Dark Genius of Wall Street

by Edward J Renehan Jr

  Beyond his household, his family, and his friends, Gould’s charitable endeavors were wide-ranging. At the time of the Memphis yellow fever epidemic, in 1879, Gould wired the acting head of the benevolent Howard Association in that city: “I send you by telegraph $5,000 to aid the Howard Association. I am certain the generous people throughout the country will contribute liberally to aid your stricken city. At any rate keep on at your noble work till I tell you to stop, and I will foot the bill. What are your daily expenses? Answer.”12 Upon receiving word that costs equaled $1,000 per day, Gould supplied that amount until the crisis subsided. On another occasion, when visiting George Washington’s old home of Mount Vernon, Gould surveyed maps of the estate and inquired of the site’s superintendent why a prominent parcel northwest of Washington’s mansion was not part of the property. When informed that the owners of the house and grounds, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, desired the hilly lot but were forbidden by their charter to invest directly in adjacent lands, Gould immediately offered to buy the plot and donate it, only requesting that his name not be used in publicity.

  Early in his career, Jay’s penchant for anonymity when it came to charitable giving was a function of his wanting to maintain his reputation as a not very nice guy. Later in life, when he was truly a prisoner of his legend and would have gladly escaped it if he could, the anonymity became necessary for other reasons. The fact was that on the few occasions when the press got wind of Jay’s giving, he usually suffered the indignity of finding himself ridiculed and his philanthropy mocked. Early in 1890, Gould heard of two Irvington churches threatened with the building of a tavern on the vacant lot between them. Though not solicited, Jay took it upon himself to buy the lot and deed half to each church. When the Times heard of this, the paper’s headline ran “GOULD SOOTHES HIS CONSCIENCE.”13 About this same time, after Jay donated $25,000 to help the University of the City of New York purchase a new campus in the Bronx, he came away rebuked yet again. He told Alice Northrop, “I guess I’m through with giving. . . . It seems to cause nothing but trouble, trouble. Everything I say is garbled. Everything I do is purposely misconstrued. I don’t care especially about myself, but it all comes back so on my family.”14 In fact he continued to donate, but quietly, as before.

  Early in 1884, Morosini’s daughter Victoria stunned New York society when she eloped with a coachman recently fired from her family’s employ. Not long after, Jay’s horrified wife, Ellie, spoke at length to Alice Northrop about how terrible it would be if any of the Gould or Northrop girls ever married a member of the servant class. Then Ellie’s son George went that dire prospect one better. Just a few weeks after Victoria’s adventure, George announced that he’d commenced a two-year betrothal to a beautiful young actress, Edith Kingdon, the product of an impoverished Brooklyn family. According to Alice, Ellie found the idea of George’s marrying a woman of the stage “utterly distasteful, such a terrible, completely crushing blow! [But] if she placed too much importance on ‘family’ and social distinctions, she simply could not help it. Steeped in old (shall we say ‘Murray Hill’?) traditions, these things were inbred in her.”15 Memories of the gold-digging Josie Mansfield must have filled Ellie’s head as she loudly protested the impropriety of the match, only to be politely but firmly shushed by her husband, who came from a modest background himself and thus did not make a habit of holding such things against people. “She went on the stage to earn her own living and to support her mother,” Jay told a New York Times reporter the day after the couple’s marriage on 14 September 1886, “and that, I think, was very much to her credit. I honor her for it.”16

  The wedding took place at Lyndhurst in a discreet family ceremony designed to spare Ellie the embarrassment of a large, public extravaganza. Edith’s mother represented her side. George’s parents and siblings, along with the house staff, represented his. A Gould housekeeper, Margaret Terry, described the scene to Alice Northrop not long after. “Your uncle surprised everyone by asking us to come down to the parlor,” the maid recalled. “He simply announced, ‘George is to be married.’ When I reached the parlor George and Edith were there, and your uncle and aunt and the other children. The minister, Mr. Choate [pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Irvington] performed the ceremony. I was asked to sign my name as a witness. Your aunt already had disapproved the marriage and she stood there looking as if the world had come to an end. I am sorry myself that George had to pick out an actress. . . . I did feel sorry for Edith, though, too. She kept up pretty well till it was all over, then she put her head down on George’s shoulder and gave way. George had his arm around her and your uncle came forward and kissed her as a sign of his blessing. He stood by George. After the ceremony two carriages drove up. George and Edith drove away in one and Mr. Choate in the other. That was all.”17

