Background

John Moody was born on May 2, 1868, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was the son of Edmund Moody and Sarah Jane Nicholls. Edmund Moody, a clerk in the Adams Express Company, provided his family only a very modest home.

Career

John showed an early talent for writing, selling a story to the Boy's World for $3 when he was fourteen. He would probably have become a journalist if his father had not lost all of his savings in the stock market. John went to work as a clerk for a New York woodenware wholesaler at $3 a week when he was fifteen, and in 1890 his mother's cousin, George Foster Peabody, got him a job in the highly conservative Wall Street firm of Spencer Trask and Company. Beginning, he says, as a "stamp licker, " Moody learned the young art of securities analysis and by 1900 was making a comfortable salary of $3, 000 a year. "Big business" in the modern sense had barely made its appearance by the 1890's. In 1900, the term still meant railroads, for although a few very large industrial companies had emerged during the era of the trusts, companies like Standard Oil, American Sugar, and Carnegie Steel were still the exceptions. And while the railroads had been urging their stocks and bonds upon the investing public for over half a century, industrial firms raised their own expansion capital by plowing back their earnings. This was all about to change dramatically.

During the 1890's investment analysts like Moody were handicapped by the fact that reliable data on industrial companies, whose securities did sometimes come up for sale or purchase by his clients, was almost impossible to attain without special investigation. There was the Manual of Statistics Stock Exchange Handbook, which Charles H. Nicoll had been publishing for over twenty years, but it listed no more than 400 industrial companies in all and in many cases provided little more than their addresses and the names of their officers and directors. It hardly touched out-of-town exchanges like Boston, which was second only to New York in importance, and the center of trading in the stocks of textile mills that had been America's first industrial companies.

There was nothing in the industrials field to equal Henry Varnum Poor's Manual of Railroads. It was Thomas F. Woodlock, editor of the Wall Street Journal, Moody said, who gave him the idea for a manual of industrial securities patterned after Poor's richly successful publication. With $5, 000 raised largely through the efforts of a fellow worker, Eliphalet Nott Potter, Moody undertook to compile the first comprehensive manual of industrials. Worried lest the Poors add manufacturing and mining concerns to their already well-known manual of railroads, Moody called on the elder Poor and cautiously inquired about his intentions. Poor replied that he was not interested because those industrial companies would never amount to anything as a source of marketable securities. Greatly relieved, and promising to stay out of the Poors' railroad province, Moody searched night and day for data on as many companies as he could. His midwestern correspondents disappointed him in his efforts to include such exchanges as St. Louis in his first volume, published in November 1900 as Moody's Manual of Industrial and Miscellaneous Securities.

But its 1, 100 pages and 1, 800 entries contained data on several times as many companies as Nicoll's volume and included the Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago exchanges. The first issue sold out in only three months, for, as Moody said, "We had appeared on the scene when new brokerage and banking houses were forming every day. " And the demand soared with each passing year of the three decades of unbroken, unprecedented prosperity that had just begun. Moody almost lost his business during the panic of 1907.

Always something of a speculator, he had put money that was needed in the business into various unsuccessful small enterprises. Somehow, he said, he managed to pay off all his debts and find $100, 000 with which to buy back the copyright to his manual. In 1905, the year Henry Varnum Poor died, he added railroad securities to his Manual, and by 1913 it was necessary to bring it out in two volumes, later increased to four. In 1957, Moody moved to La Jolla, California, where he died.

Achievements

• Moody established Moody's Magazine, added an investors' advisory service, and published several technical treatises. He also wrote The Truth About the Trusts (1904), The Railroad Builders (1919), and The Masters of Capital (1921), of which the last two are titles in the Yale Chronicles of America series. In 1910 Poor's began to publish a manual of industrials of its own, and in 1919 the two companies merged. Moody, whose program of self-education had been shunted aside by twenty years of unceasing work as a publisher, was now a rich man. Moody's name did not survive in the title of the company that publishes his manuals; a New York Times article of March 1, 1941, announcing the merger of Poor's with Standard Statistics Company did not even mention him. But the manuals published by Standard and Poor's continue to bear the name Moody, and it is repeated in large letters on rows and rows of volumes in thousands of libraries.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Frugal Homesteader: Living the Good Life on Less

    ( Achieve your back-to-the-land dreams without breaking t...)

  • Fast By The Road (inscribed and signed by author)
  • The Railroad Builders; a chronicle of the welding of the states
  • The Long Road Home. An Autobiography

Religion

An introspective person with a taste for the mystical, his search for religious faith was stimulated by the death of his older son in 1926. In 1931, Moody was confirmed in the Roman Catholic faith.

Views

Quotations: "The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad. "

"While no one railroad can completely duplicate another line, two or more may compete at particular points. "

"Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed. "

"Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive. "

"The close relationship between railroad expansion and the genera development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads. "

"Farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and the traveling public have all had their troubles with the transportation lines, and the difficulties to which these struggles have given rise have produced that problem which is even now apparently far from solution. "

"The nation did not begin to realize the extraordinary possibilities of the vast Western territory until its attention was thus suddenly and definitely concentrated on the Pacific by the annual addition of over fifty million dollars to the circulating medium. "

"The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare. "

Personality

Grasping the opportunity to give himself the education he never had, he and his family traveled extensively in Europe, from which Moody reported frequently on the work of rebuilding war-torn France.

A charming, energetic man of the slight stature of English descent whom many people no doubt took for an Irishman, Moody was a valuable asset to the church and died one of its most prominent laymen and a holder of the highest lay rank, Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.

Connections

On April 5, 1899, Moody married Agnes Addison; they had two sons.

Father:

William Francis Moody

1834-1919

Mother:

Sarah Jane, née Nichols

1839-1897

Wife:

Anna Mulford Addison

1877– 1965

Son:

Ernest Addison Moody

1903-1975

Son:

John Edmund Moody

1900-1926