Morgan: American Financier

by Jean Strouse

In 1909, after the panic of 1907 had been stopped due to Morgan's heroic marshalling of the financial forces of the country, a British associate of the Morgan Bank told a friend that "Morgan's 'position to-day in America is not due to his riches.  There are 20 richer men there.  It is due to the fact that in the dark days of 1907, he knew no fear, he believed in the country & himself & imparted pluck & spirit to others & infused strength & hope  into men 20, 30, & 40 years younger than himself..  If he had given way, the whole house of financial cards would have fallen....

"The popular idea of this man is very wide of the truth.  He is neither hard nor cunning.  Outwardly he is rough because he is very strong & yet very shy & has no command of words.  He will run rather than make a speech.  He sees clearly enough, but his explanations in words are quite incoherent.  He sees the goal & makes straight for it.  He has made big mistakes & even when his schemes are well conceived, he runs big risks of being tripped up or attacked in flank by meaner or smaller men...." (Morgan. Jean Strouse, 596-7)  In choosing these words from Grenfell, Strouse has summed up Morgan's motives, his strengths, and his weaknesses.  The picture of self-assurance, honor, duty, strength, and character which emerges from Strouse's lively biography flies in the face of the portrait with which I grew up in the forties and fifties, listening to my mother's fulminations against the banks and the trusts even while she lived as the recipient of a trust fund established by her invest banker/lawyer grandfather.

While Strouse comments that Morgan seldom, if ever, commented about himself or his motives, he exhaustively researched book provides illumination into qualities of mind and character attested to by his actions, the actions and comments of others, and the results of action he took.  Morgan himself seems to have combined a kind of supreme confidence, which could easily be seen by others as arrogance, with a vision not accessible to many of those around him.

Surrounding himself with a varied and fascinating cast of characters, Morgan emerges as ever so much more varied and interesting than contemporaries like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the bankers with whom he was so frequently linked.  His mistresses, his colleagues in art collecting, and his traveling companions serve to help him develop as he uses his wealth, taste, and urge to collect to enrich the nation's cultural coffers as he saves its financial ones.  By the latter part of the 19th century, Morgan appears to have easy access to the richest and most powerful people in the world.  Presidents, kings, and prime ministers are eager to have him on their side.  From the Grant administration to the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, Morgan seems to have served the function of central banker to the United States.  In the period before the Federal Reserve existed, Morgan used his leverage and his commitment to rational money markets to assure the good faith and credit of the United States.  For these services he was often decried as a Wall Street monster. Nowhere, in my education, did anyone ever mention that muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens had ever, in mature reconsideration of their earlier writings, decided Big Business was not so bad after all, especially in the hands of people like Morgan whose concerns were for the nation as a whole rather than the narrow self-interests of himself, his firm, or his class.  If only many of today's money men had the breadth of vision Morgan showed during the many years he acted as a private central banker for the entire nation.