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After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905

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If you followed Enron, Worldcom, the conspicuous consumptions of Donald Trump or any of the other seamier of capitalism's excesses over the last several decades, this book will show you that history was repeating itself. In fact, comparing the ostentatious displays of wealth and brutal no-holds-barred corporate infighting between then (1900) and now, our capitalists sound like mere echoes of men who defined the terms "Gilded Age" and "Robber Barons."

Patricia Beard, in "After the Ball" has used the events and people surrounding the Equitable Life Assurance Society to illustrate a bygone era of business and living at the top level of wealthy society. In addition to dissecting a nasty takeover corporate takeover attempt well, Ms. Beard writes in a way that holds the reader's attention.

The Equitable was one of the big three life insurance companies at the dawn of the 20th Century. Important to policy holders because life insurance was the only means of support available at the time if the man of the house died with dependants, it was important to Wall Street because the premiums sat in a vast cash pool and were available to finance much of our industrial growth of the period. The Equitable had been created by one man, Henry Hyde, who grew it from a store-front business to vast size in the forty years after the Civil War. Henry Hyde was a founder, a decisive man who knew his business, could make decisions and had the respect of his company officers as well as his fellows.

His son, James Hazen Hyde, had none of his father's characteristics and had not been schooled by his doting parent in the arts that would be necessary to run the Equitable when it was his turn. When Henry died, James, in his early twenties, was the product of money and society -- finishing schools in Paris, the best clubs, debutante balls, and the kingly sport of coach riding. In short, he was trained to compete in the world of Mrs. Astor, not Mr. Astor.

To compensate for these deficiencies, father Henry had established a trust for his son. A vice presidency with the Equitable and the tutelage of James Alexander, President of the company and the man entrusted by the founder to school young James until he could assume the Presidency himself.

Alexander had other ideas. Put off by James Hyde's public and ostentatious lifestyle (including the Hyde Ball, one of the most talked about and over the top dinner productions in an era of societal excess among his class), claiming that it did not befit a corporate leader who could keep the "sacred trust" of a life insurance company, and wanting control of a company he had contributed mightily to, Alexander organized a takeover fight among the board members. His goal was to strip James of control of the Board of Directors and to do it by using James' social prominence against him in a public as well as behind-the-scenes attack.

What ensued was a year long debacle that quickly spun out of control, as first the Alexander side and then the Hyde forces battled for advantage. The board members, financiers like Harriman, Ryan, Morgan, Frick and others backed the side that stood to gain them the greatest advantage in victory. Plans, compromise offers, press leaks, attacks intrigue and back stabbing came forward in a flurry as the fight became very public and enthralled ordinary people (over 100 front page stories in the NY Times in about a year's period). Regulators soon got involved, the NY Legislature, political bosses and any number of money-men, eyeing easy capital if they could assume control. President Theodore Roosevelt worried that the fight would harm the Equitable, dissolve commercial confidence and bring the economy to a grinding halt.

When it was over, neither side got what they wanted or expected, the NY Legislature was spurred into reforming insurance oversight, Charles Evans Hughes was launched on his path to the US Supreme Court and his run for the White House and the Gilded Age (from hindsight) set on a path toward memory.

Beard weaves this corporate intrigue with a biography of James Hazen Hyde. He is the archetypical society man of the Gilded Age, spending on livery, costumed balls, big houses, fast women, a sport very few could even afford to compete in and his love of French culture. She does a good job of entwining the two threads of her book, stumbling only when she sometimes over-lists what various guests were wearing to various parties and engagements. On the whole, she does a good job of painting a picture of life as James Hazen Hyde knew it, and demonstrating that he was both cut from too fine a cloth to effectively run a competitive business and that he wore that cloth too proudly, helping to make his lifestyle a large issue in the corporate meltdown that froze the Equitable as titans battled for control.

