Thomas W. Lawson (businessman)

Thomas William Lawson (February 26, 1857 - February 7, 1925) was an American businessman and author. A highly controversial Boston stock promoter, he is known for both his efforts to promote reforms in the stock markets and the fortune he amassed for himself through highly dubious stock manipulations.

The Scituate, Massachusetts Historical Society proclaimed 2007 the "Year of Thomas W. Lawson" in commemoration of the sesquicentennial of Lawson's birth.

Biography

Thomas William Lawson was born February 26, 1857 at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Lawson ran away from home to become a clerk in a Boston bank, and soon began speculating in stocks. He was a principal mover in the promotion of companies trying to establish the small town of Grand Rivers, Kentucky as a major steel-producing city. Lawson specialized in shares of copper-mining companies, which were then a staple of the Boston stock market, and became a multimillionaire during the copper boom of the late 1890s. He built the lavish estate called [http://www.scituatehistoricalsociety.org/sites_tower.html "Dreamwold"] in Scituate, Massachusetts. The site's most spectacular building is known locally for the Lawson Tower, also called Grampy's Tower by children, a water tower with a shingled outer shell and observatory which has spectacular views of the area from its observation deck.

In 1899, he joined Henry H. Rogers and William Rockefeller in forming Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, a company that combined several copper mining companies, mostly in Butte, Montana, and tried to dominate the copper market. Amalgamated Copper was the subject of much acrid criticism then and for years afterward. In the building of this great trust, some of the most ruthless strokes in modern business history were dealt: the $38,000,000 "watering" of the stock of the first corporation, its subsequent manipulation, the seizure of the copper property of the Butte & Boston Consolidated Mining Company, the using of the latter as a weapon against the Boston & Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company, the guerrilla warfare against certain private interests, and the wrecking of the Globe Bank of Boston.

Amalgamated later became Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1915. However, Lawson later broke with the financial backers of Amalgamated, and became an advocate for financial reform.

Lawson authored numerous books, the most famous of which was "Frenzied Finance: the Crime of Amalgamated", his controversial account of the formation of the Amalgamated Copper Company.

He is also famous for his namesake ship, the "Thomas W. Lawson", the only seven-masted schooner ever built. As an odd coincidence, Lawson wrote the novel "Friday the Thirteenth" in which a broker picks that day on which to bring down Wall Street; the schooner "Thomas W. Lawson" was also wrecked on Friday 13th, 1907.

Although Thomas Lawson was once a multimillionaire, he died poor.

Books by Thomas Lawson

* "The Krank: His Language and What it Means" (1888) a glossary of baseball expressions
* "History of the Republican Party"
* "Lawson History of the America's Cup" (1902), with Winfield M. Thompson
* "Frenzied Finance, the Crime of Amalgamated" (1906)
* "Friday the Thirteenth" (1907)
* "The Remedy" (1912)
* "The High Cost of Living" (1913)
* "The Leak" (1919)

Lawson in fiction

Thomas Lawson is believed to be the inspiration for the protagonist of David Graham Phillips' 1905 novel "The Deluge".

External links

* [http://www.miningswindles.com/html/thomas_lawson.html Photographs and newspaper editorial cartoons of Thomas W. Lawson]
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References

Dan Plazak "A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top" (Salt Lake: Univ. of Utah Press, 2006) ISBN 978-0-87480-840-7 (includes a chapter on the life of Thomas W. Lawson)