Man Who Made Wall Street · Default Product

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He tamed the market's bulls and bears. "He was the best friend I have ever had in every way."—J. P. Morgan It was the height of the Gilded Age and J. Pierpont Morgan controlled the fate of railroads, corporations, and governments. The wealthy and influential were said to tremble before his blinding intellect and intimidating gaze, yet he deferred to one man: Anthony J. Drexel. Drexel—whose name is familiar today only through the university he founded and his recently canonized niece and protegee, Katharine—was the most influential financier of the nineteenth century. The second son of an Austrian emigre, Anthony Drexel (1826-1893) soon established himself as the preeminent financial mind in the Philadelphia currency brokerage his father began in 1838. Shunning publicity, self-promotion, and high-profile public accolades (he declined President Ulysses S. Grant's invitation to become Secretary of the Treasury), Drexel initiated a partnership with J. P. Morgan and his father, Junius, that became the most powerful financial combination of its age. At a time when the United States did not have a central bank, the government as well as large-scale commercial ventures relied on financiers

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