle of the Gilded Age 90 percent of all securities transactions were conducted on the New York Stock Exchange. Moreover, if New York had realistic aspirations to become the capital of capitalism, it was largely because of Wall Street. It was there that the nation’s great undertakings—its coast-to-coast railroads and stupendous agricultural output, its gigantic steel, oil, and raw materials industries, its pioneering technologies in electricity and chemicals—got alchemized. Even men like Andrew Carnegie and Collis P. Huntington, whose steel and railroad enterprises were hundreds and thousands of miles away from the eastern metropolis, nonetheless directed their affairs from Wall Street, where all the critical capital transactions originated, where the best legal advice was available, where new insights into cost accounting were devised and revised. Here the city’s investment bankers and brokers turned the country’s tangible wherewithal into its paper facsimile, a virtual economy whose very liquidity made possible the mobilizing of ever greater capital resources to further enlarge the scope, efficiency, and power of the whole U.S. economy. New York was on its way to becoming the queen of American cities and would soon enough assume that position in the world because it was the financial locomotive pulling the nation forward into the modern age.
Captains of industry and finance were the first beneficiaries of this marvelous transformation. But they weren’t the only ones. All sorts of people could admire the new system and its continental accomplishments: the taming of the West, the technological marvels, the cornucopia of material delights. Although the era was marked by frequent panics and depressions real wages tended to rise and prices to fall. National income grew as did the country’s gross national product. To the degree Wall Street was implicated in this ascension it was applauded for it.
Silence could on occasion be a telling measure of popular acquiescence in the Street’s elevation. The election of 1876 is a case in point. The country was in the third year of a severe economic contraction. Political scandals, many of them traceable to Wall Street operators, had riveted public attention for the last several years. New York governor Samuel Tilden, the nominee of the Democratic Party and winner of the popular vote (the congressional compromise of 1876 gave the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes), was known as the “Great Forecloser” of bankrupt railroads, as a Wall Street insider, and was on retainer as legal adviser to some of the most suspect characters on the Street, including Gould and Fisk. Yet the campaign proceeded with hardly a word addressed to the ravaged economy, to Wall Street’s role in its peregrinations, and to the corrupt schemes both parties were neck deep in. In one sense this is all a commentary on the inherent limitations of the nation’s two-party system and on the other preoccupations of the American electorate. But it also points to a reservoir of tolerance for the Street’s misbehavior so long as the trade-off in material progress and national empowerment seemed sufficient.26
Henry Adams was far less tolerant. He lamented the degraded state of the nation’s moral conscience that allowed for this kind of election-year amnesia, that found “failure…to be the one unpardonable crime, success as the all redeeming virtue….” Not only did a deluded citizenry fail to stigmatize the four horsemen and their Wall Street confederates; they actually raised them up as objects worthy of emulation…or entertainment.27
Board games aimed at the Victorian middle classes proliferated in the 1870s and afterward, thanks to the perfection of chromolithography. These games went through their own moral evolution. Mansions of Happiness (invented in 1843) rewarded all those telltale traits of small-town Christian living—piety, honesty, humility. Gilded Age games featured different settings and emphasized different talents. The post office game set the player down amid the hustle and bustle of urban life and included Wall Street as a central locale, just a ferry ride away from a more sedate Brooklyn. Participants in these new games were encouraged to be enterprising and audacious. A popular game called Bulls and Bears: The Great Wall Street Game starred two well-turned-out bull-and bear-headed stockbrokers dressed like “fancy men,” slick, in the know, and enjoying themselves immensely. Promotional patter promised potential players that the game “for the time being will make players feel like speculators, bankers, and brokers.” Gazing down at the board’s playing surface were the visages of Vanderbilt and Gould sitting atop piles of Erie and Western Union stock.28
No legislation Adams might ever have dreamed of could address this sort of vicarious identification with the Street. By the 1870s, Wall Street had become a common destination for thousands of tourists, pointed out in all the standard tour guides, used as the dramatic mise-en-scène in thriller novels, probed by an amateur anthropological literature devoted to dissecting the mysteries of urban life. Washington Fowler, Noah Webster’s grandson, published Ten Years in Wall Street in 1870. It sold out its first printing of forty thousand copies and was reviewed everywhere. Ostensibly accounts like Fowler’s offered to penetrate this occult financial arena, decipher its secret codes and its mathematical exotica. Invariably, however, they gave in to the irresistible spectacle of the Street’s spasmodic metabolism, the violent emotions that colored its daily life.
