PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JAY GOULD.
Much of the interest in the life and career of Mr. Gould is in regard
to his personal characteristics and qualifications, and much that is
to be learned from his life is to be gained from the study of the same
circumstances. The varying opinions regarding him are perhaps more
widely different than those concerning any other great financier. As
has been said, there are those who see in him all that was ideal in the
character of a powerful money monarch. There are more whose criticisms
can not be made too scathing, whose denunciations can not be made too
strong. In an impartial history, all such opinions must be represented.
It is a relief to turn from the record of Gould’s public career to the
contemplation of his private life. As has already been said, in all his
domestic relations Gould was a model man. He had no habits but that of
hard work and home enjoyments. He did not use tobacco in any form. He
rarely, if ever, sipped a glass of wine. Social scandal never attached
to his name. He loved his home. When not in his office he was with his
family. He owned a box at the opera, but when he attended his family
always accompanied him. He belonged to no social clubs. He did not add
the excitement of the turf to the excitement of the Stock Exchange.
On his return from a journey his first questions were of the welfare
of his family. He made his home as beautiful as wealth, refinement
and purity could make it. He loved his children, the sweet discourse
of the fireside and the companionship of books and flowers. There
was no attempt at display, but everything he possessed was the best.
Neither he nor his wife had any ambition for society distinction. They
gave no great balls and rarely were they present at “society events.”
They had none of the vulgar traits of the parvenu or prejudices of
the aristocrat. When his son wished to marry an actress Mr. Gould
interposed no objection, and even approved the choice, declaring his
pleasure that his son had selected a respectable woman who was able
to earn her own living. Perhaps his devotion to his family was due in
part to the fact that his public career placed him apart from other men
and made him an object of fear and hatred. He was an exile from the
sympathies of his fellowmen. But he uttered no complaint, and found
in his family full solace for any loss of friendships he may have
incurred. The members of his family were his only intimate friends.
Mr. Gould was never a robust person. He was below medium height, thin,
nervous and reticent. His hair, beard and eyes were jet black. He was
fastidious in dress, and never approached the gaucheries that marked
and marred his lieutenant, Fisk. Gould was all brain and nerve, Fisk
all drive and muscle. Although quiet, imperturbable and indisposed to
confidences, Mr. Gould’s expression was by no means unpleasant. On
the contrary he was, in a sense, companionable. He was extremely fond
of home comforts and never permitted business to interfere with his
two o’clock dinner or his afternoon drive. In manner he was kind and
gentle. Never averse to give an opinion, unless it interfered with
a plan, he was careful not to obtrude one. He was not accessible to
strangers for obvious reasons, but his family and friends testify to
the unvarying courtesy of his manner and the rare beauty of his temper.
He was always more or less troubled with sleeplessness and often paced
the floor, tearing letters or papers to bits, as he thought out schemes
for making money. Making money was his passion. He was not ostentatious
in living and spent comparatively little. He rarely put his name on
subscription papers and, justly or not, he did not enjoy the reputation
of liberality. He was often seen in the park with his wife, his son or
driver, and invariably looked straight ahead. He ate moderately and
never drank wine save at dinner. Now and then he attended the opera,
and in the days of Sweeny and Tweed would occasionally join them in
the recesses of a private box. Mr. Gould was not exactly a selfish
man. He was too intelligent to hate and too unsympathetic to love
very strongly. He produced the impression of extreme intellectuality;
indeed, leaving out the affectionate element, he was feminine in
nature, with marked intuitive perceptions.
Slight of stature and frame, and feeble in body, with a high-strung,
nervous organization, a rebellious stomach and flesh-plagued with the
neuralgia--such was Mr. Gould as he appeared in the later years of
his life. His deceit and far-reaching were the result, largely, of
his frailty and timidity. In appearance what a meek, mild-looking man
he was! Strangers to whom he was pointed out would exclaim: “What,
that Jay Gould! Well, I never would have thought it.” About five feet
six inches in height and of slender figure, he was not an imposing
personage. His complexion was swarthy, his eyes dark and piercing; his
closely-trimmed whiskers black and streaked with gray; his forehead
dome-shaped and his hair rather thin--such was Jay Gould. His voice was
very low and mild. When a witness in courts and before committees, as
he frequently was, it was with the greatest difficulty that he could
be heard. But when once in close contact with him one soon came under
the spell of his intellect. His comprehension was wide, his intuition
wonderful, his judgment almost unerring. He was a close student when
once he took up a subject. He never ceased until he had thoroughly
mastered it in every detail. This was the secret of his success. Henry
Ward Beecher once defined genius as the power and willingness to work
long and hard, and under this definition Mr. Gould was a man of genius.
