A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States
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Geoffrey C. Ward. (2012). A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Geoffrey C. Ward. 2012. A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought On a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Geoffrey C. Ward, A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought On a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Geoffrey C. Ward. A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought On a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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A Disposition to Be Rich

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How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Ward, Geoffrey C.
   • bioText:

     Geoffrey C. Ward is the coauthor of The Civil War (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns), and the author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize.

   • name: Geoffrey C. Ward

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2012-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

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title

A Disposition to Be Rich

fullDescription

Ferdinand Ward was the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. Through his unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and ran roughshod over the entire world of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes story is told—told by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.
Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day, a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme—one that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at twenty-one and in less than a decade, armed with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of the former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire life marked by dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for anything but his own interests.
Drawing from thousands of family documents never before examined, Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfather’s rapid rise to riches and fame and his even more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions along the way; fast horses and crooked bankers and corrupt New York officials; courtroom confrontations and six years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinand’s desperate scheme to kidnap his own son to get his hands on the estate his late wife had left the boy. Here is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.
 

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Janet Maslin, The New York Times
   • content: "A Disposition to Be Rich is a special accomplishment . . . After Ferdinand De Wilton Ward Jr. became notorious as a Gilded Age financial schemer of rare weaselly ingenuity, his picture appeared in a manual of phrenology. The shape of his "low-top head, very broad from side to side," was said to explain why Ward had shown the "Secretiveness, Cunning, Acquisitiveness, Destructiveness" to bilk investors, shame and bankrupt a former president and try to kidnap his own son . . . It took a great-grandson of Ferdinand's, the prizewinning historian Geoffrey C. Ward, to write the scandal-filled but eminently fair book that airs this dirty laundry . . . A most peculiar labor of love."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Before Bernard Madoff, before Charles Ponzi, there was Ferdinand Ward . . . Based on troves of letters and other memorabilia that Mr. Ward patiently amassed over many years, A Disposition to Be Rich is actually a family chronicle of sorts, in which Ferdinand is by no means the most demented ancestor . . . [A] beguiling reminder that human nature doesn't change much from one Gilded Age to another, although each new con merchant brings fresh wrinkles to the racket."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Carlo Wolff, Christian Science Monitor
   • content: "A scoundrel and a celebrity, the embezzler Ferdinand Ward made headlines for 25 years. This work, the result of decades of research into family archives and conversations with Geoffrey Ward's grandfather, Ferd's son Clarence, often reads like fiction. What's as impressive as Ferd Ward's career was wayward is his great-grandson's powers of historical synthesis. . . . With a story like this one, no invention was necessary."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
   • content: "Like a great nineteenth century novel, this is a mordantly entertaining account of the author's great-grandfather Ferdinand Ward, whose stock brokerage collapsed spectacularly in 1885 after swindling Ulysses S. Grant and other luminaries out of millions . . . . A rollicking financial picaresque."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One
   • content: "Imagine that Bernie Madoff was in business with former President Dwight Eisenhower and that after stealing millions from Warren Buffett, Madoff left Ike with only $80 to his name. That's what Ferd Ward did to Ulysses S. Grant, but it only begins to describe the perfidy of the greatest swindler of the 19th Century. Now Ward's great grandson, one of America's finest historians, has redeemed the Ward family name with this wry and engrossing tale of Gilded Age greed that resonates powerfully in our own time."
6. • premium: False
   • source: David Walton, The Dallas Morning News
   • content: "No dramatization could match the richness of detail and command of sources that Ward provides here. Each footnote is a miniature history in itself--coming together in a remarkably vivid and focused portrait of the age, its biases and follies."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Joseph C. Goulden, The Washington Times
   • content: "A gripping story of chicanery in the stock market which drives home the ancient adage, 'Buyer, beware!'"
8. • premium: False
   • source: T.J. Stiles, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
   • content: "[An] elegant new biography."
9. • premium: False
   • source: David Walton, Louisville Courier-Journal
   • content: "A Disposition to be Rich is a unique family history that is also a unique literary collaboration."
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 12, 2012
      Like a great 19th-century novel, this is a mordantly entertaining account of the author’s great-grandfather Ferdinand Ward, whose stock brokerage collapsed spectacularly in 1885 after swindling Ulysses S. Grant and other luminaries out of millions. Ward, a historian and Ken Burns collaborator, weaves character defects and family conflicts into a social panorama, probing Ferdinand’s loathsome, beguiling personality: the youthful charm that mesmerized Wall Street graybeards; the feelings of self-righteousness, entitlement, and whiny victimhood inherited from his missionary parents (but without their restraining moralism); the omnivorous greed that turned his post–Sing Sing Prison life into an endless scheme to wheedle, con, and sue money out of everyone he knew. (He even kidnapped his own son to get his wife’s inheritance.) Ward, winner of an NBCC award and the Francis Parkman Prize for A First-Class Temperament, narrates a rollicking financial picaresque, but infuses it with psychological depth; Ferdinand’s frauds are a tangle of personal betrayals that implicate his family as they agonize over how much of his untrustworthiness they should reveal to outsiders. The result is a fascinating study of the Victorian moral economy veering toward bankruptcy. Photos. Agent: Carl Brandt, Brandt and Hochman.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 1, 2012
      

      Among the ranks of past American financial swindlers is the scoundrel Ferdinand Ward, here vividly profiled by his great-grandson. Ward (Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson) mines personal archives, letters, and diaries to reveal the origins of the dishonesty of this son of Presbyterian missionaries who had interest neither in his parents' vocation nor in an academic life. Only when he arrived in New York City in 1873 did he find his calling, earning the nickname "the young Napoleon of Wall Street." Charming and personable, he gained a reputation as a shrewd investor, attracting powerful backers and launching his own brokerage firm in 1880. The secret of his success was the classic pyramid scheme, which entailed paying off earlier investors with proceeds from newer ones. Sound familiar? In 1884, it all came crashing down and led to the firm's failure, ruining countless individuals (including President Ulysses S. Grant), and arguably contributing to the Panic of 1884. Ward went to prison but never acknowledged responsibility. VERDICT This bravely candid biography of a notorious ancestor successfully balances the truth about Ferdinand Ward's personal life with his scandalous role in this all-too-familiar American rags-to-riches-to-criminality saga. Essential for anyone interested in American financial history.--Richard Drezen, Brooklyn

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Ferdinand Ward was the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. Through his unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and ran roughshod over the entire world of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes story is told—told by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.
Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day, a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme—one that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at twenty-one and in less than a decade, armed with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of the former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire...

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Disposition to Be Rich How a SmallTown Pastors Son Ruined an American President Brought on a Wall Street Crash and Made Himself the BestHated Man in the United States

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How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States

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