Jay Gould

[DarkWaters]

What do you guys think of Jay Gould as a businessman? There are routinely some hideous allegations that accuse him of incredibly corrupt practices. Some of the worst include:

• Bribing officials in the Grant Administration to keep gold off of the market (in hopes to artificially inflate the price of gold.)
  
• Forging stock certificates when competing with Cornelius Vanderbilt for control over the Erie railroad.
  

At present, I cannot find a great source on the internet for these allegations that does not just lump Jay Gould together in the vaguely defined category of "robber barons" along with heroes of the industrial era such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan. I am suspicious of the veracity of these claims since they are not ubiquitous on the internet.

Nevertheless, here are some sources where I learned this information that seemed to be decent:

• The Tycoons by Charles Morris
  
• The Masters of Enterprise. A Modern Scholar course by Professor H. W. Brands.
  

I did check the Wikipedia entries for Jay Gould, Black Friday (the alleged gold scandal) and the Erie railroad. However, none of it contains anything too incriminating on these matters.

However, the Wikipedia articles do indicate that Jay Gould made the infamously corrupt Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall director of the Erie railroad where Boss Tweed would arrange favorable legislation for Gould. Moreover, the article indicates that Gould would try to influence top officials in the Grant Administration concerning sales of the government's gold reserves. Even if he did not resort to bribery, it still sounds as if he was helping to bridge State and economics.

Edited August 19, 2007 by DarkWaters

[Galileo Blogs]

The Life and Legend of Jay Gould by Maury Klein is a book you should read. It was cited by Objectivists a while back. It is probably the definitive biography of Gould. I read it years ago, but I would want to re-read it before I stated my own opinion on Gould now.

My method for evaluating businesspeople in a mixed economy is to try to identify the essential nature of their actions. At root, are they creating value? Or, at root are they just political opportunists using political power to illicitly obtain their wealth? Quite often, actions such as bribery of government officials are defensive actions against a corrupt government that holds power over a businessman's livelihood. For example, Cornelius Vanderbilt illegally broke the legal monopoly Robert Fulton had on steamship travel. Now, if it turned out he also had to bribe some New Jersey congressmen to do it (I don't think he did; I'm using it as an example), was that immoral behavior? Clearly not, since those congressmen should not have been able to prevent him from operating his ferries in the first place. On the other hand, if Fulton bribed New York congressmen to get them to pass a law giving him a legal monopoly, that was clearly immoral.

Gould may be a mixed case. I welcome your opinion, should you decide to do more research.

[John Link]

Here's a link to a reading of a new musical about Gould: http://www.waterwell.org