A Disposition to Be Rich, Geoffrey C. Ward
A Disposition to Be Rich, Geoffrey C. Ward
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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

Author: Geoffrey C. Ward

Narrator: Robertson Dean

Unabridged: 14 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/01/2012

Synopsis

Ferdinand Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his generation—a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street, who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme 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 only with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of a 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 never-before-examined family documents, 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, 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. A Disposition to Be Rich is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.

About Geoffrey C. Ward

Geoffrey C. Ward is an author and screenwriter of various documentary presentations of American history. A former editor of American Heritage magazine, he wrote the television mini-series The Civil War with director Ken Burns and has collaborated with Burns on every documentary he has made since, including Jazz and Baseball. This work won him five Emmy Awards. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including five companion books to the documentaries he has written. A First-Class Temperament, his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. His biography Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Catherine on February 05, 2013

The subtitle of the book, which is a bit of a run on sentence, is like the executive summary for the book: 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. I can’t speak to the ‘best-hated man’ part,......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on July 28, 2012

Author Ward mines his own family for a fascinating story; it seems one of his ancestors was rather similar to Bernie Madoff. It makes on wonder about geneology - perhaps one might not want to know such things about ones ancestors. But, an excellent and long book. If you get tired of it, don't put it d......more

Goodreads review by rmn on February 17, 2013

This is a phenomenally interesting read which is part biography, part character study, and part period piece of the US in the mid to late 1800s from the point of view of both a regular-ish family and rich New Yorkers on Wall Street. The book tells the story of Ferdinand Ward who was the late 19th Cen......more

Goodreads review by Michael on August 16, 2012

Just an excellent tale of woe in the victorian age. I thought the author (great grandson of the subject) was very objective and minimized any opinions that the current generations of Wards had. I tried to imagine my g-grandfather as a well known crook. A very interesting possition. The book gives fe......more

Goodreads review by Edward on October 06, 2012

An engrossing read; a truly amazing story. Academics might not find it analytical enough, but everyone else will just find themselves mesmerized by a tale that involves some of the biggest names in the Gilded Age, including President Grant. And, importantly, the book shows how pyramid schemes have b......more

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