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James R. Keene: The man who loved racing

Posted: Saturday, August 18, 2001

Noted breeder, innovator, risk-taker, and visionary, James R. Keene helped build an industry

Tuesday, September 2, 1913, was a day like no other in the long history of Thoroughbred racing. The setting was not a racetrack or a breeding farm, but the old Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, where as evening fell bankers and bookmakers, high-born and low, filled the seats in anticipation of what was to come.

James R. Keene
Born: Chester, England, in 1838
Died: New York City on January 3, 1913
Business: Stockbroker, investor, pool manager
Farm: Castleton Farm, Lexington
Best horses bought and raced: Domino, Spendthrift, Foxhall
Best horses bred: Commando, Colin, Sysonby, Kingston, Peter Pan, Maskette, Cap and Bells, Celt

The occasion was a horse auction, the long-awaited dispersal of the late James R. Keene's bloodstock. Forty-five of the finest Thoroughbreds ever produced in America were to pass that night before the podium of auctioneer George Bain.

At about 8:30 p.m., one can imagine a hush falling as lot number one stepped into the ring. All eyes would have been directed toward a brown stallion in the prime of life … well-muscled, a narrow path of white streaking a handsome face, long in the shoulder and wide across the hips-built for speed and power. Accustomed to huge crowds, he may have flicked his ears with mild interest as Bain's gavel began its rhythmic tap.

This was Colin, whose immeasurable courage and imperfect underpinnings had carried him to 15 victories without defeat; who had outgamed Man o' War's splendid sire in the 1908 Belmont Stakes, in a downpour, on three sound legs and an outsized heart; who had drawn fans to an otherwise empty New York track after wagering had been outlawed. Only death or disaster could have put such a creature of God onto something so lowly as an auction block.

It was whispered in the Garden that Colin was a shy breeder, a rumor based on truth. Along with the New York Legislature's antigambling mood, such gossip stopped the bidding at $30,000-a good price for a bad time but not much at all for one of racing's immortals. And so it went.

The Keene horses averaged $5,088. Among them were four Belmont Stakes winners (Colin, Peter Pan, Sweep, Delhi), two future Racing Hall of Fame members (Colin, Peter Pan) and the dam of another (Sysonby), an English Oaks victress (Cap and Bells), two leading sires (Sweep, Celt), and seven of the 19 offspring of Keene's legendary Domino.

Among the buyers that night were Hancocks and Whitneys, men whose purchases would provide foundations for their own future industry dominance. But as Bain's hammer fell for the final time, the name Keene passed into racing history.

Intimidator
"All of life is speculation."-James R. Keene

James Robert Keene was a contradiction. In the realm of high finance, he shared an era with J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Jay Gould, becoming one of the most feared stock-market manipulators of his or any time. He was a spectacular risk-taker who rode the market to fame, fortune, and bankruptcy-and back again-yet he is now rarely mentioned among the titans of Wall Street history.

Similarly, in modern racing no major stakes event bears the name Keene, though for 30 years he shaped the Sport of Kings as an indefatigable reformer, Jockey Club founder, five-time leading American owner, rebuilder of Belmont Park, and breeder of 110 stakes winners, including six enshrined in the Racing Hall of Fame. The most recent of those is Maskette, the champion filly of 1908 and '09, who entered the Hall on August 6.

Perhaps Keene himself is to blame. By contemporary accounts, he was far less than amiable; one rival called him the "toughest and meanest" of them all, though by Wall Street standards that was not likely. It is true, however, that William Collins Whitney despised him wholeheartedly, as did E. H. Harriman, both of whom had crossed financial swords with Keene and lost. Whitney supposedly entered racing in the 1890s just to challenge his enemy on another playing field.

Grainy photos of Keene depict a wiry, fearsome figure in black Victorian frock coat and derby hat, wearing a pointy beard and possessing a fiercely penetrating glare that could stop a freight train. He was not one to invite familiarity; even his own son called him "Mr. Keene."

