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.
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.