Jay Cooke I was a 19th-Century magnifico, and looked it. He financed the Lincoln Government during the Civil War, went broke backing the Northern Pacific Railroad. The crash of his banking house touched off the cataclysmic Panic of 1873.
His great-grandson, Jay Cooke IV, who looks less like a magnifico than a well-coddled good egg, is an enthusiastic archer, a limited partner in a Philadelphia firm of securities underwriters, an amiable, conservative gentleman who neither courted nor got much public notice until 1937.
Then he was taken in hand by Pennsylvania's Boss Joseph N....