The Jolly Robber

JIM FISK (310 pp.)--W. A Swanberg --Scribner ($4.50).

No one has bettered the New York Times's description of James Fisk Jr.: "First in war, first in peace and first in the pockets of his countrymen." Financier Fisk sacrificed the flower of his youth to selling mildewed blankets to the Union Army and smuggling Confederate cotton into the mills of his native Vermont. When peace came, he was rich enough to buy a directorship in the Erie Railroad--and so accelerated the decay of that calamitous line that Erie passengers felt safer "going over Niagara in a barrel." Fisk was a mere 36 when he died; yet, as a swindler, he could stand up to such Erie accomplices as Daniel Drew and Jay Gould. Indeed, in his watered-stocking feet, he stood only inches below the stature of Commodore Vanderbilt himself.

Fisk differed from other robber barons in that he looked the part and played it with scandalous ebullience. Skinny, gloomy Partner Drew was a Bible banger who would retreat to his house, bar the doors and pray; but Jim Fisk was fat and jolly as a carnival pig. Part of his share of the shareholders' money was devoted to his mistress, Actress Josie Mansfield, while other spoils went to buying and renovating Pike's Opera House on Manhattan's Eighth Avenue for the company's head offices; there business mixed with pleasure in the form of such Fiskal attractions as "THE DEMON CAN-CAN . . . 100 BEAUTIFUL YOUNG LADIES . . . Contains Nothing Objectionable." Finally Fisk was probably the only colonel (of New York's 9th National Guard Regiment) and admiral (of his own steamboats) to wear diamond-studded uniforms and command the rare title of "Mr. Director-Admiral-Colonel."

Civil War Historian (First Blood) Swanberg calls Fisk "easily the most notorious man in the nation." Probably no tycoon before or since combined so blatantly the related arts of lavish loose living, public fleecing and judicial fixing. "What the Tweed Ring was in government, the Erie Ring was in finance." The twain, interlocked by the expert pincer movements of corrupt judges, sheriffs and countless lawyers, put on a display of operatic chicanery that still makes for breathless reading.

When the stout, one-man garment center was shot to death by a rival suitor for Miss Mansfield's shopsoiled hand, Boss Tweed was the first to assure the world that the departed had been "a man of broad soul and kindly heart." But the true verdict was given by Erie shares: as Fisk sank, they rose.

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