Each time the sport of horse racing attempted to participate in the good feelings and free-flowing money that marked the lives of at least the elite class during the supposedly carefree Gay Nineties, it took a series of unsettling blows. Racing continued to expand beyond all expectations, with more than three hundred racetracks operating throughout the United States, six in the region of New York. This vast expansion brought a proliferation of problems, not the least of these the spread of racetrack gambling into the urban poolrooms that the working and the lowest economic classes patronized.
Poolrooms (i.e., betting shops) made offtrack wagering possible, offering direct competition with the racetracks. One way in which racetracks attempted to fight the poolrooms was by forbidding the use of the telegraph on track grounds. The intention was to block the transmission of race results to the betting shops, with the hope of putting them out of business. Track owners and operators were painfully cognizant that the poolrooms “enabled people to bet without attending the races, and, hence, drew largely from the attendance at the track,” as the Spirit of the Times noted. Monmouth Park in New Jersey did not stop at banning the telegraph. This track formulated a plan to maintain secrecy on the names of entered horses until twenty minutes prior to each race, when the track would distribute printed slips of paper with this information. As the Spirit reported in 1890: “The effect was that no one … at noon had any idea of what was going to start. Added to this, the police made a raid on the pool rooms in town, and the city business was at a standstill. The effect of this was the enormous attendance present. People could not back the horses in town and were compelled to go to the track.”1
More worrisome to the sport than the competition these poolrooms presented was the magnet they became in drawing the attention of social reformers. One thing led to another. In a short time, reformers began to expand their critical look beyond the poolrooms to the entire sport of horse racing. In their minds, they appeared unable to separate the racetracks from the offtrack shops that functioned like parasites feeding off the sport. A groundswell of antiracing reform began building momentum in a number of states; although the movement did not evolve as a cohesive effort under a national organization, it did affect racing on a nationwide scale.
The social concern over poolrooms simmered at low decibels during the 1890s, but the concern was, indeed, increasing. Poolrooms represented only a portion of gambling options; nonetheless, the manner in which all gambling operated openly on city streets alarmed a great many middle-class citizens. According to one account about Chicago: “Clark Street was the scene of every form of gambling from galloping dominoes to whizzing roulette wheels. Leather-lunged barkers were posted along the sidewalks at strategic points urging passers-by to enter and try their luck in the glittering palaces of chance that lined the hectic thoroughfare. Poolrooms, conducted by a well-known syndicate, … were prominent units in this gambling layout. In these rooms, bets could be made on races run at other points in addition to Chicago.”2
Lexington and Louisville also were home to a number of poolrooms. A Fayette County grand jury began an investigation of local poolrooms in 1892, with the judge instructing the jury that he did not intend to ignore “the great vice.” The intensity of such concern escalated into the early twentieth century in Lexington and included allegations of the city police looking the other way, allowing the poolrooms to operate outside the law. The telegraph enabled the poolrooms in Lexington to offer betting on races in such places as New York and Chicago. “Young Men Ruined by Pool Rooms,” proclaimed a headline in a Lexington newspaper in 1905, but not until 1909 did the Kentucky Court of Appeals put the betting shops out of business by ruling that operators of poolrooms could be held liable for breaking the law.3
Social concern over poolrooms merely constituted the warm-up to antiracing legislation, however. Early in the twentieth century, when Progressive Era reforms came into vogue, state legislative wallop would pack authoritative power into the escalating outcry to ban all Thoroughbred racing—everywhere. In the spirit leading up to those reforms, middle-class concern about the state of society was blaming a good number of the nation’s moral ills on gambling as well as on alcohol, prostitution, and the stranglehold big business had on American progress.
America’s middle class saw a multitude of reasons to feel threatened and feel inspired to initiate or at least plead for social and economic reform. As an increasing number of small businesses failed during the financial panic that prevailed from 1893 until 1897, the middle class began to look like an endangered stratum of American society. Small, family-owned businesses no longer could compete with the large corporations and conglomerates of the industrialists. Demographic changes had brought increasing numbers of Americans to the cities, but what they found there was crime, violent labor strikes, and waves of immigrants arriving from Eastern European countries to fill the expanding needs of the labor force. Middle-class Americans could turn in one direction and observe the upper classes living hedonistic lifestyles of great excess, lifestyles out of reach of most Americans. Or they could turn in the other direction and watch with horror the swelling urban slums wrought with crime, gambling, prostitution, and alcoholism. Reformminded persons of the middle class sought to clean up these moral ills affecting society’s lowest classes—and, in doing so, threatened the interests of society’s wealthiest class, at least when it came to its favorite sport, horse racing.4
This was not to say that Lexington wholeheartedly embraced the Progressive Era reform movement, at least not in the beginning. City authorities sparred with the poolroom operators, certainly. However, the poolroom crusade turned out to be little more than window dressing. Lexington remained in 1901 where it had lingered for some time: a city “cursed with disease, high mortality rates, air pollution, poor drinking water, a wasteful taxation system, and an overall disregard for the city charter,” as James Duane Bolin has written.5
Considering these ills, Lexington might have seemed a prime candidate for Progressive reform. Still, even at the turn of the century, the city remained under the lingering spell of a former political machine boss, Dennis Mulligan. The legacy of his iron rule of graft and spoils was a political system that operated much the same as before he had lost his control of municipal politics twenty years earlier. Lexington had too much catching up to accomplish by the dawn of the new century.6
A new political boss moved in to fill the vacuum—and, in a new wrinkle, Bluegrass landowners controlled this man’s politics. This was William Frederick “Billy” Klair, whose political acuity Bolin compares to “an assertive and oppressive paternalism that secured power for the elite” class of the old planter oligarchy. Bolin cites Malcolm Jewell and Everett Cunningham, who argued that the early Progressive reform movement had little effect on Kentucky owing to the conservative political alignments of railroad, coal-mining, liquor, and racetrack interests with “Bluegrass farmers and political leaders of both parties[, which] retarded progressive reforms.” One could suggest that, in the eyes of this group, reform was a good thing as long as it eliminated the competition the poolrooms presented to their well-loved Kentucky Association racetrack, but a bad thing if it affected the ruling power of this elite class in any way. When the Progressive movement gathered momentum and took aim at the sport of horse racing nationwide, Bluegrass horse breeders no longer stood on the side of social reform. Under a headline that read “Heavy Blow to Kentucky,” the Lexington Leader published a major story in 1908 that stated: “The passing of the [New York] anti-race track betting bills has caused gloom…. The situation is indeed dark in Kentucky, where the breeding of thoroughbreds is perhaps the greatest industry in the State.”7
Some years before this story appeared in Lexington, racing’s leaders in New York had sensed the increasing desire of reformers to wipe out the sport. The Spirit of the Times attempted to mediate, reminding everyone of the huge fortunes invested in the breeding of racehorses. It intoned: “These valuable sports should not be subjected to injury by the resurrection of some old Puritanical blue law.” However, the final word on this would not be the province of the Spirit. It would rest with the rising reform sentiment and proreform legislators.
