The Great Pierpont Morgan (34 page)

In Egypt, where his daughter Louisa Satterlee accompanied him, he was in miserable health, a weak old man indeed. He decided to return to more familiar scenes, and got as far on his way home as Rome. There his condition took a turn for the worse. He summoned up enough strength to go to church on Easter Day; thereafter his appetite, his nerves, his strength rapidly deteriorated.

On the evening of March 30, 1913, his mind wandered. Louisa and her husband Herbert Satterlee—who had hurried abroad in response to an urgent cable—gathered from fragments of his talk that he was back in the old days at Hartford and Vevey. At last they heard him say, “I've got to go up the hill!” He did not speak again; and at four minutes after noon the next day—Monday, March 31, 1913—he died, at the age of not quite seventy-six years.

5

His body was brought back to New York, where on April 14 there was a great funeral at St. George's; he was buried at Hartford.

By his will—which disposed of an estate estimated at 68 million dollars (aside from his art collections)—his widow received for life the income of a trust fund of one million dollars, and by another provision was assured at least $100,000 a year; No. 219 and Cragston also went to her for life. His son Jack received an outright legacy of three millions. His married daughters, Louisa Satterlee and Juliet Hamilton, each received a life income from a trust fund of a million, and each of the two sons-in-law was granted a million outright. There were many other smaller personal bequests, to relatives, friends, and members of his household; and everybody in the employ of J. P. Morgan & Co. received the equivalent of a year's salary. There were institutional bequests, too, among them being the income from $500,000 for St. George's, $100,000 for the local Episcopal diocese, and $100,000 for the
House of Rest for Consumptives. The remainder of the estate—everything—went to his son, as residuary legatee,
including his art collection
, valued at anywhere up to an additional fifty millions.

This last-mentioned provision caused consternation at the Metropolitan Museum, whose officials had confidently expected to receive the treasures. It had certainly been Morgan's intention thus to bequeath them, and during his last year he had spent much time and energy arranging to have them packed up and shipped to the United States. But the failure of the city to provide space for them had so disturbed him that he had decided to hand the problem on to his son. The greater part of the collection did later go to the Metropolitan, but many things were sold or went to other institutions; thus what was probably the most remarkable single collection assembled in our century was in the end widely dispersed.

6

After Morgan's death, there were many who said that it was the Pujo investigation which had killed him; not merely his two-day ordeal before the committee, but his feeling that he was distrusted by hostile representatives of the American public. Certainly he was weaker after those sessions in Washington. Something had gone out of him. Yet it is possible that he had not had long to live in any case. And truly there was drama in his being thus called to account at the very conclusion of his life.

Many of those present on that December day of 1912, listening as Morgan sat in the witness chair at the end of the long committee table and submitted hour after hour to interrogation, must have felt that, regardless of his denials, he actually had come to exercise a dangerously extensive authority, and that if any such authority should ever become wholly institutionalized and further developed, so that one man or group of men could direct it at will, democracy might one day become a lost cause. Yet even as they felt this, I wonder if some of these listeners did not sense the man's moral weight, and ask themselves to what extent his own rise to power may have illustrated the point he was so vehemently making: that what mattered in any business was the caliber of the men who had the funds or the properties in their charge.

Over and over he stated this conviction, but never more effectively than in the passage which I have already quoted at the beginning of this book and now quote once more at its end, as Pierpont Morgan's final apologia.

“Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?” asked Untermyer.

“No, sir,” said Morgan; “the first thing is character.”

“Before money or property?”

“Before anything else. Money cannot buy it.… Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”

What degree of truth there was in that contention, as applied to his own career, is something about which men will long differ. But in his last appearance before the bar of public opinion he had at least made his own powerful plea. And with that we may leave him, proceeding, each of us, to our own individual judgments upon the career of Pierpont Morgan.

