Dark Genius of Wall Street, by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. This book is an intriguing analysis of the most successful of Wall Street speculators. Though the favorite whipping-boy of Progressives and a prominent symbol of the wastefulness and harm caused by the unregulated stock-market speculation of the post-Civil War era, Renehan paints a more sympathetic picture. Renehan researched his subject with exhaustive detail and carefully traces Gould’s rise from almost nothing to become one of the half-dozen richest men in the U.S. through ownership of a series of businesses, his habit of buying out partners, cultivating influential friends even into the household of President Grant, and his leap into the raw stock-market manipulation associated with the booming railroad industry.
Devoid of reconstructed dialogue and highly readable, this book contains a wealth of information on how to make a million—if you lived in the 1870s that is. Though there have always been those whose frame of mind is obsessively focused on making money, virtually none of Gould’s manipulations, or those of his rivals, remain legal today, for example trying to corner the gold market, and blatantly manipulating stocks by dumping stocks to trigger panic selling then buying them back more cheaply only to run them up again, deliberately ruining competitors.
Far from the immigrant Jewish banker alien to honest red-blooded American labor so often portrayed by contemporary newspapers, Renehan asserts that the diminutive Gould was a home-grown New York Protestant, a loyal and loving family man, and one of the most generous philanthropists of his time, though always anonymously out of concern that his fearsome reputation for business acumen might suffer should these facts become widely known.
But was this true? Gould is a common rendition of the traditional Jewish surname Gold. It is hardly possible to find a Gould even today who is not Jewish, and I have never heard of a Protestant keeping a name that sounds Jewish, like ‘Gould’. Immigrant Jews often change their names so they will not be readily identified as Jews and changing Gold to Gould was favored. Jay Gould, according to Renehan, hated farming which his father had undertook and had failed at. Jews the world over have throughout history eschewed farming, and when they attempted it, or were encouraged to farm by the powers that be, like Tsarist Russia, they almost always failed and soon returned to the ancient Jewish practices of money lending and spirit distilling. In 19th century U.S., Jews lived almost exclusively in New York, as Gould did, and almost never engaged in farming, as Gould did not.
Not having myself personally researched the family records of Jay Gould, I cannot state he was of Jewish extraction and Renehan’s conclusions are certainly worth considering. But there is an undeniable tendency for today’s media to deny the Jewish ethnicity of particularly despised figures like Jay Gould or for example Dherzhinski, former head of the Bolshevik Cheka, though circumstantial evidence suggests both were Jews, or at least the sons of Jews. Just as there is a tendency among today’s publishers to decline to publish books that assert the Jewishness of despised figures, such as not only Gould and Dherzhinski, but by some reports Jack the Ripper, who was almost certainly an immigrant Polish Jew of Orthodox background but, like Leo Frank and Alfred Dreyfuss, could not be successfully prosecuted because of his Jewishness.
But the latter cannot be mentioned in the media, just as Dhershinski’s Jewishness cannot be mentioned in histories of Commuist Russia, as are, I venture to suggest, historical accounts of Jay Gould that conclude that he or his father were Jews. If Renehan had said that Gould was actually the son of a Jew named Gold, Renehan’s book would likely never have seen the light of day, given that Renehan’s publishing company, as virtually all major publishers in New York City, are owned or run by Jews. That’s how things work in modern America for anyone with eyes to see. If my speculations about Gould are wrong, I invite any interested party to inform me in detail exactly how and why and I will be glad to delete my speculations.
