To get to the point, right at the start, Jay Gould was not a “Robber Baron”, nor was he the worst “Robber Baron,” as many journalists of his time as well as many historians in the next century liked to slander him, implying he was unethical, cruel, and routinely used under-handed tactics to destroy others while making himself wealthy. In fact, he was no more a robber baron then the entire class of hard-nosed businessmen who in the 1800s became America’s first generation of today’s billionaires, using the free enterprise system to gather wealth to themselves while building vast industries that employed millions and made the lives of everyone better and more prosperous.

I have just finished reading Maury Klein’s 1997 fine biography of Jay Gould, the Life and Legend of Jay Gould, and was not surprised to learn that Gould was never the evil personification of worst sort of capitalist, as routinely portrayed by our leftist academia for the past century. Instead, I discovered he was no different then all the other leading businessmen of his time, hard-nosed and ruthless when it came to cutting deals, but strongly committed to making the businesses he ran profitable and successful, providing the public a useful product they would be eager to use.

You see, in a free capitalist society, you can’t succeed unless you are willing to be ruthless at times. This doesn’t necessarily mean you routinely use violence, or break the law, or go out of your way to hurt others, but it does mean you defend yourself from attack, and retaliate quickly using legal means when under attack. These rules apply today as they did in Gould’s time. Nothing has changed.

Gould was no different than Cornelius Vanderbilt (whose life I reviewed here). Nor does he differ from John D. Rockefeller, or Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, or any one of the thousands and thousands of American businessmen, who from the founding of this country used its free but legal framework to build a nation while enriching themselves.

Gould’s most famous area of success involved his ownership of many railroads, both in the American west as well as the first elevated subways in New York City. He also gained full control over Western Union, and for more than a decade ran a system that provided the entire country and even the world its first instantaneous method of communications. To gain control over these venues involved many battles, some of which required tactics that were harsh, even a bit under-handed, and clever. Sometimes it required payoffs to politicians, or tricky stock deals that once completed left many others sinking in the wake.

A typical anti-Gould newspaper cartoon from 1882

Gould’s tactics however were never much different than those of others of his ilk. And like those others, his overall good management of his companies he controlled, as well as the good treatment of the people who worked under him, garnered strong loyalty and support across these industries. Gould wanted control, but always when he had it he used it to make his product better and more useful.

When he died, it was the people who knew him who had good things to say about him, and it was the journalists who did not who continued to spread the slanders, because it made good copy and sold newspapers. And sadly, for the decades that followed, historians used those news reports — mostly wrong — as their primary sources of information, and thus the legend of an evil Gould was created.

Klein’s biography is a worthy effort to counter this bad history. More Americans should read it, if only to realize their past history was far more admirable than what they have been taught for the past few generations.

Gould’s tactics — and his success — were things he learned very earlier on in life, when he went out on his own.

He began as a teenager surveyor, and quickly discovered on his first real job that the man who hired him was a thief. In his first big project when he was just twenty, to build a major tanning factory in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, proved to him that to survive in business you had to be hardhearted. The project was a partnership of Gould and an established businessman named Zadock Pratt. Pratt had made a fortune running tanning factories, and was impressed with Gould’s drive and intelligence. Pratt would provide the cash and Gould would build and manage the factory, and they would split the profits.

Once Gould had successfully built the factory and was turning out hides in great numbers, however, Pratt suddenly decided he wanted it all for himself. He made Gould a take-it-or-leave it offer: Either Gould would pay him $60,000 to buy Pratt out, or Pratt would pay Gould $10,000 to buy him out. Pratt assumed Gould would have to take the ten grand because he assumed Gould didn’t have the cash. Pratt would then have gotten himself a very profitable concern with relatively little effort.

Pratt under-estimated Gould, a mistake many would make over the decades. Gould had anticipated this double-cross, and was able to quickly make a deal with others to provide him the cash to buy Pratt out. In the end, Gould got the business and Pratt was left empty-handed. And like many whom Gould outwitted over the years, Pratt then would spread veiled slanders against Gould, implicating dishonesty when there had been none.

Gould took this experience to heart. In all his business dealings over the decades he always prepared for the double-cross, and was always better prepared to overcome it. His focus was on his own success, even if it meant he had to leave others by the wayside.

And in this Gould was no different than everyone else of his time, or ours. In our free competitive American society you need to compete hard to survive and succeed. If you do, and you also focus on providing a good product at the same time, you will become wealthy, and do good at the same time.

The Declaration of Independence, which sets forth America’s
fundamental belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

And this is the fundamental lesson: Freedom is a wonderful thing, because it allows each person to follow his or her dreams. It carries with it however terrible risks and responsibility. There is no paradise on Earth. All we can do is set up our society with fair but limited laws — which Americans did initially — and ask everyone to try to follow those laws as they scramble to achieve those dreams, sometimes obsessively and without mercy.

In the 1800s Gould and the businessmen he competed against often skirted the edge of those laws, but also almost always stayed within their spirit. Their goal was to build, for profit, and they succeeded quite amazingly in this goal. Little they did was truly corrupt, and when it was it usually ended up in failure, not success.

The subsequent effort in the 20th century by Americans to tighten our laws to regulate these behaviors has generally been a failure. All it did was make success harder, by restricting freedom.

Better to let freedom reign, even if it means that sometimes bad things will happen. It is impossible to outlaw misbehavior by regulation. Better to let free competition and hard reality beat it. That’s what happened in Gould’s time. That is what should happen now, in America.