  The couple moved into a large house provided by George’s parents directly behind 579. One year later, in August 1887, Edith presented Jay and Ellie with their first grandchild, a boy named Kingdon. By that time, however, all the family had noticed a marked decline in Ellie Gould. Not yet fifty, she suffered long bouts of listlessness and weakness, endured fevers, and lost weight. The precise nature of her distress remained undiagnosed, but in October Jay made the decision that both he and his wife, together with the four younger children, needed a solid rest. A European tour was in order–at last, the cruise he’d long been threatening.

  On 25 August, the Atalanta departed for Marseilles, where the Goulds would catch up with her in a matter of weeks. Four days later, Jay and his family–Ellie along with Nellie, Howard, Anna, Frank, and one of Ellie’s sisters–boarded the Umbria for the transatlantic journey. A New York Times journalist noted that Gould, about to set off, “looked as he generally does, a trifle shabby as to clothes.” 18 Jay was seen on deck chatting with well-wishers, among them Sage, Dillon, and J. P. Morgan, the former two charged with keeping a watchful eye on George and Edwin, who would be “running” things while their father was away. Later on, a smiling and relaxed Gould surprised the gathered reporters by coming down the gangway to shake hands. “What will you boys do without me?” he joked. Asked if he would take along a physician, he responded that he had no more need of one than the average reporter. When the Herald’s man inquired about the situation in the stock market, Gould shrugged and replied, “Some people say that the market goes up when Gould goes away. Good-bye.”19 Then he retreated back to the ship.

  During their five months abroad, the Goulds visited London and Paris before departing on the Atalanta for a slow cruise of Mediterranean ports: Nice, San Remo, Florence, Naples, Rome, Sicily, and Greece. After this, the yacht stopped at Gibraltar and the Canary Islands. Then she steered for the West Indies and Florida, where the family waited out the New York blizzard of March 1888 before returning to Manhattan. Ellie, despite the relaxation and the warmth, did not improve. And even Jay himself, upon his return, seemed somehow more drained, exhausted, and skeletal than before. Though it is hard to say for sure, it was probably during the spring of 1888–not long after the end of the cruise–that Gould’s physician, John P. Munn, informed him he’d come down with tuberculosis: the disease that had killed his father and so many others of his kin on the Gould side. That May, confronted not only with his wife’s decline but his own, the fifty-two-year-old Gould instructed the proprietors of Woodlawn Cemetery to step up the pace and make an end to work on the elaborate mausoleum he’d commissioned several years before.

  Gould’s diagnosis, a death sentence, triggered the start of the most elaborate charade of his career. Dr. Munn was sworn to secrecy. Gould insisted that the already fragile Ellie not be told. The same went for the children and, most important, the Street. As of that spring, Munn’s attendance on Gould became a full-time job to the nearly complete exclusion of other patients. Whenever Gould traveled, Munn went with him lest Gould find himself having to consult with other, more talkative physicians while away from New York. For the next four-and-a-half years, Gould would mount a Hercul
ean effort to mask his symptoms while also holding up under a massive workload–a load made all the more complex and vital by his certain knowledge that he must, with some urgency, pack up his tangled affairs as neatly as possible for the next generation.

  That May, Gould headed west onboard a newly acquired and plushly appointed railroad car: an elaborate rolling palace named after the same goddess honored by his yacht: Atalanta.20 Later in the month he made unwanted headlines when he became ill near Kansas City. When queried, his offices identified Gould’s ailment as a return of his old chronic complaint, neuralgia, for which his physician had prescribed mountain air. Thus the Atalanta detoured to Pueblo, Colorado, where Gould was spotted being driven about town in an open wagon. A few days later, a reporter bumped into the mogul on a train platform at Carondelet. In the journalist’s estimation, Gould seemed weak, listless, and unsteady. He “never once straightened his head in the old defiant state.” When approached and asked how he felt, Gould explained, softly and almost apologetically, “We have had a tiresome journey.”21 Two days after that he made a stop in Memphis, to inspect a newly acquired road, but was back in New York–where he found his condition the topic of much discussion–by 16 June. Amid a public debate over whether he might soon die, Gould dispatched Sage to quell the rumors. Sage sternly warned reporters that Gould would “show some of these folks down here in Wall Street before long that he is very much alive.”22

