chapter 4

chapter 4 Wall Street in Coventry

WHILE ALIVE he was the most hated man in America. In the century since his death, and despite history’s notorious fickleness, Jay Gould’s reputation has remained irredeemably dark. He was the devil. A recent biography of “the Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” the first I know of to attempt his rehabilitation, takes a perverse delight in reviewing this unblemished record of historical denunciation. Alexander Dana Noyes, the dean of turn-of-the-century financial journalism, judged him “a destroyer.” Gustavus Myers, whose History of the Great American Fortunes was a seminal work of Progressive Era muckraking literature, called him a “pitiless human carnivore, glutting on the blood of his numberless victims…an incarnate fiend.” During the Great Depression, Wall Street’s ignominious low point, Matthew Josephson’s celebrated exposé, The Robber Barons, depicted Gould as scarily nonhuman: “No human instict of justice or patriotism or pity caused him to deceive himself or to waver…from the steadfast pursuit of strategic power and liquid assets….” As one might expect, things hadn’t improved much by the 1960s. One biographer declared his life “the ultimate perversion of the Alger legend,” awestruck by his “boldness in corruption and subornation.” Another eminent historian writing at the same time concluded that Gould’s career “encompassed almost every known variety of chicanery….” And even though his most recent biographer does yeoman work trying to aerate away the aroma of brimstone given off by the Gould legend, a New Yorker article, appearing just before the turn of our new millennium, entitled “The Confidence Man,” echoes Henry Adams’s mordant aperçu, that Gould’s plans always demanded that “someone, somewhere, should be swindled.”1

Even when he died, in 1892, no one could think of a kind word to say. The New York Times, more than willing to pay its respects to other baronial tycoons, found Gould a purely “negative quantity in the development of the country where he was not an absolutely retarding and destructive quantity.” The New York World captured best the way Gould had become a stench in the nostrils of polite society. For the editors, he was the “incarnation of cupidity and sordidness.” Lamenting the demoralized state of the nation’s spiritual life, its prostration before “the golden calf,” the paper blamed Gould in particular. His success promoted this idolatry. It “dazzled and deluded multitudes of young men. Jails, insane asylums, and almshouses all over the land are peopled with those who aspired to wealth by similar methods.” Moreover, these incarcerated few could barely take the measure of this plague that had infected many, many more, still “at large, mingling with the community in all the walks of life, excusing, practicing, and disseminating the vices of which he was the most conspicuous model in modern times.”²

Silent and secretive, Gould’s career nonetheless played itself out inside a luridly lit bubble of public infamy. An editor’s favorite foil, a caricaturist’s delight, he never could escape this purgatory of shame. Joseph Pulitzer declared him “one of the most sinister figures that have ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people.” The New York Times was scandalized by Gould, noting that the crusade to reform civic affairs could never succeed “when the insidious poison of an influence like that of Jay Gould can be detected in politics, in finance, in society, and when people claiming to be respectable are not ashamed of being associated with a man such as he.” Even his sometime partner in financial skullduggery, James R. Keene, whose own slyness had earned him a sobriquet as Wall Street’s “Silver Fox,” judged Gould “the worst man on earth since the beginning of the Christian era….” An attorney representing one of Gould’s victims went up to the financier while Gould was dining at Delmonico’s and beat him up. After a second assault a few years later he no longer walked the streets alone. Living in garrison-like privacy, at times afraid to travel abroad on his own railroad lines, the target of death and kidnapping threats—including one from a crazed Colorado man who voyaged east vowing to execute Gould on behalf of a mysterious organization known as Christ’s Followers—Gould counted on a squad of bodyguards, the iron portcullis mounted at his office, and on the protection of his close friend and New York’s chief inspector of police, Thomas Byrnes. He was a marked man.3

Many of the same people who marveled at the exploits of the four horsemen, who winked at their transgressions and applauded their nerve, were at the same time appalled by what they saw. The spectacle offended even as it seduced. For those of mixed mind and for those who had always despised these Wall Street roughnecks but despaired at the credulity of their fellow citizens, Jay Gould had become a metaphor. He was a vivid piece of iconography in the folklore of a genteel culture wrestling with the paradoxes of a raw industrial capitalism. He served this purpose perfectly, in part because he lacked all those features—the bon vivant athleticism, the backslapping good cheer, the robust, dominating physical presence—that sometimes redeemed his conferees. Diminutive, joyless, shy, unsocial, even bookish, he was easily likened to a spider or a snake, womanish like a treacherous siren. He was a living insult to all those Victorian pieties and sentimental illusions that polite society found so necessary to veil its own mercenary ardor. Gould fascinated, however, not because he was unique, but rather because he seemed to distill in his person and career a set of character traits and behaviors all too commonly associated with Wall Street and which the world of bourgeois, middle-class propriety found deeply detestable.⁴

WEALTH, even the amassing of great fortunes, did not, all by itself, offend the canons of respectability. Tooth-and-claw, give-no-quarter combat in the competitive marketplace was also acceptable, even a point of manly pride…so long as it was conducted within the implicit ground rules of Protestant morality. But Wall Street, and not just Jay Gould, seemed always to be testing, and often enough transgressing, those ground rules. The nub of the problem was that despite the growing cross-fertilizationbetween the Street and the new industrial order, they had not yet mated or produced a common offspring. Manufacturing, distributing, and selling the products of American industry and agriculture was carried on, in the main, by small and medium-sized family firms and partnerships. They had no intercourse with Wall Street. But Wall Street banks and brokerages and freelance speculators lived off the cyclical crises endemic to this nineteenth-century family capitalism. It was natural enough then for the victims of those crises, or for those inclined to romanticize or lament a more tranquil, less disorderly past, to treat Wall Street as a special kind of incubus.

When it came to pondering the relationship between wealth and work, genteel culture knew certain truths to be self-evident. Work was good, wealth incidental. Work encouraged self-discipline, probity, and good order. Wealth was the tangible outcome of this earnest laying on of hands. It was the vessel of freedom and security; its accumulation was a perpetual tutorial in self-mastery. Property arising out of work provided the material haven sheltering the patriarchal family. Inside the fortress of land, home, and heritable assets, sentimental affections and the moral education of the young would flourish. Conversely, the loss or dissipation of the ancestral patrimony through recklessness or overreaching ambition was a specter haunting this family romance. In this worldview, property was more than a mass of congealed, dead labor; it was a living, breathing alter ego, a vehicle of self-expression, a pass way to creative energies open to all—or rather open to all men. And indeed the building up of property through inventive genius, organizational acumen, or by wrestling with a recalcitrant nature, was a chief proving ground of middle-class manhood. Nonetheless, its accumulation, to be legitimate, had to come about through straightforward and transparent fair dealing, however tough-minded. Should work result in the piling up of excessive quantities of wealth and property, then a self-effacing modesty and civic-mindedness would channel it into worthy undertakings of public benefit.

So it was that respectable society surrounded its preoccupation about work and wealth with a halo of religiosity, of worthy intentions and rules of correct behavior. Everybody recognized that wealth, however beneficient, was also dangerous. It could be flaunted, a sure sign of hubris. Any out ward display of great riches, any showiness, was not only a social faux pas but a sign of moral and psychological dissipation. Wealth could feed an insatiable inner greediness, turning self-creation into self-indulgence. Wealth might lure one into the paths of dishonesty, whether or not those practices turned out to be punishable by law. Wealth might be acquired in what Christian civilization had for centuries stigmatized as the “Jewish way,” that is undeservedly, by leeching away the fruits of the honest labor of others. Wealth might emerge out of dark conspiracies rather than through open transactions conducted in the light of day. Wealth, like a loaded firearm discharged thoughtlessly or with malice, could wound or annihilate the innocent. During the last third of the nineteenth century, when middling folk as well as the genteel upper class turned their gaze to Wall Street, they tended see all that: ostentation, selfishness, dishonesty, parasitism, stealth, and economic death. So it was that they might in the same breath revere businessmen like Andrew Carnegie and revile speculators like Gould. Wall Street had crossed the line separating honest industry from the dark arts of financial witchery.

Bad feelings about Wall Street were shared by a Brahmin upper crust as well as by solidly middle-class citizens. But those feelings were inflected differently. The former cultivated a highly developed sense of elite entitlement based on culture, breeding, and education. Work did not necessarily figure in, and could even be pursued with unseemly avidity. But great piles of money mounting up on Wall Street (although not only Wall Street) threatened to breach their cherished social exclusivity. The work-a-day middle classes, however, were existentially committed to the moral rigors of work and hostile to distinctions of social class. For them Wall Street sowed indiscipline, wanton idleness, intolerable pretension, and economic calamity. The Brahmin was offended aesthetically; for the upright middle classes of town and country, Wall Street was an impiety. Money, pooling on the Street, challenged the old elite’s social and political preeminence. The rising middle classes meanwhile feared for their survival and resented the Street’s apparent sacrilege.

When it came to their shared animosity toward Wall Street, however, these differences tended to converge rather than conflict. Both Brahmin elitist and middle-class pietist, each in his or her own way, believed social position ought to be earned or deserved, rather than a matter of chance or purchase…or worse. Each took seriously the realm of sentiment, whether in the form of honor or familial affection. Both were proud of their sense of civic responsibility. Together they paid fealty to an origin myth about the republic: that it had been founded by men who not only embodied an exemplary gentility in their personal behavior—unaffected, independent, diffident, learned, and benevolent—but who were also quintessential public servants: virtuous, disinterested, averse to any hint of corruption. Hardly naïve, they were ruefully sensitive to the corrosion of the founders’ spartan political standards. Much of this they blamed on the dirty business of mass politics. But filthy lucre played its own insidious part. Men and women of the genteel persuasion saw themselves as conservators of republican purity, defenders of the faith against political place seekers, machine demagogues, and the men with the money.

Some sizable quotient of this high-mindedness no doubt amounted to so much pious cant and unctuous hypocrisy; these same circles might be caught dabbling in the Market or engaged in their own cutthroat business practices. After all, along with everyone else, they lived in a competitive world whose savage incivility insulted their most precious conceits.

Thanks to its notorious reputation for lavish display, the “age” we recall as “gilded” is easily mistaken for one of broad prosperity. Quite to the contrary, the Gilded Age encompassed a period of prolonged secular deflation punctuated by frequent panics and depressions. If it was gilded rather than golden, it was nonetheless an age of striking technological innovation and industrial growth. But this occurred in spasms and at a high price. The very process of innovation was conjoined to the coercions of the competitive marketplace. Indeed the ruthless efficiency of the market, expressed in the ceaseless outdating of existing forms, methods, and outputs of production, chronically devalued older, suddenly antiquated entrepreneurial property titles to the means of production. Fourteen of the twenty-five years between 1873 and 1897 were years of depression or recession. It was a “daimonic” economy, whipsawed by ferocious acts of creation and destruction. Ordinary businessmen saw themselves less as the titanic, Faustian movers and shakers of legend and more like the harassed and anxious strivers they really were, haunted by chaos and insecurity. They lived on treacherous terrain, littered with disabled enterprises and the corpses of once flourishing firms.5

Wall Street stationed itself along two vital arteries of this Darwinian organism: it financed the railroads. And it helped determine the flow and availability of credit. Positioned so strategically, it was for just that reason wide open to attack.

