A Grateful Nation Remembers Jay Gould [sarcasm]

 

Jay Gould: "the mightiest disaster."

One of the books I took with me on my deployment to Kuwait was a history textbook: “The Gilded Age,” by Sean Dennis Cashman (1993).  I chose it because I wanted to learn more about that particular time in our history which saw the rise of the “robber barons.”  One character whose name kept cropping up in the book was a fellow by the name of Jay Gould (1836 - 1892), who dealt in railroads and the stock market.  Here are some references to him and his kind:

“There were in fact two distinct types, or generations, of robber barons.  Strictly speaking, the first were not industrial entrepreneurs at all but rogue financiers.  Many had made fortunes in the war and were still anxious to make a killing, especially in railroads and public utilities.  It did not matter to them that the cost might be economic or political stability.  To this category we can assign the unholy trio of Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, and Daniel Drew.  Their nefarious activities spread through whatever aspects of public life they could penetrate and defile.  ‘His touch is death,’ exclaimed Daniel Drew of Jay Gould.”

Later in Cashman's book we read this:

“John Reagan, congressman from Texas, advised his constituents in 1876: ‘There were no beggars till Vanderbilts and Stewarts and Goulds and Scotts and Huntingtons and Fisks shaped the action of Congress and molded purposes of government.  Then the few became fabulously rich, the many wretchedly poor...and the poorer we are the poorer they would make us.’”

I am currently reading Mark Twain’s autobiography, and guess whose name popped up?

Mark Twain

“Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States.  He had put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come.  Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country.  The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.  They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it.  But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of the money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired.  In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money or of its possessor, in our region.  And in our region no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired his money by shady methods.

“The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days.  Its message is ‘Get money.  Get it quickly.  Get it in abundance.  Get it in prodigious abundance.  Get it dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.’... Jay Gould – that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died.”

So, what did you really think of him, Mr. Twain?