The sight of people abandoning all the rules of decorum, shattering the boundaries of social etiquette could be an elixir to people already intoxicated with democratic enthusiasm. Young men found it especially fascinating, so much so that now and then detectives were sent in search of them (and young women, too) who had “decayed from service and from home by the glare and fascination of the place.” Crowds gathered to gape at the Street’s helter-skelter motleyness, the promiscuous mixing together of “…women wringing their hands and crying in nervous excitement…old people scarcely able to totter…people who had risen from sick beds….” Jew and gentile, lettered and illiterate, “puritan and blackleg.”
Improbable as it might seem in these depictions, the Street became a kind of zany replica of Whitman’s democratic mixmaster. One writer found in this hurly-burly an emblem of the nation, a gathering in of “men of every clime, of every nation, of every tongue, and of every religion….” The electricity, the social intermixing, the mesmerizing sense that one was at the vortex of that inscrutable mechanism that somehow set in motion the whole vast system of worldwide trade and investment was breathtaking, a kind of metaphysical thrill. Whether metaphysical or more down to earth, there was plenty of bedrock sympathy and even adulation for these “nimrods of the market” whom Adams found so detestable.29
NOWHERE WAS this deep cultural ambivalence more marked than in the way people reacted to the four men who best epitomized the “Flash Age.” All four—Vanderbilt, Drew, Fisk, and Gould—earned their notoriety as well as a great deal of their fortune by looting and relooting the Erie Railroad. Yet their exploits inspired awe even as they were censured. It was a romance of industrial privateering. Starting out with little or nothing at all, they put together or presided over vast systems of daunting financial, engineering, and logistical complexity. Industries, towns and cities, whole untracked regions were given life (or deprived of it) as they executed their grand calculations. Men of surpassing boldness and reach, of such encompassing practical intelligence, were inherently powerful.
Even as they went about their business of robbing the public treasury and piling up unprecedented personal fortunes, a certain mystique grew up around the “four horsemen” and the satellite luminaries who orbited in their shadow. Great Fortunes and How They Were Made, James D. McCabe’s 1870 classic celebration of self-made American heroes, included portraits of Vanderbilt and Drew as exemplary “capitalists,” kingly yet humble, plain but hypnotic, specimens of men the Bard called “born great.” While each of the four possessed a persona starkly different from the others, in the popular mind they shared a social genealogy and a general set of character traits that lent them a collective identity.30
Rising out of obscurity, all of these men were thought to display a precocious audacity, raw aggressiveness, and a wolfish cunning that made them exquisitely fit to thrive on the urban frontier. If they were coarse, they were also perceived as irreverent in the best, democratic sense of the word. If they were moguls, they were of the uncut variety, without airs, relying, in the end, only on themselves. They were seen as promethean figures, indefatigable, prepared like any frontiersman to do what had to be done in the remorseless battle to win out over their opponents. They seemed to be the reincarnation of the English “sea-dogs” of the sixteenth century, those romanticized avatars of a ruthless commercial ambition, who synthesized the greed for gold, the desire for adventure, and the love of exploration into an unquenchable spirit of early capitalist enterprise. To the degree they were lionized as well as condemned, it was first of all because they seemed to capture the raw triumphalism of the age, the natural offspring of its creative, democratic, and adventurous esprit.