New York’s racing patrons were only too familiar with the cycles of repression and expansion as they had long occurred in the constant tug-of-war between reformers and sportsmen in that state. The founders of Jerome Park must have felt the threat of reform at their flanks when they opened their swank new racecourse in 1866, for they had made efforts from the start to placate those who opposed horse racing. Men like Jerome, Belmont, and Travers thought they would accomplish this by lending their social approval and cachet to the sport, thereby giving it the appearance of wholesomeness.
Turf, Field and Farm made the argument in 1868 that the elite status of turf sports lent a wholesome character to racing, framing its argument by likening the sport in America to the sport of kings in England and Europe. “In the Old World it is smiled upon by kings, queens and emperors,” it stated, “and in the New World it is patronized by wealth and intelligence, as well as keenly enjoyed by the masses. In view of these facts it is about time that the fanatics ceased to denounce the race course as an arena for the growth of rowdyism and obscenity.” As periodicals of that era were fond of pointing out, the display of fashionable attire at Jerome Park might even have the beneficial effect of influencing the lower classes, thereby inspiring the masses to self-improvement. As Turf, Field and Farm wrote: “The imperial goddess of fashion sends forth her edicts from the Club Stand and Club House of Jerome Park; and fashion, in our country, graduates from the highest social circles to the lowest.”8
By 1890, racing had slipped beyond the exclusive control of society leaders and any semblance of order that their social cachet could lend. The sport’s expansion even led to angst among large numbers of its most elite participants. They lamented the passing of previous decades, when, at least as they recalled it, horse racing was dedicated to pure sport and not to crass commercialism. As events had evolved, the sport’s rapid expansion had given rise to a three-headed monster: the number of racetracks proliferated; the tracks felt the pressure of competition and so raised purses to attract the numbers of horses needed to fill their programs; and, consequently, the tracks increasingly depended on public admission fees and on bookmakers to produce the money for these purses and other operating expenses. Previously, horse owners had provided these funds through their private club memberships and fees paid for nominating their horses to run in races. By 1890, the sport’s commercial turn had become apparent to everyone. This trend would only increase in subsequent years.
The first bookmaker was said to have begun business in Philadelphia in 1866, taking bets on cricket, rowing, and racing. Throughout the next thirty years, the importance of bookmakers to racetracks had become obvious to everyone. Racetrack expenses had grown to the point that operators could not manage financially without the operating fees they charged bookmakers. Each bookmaker paid a daily licensing fee to the track, generally $100. With a racecourse in a major city having perhaps sixty to one hundred bookmakers operating during a single day’s racing, the money to be gleaned from licensing fees spoke powerfully to the owners of racetracks. Need and greed became the twin devils manipulating this synergy between bookmakers and racecourses. People had long debated the pros and cons of seeing the bookmakers (and, before them, the ontrack auction pool sellers) ascend to a position of necessity in racing. “The racing code encourages speculation by legalized betting,” noted Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. “And for what? It is safe to say, to gratify the depraved appetites of about one hundred and fifty men of questionable character. Watch at Saratoga, or Jerome Park, where you please, the crowd that gathers around the pool stand. Meeting after meeting the faces are the same. Those who bid in the pools are professional gamblers. A gentleman of respectable business connections does not like to be seen in that wrangling crowd.”9
Accompanying the proliferation of bookmakers and professional gamblers was the chicanery that goes hand in hand with the siren call of the big money to be won gambling, including horse drugging, race fixing, and the bribing of jockeys. “Legalized betting encourages promiscuous gambling; and promiscuous gambling excites passion, and points the way to fraud,” opined Harper’s. Fraudulent practices became known through articles published in newspapers and the sporting press. Because of this reportage, racing’s audience certainly was aware of what was transpiring. Suspicion about the honesty of jockeys and horsemen became widespread. The sport was acquiring a poor reputation as a result of dishonest practices. Northeastern racing no longer had the aura of sport for sport’s sake that Belmont and Jerome originally had brought to the game.10
As far south as New Orleans, fraud and commercialism had changed the sport. Writing about New Orleans, Dale Somers cites bookmaking as bearing only part of the responsibility for this change. “Racing’s integrity declined in large part because control of the sport shifted from the planter aristocracy to professional sportsmen,” he argues. One could have said the same about the Northeast, by substituting “Belmont et al.” for “planter aristocracy.”11
An internecine gambling war also loomed. Bookmakers and the major gamblers resisted the primitive pari-mutuel machines that Pierre Lorillard had brought over to the United States from France in 1871, when the machines were known as Paris Mutuel Pools (hence the Americanization of the term intopari-mutuelbetting). Pari-mutuel machines allowed for a minimum $5 wager when a small number of them first appeared in North America; they held the potential to appeal to patrons who could not afford the large wagers that bookmakers took. The bookmakers, in turn, had displaced the auction pools that had been the earlier form of racetrack betting. And now the bookmakers saw the machines as cutting in on their action. Heavy gamblers like Mike Dwyer detested the machines because gamblers using them could not manipulate the odds, as they could when attempting to outwit the bookmakers. No one could agree on what was best for the sport. Truthfully, few cared.12
Racetracks also fought among themselves. Different groups of tracks banded together into various “turf associations” with one association sometimes prohibiting the entry of horses that had raced at another. Moreover, some tracks failed to honor the rulings of other tracks, ignoring or overlooking official decisions that would have denied participation anywhere to an owner, trainer, or jockey for an infraction of the rules at the track where the ruling originated. Consequently, these rulings lacked the official backing that would have made them universally effective. The banned offenders simply moved their action to whatever racetrack would take them in.