The author writes well and generally keeps the pace moving along swiftly. The story weaves many famous business and historical personalities (it was a much smaller world at the top then) into the saga of a now forgotten business drama that held the public in fascination. This is a good book for readers interested in business history as well as viewing the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy a hundred years ago.

AFTER THE BALL is a well-written reminder that the more things change, especially in the business world, the more they remain the same. With simple contextual shifts, the story could have easily appeared in an MSNBC/CNN feeding frenzy today rather than as a distant - albeit poignant - episode during the final throes of America's Gilded Age.

Patricia Beard has been an editor of several major magazines and is the author of several books including GROWING UP REPUBLICAN: CHRISTIE WHITMAN, THE POLITICS OF CHARACTER and GOOD DAUGHTERS: LOVING OUR MOTHERS AS THEY AGE. The latter is a well-regarded exploration of changing relationships between mothers and daughters as they journey through the aging process. In her latest book, Ms. Beard chronicles the pivotal event in the young life of James Hyde, heir apparent to the Equitable Life Assurance Society empire. While one of the most fascinating watershed event in corporate and governmental righteousness, the story also serves as a harbinger to the whirlwind circling about a perception of scandal as various individuals with distinct agendas respond to that perception. Written in the style of a finely honed historical novel, AFTER THE BALL provides the reader with a detailed tapestry of turn-of-the-century upper class society. The "Ball" as a tipping point, can be seen as a metaphor for the perceptual demarcation between the excesses of the old from the social idealism (or perhaps the idealistic rhetoric) of new, more "moral" commerce. Hyde appears as the sacrificial lamb, an embodiment of corporate greed and excess (there are similarities to the movie "Wall Street," Gordon Gecko and Bud Fox). A seemingly trivial and superficial (although admittedly lavish) private affair provides the ammunition for self-righteous, self-styled altruistic corporate raiders and opportunistic politicians to feast upon the carcass of a fallen member of the club. Business practices of the day are contrasted with societal norms, offering the reader an excellent understanding of upper-class life in "pinkies-out" New York City along with the detailed portrait of the protagonist.

Ms. Beard's considerable writing ability continues to improve with each book, reflecting maturation born of experience, talent, research, and reflection. Her writing style, while substantive, is delightfully polished, engaging the reader throughout the 350-page narrative. The crisp prose displays a clearly defined purpose and fidelity to the themes throughout. While not always in strict chronological order, the book is well organized to deftly move the story along its intended path toward its conclusion.

The Afterward, a short exploration of Hyde's son Henry and his adventures in World War II, offers an additional fascinating contrast between the perceived superficiality of the father and the seriousness of the affairs of the son. The material in this portion of the book, while an appropriate epilogue to the story of James, would also stand nicely as the subject of its own book. I would recommend AFTER THE BALL to anyone fascinated with the continuing drama of American business and upper-class society.

A well-researched history book that reads like a novel is a rare find, but this is one. In an era when corporate greed and corruption are once again a part of everyday life, it's also a nice reminder of where years of deregulation and laissez-faire policies got us last time. James Hazen Hyde was a product of that time: spoiled, overly entitled, shamelessly extravagant in a city where poverty was widespread, and fond of business practices that have since been made illegal. But he was also the victim of even greedier - and smarter - associates, and Beard does a great job of portraying a rather unsympathetic character sympathetically.

Hyde's downfall seems to have been a lack of ambition or interest in learning the business he inherited, coupled with an overeagerness to reap the benefits of his father's financial success. Illustrating the latter is the party that serves as the book's climax, an incomprehensibly extravagant affair by the standards of any era. Beard argues that Hyde's detractors had already been hoping for years to bring him down, and the ball simply served as a welcome excuse to do so. Whether she's right or wrong about that, the event certainly proved to be fertile ground for scandal. In a classic case of "the truth is never juicy enough," rumors began circulating that Hyde had paid for the ball with company funds (he hadn't) and that the already-obscene cost was four times as much as it really was. Despite being guilty of nothing worse than bad taste, Hyde was soon bought out of his father's company and out of Wall Street society. Investigations and reform legislation followed, but those who were guilty of real wrongdoing were never punished.