Though not by any means wholly bad, he was a dangerous man. His life
was a menace to his country. His successes were demoralizing to the
young. He looked like a premium on dishonesty, a reversal of the old
adage that “honesty is the best policy.”
No just estimate of Mr. Gould can be formed without taking into
consideration the fact that he lived in a time and country in which
corruption in politics and business was widespread. The great mass of
the people were honest, but municipal government was the most corrupt
ever known. Bribery walked the streets of the national and state
capitals, and “jobs” were behind nearly every public undertaking.
It was a period, on the one hand, of glorious achievement and
extraordinary development, and, on the other hand, of venality, deceit
and dishonesty. The besetting temptation of the times was the desire to
get rich--enormously rich--suddenly. Mr. Gould may be said to have been
little if any worse than most of his contemporaries in business. His
triumphs were, for the most part, over men who would have ruined him if
he had not ruined them.
In regard to himself, he once said when told that he was the most
unpopular man in the United States:
“I never notice what is said about me. I am credited with things I
have never done and abused for them. It would be idle to attempt to
contradict newspaper talk and street rumors. As to enemies, any man
in my position is likely to have them. With me the bitterest enemies
have always proved to be men to whom I had rendered services. As a
general thing, I do my best to be on good terms with everybody I come
in contact with. I am not of a quarrelsome disposition. But, on the
other hand, I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall street
men are fond of company and sport. A man makes $100,000 there and
immediately buys a yacht, begins to drive fast horses, and becomes a
sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business
hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my
wife, my children, and the books of my library. Every man has natural
inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to
make me particularly popular in Wall street, and I cannot help that.”
The day after his death, his friends had only one word to say as to
the qualities in the dead man which commanded a tribute from them--his
ability, his foresight, his wonderful patience in the working out of
his aims, his fidelity to friends, his good faith with his business
associates and his generosity to subordinate workers. Mr. Morosini,
speaking of his dead friend and former employer, with whom he had been
associated for a longer period, and perhaps more continuously and in
some respects more intimately, than any other man in New York, said:
“Mr. Gould was one of the most lovable men I ever knew. It was a
pleasure to serve him. He was very appreciative, and never imposed
a needless task upon any one. In the office he always took things
easily and coolly. There was never any hurry or confusion. In his
family he was the best of husbands, and I never knew a man who loved
his children with such intensity as he did. He seemed to worship them
all. He was a very companionable man, and there was a great deal of
humor in his disposition. While he was not given to telling stories or
cracking jokes himself, he enjoyed hearing others do so and would laugh
as heartily as the rest. He was very abstemious in his habits, but
was exceptionally fond of coffee. Now and then he would sip a little
wine, but he rarely took more than a spoonful at any time. My opinion
is that his system gave way under the great strain resulting from the
consciousness of his immense wealth. It was a tremendous care, and he
was always weighed down with the anxiety and excitement of protecting
his properties.
“Mr. Gould was the most generous of men, and he made a great many other
men rich by his own generosity. I could give you hundreds of instances
where in return for some slight service to him he has started men in
the way of making fortunes. There is one which just comes to mind
while I am talking which is a good illustration. Once there was a man
out West who did some little work for Mr. Gould in a railroad matter
there. The man was of the ordinary type of a Westerner on the frontier.
Mr. Gould said to me: ‘I ought to do something for him; what would
you suggest?’ I replied, ‘Buy him a thousand shares of stock for a
rise.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and ordered the purchase of 1,000 shares
of Denver and Rio Grande. The stock was then about 29. We carried it
along until it reached a very high point and looked like going off, and
then we sold it. The profit was $65,000 and I paid that money, all of
it, sixty-five bills of $1,000 each, to that man myself. Mr. Gould had
ordered that transaction for that particular purpose. He took none of
the profit himself, but directed that the man should have it all.
“There were many instances,” continued Mr. Morosini, “of just that
sort, and many in which he greatly helped men there in Wall street
from going down--men whom he was under no obligation to help, but he
assisted them under an impulse of generosity.”