Here, again, Kentucky racing found itself at odds with the sport in New York. On one occasion, when the New York tracks failed to reciprocally honor a ruling that barred two jockeys, this action struck the president of the Louisville Jockey Club, Colonel Clark, as a slap in the face. Benjamin Bruce used the pages of his Kentucky Livestock Record to lambaste the New York decision as a contemptible insult to Kentucky: “The West [i.e., Kentucky] has done everything in her power to conciliate the East, has tried to have a uniform set of rules and even gone so far as to meet the East on their ground, but with no good result.” The regional tension that had been so apparent in the controversy over Asteroid and Kentucky never had completely dissipated. Periodically, the tension bubbled to the surface of the slowly stewing pot, and the sporting press occasionally took notice.13
The real headlinemakers were the high-rolling gamblers whose mercurial adventures at the racetracks went on full public display for newspaper readers. The great number of column inches devoted to their stories sometimes implied a suspicion of race fixing, which, in turn, drew the attention of social reformers. John Wayne “Bet a Million” Gates was one of the sport’s new arrivals during the Gilded Age. He started out selling barbed wire in the West and visiting gambling palaces in the cattle towns where he sold his product. Eventually, he made his way east to Wall Street. One biographer wrote: “In an age of unprecedented industrial expansion, fantastic risk taking, ruthless exploitation, Gates was the most daring builder, the biggest gambler, the sharpest promoter of them all. He challenged the kings of the wheat pits, the lords of steel, the barons of mining and railroading, the oil and financial rules in his heedless, slashing career.” According to another biographer: “For sheer daring and raw nerve none of them [i.e., the high rollers on the turf] could hold a candle to Gates.” One story held that, on one occasion, he won at least $2 million on a single race. Most Americans knew that he died broke.14
Gates and Belmont stood in complete opposition when it came to their purposes for pursuing the sport of racing. Belmont believed that Gates and the excessive amounts of money he wagered tainted the reputation of the turf. Interestingly, Corrigan, of Chicago’s Hawthorne Park, liked Gates and forwarded tips on his horses to him. Men like Gates received their inside information in various ways, among them, pressing jockeys for information on their mounts. “Many times scandals brewed from these paddock conferences between the rider and some big operator,” noted the Thoroughbred Record. “For many years heavy bettors, like John W. Gates, Jesse Lewisohn, Dave Gideon, Dr. J. Grant Lyman, Mattie Corbett and the late George E. Smith (“Pittsburg Phil”) could be seen buttonholing jockeys five minutes before the boys had mounted…. Hereafter the only persons who will be permitted to talk with the jockeys are the owner of the horse to be ridden, the trainers and the jockeys’ guardians.”15
By 1890, Pierre Lorillard had decided that he had seen more than he cared to of warring racetracks, dishonesty in the sport, and the increasingly critical look that social reformers were casting toward horse racing. He organized a dinner in New York, inviting twenty-four prominent patrons of the turf to hear his plea for organizing the sport. The outcome was their agreement to form a national board, beginning in 1891, for the purpose of reforming the sport. Generally, their club has been known as the Board of Control. Originally, Lorillard did not invite the Dwyer brothers despite the fact that they controlled the Brooklyn Jockey Club and two tracks in New Jersey. This appeared as a social slight and, perhaps, also an acknowledgment that the Dwyers were business competitors, operating their tracks in direct opposition to Jerome Park, the Coney Island Jockey Club at Sheepshead Bay, and Morris Park, tracks all owned and operated by New York’s elite class of turfmen. Later, Lorillard changed his mind. He invited Phil Dwyer to serve on the board of directors of this “national” club. The name of the group actually was misleading, for it was not at all national; its seven members represented only the four major racing associations of the East—Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, Monmouth Park, and Westchester—plus three racing stables, including that of John Hunter. Bluegrass Kentucky had not been included in this exclusive group.16
Kentuckians undoubtedly resented this latest insult to the state’s standing in the sport, but they already were dealing with a more devastating problem. A mysterious and deadly disease had crept into the emerald fields of the Bluegrass during the winter of 1890. Mares had begun aborting their unborn foals at an alarming rate, and no horseman, no matter how deep his equine knowledge, knew the origin of this malady. Many wondered whether a phenomenally warm and wet January might be the cause.17
The foals were intended to be the cash crop either that season, when they were weanlings, or the next, when they were yearlings. The situation began to look dire: the “slipping disease,” as people began calling these mysterious stillbirths, was threatening to rob the Bluegrass of its young racehorse prospects. One estimate put the loss as high as 75 percent of unborn foals. Mares of all breeds, but most importantly Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds, were losing their embryos. The telltale sign of miscarriage was generally the same everywhere: a small, bloody mass left on the ground or in the stall of a broodmare. The Spirit of the Times reported to its nationwide audience that Kentucky weanlings were in short supply from the 1890 crop, owing to the slipping malady. The news coming out of Kentucky was not good. The Bluegrass region had long been haunted by the notorious violence and lawlessness and now appeared tainted with unidentified germs.18
The disease returned the following winter and spring foaling season of 1891. Once again, horsemen wondered whether the weather might have had something to do with it, for 1891 had begun with a phenomenally warm January, accompanied by rapidly thawing ground. But no one really knew what the source of the problem was. Bluegrass breeders knew only that their pocketbooks would be affected. They feared that the news reports of this mysterious disease killing off the second foal crop in as many years could prove nearly as devastating as the actual loss of foals. They mounted a quick attempt at damage control, informing the Spirit of the Times that “rumors” of another year of the slipping disease were highly exaggerated. Whatever was killing the horses in Kentucky was not helping sell the Bluegrass as a desirable location for breeding farms. The impact of the foal disease threatened to steer potential investors away. Bluegrass breeders struggled with the devastating loss to their foal crops.
At precisely this time when the Bluegrass needed a boost either from public relations or development, help appeared on the horizon. The Silver Fox of Wall Street, James R. Keene, returned to horse racing in 1891. The man who had won the 1879 Belmont Stakes with Spendthrift and then sent Foxhall on a successful mission to France in 1881 was back in the sport. Americans had not forgotten his success a decade earlier when Foxhall become the first American horse to win France’s greatest race, the Grand Prix de Paris, followed a year later with a victory in the Ascot Gold Cup, the renowned English race.
Keene epitomized the sort of wealthy man whose spectacular rise and mercurial fall on Wall Street fascinated America’s financially strapped middle class. His story represented an amazing rags-to-riches tale. He had recovered from financial ruin and was spending heavily on horses with a newly made fortune. The ramifications for Bluegrass Kentucky were huge and came just in time to offset the devastation that the slipping disease had inflicted on the region.
The main residence at Castleton Farm in Lexington. James R. Keene purchased Castleton but visited the farm only twice. He typified the absentee owner, representing a class of wealthy men who began buying up horse-farm property in the Bluegrass late in the nineteenth century. (Ford Photo Album Collection, 1890–1904, KLGSC-FORD-77.01.007, Special Collections, University of Louisville.)
