Chapter 14
BLUE FIRE
LOOKING BACK, few commentators would think it inappropriate that Vermont native James Fisk, Jr., had been born on 1 April (Fool’s Day) of 1835. Not that Fisk was a fool. But he was a rather gleeful and thoroughly lovable master of the hoodwink: a most amiable fraud, the quintessential noble and endearing bad boy whom women and bankers alike hoped in vain to reform. The journalist Robert H. Fuller–a Harvard graduate and a childhood friend of Fisk’s who eventually wound up among a gaggle of reporters covering his and Gould’s most flamboyant business outings–wrote that Fisk’s “generosity, geniality and open-hearted good fellowship were as pronounced as his capacity as a swindler. Jim never saw a stock he would not water, a fool he would not rob, or a hungry vagabond he would not feed. The part of him that favored two-headed pennies was very much a man of his times busy combating others who sought the same sort of advantage. The part of him that routinely did so generously for others was unique in a coarse, craven, grasping age. As for his many dalliances and indulgences, tell me with a straight face that New York–that town of so many avid spectators–did not delight in them, just as it did in Jim.”1
Another journalist would note that Fisk, not deeply philosophical and hardly religious, saw life, business, and love simply as elaborate, absurd, and ironic games of the boardroom and bedroom. “The phenomenon of his existence,” noted a reporter for the Sun not long after Fisk had suddenly and violently ceased to exist, “didn’t trouble him a bit, but simply titillated him as a continual joke.”2
Like Gould, born one year after him, Fisk had only the barest memory of his mother, who died when the boy was tiny. He was still quite small when his father, Jim, Sr.–a peddler and, like old John Burr Gould, a dealer in tin–married the woman Jim, Jr., would always revere as his mother, Love B. Ryan. Shortly after their marriage, the Fisks moved from Pownal, Vermont, to nearby Bennington, where they would remain until young Fisk turned fifteen. Here the boy became close friends with Fuller. “Everybody liked him,” Fuller recalled. “He was the leader among the boys in the village in spite of the fact that his father, who was an unprosperous tin peddler, owed everybody who would trust him. [ Jim] had a fair skin, with red in his cheeks and wavy chestnut hair that turned brown when he was older. His eyes were greenish gray and a trifle prominent–the bold kind of eyes. He had plenty of self-confidence–‘cheek’ we used to call it. He was smart in school, especially in arithmetic.”3
The geography of Fisk’s boyhood, like that of Gould’s, was eminently pastoral. Fisk commanded Fuller and a pack of other boys in years of adventures through the woods that draped themselves about Bald Mountain, the naked granite ledge below which their town sat. Fisk also marshaled his gang on the unpredictable Walloomsac River, a stream of plunging cataracts interrupted by long, placid levels that ran along the broad valley to the south. As Fuller recalled, he and Fisk knew not only every foot of the Walloomsac near Bennington, but also, like Gould and Burroughs at Roxbury, all the trout brooks for miles around. “We swam in the pools and we built rafts to sail on,” Fuller wrote. “We made fires and roasted our fish on forked sticks and ate them. We got as sunburned as it was possible to be.”4 The river and woods were as well a refuge in winter. The broad flanks of Bald Mountain seemed made for coasting; and sections of the frozen Walloomsac were perfect for skating parties, after which the boys gathered by great bonfires on the bank. To the south, on clear days, they could see Mount Anthony and further, over the line in Massachusetts, Mount Greylock and other heights of the Berkshires.
When Fisk was fifteen, his father moved the family–which now included Fisk’s half sister, Minna–from Bennington in southwest Vermont to the town of Brattleboro, which sat on the banks of the Connecticut River in the southeastern corner of the state. Here Fisk, Sr.–having cleared his debts and saved up his peddling receipts over many years–built the imposing Revere House Hotel, a three-and-one-half-story Greek Revival edifice destined to dominate Brattleboro’s downtown until its destruction by fire in 1877. When the teenaged Fisk, Jr., was not busy waiting tables, he traveled the local roads around Brattleboro peddling wares of all kinds in the tradition of his father, for whom he now worked. Both professions helped him develop his gift for blarney. He was, by all accounts, quite an amusing story-and joke-teller, spouting tales honed on the sharp edge of irony, all of them guaranteed to delight.
