The Great Pierpont Morgan Read online

  With such nonsense Pierpont Morgan would have no truck. He shared the rising veneration for the art of the Old World and subsequently became a collector and importer of it on a tremendous scale, but he didn’t want to subdue his domestic life to it. His brownstone house was large, dignified, comfortable, and in every way suitable to his position. In due course he consented to have his drawing room done over from more-or-less-Pompeian into more-or-less-French; and still later, when his collection of books had long since overflowed not only the bookshelves of the house but also the cellar room which he used for storage, he built a marble Renaissance library on Thirty-sixth Street next door to his house, and incorporated into its interior design many of the architectural trophies of his chase for art; but even then he wouldn’t change the original library at No. 219. It was just about right for him, and that was that.

  This room was the center of his life at home. It was here that he held his important conferences, whether of railroad presidents or of churchmen. It was a large room with a very high ceiling. The walls were paneled higher than a man could reach with Santo Domingo mahogany; the general effect was so imposingly dark that in later years the household staff referred to the room as the “black library.” In an arched alcove there was a tiled fireplace flanked by settees, and near the middle of the carpeted floor there was a big, ornate kneehole walnut desk. The room reflected the late-Victorian unwillingness to leave any foot of wall space unoccupied; there were even paintings hung in the narrow and lofty interval between the wainscoting and the ceiling. But above all it conveyed a sense of somber and dignified comfort. It was a haven of masculinity within a home; and though in later years Morgan traveled like a prince and spent millions on masterpieces, he never quite relinquished the idea that home was a hearth, cluttered perhaps with mementos of one’s expeditions, but not a show place.

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  Here at No. 219 the Morgan family spent the winter months. During the rest of the year—from April to October or thereabouts—they made their headquarters at Cragston; and just as they stood fast on Murray Hill despite the northward drift of wealth and fashion, so they remained loyal to the Highlands of the Hudson all the rest of their lives, despite the waning popularity of a region that the rising generation of affluent New Yorkers would soon condemn as much too hot in summer compared with, say, Newport or the north shore of Long Island. To such decrees of fashion the Morgans were indifferent. In the complex of social groups in the well-to-do Manhattan of the eighteen-eighties, they belonged neither to the aristocracy of the old Dutch families, who would probably have classed them as “new rich,” nor to that (overlapping) Society with a capital S which was dominated by Mrs. Astor, shepherded by Ward McAllister, and aspired to by upcoming millionaires and their wives. For membership in this circle of the fashionable they were certainly not too newly arrived; they just had little taste for it. Pierpont Morgan, for one, didn’t care for balls, cotillions, gilt chairs, chatter, lackeys in livery, or social emulation. He preferred solid comfort, solid dinners, solid people; butlers in discreet black coats; and if there was occasion for splendor, his own sort, on his own terms.

  He belonged to what in Europe would be called the haute bourgeoisie, and in New York might—to borrow a word applied recently by Cleveland Amory to Bostonians—be called the Proper New Yorkers: a vaguely defined group of men who had plenty of money, were engaged in large corporate business or finance, voted the Republican ticket, believed in the sanctity of property, subscribed to sedate and conservative newspapers, held a low view of most politicians and practically all Democratic politicians, and an even lower view of “labor agitators”; who belonged to the right sort of church (preferably the Episcopal Church, which as Clarence Day put it was “a sect with the minimum of nonsense about it—no total immersion, no exhorters, no holy confession”); served on the boards of well-established charities, hospitals, and museums; joined reputable clubs such as the Union or perhaps the Union League, where they would be unlikely to be troubled by hearing any queer ideas; had a proper taste for good cigars and good wines; had decent manners, at least toward one another; and expected their wives to be charming and angelic, but not to know anything about their business affairs or for that matter about any affairs of moment. Morgan himself had little social traffic with artists, musicians, writers, scholars, or with professional men generally, except corporation lawyers and such architects or lawyers or physicians as he or his firm might have occasion to engage professionally. His social world was a world of business gentlemen of English descent and Protestant affiliations.

