Product Description

"[A] revisionist biography of the man whom a London newspaper eulogized as a 'wrecker of industries and an impoverisher of men'.... Mr. Renehan describes [Gould's business deals] with zest." (New York Times)

Though reviled for more than a century as Wall Street's greatest villain, Jay Gould was in fact its most original creative genius. Gould was the robber baron's robber baron, the most astute financial and business strategist of his time and also the most widely hated. In Dark Genius of Wall Street, acclaimed biographer Edward J. Renehan, Jr., combines lively anecdotes with the rich social tapestry of the Gilded Age to paint the portrait of the most talented financial buccaneer of his generation-- and one of the inventors of modern business.

"An informative and entertaining account of no-holds-barred finance in the late 19th century." (Forbes)

"It's the shenanigans that make this book worth reading." (New York Times Book Review)

"A primer for our own dark age of business leaders.... [A] dead-on biography." (Bloomberg News)

"Lively revisionist biography." (Washington Post Book World)

"A fresh, evocative take on the Gilded Age and its brutal brand of business." (Barron's)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #177712 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780465068869
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In the late 19th century, strong and well-moneyed families such as the Morgans and the Vanderbilts controlled the fortunes of Wall Street and the emerging industries. Renehan, author of splendid biographies of the Kennedys, Theodore Roosevelt and the naturalist John Burroughs, turns in a masterful glance at the social history of the Gilded Age as well as a brilliant biography of Gould, who outfoxed many of these other wealthy industrialists to win fame and fortune. Although his early work as a surveyor and a tanner did not bring Gould much wealth, he learned to engage in shrewd business practices that would eventually allow him to gain some dominance in the tanning industry. Wall Street and the newly emerging rail industries soon attracted his financial eye, and he turned his full attention to them. While he initially dabbled at the edges of the stock market, he picked up enough financial savvy to engineer a scheme to corner the gold market in 1869 and cause the infamous Black Friday frenzy. Renehan deftly chronicles Gould's canny financial successes in the acquisitions of the Erie, the Union and Pacific, and the Atlantic and Pacific railroads as well as the emerging telegraph industry. Maligned by his competitors and the media as an unscrupulous businessman, Gould never achieved the fame and status of Cornelius Vanderbilt or J.P. Morgan. Yet, as Renehan points out so gracefully, Gould was simply an ambitious financier in an ambitious time before the existence of regulations that his own financial deals helped create. Renehan's sumptuous prose and his dazzling research and style provide a window into Gould's ambitions and offer a first-rate social history of the financial workings of his time. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Business news in recent years has been rife with reports on the unethical and illegal actions of executives who should have known better. But Enron's Kenneth L. Lay never stormed the quarters of a corporate rival amid a hail of bullets or employed gun-toting police officers to fend off armed thugs dispatched to bring him into courts controlled by his enemies. Jay Gould did both of those things during the Gilded Age, when America's industrial capitalists used any means necessary to win their battles for competitive advantage.

Even in that wide-open period, he had a bad reputation. While Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller were grudgingly conceded to have built industries as they enriched themselves, Gould was viewed as a predator who looted companies. Dubbed "the Mephistopheles of Wall Street" in 1869 by the New York Times, he was getting bad press from such popular historians as Matthew Josephson (The Robber Barons) and Richard O'Connor (Gould's Millions) long after his death in 1892.

Edward J. Renehan Jr. aims to correct those one-sided portraits in his lively revisionist biography. "Gould's operations were . . . no more sinister than those of . . . men whose reputations have soared above his over the past century," he argues. Gould was simply better than anyone else at the widely practiced arts of watering stock, selling short, buying on margin, cornering a market, bulling up prices and making bear raids. "Capable of creating capital out of thin air and gaining control of companies by using just a few dollars reflected in a hall of financial mirrors," he proved to be a capable manager of a western railway system, a telegraph network and New York City's elevated trains. Moreover, far from being the cold-hearted confidence man of legend, Gould was an admirable human being: devoted to his wife and children, generous to employees (so long as they didn't join unions), content to immerse himself in his book collection or to cultivate flowers while his flamboyant associate Jim Fiske caroused with the politicians and judges whose paid-for cooperation kept the duo's tactics (mostly) legal.

This sympathetic take is persuasive in early chapters, which depict Gould as a studious farm boy in the Catskills using his brains to acquire joint ownership of a tannery by 1856. Tales like that of a betrayed partner driven to suicide, Renehan demonstrates, gained credence only decades later as Gould's reputation grew increasingly demonic. Gould was already using the letter of the law to his advantage as a teenager, but no one ever suggested at the time that he was anything but a shrewd businessman. Only after he hit Wall Street and the big money did his serious, reserved demeanor begin to seem sinister.

Renehan's zestful recounting of the intricate maneuvers involved in the titanic struggles over the Erie and Union Pacific railroads, Western Union and the Manhattan Elevated amply make the point that Gould was no more unscrupulous than his opponents and frequently a lot smarter. But Gould's 1869 attempt to corner the gold market is not so easily retouched. He may have realized, as Renahan puts it, that "a sharp decline in the value of greenbacks against gold would stimulate American agricultural exports." But he was mostly interested in convincing President Ulysses S. Grant to tighten the gold supply so that the resulting escalation in gold's greenback price would make Gould even richer. The president proved unresponsive, and Gould's failed run on gold provoked Wall Street's first Black Friday, when more than a dozen banks and brokerage houses failed. The episode suggests that Gould was more of a scheming speculator than a responsible businessman. Nor is Renehan's case for his subject as "an exemplary, successful, long-term CEO" entirely convincing. Western Union survived his attentions, but the Erie Railroad, after years of financial chicanery that reaped millions for Gould, was a hollow shell.