Beard's overview of the financial events and disputes will probably be too simple for those with a strong knowledge of finance and business, but it's perfect for the rest of us. In any case, she is clearly more interested in Gilded Age high society and how it set the stage for James Hyde and his party, and her research in that area is impressive. The era's many excesses leap off the pages, with various Vanderbilts and Roosevelts making cameos throughout, making the greed and injustice palpable without anything approaching preachiness. Hyde himself becomes a somewhat tragic figure, living off his inheritance in Europe, outliving the damage to his reputation but emerging as a walking anachronism on his return to New York in the 1940s.

Sad, but very well done!

Telling the true story of James Hazen Hyde, a glamorous young man who was majority shareholder of Equitable Life Assurance Society from 1899 - 1905, Patricia Beard gives a close-up view of the turn-of-the-century Gilded Age, with all its excesses. Upon the death of Henry Baldwin Hyde, who founded and ran Equitable, his son James, a recent graduate of Harvard, succeeded to the Board. Under the terms of his father's will, a regent would oversee his participation in the company until he was thirty, at which point he would take over.

His regent and "mentor," a friend of his father, was James W. Alexander, who had engaged in some questionable deals with Henry Hyde. More interested in protecting his own wealth and interests than in guiding James, Alexander, aided by other self-interested Board members, put James on forty-eight different boards, persuaded him to invest company funds in a variety of projects, and generally kept him in the dark. Because Equitable was formed by private investors who became shareholders, and was not a "mutualized" company, Board members could reap huge profits from the company's investments while avoiding oversight.

In 1905, when he was twenty-eight years old, the attractive James, a much-sought-after socialite, gave a huge ball, modeled after an event at Versailles, which cost him $100,000. James Alexander and other Board members, fearing young James's takeover of power in two years, used this party to accuse James of illegally using company funds. Throughout the many legal investigations which ensued, James behaved honorably as his father's "friends" destroyed his reputation to save their own.

As a portrait of the Gilded Age and the venality of some of its wealthiest men, the book is fascinating. The financial complexities are difficult to follow, however, and the assorted characters, including, unfortunately, James Hyde himself, never really come alive. James was only twenty-three when he became embroiled in Equitable and twenty-eight when he sold out and moved permanently to France. Too young and too much a victim to be intrinsically interesting, he is a cipher who reveals nothing about his inner self. Lacking a clear focus, the author devotes considerable research to the peripheral characters, their lifestyles, and marriages, even devoting pages to James's son, who was not born until long after the events at Equitable. More interested in lifestyles than financial dealings, the author misses the chance to draw meaningful lessons from the financial crisis at Equitable in 1905. Mary Whipple

James Hyde, the main character in Patricia Beard's "After the Ball," a fascinating chronicle of the Gilded Age, conceded, "I got too much power when I was young." Shortly after the turn of the century, Hyde appeared to be coasting to glory in charmed young adulthood affluence. In his twenties he owned a brownstone in New York, a house in Paris, a private railroad car, and a four hundred acre estate, The Oaks, on Long Island. Add to the aforementioned that he was Harvard-educated with all the right social connections, was matinee idol handsome, and was a vice president in the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and it becomes easy to see why many sought his company and others were just plain jealous.

Beard's intensely researched work strips the veneer off the visible top layer and reveals that life can be highly disconcerting at the top of society as well. The difference is the battles that are fought, which, considering the stakes, contain a ruthless intensity.

In the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, in which James Hyde's father Henry flourished after founding the billion dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society, commercial triumph resulted from truly being in the right place at the right time with the right product. While income disparities were vast, ordinary citizens seeking to make financial ends meet bought life insurance policies to provide their families with security in the face of often rocky existences. The resourceful elder Hyde tapped into this desire. He succeeded so handsomely that big name magnates such as E.H. Harriman and Henry Clay Frick would soon grace Equitable's board of directors.

