On 9 April 1850, Oliver instructed his older students to write a composition on the theme “Honesty Is the Best Policy.” Gould did as he was told, creating a document that more than one newspaper editorialist would throw in his face later on.
HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY
By this proposition we mean that to be honest; to think honest; and to have all our actions honestly performed, is the best way, and most accords with precepts of reason. Honesty is of a self-denying nature; to become honest it requires self-denial; it requires that we should not acquaint ourselves too much with the wicked; that we should not associate with those of vulgar habits; also, that we should obey the warnings of conscience.
If we are about to perform a dishonest act, the warnings of conscience exert their utmost influence to persuade us that it is wrong, and we should not do it, and after we have performed the act this faithful agent upbraids us for it. This voice of conscience is not the voice of thunder, but a voice gentle and impressive; it does not force us to comply with its requests, while at the same time it reasons with us and brings forth arguments in favor of right.
Since no theory of reasoning can be sustained without illustration, it will not be unbecoming for us to cite one of the many instances that have occurred, whose names stand high upon the scroll of fame, and whose names are recorded in the pages of history,–George Washington, the man who never told a lie in all his life. In youth he subdued his idle passions, cherished truth, obeyed the teaching of conscience, and “never told a lie.” An anecdote which is much related and which occurred when he was a boy, goes to show his sincerity. Alexander Pope, in his “Essay on Man,” says “An honest man is the noblest work of God.”
And again, we find numerous passages in the Scripture which have an immediate connection to this, and summing up the whole, we cannot but say, “Honesty is the best policy.”
–JASON GOULD8
While Jay spent time on such exercises as these, his father was busy confronting harsh realities. The autumn of 1850 found twenty-two-year-old Sarah and sixteen-year-old Bettie employed as schoolteachers. Only twenty-one-year-old Anna and eighteen-year-old Mary (known as Polly) remained to keep house, but each had a sweetheart and looked likely to be leaving the parental hearth before long. (Polly was by now practically engaged to James Oliver.) Jay–the eldest son and heir–had already made clear that he wanted no part of the farm, which exacted so much in labor and delivered so little in return. As for Abram, at seven years he could not contribute much. In the short term, these facts led John Gould to take on a young hired man, Peter Van Amburgh, who proved diligent and reliable. But nearing sixty, and rapidly approaching the point where the homestead on which he’d been born might prove too much for him, the elder Gould soon reached for a far more radical solution.
During July 1851 John Burr Gould signed papers with Roxbury resident Hamilton Burhans wherein he agreed to trade the Gould farm for Burhans’s business on the village’s Main Street and Burhans’s house around the corner on Elm Street (today’s Vega Mountain Road). Burhans–whose brother Edward was the most prosperous merchant in town–had recently been a dealer in tin, sheet iron, and stoves. This was a business of which John Gould had no knowledge; nevertheless he hoped to make a go of it with the help of his clever son Jay. “There is no use my trying to make a farmer out of Jay,” he told Sarah. “I cannot do it [but] I think, if I make this change, that probably he will be satisfied.”9 In other words, John Gould hoped the headstrong boy who refused to apprentice on the farm would consent to apprentice in the tin business. Gould’s agreement called for the actual swap to take place in April 1852. Seven months before this date–in September 1851–Jay, now fifteen, was sent to board with the Burhans family, work in the tin shop, and learn the business.10
Jay’s days at Beechwood were now finished, but in his spare time he continued to pursue applied mathematics–specifically the sciences of engineering and surveying. At some point in the autumn he borrowed surveying tools from Edward Burhans and began to tutor himself in their use. Evidently not thrilled with the idea of a career in the Roxbury tin business, Jay told Sarah that surveying represented his “ticket out” of town. “Jason does not intend to stay in B[eaverdam], . . .” she wrote a cousin in February. “I don’t know where he will go.”11 But Jay did. A Beechwood friend, Abel Crosby, had recently introduced him to a surveyor by the name of Snyder.12 About to embark upon a mapmaking tour of neighboring Ulster County, Snyder offered Jay twenty dollars a month to assist in the project.