  Gould remained secluded at Lyndhurst with his family and his flowers throughout the early summer. There, in mid-July, he gave an interview designed to calm fears. A reporter for the Philadelphia Times described Jay emerging from the famous greenhouse, his arms cradling two large pots of infant rose bushes. Gould wore a straw hat, a blue flannel suit, and felt slippers. He looked thin and pale but seemed chipper. “They make me out a hopeless case,” he chuckled. “Well, it isn’t bad as that. I am more miserable than actually sick.” He rehearsed his history of neuralgia and his long-standing problem with insomnia, adding that luckily he found himself twice removed from the concerns of business these days. His sons, especially his eldest boy, George, in collaboration with Mr. Sage and Mr. Dillon, were proving themselves to be quite capable financial lieutenants. Gould now considered himself “a gardener first, last and nearly all the time.” He intended to steer clear of commercial stresses for the balance of the summer and wait on the appearance of his second grandchild, due in August. “I won’t undertake to say that my mind is free of thought about my enterprises–a man can’t leave his intellect in his office and bring nothing but his body home–but I am diverting myself.”23

  Two weeks later, Jay traveled to Saratoga with Ellie, several of the children, Alice Northrop, and Munn. There, the Gould party moved into two large cottages on the grounds of the United States Hotel. (Morosini, his wife, and their youngest daughter, Guilia, arrived several days after the Goulds, taking rooms in the hotel proper.) Gould declined to immerse himself in the waters that had made the town famous, but he relaxed nonetheless. The multimillionaire snoozed quite publicly on the hotel’s piazza, ate his dinners in the large community dining room, and strolled every evening with Morosini. When the circus came to town, he maneuvered his chair on the piazza to gain an excellent view of the parade. Acquaintances among the hotel’s guests–these including Frank Work and Henry Clews–told reporters that Gould, though chatty enough when it came to nonfinancial topics, was steadfastly refusing to talk shop. (The hotel’s management at the same time confirmed that Gould had turned down an offer to have a private wire installed in his cottage.) “If ever a man were careless of stocks and stock market fluctuations,” noted the Times’s man on the scene, “Jay Gould just now is posing as that man.”24 Operating from a somewhat closer perspective, Alice observed what reporters could not: Her uncle “had to lie on his bed and rest before he could go anywhere.”25 Munn never strayed far from his side. Meanwhile, Ellie continued her own slow fade, suffering a mild stroke while the family was at the resort.

  After Saratoga, Ellie returned to Lyndhurst. Jay, however, insisted on making a side trip to Roxbury with Nellie, Alice, Howard, Anna, and Frank. Jay had last been back to his old home one year earlier with Ellie. Before that he’d come alone in 1880 to install a marker above the grave of his parents and sisters. Now he was intent on showing John Burr Gould’s grandchildren their place of origin. Staying in town for several days, the party operated out of Gould’s Atalanta, pulled up on an Ulster & Delaware siding near the Roxbury station. From there Jay–sans bodyguards, who were not needed here–guided the young people around the village on foot. He showed them the former Gould home downtown, pointed out the tin shop, and introduced them to such worthies as Hamilton Burhans and “cousin” Maria Burhans Lauren. Later on, Jay hired wagons and took the children to the graves by the Yellow Meeting House. They also went to the old Gould farm, visited the school where Jay long before had wrestled with John Burroughs, and ascended to the summit of Utsayantha Mountain. On another day, with boyish glee, Jay took time to fish for trout at Furlow Lake near the town of Arkville: a beautiful stretch of land and water just a few miles from Roxbury. (George subsequently bought the place, planning to build a rustic lodge that he hoped his father would enjoy.) “I have never seen Father so merry,” Nellie wrote her mother. “[He] has been so different, the old memories and the old friends have quite brightened him up.”26 Appropriately, while Jay was visiting the place of his birth, word came of the arrival of his latest grandchild: a boy to be named Jay Gould II. (George and Edith were to have two more children in Jay’s lifetime, daughters Marjorie and Vivien.)

