Gould, Jay

Young years

Jason Gould was a descendant of Major Nathan Gold, who moved to New England in 1646 and settled in Fairfield , Connecticut . Major Gold's son, Jason's great-grandfather, Nathan Gold, Jr. became assistant governor of the Connecticut colony in 1706 and chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1724. Jason's grandfather, Colonel Abraham Gold, was an officer of the Continental Army . Since 1806, Gold Sr. began to sign Gould (Gould). ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Jason suffered from tuberculosis since childhood. From hatred of cramming, he dropped out of school, but from childhood he had the ability to rhetoric and literary abilities, in particular, as a teenager, wrote the story of his hometown of Delaware.

Having abandoned the school, Gould worked as a surveyor , and managed to earn $ 5,000 for the sale of maps and historical works compiled by him. With this money, in 1856, he and his business partner, one Pratt, opened an extremely profitable leather industry. Gould deceived Pratt by withdrawing profits from the company to his own (essentially clandestine) bank ; when Pratt discovered the fraud , he preferred a settlement and left the company with monetary compensation - half the down payment. When Gould was 20 years old, he entered the New York commodity market and, using the money of his new partners, actually bought up the leather market. In 1857, his fortune reached a million, but the panic on the exchange of 1857 destroyed his fortune; Gould’s partner, Charles Lewip, committed suicide (modern biographers dispute Gould’s guilt in his death, considering Lewip’s mental disorder to be the fault).

Black Friday 1869

In the next decade, Gould’s activities did not stand out, but in the second half of the 1860s he and James Fisk became prominent figures in Tammany Hall (New York’s Democratic headquarters). After the death of the scam tycoon Daniel, Drew Fisk and Gould became the managers of his Erie Railroad, appointing the honorary director of Boss Tweed ; Tweed provided Fisk and Gould with a political “roof”. During the prosecution of Tweed in 1871, it was Gould who contributed eight million bail for him.

In August 1869, Gould and Fisk decided to provoke a rise in prices in the markets. Purchasing gold, they expected that it would be followed by an increase in grain prices, and then - an increase in demand for grain transportation, which would allow raising the railway tariff. Gould’s Napoleonic plan (as contemporaries estimated this scam) relied, inter alia, on contacts with President Grant’s inner circle. Gould invested 7 million in business, which boosted gold prices by 40%; in the following days, price increases amounted to 65% by July 1869. The doubting players turned to the president directly, and only after that, without special warnings and information leaks, the US Treasury entered the gold market. September 24, 1869 “ Black Friday ” broke out, the gold exchange rate collapsed; although Gould did not lose the money invested in the scam, he was overwhelmed with numerous lawsuits, and once he was almost lynched on the street - as a result, Gould left the stock exchange and the railway in 1872, and James Fisk was shot on the street by his ex-girlfriend’s lover.

Rail King

Throwing the devastated Erie Railroad, Gould undertook to buy railways in the Midwest, taking control of Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific. By 1880, it controlled about 16,000 kilometers of roads (1/9 of the US national network), in 1882 - 15% of the national network. In 1883, Gould had, however, left Union Pacific due to financial claims by the federal government. Gould is credited with the phrase spoken about the 1886 railway strike: “I can hire half of the working class to kill the other.”

Gould was married once (his wife died two years before his death) and had six children. After his death, his inheritance was valued at only 72 million dollars - to save on taxes.

Modern biographers who reconstructed Gould’s biography on primary sources believe that his image of the “robber baron” is largely exaggerated by the press (including at the direction of Gould himself during his lifetime), and Gould’s business practices exclude the practice of intentional bankruptcy and direct non-compliance with the interests of minority shareholders - justified in the conditions of the XIX century. However, in the popular and educational literature, Gould’s personality is still presented as an example of a particularly unprincipled bigwig.

• Charles R. Geist. History of Wall Street., M., Quartet Press (Aton Library), M., 2001 ISBN 5-901822-01-3 , c.69-115

• Gould, Jay (second)
• Robber Barons

• Mephistopheles on Wall Street - biography of financier Jay Gould