  His life at No. 219 was a fabric woven upon a pattern of strict routine. Church at St. George’s on Sunday morning, with perhaps a walk home afterward—this mile and a half or so on foot being his nearest approach to exercise after he gave up riding when he was in his forties. (The sedentary life was the rule rather than the exception among the business men of New York in the eighteen-eighties, when there was no golf, little tennis, no squash or racquets, and no country-club life.) Friends or relatives in to supper Sunday evening. Hymn singing after Sunday supper. Dr. Rainsford of St. George’s Church to breakfast Monday morning. For some years, the Mendelssohn Club, a choral society, on Wednesday evening—presumably to please Fanny, for Pierpont’s inability to hold a tune was marked, despite his undaunted appetite for what Satterlee called “strenuous, tuneful hymns.”

  He dressed for a business day in a frock coat, a hard winged collar, and an Ascot tie; this was the costume of his kind in Wall Street, and only on the hottest days was it considered proper to remove the coat for certain office chores, such as the signing of papers. He ate a solid breakfast, and delighted in having his children—in later years, his grandchildren—on hand then. In the pre-telephone days there was a private wire between his house and his office, on which reports and quotations were printed on a tape, news-ticker fashion; he would send a child into the next room to bring him the tape, so that he could scan it at the breakfast table and write messages or orders for the child to type off on the machine; he especially liked to get the quotations on foreign exchange and perhaps to do a little arbitraging—the simultaneous purchase and sale of dollars, pounds, and other currencies so as to net a profit on the fluctuations of the moment. Long experience and a lightning mathematical mind enabled him to see at a glance what the winning operation would be, and he enjoyed these little gambles. Then he would proceed to his office—preferably, as the years went by, not by the elevated railroad but by horse-drawn cab. At the end of the day’s work he might stop off at the Whist Club or the Union Club for some cards, or might call briefly on a friend; but as often as not he would go straight home, lie down on the sofa in his study, pull an afghan over him, and sleep until it was time to dress for dinner—which he did with great rapidity: he prided himself on being able to hurry upstairs just as the first guests arrived, and come down again only six minutes later in tails and white tie. The Morgans gave a good many dinner parties and dined out often, and in addition Pierpont took in many stag dinners. The last item of his daily routine was a few games of solitaire, his constant solace.

  There was a pattern of routine during the Cragston months too. He always spent Thursday there as a mid-week holiday—a custom which dated back to his earliest business days, when there had been long letters to write to London on Friday night, and he had had to spend most of Saturday at his desk. (He still wrote those voluminous letters to his father, until the latter’s death in 1890.) Now the Corsair took him to Cragston for the Thursday respite and again—usually with a house party of guests—for a short week end. Cragston was expanding; now he could show his guests his new cow barn and his prize cattle, as well as the Cragston Kennels, where he was breeding blue-ribbon-winning collies. Yet for all the amplitude of the place, with its stables of driving horses, saddle horses, and ponies, its farm buildings, its grass tennis courts, its subordinate buildings to house the servants, and its numerous guests, it remained essentially a place of unostentatious domestic comfort, typ
ified by the sight of the Morgan children playing what they called polo on the two donkeys Beelzebub and Apollyon up and down the field by the brook.

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  Upon this pattern of domestic routine, however, was superimposed another pattern more individual and more splendid. First of all, there was the magnificent Corsair. Before he bought her in 1882 he had had rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel which he occupied on weekday nights when the family were at Cragston; now he spent most of his leisure time aboard the great yacht. She would lie at anchor in the North River and he would pile guests into a little naphtha launch to go out and dine aboard her; usually he slept there. She not only did ferry duty to Cragston, but frequently took him off on cruises, sometimes with his family, sometimes with a party of friends. An especial group of cronies, which originally included George Bowdoin (a partner), Charles Lanier, Frank K. Sturgis, David Egleston, and William Turnbull, made privileged use of her, and while she was laid up for the winter used to continue the association by dining at one another’s homes in turn, calling themselves the “Corsair Club.” She was a big yacht, but not big enough to suit him as his fortunes waxed, and so in 1890 he engaged J. Frederick Tams to superintend the building of Corsair II, which was 39 feet longer and also roomier belowdecks; she measured 204 feet on the water line, 241½ feet overall. On such a superb pleasure boat one could live and entertain like a prince.