Railroads were the principal, if not the only form of industrial enterprise whose capital needs were so enormous that they had to have resort to sources outside the firm. Half of new private investment went into railroads between 1830 and 1890; every year that decade another seven thousand miles of track were laid, an unprecedented number. Railroads were themselves subject to the same rigors of market competition. They, too, could come into being and go out of existence with extraordinary rapidity. They, too, suffered the need to grow or die. Speculation was nowhere more feverish: perhaps a third of the new tracks were built to meet current demand, a third might find some useful future, but a final third were of no value to anyone except their promoters and were derided as “blackmail railroads” by more reputable operators. (In 1884, Moody’s estimated that as much as $4 billion in railroad stock represented pure water.)

But as corporate undertakings of gigantic size with a great deal of capital at risk, they also devised means of survival that propped up the often grossly inflated values attached to the securities issued in their name. Moreover, the roads enjoyed preeminence in an economy increasingly strung together with steel rails and telegraph wire. Farmers, merchants, and manufacturers, not to mention fledgling communities eager to spread their wings, found themselves at the mercy of railroad routes and rates. Wall Street thrived on this largesse and power.⁶

This relationship of dependency was aggravated by the deflated state of the economy. Starved for cash and credit, agrarian as well as urban entrepreneurs faced off against an intractable banking establishment headquartered in Wall Street. The national banking system that coalesced after the Civil War consolidated financial power in the East, in New York particularly, leaving regional interests in the West and South on hard rations. Due in part to their holdings in government bonds and to the nation’s reliance on British gold reserves to finance its international trade, the great Wall Street banks were unshakably wedded to the gold standard and opposed to all forms of monetary inflation. Add to all this a predilection for gilded opulence amid chronic privation, and, under duress, this triangulation of the economy by Wall Street’s strategic control over credit and transportation was bound to provoke.

Its power seemed undeserved. It derived as much from the parasitic mulcting of the citizenry as it did from the laying of track, the building of drawbridges, and the choreography of freight trains. It seemed tainted, acquired in the act of degrading the integrity of the commonwealth.

AN INESCAPABLE IRONY accompanied the ascent of these “nimrods of the market”; it wholly depended on their intimate relations with the institutions of political power. For good reason this political moment in the country’s history has been ridiculed as the “Great Barbeque.” Without the active collaboration of state legislators, sitting judges, mayors and city machine bosses, congressmen and cabinet members, the vast wealth amassed by our four horsemen is inconceivable. Their rugged individualism was nonetheless rugged for all that; navigating the snares of an uncharted political labyrinth was no mean feat. It was another sign of their mastery. However, this intimacy with government, some of it skirting or crossing the borders of legality, did mean that the state was in danger of being converted into a client-state whose legitimacy could naturally be called into question. So the elevation of the financial pathfinder was, in a bizarre fashion, given its special lift by the debauching of republican government.

Erie’s story has been told and retold dozens of times because it’s so good and because it captures this special relationship so perfectly. It has come to stand as a founding legend of the Street, capturing its braggadocio, its cunning, and its outsized ambitiousness. The tale contains an irresistibly delicious set of ingredients: waterlogged stock manipulated by maestros; locomotives, passengers cars, and track left in such sorry condition they killed people; suborned jurors and bought judges; open bribery of the whole New York State legislature and New York City Council; an attempted kidnapping and a harrowing midnight flight across the Hudson in a rickety boat; an armed siege in a converted Jersey City hotel guarded by gangland thugs; a looted corporate treasury; and international lawsuits that would continue into the next century.

At first Drew had the Erie all to himself. During the 1850s he used his official positions in the company’s management to arrange for the overcapitalization of the road and then, making use of his privileged information about the company, made a fortune bearing and bulling its stock on the Exchange. The road itself was left in deplorable condition, an accident waiting to happen, as it often enough did. Erie’s decrepitude—faulty tracks, broken-down engines, collapsing bridges, exploding locomotives, derailments, and collisions—produced an unending series of mishaps, major and minor, some fatal. Drew was out to milk the road. Precious little of the money raised on the stock and bond markets found its way into upkeep and modernization. But, especially after the Civil War, the road was “put in play” by others, Cornelius Vanderbilt particularly, who sought to control it in the interests of monopolizing railroad access to and egress from the booming New York market.

Vanderbilt clashed with Drew, who was joined by two younger men, each in his own way as outrageous and shrewd as Drew. “Jubilee Jim Fisk” and Jay the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street” Gould attempted to trap the “Commodore” in his own monopolizing scheme by forcing him to engorge endless quantities of Erie stock at ever-escalating prices. The supply of stock was made virtually limitless because it was being manufactured almost at will and on the sly by Drew and the boys. They made clever misuse of a provision in the New York State law allowing the company to issue bonds for the upkeep and operation of the line, bonds that could be subsequently converted into stock. When Vanderbilt tried to put a stop to these expensive high jinks, he got a pliant judge to issue an injunction and arrest warrants. But Drew and company purchased their own jurist and had the injunction countermanded. Not to be checkmated, the Commodore’s judge ordered the police to enforce his writ. The elderly “Uncle Dan’l” fled immediately to New Jersey. Flush with the daredevil confidence of their youth, however, Fisk and Gould hung around partying for almost too long, hailing a small skiff at the Battery just in time to make a fog-enshrouded and nearly catastrophic voyage across the river with the local constabulary hot on their trail. Once in Jersey City they set up Erie headquarters in a hotel, rechristened “Fort Taylor,” guarded by heavily armed “security” and a small cannon. The artillery discouraged plans to kidnap the threesome and there matters stood…until Jay Gould showed up in Albany with a satchel full of cash ready to pay liberally to all those state lawmakers willing to vote the Erie a franchise into New York City. Many proved willing indeed. Vanderbilt’s agents arrived on the scene with their own bag loads of money. An auction followed, votes going to the highest bidder.

In the end a compromise was reached, the sort of compromise thieves are apt to arrive at. Drew, anxious to return to the comforts of home, betrayed his young protégés, did a deal that saved Vanderbilt from the more extreme consequences of his bullish position in Erie stock, and the road resumed its career as “the scarlet woman of Wall Street.” While its foreign investors, especially the British, tried to call management to account and exercise their “rights” as shareholders, their lawsuits failed, and for the rest of the century and beyond the Erie, growing ever more haggard, looted and relooted of its dwindling resources, was emblematic of Wall Street at its most rapacious.7

The Erie was hardly an isolated case. The years after the Civil War were full of similar instances, minus the more lurid details perhaps, of companies, especially railroads but not only railroads, held for ransom on the Street. Stock watering, insider manipulations, ruthless wars for control, bribed officialdom, lawsuits, and the piling up of great personal wealth became regular newspaper fare. What is strikingly distinctive about this primitive age of Wall Street freebooting is how much of it depended on and inveigled the state.

Two scandals in particular competed with the Erie for public attention and both involved the government. In the fall of 1869, Gould and Fisk managed for one stupendously terrifying moment to corner the market in gold. Their secret weapon was a back-alley channel of influence running directly in to the White House. During the congressional investigation that followed the “gold conspiracy,” it became clear that President Grant was himself innocent of any connivance in the scheme, although perhaps innocent as well of the financial knowledge and prudential wariness that might have nipped the plot in the bud and that would years later leave the ex-president the impoverished victim of another Wall Street scam. After all, Grant had long cultivated a taste for high living avidly encouraged by his wife, Julia, and regularly accepted lavish gifts from grateful businessmen (a more or less normal practice at the time).

But if Grant was not their willing creature, Fisk and Gould could depend on his brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, a onetime influence peddler from the St. Louis frontier and now a New York lawyer, lobbyist, and speculator. Together with a key Treasury Department official, these men, hoping to profit personally, did what they could to keep the price of gold artificially high by getting the government to refrain from selling into the Market from its own supply of gold. Grant allowed himself to be entertained by Fisk on his sumptuous steam yacht and in his private box at Jubilee Jim’s opera house, creating the erroneous impression he was a confidante. Gould plied the president with facile arguments about why it would be wise for the government to allow the price of gold to rise and so purportedly provide American farmers with a windfall when they sold their crops abroad. A gullible newspaper columnist suggested Grant had bought the argument and would keep a tight rein on the government’s gold. Only belatedly did Mrs. Grant get wind of what her brother-in-law was up to. At last Grant smelled a rat. Just as Fisk and Gould set their cornering scheme in motion, the president ordered the sale of enough gold to collapse the corner. It produced instant pandemonium in the “gold room,” an oddly configured, dingy hall full of nooks and crannies, once known as Gilpin’s Reading Room located at the corner of William Street and Exchange Place. The scene there was described by one journalist as a “ratpit in full blast.” The sheer heat generated by so many messages flowing back and forth across the gold room’s telegraph system melted the wires and produced a telegraphic blackout in much of the Northeast. Crowds gathered from all over hoping to catch a glimpse of the renegade conspirators. Spotted, Gould and Fisk were chased through the streets to “Jubilee Jim’s” Grand Opera House, where they lived under siege for days. Grant’s action did save the integrity of the government’s finances and avoided a more general economic calamity, although plenty of ruined western farmers wouldn’t agree. But the stunning memory of financial paralysis and near disaster lingered on; even two years later the London Times compared the vanquishing of Gould and Fisk to the “defeat of Hannibal or Napoleon—a victory of Fate over Genius.”8