A distinctive vocabulary inscribed these men in urban-industrial legend. Contemporaries, even critical ones, always described them as “bold,” and “magnificent of view,” full of “verve,” capable of absorbing a hard blow without flinching, as “audacious,” “keen,” and possessed of that sangfroid that could stand up to the worst possible news. Often treated as American primitives, observers marked and often celebrated their lack of education and refinement; they were profane and uncouth but endowed with native frankness, self-confidence, and blunt force of personality. This language of masculine virility and plebian brashness also signaled their inspiring escape from unprepossessing origins. Vanderbilt left the modest family farm on Staten Island to run a small ferryboat to Manhattan. Fisk was the son of a Vermont peddler and spent time in a traveling circus, where he was educated in the art of the con and the easy mark. Drew also spent part of his youth in the circus, tended bar, drove cattle, and later in life deliberately cultivated his rustic airs, dressing shabbily, never seen without his old drover’s hat. Gould sprang from marginal farming stock in upstate New York and ran a tannery before bilking its owner of his life’s investment. Accounts of their doings often began with depictions of their hardscrabble youth full of escapades conveying their peculiar roguish charms. Cast adrift in a liquefied society scarcely restrained by formal law or established convention, they made their way and triumphed, without apology, in single-minded devotion to the instinct for mastery and power. They may have started out as little more than confidence men, but in the imagination of the Gilded Age they played the role of the colossus. And that improbable trajectory was precisely the source of their cultural allure.31
In dozens of ways, no two men could have been more different than Drew and Vanderbilt. But according to one insider, both men “have the mind of crystal, the heart of adamant, the hand of steel, and the will of iron.” This is the language of Napoleonic mythmaking and it saturated the media. Jacob Little was perhaps the first figure to be popularly christened as the “Napoleon of Wall Street,” but by the 1860s he was a spent figure. No time was lost transferring title. Jay Cooke first assumed the mantle, thanks to his financial patriotism during the Civil War. But it wasn’t long before even a paper like the Herald, which otherwise declaimed against the Erie debacle, acknowledged that the schemes devised by Gould and Fisk “exhibit Napoleonic genius.”
Fisk in fact developed a reputation as an industrial Robin Hood. A big spender on wine, women, and flashy good times, he also made conspicuous charitable donations of coal and flour to the needy, of funds to support a poor Negro church on Eighth Avenue, and most spectacularly of Erie trainloads of food and provisions to the victims of the Chicago fire. When Fisk was assassinated in 1872 by the current paramour of his ex-mistress, he was lionized as that “poor, toiling lad who had wrought his success out of hard, earnest effort,” and one hundred thousand New Yorkers gathered “Like a Black Restless Sea” at his funeral. One anonymous barroom poet remembered Wall Street’s Robin Hood:
We all know he loved both women and wine,
But his heart it was right I am sure;
He lived like a prince in his palace so fine,
Yet he never went back on the poor.
Newspapers that had held their noses in disgust when he was alive decided that “there was grandeur of conception about Fisk’s rascality which helps to lift him above the vulgar herd of scoundrels.”
Vanderbilt was sent off in even grander style in 1877; flags flew at half-mast at City Hall, at the Stock Exchange, at Grand Central Station, and all along the routes of his railroads. The New York Times, which had once labeled him a “robber baron,” called him an “immense boon to the public.” Other obituaries memorialized his unaided rise from unlettered ferryboat captain to “one of the kings of the earth.” Senator Chauncey Depew, a Republican corruptionist of the first water, and sometime Vanderbilt lawyer, eulogized the Commodore as a hero of material progress, a “genius of affairs.” Others, with cleaner hands, joined in the chorus of praise for Vanderbilt as a great public benefactor, both as an employer and as a provider of a vital public service. He was eulogized as an engineering visionary, a manager of operations so vast and complex they required a kind of military genius to master. Much postmortem opinion in the big-city dailies treated his passing with a solemnity that was truly Napoleonic in so far as it took the measure of Vanderbilt’s untrammeled individualism and found it a perfect expression of the national genius and a confirmation of America’s social promise.