In regard to Mr. Gould’s business methods, Mr. Morosini said: “Of
course, he was very reserved. He never let the left hand know what
the right hand did. His motto was never to say ‘cat’ until you had
him in the bag. For instance, he asked me one day to call in about
$8,000,000--which we had loaned out. I followed his instructions; the
money was collected; he said nothing to anybody about why he had called
it in. I kept the money for nearly a month, when one day he told me
that I might loan it out again, as he had no more use for it; that he
had intended it for use in buying the Reading road, but the deal had
fallen through and therefore it might as well be drawing interest. That
was the first I knew of what he had in contemplation when he called
the money in. Then again, when he bought the Missouri Pacific, his
negotiations with Commodore Garrison were carried on for three months,
and it was only when he asked me to draw checks and told me to whom
they should be drawn that the whole thing came out.”
Continuing, Mr. Morosini said: “Mr. Gould could enjoy immensely
anything funny or ludicrous. We used to have a small window in the
office through which I would talk to some of the unimportant callers,
and through which Mr. Gould would also talk to people whom it was not
necessary to bring into the inner room. One day a man came to the
window and said, ‘I want to see Mr. Gould.’ I told him he could not
see Mr. Gould unless he told me what he wanted. He replied, ‘I have
an invention here, and there’s millions to be made out of it.’ Mr.
Gould was in the next room, and he said, ‘Morosini, what is it the man
wants?’ and I told him, whereupon he got up and came to the window to
talk to the man.
“When Mr. Gould appeared, the man put his hand under his coat as
if to pull something out. I saw it glisten, and thinking it was a
blunderbuss, I dodged down under the counter, and Mr. Gould seeing me
go down dropped down also. ‘Shoot high, you son of a gun,’ I yelled
out. Then the man laughed and said there was nothing to fear, and began
to explain the nature of his invention. We got up and looked at it,
and what do you think it was? He had a sort of a brass cylinder, and
he said it was a patent portable churn. It was to be filled with cream
in the morning when a man was starting away from home, and slung by a
strap over his shoulder under his coat. The motion of the body while
walking would keep the cream stirring, and then besides there was a
sort of piston with a handle on the top. Every now and then you were to
give that a jerk, so that by the time the man reached home at night he
could turn out on a plate for his wife a pound or two of fresh butter.
“I said to the man when he had explained what the thing was, ‘I will
give you thirty days in the penitentiary,’ and you ought to see him
get out. It would have done you good to see Mr. Gould laugh over our
dropping down behind that counter at the sight of that portable churn.”
Mr. Morosini illustrated Mr. Gould’s peculiar tactics in operations in
some particular stock in the Exchange with another anecdote. Said he:
“At one time Mr. Gould was short on Pacific Mail, and he bought and
sold, bought and sold, bought and sold until the commissions paid
brokers amounted to about $36,000. Then the account was finally made up
and showed to the credit of Mr. Gould on the entire transaction the sum
of fourteen cents. A rumor was in circulation that Mr. Gould had made a
great deal of money in the stock. One afternoon, just about that time,
I was at Mr. Gould’s house when William H. Vanderbilt called to see him
about some matter of business. He congratulated Mr. Gould on having
made so much money on the stock. Mr. Gould turned to me and said,
‘Morosini, how much have we made on that deal in Pacific Mail?’
“I answered, ‘$140,000.’
“‘What,’ he exclaimed, and looked at me in a queer way. After Mr.
Vanderbilt had gone Mr. Gould said, ‘When I asked you what we had made
on that Pacific Mail transaction why did you say we had made $140,000?’
I answered, ‘Did we want to disgrace ourselves by saying fourteen
cents? Why not let them know that we can make money as well as they
can?’ Mr. Gould was very much amused.”
Those men who of late have been most intimately associated in business
with Mr. Gould, and those directly connected with the business
enterprises of which he was the commanding power, invariably speak
of him in the highest terms. The directors of the Manhattan Elevated
Railway, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Missouri Pacific
System, and other great corporations in which Mr. Gould’s holdings
of stock were the controlling interests, have been lavish in the
compliments and admiration which they express.
Newspapers throughout the country, in their editorials, seem to have
made every effort to be kind, even while expressing, most of them,
detestation for Mr. Gould’s methods. In the public press, however, he
has had few compliments except for his shrewdness and his family life,
while criticisms have been very severe on all of the prominent features
of his career.
A great number of clergymen, too, have taken occasion to preach
sermons on the death of Mr. Gould, some of them very bitter in their
denunciation of him. A few have been charitable enough to object
entirely to the fact that he made little application of his wealth
toward benevolences, and have said little about his methods of
acquiring it.
It is true, however, that the weight of the consensus of opinion has
been that Jay Gould’s life was that of a wrecker of fortunes and of
honor, that the good that he is done falls far short of balancing the
account, and that his loss will be felt less by the world at large than
would that of any other man of equal prominence.