That March, with Snyder’s offer in hand, Jay explained his opportunity to his sisters as a prelude to having a hard conversation with his father. “We begged and pleaded with him not to go,” Sarah recalled. “We thought he was too young. I never expected to see him again.”13 In the end, though greatly disappointed, John Gould gave his permission for Jay to take the job. Early in April–barely a month before his sixteenth birthday, and in the same week his family made the move from the farm into town–Jay took off for Ulster with a mere five dollars in his pocket.
Jay Gould was never one to make a Horatio Alger myth out of his early struggles. Indeed, he recounted them only once, in the 1880s, when summoned to appear before a U.S. Senate committee and there deliver a sworn account of his history. Thus the story of young Jay’s first venture into the business world comes straight out of the Congressional Record.
Snyder the mapmaker provided Jay with surveying tools and assigned him to work a precisely defined corner of Ulster County. He also handed Jay a small account book. “As you go along,” he said, “you will get trusted for your little bills, what you will eat, and so on, and I will come round afterwards and pay the bills.” Thus armed, Jay set off–sketching, measuring, and plotting the raw data that would eventually become part of Snyder’s master map. He was three days out when, after stopping overnight with a farmer, he started to enter the fee for room and board in his little book. The farmer stopped him: “Why, you don’t know this man! He has failed three times. He owes everybody in the country, and you have got money and I know it, and I want the bill paid.” Upon hearing this, Jay turned his pockets out and said, “You can see that I tell the truth; I have no money.” The farmer nodded. “I’ll trust you,” he said, “but I won’t trust that man.”
According to Jay’s testimony, he subsequently went through most of the day without food for fear of creating another scene with his account book. Late that afternoon, alone in the woods, he collapsed in tears. “It seemed to me as though the world had come to an end. I debated . . . whether I should give up and go home, or whether I should go ahead.” Gathering himself together and settling on the latter course, he boldly asked for food at the next house he came to and was made welcome by a farmer’s wife. When Jay explained that he would enter the money owed in his book, the woman agreed. A few minutes later, however, as Jay hiked down the road with his gear, he heard the farmer calling behind him. Turning around, Jay braced himself for the worst but was relieved to learn that the farmer merely wanted him to come back to the house and make a noon mark (a north-south line run through a window in such a way that the sun strikes the line at noon precisely, thus allowing one to set a clock). After Jay performed the task, the farmer offered him a dollar, out of which Jay had the man deduct “a shilling” for his dinner. “That was the first money I made in business,” Jay remembered, “and it opened up a new field to me, so that I went on from that time and completed the surveys and paid my expenses all that summer by making noon-marks at different places.”14
It was September before Snyder finally admitted to Jay and Peter Brink, another young surveyor working on the Ulster map, that he was yet again bankrupt and could not pay the money due them both. In lieu of their salaries, Gould and Brink took Snyder’s rights to the map and then brought in another youthful surveyor by the name of Oliver J. Tillson as a third partner. Unlike his compatriots, Jay did not have much ready cash; so he hired himself out to his partners at a rate of thirty dollars per month pl
us board, at the same time agreeing to a reduced share of the proceeds from the map. (Brink and Tillson would split 80 percent of the profits between them, leaving the balance of 20 percent for Jay.) Jay Gould “was all business in those days, as he is now,” Tillson remembered four decades after the episode. “Why, even at mealtimes he was always talking map. He was a worker, and my father used to say: ‘Look at Gould; isn’t he a driver?’”15 Three months later, when the map was done and the partners settled up, Jay walked away with five hundred dollars as his share of the proceeds.