  Of Jay’s numerous old friends, perhaps none was a more welcome sight than Peter Van Amburgh, who clambered aboard the Atalanta one rainy night with his hat pulled down over his eyes. Despite the hat, Jay recognized Peter immediately. “You needn’t try to disguise yourself,” he laughed, “I know you.”27 The following day, Gould and the children visited Van Amburgh’s farm, where they dined on homemade bread, butter, and honey. After the feast, Jay and Peter spent a good hour walking Peter’s fields, reminiscing about old times and people. Then, as Gould climbed back into his carriage, he invited Peter to visit him at Lyndhurst anytime he liked. Earlier, Jay had boasted about his fine, award-winning cattle. Now he added, temptingly, that if Peter came to call he’d let him have his pick of any animal from the Lyndhurst herd.

  Lured by this offer, the thrifty Van Amburgh, dressed in his Sunday best, turned up at Lyndhurst one month later. The two spent a morning together, Jay escorting Peter on a tour of the castle and the greenhouse. Then, setting off to take care of some business in the city, Jay handed Peter off to Mangold, with instructions that they go look at Lyndhurst’s “beasts of the field.” When Jay returned later that evening he found Van Amburgh smiling and Mangold beside himself. “Picked out our prize Jersey,” the groundskeeper complained, “that’s all. Just the finest one of the lot.” Gould, according to his niece, who witnessed the exchange, laughed so hard he could hardly breathe. “Peter,” he said, once he’d composed himself, “I always said you were a smart one, and now I think Mr. Mangold agrees with me. The cow is yours. I will send you her pedigree papers and pay for transportation.”28 Van Amburgh spent much of the balance of the night sitting up with the sleepless Gould, talking over days long gone, and agreeing that one’s oldest friendships were one’s best friendships.

  That was in October. On 6 November, Ellie suffered a second stroke. The stroke left her completely paralyzed, able to utter only a single word: Yes. Doctors offered no hope for recovery. The household removed from Lyndhurst to 579 for the deathwatch. Munn at first predicted that Ellie would not last a week. But she tarried for more than two months, a feeble wreck of her former self, nearer dead than alive. Gould spent long hours by her bedside day and night, retreating only when he needed rest himself or–as frequently happened–when business demanded his presence elsewhere.

  At this time, Gould’s chief professional priority was the same as that of other railr
oaders around the country: to curb the ferocious price competition stemming from the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. By breaking up the pools with which railroads had previously worked among themselves to coordinate competition, support prices, and ensure some measure of profitability, the 1887 act had led to a series of bitter rate wars from which no major road had emerged unscathed. As Charles Francis Adams summed things up in his diary, “We [the railroads] need law and order. We resemble nothing so much as a body of Highland clans,–each a law under itself,–each jealous of its petty independence, each suspicious of the other, but all uniting in their dread of any outside power which could compel obedience. . . . In other words, a railroad Bismarck is needed.”

  On 20 December the nation’s leading bankers, railroad owners, and investors gathered at the home of J. P. Morgan on Madison Avenue for the start of a two-day conference to address the problem. There Gould, Adams, John Crosby Brown of Brown Brothers, George Magoun of Kidder-Peabody, and other worthies drew up a document in which they agreed to cooperate on rates and thereby support pricing nationwide. Although voicing skepticism, Gould nevertheless signed. So, too, did Adams, even though he criticized the agreement as an unenforceable effort to bind the railroads together “with a rope of sand.” After adjournment, pending further deliberations the next morning, Adams wandered up Madison Avenue with his nemesis, whom he later described as appearing “dreadfully sick and worn.” Gould wearily concurred when Adams expressed his dissatisfaction with the agreement. Then he sprang to life when Adams suggested that the overseers of the Interstate Commerce Commission be made a part of the process, to give the arrangement teeth. “Yes!” said Gould, suddenly enthusiastic, “and why not call the Commissioners in now; invite them to meet us, and cooperate in developing a scheme?” This, Gould knew, would not only force compliance but also eliminate the scent of collusion, price-fixing, and monopoly. He promised to bring the idea up the following morning.