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

Well-written, interesting and sheds new light on a long-forgotten subject. The author has the gift of understanding and writing well about both Gilded Age high society and finance, and uses her gift to good advantage. Occasionally the inner manueverings in the Equitable drag a bit, but this is a hardly noticeable defect. Five stars +; buy and and read it with enjoyment.

"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.

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!

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

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 a