Outwardly at least, this iceberg of a man seemed to have had but a single warm chamber in his heart, and that was reserved for racing.

Self-made man

His was the classic American success story: James Keene rose from nothing, a merchant's son growing up in post-Gold Rush California, patching together a living as an editor and teacher while studying law and selling equipment to miners. Early stock investments brought his first monetary success, after which he routinely made and traded away millions on the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Keene mingled during those years with such wealthy racing men as E. J. "Lucky" Baldwin and Governor Leland Stanford, married the former Sara Daingerfield, and probably smiled at the newspaper shenanigans of a young Mark Twain, all while building and rebuilding his financial empire.

Racing was an unsophisticated, rough-and-tumble sport in California when Keene's interest was born. Early in the 1870s, he was drawn into a trivial but now-famous debate with the horse-loving Stanford over whether there was a point in the equine stride at which all four legs were simultaneously aloft. Stanford said yes; Keene disagreed and backed his contention with $25,000.

The wager was unresolved until 1878, when the embryonic art of photography finally evolved to where such a thesis could be tested. Celebrated photographer Eadweard Muybridge set up 24 evenly spaced cameras along the outer railing of Stanford's Palo Alto training track and then ran a string from each shutter across to the inside rail. A horse racing by would break the strings and trigger the shutters. Muybridge later cobbled together the photos and employed his brand new zoopraxiscope projector to create one of the earliest illusions of a moving image-proving the governor right. America went wild over the "flying horse of Palo Alto," and Keene paid up.

Wall Street
"The man who is right six times out of ten will make his fortune."-Keene

Mounting business pressures sent Keene's health into a tailspin around 1876, prompting him to board a private rail car to New York where he would embark upon a medically prescribed sea voyage. He never made it past Wall Street. En route, Keene saw opportunities in railway stocks, bought 10,000 shares of New York Central upon arrival, and somehow managed a quick $20-per-share profit.

Keene was bedazzled by the Street, his instant success there giving him perhaps an overblown sense of personal infallibility. Fantastic tales of legendary speculator Jay Gould elicited from Keene a vow that he would teach the "Wizard of Wall Street" a lesson in finance.

Of course, Gould needed no such lesson. He was wealthier than Croesus and had himself financially ruined friend and foe alike. Keene's supremely silly remark eventually made its way to Gould, whose blood-chilling response was that while Keene had arrived in New York by luxury car, he would send him home in a boxcar.

Despite Gould's menacing presence, Keene plunged in with both feet, displaying an uncanny talent for tweaking and twisting the market to his own purpose. He found he could create a suddenly insatiable demand for previously unsaleable securities by acquiring worthless shares and driving them up "point by point" until people were mad to buy them. "He did not bet on fluctuations-he made them," wrote one awed Wall Street observer.

Keene's reputation grew to heroic proportions. In 1877, violent railroad strikes threatened the entire United States railway system, breeding terror in the securities market. Keene, then 39, stood alone on the exchange floor one day at the height of the panic, buying all that was offered of a particularly high-profile railroad stock, knowing he might be bankrupt by day's end. But, according to a contemporary reporter, "When the hammer sounded, it was known that Jim Keene had saved the market."

Keene must have believed himself invincible after that. In 1884, he poured his entire fortune into an attempt to corner the wheat market, an effort that failed when Gould ordered his agents to glut the market with wheat. Keene went from wealthy to penniless overnight. Though he later recouped his millions, he would loathe Gould with an icy passion to the day he died.

"He is the worst man on earth since the beginning of the Christian era," Keene once said of his enemy. "A treacherous, false, cowardly, despicable worm incapable of generous nature."

Famed blue and white
"When I enter a race, I never figure on getting left at the post."-Keene

While still riding high after the '77 railroad panic, Keene had his interest in racing reignited. During the 1870s, the Lorillard brothers, tobacco magnates Pierre and George, virtually owned the Eastern sport. Their horses were winning everything when Keene announced his decision to "break up this monopoly."