After his initial foray into peddling, Fisk traveled the Northeast with an outfit known as Van Amberg’s Circus, working variously as an animal keeper and ticket salesman. Then he returned to the peddler’s life. In 1854, at age nineteen, he married Lucy Moore, four years his junior and a native of Springfield, Massachusetts. The couple would remain married–and, in their way, devoted to one another–for seventeen years. But they would rarely spend time under the same roof. Indeed, during the last six years of their marriage they maintained completely separate and distinct residences in two different cities: Lucy in Boston and Fisk in New York. “She is no hair-lifting beauty, my Lucy,” Fisk told one of his numerous lady friends, the actress Clara Morris, “just a plump, wholesome, big-hearted, commonplace woman, such as a man meets once in a lifetime, say, and then gathers her into the first church he comes to, and seals her to himself. For you see these commonplace women, like common sense, are apt to become valuable as time goes on.” In the same breath, Fisk praised his wife’s discretion. “Never, never, does Lucy surprise me with a visit, God bless her!”5 (Lucy in fact had little inspiration for jealousy, just as she had little cause to complain about her husband’s numerous infidelities. An inescapable fact had revealed itself early in their marriage: Jim was not Lucy’s type. Through most of her long years “alone,” Lucy would live with Fanny Harrod, a childhood friend and her inseparable companion.)
Around the time he married Lucy, Fisk began expanding his father’s peddling business by using publicity and sales gimmicks he’d picked up during his brief tenure with the circus. Dubbing himself “Jubilee” Jim Fisk, he dressed up in a garish uniform that included a ringmaster’s striped pants and top hat. Then he painted his wagon to look like a circus coach with a red frame and yellow wheels. (He would always love being the center of attention, the jovial and loud personality around which all else revolved.) Armed with his regalia and a dazzling script of jokes, the handsome and flirty Fisk quickly developed a brisk and profitable trade selling shawls, utensils, and other knickknacks to bored, easily complimented housewives. (His travels covered all of southern Vermont and New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, and eastern New York.) In the words of one early biographer, “The matrons and maids from one end of his route to the other could never have been brought to admit that Jim Fisk was not the most captivating peddler, the most stylish driver, and the most princely traveler that ever measured silk, cracked whip, or settled tavern bill.”6 As often happened throughout his short life, not a few of Fisk’s flirtations led to something more.
So, too, did his career as a peddler. Fisk’s supplier–the venerable Eben D. Jordan of the Boston dry-goods franchise Jordan, Marsh & Company–took due note of Fisk’s distinction as one of the firm’s most successful dealers. In 1860, Jordan offered him a place in Boston representing the firm at the wholesale level. At first, after selling his route and moving to the city with Lucy, Fisk looked to be a failure in his new role. His charms did not help him in negotiations with the hard-nosed merchants who routinely bought from Jordan, Marsh in volume: men who could not be complimented and prodded into overbuying and overpaying. Only when the Civil War erupted did Fisk’s fortunes rise, for only then did he find wholesale buyers who could be complimented and prodded into overbuying and overpaying.