Keene had reentered the turf world by purchasing Brookdale Farm in Red Bank, New Jersey, on the death of the farm’s founder, David Dunham Withers. But, before long, he, like Belmont, turned his attention to Lexington. In 1892, seven years following Belmont’s move to Kentucky, he bought 600 acres of farmland that had once belonged to the Breckinridge family estate, Cabell’s Dale. Keene called his new place Castleton Farm. He would enlarge the farm to 1,070 acres before selling it to another New Yorker, David M. Look, in 1911.19
Keene’s development of Castleton Farm into the premier powerhouse of racing was a milestone along the path toward the Bluegrass regaining its singular renown. Americans were well aware of his financial ruin in 1884, which led to his hiatus from racing. He had attempted to corner the wheat market, pouring his entire fortune into that effort. Jay Gould, his bitter rival, had countered that action by ordering his agents to glut the market. This ruined Keene, sending him out of New York via that literal boxcar that Gould had wished on him. Edward L. Bowen quotes an account of Keene’s radically altered lifestyle following his financial ruin: “I used to see him going to and from his little cottage in the country because he was, like myself, too poor to live in the city. I was poor, too, but I could still afford to have my wife’s phaeton meet me at the station. Not so with Keene. He walked from the station to his house. I have seen him in the dead of winter struggling through the snow drifts, with his head lowered and his body bent, walking against the wind, a dismal figure on the chill landscape.”20
Keene bent his body into the wind until he climbed back to the top. He engineered some major business coups for the banker J. P. Morgan and grew rich again himself. The latter had hired him in 1890 to wrest control of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Edward Henry Harriman. Keene accomplished the job by means of stock manipulation. He had always demonstrated extraordinary perception and cunning on Wall Street, and he was at his best in this instance. “Keene was a master at buying cheap, then manipulating share prices upward” until the public caught on and charged in afterward, following his lead, according to Bowen, who quotes the English writer on turf matters Edward Moorhouse: “He did not bet on fluctuations. He made them.” Returning to racing, Keene imported forty-four English mares and with his son, Foxhall Keene, paid $3,000 for a son of the Kentucky stallion Himyar. The colt’s name was Domino. That name would become synonymous with speed on the racetrack—and with Bluegrass Kentucky. Domino’s influence on the breed as a stallion would be immeasurable.21
Keene could not have returned to Thoroughbred racing in a more spectacular way than with Domino. The horse was a wonder on the track, for he remained undefeated at age two, setting an earnings record that stood intact for thirty-eight years. Domino’s life story could have served as illustrative of the struggles of Bluegrass horse farming and its increasing dependence on New York racing after the Civil War. Domino’s breeder, Major Barak G. Thomas, a former Confederate, had returned from the war financially ruined, discovering that, while he was away, his assets had been sold to cover his debts. Practically all he had left was a yearling Thoroughbred filly, a daughter of Lexington named Hira. She raced with moderate success in Kentucky. Major Thomas also traded some land he owned in Alabama for a mare named Dixie, who developed into a significant broodmare, thereby supplementing the major’s income. In the beginning, Thomas did not rely on breeding horses for his sole financial support; among other endeavors, he was the general manager of the Lexington Observer and Reporter. But, by 1877, when he had regained sufficient financial strength to purchase 250 acres on Russell Cave Pike, he did turn the majority of his attention to horse breeding. He named his farm Dixiana, in honor of the mare Dixie, and, in an unabashed display of his personal eccentricities, he placed a sign on the iron gates at the entrance to Dixiana:
Domino’s name became synonymous with speed on the racetrack. People called this horse, owned by James R. Keene, the Black Whirlwind. He was a champion and the best sprinter of his time (1893–1895). Retired to Castleton Farm, he had a great influence on the Thoroughbred breed. (W. S. Vosburgh, Racing in America, 1866–1921 [New York: Scribner Press, 1922], facing 162.)
NOTHING EXCEPT
A GOOD
RACE HORSE WANTED
***
AGENTS
FOR THE SALE OF
BOOKS, PATENT MEDICINES,
SEWING MACHINES,
AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS,
HORTICULTURE &
NURSERY PRODUCTS AND
ESPECIALLY
OF LIGHTNING RODS
AND WIRE FENCES
NOT ADMITTED
***
VISITORS
OF EVERY NATIONALITY
WHO WILL COME UN TO MY HOUSE
ALWAYS WELCOME
***
B. G. Thomas22
Thomas raced Hira in New York because that was where you had to send a promising racehorse whether you wanted to sell it or to build its reputation so that its offspring would sell well. Eventually, the major brought Hira back to Kentucky to serve as a broodmare. Her third foal, a colt sired by Alarm and born in 1875, was named Himyar, an outstanding racehorse whose destiny was to sire Domino, the fastest horse the major bred, and the horse that would mark the return to the sport by Keene.
The major sent Domino among his consignment of yearlings to be sold in New York at the annual Tattersall’s sale in 1892. Foxhall Keene purchased the colt for $3,000, and Domino went into the father-son racing stable. Thomas no longer owned the Dixiana Farm—his financial situation had forced him to sell out in 1890 to Jacob S. Coxey, a populist from Ohio who, in 1894, during the financial depression, was to lead bands of unemployed men—called Coxey’s Army—in a march from Ohio to Washington, DC. Coxey’s Army demanded that the federal government create jobs for the unemployed. Coxey, his wife, and his son, Legal Tender Coxey, accompanied the marchers. By that time, Thomas was well established at his new, smaller farm, Hira Villa Stud, where Domino was born in 1891. By 1893, the year of the nationwide financial panic and the year preceding the march of Coxey’s Army on Washington, Domino had moved to the head of Keene’s racing stable and acquired a popular nickname synonymous with his extraordinary talent: the Black Whirlwind.23
On Domino’s death in 1897 at Castleton Farm, his owner, James R. Keene, had the horse returned to his birthplace, Major Barak Thomas’s Hira Villa Farm. The horse’s body was delivered to the grave site in a horse-drawn wagon. The grave stone was inscribed: “Here lies the fleetest runner the American turf has ever known, and the gamest and most generous of horses.” (C. Frank Dunn Photographs Collection, KNU1987PH2–3484, Kentucky Historical Society.)
