Books: Another Black Bag

JUBILEE JIM: THE LIFE OF COLONEL JAMES FISK JR.—Robert H. Fuller—Macmillan ($3.50).

The Melodrama. In a stovepipe hat, and suiting of extreme flare, a jovial peddler startled New England villages out of their mid-century placidity to gape at a wagon resplendent with paint and varnish and polished brass, four white horses jingling the harness. Gilded letters announced “JAMES FISK JR. Jobber in Silks, Shawls, Dress Goods, Jewelry, Silver Ware, and Yankee Notions.”

Shawls were soon supplanted by army blankets—lucrative civil war contracts Fisk secured for his Boston firm. And before long he was buying cotton at 12¢ a pound in the South, selling it at $2 in the North. Some days he bought $800,000 worth, only to lose it (well insured) on the Mason Dixon line. One day, pursued by a Rebel patrol, he tossed them his wallet stuffed with $300,000, and made off with his more precious life.

At that time, thousands of Confederate bonds were daily bought and sold on the London stock exchange. Mouth watering, Fisk conceived the shrewd scheme of hiring a fast clipper to start for England the moment Lee surrendered, sell hand over fist until official news of the defeat, then buy and make delivery when the bonds were practically worthless. Over the 50-mile gap in the telegraph line to Halifax gangs of linemen strung a temporary wire; and in thirteen days—so well had he calculated—Fisk flashed over it the one word “Go!” His clipper reached Liverpool five days before the official report of Southern defeat. The only reason that Fisk and his capitalists did not make their everlasting fortunes was that one of them had secretly, timidly, limited the sale to five million.

Whetted by his first stroke of high finance, Fisk brashed into Wall Street, but with indifferent success until Uncle Dan’l Drew, dour and dignified and sanctimonious, took the mustachioed youngster under his batlike wing. Drew was the man who drove thirsty live stock into Manhattan, and having watered it just before weighing it, greatly increased the pounds for sale, thus originating the financial term of “watering stock.”

Fisk and his partner—Jay Gould of the dark, calculating eye—were apt pupils, useful aides in Drew’s grim wrangle with Commodore Vanderbilt. Between them they trimmed the old war-horse in the Erie Railroad deal, and escaped melodramatically across the river (state line) with six millions of his greenbacks in a little black bag. When Drew thereupon double-crossed his juniors in a dicker with the commodore, Fisk and Gould cut loose upon an independent career of buying railroads, Tammany judges, and gold. On the famous Black Friday, 49 years ago, they cornered gold in a grand scandal of disaster. Fisk “went in” to save his partner, but Gould took cunning advantage of the generous gesture, ruined debonair Fisk, and saved himself.

Yet 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 and fanfare. In splendid military regalia he escorted shabby President Grant to a Boston jubilee, where many mistook him for president, and ever afterwards dubbed him Jubilee Jim.

He further fancied himself as impresario, sank millions in grand opera (conveniently in the same flamboyant building with his Erie offices); and millions more for French farce and Shakespeare at the “Boudoir Theatre.” By way of advertisement, he filled his splendid barouche—three white horses pulling on the right, three black horses on the left—with buxom wasp-waisted actresses in picture hats. But his mistress refused to. believe it mere advertisement, cuckolded him with his best friend—a double-dealing popinjay—and broke his heart. The popinjay, balked in blackmailing Jubilee Jim, shot him dead. Tammany-Boss Tweed and Jay Gould sorrowed sincerely; the masses, damp-eyed, mourned vociferously.

The Significance. Though differing in detail from The Book of Daniel Drew and Warshow’s Jay Gould, Jubilee Jim completes the 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 Jim.

The Author. At a conference of press correspondents in Albany the late Robert Fuller was so conspicuous for his intelligent questions that Charles Evans Hughes marked him, later appointed him his gubernatorial secretary and right hand man. A graduate of Harvard (1888), 18 years a newspaperman—reporter, editor, political pundit—he spent the last 20 years of his life in public service, representing Mr. Hughes’s “ideal of the faithful, intelligent public servant, the sort that makes democracy worth while.”