Dark Genius of Wall Street by Edward J Renehan Jr

Author:Edward J Renehan Jr [Renehan, Edward J Jr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465068852
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

MEPHISTOPHELES

THE DEMONIZATION OF JAY GOULD following the shipwreck of Black Friday was strident and fanatical. The juggernaut of negative press launched in late September 1869 has yet to stop, as is evidenced by annual “Today in History” blurbs that routinely damn Gould’s soul in newspapers nationwide every 24 September. In Gould’s own era, 1869’s images of ruined men (with their implicit corollary of once-prosperous families demoted to lives of destitution) formed the bedrock for a lasting reputation as a jackal and betrayer. Gustavus Myers, an early Gould chronicler and critic, wrote that Gould “became invested with a sinister distinction as the most cold-blooded corruptionist, spoliator, and financial pirate of his time. . . . To the end of his days [this image] confronted him at every step, and survived to become the standing reproach and terror of his descendants. For nearly half a century the very name of Jay Gould was a persisting jeer and byword, an object of popular contumely and hatred, the signification of every foul and base crime by which greed triumphs.”1

The process began with the pot calling the kettle black. In the immediate aftermath of Gould’s misadventure in gold, reporters resurrected and burnished a phrase uttered by Daniel Drew one year earlier. At the time of the Erie Corner, Drew had said of Gould, “His touch is death.”2 Thereafter, similar dark metaphors sprang up like mushrooms. The Times’s Norvell dubbed Jay “the Mephistopheles of Wall Street.”3 Cartoons depicted him flying on batwings, horns protruding through his top hat as he scowled down on Trinity Church and Wall Street. The same papers, which in the manner of the day did not bother to mask their anti-Semitism, cited standard stereotypes and meditated on the likelihood of a Hebraic background for the covetous, devious financial predator with the Jewish-sounding first and last names. The Sun went so far as to suggest a Faustian overtone to Gould’s skill: a pact with evil that, though it made Gould formidable in this world, would ultimately destroy him in the next. Wall Street operator James R. Keene, no saint himself, went on record denouncing Gould as “the worst man on earth since the beginning of the Christian era. He is treacherous, false, cowardly and a despicable worm incapable of a generous nature.”4 Meanwhile the Tribune chastised Gould for squatting, Drew-like, on the worst of his and Fisk’s gold contracts: “They use lawyers’ injunctions to prevent the payment of honest debts; obey the rules of the Gold Exchange when they make by it and repudiate when they lose; betray each other’s counsels, sell out their confederates and consent to the ruin of their partners.”5

Throughout October, newspapers revisited early episodes in Gould’s career and recast them to fit the contours of a villainous biography. It was now that Charles Leupp’s solvency and insanity at the time of his suicide were forgotten and his death moved up from 1859 to 1857, better to coincide with that earlier panic. In subsequent years, the story of Black

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