Targeting army supply officers–agents charged with the expenditure of vast sums not their own–Fisk moved to Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1861 and opened a “hospitality suite” at the capital’s finest hotel, Willard’s. Here, once again center stage, and quite happy to have left Lucy behind in Boston, the jovial Fisk ente
rtained lavishly. “[Aided by] some Massachusetts members of Congress,” remembered Fuller, “and the member from the Brattleboro district, who was a friend of his, Jim got together the men he wanted and he gave them such good things to eat and drink and smoke that they forgot their cares and enjoyed themselves. . . . Jim was the first in the field in providing a snug refuge where government officials on small salaries could always find a welcome, a good cigar, and a drink of the kind of poison they preferred.” As well, when necessary, Fisk administered outright bribes in return for government contracts. “Jim knew how to distribute little presents, as he called them, and keep his mouth shut about it. He always attended to such matters himself.”7
Despite the payola and despite what were plainly inflated prices, Jordan, Marsh & Company nevertheless–unlike so many other suppliers who were busy giving bribes and overcharging–quickly developed a reputation for quality items delivered in a timely manner: facts that went a long way in helping army buyers decide whose bribes to take. Blankets, shirts, shoes, and other essentials moved by the trainload from Jordan’s warehouses to the Union forces in the field. In return, rather than quibbling over Fisk’s massive expenses at Willard’s (which sometimes ran as high as $1,000 a day), Eben Jordan took his young protégé in as partner. Fisk further endeared himself to Jordan (and to starving southern planters) when he devised a successful scheme to circumvent both the Northern blockade of the Confederacy and the Confederacy’s own laws forbidding sales of cotton to the Union. The Southern cotton smuggled to hungry northeastern mills made Fisk a small fortune while also providing the raw material for more Union Army blankets and shirts. (Meanwhile, the man who sacrificed most for the cause of contraband cotton was Fisk’s father, who suffered a mental collapse of some kind while representing his son on a furtive cotton-buying expedition, after which he had to be committed for a time.)
As generous as he was mercenary, Fisk was frequently driven by a brash and sentimental benevolence. He first came to national prominence as a colorful, good-hearted philanthropist. Fisk happened to be in Boston on a Sunday in the middle of September 1864 when telegrams brought word of the previous day’s fight between McClellan and Lee, a savage battle that left 22,000 dead and wounded on the battlefield near Antietam Creek. (This astonishing figure, the greatest single-day accumulation of casualties in the entire Civil War, was greater than the total casualties suffered by both sides during the American Revolution.) Telling Jordan that they simply had to do something to help the thousands of “poor devils” who lay in need of assistance, Fisk anxiously set about collecting donated supplies for shipment to “the boys,” both blue and gray.
A Jordan, Marsh & Company employee who worked with Fisk on the project remembered him at Boston’s Tremont Temple surrounded by crates, boxes, and barrels. “Jim was the center of everything. His remarkable organizational ability and his boundless energy made a great impression on the beholders. He was a wonder that Sunday. He just threw his whole soul into it. He did more in an hour than any other three men, and there were some fast workers there. He looked after everything, gave all the orders and inspected everything. Everybody did what he told ’em to do. The whole thing was his from beginning to end and nobody was able to take the credit away from him. Was he proud? What do you think?”8
Through the end of 1864, as the Confederacy continued to show sure signs of faltering, Union Army expenditures dropped. At the same time, with more and more of the South falling into Union hands, Fisk’s profitable sideline of smuggling Confederate cotton up to Northern mills began to fade. In this environment, he shut down his D.C. operation and–perhaps recalling his lack of success with Jordan, Marsh & Company before the war economy took hold–opted out of the firm, selling his share back to his friend Jordan for the princely sum of $65,000. A bit later, after a few months of dabbling with other Boston opportunities that proved unsuccessful, Fisk packed his bags and headed for the place where his instincts told him he was meant to be, a place in need of a great impresario, a place of unsure rules, a place–he said–of “great doings.” This was Wall Street, to which Fisk came as a complete novice.
Twenty-nine, rotund, and very much used to high living after his days in D.C., Fisk was powered not only by his own usual high energy and the remains of his Marsh profits but by an unusually large dose of uninformed confidence. After just one week in town he opened a gaudily ostentatious brokerage office on Broad Street. At the same time, he moved into the luxurious Fifth Avenue Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, on the western perimeter of where Broadway and Fifth Avenue crossed Madison Square. Said to be the finest hotel in the city, the Fifth Avenue was itself the site for much after-hours trading in stocks and bonds. Thus it was not only convenient for everyday living and dalliances but for business as well. (Once again, Fisk traveled without Lucy, who remained in Boston, living for the time being at the Tremont House Hotel.)