SOURCES AND OBLIGATIONS

I have drawn very frequently upon the big biography by Herbert L. Satterlee of his father-in-law:
J. Pierpont Morgan, An Intimate Portrait
(Macmillan, 1939). Satterlee combed over a quantity of letters, diaries, and private family records, and interviewed many of Morgan's then surviving friends, and his work is especially useful as a source because of its wealth of specific detail—including such things as the dates of every trip abroad, the exact itinerary, etc.—and because of its severely chronological arangement. (There is even more detail on Morgan's earlier years in Satterlee's earlier, privately printed volume covering Morgan's life only up to 1866:
The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan.
) My point of view is quite different from Satterlee's, but I acknowledge my heavy dependence upon his previous spadework.

The other two biographies of Morgan—
The Life Story of J. Pierpont Morgan
, by Carl Hovey (Sturgis & Walton, 1911), sometimes erroneously described as an “official” life, and the lively
Morgan the Magnificent
, by John K. Winkler (Garden City Publishing Co., 1930)—I have used only sparingly; and
The House of Morgan
, by Lewis Corey (G. Howard Watt, 1930), a sharply adverse book, has been useful chiefly as a guide to possible source material.

As will be clear from the detailed citation of sources, which will follow shortly, I have made much use of (1) various hearings before government commissions and committees, especially the Stanley Committee and the Pujo Committee, at which people who participated in great episodes of Morgan's career gave their own versions of what had happened and submitted to severe interrogation; (2) certain over-all studies of the period, including especially
Forty Years of American Finance
, by Alexander Dana Noyes, and Mark Sullivan's
Our
Times
; (3) books of memoirs, or detailed biographies of other men, which introduce Morgan incidentally but sometimes enlighteningly—such as, for example, Burton J. Hendrick's
Life of Andrew Carnegie
, Ida M. Tarbell's
Life of Elbert H. Gary
, and the autobiographies of W. S. Rainsford and Lincoln Steffens, to mention only a few of many; (4) the files of the
Commercial & Financial Chronicle
and of
The New York Times
and
Tribune
; and (5) certain original documents to which the Morgan firm kindly gave me access, such as the original syndicate books for the gold operation of 1895, for the launching of the Steel Corporation, and for the launching of the International Mercantile Marine; the cable books for the periods of the 1895 operation and the Northern Pacific Panic; a private memorandum on the history of the London and New York firms written by J. P. Morgan (Jr.) in his last years, which Junius S. Morgan thoughtfully lent me; and various diaries, account books, and other documents of J. Pierpont Morgan's.

Few people who had known Morgan really well were living by the time I went to work. But I spent many hours questioning the late Thomas W. Lamont a few months before his death; and among others I should like especially to mention Leonhard A. Keyes of the House of Morgan, who provided me with many details of Morgan's office life, and also Belle da Costa Greene, librarian of the Morgan Library, who was helpful with firsthand information and impressions as well as with Morgan data in the Library files.

Some of the ground traversed in this book I had previously been over when I wrote
The Lords of Creation
in 1934–35; here and there I have relied upon the earlier book to save myself the labor of going back to certain original sources, and at one point, in the description of the Panic of 1907, I have lifted two paragraphs almost bodily from the previous work.

I should like especially to thank R. Gordon Wasson of J. P. Morgan & Co. for helping to make available to me the original material at 23 Wall Street, for patiently running down the answers to various questions of mine, and for reading the manuscript in rough draft and, with the aid of Mr. Keyes and others, catching errors and providing me with useful comments—always with complete respect for my independence of view.

I shall now proceed, chapter by chapter, to list my sources of material on matters which might be open to question or inquiry by other writers or scholars; and to save space I shall begin by listing here several sources to which reference will most frequently be made. The symbol which precedes each of the names is the one which will identify it in the pages which follow:

CFC—
Commercial & Financial Chronicle
.

H—
The Life of Andrew Carnegie
, by Burton J. Hendrick (Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932).

L of C—
The Lords of Creation
, by Frederick Lewis Allen (Harper & Brothers, 1935).

N—
Forty Years of American Finance
, by Alexander Dana Noyes (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909).

