Jay Gould
Jason Gould (
May 27,
1836 –
December 2,
1892) was an American
financier.
Jason Gould, the son of John Burr Gould (1792–1866) and Mary Moore Gould (1798–1841), was born on a farm near
Roxbury, New York. Contrary to the assumptions of
Henry Ford and
Henry Adams, Gould's father was of
Scottish ancestry, not Jewish. He studied at the Hobart Academy, but left at age 16 to work for his father in the hardware business. He continued to devote himself to private study, emphasizing
surveying and
mathematics. Gould later went to work in the
lumber and
tanning business in
western New York and then became involved with banking in
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In 1856, he published the
History of Delaware County, New York.
He married Helen Day Miller in 1863 and had five children:
*
George Jay Gould I (1866–1933), who married
Edith M. Kingdon (1864–1921)
*
Helen Gould (1868–1938), who married Finlay Johnson Shepard (1867–1942)
*
Howard Gould (1871–1959), who married Viola Katherine Clemmons on October 12, 1898
*
Anna Gould (1875–1961), who married:
Paul Ernest Boniface, ("Boni") Comte de Castellane (1867-1932); and after a divorce married his cousin: Helie de Talleyrand-Perigord (1858–1937), 5th duc de Talleyrand, 5th duc de Dino, 4th Herzog von Sagan, and Prince de Sagan
*
Frank Jay Gould (1877–1956), who married Helen Kelley, then Edith Kelly, and then Florence La Caze (1895–1983)
Through his wife's father, Daniel S. Miller, he was appointed a manager of the
Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad. He purchased and reorganized the railroad. He also purchased the
Rutland and Washington Railroad and sold it for a large profit. Gould's greatest coup was his acquisition of the
Erie Railroad. In 1867, Jay Gould was elected to the board of the Railroad. Soon after,
Cornelius Vanderbilt began to buy up shares of the Erie with the intention of owning the Railroad. Gould was determined to prevent Vanderbilt from accomplishing this goal. Cleverly, Gould found a loophole in
bond law and practice that gave him the weapon he needed. Gould would convert newly printed railroad bonds into convertible stocks that were then sold on the open market. This way, Gould was constantly generating new available stock in the Erie Railroad and making it available on the market when legally the Railroad could not generate any more. Vanderbilt tried to fight Gould in the courts, and both men appealed to local legislators to change the laws. Eventually, Gould won. He bought out Vanderbilt's stocks at a greatly inflated price. In all, Gould gave $9 million to Vanderbilt. This amount
bankrupted the Erie Railroad. Gould, however, soon resuscitated the Railroad. Falling short of his great ambitions, he was never able to make it the most used line between New York and the Midwest, but he did expand the line a great deal and became wealthier in the process.
It was during the same period that Gould and
James Fisk became involved with
Tammany Hall; they made
Boss Tweed a director of the Erie, and Tweed, in turn, arranged favorable legislation for them. Tweed and Gould became the subjects of political cartoons by
Thomas Nast in 1869. In October 1871, when Tweed was held on $1 million bail, Gould was the chief bondsman.
In August 1869, Gould and Fisk began to buy gold in an attempt to corner the market, hoping that the increase in price of gold would increase the price of wheat such that western farmers would sell, causing a great amount of shipping of breadstuffs eastward, increasing freight business for the Erie railroad. During this time, Gould used contacts with President
Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law,
Abel Corbin, to try to influence the president and his Secretary General
Horace Porter. These speculations in gold culminated in the panic of
Black Friday, on
September 24,
1869, when the premium over face value on a gold
Double Eagle fell from 62% to 35%. Gould made a nominal profit from this operation, but lost it in the subsequent lawsuits. The affair also cost him his reputation.
After being forced out of the Erie Railroad, Gould started, in 1879, to build up a system of railroads in the midwest by gaining control of a total of four western railroads, including the
Union Pacific and the
Missouri Pacific Railroad. In 1880, he was in control of 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of railway, about one-ninth of the length of rail in the United States at that time, and, by 1882, he had controlling interest in 15% of the country's tracks. Gould withdrew from 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.
Gould died of
tuberculosis and mental strain on December 2, 1892 and was interred in the
Woodlawn Cemetery in
The Bronx,
New York. His fortune was estimated between $65 million and $120 million, and a year before at $250 million, making him the richest person in the country. He left his personal fortune to his family and his business holdings to various trustees.
In his lifetime and for a century after, Gould had a firm reputation as the most unethical of the 19th century American businessmen known as
robber barons. Many times he allowed his rivals to believe that he was beaten, then sprang some legal or contractual loophole on them that completely reversed the situation and gave him the advantage. He pioneered the practice, now commonplace, of declaring
bankruptcy as a strategic maneuver. He had no opposition to using stock manipulation and
insider trading (which were then legal but frowned upon) to build
capital and to execute or prevent hostile
takeover attempts. As a result, many contemporary businessmen did not trust Gould and often expressed contempt for his approach to business. Even so,
John D. Rockefeller named him as the most skilled businessman he ever encountered.
The
New York City press published many rumors about Gould that biographers passed on as fact. For example, they alleged that Gould's dealings in the tanning business drove his partner Charles Leupp to
suicide. In fact, Leupp had episodes of
mania and
depression that
psychiatrists would now recognize as indications of
bipolar disorder, and his family knew that this, not his business dealings, caused his death. These biographers portrayed Gould as a parasite who extracted money from businesses and took no interest in improving them.
Anti-semitism in connection with Gould's name motivated some of this hostility, even though he was 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.Despite this is almost certain that during a railroad workers strike, once he said: "i can hire half of my workers just to kill the other half", the sentence is reused in the movie
Gangs of New York to depict the standard businessman of those year.
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]
*1836 Birth of Jay Gould as Jason Gould
*1841 Death of Mary Moore Gould, mother
*1850
US Census with Jay Gould in
Roxbury, New York*1856 Publication of
History of Delaware County*1863 Marriage to Helen Day Miller (1838-1889)
*1864 Birth of George Jay Gould I, his son
*1866 Death of John Burr Gould, his father
*1866 Birth of Edwin Gould, his son
*1868 Birth of Helen Gould, his daughter
*1869 Black Friday
*1870
US Census in first
Manhattan home
*1870
US Census in second
Manhattan home
*1871 Birth of Howard Gould, his son
*1875 Birth of Anna Gould, his daughter
*1877 Birth of Frank Gould, his son
*1880 Purchase of Lyndehurst from the widow of George Merritt, shortening name to Lyndhurst
*1880
US Census with Jay Gould in
Greenburgh, New York*1889 Death of Helen Day Miller, his wife
*1892
Death of Jay Gould*
Lyndhurst, his country estate on the
Hudson River*
Death of Jay Gould in the Brooklyn EagleThe Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons by Edward J. Renehan - (2005) ISBN 0465068855
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 0805075992
See
List of personalities associated with Wall Street.
*[
2] Obituary by the Iowa City Daily Citizen
*[
3] Findagrave: Jay Gould
*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"