  Each year, furthermore, he had been accustomed to go to London, usually in the spring, to maintain touch with his father’s old office at 22 Old Broad Street and to take a short holiday on the Continent; now these annual expeditions tended to become longer and more elaborate. As time went on, no more did Fanny accompany him; she remained enveloped in domesticity at 219 and at Cragston. Usually he took along one of his growing daughters. A busy stay at Prince’s Gate or Dover House, and he would be off for Paris, where the Hotel Bristol (which was run by his father’s ex-butler) always let him have the same corner suite on the premier; he might go on to the Riviera, or visit Rome (for which he had a special veneration), or take the cure at one of the great watering places. Several months might elapse between the day when he boarded an eastbound liner in New York and the day when, approaching the city on his return voyage, he would spy the Corsair, decked with pennants, coming down the harbor to welcome him home. These were months when he moved out from under the shadow of the strict conventions of Murray Hill and enjoyed the more varied company of men and women of the world.

  Somewhat as royalty must reinforce the current code of respectability by careful visible observance of all the forms held dear by commoners, yet is implicitly granted a license to range more widely when the eyes of the people are turned the other way, so this prince of finance could live by a more relaxed code aboard the Corsair and on his continental journeyings. Like many an American man of that era of sheltered and shackled womankind, Pierpont Morgan believed that it was necessary for the safety of the republic that his wife and daughters, and the wives and daughters of all right-thinking men, should be kept unsullied from contact with anything so gross as profanity, outspoken talk, or for that matter politics and business affairs; and also he enjoyed with unashamed gusto not only the freer talk and freer conduct of gentlemen apart from their ladies, but also the company of those women—widows, perhaps, or actresses, or simply defiers of convention—whose wit and beauty had escaped the confines of a dulling respectability. Despite his swollen nose and his often brusque manner, Pierpont Morgan was immensely attractive to many women of all ages; his force and directness and his inner and sometimes abashed kindness won for him an astonishing allegiance. He liked to shower gifts upon them; at least one or two he presented with houses or set up financially for life. Exactly what his relations were with them, this particular biographer does not care to inquire; he would prefer to respect the privacy of private life. Yet it might be reasonable to observe that in an era when an unmarried woman was considered already lost to decency if she so much as dined alone with a man, and when even a widow would be considered to have removed herself beyond the pale if she dined with him on his yacht, gossip portrayed in flaming colors many companionships that today would attract no attention whatever; and also that in an era when most men sought their own ways, often shabby, of escaping from the constrictions of the Victorian proprieties, Morgan’s ways were simply grander. He had his own standard of personal conduct: to try to behave like a gentleman. Part of the time he lived by the rules of nineteenth-century gentility, and part of the time he was free to make his own rules; but there is no reason to believe that his own standards did not govern him throughout.

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  Not only in business but in other affairs too, Morgan’s personality put him naturally in command in any group of men who had a problem to deal with. No railroad executive ever adequately described him in action at a business conference, but the Reverend W. S. Rainsford, rector of St. George’s Church, could sketch him in words as he took charge of a vestry meeting of the church, and Rainsford’s account of a session at No. 219 in the early eighteen-eighties is illuminating.

  It was in 1882, three years before the Corsair conference, that Rainsford, a man of fiery religious and social convictions who had been occupying a pulpit in Canada, was invited to become the rector of St. George’s. At that time the church was in bad shape. The congregation was dwindling, there was a floating debt of $35,000, and the institution’s influence seemed to be waning. The senior warden was Charles Tracy, Morgan’s father-in-law; Morgan himself, then forty-five years old, was only a vestryman; but it was significant that when Rainsford arrived in New York to meet with the wardens and vestry, it was to the house into which Morgan had just moved that he was directed.