Financial intrigue at the Union Pacific Railroad, when exposed not long after the infamous “gold conspiracy,” provided a second spectacular instance of the incestuous carryings on between Wall Street and Washington. The Union Pacific was born out of the heroic wartime effort to traverse the continent by rail and depended heavily on government subsidies and loans. By 1864, it was being run by a group of Wall Street promoters who viewed the Treasury as a cash cow. Although there were warning signals aplenty, every time management returned to Washington for additional subsidies Congress complied. Indeed, Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher, who was supposed to monitor the undertaking for the government, held stock in one of the road’s subsidiaries and knew the promoters personally. Construction was so shoddy parts of the road could scarcely bear the weight of a locomotive. But nothing was said because Usher was not alone. Members of Congress and other government officials, including Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax, accepted campaign money as well as shares of stock in the railroad’s construction and land development company spin-offs. Between 1866 and 1872, the railroad handed out $400,000 in graft. Most notoriously, a separate company was established, the Credit Mobilier, which was ostensibly created to build the road but effectively functioned to funnel government subsidies from the Union Pacific itself into the hands of Credit Mobilier’s managers, who not coincidentally turned out to be the same cast of characters running the railroad. Congressman Oakes Ames also headed up the Credit Mobilier, and to keep the machinery of government subsidy running smoothly, he liberally distributed shares in the company to a variety of politicians, including future president James Garfield and Republican Speaker of the House and future presidential candidate James G. Blaine. It is estimated that the Union Pacific was short about $44 million, thanks to these machinations. On top of this, the federal government effectively lent the railroad the use of the army, with which to pacify restive Native Americans and discontented workers. When the whole unseemly mess came to light in the early 1870s, the government was naturally embarrassed. But given the density of Wall Street’s relations with every level of government, it’s doubtful anyone could have been overly surprised.9

This was America’s first full immersion in the political culture of crony capitalism. It reversed the relationship between business and government Jefferson had once worried about. In those days, government, and in particular the executive, was perceived to be the originating source of corruption, winning over elements from the private sphere with favors, emoluments, and cash. During the “Great Barbeque” it was the public sphere that was seduced and exploited by great aggregations of private economic power, by magnates who had long since given up any active involvement in governmental affairs. They were more than content to use middling political functionaries to help them in the pursuit of their own self-interest. Gould put it concisely: “In a Republican district, I was a Republican; in a Democratic district, I was a Democrat; in a doubtful district, I was doubtful; but I was always for Erie.”

One shameless piece of business-political chicanery after another scandalized the postwar public: gross corruptions at the Indian Bureau, at custom houses in New Orleans and New York, at the ministries to Brazil and England, and in dozens of state and local dark dealings. An Ohio congressman compared the House of Representatives to “an auction room where more valuable considerations were disposed of under the Speaker’s hammer than any other place on earth.” If Wall Street began its career living off the largesse of the state in the days of William Duer, by the time of the Civil War it was getting hard to tell who was being kept by whom. Depending on one’s point of view, this could pass for a neat bit of productive ingenuity or a form of gross delinquency.

Thanks to the continuing shortage of private capital willing to take risks on large-scale ventures, state-chartered corporations prevailed well into the 1850s and beyond. This sort of public support encouraged private subscriptions in mixed enterprises in transportation, banking, and various public works. Promoters of these undertakings necessarily looked to the eastern capital markets (as well as to the foreign investment community) for funds; by 1870, a quarter of all the financial resources of the country were concentrated in New York. All of these projects, railroads most emphatically, were vital to the accelerating pace of economic growth. All of them provided as well unimagined opportunities for speculation and peculation tempting both businessmen and politicians, sometimes effacing the distinction between them.

Railroad companies depended on the government for lands, loans, and subsidies; altogether between 1862 and 1871, the government donated 100 million acres to the railroads. Because the government distributed its land and loans only as track mileage was completed, there was an incentive to quick and careless construction; fifteen years after completion nearly all the land-grant railroads had to be rebuilt, all at public expense. By 1880, federal, state, and local governments had contributed $700 million to the building of the railroads and donated 155 million acres of public land; that is, more than the size of France, four times the size of New England. Nor does this include the railroad’s own sales of land granted to them which, in the case of the Northern Pacific alone, was worth $140 million. Many roads might have collapsed without public help from state and local governments, who would agree to underwrite the interest on company bonds for instance. In the case of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific transcontinental project, the federal government not only capitalized the roads at $100 million, but made repeated and generous loans for construction costs—as much as $48,000 per mile through the Rockies and Sierras.

In tackling the huge task of raising capital for his vast new railroad, the Northern Pacific, Cooke relied on political influentials to pump up enthusiasm for the project. He lined up Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, notable judges, the country’s preeminent minister, Henry Ward Beecher, respected journalists like Horace Greeley, and such intimates of President Grant as General Horace Porter and Vice President Schuyler Colfax. After completing a portion of the road up to the Red River so that it wouldn’t seem purely chimerical, he went to the government for land grants and bond guarantees, in part to induce European emigrants to settle along the route, in part to convince wealthier continental investors to buy the company’s bonds. (The capital of North Dakota turns out to be called Bismarck because Cooke was trying to peddle bonds in Germany.) The 50 million acres donated to the railroad was larger than the entire territory of New England. To keep the money flowing, Cooke hired ex-senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio to represent the project in Washington. Meanwhile, he underwrote a mass publicity campaign extolling the patriotic virtues of the road. It was to be a great civilizing project that would populate the wilderness, carrying men and ideas and goods into a rich but unexploited part of the continent. Along with Northern Pacific bonds, his sales agents carried with them maps and posters and pamphlets heralding the cornucopia to come. Celebrities were taken on excursions, traveling exhibits of products from the back country were staged around the country, editors were wined and dined.

Still the aroma of corruption filtered through. Stories of fraud and thievery associated with the road’s construction began to surface. There were derisive allusions to the Northern Pacific as “Jay Cooke’s Banana Belt,” mocking a promotional literature that portrayed the region as a lush tropical paradise. Bond sales suffered. Attempts to lure settlers from abroad dead-ended with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. When Massachusetts congressman General N. P. Banks called for an inquiry, Cooke said he “ought to be expelled from Congress for such outrageous attacks upon the great interests of the country.” His stature was still substantial enough to quiet the accumulating suspicions, and the committee’s brief report was a favorable one. But the relief was only temporary. Cooke was deeply overextended. The collapse of Northern Pacific securities a year later in 1873 was responsible, more than other single event, for the next great Wall Street panic and the greatest depression of the nineteenth century.10

Like the Erie and the Northern Pacific, railroads became the preferred object of financial gaming. Promoters and financiers were often handsomely rewarded and then sought further ways to reward themselves. If Erie was the most notorious “scarlet woman of Wall Street,” other roads like the Harlem, the Michigan Southern, Prairie du Chien, and the Chicago and Northwestern earned similar reputations all through the 1860s and 1870s.

This admixture of chicanery and impressive accomplishment produced storms of public alarm and outrage over the despoiling of republican government, followed by an amazing quiescence. Henry Adams wrote a biting exposé of “black Friday”—the newspapers’ name for the gold panic—that was all the more acidic because the congressional investigation into the scandal, led by James Garfield, went nowhere and exonerated everybody of any real wrong-doing, while providing covering rhetoric that excoriated Fisk for his “singular depravity.” (Fisk in turn provided some hilarious testimony that tried, clumsily, to put the finger on Grant.) Great battles for control between contending Wall Street financiers became, by necessity, turf wars for political influence. Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed and his “gang,” who controlled New York City’s Democratic Party and were a major power in state politics as well, regularly solicited bribes and stealthily participated in speculative pools where the price of railroad stock depended on the actions of the legislature in granting or refusing franchises. Tweed’s massive public works project—which endeared him to many working-class New Yorkers—were largely funded with city bonds gobbled up by Wall Street, usually underwritten by fellow Democrat August Belmont, who then resold them in Europe at a handsome premium. The Tweed ring used its control over city funds to manipulate the Market on behalf of its favored speculators and to punish their Wall Street enemies on the Republican side of the aisle. Tweed himself became an Erie director, for which he received a $100,000 annual retainer.

Ultimately Tweed got caught and went to jail (although not for his railroad felonies), but for years he got away with what was more or less public knowledge of criminal behavior. During the height of the Erie imbroglio, when the legislators in Albany were being openly solicited, the New York Herald sarcastically called the “Erie bill” a “Godsend to the hungry legislators and lobbymen, who have had up to this time such a beggarly session that their board bills and whiskey bills are all in arrears and their washerwomen and boot blacks are becoming insubordinate….” The judicial system was similarly compromised. One magazine concluded from the Erie wars that in New York “there is a custom among litigants…of retaining a judge as well as a lawyer…it is absolutely essential to each party to have some magistrate in whom it could place confidence.” When the New York State Senate went through the motions of conducting its own investigation, it concluded that while it was clear enough that large sums of money were on the premises and intended to influence legislation unlawfully, there was no actual proof these sums were so used. However, a dif ferent sort of proof of Wall Street’s deadly impact on the commonwealth was in the offing.11

NEXT TO LINCOLN and Grant, Jay Cooke was perhaps the most widely admired man in America. What a shock then when, in the autumn of 1873, Cooke’s empire fell apart, precipitated by the collapse of his Northern Pacific Railroad, carrying down with it the whole rest of the economy. The crash ushered in sixty-five consecutive months of deep depression, the longest such downturn in the country’s history, and left people in an unforgiving mood. It now turned out that the man whose probity had been the stuff of legend was hardly beyond reproach. And reproach is what he got. Suddenly darker moments of his past resurfaced. People remembered that Cooke had all along been a “moneyed aristocrat.” He had led the banking community in its intransigent insistence that the government redeem its bonds in gold, not in the greenbacks demanded by Democrats and credit-hungry debtors. Rumors circulated that he’d tried to bribe highly placed officials in the Grant administration.¹²

Everything paled, however, when measured against the trauma of 1873, for which Cooke received the singular blame. All the hoopla surrounding the promotion of the Northern Pacific—the celebrity testimonials, the patriotic cant about progress and the taming of the continent, the lavishly illustrated and fantastical brochures depicting Duluth as the Paris of the prairies, the public forums featuring local celebrities, the traveling exhibits of the unexplored region’s flora and fauna, the expeditions to Vienna and other European capitals to drum up bond sales and immigrant settlers for hypothetical towns in a tropical wilderness—all of this was not unlike his famous campaign to save the embattled Union’s finances. But this time it was largely make-believe, kept aloft by wishful thinking, political corruption, and federal largesse.

