I just finished Capital City by Thomas Kessner, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University. Though Kessner is a social historian who has done some published some excellent research on New York’s immigrant history, this book focuses on Wall Street’s elite: financiers, industrialists, investors, and so on. This is the “other” Gangs of New York.
And it reads just as sensationally as Asbury’s classic, and probably intentionally so. Unlike Kessner’s academic books, Capital City is published by Simon & Schuster. Kessner makes what could be a rather dry account of corporate take-overs, monopolistic mergers, and both financial and political corruption, seem like a cross between a war epic and a thriller. This is definetely a “popular” book, rather than an academic history.
Kessner doesn’t really offer much in the way of an argument, but perhaps it’s not necessary in a book of this kind after all. His main claim is that “despite the tendency to think about the Industrial Revolution, the rise of big business, and metropolitan growth as a braided set of ineluctable forces, the new corporate economy was built in New York by individuals”. Those individuals include among others the Morgans, Astors, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Jay Gould, Andrew Green, Samuel Gompers, and on the political side, the first Roosevelt and the omnipresent “Boss” Tweed. Even if you don’t find these men as fascinating as Kessner does, you’ll atleast find out why there are so many buildings in New York named after them.
The one thing that surprised me – and I admit I know very little about the rise of big business – is that the period covered by the book, 1860-1900, wasn’t really characterized by market-driven competition as much as the consolidation of gigantic corporate monopolies: US Steel, General Electric, Western Union, and so on. While the rhetoric of a liberalized marketplace was bandied about, the boys on Wall Street made sure they had everything under pretty tight control. (Kessner’s account of JP Morgan’s influence over the US Treasury’s gold reserves is definetely an eye-opener.)
So if you enjoy urban history or adventure stories about pirates and roughriders, you should definetely take a look at this book. I am reading Chants Democratic by Sean Wilentz next, which deals with the period right before Kessner’s, and looks specifically at New York’s working class. That should be an interesting comparison.
1 Comment
June 16, 2008 at 6:59 pm
[...] 1984 but reissued on its 20th anniversary with a new introduction by Wilentz. I read it right after Kessner’s Capital City, and the too make an interesting pair. While Kessner studies the way in which New York transformed [...]