Stories aplenty embellished the folklore that gathered around all these men. In Vanderbilt’s case one anecdote, told over and over again, summed up his imperial insouciance. When two misguided associates attempted to challenge his position in the Nicaragua Steamboat Company, the Commodore concisely explained: “Gentleman: you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.” This was a true story. Not so the one about how the Commodore, at sea during a fierce storm, the ship floundering, a collision imminent, panic above and below decks, seized the helm and with characteristic daring guided her safely to port. Tales like this were part of an enveloping mystique, so inflated it could lead somebody like Russell Sage, a coldhearted sociopath, to indulge a grandiloquent impulse, suggesting Vanderbilt was “to finance what Shakespeare was to poetry and Michelangelo to art.” His legend crossed the ocean and even a British observer, who otherwise viewed the world of Wall Street with bottomless contempt, exempted the Commodore who “assumes the royal dignity and moral tone of a Gaetulian lion among the hyenas and jackals of the desert.” Traveling to London aboard his thousand-ton North Star yacht, his wife, twelve children, caterer, doctor, and chaplain in tow, the Commodore presented a spectacle of surpassing vulgarity, yet gave a British observer pause for social reflection: “Here is the great difference between the two countries. In England a man is too apt to be ashamed of having made his own fortune…. It is time that the millionaire should cease to be ashamed…. It is time that the parvenu should be looked on as a word of honor….”
In the end his heroism could be simply put. Noting that he enjoyed no advantages of birth or education or social position, the New York Herald concluded when he died: “It was one honest, sturdy, fearless man against the world, and in the end the man won.”32
Soon enough, less than ten years after he died, Vanderbilt’s first biographer—his hagiographer really—presented the Commodore’s story as a model for “boys and young men,” indeed for all who aspired to become “leaders of their fellows in the sharp and wholesome competition of life.” In the American empire of the parvenu, where birth and title counted for nothing, Vanderbilt was the preeminent citizen. Before his death, before an obligatory piety had descended over his reputation, even far less enamored commentators like Charles Francis Adams felt compelled to acknowledge the Commodore’s monumental grasp, his gargantuan ambition, his “steady nerve and sturdy gamblers’ pride,” the relentless force of will that made him a “dictator in modern civilization” as he presided over the iron arteries of the nation’s economic circulatory system.33
THIS NAPOLEONIC CONCEIT seemed ideally suited to capture what was simultaneously both intimidating and grand about these men. Napoleon gripped the romantic imagination of the nineteenth century. It was a fascination produced as much by the outrageousness of his character as it was by the grandeur of his imperial exploits. Whether idolized or hated, he seemed to epitomize the demiurge of the age, its exaltation of the unfettered individual engaged in an act of perpetual self-creation. By the end of the century, Napoleonic metaphors were deployed widely to signify the imperial, military, and autocratic inclinations of men like J. P. Morgan. However, in this earlier, formative period, the Napoleonic image still conjured up the mountebank, the cowboy, and confidence man writ large. It worked to exalt a pure and insatiable appetite, to transform what might seem at first blush a mere hunger for money into a visionary quest by extraordinary creatures blessed with unique foresight and imagination. A “young Napoleon of finance” was to be admired not for his riches, but for the power with which he moved “the world’s greatest interests.”34
Embedded at the heart of this cultic fascination was a preoccupation with manliness. E. L. Godkin, a passionate hater of these Wall Street buccaneers, was particularly struck, and not entirely in a negative way, by their roughness and size. Fisk dressed “like a bartender, huge in nerve as in bulk….” Drew lied and stole his way to wealth with “tobacco juice drooling from his mouth.” Six feet tall, red-cheeked, and with a shock of white hair and flowing sideburns, Vanderbilt’s feats of physical strength were part of his legend as was his dauntless braving of the British blockade during the War of 1812. The Commodore, moreover, was renowned for his profanity, a colorful flood of dockside obscenities that embellished his earthy machismo. Even his reputation for heroic bouts of drinking and gambling and for the lascivious pursuit of young women burnished more than tarnished his mystique. So too August Belmont, whose confected world of high society would exclude ruffians like the “four horsemen” for years to come, enjoyed a reputation for sexual allure based as much on his immense financial and political power as on his brooding eyes and dark good looks. With Belmont, sexual prowess, whether real or imagined, became an enduring part of the mythos of the Wall Street titan.
