Jim Fisk [Laws F18]

DESCRIPTION: Jim Fisk, though a rich and fine man, still remembers the poor and gives aid to many at the time of the Chicago fire. Fisk is shot by Edward Stokes (his rival for a girl); the singer is afraid that Stokes's wealth will allow him to win his freedom
AUTHOR: William J. Scanlon ?
EARLIEST DATE: 1874 (broadside)
KEYWORDS: homicide trial money
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jan 6, 1872 - Edward Stokes shoots Jim Fisk, "his rival for... the actress Josie Mansfield." Stokes (who, despite the song, was not rich) spent four years in prison for manslaughter
FOUND IN: US(MA,MW,NE,Ro,So)
REFERENCES (17 citations):
Laws F18, "Jim Fisk"
Cohen-LongSteelRail, pp. 90-96, "Jim Fisk" (2 texts, 1 tune, plus a copy of the cover of the sheet music)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia1, pp. 111-113, "Jim Fisk Song" (1 text plus a copy of the sheet music cover)
Belden-BalladsSongsCollectedByMissourFolkloreSociety, pp. 415-416, "Jim Fisk" (1 text)
Dean-FlyingCloud, pp. 30-31, "Jim Fisk" (1 text)
Peters-FolkSongsOutOfWisconsin, pp. 187-188, "Stokes's Verdict" (1 text, 1 tune)
Friedman-Viking/PenguinBookOfFolkBallads, p. 207, "Jim Fisk" (1 text)
Flanders/Ballard/Brown/Barry-NewGreenMountainSongster, pp. 213-215, "Jim Fisk" (1 text, 1 tune)
Flanders/Brown-VermontFolkSongsAndBallads, p. 75, "Jim Fiske" (1 fragment, linked to this mostly on the strength of the line "He never went back on the poor.")
Burt-AmericanMurderBallads, pp. 49-50, "(no title)" (1 text, 1 tune)
Hubbard-BalladsAndSongsFromUtah, #137, "Jim Fisk" (1 text)
Sandburg-TheAmericanSongbag, pp. 416-419, "Jim Fisk" (1 text, 1 tune)
Shay-BarroomBallads/PiousFriendsDrunkenCompanions,pp.195-197, "Jim FIsk, Jr." (1 text, 1 tune)
Botkin-TreasuryOfNewEnglandFolklore, pp. 550-552, "Jim Fisk" (1 text, 1 tune)
Gilbert-LostChords, pp. 101-102, "Jim Fisk or He Never Went Back on the Poor" (1 text)
Newman/Devlin-NeverWithoutASong, p. 191, "Jim Fisk" (1 reminiscence)
DT 631, STOVRDCT*
Roud #2215
NOTES [927 words]: Belden-BalladsSongsCollectedByMissourFolkloreSociety calls "Jubilee Jim" Fisk (1834-1872) "Jay Gould's fellow bandit in Wall Street." Which is quite a statement, give that Gould was "a man whose name, it was said, was spoken by decent people only after sprinkling disinfectant" (Graff, pp. 25-26).
The description is apt but incomplete. Fisk, unlike Gould, was largely a showman -- DAB, volume III, p. 414, notes that after his very brief schooling and a couple of minor jobs, he took employment as "salesman with his father's 'traveling emporium,' which he later purchased and operated himself, graciously admitting his father to his employ." He also managed supply contracts during the Civil War for a place called Jordan and Marsh (Klein, p. 84).
Bunting, p. 96, describes him this way: "Fisk was a preposterous figure, a kind of caricature of what he believed the world would admire and envy. Ostentatious, self-indulgent, promiscuous (he would be gunned down, many years later, by the husband of a woman he was seeing), a militia 'colonel' in the war and, by his own authority, admiral of a steamship line."
Economic conditions at the end of the Civil War hurt his business, but by 1866 he had founded the brokerage firm of Fisk & Belden.
It was after this that he started working with Jay Gould (and also a former boss, Daniel Drew, the so-called "Erie Ring"; Klein, p. 86) to wrest control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt. His actions in this regard, according to Adams, pp. 218-219, were patently immoral -- although apparently technically legal because enough state legislators had been bribed that they changed the rules. In the conflict, Fisk and friends printed up ten million dollars of fake Erie stock, which they sold at discount (according to Klein, p. 84, to Vanderbilt himself!), and started buying up real stock. Thus they ended up with both control of the company *and* a lot of money. They also issued what appear to have been a series of margin calls, resulting in a stock market crash.
Gould and Fisk weren't done. After the War, the goal of the Grant administration was to restore the nation to the gold standard, getting rid of greenbacks (Bunting, p. 95). Gould and Fisk realized that, if they could learn in advance how much gold the Treasury would release at its regular auctions, they could manipulate the price. So they worked to try to get this information (Bunting, pp. 95-96) -- what we would now call "insider trading."
There wasn't even honor among thieves; having gotten that far, they cut Drew out of the business to increase their cut of the profits (Klein, p. 86).
As a matter of fact, they failed to get what they wanted, resulting in the "Black Friday" gold crash of September 24, 1869 (Bunting, pp. 97-98), with the result that "'the business of the whole country was paralyzed for weeks' and the 'foundations of business morality' shaken" (Adams, p. 219). DAB, Volume III, p. 515, says that Fisk went on to repudiate many of his contracts, leaving the blame at the door of his "responsible partner" Belden.
Later in 1872, with Fisk dead, Gould was forced out of the Erie -- although, with a net worth estimated at about 25 million dollars, that didn't stop him from working more financial mischief (Klein, p. 87
It's hard for me to see any real difference between Fisk's business practices and those of his contemporary robber barons, except that -- unlike many speculators -- he did try to appeal to the public (he has been called "the most opulent of the robber barons"). According to Gilbert-LostChords, he sent supplies to help the survivors of the Chicago Fire (October 8, 1871).
DAB, Volume III, p. 515, says that he kept "numerous mistresses" in addition to his wife Lucy D. Moore (whom he had married in 1855), but that Josie Mansfield (an actress, according to Klein, p. 85) was his favorite. Stokes shot Fisk partly over Mansfield and partly over a business quarrel. It is ironic that it is Fisk's murder, rarely mentioned in the histories, that gained him a place in oral tradition.
Fisk's assassin, Stokes, died in 1901, reportedly having spent his last years in neurotic fear of Fisk's ghost (e.g. Stokes would only sleep in lighted rooms).
There is a twentieth century biography, W. A. Swanberg, Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal, Scribner's, 1974. I have not read it. Other relevant books are John Steele Gordon, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway Wars, and the Birth of Wall Street; Keneth D. Ackerman, The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869; and H. W. Brands, The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield: A Tragedy of the Gilded Age (American Portraits).
Much additional information can be found in Cohen, who notes incidentally that the recorded versions of this song are generally much shorter than the original "Stokes' Verdict" text.
Botkin, apparently quoting Barry, claims there are three Jim Fisk songs. This one (which exists in many variants, but is recognized by the fact that most stanzas end with the word "poor") is said to be the "most popular" -- and is, as of this writing, the only one I have encountered.
Spaeth mentions this song several times, noting on p. 217 both the fact that this song was attributed to William J. Scanlon (whom he calls a typical composer of the era) and the difficulty with this attribution: The first sheet music, published in 1874, has the initials "J. S.," rather than "W. J. S.," and Scanlon in any case was only 15 at the time. - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.7
File: LF18

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2024 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.