Man Who Made Wall Street Anthony J. Drexel And the Rise of Modern Finance

It was the height of the Gilded Age and J. Pierpont Morgan controlled the fate of railroads, corporations, and governments. The wealthy and influential were said to tremble before his blinding intellect and intimidating gaze, yet he deferred to one man: Anthony J. Drexel. Drexel--whose name is familiar today only through the university he founded and his recently canonized niece and protegee, Katharine--was the most influential financier of the nineteenth century. The second son of an Austrian emigre, Anthony Drexel (1826-1893) soon established himself as the preeminent financial mind in the Philadelphia currency brokerage his father began in 1838. Shunning publicity, self-promotion, and high-profile public accolades (he declined President Ulysses S. Grant's invitation to become Secretary of the Treasury), Drexel initiated a partnership with J. P. Morgan and his father, Junius, that became the most powerful financial combination of its age. At a time when the United States did not have a central bank, the government as well as large-scale commercial ventures relied on financiers to raise the enormous sums of money necessary to build railroads, construct factories, and fight major wars. With branches and partnerships in London, Paris, Chicago, and New York, all benefiting from their leader's reputation for impeccable integrity, Drexel's firms were able to steer American business through the most extraordinary long-term economic growth of any nation in world history, as well as through four devastating depressions, an enlightening lesson in the cyclical nature of the U.S. economy. "This solid biography is well documented, thoughtful, and analytical; it displays a thorough knowledge of thesources and is engaging to read. . . . Highly recommended."--Rottenberg, Dan is the author of 'Man Who Made Wall Street Anthony J. Drexel And the Rise of Modern Finance', published 2006 under ISBN 9780812219661 and ISBN 081221966X.