After the Ball is that rare true
story that reads like an epic novel, a sweeping chronicle of
an era, and an intimate account of the hope and betrayal of a
son whose father gave him everything -- except the training to
find his way in territory ruled by the rapacious.
James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three in 1899
when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar
Equitable Life Assurance Society. Only five years later, he
fell from grace in a Wall Street scandal that obsessed the
nation and commanded 115 front-page articles in the New
York Times.
Hyde was intelligent, cultured, and
ambitious, but he was no match for an older generation that
had mapped the backstreets of high finance. Vying to control
the Equitable's vast investment pool, the most famous
financiers and industrialists of the era -- among them E. H.
Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and J. P. Morgan -- put Hyde on
forty-eight boards and included him in deals that shook Wall
Street. And then, at the pinnacle of social success, he made a
fatal miscalculation.