Like Coxey, Keene had set up his breeding farm in Kentucky; unlike Coxey, who would own Dixiana Farm for only three years, he would exert an enormous influence on horse breeding. Castleton Farm developed into the dominant Thoroughbred nursery in the nation in terms of champion horses produced. From 1893 through 1912, the father-son team bred 113 stakes winners, among them four of the greatest to compete on American racetracks: Colin, Commando, Peter Pan, and Sysonby. Kent Hollingsworth writes in a history of Thoroughbred champions that Keene “more or less wrote the American Stud Book around the turn of the century.” True, Sanders Bruce had written the first six volumes of the actual stud book, yet “it was Keene’s horses which provided the significant copy: Spendthrift, Kingston, Domino, Voter, Commando, Cap and Bells, Delhi, Sysonby, Peter Pan, Ballot, Colin, Celt, Ultimus, Maskette, Sweep, Black Toney, Pennant, and such. The foregoing list of champions and leading sires owned or bred by Keene suggests that racing and breeding Thoroughbreds at the turn of the century was his private preserve.” In other words, Keene dominated the game.24
Keene visited Castleton only twice during the nearly twenty years he owned the farm. He remained in New York and on the racecourses near that city as well in Europe, where his stable also was successful. Once more seated at the pinnacle of Wall Street, he relished life as the owner of a racing stable stocked with the finest equine athletes. The recognition afforded him as the owner of the dominant racing operation in America was enhanced by the fact that he had not purchased these horses at a public sale but bred and raised most of them. This matter of pride in his home-bred horses drove his energies in the sport, much as the same pride had driven Belmont.
Keene did not personally oversee the breeding and raising of these horses. He entrusted that job, as well as the management of the farm, to his brother-in-law, Major Foxhall Daingerfield. In this practice, Keene followed a similar absentee-ownership pattern that Alexander John Alexander had initiated at Woodburn Farm on inheriting that estate in 1867 from his brother. Belmont similarly had structured Nursery Farm around this absentee-owner model when he moved the operation to Kentucky in 1885. Keene and Belmont stood in the vanguard of a new type of horse-farm owner that would begin coming to the Bluegrass in greater numbers. Major Thomas, John and Josephine Clay, and, before them, old John Harper had been farm owners of a different type, making their primary residences on these properties, and generally managing the farms themselves. Keene and Belmont represented the new type of absentee horse-farm owner soon to replace the smaller, owner-operated horse farms in the Bluegrass.
Keene’s success on the racecourse brought so much attention to Castleton Farm that racing historians generally have overlooked his prior ownership of a famous stud farm in New Jersey. His purchase of Brookdale Farm had followed a model that owners of racing stables had accepted since the return of the sport to New York following the Civil War. The question, then, was why Keene changed his mind about New Jersey and turned to Kentucky.
He might have seen merit in August Belmont’s decision to transfer Nursery Stud to Lexington in 1885, for Belmont had turned his track fortunes around in 1890 to become the nation’s leading breeder. The success that Belmont realized off his Kentucky farm had not brought Eastern turf moguls in great droves to Kentucky, however. Something else must have changed Keene’s mind.
What cannot be overlooked was the timing of Keene’s purchase of Castleton Farm. This occurred in a time frame that coincided with the rise of antiracing sentiment in the Northeast. Perhaps Keene had begun to consider Kentucky as a more stable environment for race-horse breeding because thus far the state had essentially ignored the antiracing momentum building everywhere else throughout the United States.
Whatever his reasons for transferring his operation to Bluegrass Kentucky, Keene, like Belmont, overlooked the rampant lawlessness that had rendered the Bluegrass unsuitable in the eyes of a previous generation of Northeastern horsemen. In modern terms, these men assumed a sense of denial. In 1900, Kentucky violence reached its zenith with the assassination of Governor William Goebel. Some have viewed the assassination as a consequence of a fight Goebel had engaged in with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, a powerful entity that had enjoyed considerable state government influence. Its president was August Belmont II.
The killing of a state governor aside, violence still raged in every direction in Kentucky. To the east in the mountains, feuds brought negative attention to the state. Altina Waller has argued that social change sparked these famous feuds. In her view, mountaineers feuded out of negative reaction to upheavals brought by the arrival of outsiders and industry focused on timbering and coal mining. No doubt, the mountaineers experienced displacement and disempowerment in the process of eastern Kentucky becoming colonized by emigrants from the industrial states, as Ron Eller has argued. But these are modern historical arguments. Nineteenth-century Americans read about these widely publicized mountain feuds and received further reinforcement for the notions they harbored that Kentuckians were violent and backward.25
The odd twist was that eastern Kentucky was beginning to be seen as the locus of violence in the state. The reality was that violence and lawlessness did not diminish in any part of Kentucky, including the horse country of the Bluegrass. From 1896 to 1896, Kentuckians engaged in a Tollgate War, tearing down or burning the ubiquitous tollgates that blocked most roads, including those approaching Lexington. People had become weary of paying tolls to pass through the gates; as things generally went in Kentucky, some took up their guns to prove their point.26
On the heels of the Tollgate War came the Black Patch War, a phase of vigilante violence that began in the tobacco fields of western Kentucky and spread to the Bluegrass. Night riders wreaked havoc on tobacco-growing farms, setting fire to barns. In central Kentucky, where most farms raised tobacco in addition to horses, the violence was believed to have touched Haggin’s Elmendorf Farm. Newspapers initially placed blame for a barn burning on night riders. However, Elmendorf Farm claimed that this was not the case. Nonetheless, several more incidents of barn burnings in central Kentucky did point to the night riders of the tobacco wars. This reign of terror seemed like the Ku Klux Klan reprised, with a twist: during the tobacco wars, farmers felt threatened, regardless of their race. The wars were intended to unite all farms in ceasing to grow tobacco until the giant trusts met the growers’ price demands.27
Thus, it seemed ironic when men like Belmont and, later, Keene looked to central Kentucky with capital investments in mind, considering Northeastern titans of the turf had long considered the Bluegrass too unstable for development. But, when compared to the increasingly dubious outlook for the future of New York racing, Kentucky might not have looked so unstable regardless of its lawlessness. A racing official at the Latonia Race Course in northern Kentucky remarked in 1891 that the Thoroughbred interest was so paramount and all pervading in the Bluegrass that Kentucky would be the last state in the Union to enact antiracing legislation. Keene arguably agreed with this idea. Despite two years of slipping disease in Kentucky, despite the lawlessness that continued to give the state a bad name, Keene took the plunge and purchased Kentucky land, just as interest in social reform rose higher in New York.28
Two years following his purchase of Castleton Farm, Keene took a bold step to protect New York racing and, as well, his huge investment in his Kentucky breeding farm. He spearheaded the organization of a new jockey club in the hope of bringing the type of reform and order to the sport that the Board of Control had been unable to accomplish. This amounted to a preemptive strike intended to negate the power and legislative influence that the social reformers were amassing. But, though they tried to clean up their own house, racing’s reformers like Keene would see their own power minimized when the juggernaut that was Progressive social reform reached full flower early in the twentieth century.