All sorts of middling folks—widows and clerks and schoolteachers and ministers and small businessmen who normally maintained a skeptical attitude about Wall Street—had taken the plunge in Northern Pacific bonds, trusting in Cooke’s impeccable reputation. They were sorely disillusioned. When his great bank failed, the patriot turned into a scoundrel. Everybody was shocked. Angry and bewildered crowds gathered at the shuttered doors of Cooke and Company at Nassau and Wall. A murder trial in Washington adjourned as the judge, jurors, witnesses, and attorneys for both sides rushed out of the courtroom on hearing the news. As dozens of firms, some of ancient lineage, closed up and the New York Stock Exchange was forced to shut down for ten days, the panic and depression that followed left an indelible memory for a whole generation. A broker described “black Thursday” as “the worst disaster since the Black Death.” It would be decades before the small investor returned to the Market. A year later half the iron furnaces in the country were closed down. By 1876, half of all railroad bonds were in default. A fifth of the labor force was out of work for most of the decade. Mass gatherings of the unemployed were broken up by police attack. As Alexander Dana Noyes later recalled, “the financial crash of September, 1873, had been as memorable a landmark as, to the community of half a century later, was the panic of October, 1929.”13

Cooke’s calamitous downfall was shattering enough in its own right. But it happened to coincide with three other events that heated up an already-simmering genteel abhorrence for speculative excess and the usurious instincts of the New York banking establishment. The Credit Mobilier revelations hogged the front page throughout the year with their stunning exposure of the subornation of America’s political elite by the stock and bond promoters and directors of the Union Pacific. Then a Republican Party now dominated by its most conservative elements managed to withdraw silver from the nation’s circulating currency. This act of legislative miserliness, dubbed by its opponents “the Crime of ’73,” infuriated legions of credit-starved businessmen and farmers who blamed the deed on Wall Street’s “gold bugs.”

And finally in 1873, Mark Twain cowrote (along with his good friend, Charles Dudley Warner) The Gilded Age, the novel whose title has remained part of the national idiom ever since. The book was an instant best-seller. A year later a dramatic version opened on Broadway, where it, too, became a smash hit that then toured the country. People found it mordantly funny, and it still seems that way now. Twain captured the ridiculousness, the cant, and the pretentiousness of a post–Civil War America where “the air is full of money, nothing but money, money floating through the air.” Who today can fail to hear the risibly familiar in the following contemplation: “Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society…That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in a familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark—‘I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.”

Like all good satire The Gilded Age carried a high voltage moral charge. Twain and Warner sought to skewer a society that Walt Whitman at just this moment condemned as “cankered, crude, superstitious, and rotten…,” overwhelmed by an insatiable greed for money, land, and power. In his considered judgment, “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, not excepting the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration….”

Although we have grown accustomed to associating the phrase “gilded age” with a dissolute fixation on material things and sensuousness in private life, the novel was actually much more about the depraved condition of public life and especially the profound corruption of democratic government. The novel zeroed in especially on that relationship. Twain’s satirical barbs aimed at Tweed and the bacchanalia of the Gilded Age were armed with the lapidary axioms of a conventional middle class morality; his iconoclasm was still steeped in the ethos of prudence, thrift, and honest dealing. “Colonel” Beriah Sellers, the comic foil of The Gilded Age, is a man of stupendous bombast. The zaniness of his designs and his irrepressible good cheer in the face of one fiasco after another inspired a certain sympathy among readers and theatergoers, but it was hardly meant to excuse the debauching of the public purse and the despoiling of the public trust by people like Cooke and his political confederates.14

OUTRAGE OVER THE “Great Barbeque” emanated from two locales that rarely had any intercourse with each other. Elitists from the coastal Northeast and middling folk from the farms and small cities of the heartland shared a foreboding about Wall Street’s machinations. But what they were prepared or not prepared to do about them kept them far apart.

The Adamses—Charles Francis and Henry—coauthored, under the unassuming title Chapters of Erie, what was undoubtedly the most scathing indictment of the whole postwar Wall Street scene. The elegance and erudition of their acerbic formulations left behind the distinctive fingerprint of their Brahmin heritage. While they found everything about the doings of the “four horsemen” scandalous, Charles Francis grew particularly exercised about the political implications. Thinking of Vanderbilt especially, he worried about the creation of great financial combines that would overwhelm the state and its citizenry and gloomily forecast the advent of a kind of corporate imperialism. Describing the seduction of the judiciary, he likened it to a “monstrous parody of the forms of law; some Saturnalia of bench and bar.” At the same time the whole legislative process was in immediate danger of being transformed into “a mart in which the price of votes was haggled over, and laws, made to order, were bought and sold.” The arrangements between Tammany Hall and the Erie were, in Adams’s view, “equivalent to investing Mr. Gould and Mr. Fisk with the highest attributes of sovereignty.” Charles Francis (a railroad manager of considerable distinction) and Henry were most exercised about railroads—the Erie in particular. But their underlying message, that the integrity of the republic was in jeopardy thanks to a breed of swindling “moneycrats,” was no less cosmological for that.

Much of the material the brothers unearthed mapped the intricate financial chicanery carried out by Gould, Fisk, Drew, and Vanderbilt. In their eyes this spectacle damned a whole culture, one that could no longer tell the difference between piracy and legitimate business, one that could bestow honors and titles and welcome into the most fashionable resorts men “without character” who “possessed themselves of an artery of commerce more important than even the Appian Way….” Dishonorable men like Drew struck at the very foundations of society and were “the common enemy of every man, woman, and child who lives under representative government.” Vanderbilt, although just as selfish and unscrupulous as Drew, presented an even greater danger. His grasp and gargantuan ambition to control the nation’s whole transportation system would overwhelm the state and citizenry. Proof was everywhere. The Credit Mobilier debauch in particular persuaded Henry Adams that “the moral law had expired—like the Constitution.”

The implications of all this corruption were bleak. Graft could no longer be isolated as an abnormality. In a political system ostensibly committed to popular rule, but one in which the ambitions of a plutocracy proved irresistible, graft became the essence rather than the excrescence of political life. While the Adamses decried this new “government by moneyed corporations,” they had a characteristically Brahmin explanation for its venality; namely “the combination of the corporation and the hired proletariat of a great city,” by which they meant Boss Tweed’s Tammany machine. To the already world-weary Adamses there seemed no remedy.15

E. L. Godkin shared the Adams brothers’ disdain for Wall Street along with their contempt for the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics. Godkin was an activist engaged in good government reform, while the Adamses stayed away from the fray. But he, like they, could in the same breath lament the polluting of the republic by Wall Street moneymen, yet condemn efforts by what he considered the unruly to rein in the swindlers.

Godkin felt at home in Society and was more than a bit of a snob. His magazine was financed in part by James Brown of Brown Brothers, a prewar pillar of Wall Street rectitude, scandalized by the Street’s uncouth arrivistes. Naturally, Godkin, too, deplored the new buccaneering plutocracy, its subverting of honest government, and the vulgarity of its appetites. But Godkin hated with equal passion the agrarian bitterness and the urban leveling instincts that fueled the Greenback and Labor Party insurgencies then gathering energy in the Midwest. That was the peculiar dilemma of the Brahmin opposition. Like Godkin’s commitment to the cleaning up of the Republican Party and the civil service (dubbed mugwump reform by condescending journalists), it might broadcast its withering scorn of Wall Street and the usurping nouveaux riche, but its social inhibitions and prejudices left it politically inert.¹⁶

One famous cartoonist escaped that fate. Thomas Nast was a deeply conservative man. He caricatured immigrants, especially Catholic immigrants, as a lesser breed whose fondness for alcohol and the pope threatened to undermine republican stability. His cartoons in Harper’s Weekly portrayed striking workers as shirkers and anarchist incendiaries. He was a fervent believer in the free enterprise system and sustained a Calvinist conviction about the sanctity of the government’s gold-backed debt. But he was appalled by the shameless display of corruption and the way it undermined faith in the possibility of progress and civic virtue. Credit for the downfall of the Tweed Ring and the jailing of Boss Tweed rightly belongs to Nast’s gothic nightmare cartoons that exposed Tammany’s ravenous appetite for city treasure. His drawings of a terrifying Tammany tiger unleashed by a cretinous band of drooling Tweed henchmen and slithering city officials led by the obese Boss himself, cartoons that ran relentlessly, week after week, in Harper’s, helped immeasurably in creating an atmosphere of universal revulsion.

While Nast had no axe to grind against the business community generally, he was unsparing in depicting the complicity of Wall Street and the great railroad speculators in the ravishing of the public. “The Street,” one of his Tweed series, caught the Boss in prison garb with a ball and chain around his neck walking down Wall Street past a storefront labeled “Cuthem-Cheatem & Co. Bankers,” musing as he strolls, “Why a fellow feels quite Honest in this neighborhood.” In another, Tweed is proposed for president, while Fisk, whose buffoonish masquerading as an admiral was known to all, is to serve as secretary of the navy. His 1871 “On to Washington” sketched a White House under ambush by a stealthy squad of frontier garbed characters crawling on their knees and bellies, including a buckskin clad Jay Gould, led by an unsavory figure wearing a plume in his hat labeled “Erie,” sneaking up on an oblivious President Grant, contentedly smoking a cigar on the porch of the White House. “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” which ran following the assassination of Jim Fisk, featured a ghoulish gathering of men around Fisk’s tombstone, where Jay Gould comforts Vanderbilt and others with the thought that “All the sins of Erie lie buried here,” while off to the side a stern figure of “Justice” warns, “I am not quite so blind.”

Politics was his preoccupation, but Nast would, on occasion, forefront his contempt and distrust of the Street itself. During the gold panic of 1869, his “This Street Is Closed for Repairs,” left only Trinity Church standing in the background of a ruined Wall Street littered with the corpses of bulls and bears. Concern for public morals and the political integrity of the republic, however, was always what Nast was driving at. So it was hardly incidental that Trinity was left intact, as it was again in the cartoonist’s take on the crash of 1873, “Out of the Ruins.” There the chief of police is shown lifting Lady Liberty out of the devastation, assuring this distraught and visibly grateful maiden that “The Houses in this ‘Street’ have been shaky and on false Bases for a Long Time and you’ve had a very Narrow Escape.” Trinity’s preternatural solidity amid the wreckage suggested a divine admonition.17

Thomas Nast was the most celebrated and popular cartoonist of the Gilded Age. Thanks to the energy, tensile strength, and imaginative richness of his drawings, he was enormously influential in the forming of respectable middle-class opinion on a great range of public matters. His aesthetic featured the contorted warping of the classic imagery of antiquity as if to convey that Western civilization was at stake. It echoed the gothic revulsion felt by a Victorian and Protestant sensibility that sought to excise a species of moneymaking as unclean and subterranean. He inaugurated a tradition in the graphic arts that for the next seventy-five years would exploit Wall Street as an irresistible target of satiric mockery and social criticism.

