New York’s Armstrong Investigation Went After Gilded Age Corruption

The state regulated how much money life insurance companies could rake in

James Hazen Hyde (1876–1959), portrait by Théobald Chartran in 1901 — Wikimedia Commons

I just read Patricia Beard’s history book, After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals & the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905. It was published over two decades ago, but it’s new to me. It relates to a time period I often read about. It’s a story of financial corruption, centered on the biography of one man.

The story of James Hazen Hyde

Henry Baldwin Hyde, founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which became the world’s largest life insurance company, died in 1899 in New York City, leaving his 22-year-old son, James Hazen Hyde, with enormous wealth. That’s James in the portrait above.

James Hyde was owner of “a brownstone in New York, a house in Paris, a private railroad car, and a four-hundred-acre estate, The Oaks, on Long Island,” writes Beard in After the Ball.

A photo of The Oaks (Country Life in America, July 1903). Original caption: “Coaching with a six-in-hand.”

At age 28 in the second half of 1904, Hyde was enjoying his Paris home in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. He was…