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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

John

Gordon

Articles by this Author

Sometimes making a lot of money is a snap. And sometimes it’s a snare.
The author’s desk connects him with a businessman forebear, the Indian wars, and Old Hickory
AT&T protected its interests with the fiercest vigilance—and thereby helped bring itself down
A great and living monument to commerce, engineering, art, and human ingenuity
At the age of eleven Roger Tory Peterson had an experience that produced a major hobby and a new industry
What you owe your car (ending the tyranny of the horse is only the beginning of it)
George Selden never built a car himself, but he did manage to secure a patent on every auto manufactured
The Philanthropist, October 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 6
How Peter Cooper managed to make himself deeply rich and deeply beloved at the same time
The Chicken Story, September 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 5
A CENTURY AGO you’d eat steak and lobster when you couldn’t afford chicken. Today it can cost less than the potatoes you serve with. What happened in the years between was an extraordinary marriage of technology and the market.
For a little while Stephen Girard held the future of the United States in his hands. Destiny had chosen the right man.
Sawdust Pudding, July/August 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 4
Sylvester Graham’s preposterous theories about food and health inadvertently created the American diet-fad industry
American Taxation, May/June 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 3
HOW A NATION BORN OUT OF A TAX REVOLT has—and especially hasn’t—solved the problems of taxing its citizens
R.I.P., ICC, May/June 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 3
One hundred and eight years of managing a problem that might have been solved at the outset with a single law
The man who showed Warren Buffett—and thousands of others—how to get rich
For sheer drama, William Durant’s career eclipses even Henry Ford’s
How two bold sisters set up a business in the very citadel of masculine prerogative: 1870s Wall Street
The Federal Debt, November 1995 | Vol. 46, No. 7
And how it grew, and grew, and grew…
Something he noticed in its showrooms kept the car from going the way of the Duesenberg and the Marmon
Postalization, October 1995 | Vol. 46, No. 6
It meant that the government should run the telephone system. And there’s a reason the word is forgotten.
Commerce Raider, September 1995 | Vol. 46, No. 5
When private enterprise served the public good on the high seas—and made its promoters a bundle
Why Americans should mourn the death of a British financial institution
Not only are the good ones surpassingly rare, two of the best are outright fakes
Timing is everything in music—and in business. Jerome Kern demonstrated this twin truth in the most impressive way.
How one of our most enlightened business leaders became the symbol of corporate ruthlessness
It went to Russia along with capitalism, but its greatest players worked over here
The great, heroic American labor movement—how it became obsolete
Keeping The Books, September 1994 | Vol. 45, No. 5
Why can our government use accounting methods that would put any publicly held company out of business?
When the government manipulated and misused the robber barons
Mary Mallon could do one thing very well, and all she wanted was to be left to it
Sewell Avery was a careful student of business history—but he learned the wrong lesson

"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…