His name was Thomas Fortune Ryan.

Few men have wielded greater power in American finance, but in 1884 Ryan was merely a ruddy-faced, cleancut, and clean-living Irishman of thirty-three, who could be depended on to execute quickly and faithfully orders on the New York Stock Exchange--even though they were small ones--and who, in unostentatious fashion, had already acquired much influence in Tammany Hall.

With his six feet of stature, his extremely slender figure, his long legs, his long arms, his raiment--which always represented the height of fashion and tended slightly toward the flashy--Ryan made a conspicuous figure wherever he went.

He was born in 1851, on a small farm in Nelson County, Virginia.

The Civil War, which broke out when Ryan was a boy of ten, destroyed the family fortune and in 1868, when seventeen, he began life as a dry-goods clerk in Baltimore, fulfilling the tradition of the successful country boy in the large city by marrying his employer's daughter.