John Steele Gordon

Profile picture for user 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 John Gordon

The Golden Touch, Winter 2010 | Vol. 59, No. 4
Banker J. P. Morgan rescued the dollar and bailed out the nation Read >>
Wall Street’s 10 Most Notorious Stock Traders, Spring 2009 | Vol. 59, No. 1
The country’s financial hub has a long history of lying, cheating, and stealing Read >>
10 Moments That Made American Business, February/March 2007 | Vol. 58, No. 1
How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known Read >>
40 More Critical Moments In American Business History, February/March 2007 | Vol. 58, No. 1
Read >>
The World’s Fair, October 2006 | Vol. 57, No. 5
It was a disaster from the beginning Read >>
My Backyard, April/May 2006 | Vol. 57, No. 2
. . . was a lot bigger than yours. Here’s why you should care. Read >>
Running Out Of Oil, November/December 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 6
The problem is as old as the industry itself Read >>
“An Adventure In Prosperity”, October 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 5
We gave the baby boomers plenty of room to play in Read >>
Trading Up, August/September 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 4
The New York Stock Exchange plans to modernize by merging with a new competitor—just as it did in 1869 Read >>
Horace Hagedorn’s Little Miracle, June/July 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 3
A Fortune in Other People’s Back Yards Read >>
Business, November/December 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 6
Read >>
An Empire Of Wealth, October 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 5
Looking At The Big Picture Read >>
We Reap What He Reaped, August/September 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 4
Cyrus McCormick and the problem with agriculture Read >>
The 50 Biggest Changes In The Last 50 Years, June/July 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 3
Business Read >>
The Self-Made Founder, April/May 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 2
Alexander Hamilton conceived an America that encouraged huge successes like his own Read >>
“you Press The Button, We Do The Rest”, October 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 5
WHAT DIGITAL CAMERA MAKERS CAN LEARN FROM GEORGE EASTMAN Read >>
Business Scandal, October 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 5
Read >>
The Greatest Comeback, June/July 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 3
After one Ford changed America, another accomplished something almost as amazing Read >>
Forgotten Fury, April/May 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 2
A Long-ago Calamity May Shed Light on a Current Impasse Read >>
Why Enron Always Happens, November/December 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 6
And how history shows it’s actually good for us Read >>
The Man Who Invented the Newspaper, August/September 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 4
James Gordon Bennett was the forefather of the people inventing Internet news Read >>
Pushing the Envelope (in the 1860s), June/July 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 3
The Birth of the Global Village Read >>
Enron & Henry Ford, April/May 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 2
WHY THE BOSS MUST HAVE A BOSS BY JOHN STEELE GORDON Read >>
Dr. Townsend’s Crusade, October 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 7
THE CRACKPOT IDEA THAT LED TO SOCIAL SECURITY Read >>
Standard Time, July/August 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 5
WE ALL LIVE BY WHAT HAPPENED ON NOVEMBER 18, 1883 Read >>
Colossus, June 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 4
A CENTURY AND A HALF E U.S. ECONOMY, FRO RAILROAD REVOLUTION Read >>
The Business of America, June 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 4
A century and a half of the U.S. economy, from the railroad revolution to the information revolution. Read >>
Death of a Marque, April 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 2
OLDSMOBILE, GONE AFTER 107 YEARS Read >>
Uncle Scrooge’s Father, February/March 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 1
WALT DISNEY GAVE US DONALD DUCK, BUT ANOTHER MAN GAVE HIM HIS CHARACTER—AND HIS FAMILY Read >>
Hearst Gets His Due, December 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 8
A NEW BIOGRAPHY RESCUES A GREAT INNOVATOR FROM THE SHADOW OF CITIZEN KANE Read >>

"Web only stories" by this contributor

30 Years Ago: Gary Hart's Monkey Business, and How a Candidate Got Caught
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… Read more >>
Pork Barrel Politics
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… Read more >>
Plame Again
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… Read more >>
The Nobel Prize
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… Read more >>
Don’t Just Sit There, Do Something!
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… Read more >>
Why Do Presidents’ Second Terms Go Sour?
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… Read more >>
State Flags
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… Read more >>
Bush’s Current Travails
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… Read more >>
The Forbes 400
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… Read more >>
The Bonus Army
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… Read more >>

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