Henry Hyde died May 2, 1999, a year after his son graduated from Harvard. Young James was convinced that one day he would follow in his father's footsteps after receiving the proper seasoning, and the person designated to provide that assistance was acting president James W. Alexander, a veteran who had worked his way up the Equitable ladder. He would be assisted, it was anticipated, by Gage Tarbell, Equitable's third vice president and head of sales.

The book's title relates to a grand New York ball young Hyde gave on January 31, 1905. At the time this appeared to be the latest stepping stone up the success ladder for the handsome, witty, urbane New York City executive and socialite. One of the evening's guests would be another young New York aristocrat who would marry a cousin less than one year later and ultimately surge to inernational greatness and an enduring place in world history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In a contemporary framework it would appear that perhaps the gifted Hyde would succeed in New York society and beyond in the same manner as Franklin Roosevelt, but whereas the future president was just working his way into the city's and state's limelight with an ultimate focus well beyond those objectives, Henry Hyde's run of bad luck would bear an inverse relationship to the good fortunes of Roosevelt. Before long his company would be immersed in conflict. Alexander and Tarbell would turn on him, while Henry Clay Frick, who chaired an investigation into company activities, would so the same. E.H. Harriman was another formidable force pitted against young Hyde.

While Equitable fell into a comparable pattern of excess and wheeler-dealer activity characteristic of highly competitive New York corporate life, with its agents being provided with excessive advances and state law being violated by selling stocks to companies on whose boards they sat, directing animus against the youngest executive in the ranks appeared to be a case of absolving their own conduct through a designated scapegoat. In the process they also released pent-up jealousies against one of the dashing princes of New York society, who had dated Alice Roosevelt and visited with her and father Theodore in the White House. Hyde was also a friend of the period's most famous actress, Sarah Bernhardt.

Another highly publicized effort, the Armstrong Investigation, headed by Charles Evans Hughes, later to become Attorney General, Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, captured many headlines but resulted in no prosecutions. All the same, the damage was done and Hyde relocated to Paris.

A new phase of Hyde's life began in Paris, where he had earlier headed an Equitable office. In the manner of a seasoned aristocrat more characteristic of an ancient British family, Hyde ultimately married three times and cut a wide swath in Parisian society. His only son, Henry, had a large shadow to climb out from under, feeling initially dwarfed by his formidable father. Eventually he emerged from that shadow and achieved marks of distinction initially in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, in World War Two, then as a prominent New York-based international lawyer whose client list included prominent film director John Huston.

Patricia Beard is able to provide readers with such a fascinating front row seat in boardrooms, drawing rooms and ballrooms of the period due to her close friendship with the Hyde family. Henry served as godfather to one of her children. The book serves as both an interesting corporate chronicle of the times as well as providing social commentary wherein readers feel a part of the scene, rubbing elbows with the cream of international society.

An interesting read, though it has the feel of having been padded a bit, especially at the end when the author veers off into a mildly interesting but irrelevant mini-bio of the the son of the main character. I would rather she had spent more time clearly defining some of the financial shenanigans; I still am not clear on some very major points. I reread them several times, and perhaps they are just beyond me, but the rest of the book dragged because the author tried to build the story on what I thought were some shaky foundations. Perhaps if you're a stock-broket or banker it would be clearer. Also, the main actor in this drama, James Hazen Hyde, seems like such a pampered, spoiled child. Although Beard doesn't convert most of the sums involved into today's dollars, the one or two times that she does provides a basic formula; by that account, poor Mr. Hyde was worth approximately $50 million BEFORE his inheritance. Even if that figure is wrong by half, the letters he wrote to his mother wanting her to foot some of his bills are pretty pathetic. To be fair, this book probably suffered because I had only recently finished DAvid McCullough's THE GREAT BRIDGE.

