Bio and Industry

Jay Gould was born on May 27, 1836 in Roxbury, New York. He was an American railroad executive, financier, speculator, and important railroad developer. Jay Gould never formally learned how to run a railroad, but he understood the stock market. By 1871, he had become the most powerful railroad man in New York. A decade later he controlled the largest rail network in the nation.

Business Practices

Gould began buying and selling shares of small railways in 1859 and rose to the position of Director of New York’s Erie Railroad Company. In 1867, Cornelius Vanderbilt moved to buy stock in the Erie to combine it with his own New York Central Railroad. Gould, seeking to keep control out of Vanderbilt’s hands, swiftly issued 50,000 new shares. Knowing the stock issue was illegal, Gould bribed members of the New York State Legislature to legalize his stock sale and to forbid the combination of the New York Central and Erie railroads. Vanderbilt had been stopped. 

Now securely in control, Gould directed the Erie to pay his own private construction companies to lay track. No work was done. Gould pocketed the money, and the Erie’s share price fell sharply. When several British shareholders tried to stop him, Gould refused to recognize their voting rights. A judge ruled against the shareholders when they sued.

In an age of scandal and corruption, Jay Gould was regarded as a master of bribery and insider stock manipulation. He paid off President Grant's brother-in-law to learn the president's intentions about government gold sales; he bribed members of New York's legislature; and he tried to corner the gold market.

Workers

The Knights of Labor organized strikes against Jay Gould’s southwest railroad system in 1884 and 1886. According to the the New York Times in March 29, 1886 the reason for the strike was that Gould mistreated 15,000 out of 18,000 of the workers employed by his railroad by paying them “slave wages” for their work.

However, Socialist and Labor organizer Eugene Debs wrote in 1893 "Already, lodges of workingmen on lines of railroad controlled by Jay Gould are bearing public testimony of his generous treatment — and one word from such men is more than a thousand columns of newspaper detraction or the vapid utterances of pulpits — and the fact that he placed his interests in a man like S.H.H. Clark is proof conclusive that he was animated by a sincere desire to promote fair dealing with employees on all of his great lines of railroad." 

Philanthropy

Gould lived in a time when corruption was common among judges, politicians, and presidential advisors. Some corrupt individuals were caught and punished. Jay Gould, on the other hand, died a very wealthy man. His six children inherited his $77 million fortune; the oldest, George Jay Gould, became a railroad baron in his own right, but without the unethical taint of his father. Unlike other wealthy industrialists of the era, the tightfisted Jay Gould did not pursue philanthropic efforts, neither in his own lifetime nor through his death. His story illustrates the remarkable flavor of politics and business in the Gilded Age.