The founding members of the new Jockey Club included twenty-seven elite patrons of Eastern racing. Their intention was to control racing and see it conducted to their own standards. Unlike its predecessor, the Board of Control, this group did possess the power needed to control the sport; this happened because the new Jockey Club represented racing’s interests more fully than had the Board of Control. Keene wanted to see the Jockey Club organized along the pattern of the prestigious English Jockey Club, in which titled landowners ruled their sport with imperious power. Like-minded colleagues carried out his wish. In the style of his late father, who had reigned as the “dictator of the turf,” August Belmont II assumed the chairmanship of the Jockey Club in 1895, taking over the reins of the sport in the Northeast, a sport that had changed radically from that which his father had ruled. He thus became the “ruling spirit” in Jockey Club affairs.29
One of Belmont’s first initiatives was to use his influence in seeing the Percy-Gray law on a safe passage through the New York State Assembly in 1895. This law was intended to outlaw gambling on horse racing. However, as a result of Belmont’s influence in the assembly, the new legislation really did not outlaw horse racing. It simply authorized a specified amount of racing by limiting the sport to the “better” tracks. This brought racing in New York entirely under the control of the Jockey Club and, thus, Belmont. Belmont and his associates saw this law as an appeasement to social reformers. The carrot held out with this law was the thousands of dollars the tracks would agree to pay annually to the state treasury, the money to be used for the benefit of agricultural societies. By the early years of the twentieth century, this money amounted to some $200,000 annually. Here was another turn in the affairs of the sport, for, from this point forward, racing would make a practice of reminding state legislators of the economic value of the sport to the state. As the amount of money increased, so, proportionately, did the appreciation of the legislature for what became known as this sin tax. Horse racing would be on its way to becoming big business—if social reformers remained content with the Percy-Gray law. But they did not.30
Pierre Lorillard, perhaps believing that New York racing could return to the hobby sport it had been decades earlier, viewed the outlawing of gambling and bookmaking as a return to a sport controlled exclusively by elites, the commercialism having been removed. Consequently, “the right class of men to own race horses will come to the front,” Lorillard predicted, because wealthy men would then race their horses “for each other’s money,” as they once had, rather than depending on purses bolstered in large part by the bookmakers’ daily licensing fees. In other words, the Percy-Gray law was intended to exclude undesirable horse owners every bit as much as it was intended to prohibit gambling offtrack. With this law, the Jockey Club began to amass formidable power in New York.31
In reality, the sport was not going to return to its roots no matter how dearly Lorillard and his friends might have wished it would. Expansion had taken Thoroughbred racing too far beyond the sphere of Lorillard, Belmont II, and Keene. The Jockey Club made a grave mistake in believing that the Percy-Gray law would bring order where there was none, for gambling continued despite it. Even with the law in effect, bookmakers working the New York tracks continued their business as usual—with one slight alteration. Instead of writing receipts for bets taken, they found a way around the law by acknowledging bets verbally without writing out receipts. Bookmakers paid off the winners at a predetermined place outside the racetrack gates at the end of each day. The Jockey Club remained aloof and oblivious, leaving the controlling of betting to the Pinkerton detectives. The Jockey Club erred in looking the other way.32
The Jockey Club amassed a concentration of power unlike anything seen previously in the sport as conducted in North America. It licensed jockeys and trainers, appointed racing officials to the tracks, allotted racing dates, and, in 1896, took over the American Stud Book, buying out the original six volumes from Sanders Bruce. This landed exclusive control of the Thoroughbred registry with the Jockey Club. No horse could be registered as a Thoroughbred unless it traced back eight consecutive generations as recorded in this stud book. It did not trouble racing’s elite powers that Bruce’s work was replete with errors and that horses might not be from the families purported to have produced them. All that mattered to the Jockey Club was that the stud book brought order and control to the sport, in an era when businessmen sought these qualities. The stud book placed a vast amount of power in the Jockey Club for the club to use at its discretion; the consequence was that all breeders of Thoroughbreds now came under its control.
The Jockey Club wrote the rules of racing, interpreted these rules, and enforced the same. It also declared that any track refusing to accept its authority would be classified as an outlaw track; horses that raced at outlaw tracks could not race at Jockey Club tracks. This, too, placed a significant amount of control in the Jockey Club’s hands.
Theodore Roosevelt’s model of the “bully pulpit” and “big stick” diplomacy actually had been in place at the Jockey Club for seven years by the time this twenty-fifth U.S. president moved into the White House in 1901. That is to say, the Jockey Club had anticipated the desire to instill bureaucratic order on all entities, a desire that characterized Roosevelt’s presidency. William Robertson writes: “It was an awesome concentration of power, and the Jockey Club wielded it with gusto.” Not all were in agreement with the club’s policies or practices, but, unlike previous jockey clubs, this organization indicated that it was in racing to stay.33
Despite the power and control that the Jockey Club assumed, the sport across the United States did not fall uniformly under its control. In Chicago, the second-largest racing venue behind the Eastern tracks of New York and New Jersey, all matters pertaining to sports, politics, and corruption marched to their own beat. Ed Corrigan, as the owner of Hawthorne Race Course in Cicero, dabbled in at least the first two, if not the third. At war with a long-standing rival track owner whose Garfield Park was within Chicago’s city limits, Corrigan persuaded the mayor of Chicago to shut down the Garfield track. Two hundred police officers descended on Garfield Park on September 7, 1892, and loaded bettors, racing officials, and even jockeys still wearing their racing silks into the patrol wagon for a trip to jail. One horse owner from Texas resisted arrest, killed two policemen, was fatally shot by other police, and Garfield Park closed—never to reopen.34
Black horsemen felt a change descending on horse racing. The change of color in the sport’s prominent positions, from black to white, would occur less noticeably at Northern tracks, where whites traditionally had dominated the ranks of horse trainers and jockeys. But, at Southern and Midwestern tracks, including those in Kentucky, blacks traditionally had dominated these job categories from the slavery era on. By the end of the century, they would not.
Some racing historians have explained the displacement of black jockeys as a function of the increasing value of purse money available as the nineteenth century progressed. This explanation never accounted for the displacement of black horse trainers. Much more was responsible for this change of color in the sport’s front lines, not the least the societal transitions under way at that time throughout the United States. Segregation was becoming institutionalized, and sports, including horse racing, were falling in line with the trends of larger American society.
As mentioned, Alvin Harlow wrote in Weep No More, My Lady, “‘These new people,’ meaning New Yorkers, Northerners, who have barged in and taken over much of the breeding, don’t understand the Negro, say the veterans.” This racist belief served generations of Southerners effectively in exploiting black labor. But the reality was that white Americans, North and South, finally had figured out “what to do with the Negro in American society,” that old dilemma that Myrdal argued had plagued Americans since the end of the Civil War. The solution that whites finally hit on was to render blacks invisible by means of segregation. The U.S. Supreme Court validated segregation in 1896 with its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This ruling determined that “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites were, indeed, constitutional, as argued in the appeal. The result was the proliferation throughout the South of segregationist Jim Crow laws.35
Two years earlier, Congress had repealed the Enforcement Act, thus opening the way for states to disenfranchise African Americans. With blacks no longer permitted close association with whites or to possess a voice in the electoral process, it would hardly do to see African American athletes starring in sports, particularly if women were in the audience. White patrons of the sport would not have wanted their female companions making heroes of black jockeys. Isaac Murphy did not live long enough to know that no longer would a place exist for a jockey of his extraordinary talent.