Joseph Keppler’s sculpted drawings in Puck, which seemed almost carved onto the page and which ran well into the 1890s, shared a similar aesthetic. Puck was a cheeky, mildly ironical magazine that attempted to stretch the inelastic boundaries of upper-middle-class propriety. Keppler was fittingly a bit more distanced from and amused by the cynicism and corruption of American politics than was the righteous Nast. His work appealed, as a form of high graphic art, to the same conservative, genteel audience that devoured Nast, revolted equally by money-mad speculators and disorderly proletarians. Keppler relished Gould particularly as a subject and his caricatures on occasion indulged the causal Jew baiting that was an axiomatic element of elite snobbery. In “Shylock’s Bad Bargain” a mob of farmers, workers, and businessmen are in hot pursuit of Gould, who is making off with the election of 1884 and flees wearing a banner that says “Bond for One Pound of Uncle Sam’s Flesh.” Keppler’s crucifixion of Gould, in this and other cartoons, was a picturesque amalgam. It captured the ancient satanic aroma as well as the more high-tech fire and brimstone hovering over Wall Street. “Monopoly in Hades” displays a devilish Gould arriving in a hell bisected by a railroad track, surrounded by slavish imps working for his various railroads and telegraph companies; this is “How the place will be run two years after Jay Gould’s arrival,” the reader is informed. Gould is depicted ghoulishly sitting atop a pile of stocks and bonds, skeletal victims in a closet behind him. Fellow Wall Street bad man Russell Sage is seated deferentially at his feet in a sketch characteristically titled “In the Robbers Den.”18

Not only in Harper’s Weekly and Puck, but in most of the leading magazines and newspapers read by upstanding burghers in the Gilded Age, Nast’s and Keppler’s demonic cast of characters were over and over again excommunicated from the legitimate world of business and public affairs. In theory any unscrupulous man of business might come under this moral censure. In the main the indicted tended to be habitués of the Street with a special craving for railroads.

The New York Times, even then the paper of record of the haute bourgeoisie, never tired of drawing a line in the sand to cordon off Wall Street’s untouchables; so it, too, in 1877 declared, “The Erie record of Mr. Jay Gould should have sufficed to banish him from decent business society. The perpetrators of the frauds…should have no place among reputable people. Whatever they touch they defile.” The Times couldn’t even abide Gould’s occasional acts of charity, headlining a report on his contribution of land to a church “Gould Soothes His Conscience.”¹⁹

Others, however, saw in cultural philanthropy a means of civilizing the savages among the nouveau riche. When the new Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors in 1880, its first director, Joseph Choate, mugwump reformer, corporate trial lawyer, and Brahmin cognoscente, delivered a fund-raising peroration aimed at the idling pools of money collecting around Wall Street and the railroads. Why not convert railroad shares and mining stock, he sublimely tutored his potential donors—“things which perish without the using, and which in the next financial panic shall surely shrivel like parched scrolls—into the glorified canvases of the world’s masters…. The rage of Wall Street is to hunt the philosopher’s stone, to convert all baser things into gold, which is but dross; but ours is the higher ambition to convert your useless gold into things of living beauty that shall be a joy to a whole people for a thousand years.” Some, like members of the Vanderbilt dynasty or railroad financier Henry Gurdon Marquand, were moved by such appeals, supplying a considerable portion of the museum’s early holdings in painting and the decorative arts out of their own private collections. Jay Gould, who counted Marquand among his many vanquished Wall Street foes, was not so easily swayed and his stinginess was duly noted.20

Jim Fisk played in a league of his own. On the occasion of Fisk’s death, not long after Tweed’s conviction, the Times exulted that the mighty had fallen: “Their wealth is gone…. Some of them are vagabonds on the face of the earth; others perish, in the bitter language of Swift, like poisoned rats in a hole…somehow or other…the sin of every man finds him out, and the divine laws are just in execution…” Godkin was less sanguine. He lamented that Fisk, the mountebank, had been struck down amid his “velvet and diamonds,” with his “gorgeous coach at the door” and a “dozen physicians round his bed and a hundred reporters outside”; instead, he should have died “in old clothes, and in penury and neglect” to serve as a warning rather than a model to all.²¹

Public rage was kept at the boil by egregious instances of reckless indifference and by shameless displays of wealth’s insolence. When, right in the middle of all the financial shenanigans involving the Erie, a train decoupled outside of Port Jervis, New Jersey, sending three cars into a ravine where forty passengers were incinerated, the outcry engulfed the railroad’s managers. After the 1873 panic left the country in deep depression, these overnight tycoons wantonly flaunted not only their ill-gotten gains but their déclassé coarseness. From a great altitude, Henry Adams dismissed Fisk as “coarse, noisy, boastful, ignorant; the type of a young butcher in appearance and mind”; Adams thought Fisk’s Wall Street operations a “gigantic side-splitting farce.” Posh dinner parties where cigars were rolled in $100 bills, where black pearls were stuffed into oysters, diamond bracelets served as party favors, and pet dogs leashed on diamond collars, were once, in the boom years following the war, thought amusing, if tasteless. As the tough times lingered, however, when Wall Streeters like Leonard Jerome and August Belmont tried dazzling the populace with teams of thoroughbreds, steam yachts, and private race courses, they were deemed crude and unfeeling. The sheer garishness of such exhibitions unleashed a torrent of sanctimonious judgment that often enough confused bad morals with bad manners.22

Fisk was emblematic of all that Godkin understood to be morally diseased in a licentious, vain, mammon-hungry, luxury-loving commercial culture. But the Nation editor drew back from schemes to confiscate and nationalize the railroads on behalf of farmers and hard-pressed businessmen. They were crazy notions, in Godkin’s eyes, and, by driving capital out of the United States, would prove worse than the illness they purported to cure. After all, he argued, people like Cooke may have been imprudent in their railroad promotions, but they were the same far-seeing, risk-taking people who made the development of the West possible. The only remedy, according to the dour Godkin, was a general raising of the level of public morality…and he wasn’t counting on it. “People are eager for money and as unscrupulous about the means of getting it.”

Godkin’s patrician fear of the “dangerous classes,” of the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics, left him in this cul-de-sac. He would in one breath excoriate scoundrels like Vanderbilt and Fisk; in the next he would defame their enemies as hypocrites consumed with envy; and then exhaling one final time he would conclude that after all Wall Street was just a scapegoat for what was a universal and unexceptional condition of business civilization, namely the hope for an advance in the value of property that everybody wanted. “Indeed, nothing in the way of moral distinctions is less plainly marked than the line which separates the Wall Street ‘operator’ from the great bulk of the community….”

The moral and political torment of the Brahmin intellectual was painful to watch. It was part of a more general conservative retrenchment that, staring into the face of popular anger, worried more about restricting the franchise than it did about business behavior it once considered scandalous. What people like Godkin didn’t like was the spirit behind popular songs like the following, sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”:

For Vanderbilt and Company, tis indeed a gilded age

But poverty increases, tis thus that tramps are made

Shall it be continued when the people’s votes are weighed

As we go marching on?

No. We’ll hang Jay Gould on a sour apple tree

And bring grief to the plotters of base monopoly

From the ghouls of booty we shall go free

As we go marching on.23

Skirting incendiary social anger while holding to a position of moral censure was a peculiarly upper-class dilemma. Other organs of public opinion that hardly spoke for the empowered classes were less self-righteous and less worried about the social consequences of criticizing Wall Street. Bankers particularly were marked men, violators of republican virtue. Not long after the war ended, calls to continue the issuing of federal greenbacks and for the coinage of silver swept rural America and reverberated in small towns and struggling industrial cities all across the country. It was an emotionally charged agitation that grew ever more heated. Soon silver became the emblem of economic freedom, gold the metal of slavery.

Silver and greenbacks, the currencies of the “little man” and the indebted entrepreneur, promised liberation from the “the money power,” the “bloated bondholders,” “the moneycrats,” and “the Wall Street sharks,” those “mere vermin” living off what others produced. Sentimental melodramas like Esau; or, The Banker’s Victim, set in rural Indiana, treated Wall Street bankers like usurious vultures devoid of human or patriotic sentiment. Hugh McCulloch, secretary of the treasury after the war, was labeled a “tool of Wall Street brokers and capitalists” by radical Republicans from the West. The depression of 1873 aggravated this social polarization. Merchant princes, financiers, and wealthy manufacturers were pledged to gold. Farmers, workingmen, and petty entrepreneurs swore fealty to silver and loathed the Wall Street usurer, a figure of the blackest infamy. An angry Texas congressman and one-time cabinet member of the Confederate government, John Reagan, decried the dire consequences of political corruption, claiming: “There were no beggars till the Vanderbilts and Stewarts, and Goulds and Scotts and Huntingtons and Fisks shaped the action of Congress and molded the purposes of government.” Ignatius Donnelly, an insurgent Republican congressman from Minnesota, laid open the barbaric logic of the “goldbugs.” Now that they’d succeeded in demonetizing silver in the “Crime of 73,” these “Wall Street misers” would next drive gold itself out of circulation, willfully bringing on the Dark Ages where only the usurer ruled.24

A flood of verbal invective supplemented the graphic artillery of Nast and Keppler. Beginning in the late 1870s, the volume of periodical literature and newspaper column inches devoted to Wall Street increased dramatically. Some of it connected the Street’s transgressions to the most dangerous social questions. The great railroad strike of 1877 ignited urban insurrections all over the country, led President Hayes to order federal troops into the streets, and created in its aftermath a frenzy of armory building in leading cities to prepare for any future such uprisings. Alarmist editorial opinion in papers like the Chicago Daily News didn’t only harp on the danger of anarchism. It severely condemned as well those like Vanderbilt and Gould “who have been running the railroads and have ruined the finest properties the world has known.” These railroad barons having found “nothing more to get out of stockholders and bondholders, they have commenced raiding not only the general public but their own employees.”

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper appealed to a less prepossessing middle-class reader, especially in small towns and villages, abashed and fascinated by the Street. Leslie’s Illustrated worried about how the Street was aggravating the “Great Labor Question” and emitted a sympathy for the downtrodden it normally avoided. “To make cheap railroad iron for the benefit of Rings and Speculators, while the producers are torn by the pangs of want…is not a spectacle likely to cement Labor in the bond which alone can hold the dependent links of the social chain unbroken.” To the editors, Wall Street was a kind of madhouse, mixing felonious pocket picking with chivalrously honest dealings, a “cauldron like to that of the witches in Macbeth,” where prudential norms were in permanent suspension.²⁵

The moral umbrage of the metropolitan media was echoed in the hinterlands. When Fisk’s desperado-like escapade to take over a competing railroad, the Albany-Susquehanna, led to an armed clash between hired thugs on both sides and a head-on collision on a desolate mountaintop, the militia was called in to restore order. The Albany Evening Times rejoiced in this victory of rural virtue over the “Money-bags, swagger and braggadocio, and eleven thousand dollar diamond pins.” The Springfield Republican declared that “nothing so audacious…in the way of swindling has ever been perpetrated in this country” as the interlocking of the Tweed and Erie rings.

Papers throughout the greenback-agrarian Midwest and South treated Vanderbilt like a blight on the land, as “profane, a dangerous monopolist, irreligious,” and exemplary of an eastern Sodom and Gomorrah lost in its worship of the golden calf. During the gold panic, the machinations of “the great gorilla of Wall Street, the gold-grabbing Gould,” and “the ring-tailed financial ourangoutang,” Jim Fisk, were followed in exquisite detail by papers in dozens of cities.