After spending the Christmas holidays of 1852 with the family at their new home in downtown Roxbury, Jay set off for Albany, where he had arranged a small commission to help survey a planned plank road between Albany and Shakersville. At Albany he roomed in a house owned by one of his More uncles and–with a cousin, Iram More–enrolled at the Albany Academy, a college preparatory school. “School commences at 9 in the morning and closes at two in the afternoon,” Jay wrote his sisters. “One recess of five minutes. Eat twice a day.”16 When they were not in school, Iram helped Jay do his work for the plank road survey. (In this job Jay taught himself to use a theodolite, a complex instrument for measuring horizontal angles with great accuracy.) The two young cousins took their meals together, studied together, and also worked together for a time as lobbyists knocking on doors at the New York State Capitol. The object of their support was a bill funding a complete survey of the Empire State. The bill–introduced by a representative from Manhattan and destined to fail–called for separate maps documenting each county, these to be assigned by a process of independent bidding. “If this bill passes,” Jay wrote James Oliver, “I think I will realize enough to see me through Yale College and that is the extent of my hopes.”17
Jay sounded serious and sober in all of his letters home. Nevertheless, his sisters frankly worried about his association with cousin Iram, who had recently been dismissed for drunkenness from a school in the Catskills town of Richmondville. Liquor was a subject on which the Gould girls were unusually sensitive. They well remembered their own mother, Mary, calling her father–Alexander Taylor More–to her deathbed, where she begged him to give up liquor. (“Poor old man,” Polly Gould wrote, “. . . how quick the tears would roll down [my mother’s] face when she saw him coming intoxicated.”) Now–confronted with the slow but steady failure of his dairying business, his relegation to the grim tin shop, and the increasingly obvious unreality of all his aristocratic pretensions–John Gould had taken to the bottle as well. “Father has one fault–you know what it is as well as I,” Polly commented in a note to James Oliver. Elsewhere she wrote, “Trials and afflictions of the severest kind have made him such a man as he once was not but he has taken a poor way to drown his trouble. I can but hope he will yet reform, although I know a man of his age seldom changes his habits, they seem so fixed that they cannot be altered. . . . I do hope it may be a good lesson for Jason and I believe it will.”18 Polly had nothing to worry about. Not long after she penned her complaints about John Gould, Jay stated to a friend his outright belief that happiness consisted not so much in indulgence as in self-denial.
Although the mature Jay would, out of politeness, sometimes take an occasional glass of claret or champagne, he would much more routinely shun drink just as he did tobacco, games of chance, and the habit of swearing. Whether he considered these things evil or simply unproductive, we cannot know–but one is inclined to think the latter. Unlike his father, who eschewed church entirely, Jay went through the motions of attending services–first to humor his sisters, later to humor his pious wife and daughters. But he would never–unlike his mother, sisters, wife, and daughters–express his faith outright by announcing himself “born again” in Jesus. Passionate feeling for dogma was never Gould’s style. He seems to have nurtured only the most elementary religious belief: a nominal and socially acceptable devotion to that abstract thing called the Lord, but nothing more. What mattered was the here and now. “As regards the future world,” he told a friend at about this time, “except what the Bible reveals, I am unable to fathom its mysteries; but as to the present, I am determined to use all my best energies to accomplish this life’s highest possibilities.”19
Chapter 5
RAT TRAPS AND MAPS
WITH HIS SURVEY WORK on the plank road accomplished, Jay resigned from the Albany Academy in early March of 1853 and set out to tour four colleges in which he thought himself interested: Yale, Rutgers, Brown, and Harvard. As well, he planned to see the sights in Manhattan–his ticket that far having been purchased by his Grandfather More in exchange for a favor. Accompanied on this leg of the trip by cousin Iram, Jay carried with him an elaborate, beautifully detailed mahogany box in which his and Iram’s drunken, senile grandfather had packed what the old man believed to be a most miraculous innovation: a brightly painted mousetrap of his own contrivance. Jay’s charge was to take the gadget around and show it to manufacturers then attending the World’s Exhibition at New York’s Crystal Palace.
