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John Steele Gordon

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special. Gordon's writing has also been published in the Washington Post's Book World, Outlook, Forbes, and The New York Times.

Articles by this Author

As long as there have been bankers and brokers, there have been people asking what would happen if they had to earn an honest living
At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began
For a century now it has been a haven to some, an outrage to others—and it is one of the very few social institutions that have survived their founders’ world
Saint Straus, July/august 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 5
He excelled at business and made Macy's highly profitable. But Nathan Straus was even better at giving away his earnings to help people in need.
Two hundred years ago the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a healthy young economic giant. How did he do it?
Paying For The War, March 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 2
In 1820 their daily existence was practically medieval; thirty years later many of them were living the modern life
Opportunities, November 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 7
It wasn’t enough for Woolworth that his monument be grand and useful and beautiful—he wanted it to be profitable too.
It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power no man of affairs will ever have again.
Why do you need so much money to be rich nowadays? It’s a question that historians and readers of history have always found difficult to answer.
Rich For A Day, April 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 3
What happened to all the great nineteenth-century fortunes?
To the Swiftest, March 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 2
Steamboat competition was about more than speed.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Thirty years ago this week, rumors began circulating about the supposed extramarital affairs of Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President. In response, Hart challenged the media. He told The New York Times in an interview published on May 3, 1987, that…
Pork is not a partisan issue and not a new one. The term “pork barrel” is over a century old in its political sense, an allusion to the regular handing out of joints of salted pork, stored in barrels, by plantation owners to slave families before the Civil War. Because it is believed with nearly…
I did not mean to imply that Alger Hiss passed atomic secrets to the Russians. I used the atomic secrets image only as an example of a serious disclosure of classified information, as opposed to the trivial “outing” of someone who has had a desk job at Langley for the last several years and is such…
The Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to the British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter. The good news, I suppose, is that at least I knew who he was when I learned about his prize. That is a good deal more than can be said for Elfriede Jelinek, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Imre…
Ellen Feldman writes that post-election fatigue is an unlikely reason for President Bush’s recent troubles, given “the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina.” I’ve taken a few cheap shots myself over the years, so I don’t much mind this rather gentle one, especially as I’m…
The Bush Administration right now is going through a major bad patch. Hurricane Katrina, the rising cost of oil, the Miers nomination, and the undropped shoe of the Valerie Plame investigation are but some of its troubles. As a result, Bush’s approval ratings are at the lowest point of his…
Fred Schwarz notes below that New York State has little that unifies it into a politically cohesive whole and that that is reflected in the state’s flag. Let me leave New York’s tangled politics and its even more tangled political history to another time and write a little about state flags. They…
Joshua Zeitz blogged on Wednesday that some liberal pundits, such as the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, are happily opining that the present troubles of the Bush Administration are turning the President into a lame duck if not a dead duck. Perhaps so, perhaps not. A week can be an eternity in…
The 2005 Forbes 400 list is out, and once again, alas, I failed to make the cut. And the cut this year is an altogether impressive $900 million. Only twenty-three on the list are worth less than a billion. A mere ten years ago, $340 million got you a spot among the American financial seraphim. In…
Ellen Feldman, in her posting of September 19, wrote about the Bonus March in the early 1930s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to demonstrators in early 1933. Leaving aside her highly dubious suggestion that a President of the United States should walk through the streets of a blacked-out city where…