In the earthiness of the language, in the barbed references to “monopoly” and “the labor question” plebian reactions to Wall Street evinced a combativeness and an egalitarianism that Brahmin critics veered away from. From these more homely neighborhoods Vanderbilt received not only a volley of insults, but occasional threats on his life. Russell Sage, a Wall Street figure whose early fortune in street railways rested on the fathomless corruption of New York City government and whose reputation for mean-spirited selfishness rivaled Gould’s, was nearly blown to smithereens by a bomb planted at his office in the Old Arcade building opposite the Trinity Church graveyard.26

Moreover, middling Americans caught up in the struggle to survive and rise expressed a fear for their own moral health that elite critics like Godkin never entertained. Thus a cautionary children’s literature cropped up to draw the appropriate lessons. Story papers, read by strivers from the upwardly mobile working class, advised young men about “the folly of dabbling in stocks,” warning them with tales of forlorn young women left adrift in spinsterhood when their fiancées went under with Cooke. Stressing the “importance of habits in business,” the New York Ledger alerted its callow readers to beware heroes like Fisk or else they would trade moments of adolescent excitement for years of “suffering and anxiety.”

Fisk alone, or Gould alone, or even the whole gang taken together wasn’t the real problem, however. What the behavior of these men signaled for defenders of the old moral order was a disease of “modern skepticism” abroad in the land. It was a skepticism far more dangerous than that represented by modern science, the “skepticism of the laboratory and the naturalist’s closet.” Science at least possessed a pure heart. Denizens of Wall Street, however, had no fear of God. They mocked eternal truths. Speculation described not so much a profession or occupation as it did a state of spiritual jeopardy, a place where the monomania of money subverted all tradition and civilized inhibition. The speculator was a mystic of the dark arts of money; he unleashed an inner frenzy that threatened a general chaos. As the Herald unctuously proclaimed: “Society needs a general purification.” About this the nation’s spiritual guardians were in agreement.²⁸

FOR THE PRAETORIAN GUARD of American Protestantism, amassing mountains of wealth wasn’t at issue. Denominational leaders, especially among the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, whose congregations drew heavily from among the gilded rich, were theologically comfortable with the notion that the road to celestial peace could, perhaps even should, be paved with gold. Clergymen like Lyman Abbott and William Laurence, among many others, authored tracts on success that effortlessly allied God with mammon. Russell Conwell was a farm boy from Massachusetts and later a Baptist minister and founder of Temple University as an institution of educational as well as moral uplift for the children of the working classes. Conwell issued the most famous defense of this position. His “Acres of Diamonds” sermon, delivered in 1889 and six thousand more times over the course of the next quarter century and circulated nationally in printed form in vast numbers, made the case that not only was the opportunity to make a fortune open to all, but that striving to do that encouraged, like regular exercise, the muscular development of strong character, and that successful striving—harvesting those “acres of diamonds”—would redound to everyone’s benefit. In Conwell’s circular theology, rich men got rich thanks to their moral superiority, while their wealth counted as incontrovertible evidence of their moral preeminence. Official religion in America had no argument with business in general, and Conwell was hardly the only man of the cloth prepared to sanctify great wealth. But when it came to Wall Street, a note of ambivalence audibly disturbed this pious equanimity.29

Henry Ward Beecher was the country’s most celebrated and highly regarded religious orator and writer for thirty years, from the time he assumed his ministry at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn in 1847 until 1880. He was a showman whose sermonizing stagecraft even drew an audience of agnostics and atheists like Mark Twain. (Sinclair Lewis once described him as a “combination of St. Augustine, Barnum, and John Barrymore.”) His congregants were, by and large, well-to-do businessmen and their families. Beecher’s basic message was a pleasing one. Mainstream American Protestantism had for some time given up an older, refractory Calvinism with its grim sense of congenital sin, in favor of an ameliorative view of man that not only allowed the possibility of self-improvement but made moral room for enjoyment, even luxury. Beecher maintained a sanguine belief in progress, a reassuring conviction that the spirit of materialism and science was fundamentally benign and no threat to the moral order of things. He was a congenial sort, supremely self-confident, whose fatuous sermons confirmed the social prejudices of his rather complacent parishioners.

Like Nast, Beecher distrusted unions, feared immigrants, and was unrestrained in his denunciation of the 1877 railroad strikers. He was a champion of that new hero, the captain of industry. He could even go so far as to rationalize the itch for extravagant spending as long as it was devoted to beauty and the edification of the citizenry.

Still, Beecher recognized a certain disquiet among his parishioners. They harbored doubts about the cupidity and corner-cutting behavior they saw around them. Luxury, conspicuous waste, self-indulgent preoccupation with fashion left them vaguely anxious. So even while he defended business and enrolled in the school of social Darwinism, which justified its ruthless competitiveness, Beecher mirrored these underlying misgivings about the businessman’s single-minded pursuit of profits and property and his complicity in corrupt practices. Those too intensely eager to pile up possessions, who abandoned their responsibilities as stewards of wealth, were guilty souls and carriers of moral anarchy and social disorder. Wealth accumulated unjustly was “a canker, a rust, a fire, a curse.”30

Some Wall Streeters, J. P. Morgan most famously among them, were deeply pious or at least showed all the outward signs of piety. Morgan would leave his office now and then in midafternoon to pray and sing hymns in St. George’s Church. Others on the way to the Exchange would stop at Trinity or at a nearby Dutch Reformed church after a busy day to offer thanks for their winnings. Morgan and other financiers were generous with donations to build churches or support missionary work. Beecher and his fellow clerics were grateful, sometimes fawning, yet wary.

Jubilee Jim Fisk was a perfect foil for Beecher’s ambivalence, allowing free rein for the preacher’s moral high dudgeon without calling into question the fundamentals of a civilization resting on business. Indeed, ministers all over the country used Fisk as a negative exemplar of depravity. On the Sunday following the gold panic, sermonizers drew on Matthew 6—“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth”—for their text. Fisk’s rakish disregard for all propriety infuriated Beecher, who denounced him as “that supreme mountebank of fortune…absolutely devoid of moral sense as the desert of Sahara is of grass.” When Fisk died, Beecher sent him on his way with a eulogy as lush as a Nast cartoon, dismissing him as a “shameless, vicious criminal, abominable in his lusts.” On Vanderbilt’s passing, he found the Commodore utterly lacking in religious conscience. Foretelling Gould’s demise, he described him as “a great epitomized, circulating hell on earth, and when he dies, hell will groan—one more woe.” These people had gotten their riches through fraud, and, as another New York minister, William Van Doren, warned, echoing Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables, dishonest fortunes carried with them a curse that “sooner or later will break forth like leprosy.” Speculators were a breed apart, consigned to a moral gulag, sharply segregated by ministers of the cloth from true heroes of entrepreneurial self-reliance and hard work like Andrew Carnegie or Peter Cooper.

Beneath the fiery rhetoric, however, Beecher always maintained his social equipoise. So he was equally quick to point out that Wall Street was full of people resisting temptations their worst critics sometimes fell prey to. His sermon “The Deceitfulness of Riches” cautioned against the lures of excessive wealth, but duly observed, “There are men in Wall Street—Brokers and Bankers—who stand near to the heart of God, and who are pouring out their means in a way which gives evidence of a Christian manhood in them.” Moreover, Beecher, whose own fall from grace was front-page news for months when he was embarrassed by the exposure of his adulterous affair with a parishioner, was not averse to investing heavily in Gould’s transcontinental railroad ventures when “Mephistopheles” took control of the Union Pacific.31

Beecher was hardly the only one caught up in this ambivalence, hypocrisy even. Like many a secular thinker, the Reverend C. H. Hamlin, a Congregationalist minister, wrestled with the distinction between speculative investment and gambling. He decided it was a matter of the size of the risk: if very big and entailed no work, it was wicked and would lead straightaway to physical degeneration and addiction. Most Protestant thinkers agreed that there was something inherently dangerous, in a moral sense, about speculation. Beecher warned young men that “a Speculator on the exchange, and a Gambler at his table, follow one vocation only with different instruments…. Both burn with unhealthy excitement…they have a common distaste for labor…neither would scruple in any hour to set his whole being on the edge of ruin, and going over, to pull down, if possible, a hundred others….” However, critics of speculation, theologians among them, tended to steer clear of advising any form of public restraint. They feared violating the laws of the market, trusting to the working out of providential law to punish wrongdoers. Indeed, for some, like Baptist minister, George C. Lorimer, economic and divine law worked hand in hand; panics were a form of celestial wrath meted out to financial sinners.32

As the Gilded Age blazed on, the sight of urban squalor, armies of unemployed tramps, and violent uprisings like the 1877 railroad strike and the Haymarket bombing of 1886 pricked the social conscience of some Protestant intellectuals. They felt the urge to shake up the religious indolence of the mainstream. The Social Gospel movement was the outcome, and Washington Gladdens was among its most distinguished progenitors. In the year of Haymarket, Gladdens published a sermon entitled “The Three Dangers: Moral Aspects of Social Questions.” He targeted three sources of selfishness—drink, family disintegration, and gambling—for analysis and concluded that the last was by far the most dangerous. By gambling, however, he did not chiefly mean traditional forms of card and dice playing. The more insidious villain in his eyes was speculation, not, however, the mere holding of a piece of property in the hope of a rise in its value, which he thought legitimate and a good thing, even if touched by selfishness. He zeroed in instead on commercial transactions in which there was no real exchange of value, where the hope was in getting something for nothing. “Speculating in margins,” betting on the future value of stocks or commodities, was more precisely what he had in mind. This was “immeasurably worse” than gambling at a casino because it was far more dishonest. The speculator loaded the dice, and when the game was done, many more people were left injured or ruined. The big-time speculator “may be a pillar in the church; he may hob-knob with college presidents, and sit on commencement platforms…but he is a plunderer….” Gladdens had no patience with people who “hold up their hands with horror at the rantings of a few crazy communists, sit by and suck their thumbs while operations of this sort are going on.” He for one would challenge the inertia and passivity of the pulpit and work to extirpate this “evil genius of our civilization.”33

PROBING THIS “EVIL GENIUS” also became a preoccupation of the literary imagination. As a general rule, narrative art flowing out of the genteel tradition veered away from the world of work and commerce. Its sentimental predispositions kept it at home, where the drama of family life provided the raw material for novelists and short-story writers wrestling with the moral dilemmas of middle-class life. Indeed, this studied absence of the workshop, the office, and the countinghouse was what, in part, defined the tradition as genteel. Melville, Whitman, and a tiny handful of others had breached these borders even before the Civil War. Afterward, the rush to industrialize, the gaudy parade of unparalleled fortunes, and the explosive growth of great metropolitan centers, made business an irresistible subject of fictional representation for a growing number of writers.

