John Pierpont
Morgan
Born: Hartford;
April 17, 1837
Died: Rome, Italy; March 31, 1913
Connecticut's
historical identification by some as the “Nutmeg State” bespeaks
a recognition that the state has frequently been identified
with
sharpness in trading, or, more delicately put, entrepreneurial
acumen. Call it what one will, Connecticuters have long had
it,
and the individual who undoubtedly did the most with it was J.
P. Morgan, turn-of-the-century America's financial emperor.
An
investigation of the so-called "money trust" by the
Pujo Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1912
was
aimed directly at J.P. Morgan and Company, private bankers with
deposits of $160 million, with ties to banks and trust companies
in New York City with assets of $723 million, possessing control
of the operation of dozens of railroads and street-railway
systems,
and influential in giant firms such as United States Steel, International
Harvester, General Electric, and American Telephone and Telegraph.
One critic of the empire over which Morgan ruled wrote:
Investment
bankers, like J.P. Morgan & Company, dealers in bonds, stocks,
and notes,... became the directing power in railroads, public
service and industrial companies through which our great business
operations are conducted—the makers of stocks and bonds. They
became the directing power in the life insurance companies, and
other corporate reservoirs of the people's savings—the buyers
of bonds and stocks. They became the directing power also in banks
and trust companies-the depositories of the quick capital of the
country—the life blood of business, with which they and others
carried on their operations. Thus four distinct functions, each
essential to business, and each exercised, originally, by a distinct
set of men, became united in the investment banker. It is to
this
union of business functions that the existence of the Money Trust
is mainly due.
While
Morgan and his associates denied consistently before the Pujo
Committee and on other occasions the existence of a "money
trust," few acute observers of the American business scene
doubted the unparalleled business and financial clout of Morgan
and Company.
Born
to a father who was a prosperous international banker with a home
on Asylum Street in Hartford and a mother with roots in Connecticut
Puritanism, young Morgan was educated at a school in Vevey, Switzerland,
and at the University of Gottingen. Entering his father's banking
house in London in 1856, Morgan began a meteoric rise in American
financial affairs. By the time J.P. Morgan and Company was formed
in 1895, Morgan had become nothing less than the nation's financial
backstop. When the gold reserves of the United States became dangerously
low in the mid-1890s, President Cleveland turned to Morgan to
oversee the international purchase of $65 million in gold. Morgan
handled the operation to the advantage of the financial stability
of the nation and to the enormous profit of J.P. Morgan and Company.
Physically
imposing with a large frame, massive shoulders, and piercing
eyes,
Morgan could easily intimidate by his presence alone. That presence
combined with a frequently abrupt and dictatorial bearing made
him a formidable competitor—even at dinner parties. Yet, there
was too in the man an apparently sincere conviction that his masterful
success at combination, integration, and centralization in the
business world proceeded from talent—and character. His statement
that the first requisite of credit was character leaves one with
the impression that this twentieth-century giant was not without
recognition of the values of seventeenth-century Connecticut
Puritanism.
J.
P. Morgan's ties to Hartford were expressed in his presentation
in 1910 of the Morgan Memorial Wing (in honor of his father) to
the Wadsworth Atheneum.
For
Further Reading
Allen,
F.L. The Great Pierpont Morgan. New York, 1949.
Hoyt,
E.P. The House of Morgan. New York, 1966.
Entry
by David M. Roth
*
Entry under revision.
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