Whether in such homely illustrations or in more exalted rhetoric, an old-fashioned image of Victorian masculinity, one identified with thrift, perseverance, responsibility, chastity and honesty, was under revision. Over and over again a set of warrior attributes associated with power, will, and force were singled out for special regard, implicitly demeaning the boring utilitarianism and methodical routine of the reigning version of bourgeois masculinity. Their presence absorbed the empowering enthusiasm associated with the “technological sublime,” that rapturous faith in the irresistible triumph of technical progress. Metaphors that drew their imagery from the new industrial technologies and referred to an iron will, a will of steel, or a magnetic personality colored the portraits of Wall Street tycoons, along with other giants of industry. It all began with the four horsemen and crested around the turn of the century when just about anybody who made a big splash in the worlds of high finance and big business, from J. P. Morgan on down, seemed endowed with a truly Napoleonic abundance of the y chromosome.
Their power was as much about their domination of other men as it was about their control over the material world. Wall Street was a man’s world; women were considered by nature to be ill suited to its rigors, lacking in the brains, emotional equanimity, and masculine reserve that the life of the speculator demanded. Even the rare exception, like Hettie Green, notorious as the “Witch of Wall Street,” seemed to prove the rule as she was regarded as possessing a man’s brain trapped in a woman’s body. Green was a fearsome figure. Quaker heiress to a whaling fortune, she dressed from head to foot in black crepe, was known to threaten her rivals with a handgun, and was both terrifyingly vindictive and so miserly it was reported she washed her own underwear rather than pay the cheap boardinghouses she frequented. She made a fortune as a usurious moneylender to speculators and companies in distress, and nurtured a paranoid conviction that her father and aunt were poisoned and that she was herself the target of assassins. Her fellow Wall Streeters considered her a freak of nature, as “one among a million of her sex,” which accounted for her distinctively male ruthlessness.
Aside from Hettie Green the only other women who dared venture into Wall Street were the notorious sisters Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull. Woodhull was a pioneer feminist and suffragist, the first woman to run for president, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Her sister was a celebrated faith healer who exercised a mystic influence over Cornelius Vanderbilt, a man of profligate superstitions (homeopathy, magic spells, séances where Jim Fisk made guest appearances offering business advice). Vanderbilt set the sisters up as Woodhull, Claflin & Company in 1870 at 44 Broad Street. Less fearsome than the “Witch of Wall Street,” they were mocked as the “Lady Brokers” and the “Bewitching Brokers.” Woodhull in particular was condemned for “brazen immodesty as a stock speculator….”
Across the gender divide Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton pointed to the 1869 conspiracy put together by Gould and Fisk to corner the market in gold as an allegory of sexual politics, proof positive of the “disqualification of the male man” to be entrusted with money or power. The “male man” of Wall Street was subject to this sort of ridicule from other quarters as well. Attempts to capture the high-wire emotional life of the Street sometimes likened its reveling to the adolescent machismo of a fraternity party. More often, however, its inherent maleness was taken with deadly seriousness, its financiers portrayed as exercising the sort of dominion otherwise associated with traditional Western and military heroes. And nothing more clearly suggested the sexual magnetism of the Wall Street speculator than his icy composure, his capacity to remain under emotional control while others panicked around him.35
EARTHINESS, sexual prowess, folksy simplicity, imperial ambition, nerveless presence, and the gambler’s flash, each in its own way helped crystallize an oddly hybrid image of the great Wall Street speculator as a plebian aristocrat. This hybridization was peculiarly appropriate to their ambiguous location in the nation’s political economy, living, as they were, off the largesse of state-sponsored enterprise, yet born and bred in the free-for-all atmosphere of the open market. Moreover, no one man possessed each and every one of these characteristics in equal measure; they assumed distinctive roles within an unfolding Wall Street allegory. Vanderbilt took on most clearly the aspect of the profane and mighty Napoleonic hero. Drew became a self-parodying rustic, a foxily simple soul in the tradition of the Yankee peddler whose feigned innocence was his cleverest ruse. Fisk came on as pure irreverence, lustily ribald and a moral provocateur. Gould was enlisted as the devil’s lieutenant.
