Jay Gould

Jay Gould

James Fisk used his money to the public benefit. Colonel Fisk restored the 9th Regiment of the New York National Guard, bought its band new instruments and paid its top cornet player $10,000 a year. He raised the regiment's numbers to 700 and took them on splendid outings. Jim Fisk came to the rescue of Chicago after its fire in October 1871, organizing relief and settling up a fund to restore the burned properties of survivors. He also invested heavily in New York theater, especially in opera productions.

These financiers were not without redeeming features. Daniel Drew was a pious Methodist and made huge donations to Madison Theological Seminary in New Jersey, which was renamed Drew Theological Seminary and is now Drew University. Jay Gould was also a large-scale financial benefactor. He was not without taste or a sense of the public responsibilities of wealth.

Edward Henry Harriman had an instinct for the travel business and wanted to make the system better and cheaper. The Union Pacific, the biggest road, went bust in 1893. By 1908 he had made the Union Pacific the best railroad in the country. Then he put $175 million into improvements and made the Union Pacific the finest railroad property in the world. In short, he ran his properties for the benefit of passengers and businessmen sending freight, as well as for himself. He was also the hero of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake organizing the rescue effort using his immense rail and financial resources.

Men like Gould and Harriman were more important, in their impact for good on the public, than most of the presidents of the time.

America had been founded by adventurers and preachers, and transformed into a republic by gentlemen-politicians, but it was businessmen who made it, and its people, rich. Americans were conscious, in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, that they were proud inhabitants of the world's wealthiest country, enjoying living standards unprecedented in the history of humanity. It was inevitable that the men who presided over this pulsating, throbbing, enriching system should inspire confidence and invite emulation.

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