Mind you, Erie's stock was "the scarlet woman of Wall Street" -- prostituted for the personal gain of an unscrupulous investor named Daniel Drew -- well before Gould joined the board of directors. If Renehan doesn't wholly succeed in persuading us that Jay Gould was an upstanding industrialist, his vivid account makes it clear that the rapacious financial practices of the Gilded Age were not invented by one brilliant buccaneer. "The letter of the law is very deficient in its regulation of the management of corporate interests," noted the Commercial and Financial Chronicle in 1868. The U.S. government did not craft business regulations with teeth until the 1930s, when the Depression had made average Americans painfully aware of the broader economic consequences of shady stock manipulations. Those who argue that such regulations are outmoded and unnecessary today may find Dark Genius of Wall Street uncomfortable reading.

Reviewed by Wendy Smith
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Renehan claims to offer the first unbiased biography of Jay Gould (1836-92), financier and family man, which is presented against the backdrop of the cultural and social realities of the Gilded Age. This is the saga of the master of the nation's railroads and telegraph systems when they were the fastest growing new technologies of that age. On Wall Street he crafted financial devices and strategies unique in his day, and Renehan concludes that Gould was no more sinister than his competitors. Particularly fascinating are the details of how Gould cornered the gold market in 1869, which led to the infamous Black Friday panic. The author notes that Gould, one of the inventors of modern business, is too important a player in U.S. business history to be misunderstood, and a recent inflation-adjusted listing of the all-time richest Americans (which compares fortunes as percentages of GNP) places Gould eighth--after Cornelius Vanderbilt and John J. Astor but ahead of Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, and Bill Gates. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The smartest guy on The Street
Many of us grew up in the greater NY area and have visited Jay Gould's opulent castle, Lyndhurst, on the Hudson River in Tarrytown. But the man himself has remained a mystery until I read Mr. Renehan's fast-paced bio of this nineteenth century transportation and communications mogul. Dark Genius takes the reader to a byzantine world where anything and anyone can be bought for a price, and, hence, one could make a fortune doing so, sans scruples. Mr. Gould, driven to make a fortune, possibly by his impoverished childhood experiences in Roxbury, NY, and without the moral backbone to restrain him from using his enormous intelligence to exploit Wall Street, succeeds marvelously at his goals. Perhaps in envy, the press and his rivals berate him until his dying day. He literally becomes a national pariah, only because he plays the game better than anyone else. In private, he is a good family man, with compassion for his relatives who are down on their luck. Having sought religion and never found it, Mr. Gould is curiously devoid of hypocrisy, much to the chagrin of his whitewashed rivals. This book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the Gilded Age or the history of New York City. Mr. Renehan has succeeded in writing a most engaging chronicle of an era that we all hope is long gone, yet piques all our romantic tastes.

Thorough but technically challenging
Renehan really did his homework. He also does a fair job of trying to reduce some of the mischaracterizations and misunderstandings about some of Jay Gould's machinations. Yet Gould remains less than admirable and still a bit of an enigma. The primary difficulty is the need for degrees in law and finance to fully appreciate the intricacies of Gould's schemes. Some were brilliant. Some schemes were lucky. Most of the time meant to manipulate markets. Gould's repeated use of stock shorting, watered down stocks, "pools" and injunctions makes one's head spin. Gould and his regular colleague in crime, Jim Fisk, used the law -- especially easily swayed or purchased judges -- to have their way with the financial markets.

But he remains an unsympathetic if not fully appreciated character. He did no worse -- in most respects -- than his equally unscrupulous colleagues. Some of this is a sign of the times, when unethical if not downright evil men did their best to exploit the immature markets, pre technology, pre regulation, and prior to any professional standaqrds or ethics.

Reading Gould's life story shows -- for the most part -- how he sort of stumbled into this life of milking the markets. His motives remain somewhat hidden. All in all, Gould comes across as an unsavory genius, not just a dark one. The story is highly complex and sometimes bogs down in the details that don't come across clearly in a biography. Read slowly.

A Splendid Look at the Master of the Game
Any history of finance and entrepreneurs is incomplete without noting the paramount character of Jay Gould. However, few unbiased writings exist on the life of the so-called "Dark Genius". Gould was painted as the Ty Cobb of business - a talented master of the game, but also a vilified character held in contempt by his contemporaries. Renehan strips away the years of misinterpretation and provides his readers with an honest look at a man who deserves our attention. Business is not a place for the timid. If it were then we would live in a drastically different and in my view a deplorable state of affairs. Gould took an ambitious and aggressive posture in his dealings, and by so doing helped build the industrial might of early 20th century America. Furthermore, much of the financial wizardry that we take for granted today originated in the creative thought of Gould. This book is an absolute must for anyone seeking to understanding business.