The business novel was born in these years, but the concerns of those writing during the first two decades of the Gilded Age remained within the affective universe of the family and the soul of the morally challenged individual. For most of the nineteenth century, after all, the writer functioned as a kind of secular priest, a sermonizer, instructing and inspiring. Her or his language, plot design, and character development, even what was elided from the imagination, responded to the powerful undertow of the religious temperament and sensibility. Even when masked as satire, it was implicitly a didactic, hortatory literature, an admonishment directed at the Philistine enemy. Only beginning in the 1890s would the nitty-gritty worlds of the factory, farm, and office emerge in their own right as the central sites of the literary imagination shorn of their refractory religiosity. Nonetheless, even before then the shadow of business lengthened over the world of the parlor and the drawing room. No place cast a gloomier pall than Wall Street and its netherworld of financial speculation.

Several long-running plays on Broadway, staged consecutively through the 1870s and 1880s, catered to theatergoers’ fascination with the Street. The dialogue makes clear the playwrights assumed that audiences for these plays were familiar with the argot of the Street, that indeed a goodly portion probably worked there. The first of course was Twain’s Gilded Age, renamed Colonel Sellers to milk the public’s fondness for this incurably good-natured charlatan. The play made the most of the feverish excitement and ridiculous antics aroused by speculative fantasies one more outsized than the last. A second play, The Big Bonanza, opened a year later. Most of its plot was devoted to doings on the New York Stock Exchange. A light comedy intended to poke fun at the smug self-assurance of gentility, it probed the dilemma of a learned man, a professor in fact, who, on a dare, ventures into Wall Street under the mistaken impression that his brains and breeding are more than a match for business talent.

By the mid-1880s, the humor was fading. The Henrietta, produced in 1887, expressed a distinct anxiety about the power of financiers to dominate the business world from their headquarters in Wall Street. The playwright Bronson Howard applied the strictest Victorian moral code to the Street and found it in violation. A didactic piece of satire, it was enormously popular and was actually revived in 1913 and later made into a movie starring Douglas Fairbanks.

Howard frankly voiced his contempt: “I tell you Wall Street represents the fiercest kind of gambling in the world…. Wall Street is a thousand times deadlier than Monte Carlo….” And that’s just what the play harped on, portraying the Street as a maddening and demoralizing casino, so toxic it poisons the most intimate human affections. A father and son battle each other ferociously for control of the Henrietta Mining Company. The old man is a bull, his offspring a bear who seeks to ruin him. Both epitomize a “raw civilization and selfish society.” However, the son in particular is a lost soul. While a first-generation Wall Streeter like the father may be unconscionably ruthless, he’s still capable of generosity and genuine human emotions like grief; even his larceny is somehow more transparent and so more innocent. But the son is spiritually wasted, the degenerate outcome of idle wealth that “parades 5th Avenue in clothes and manners and dialect brought and borrowed from London, and that occupy their minds with clubs, clothes, and chorus girls….” It is, then, a play about decline; even Wall Street, the playwright seems to be telling his audience, was once less morally and psychologically bleak.

Because it was a Victorian melodrama, The Henrietta was full of sage advice, near catastrophes, and heavy-handed symbolism. So a younger son rescues his father from his brother’s diabolical financial assault; the evil one is punished with a heart attack and stares death in the face as a stock ticker behind him counts down what may be his last moments, remorselessly recording his downfall after his brief and terrible triumph over his father. Coldhearted to the end, his dying words mimic the nearby ticker: “seventy-one…seventy-eight…”

By the time of The Henrietta, the high hilarity of Colonel Sellers or even The Big Bonanza had cooled. Speculation, once a fleeting pastime mirroring a native incorrigibility, now seemed more the professional habit of a dangerous coterie practiced in a diseased locale.34

Broadway playwrights, even at their most didactic, were less lugubrious than novelists and short-story writers. The latter tended to hold the businessman in lower regard, no matter how much he might be respected by economic theorists and admired in the vernacular of popular culture. That disrespect was rooted in an artistic conflation of the generic businessman with the more specific traits, and specifically the more loathsome traits, of the financier and stock market manipulator. A very considerable portion of this literature was really about corrupt practices, much of it related to the buying and selling of stocks. Tales of bribery and blackmail and fraud associated with stock watering, false capitalizations, dishonest promotions, and criminal investment conspiracies betrayed a deep-running if unarticulated hostility to the speculative nature of business more generally.

Whether of high quality, or, more commonly, bombastic and stilted, this writing deployed the genus of the speculator as a stand-in for the broader family of injustices and iniquities that pockmarked the landscape of industrializing America. The indictment was broadly pitched, citing the multiple injuries of the speculator’s dark arts: pervasive insecurity, moral dissipation, lawbreaking, and preying upon legitimate business. The Wall Street operator inhabited a niche within that larger social ecology. He spread, like a virulent germ, a reckless and destructive spirit of wild risk taking and infected the wider world of business, leading it into unholy desires for extravagant gains without an equivalent input of honest hard work, diligence, and patient deliberation. He violated a cherished folk ethic inscribed in such hoary Franklinisms as “lying rides upon debt’s back” and “diligence is the mother of good luck.” In Edward Eggleston’s The Mystery of Metropolisville, towns are born and killed in a flash of “speculative madness” spread by railroad promoters full of religious cant and glib promises about the general welfare. Characters like Zedekiah Hampton in H. H. Boyesen’s A Daughter of the Philistines (1883) or “Uncle” Jerry Hallowell in Charles Dudley Warner’s A Little Journey in the World (1889) were caricatured speculators, sometimes bearing a telltale Semitic trait: savage, vulgar, and uncultured defilers of the quiet refinement and moral gravity these authors identified with the fading redolence of New England gentility.

Stories appearing in middle-brow magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Peterson’s, and Scribners were often maudlin and preachy. They focused on small-time financial scoundrels who placed their immortal souls in harms’ way. Novelists, including William Dean Howells and Mark Twain, as well as some now forgotten but once rather popular writers like Josiah G. Holland and J. W. DeForest, went after bigger game. With real-life Wall Street tycoons like Jay Cooke or Jay Gould hovering in the background or foreground of their fictions, these authors tracked not only the moral but the communal and political devastation such characters trailed in their wake.35

Josiah Holland was one of the creative editorial minds that made Scribner’s Magazine the chief competitor of Harper’s Monthly for the allegiance of the middle-class reader. His Sevenoaks: A Story of Today, was a potboiler, except that its social psychology managed greater complexity than usually found in the genre. Thanks to their cupidity and credulity, the people of Sevenoaks, a once sylvan mountain town, are complicit in their own victimization by the novel’s antihero, Robert Belcher. Belcher is a primordial capitalist whose local schemes and stock manipulations catapult him into the world of Wall Street and the Fifth Avenue nouveaux riche. His career track pinpoints Wall Street’s exact location within the moral geography of industrializing society, at least according to surveyors like Holland. Belcher treats actual enterprises, his railroads especially, like playthings, as trophies and as devices designed to achieve ends having nothing to do with their ostensible purposes. They are the means of his personal gain and social aggrandizement. In behaving this way he defiles an official morality that honors work and its products. Worse, he adopts the moniker “General” to celebrate his ascension. This is a kind of sacrilege in a country that still reveres the martial valor of the Civil War. Even more deplorable is the sad fact that the people of Sevenoaks at first take this masquerade seriously, cringing before Belcher’s apparent omnipotence.

Masquerade and deceit are at the heart of Belcher’s transgression. Not only is he indifferent to the underlying purposes of his industrial enterprises, his nefarious machinations are mainly devoted to concealing an original sin. It turns out that his wealth is founded on an ingenious mechanical invention he stole years earlier from an unsuspecting partner who ended up prematurely aged and driven insane by Belcher’s perfidy—here the tale parallels the rumored origins of Jay Gould’s own fortune, alleged to have come from his bilking of the senior partner in a tannery business who then went on to commit suicide. Ever since, Belcher has been busy covering up the deed, gilding his reputation with honorifics like “General” and armoring himself against possible attack through philanthropic acts, finally deciding, not coincidentally like Daniel Drew, to endow a theological seminary bearing his name. And Belcher is nothing if not cynical about the whole charade. He confides in his factotum from Wall Street:

Well, all our sort of fellows patronize something or other. They cheat a man out of his eye-teeth one day, and the next you hear of them endowing something or other or making a speech to a band of old women…. That’s the kind of thing I want…. I behold a vision. Close your eyes now, and let me paint it for you. I see the General—General Robert Belcher, the millionaire—in the aspect of a great public benefactor. He is dressed in black and sits upon a platform…. There is speech-making going on, and every speech makes an allusion to “our benefactor.”…The General bows. High old doctors of divinity press up to be introduced. They are all after more. They flatter the General; they coddle him…. They pretend to respect him: They defend him from all slanders…. I look into the Religious newspapers, and in one column I behold a curse on the stockjobbing of Wall Street, and in the next, the praise of the beneficence of General Robert Belcher…. I believe I’m pining for a theological seminary…. It’s a theological Seminary or nothing….36

In the end virtue triumphs. The people of Sevenoaks are restored to their senses. Belcher’s cheated partner, who through it all has borne his martyrdom without rancor, recovers his sanity as well as his property. A decorous Victorian universe, upstanding and demure, and in every way offended by Belcher’s flash and ostentation, is put right again. The whole arsenal of the genteel literary tradition—its sentimentality, moral righteousness, stereotypical plot devices, improbable coincidences, Natty Bumpo–like characters of virginal rural simplicity—are mobilized to slay something monstrous that may originate in the deep recesses of the human heart, but has found a nurturing habitat in Wall Street.

If Belcher was a recognizable hybrid of Gould and Drew, Honest John Vane recalled for readers all the ugly circumstances surrounding the Credit Mobilier scandal. The novel, published in 1875, was written by J. W. De Forest and was first serialized in the Atlantic just as all the Washington high-jinks surrounding the Union Pacific were being exposed to the light of day. De Forest had been a captain in the Union Army stationed in Louisiana. Honest John Vane, like all of his novels, decried the collapse of standards of public and private behavior that followed the high-mindedness of the war. De Forest hated New York particularly as the epitome of materialist decay and described its bourgeois patricians as “half Carthaginian and half Sybarite.”