"After the Ball" is a biography of James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), Gilded Age aesthete, sportsman, patron of the arts and heir to the majority shares in The Equitable Life Assurance Society, which his father Henry Baldwin Hyde had founded in 1859. The emphasis is on the decisive event of James' life: His battle to retain control of his father's company that played out over the course of 1905 against Equitable's president James Waddell Alexander and its ruthlessly ambitious 2nd vice president Gage Tarbell. That battle commanded 115 front page articles in "The New York Times" alone and resulted in the passage of New York's Armstrong Laws in an attempt to regulate the insurance industry. Author Patricia Beard knew James Hyde's only son Henry Hyde -Henry was godfather to her son- which explains the late chapter dedicated to Henry Hyde's life.

James Hyde became the majority shareholder in The Equitable at the age of 23 upon his father's death in 1899. Henry B. Hyde had planned that his son serve as 1st vice president under the tutelage of James Alexander before assuming the role of company president at age 30. But Henry had ill prepared his son for the murky realities and unbridled ambitions of the business world. And James was ill-suited to the job, being by nature a man of arts and letters and high society. James idolized his father and took his legacy seriously but didn't understand his responsibilities until it was too late. In 1905, frustrated by James' ability as majority shareholder to stifle his plans for the Society, unscrupulous, dogged Gage Tarbell recruited malleable and unstable James Alexander as his ally and launched a campaign to force The Equitable to mutualize (give shareholders voting rights) with the intent of ousting James. They expected James to resign, sell his stock, and move to France. Instead, he put up a fight.

"After the Ball" provides a blow-by-blow account of The Equitable crisis and the attempts to resolve it, from James Hyde's lavish 18th century France-themed ball in January 1905 until his self-imposed exile in France a year later. Although it occasionally bogs down in minutiae, the battle for The Equitable is a page-turner. Histories of Henry B. Hyde, The Equitable, James' later life in Paris and New York, and his son's service in the OSS during World War II bookend the drama. Prominent industrialists and financiers from Wall Street's boom years of the 1890s-1920s are the cast, and The Gilded Age itself is a character. James' flamboyance, active social life, and ostentatious wealth exemplified the ideals of the era. He was praised for successfully juggling his business, social, and artistic pursuits. But he couldn't. "After the Ball" is the story of a doting father who gave his son an empire but neglected to teach him how to rule for fear that his image would be tarnished in the boy's eyes. It's the story of a son who inherited great wealth and power but little motivation to comprehend or exploit them and so fell victim to those more willing.

This is a well presented and gripping account of the clash of the titans of industry of a century ago. It shows them in their true, unsavory, colors, albeit a tad muted....

We find the anything-but-poor, yet unsuspecting Mr. Hyde (heir in his 20s to the Equitable Insurance fortune) shaken from his elite complacency and thrust into the eye of a storm that is kept stirred by the machinations of Equitable board member Henry Clay Frick, one of the more amazing and alarming capitalists from Pittsburgh's steel days.

In a bid to oust Hyde from control of the mega-insurance concern that his father founded with wit, skill and sleight of hand, Frick engineers a negative publicity juggernaut that calls Hyde's personal financial ethics into question and ends up in the courts. The Equitable goes into receivership-with some luminaries like George Westinghouse in temporary control-until, beset by the scandal, Hyde sells out, shakes the dust off of his well-heeled shoes, and departs for Pre-World War I Paris. He remains a Francophile expatriate for the remainder of his days.

There is more to the story and some of it is here, and well worth the reader's time and attention, especially since Ms Beard had access to some privately held family papers and files that cast the story in a Schubert pink spotlight, with few shadows. The author, a personal friend of Hyde's granddaughters and a member of the same giltetry social set, goes easy on some of the tale. What is left on the cutting room floor is even more fascinating than what made it into this book.