  Mr. Tracy presided at the meeting, which was presumably held in the “black library.” He explained the state of affairs in the church and asked Rainsford whether he would consent to become its rector. Rainsford demurred; he didn’t know whether he could cope with such a situation; and he sketched out the sort of work he would like to do. As often happens in sessions of this sort, the conversation began to ramble inconclusively; they seemed to be getting nowhere. Then Morgan spoke up (I quote directly from Rainsford’s autobiography):

  “Mr. Rainsford, will you be our rector? If you consent I will do what I can to help you carry out this plan.” Turning to the others, “Gentlemen, do you agree with me?” Then, again turning to me, “Will you accept our unanimous call?”

  At once I replied, “I will, on three conditions.”

  “Name them.”

  “First, you must make the church absolutely free. Buy out those who will not donate their pews. Second, abolish all committees in the church except the vestry, and only reappoint such as I shall name. Third, I must have an annual fund of $10,000 for three years, independent of my salary, to spend as I see fit on church work. My salary I leave to you.”

  Dead silence followed. I saw Mr. Morgan look around the circle of tense faces. Then he looked full at me and said one word: “Done.”

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  What is a conservative? The word, like its antonyms “liberal” and “radical,” carries such a freight of special political and economic connotations that it often bears little relation to the actual human impulses to which it is applied. In the strict sense of the word meaning “disposed to maintain existing institutions,” there was a strong conservative strain in Pierpont Morgan’s temperament. He cherished old family rites. There must always be a gathering of the Morgan clan for Thanksgiving dinner, with an invariable menu. He loved the traditional Christmas ceremonies: the dressing of the tree on Christmas Eve, a carriage trip with one of the children to distribute presents; church on Christmas morning, and then a family dinner. (For several years, when his children were young, he used to dress up as Santa Claus.) In his religion, unchanged since his Hartford days, he especially warmed to what was venerably traditional. When he liked anything—the furnishings of his library or of his yacht, a certain suite at a hotel, a house or scene hallowed by associ
ation—he wanted to keep it as nearly as possible unchanged. In his later years, as a collector, on a gigantic scale, it was always old things that he collected, books and manuscripts and works of art loaded with venerable tradition: he was associating himself with the beauty of bygone times, which nothing new could possibly match.

  In politics and economics too, he was what most of us would call deeply conservative. He voted the Republican ticket steadily except in 1884, when he disapproved of Blaine and cast his ballot for the fearlessly honest Cleveland, who was certainly no apostle of quick change. He objected to any sort of government intervention in business. In his son-in-law’s biography of him there is a passage describing the prosperity of 1881 which reflects the conservative nineteenth-century attitude: “There were not many problems in the national life of the day. Immigration was practically unrestricted. Work was plentiful. Food and clothing were cheap. Everybody was busy. Labor was not yet unionized. The organized attempts to stir up discontent and raise class feeling had not been begun. Pierpont was making money, as was almost everybody else who was engaged in sound business.…” That passage would probably have struck Morgan himself as reasonably stated. If you had reminded him that the Reading Railroad’s anthracite workers in the valleys of Pennsylvania, for example, were sharing only microscopically in the benefits of national prosperity, being virtually peons of the company, overworked and underpaid, the glare he would have given you would have signified that this was wholly irrelevant: that new inventions and new industrial processes, sensibly applied by well-financed and expanding companies, were one of the answers to general poverty; that churches and charities were another; and that—in the words of William Graham Sumner—“the yearning after equality is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.” As for politicians being of any value in combatting poverty, Morgan had seen enough of them in the Albany & Susquehanna business and in subsequent litigations to be convinced that they were low fellows who bleated about the poor and were always ready to sell their services for a handout from the rich. People like himself, who helped business secure capital and tried to keep it on an orderly and solvent basis, were doing more for the general well-being than all these yawpers put together.