Russell Sage: 'Old Straddle,' a Dynamite Bomb and a Clerk Used as a Shield

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Russell Sage was born in 1816 in Verona, Oneida County, New York, and worked as a farmhand until about 15, then as an errand boy in his brother Henry's grocery in Troy. He bought part of a retail grocery in 1837 and moved into wholesale groceries in 1839. Elected a Troy alderman in 1841 and treasurer of Rensselaer County for seven years, he served two terms in Congress as a Whig from 1853 to 1857 on the Ways and Means Committee, where he was the first to propose that the government buy Mount Vernon. In New York he pioneered puts and calls, then called privileges, and the straddle, earning the nicknames Old Straddle and father of puts and calls.

In 1869 he was convicted of using options to disguise loans above the usury cap and fined 500 dollars with a suspended sentence. He bought a New York Stock Exchange seat in 1874 and, with Jay Gould, took control of railroads including the Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific and Wabash, plus Western Union and the New York elevated lines. In the Panic of 1884 he paid every put holder, then quit options. In 1891 Henry L. Norcross demanded 1.2 million dollars and set off dynamite in Sage's Broadway office. Clerk William R. Laidlaw Jr. said Sage used him as a shield and won 43,000 dollars after four trials, but Sage had it reversed and never paid. He died in 1906 worth about 70 million dollars.

• He was president and vice president of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway for a dozen years.
• His first wife, Marie Henry, died in 1867, and at 53 he married Olivia Slocum.
• He belonged to the West Presbyterian Church of Manhattan while reportedly fathering a child with a chambermaid.
• His unnamed mausoleum at Oakwood Cemetery in Troy has a stone bench carved with Medusa.
• Olivia used the unrestricted fortune to found the Russell Sage Foundation and Russell Sage College.