Fifty Years in Wall Street
1908
Henry Clews arrived in Wall Street in 1857 with nothing but nerve and a front-row seat to the financial earthquakes that would shape America. Over the next half century, he became one of the most powerful financiers in America: a kingmaker who helped finance the Union's Civil War effort, organized the Committee of 70 that toppled the corrupt Tweed Ring, and counseled Presidents. This is his unrepentant memoir of the era when Wall Street was a lawless frontier, speculators were folk heroes, and fortunes rose and collapsed with terrifying speed. Clews writes with the swagger of a man who survived it all, revealing the raw machinery of Gilded Age finance: the manipulation, the panic of 1873, the rise of J.P. Morgan, the behind-the-scenes deals that kept the whole system running. It's a time capsule wrapped in ego, an insider's confession that pulls no punches about the wild, unregulated capitalism that built modern America.