In 1905, the Washington Post published an article titled “Negro Rider on Wane.” The subheadline read: “White Jockeys’ Superior Intelligence Supersedes.” Here lay another slap in the face of jockeys who, like Murphy, had outridden whites in many a horse race, including the most significant in the United States. No one had spoken about relative intelligence during the 1870s and 1880s, when the black jockeys were at their peak in terms of both numbers and success. Yet, by the early years of the twentieth century, white Americans had fixed their attention on the notion of saving the United States for the sake of Anglo-Saxons. Theories of racial determinism became popular. Scientists studied the size and shape of the skulls of African Americans, claiming that they found evidence of inferiority. In the popular culture, racist ephemera began depicting African Americans as monkeys.36
The Illustrated Sporting News took up the cry that, in golf, “the disturbing race” was invading the peaceful links. “With all due respect to the great work of leading the lowly brother toward the hill-tops of industry and equality,” it intoned, “there is something incongruous in the idea of the negro as a follower of golf, just as there would seem a lack of harmony if he tippled nothing but Scotch and soda, and banished the watermelon in favor of the Welsh rabbit [sic].” Race was seen here as defining class, a contradiction to the enviable positions that some black horsemen had held among the African American upper class in the horse-oriented society of Lexington.37
All throughout sports, black athletes began to take a place not on the sidelines but behind the scenes: in racing, in college football, in major league baseball, and in cycling. As tension increased, sometimes blacks fought back. The news out of Kentucky in 1891 was a race war among jockeys at the Latonia Race Course: white jockeys accused blacks of a conspiracy against them. As we have seen, the Spirit’s correspondent observed: “Whether or not there is … prejudice in the ranks of the riders, it is certain there has been altogether too much jostling and crowding.” In Chicago, the word at prestigious Washington Park was that black riders had formed an organization to control all the choice mounts, thus creating racial tension and fear. This would not have raised any interest in the previous decade, for black jockeys had predominated in numbers at Southern and Midwestern tracks. White youths had not wanted to ride alongside them; the work had been considered “Negro” work. But, after riders like Murphy had developed the work from labor into a profession, white youths eyed the increased amount of money available in racing, with the result that, as the Washington Post wrote, “the white jockey is now crowding out the colored riders as the paleface is pressing back the red men on the plains.”38
In 1900, the New York Times had reported that black riders disappeared when “a quietly formed combination [of whites] formed in New York to shut them out.” If this surprised anyone at the time, it should not have. The lynching of African Americans had reached its highest numbers during the 1890s and did not end with the turn into the twentieth century. Black horse trainers had disappeared from their high-profile positions, out in front of the public, for the same reasons that black jockeys had been shuffled back behind the scenes: they could no longer be seen as heroes to be cheered or applauded in full public view. Black horsemen who might have become horse trainers consequently worked as grooms; youths who might have developed into jockeys faced no greater future than that of exercise rider for morning gallops. The diverse face of Thoroughbred racing had changed to one color—white— and the narrative of the sport would be related in white-only terms from that point until the discovery of Murphy’s grave site in the 1960s.39
What did not change in racing was the great amount of money that continued to churn through the bookmakers in the ontrack betting enclaves known as the betting rings. With racing laboring under a cloud tainted by the crime and moral decline that social reformers desired so sincerely to extinguish, it was a wonder that anyone of means or social standing participated in the sport. However, owning a racing stable has always marked a man with the badge of success, by its showy nature and its obvious expense placing the owner symbolically above everyone else. Racing has fanned the flames of rich men’s egos for as long as men have seen the racing capabilities in horses. The sport of racing is in the business of selling glamour and outrageous dreams. Keene once described the ownership of premier racehorses as “the gratification of possessing something that you know is a little better than that possessed by anybody else.” And so racing continued its expansion as the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth began.40
The Kentuckian who knew precisely how to sell the appearance of those ethereal qualities that placed the rich above the common folk was John Madden. There were wizards of Wall Street like James Keene, a “man who lifts his finger and stocks obey his slightest sign,” in the words of the New York World. And then there was the Wizard of the Turf, John E. Madden. Madden exclusively owned this sobriquet for the last thirty years of his life (he died in 1929). People viewed him as an alchemist who turned everything he touched into gold, the way Keene did with stocks. He accomplished this with much less money than Keene brought into racing.41
Madden was an extraordinary salesman of great charm that moguls like Marcus Daly or William Collins Whitney could not resist. He completely understood why racing appealed to the very rich. He once wrote: “Why do people race horses? Why do people play golf? Why do people play baseball? Why do people operate theaters? To enable a rich man to find an outlet for some of his surplus wealth. To gratify a thirst for notoriety on the part of some ‘unknown to fame.’”42
Madden grew up in the steel mill country of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, learned to excel at running footraces and driving trotting horses, and, as a young man, began selling various types and breeds of horses at county fairs. On moving his business to Lexington at age thirty in the early 1880s, he styled himself as a trotting-horse man. By 1894, he began to change course, “forseeing [sic] that races on the flat would soon supersede the harness events,” as the New York Times explained the transition. He paid $400 for a Thoroughbred yearling, trained it to race, and shipped it—where else—to New York, where he sold it for $10,000 to Mike Dwyer.43
John E. Madden, known as the Wizard of the Turf, founded a breeding farm in Lexington that he called Hamburg Place after the horse Hamburg, whose $40,000 sale price to Marcus Daly in 1897 enabled Madden to purchase the property. Madden bred five winners of the Kentucky Derby and won the race still another time with a colt he had purchased. (Courtesy of Keeneland-Cook Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington.)