For, shadows there are, and there is oh so much more of the story to be told, ranging from the Johnstown Flood (this family is connected to the infamous South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club) to the crafty ire of Mr. Frick's European counterpart, the equally effective and furiously ambitious harridan, the Archduchess Isabella of Austria-Hungary (again, an extended family connection).

What a yarn and all of it, true!

Perhaps Miss Beard will muster the courage to follow up this book with a prequel about Mr. Frick's very similar, skillful machinations regarding Mr. Hyde's future father-in-law, and a sequel that more fully addresses the irony of World History that found Mr. Hyde's son among two generations of this extended family who served diligently, on both sides of W W I and W W II, some as top level spies. Then again, perhaps not.

But if not, one hopes that other historians might take note, there is so much more to be told! This is a real life E Phillips Oppenheim novel. It would find as its centerpiece, Hyde's father-in-law, a rags to riches success - an orphan who rose to the top of the tree, on both sides of the Atlantic and who had his hands in many a pie, industrial and diplomatic....

Now...The only question is: Who will be the first to tell it?

Perhaps Martha Sanger, or Teresa Carpenter or Les Standiford or - of course - the incomparable David McCullough!

If you find this review helpful you might want to read some of my other reviews, including those on subjects ranging from biography to architecture, as well as religion and fiction.

"After the Fall," Patricia Beard's clear-eyed look into the excesses at the tag end of the Gilded Age, focuses around a costume party thrown in 1905 by then 23-year-old James Hazen Hyde, who was expected to accede to the presidecy of the Equitable Life Insurance Company when he turned thirty.

It never happened. Instead his enemies, in the company and outside it, used the ball as an excuse to start a power play that would bring him down. As sometimes happens, however, they brought themselves down as well.

The book is almost like a musical comedy in structure. The title is somewhat misleading as the ball itself comes in the middle of the book (imagine the ball as the big production number that brings the curtain down on act one). It begins with James's father, Henry, skips quickly through James's adolescence and early manhood (there'll be a production number having to do with James's hobby, racing horsedrawn carriages), the premature death of his father, and his rise to the first vice presidency of the insurance company, where, or so his father had hoped, he would be tutored by the interim president, James W. Alexander, who was nearing retirement age.

When the curtain rises on act 2, you will encounter an array of schemers, some driven almost batty as they struggle for power, and a parade of the gilded age financiers, J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and James Fortune Ryan, as well as President Theodore Roosevelt, ex-President Grover Cleveland, and Charles Evans Hughes, who would some day be, thanks largely to his investigation of the scandal, Chief Justice of the United States.

You'll maybe hear patter songs in your head as the robber barons form committees, make deals, break deals, and leak their doings to the press, as they scheme to acquire the faltering company for themselves.

And when the curtain comes down on the tale as the chastened but hardly impoverished Hyde leaves for France--saying his goodbyes aboard the ship that's about to sail perhaps--it comes down, as well, on the Gilded Age itself.

Notes and asides: The afterword, about Hyde's later life and that of his son, who was in the OSS during WWII should not be skipped.

James Hazen Hyde inherited the majority of shares in the Equitable Life Assurance Society at the age of 23.Intelligent, wealthy, cultured and received in the best circles,he seemed ready to run the billion dollar company. He was no match for the older more seasoned men on the company's board. Encompassing the Gilded Era, when wealth was displayed and the 400 Ruled society,"After the Ball" details the ascent of Hyde and his eventual fall from power.Not only is this a story of business and the mechanisms of power, it is a a glimpse into the rarified world of the social elite. No expenditure seemed to extravagent if it meant besting your social peers,no display too vulgar. It is the time when Vanderbilts,Astors,Roosevelts and others filled the society news. James Hyde moved in these circles,using the vast monies in his business to ease the way. Briskly written, well-paced, "After the Ball" not only details the behind the scene power struggles (usually front-page news)but the intrigues within the highest of society.