Word: fiske
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Largest store in the Hahn combine is Jordan Marsh Co. of Boston. For 78 years Boston shoppers have been going to Jordan Marsh's, which, during the U.S. Civil War, did a large cotton business through the energy and shrewdness of a young employe named James Fisk. When the war was over, the Jordan Marsh Co. found that Fisk's temperament was not adapted to peacetime merchandising, ousted him. Fisk went on to a career of high finance, became the Jim Fisk of Black Friday*and similar notoriety...
...Friday, Sept. 24, 1869, when Jim Fisk and Jay Gould tried cornering the gold market...
...being tangible matter of action. His chosen advisers were crooked or incompetent (the minister to England, a poker expert, taught the game to British peers, started a fad), his policies pathetic; but grimly he stuck to both. Scandals rivaling Teapot Dome culminated in the gold corner by Gould and Fisk, shrewd rascals who dazzled Grant with their powerful wealth, involved the honest dupe in fiasco...
...Fisk had the fun. As Prince of Erie he gloried in running the notorious railroad. Then he built the Fall River Line of boats, painted the cabins a delicate green with pearl trimmings; the cornices and arches, lilac, pink, and pearl; and as admiral laden with gold braid he stood gloriously on the bridge issuing resonant (though meaningless) nautical orders. His twinkling justification: "If Vanderbilt's a commodore, I guess I ought to rank as admiral." But colonel he actually was-the ninth division, short of men and funds, had gladly elected him, and he paraded with pomp...
...fascinating picture of those two crooked wizards in relation to their lesser but indispensable associate. Told in the fictitious third person of Jim's confidant and publicity man, it records the entire gamut of his knaveries, but gives him where possible the benefit of the doubt. After all, Fisk died with a paltry million, while Gould left seventy millions, and Vanderbilt a hundred. If such figures are as nothing today, the balance is struck by bygone melodramatics of vulgar splendor and reckless abandon, recorded so readably in Jubilee...