Jay Gould

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Jay Gould
Image:Jaygould2.jpe
Born	May 27, 1836 Image:Flag of the United States.svg Roxbury, New York
Died	December 2, 1892 Image:Flag of the United States.svg Manhattan
Occupation	Railroad
Spouse	Helen Day Miller (1838-1889)
Children	George Jay Gould I Edwin Gould I Helen Gould Anna Gould Frank Jay Gould
Parents	John Burr Gould (1792-1866) Mary More Gould (1798-1841)

Jason Gould (May 27, 1836 – December 2, 1892) was an American financier, who became a leading American railroad developer and speculator.

Birth and early career

Jason Gould, the son of John Burr Gould (1792-1866) and Mary More Gould (1798-1841), was born on a dairy farm in Roxbury, New York. Contrary to the assumptions of Henry Ford and Henry Adams, who presumed Gould to be a Jew, Gould's father was of British colonial ancestry, and his mother of Scottish ancestry. He studied at the Hobart Academy, but left at age 16 to work for his father in the hardware business. He continued to devote himself to private study, emphasizing surveying and mathematics. Gould later went to work in the lumber and tanning business in western New York and then became involved with banking in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In 1856, he published the History of Delaware County, New York.

Marriage

He married Helen Day Miller (1838-1889) in 1863 and had six children:

• George Jay Gould I (1864–1923), married Edith M. Kingdon (1864–1921)
• Edwin Gould I (1866–1933), married Sarah Cantine Shrady
• Helen Gould (1868–1938), married Finlay Johnson Shepard (1867–1942)
• Howard Gould (1871–1959), married Viola Katherine Clemmons on October 12, 1898; and later married actress Grete Mosheim in 1937
• Anna Gould (1875–1961), married Paul Ernest Boniface, Comte de Castellane (1867-1932); and after a divorce married his cousin: Helie de Talleyrand-Perigord, 5th duc de Talleyrand, 5th duc de Dino, 4th Herzog von Sagan, and Prince de Sagan (1858–1937)
• Frank Jay Gould (1877–1956), married Helen Kelley; then Edith Kelly; and then Florence La Caze (1895–1983)

The Tweed Ring

It was during the same period that Gould and James Fisk became involved with Tammany Hall. They made Boss Tweed a director of the Erie Railroad, and Tweed, in return, arranged favorable legislation for them. Tweed and Gould became the subjects of political cartoons by Thomas Nast in 1869. In October 1871, when Tweed was held on $8 million bail, Gould was the chief bondsman.

Black Friday

Main article: Black Friday (1869)

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

Late career

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

Gould also obtained a controlling interest in the Western Union telegraph company, and, after 1881, in the elevated railways in New York City. Ultimately, he was connected with many of the largest railway financial operations in the United States from 1868-1888. During the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 he hired strikebreakers; according to labor unionists, he said at the time, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

Legacy

Gould died of tuberculosis on December 2, 1892 and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. His fortune was conservatively estimated $72 million for tax purposes. He left all of it to his family. The family mausoleum was designed by Francis O'Hara (1830-1900) of Ireland.

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

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

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

At the time of his death, Gould was a benefactor in the reconstruction of the Reformed Church of Roxbury, now the Jay Gould Memorial Reformed Church.[1]

Timeline

See also

• List of personalities associated with Wall Street
• Lyndhurst, his country estate on the Hudson River
• Death of Jay Gould in the Brooklyn Eagle
• Paragould

Further reading

• The Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. - (2005) ISBN 0-465-06885-5
• The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy by Charles R. Morris; Publisher: Times Books, 2005; ISBN 0-8050-7599-2

• New York Times; September 15, 1886; page 1; "George Gould marries"
• New York Times; October 13, 1898; page 1; "Howard Gould marries"
• New York Times; September 15, 1959; page 39; "Howard Gould dies here at 88; last surviving son of Jay Gould, rail financier -- yachtsman, auto racer"

External links

Template:Wikisource

• Obituary by the Iowa City Daily Citizen
• Findagrave: Jay Gould
• Photo from the Library of Congress's George Grantham Bain Collection
• George Labarre Galleries : Jay Gould autographed Saint Joseph Western Railroad Company Stock dated 1879.de:Jay Gouldfi:Jay Gould