Only one horse was deemed capable of stopping the Lorillard stampede. Daniel Swigert's unbeaten Spendthrift had been the subject of several sizable offers despite having raced only in Tennessee and Kentucky. His owner was not tempted until Keene's agent showed up with $15,000-a huge sum to a horse breeder of 1878, though pocket change for the millionaire financier.

Spendthrift was strictly no frills. Broad-hipped, deep through the heart, and just a hair short of 16 hands, he possessed a utilitarian physique that bespoke strength in all aspects but one: his thin-walled hooves, which would torment him all through his racing days.

In the Withers Stakes at Jerome Park on May 31, 1879, Spendthrift and Dan Sparling became the first to carry Keene's silks, which were white with blue spots. Spendthrift was pulled double to allow his lesser stablemate to cash a bet for Keene, but in the Belmont Stakes five days later he emphatically stomped three top Lorillard colts.

Spendthrift won several big races before his delicate hooves gave out. The best of his subsequent offspring was a homicidal maniac named Hastings, who captured the 1896 Belmont Stakes and then passed on a miraculous genetic spark to a good son and an immortal grandson in Fair Play and Man o' War.

As Spendthrift's career ended, Keene campaigned abroad an even better one-a $650 colt named for his teenage son, Foxhall. In 1881, Foxhall carried Keene's blue and white silks to victory in a number of Europe's most important events.

Second chance

Keene's idyllic Spendthrift-Foxhall period was cut short by the wheat disaster, which prompted the sale of his entire racing stable. Thereafter, he borrowed heavily and began again, promoting sugar stocks. Sugar soon turned to gold for Keene.

Such was his reputation that by 1890 famed banker J. P. Morgan hired him to help wrest control of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Harriman, which he accomplished through crafty stock manipulation. A decade later Morgan would again call on Keene, this time to take a recently merged steel company public. Keene worked his market magic once more, pocketing $1-million in overnight commissions while creating clamorous demand for the new stock. U.S. Steel would become America's first billion-dollar corporation.

Keene re-entered racing in 1892 with three key acquisitions. First, he purchased 600 acres of Kentucky bluegrass on which to establish Castleton Farm. Next, he imported 44 English-bred mares to cross with domestic stallions.

Finally, with son Foxhall, he paid $3,000 for a yearling Himyar colt who would change his life and forever alter the landscape of American racing.

The dark brown colt, named Domino, endeared himself to Keene with his quirky combination of placid nature and blinding speed, though the latter quality nearly ruined him. In an insanely fast 1892 yearling trial at Coney Island, Domino blew out both front tendons. Still, the "Black Whirlwind" held together through a nine-for-nine juvenile season, during which he established an American earnings record that would stand for 25 years.

In 1896, Domino was enthroned as king of Castleton. In his palatial new home he was pampered and coddled, perhaps to death, by loving caregivers who allegedly fed the voracious stallion up to 18 quarts of grain a day. He took suddenly and gravely ill during his seventh summer, lingered for 20 agonizing hours, and then died in a spasm of pain on July 29, 1897, of what was publicly called meningitis.

For Keene, Domino's death was a dagger to the heart. The Wall Street lion had lost fortunes, friends, and family members during the long voyage of his life, but this was his saddest moment. Until his own death 16 years later, the very mention of Domino would bring a mist to the old man's eyes.

"He was one of the best friends I ever had," Keene recalled long afterward in a rare moment of sentiment. "Colin was the best I ever had in my stable, but Domino I loved the most. He was a great and wonderful two-year-old, a loyal horse, and a brave one."

The financier ordered a monument placed over Domino's grave, with the poignant inscription: "Here lies the fleetest runner the American Turf has ever known, and one of the gamest and most generous of horses." It stands today, as durable as the blood of Domino himself.

Domino left behind only 19 foals, but among them were champion and leading sire Commando; English Oaks heroine Cap and Bells; Disguise, conqueror of an English Triple Crown winner and sire of three champions; and the dams of influential American sires Sweep, High Time, and Ultimus.