The mousetrap led to the first coverage Jay would ever get from the New York papers: an unheroic tale of petty theft. Jay and Iram were walking toward the Palace at Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue when a man suddenly rushed up to Jay, grabbed the box, and started to run. After a block-long chase, the cousins eventually collared the mugger, whom Jay subsequently described as “a great strong fellow.” The thief proved so large and tough, Jay later recalled, that he eventually “regretted” he had caught him and “and tried to let him go, but the fact is one of my fingers caught in a button hole of his coat and before I could get off there was a crowd around us and a policeman.” When the thief protested that the box was actually his and that Jay and Iram were the ones trying to steal it, the officer brought all three down to the police station to sort things out. Once inside the precinct house, Jay loudly challenged the mugger to say what was in the box and thus prove his ownership, which of course he could not do. Then Jay himself announced the contents and asked the police to lift the lid. Gould later enjoyed telling the story of how, upon seeing the absurd thing he had gotten arrested over, the thief ’s face “assumed such an expression of disgust that I could not help laughing at him.” (Later on, the wry judge hearing the case had it put in the court record that the suspect was most certainly the largest rat ever caught by a mousetrap.) The New York Herald devoted half a column to the adventure of the two “plucky visitors” to New York’s mean streets–one of the few times the paper would ever mention Jay Gould favorably.1 The Herald publicity even generated enough interest in the mousetrap so that Jay was able to negotiate a small licensing deal for Grandfather More.
That business done, Iram More returned to the mountains and Jay continued, over the next two weeks, to visit the four schools in which he would never enroll. There is no record of his stopping at Fairfield on his way to or from nearby New Haven. There is no indication of his pausing in that town to contemplate ancestral sites or to visit his father’s first cousin, Captain John Gould, the son of old Captain Abraham’s brother Jason, and the rich owner of a fleet of schooners plying the China trade. Captain John Gould had recently replaced Elizabeth Burr Gold’s Revolutionary-era house with a large mansion. But it seems none of this was even known to Jay, as the two sides of the family had lost touch years before. As well, the fact of his humble background and means may have stopped Jay from presuming to present himself.
Back in Roxbury by early April, Jay found a grim scene. Polly was temporarily under the weather with recurrent fevers and an ominous cough. In addition, Jay’s friend Orrin Rice Bouton–a fellow seven years Jay’s senior known to associates by his middle name, Rice–had recently put his divinity studies at Schenectady’s Union College on hold.2 Rice lay abed in his parents’ Roxbury home fighting a bad case of typhoid that threatened his life. This same fever also afflicted Mary More Burhans, wife of Edward and a cousin of Jay’s mother.3 Jay and his sister Bettie braved the threat of infection to visit and help tend both Rice and Mary.
In fact, Jay spent so much time at the Burhans’s home that rumors of a romance between he and the Burhans’s daughter Maria circulated through town. Then on Sundays, Jay escorted his sister Anna to the Windham church of the young Reverend Asahel Hough, a divine whom Anna would eventually marry. (Years later Anna would remember her brother driving her to Windham in a three-seat wagon pulled by “a nice team of large high-spirited gray horses.”4) In the evenings, Jay did his father’s books, these revealing the ever dismal finances of the senior Gould. Adding to Jay’s worries was news from Albany that the Empire State survey bill had died, along with its sponsor.
Despite all this, Jay remained optimistic for himself in the long run. He said as much to Abel Crosby one night while sitting by the fire in the tin shop. After long hours of banter on other subjects, Jay suddenly announced, “Crosby, I’m going to be rich. I’ve seen enough to realize what can be accomplished by means of riches, and I tell you I’m going to be rich.” When Crosby asked by what method Gould proposed to achieve this feat, Jay answered, “I have no immediate plan. I only see the goal. Plans must be formed along the way.”5
As his dreams of wealth grew, his dream of a college education ironically faded. “I have long indulged that fortune will throw me in the way of a better education,” he wrote a cousin, Taylor More, “but as the period seems to be getting farther and farther distant unless I sacrifice a great deal, I am fearful I shall never realize it. I intended as soon as my finances would permit to take a course through college, but as my father requires a share of my time here it seems wrong to do otherwise than remain for the present.”6 Shortly, when it became obvious that a college education would always elude him, he began to disparage the item as unnecessary, and as no substitute for the practical learning accomplished in the trenches of the real world. “I might,” he told a friend, “have a stock of Geometries, Chemistries, Algebrays, Philosophies and the whole catalogue of studies that make up the routine of a finished education piled shoulder high on either side–all, I am fearful, could not hinder me from dreamy delusive visits into the world of rat traps and maps.”7
Dark Genius of Wall Street Page 4