The novel was an allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse, its hero falling from a state of quotidian decency and diligent effort to his destruction, driven there by the temptations of ease and wealth as well as by conspiratorial design. Vane starts out a self-made manufacturer of iceboxes. His fellow townsfolk, staunch Republicans all, hold him in high esteem and elect him to Congress. But there he falls into bad company, especially into the clutches of one Darius Dorman, a creature whose villainy is foretold by his shadowy occupation as a man of general business, a broker of deals. Dorman advises Honest John that once elected, “Don’t go into the war memories and the nigger worshipping; all these sentimental dodges are played out. Go into finance….” That’s the way, according to Dorman, “to make politics worth your while.” Once in Washington the lesson is reiterated by a veteran congressman, Simon Sharp, who confirms Dorman’s insight: “Capital will become your friend. And capital—ah, Mr. Vane, there’s the word! My very blood curdles when I think of the power and majesty of capital….” Sharp is a visionary who foresees that the whole land, its people and resources, “is the servant and I had almost said the creature, of capital…. Capital is to be, and already is, its ruler. Make capital your friend. Do something for it and secure its gratitude….”

Just before he succumbs, Honest John experiences a last prophetic insight. Watching the common corruption enveloping Congress, he senses that “this great Republic which brags of its freedom is tyrannized over by a few thousand capitalists and jobbers….” But then the tidal wave of stock deals and fraudulent subsidies washes over him, abetted by the covetousness and social ambition of his wife, Olympia. Casting his bought-and-paid-for vote for “the Great Subfluvial Tunnel,” “Honest John Vane” is lost in a sinkhole of public depravity and private greed.37

Satire took the place of this rather dreary moralizing in The Gilded Age. With “Colonel” Sellers (like “General” Belcher’s, the “Colonel’s” title was self-appointed), Twain and Warner invented a character of native charm, a walking, talking catalogue of homespun American foibles. His capacity for gargantuan exaggeration was mated to a remarkable faith in his most preposterous schemes. His bombast, softened by the quaint accents of a southern courtesy already the butt of northern condescension and ridicule, made him laughable but not repulsive. The pure enthusiasm with which he managed to envision luxury amid the most miserable discomfort mirrored perfectly the perverse optimism, the ingenuous ardor, and zeal that seemed to mark the national character.

Underneath the belly laughs and intoxicating silliness, however, the novel still pivoted around the moral distinction between the industry and perseverance of Phillip Starling, a New England engineer and avatar of science and due diligence, and the scams and speculations of men far more venial than the “Colonel,” men of power and wealth busy pilfering the public purse. What’s being satirized has little to do with industrialization per se, but rather treats large undertakings like railroads as the newest frontier on which get exercised the devilish talents of the plunger and his confederates. The whole panoply of business-political chicanery is on display: larcenous promotions of railroads and railroad construction, real estate jobbery, mulcting of federal agencies, conspiracies to “corner” the market, and the bribing of legislators with shares of stock. Congress is a caricatured Stock Market: votes are traded, lobbyists resemble stock promoters, congressmen behave like brokers hiving into factions of bulls and bears battling for federal booty. The “Colonel” feels at home here, while Phillip Starling finds Washington “the maddest Vanity Fair one could conceive….”

Casualties pile up as the novel rolls along. Democracy is disgraced, workmen left unpaid and abandoned to their fate, intimate feelings among lovers, family, and neighbors end up prostituted or silenced. Twain wanted Sellers to fail in his wacky schemes because, he explained, “It would be clearly a crime against society to make him a ‘success’ in life, since this would be to add another Jay Gould to the world’s burdens.”

In real life, Twain was his own “Colonel” Sellers. He was an incurable speculator and had, it seems, a special knack for failure. At one time or another he took fliers on timber and mining claims, a steam pulley, a new means of marine telegraphy, an engraving process, some invention vaguely like a television, a self-adjusting vest strap, and the Poise compositor, on which he managed to lose $200,000. His mordant tale The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg was a metaphor for his own credulity and ruin in the panic of 1893. When he wasn’t falling prey to his own credulousness, however, Twain trained a gimlet eye on the “great game” that preoccupied a whole society whose motto might well have been: “Mundus vult decipi—ergo decipitatur” (The world wants to be deceived, let it therefore be deceived). His coruscating wit captured the essence of the era’s crony capitalism: “I think I can say with pride that we have legisla tures that bring higher prices than any in the world.” He once described a mine as “a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.” That neatly summed up his attitude about Wall Street.38

While Twain in many ways stood outside the “genteel tradition,” William Dean Howells straddled it. For a time he accepted the social Darwinian defense of market society. Those certitudes began to crumble with the panic and depression of 1873, and were effectively destroyed by the sentencing to execution of the Haymarket anarchists which outraged his sense of fairness. Influenced variously by Leo Tolstoy, the primitive communalism of the Shakers, Henry George’s single-tax panacea, and by the liberal theologian W. D. P. Bliss, he became a convert to the Social Gospel that supplied an ideological fix for his ambivalence. Notwithstanding his lingering fondness for the code of New England gentility, in novels like The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells discarded much of its sentimentality and evasive reticence when it came to facing up to the social ugliness of the Gilded Age.

In Howells’s imagination, the stock market and speculation more generally played the role of the snake in the garden, poisoning the well of the Protestant work ethic, weakening its precious character armor of ascetic self-discipline, and restraining modesty. Silas Lapham falls because he can’t resist its temptations. Speculation, for Silas, is a kind of initiation rite into the netherworld of modern capitalism, a place where he sheds his old identity as a family farmer and miner and manufacturer of paint. Only after heavy losses and in desperation does he rediscover the merits of an ancient prohibition and thereby recover himself: “I always felt the way I said about—that it wasn’t any better than gambling and I says so now….”³⁹

Revelatory experiences of such saving grace were neither common nor easy to come by, however. As Howells notes in A Hazard of New Fortunes, the successful speculator and financier represented “the ideal and ambition of most Americans.” What went on in Wall Street was like some withering disease. If Silas was unwittingly seduced, Jacob Dryfoos, the tragic patriarch of Hazard, is fully attuned to “the game,” subscribes to the harsh orthodoxy that likens business and life itself to an unforgiving game of chance, and in particular epitomizes an ethos native to Wall Street that honors money, “especially money that had been won suddenly and in large sums.”

Dryfoos, not unlike Silas, started out as a upright, public-spirited, conservative family farmer, a forbidding but devoted husband and father, a practical-minded man of time-tested, rock-solid conviction, “crude but genuine.” Drawn away, despite his earnest resistance, by the lure of neighborhood land and oil speculations, he changes. He becomes a kind of vampire, sucking the poetry out of life, measuring everything, in his cold-eyed, merciless way, by its rate of return, including even the fledgling magazine he invests in to give his wayward son something to occupy his time and so make of him something more like himself and less like the womanish preacher or literary scribbler Jacob fears he may otherwise become. Utterly captivated by the Wall Street spirit of things, he lets his son, Conrad, feel his contempt for the magazine’s meager first issue’s earnings: “I made that much in half a day…. I see it made in half a minute in Wall Street sometimes.”

Here was the true hazard of new fortunes as Jacob “came where he could watch his money breed more money and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour of luck than the toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year. He called it speculation, stocks, ‘the Street,’ and his pride, his faith in himself, mounted with his luck.” Here is where Dryfoos suffers an “atrophy of the generous instincts.” Here on the Street an alchemy is preformed. Traits once heralded as the businessman’s virtues are transmuted into their opposite; on the Street “sagacity” becomes “suspiciousness,” “caution” turns into “meanness,” “courage” into “ferocity.” Dryfoos stares into an abyss devoid of all moral meaning: “When he broke down and cried for the hardworking, wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself. He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizenship…the money he had already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love in him….” For wealth earned “painfully, slowly, and in little amounts he had only pity and contempt.” Groveling before those on the Street who’d accumulated even more than he, he harbored a secret resentment and “respected not them, but their money.”

Howells himself draws back from the edge of this precipice. The novel ends on a note of Christian hope about the future, about the possibility of class reconciliation and moral redemption. It is the sound of the author’s ambivalence, and it has a reedy, hollow ring. Jacob’s son, Conrad, who has enlisted in the ranks of the Social Gospel movement, is killed in a vain attempt to head off a violent clash of striking streetcar workers and the police. Ravaged by anger, guilt, and remorse, yet out of joint with his son’s callow mission of peace, Jacob dimly recognizes the high cost his Wall Street addiction has exacted but is left powerless to do anything about it. The reader senses a tug-of-war between Howell’s lingering sentimental piety and a brooding, starker foreknowledge of some gathering storm.

Among the novel’s socially diverse gallery of memorable characters, there is one who gives voice to this premonition. Lindau is an embittered, aging German immigrant—probably a refugee of the 1848 revolution—who is convinced to write for the magazine by its new editor, Basil March, himself a refugee from Brahmin Boston. A cantankerous revolutionary, dogmatic in disposition, Lindau is hardly shy about expressing his hatred for the rich. He lost a hand fighting for the Union, and he confides in Basil the bitter significance of that sacrifice in light of all that’s happened since the war: “Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine slave drivers and mill serf owners? No, I gave it to the slave; the slave—Ha. Ha. Ha.—whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold.” Basil is too insular, still too hooked on the rarefied air of the genteel drawing room, to take this indictment seriously, dismissing it as “tasteless” at worst, or as a harmless rhetorical effusion at best. But by the time of the story’s denouement, when Lindau’s leg is amputated in the same savage violence that killed Conrad, the old man’s foreboding that the overbearing power of Wall Street and the trusts will destroy any semblance of a society in which people reap their just rewards, shadows Basil. It darkens the mood of pious hope to which he clings. Reluctantly, he’s driven to the dreariest prognosis: “And so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and when we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame and look back over the way we’ve come…I don’t think the prospect can be pleasing.”40

A Hazard of New Fortunes was published in 1890. Wall Street was just then poised to embark on a wholly new phase of its career. Lindau spied it through the prism of his doctrinaire rigidity. The Street, once the frontier terrain of financial badmen, was about to become the organizing center of the nation’s industrial economy. Howells’s novel grappled with the moral psychology that drove men like Gould and Vanderbilt, Dryfoos-like figures writ large. A Hazard of New Fortunes was not the final word but certainly the most nuanced indictment of that species imagined from the standpoint of genteel America and just as their swashbuckling days were drawing to a close.

The new men of Wall Street, the Morgan men, promised to restore order and rationality to the Street and to the economy over which they presided in a kind of benevolent dictatorship. The gravitas of the Street would achieve a density earlier generations of Americans could never have anticipated. It became the magnetic center of the country’s political and social tensions, an abiding cultural preoccupation where once it had been a curiosity, although one growing curiouser and curiouser. Some would welcome and others abhor the new order. And everybody was forced to wrestle anew with questions of social hierarchy, political power, and even such recondite matters as fate and moral action.