P—Pujo Committee Hearings. (U. S. Banking & Currency Committee. House. 62nd Congress, 2nd and 3rd sessions. Money Trust Investigation. Investigation of the financial and monetary conditions in the United States, under House Res. 429 and 504.)

R—
The Story of a Varied Life
, by W. S. Rainsford (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922).

S—
J
.
Pierpont Morgan, An Intimate Biography
, by Herbert L. Satterlee (Macmillan, 1939).

Stanley—Stanley Committee Hearings. (House Committee on Investigation of the U. S. Steel Corporation, under House Res. 148, 62nd Congress, 1st and 2nd sessions.)

Steffens—
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
(Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931).

Sullivan—
Our Times
, by Mark Sullivan (Charles Scribner's Sons), especially Vol. II (1929).

T—
The Life of Elbert H. Gary
, by Ida M. Tarbell (D. Appleton-Century Co., 1933).

Chapter I—Judgment Day

The details of Morgan's travels during 1912 follow Satterlee; the quotation beginning, “His feeling …” is from S 556. The account of Morgan's examination is from the Pujo Hearings, with quotations from P 1003, 1004, 1006, 1019, 1056, and (the final one, which appears again in Chapter XIII) 1084. The figures for deposits with J. P. Morgan & Co. are
given not as stated at the outset of the hearing but as later corrected as it proceeded.

Chapter II—The Materials of a Career

The data on Joseph Morgan are from Satterlee; on Junius Spencer Morgan, from Satterlee, checked against the account of the Beebe firm in
Levi Parsons Morton
, by Robert McElroy (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930). Satterlee's earlier volume, the privately printed
Life of J. Pierpont Morgan
, contains a photograph of 26 Asylum Street before the building was destroyed; I visited the site in 1948. I have inspected some of Morgan's boyhood diaries at the Morgan Library but the items and quotations on the Diorama, his letters to Jim Goodwin, and his letters from Horta, are all from Satterlee. The 1871 account book from which I have quoted is in the Morgan Library. For the Rainsford “precious heirloom” quotation, see R 284. The first paragraph of the Morgan will is from Winkler, p. 12. My account of his western trip, his school and university days, and his early days in New York (including the New Orleans episode and his first marriage) is based on Satterlee; but the 1857 account-book items are from the original book, now at J. P. Morgan & Co. Incidentally, in a wallet of his at the Morgan Library I found a calling card on which in 1871 he recorded the full statistics of a voyage to England.

Chapter III—Groping for Direction

The draft figures of 1863 are from Morison and Commager's
Growth of the American Republic
, Vol. I, p. 602.

If the Hall Carbine Affair had been a major episode in Morgan's life I should have felt compelled to make my own lengthy investigation of the original documents. As it seemed to me of minor importance, I have relied upon R. Gordon Wasson's
The Hall Carbine Affair
(second revised edition, Pandick Press, 22 Thomas St., New York, 1948), which, though written by an officer of J. P. Morgan & Co. with the obvious intent of clearing Morgan's name, is so scrupulously detailed and reproduces or cites so many original documents that for the purposes of this book I have accepted its factual data. The figures I have quoted may be found in Wasson's summary on pp. 77–81, except for the amount of Morgan's
commission, for which see pp. 22–23; the quotation from the War Department Commission is from p. 46.

For the gold speculation of 1863, see Winkler, pp. 58–59;
The New York Times
, October 12 and 14, 1863; New York
Daily Tribune
, October 11, 1863. (These newspaper accounts, however, name no names.) For Morgan's personal income for 1864, see Corey, p. 64.

On the Susquehanna affair, I have followed in the main the careful and detailed' account, virtually contemporary, by Charles Francis Adams in the
North American Review
for April 1871, as reprinted in
High Finance in the Sixties
, edited by Frederick C. Hicks (Yale University Press, 1929). Certain details are from
The New York Times
of August 7 and September 8, 1869. The Supreme Court quotation is from
Supreme Court of the State of New York
, 1869, I, 339. On the Pacific trip I follow S 130–133, but on the Susquehanna affair I have found the Satterlee version unsatisfactory and probably erroneous at more than one point.