Uncle Dan’l, the inveterate trickster, was still gulling people a half century after his death. A book purporting to be his diary, The Book of Daniel Drew, was published in 1910. It was a fake, but it worked for decades because its “editor”/ghost writer, Bouck White, had managed to capture the idiom of Drew’s rustic, homespun charm, which had become such an accepted part of his legend. White, a one-time Socialist, skewered Drew as a greedy rascal and pious hypocrite (in fact, many years later the Nazis made use of a German translation of the book in a propaganda assault on American capitalism). But White also painted a portrait of an irresistible, wrinkled, twinkly-eyed jokester who fleeced his victims with a certain down-home panache. So he was alleged to have chortled to himself when spying a gang of his fellow speculators salivating over the prospects of a killing in Erie stock: “Happy creatures, how merry they be. Wal, I guess I must pinch ’em.” His folksy aphorisms became Wall Street scripture and were widely known and applied beyond the precincts of the Street. The most famous perhaps was a piece of rhyming folk wisdom: “He who sells what isn’t his’n/Must buy it back or go to pris’n.”
What was perversely fetching about him was the candor and ingenuousness of his avarice and treachery. “I had my own fortune to make…. I didn’t feel called upon to keep myself back” is what Bouck had him say. And whether he actually said it or not, it was what people expected a plain-spoken Yankee like Drew to say. He appeared a Jacksonian democrat come to Wall Street without airs, whose self-presentation mocked precisely those aristocratic inflations of dress and rhetoric that were so alien to the American sensibility. Drew had two passions—religion and speculation—and they lived happily together inside his untroubled psyche in a way that appalled many, but was probably a secret comfort to legions of his fellow citizens similarly negotiating the moral shoals of a very American conundrum. A Methodist, he founded Drew Theological Seminary, but there was never a hint that he invested his winnings in piety to assuage some deeper guilt. He felt none. Uncl’ Dan’l summed it up best: “It seems like a dream to me.”36
Fisk had his own way with words. “I was born to be bad,” he once said, and who could entirely resist that. He was a comic-opera character—fat, jolly, and unabashed. Dressed like a racetrack tout, he paraded around New York with pomaded hair, waxed mustache, and a diamond-studded shirtfront, often dressed in an admiral’s uniform—one paper called him the “Mushroom Mars”—and flaunted his showgirl friends and lavishly appointed steam yacht. Erie headquarters, widely known as “Castle Erie,” was housed inside Fisk’s Grand Opera House at Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, a sumptuous structure, emblazoned with Erie Railroad royal cartouches, gilded balustrades, and stained glass, where the “Prince of Erie’s” private offices featured a throne cobbled together with golden studded nails. It was a kind of corporate Xanadu gaped at by passing throngs of Gothamites. Even a Wall Street Brahmin like George Templeton Strong, who considered Fisk “vulgar,” “unprincipled,” and “profligate,” conceded he was “freehanded with his stolen money, and possessed, moreover, a certain magnetism of geniality.” “Jubilee Jim” was the P. T. Barnum of Wall Street and really never pretended otherwise. His primitive impiety left one Wall Street insider thunderstruck: “Boldness! Boldness! twice, thrice and 4 times. Impudence! Cheek! Brass unparalleled, unapproachable, sublime!” It was all a great and hilarious gamblers’ game to him whose point was hardly money. Morality didn’t enter into it, either. And his sheer cheek was indeed unparalleled. As Fisk himself breezily quipped when the gold corner collapsed and all its seamy skullduggery was exposed, “Nothing lost save honor!” Henry Adams was probably right when he guessed that Fisk thought of his Wall Street operations as one “gigantic side-splitting farce.”