Fisk held regular open houses at his Broad Street offices, treating fellow brokers and speculators to choice liquors. But this time the men he entertained were not quiet clerks with small aspirations. They were, instead, wolves with no allegiances–wolves looking for profitable kills. Until he learned expensive lessons, Fisk would remain for several months an unwitting financial lamb easily ambushed by self-serving advice dished out by untrustworthy associates. “He was mercilessly hugged by the bears,” wrote one early biographer, “and unceremoniously tossed by the bulls, but with indomitable pluck and a blind trust in the possibilities of the future, he held his ground until the Street had swallowed every dollar of his money and he was ruined.”9 When the market suddenly turned bearish that winter, the unsuspecting Fisk found himself dangerously long in a range of falling stocks, and at risk of going under completely. When a subsequent attempt to short falling Confederate bonds on the London Exchange proved successful, he again went long in the Street–taking advice from some of the same players as before–and came a cropper. Unfazed, Fisk told a friend, “I’ll be back in Wall Street inside of twenty days, and if I don’t make things squirm I’ll eat nothing but bone button soup until Judgment Day.”10
It is emblematic of the serendipity that so often governed Fisk’s life that on the train ride back to Boston from his New York disgrace he encountered a gentleman on whom he would, in the long term, make a great deal of money. John Goulding, a native of Maine, was bound back home after his own period of failure in New York, where he’d hoped to market the patent on an improved device for weaving textiles invented by his father. Fisk knew a little about textile processing from his days with Jordan, Marsh & Company. Showing Fisk his drawings, Goulding explained that the device, duly patented in Washington, was already used in numerous New England mills. All it would take was effective lawyering (which Goulding didn’t have) to get the textile manufacturers to pay the royalties they owed on the machine. Settling on $20,000 as a price for the rights, Fisk quickly raised this money from Jordan and other investors. At the same time, for a share of the back-end profits, he engaged a team of attorneys to embark upon dozens of infringement suits that would eventually prove quite lucrative.
Still, the Goulding deal did nothing to relieve Fisk’s immediate financial need. For this, he turned once again to his most steadfast benefactor. Using funds provided by Eben Jordan, Fisk reestablished himself in New York in late 1865, once again at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Here he approached Daniel Drew–a frequent participant in the hotel’s after-hours trading sessions–with an offer from a group of Boston investors (including Jordan) to buy Drew’s Stonington line of steamers: nine ships navigating Long Island Sound between Manhattan and Stonington, Connecticut. The barely profitable enterprise was one that Drew was glad to be rid of. Fisk brokered it to the Boston syndicate for a lordly $2.3 million, earning himself a fat commission in the process and, more important, earning Drew’s profitable attention. The two former circus hands got on well. Within months, Drew, always on the lookout for another friendly broker to lend a hand in his manipulations of the Erie an
d other stocks, helped establish Fisk in business. By the spring of 1866 Fisk was partnered with one William Belden (the son of a friend of Drew’s) in the firm of Fisk & Belden, from which office he actively represented much (though by no means all) of Uncle Daniel’s buying and selling.
As one-half of Fisk & Belden, Jim Fisk happily participated in a succession of Drew’s plays of Erie stock through 1866, making large brokerage commissions and also benefiting from his own insider speculations transacted on Drew’s coattails. No longer a lamb, Fisk had transformed himself into the most capable of Wall Street wolves. The broker W. W. Fowler wrote after Fisk’s triumphant return to New York’s financial district that “the blonde, bustling and rollicking James Fisk, Jr. . . . came bounding into the Wall Street circus like a star-acrobat: fresh, exuberant, glittering with spangles, and turning double-summersets, apparently as much for his own amusement as for that of a large circle of spectators. He is first, last and always a man of theatrical effects, of grand transformations, of blue fire.”11
By the end of 1866 Fisk was able to build Lucy and her friend Fanny a $75,000 brownstone on Boston’s then-fashionable Chester Street. He likewise upgraded himself to the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s most expensive suite of rooms and became something of a fixture at the finest eatery in town: Delmonico’s, near the financial district on Beaver Street. Champagne breakfasts, the most exquisite silk suits, and gold-headed canes became his permanent norm. So did actresses and chorus girls, a steady procession of them, all dazzled, one gathers, as much by Fisk’s joyous wit and manic energy as by the baubles he dispensed so liberally.
Dark Genius of Wall Street Page 13