When Madden’s horse Yankee lined up against the horses of Keene, William Collins Whitney, Perry Belmont, and other scions of the turf for the Futurity in 1901, the World wrote: “John E. Madden, not a millionaire, is the man who stands arrayed against all this great combination of wealth…. The aggregation of wealth represented by all the owners engaged in the Futurity runs up into the billions.” Yankee won the Futurity in record time, and the World savored the moment of David defeating the Goliaths. The next day’s headline announced Yankee as the winner and noted that he defeated “the High-Priced Animals of Wm. C. Whitney, Perry Belmont, Clarence H. MacKay and other Millionaire Aristocrats of the Turf.” Madden was on his way to becoming a millionaire himself. On this occasion, when Madden remained a man of moderate resources, and during this age, when America stood in awe of its rising numbers of extremely wealthy men, Madden and Yankee had accomplished the extraordinary by showing their heels to the rich men. Whitney promptly purchased the horse.44
On Madden’s death in 1929, the Thoroughbred Record paid him its highest compliment: “He was a natural horse-trader.” Working out of Hamburg Place in Lexington and at the racetracks in New York, Madden gained the confidence of wealthy men like the Dwyers and the railroad mogul William Collins Whitney, managing the horses of the latter to great success. He also was a highly successful breeder in his own right at Hamburg Place. He bred five winners of the Kentucky Derby and won the race another time with a colt he had purchased.
The farm was renowned for its pastoral beauty, for its novel equine graveyard, and for the champion horses among its stallions and broodmares. Serenity prevailed in this place, where one writer, seeing the farm at twilight, described an ethereal scene “with fresh, soft air” to breathe as “the mists of darkness were gathering, with the afterglow rosy above them.” Nearly fifty years later, a retrospective on Madden’s life described his feeling for Hamburg Place as akin to that of Gerald O’Hara’s for Tara in Gone with the Wind.45
The reference was slightly anachronistic—Gone with the Wind would not be published until 1936, seven years following Madden’s death. But the residence at Hamburg held a nostalgic charm evocative of the antebellum era that framed the first portion of the novel. A house at Hamburg Place indeed held a certain charm, for people believed that Henry Clay had been married on the farm early in the nineteenth century. Like a proper patriarch of that era, Madden had built a small and isolated community within his farm. He constructed a dormitory for the youths who exercised his horses. He required them to attend school and church on the farm. The notion of an orderly life was everywhere about Hamburg Place and readily present even in the habits of its owner. The turf moguls of the Northeast and Far West were businessmen who desired to attain order in all they touched. Madden inspired them to take a closer look at his Bluegrass operation, which seemed removed from the violence and disorder ruling Kentucky.
Madden also was well known for his eccentricities. His contemporaries knew him for constructing a daily regimen built around physical exercise. Staying in peak physical shape became Madden’s obsession. He epitomized the natural man that President Theodore Roosevelt idealized as the only way in which Anglo-Saxon Americans would find it possible to maintain order and hold their place in this rapidly changing republic. The president feared that white Americans were becoming too soft. Madden made certain that he, personally, was never soft in physical or mental capacities.
He swam year-round in a spring-fed pond on his property regardless of the temperature and whether ice or snow covered the ground. He exercised daily at the farm or at the New York Athletic Club. He watched his diet, did not smoke, and drank alcohol sparingly. When he advertised for help at Hamburg Place, he included an advisory concerning the healthy habits he expected of his workforce: “Coca-cola addicts need not apply.” In his youth, besides experiencing success in footraces, he had played baseball and was an amateur boxing champion. As the owner of Hamburg Place, he would casually vault the fences of the farm fields. He would throw rocks on his walks to exercise the muscles in his arms. The Illustrated Sporting News remarked that he appeared to be within a week of a [prize] fight even during his final years and remained a perfect specimen of manhood. He complemented the nostalgia that Hamburg Place evoked for a more orderly time when men had been men, servants had been the responsibility of the landowning family, and all had been peaceful in the emerald green pastures of the Bluegrass.46
Madden’s horse business mirrored his lifestyle. He was a back-to-nature breeder who raised his horses outside regardless of the weather. He abhorred the idea of coddling them in the barns. He believed that this produced a stronger horse; the hundreds of winners that came off Hamburg Place undoubtedly proved him right. Choosing the right bloodlines in mating his horses also accounted for the high number of winners he bred. But he had help in this—perhaps more help than the historical narrative of Thoroughbred racing has been willing to acknowledge. The mastermind behind the Wizard of the Turf was none other than Billy Walker, Isaac Murphy’s onetime mentor and a black horseman now retired after a career as a jockey and a second career as a horse trainer. Walker was brilliant in his knowledge of bloodlines and worked behind the scenes as Madden’s adviser. The Wizard was truly grateful and remembered Walker when writing his will. He left him a $1,000 bequest.47
Madden was living in the Phoenix Hotel in downtown Lexington when he purchased a son of Hanover for $1,200, naming him Hamburg. He shipped the horse to New York to race. Hamburg won twelve of sixteen races at age two and was acknowledged as the champion of his age group before Madden sold him to Marcus Daly for a price estimated at somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000. Two months later, Madden purchased 235 acres of land out Lexington’s Winchester Road, naming his farm Hamburg Place in honor of the horse he had recently sold. The master salesman believed that he had found the ideal location for his business; behind a fast trotter, Hamburg Place was within fifteen minutes of the Phoenix Hotel.48
“I wanted a place near town so, if I had a customer, I could get him out there before he changed his mind,” Madden said. One success led to another; twelve years later, his farm had expanded to two thousand acres. The farm expanded because Madden knew precisely how to sell a notion of horse ownership as well as how to sell horses. He was a man of the new era that was descending on the sport, a man who realized that many more people in addition to the New York elites were coming into racing by way of Bluegrass Kentucky.49
Madden’s fame as a horseman expanded each year of his career. People saw him as a gentleman of the old school who maintained patriarchal order on his farm, providing for his help in the way of education and religion. His well-known obsession with physical fitness evoked the physically fit cavalier of those lost times when Americans relied more on their knowledge of horses than on the oppressive presence of urban machinery. Success breeds success in the horse business, and Madden’s success, combined with his unquestioned reputation for honesty, helped draw the increasing attention of outsiders to central Kentucky.
The Bruce brothers had worked hard through marketing to restore to the sport the notion that the best racehorses in the United States, horses like Longfellow and Asteroid, could be bred and raised only in Kentucky. Robert Aitcheson Alexander, Dan Swigert, John and Josephine Clay, old John Harper, Isaac Murphy, and Major Barak Thomas had helped boost this idea through their individual success—success that implied that Kentuckians possessed a unique knowledge of horses. Madden took all these notions to another level.
Madden’s popularity and success grew at a time when racing most needed the image of this man. He helped shape notions of Bluegrass Kentucky even as the reformers closed in on the sport of horse racing, surrounding it like a tightening noose while trying to shut it down across the United States. Madden, although a great gambler, imposed on those harmful images that had tainted the sport a greater notion of the self-made man. The image he projected was one of the natural man, one who brought orderly control to his Bluegrass farm in a notoriously violent, lawless state.