Later years

Keene wept for Domino, but in matters of finance he was no sentimentalist. A 1913 New York Times article described him as a market genius to whom investors looked for leadership, though "most learned to their sorrow that Mr. Keene usually came out the winner, while those associated with him came out losers."

As much as Keene may have bent the rules of Wall Street, he was all honor and ethics when it came to racing. In 1893, he noted with disgust the moral disintegration of his sport, now drowning in crooked jockeys and bookmakers, dope, and race-fixing scandals. That December he leveled his steely gaze at a roomful of industry leaders and demanded regulatory action.

"There have been changes in racing," he warned. "The sport has been pulled down by unscrupulous men intent on its destruction. ... A great moral wave is sweeping the country. It will wipe out the laws under which we race and close forever the gates of our finest tracks. Unless we reform our Turf matters, we will deserve the ruin that will come to us all."

The Jockey Club was launched in 1894, with Keene a founding director, but the moral avalanche came down anyway in the form of antiwagering legislation more than a decade later. By late 1910, most of America's premier racetracks had been shuttered.

That year marked the beginning of the end for Keene as well, with the collapse of the Columbus and Hocking pool, which he managed. Tired and sick, haunted by that failure and deeply depressed by racing's woes, he began phasing out of both finance and Thoroughbreds-even selling several mares to George Jay Gould, son of his late archenemy. On August 23, 1910, at Saratoga Race Course, a colt named Helmet carried the blue and white silks into a winner's circle for the last time. Castleton was sold and, at age 72, Keene sailed abroad.

Stomach problems soon brought him home to his apartments in the old Waldorf-Astoria, where he went into seclusion. Foxhall visited him there in December 1912 and, appalled at the old man's deterioration, moved him to a sanitarium. Keene did not go quietly. Outraged over lost privacy and independence, he cruelly mocked his son and ridiculed his physician's assertions that his situation was critical. Death claimed James R. Keene in the early hours of January 3, 1913.

Finis

Captains of industry and racetrackers met in New York's Church of the Ascension on January 6 to bid farewell to the "Silver Fox of Wall Street." Among them were August Belmont II, who in three years' time would breed Man o' War, by a grandson of Spendthrift; trainer James Rowe Sr., to whom Keene had entrusted Commando, Peter Pan, Colin, and Sysonby; jockey Joe Notter, who had held the reins of Colin in his Hall of Fame hands; Hall of Fame trainers John E. Madden and William Lakeland; and mega-millionaire financier Thomas Fortune Ryan.

Jockey Club secretary Frank Sturgis was an honorary pallbearer, as was Andrew Miller, founder of Life magazine and soon-to-be owner of a two-year-old gelding named Roamer. J. P. Morgan was asked but could not attend; by March 31, he too was gone.

If only Keene could have bought himself another four months of life. This man who loved racing, who fought hard for its integrity, and who in 1905 had invested a fortune in the construction of Belmont Park would have been present on May 30, 1913, to witness the reopening of that great facility after three years of legislatively imposed darkness.

On July 5, Belmont appropriately honored its late benefactor with the Keene Memorial Stakes, a straightaway dash for two-year-olds that would eventually number Man o' War and Equipoise among its winners.

By the Great Depression year of 1933, however, when racing associations were desperately slashing purses, the track that Keene had helped to build could no longer afford to remember him. Although the Belmont and Withers Stakes lived on, the Keene Memorial was relegated to history's dusty archives. Sixty-eight years later, Belmont Park schedules races recalling assorted owners, breeders, handicappers, historians, racetrack executives, sports writers, and even an American general. The name Keene remains conspicuously absent.

Yet, in a sense, James R. Keene's spirit hovers everywhere over racing today. Belmont Park may have forgotten the man, but it hosts annual races named for Castleton-bred champions Peter Pan and Kingston, while the blood of Keene's beloved Domino continues to flow like a distant river through the veins of America's finest, including 2000 Horse of the Year Tiznow and 2001 dual classic winner Point Given. The former carries 64 crosses of the Black Whirlwind in his extended pedigree; the latter, 51. Keene would have been proud.