Fisk was a scandal. When he visited Long Branch, New Jersey, one of the favorite watering holes of the leisure class, the “best people” checked out when he checked in. Yet New Yorkers stood transfixed when his lover’s playboy lover, Edward S. Stokes, first blackmailed Fisk and then shot him to death in the lobby of the Grand Central Hotel. Talk of lynching Stokes filled the air. Eulogized for his magnetism and generosity of spirit, thousands lined the route of Fisk’s funeral train as it made its solemn way back to his birthplace in Brattleboro, Vermont. Popular singer and songwriter Billy Scanlon memorialized Wall Street’s flashiest in a ballad, “Jim Fisk, or, He Never Went Back on the Poor,” which remained a barroom favorite for years afterward. Like many a celebrity of modern consumer culture, Fisk was all style and image, admired less for what he actually accomplished than for the raffish glamour and voluptuous irreverence of his presence. His bravado and dash became part of the Wall Street aura.37
Even a hundred years later, when the “robber baron” stigma had long since attached itself to all their names, one can still hear the echoes of a persistent if ambivalent admiration. According to one account from the 1950s, “These men were as magnificent in their particular ways as they were pathetic in their dude clothes, trying to eat with a fork, wondering how best to approach a chaise longue. They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome.” The eminent historian Richard Hofstadter, certainly no apologist for the Gilded Age, nonetheless considered these men of “heroic audacity and magnificent exploitative talents—shrewd, energetic, aggressive, rapacious, domineering, insatiable. They directed the proliferation of the country’s wealth, they seized its opportunities, they managed its corruption….”38
Many of the qualities that made romantic figures out of Vanderbilt, Drew, and Fisk were also assigned to industrialists who never set foot in Wall Street and even, in some instances, hated the place. Something else in addition allowed Wall Street to be treated as a separate bestiary, set off as if by some translucent curtain from the larger jungle of straightforward industrial mud wrestling.
The great speculators—and even Vanderbilt was considered by many to be a great speculator, his assiduous attention to railroad construction and management notwithstanding—belonged not so much to a profession or occupation as they did to a state of spiritual subversion. Nothing tangible arose from their work as speculators. They lived instead in that formless infinity of pure money, a universe with no fixed values, a place where it was unwise to take anything for granted and where the improbable was to be expected. If the great speculator might be likened to Napoleon, he was also regarded as kin to the plunger, the wildcatter, the mystic traveler to uncharted and dangerous lands of fathomless risk. It was an exhilarating world, dizzying, and carried with it the headiness of unadulterated freedom. Those brave or foolhardy enough to expose themselves to its vertiginous atmosphere broke free of the world of work and its structures of inner moral discipline. They recognized no authority, treated all men with egalitarian indifference, responded only to the universal mathematics of the disembodied market. They seemed parodies of Protestantism, sprung free of its repressive commandments. In a culture saturated in Protestant moralizing, they provided an entranced public a sneaky thrill. They had crossed the border. Waiting on the other side, however, was Jay Gould.
Gould alone was universally loathed. Vanderbilt might be profane, his cheaper-by-the-dozen children a sign of his lechery, but he was an empire builder. Drew was not to be trusted. But his folksy idiom and down-home candor were endearing. Fisk was a born scoundrel. But his native wit and public passions were disarming, and besides, he seemed sentimentally attached to “the people.”
Not so Jay Gould. He wasn’t witty and he wasn’t sexy. He lacked the common touch. He was taciturn, stealthy, owlish, and humorless, and seemed to be without any of the redeeming virtues of the plebian aristocrat. To many he appeared instead a demonic figure. Gould was Wall Street gone to hell. He seemed to epitomize a revulsion for Wall Street articulated by respectable middle-class opinion, by novelists, graphic artists, dramatists, ministers, mugwump reformers, cultural aristocrats, and crusading journalists.
Over the course of a single generation, many Americans had come to admire the country’s new class of financial Napoleons. They were awed; they envied them and tried to emulate them. Many others, however, knew in their hearts that these colossuses were first and last confidence men, and they loathed them for it.