Private Life of the Might Morgan
A profile of John Pierpont Morgan Jr.
Published on June 11, 1933 — The Sunday Star (Washington D.C.)
In the house where she had reared her children, a woman lay dying. Doctors shook their heads. They could do nothing in the presence of the mysterious malady encephalitis, or sleeping sickness, of which almost nothing is known.
After a momentary rally, the woman died. As the owner in her own right of considerable property, she left a will. And when it was read, it was found that she had left most of her property to her sons and daughters, not to her husband.
The mere fact was not surprising, but through the cold legal language of that will shone a tenderness that is pathetic and touching.
“I feel sure,” it read, “that if, through any unforeseen circumstances, my dear husband should ever be in need, my children will share with him the property derived from me.”
Only the simplicity of a loving and devoted wife could have written those words, for the husband to whom they refer is John Pierpont Morgan, head of the world’s greatest private bank, mightiest dealer in dollars that the country has ever known.
Such glimpses into the (to them) sacred private lives of the Morgan family are rare. For the Morgans are aggressively secretive and fiercely jealous of those private lives.
Their gigantic banking projects may include such things as organization of United States Steel Corporation, the first “billion-dollar baby.” They may include coming to the rescue of a moribund United States Treasury in 1893, and standing grim-shouldered to stem the financial panic of ’07, cracking the whip while tight-lipped New York bank presidents filed in and laid their assets on the line to stem the panic.
They may include saving the credit of the City of New York when it was endangered by the outbreak of the war in 1914 and Europe sucked away the city’s gold; or raising a half billion for the allies in 1915, and representing them in raising loans and buying supplies in America throughout a great war.
They may include congressional investigations by investigators intent on proving that the house of Morgan is a financial octopus, relentlessly crushing to its evil body all money, all industry, all power.
They may include organization or reorganization of some of the greatest industrial units in the country, and hundreds of fingers in the industrial pie through directorships held by 30 partners.
But the Morgans themselves remain elusive, aloof, fiercely retiring.
They are so little known that there is no doubt that thousands of people do not realize that the elder J.P. Morgan, whose fierce flashing eye and bulbous nose became the cartoonist’s symbol for financial dominance in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, has been dead these 20 years, and that a son has carried on his name and affairs, increasing the glamour and potency of both.
That is partly because the present J.P. Morgan, while a handsomer man than his father, nevertheless resembles him strikingly, and has perhaps an even greater hatred of personal publicity. Even in Wall Street, where the memory of terror-inspiring “Jupiter” Morgan still lives, the son, now 66, is accorded the titles “senior” and “chief,” by which the elder and legendary Morgan had been known.
The present J.P. Morgan, born and bred to great financial affairs if ever a man was, presents a strange picture of apparent contradictions.
Though essentially a bookish, studious, retiring figure, he has ever since the death of his father plunged him into the headship of his house, maintained and even increased its preeminence. While his merest memorandum beginning “J.P. Morgan suggests…” is law to one of the greatest associations of great bankers in the world, he enjoys nothing more than sitting in as a lay member in a discussion of doctrine by clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church. For Morgan is not only learned in that church’s history, but its most active financial supporter, vestryman at St. George’s in New York, and a sort of lay pope to the denomination. In this, he is simply following the course of his famous father.
A silent man, keeping to the bosom of a much-loved family, he is yet a man who appears to enjoy his annual reunions with his graduating class (’89) at Harvard, and who seldom misses the Yale-Harvard boat race. Despite an instinctive distrust, or even hatred, of cameras, Morgan faced them, and was always most pleasant to newsmen when he returned from Europe as unofficial American representative to the Reparations Conference of 1929. That was public business.
A man born to crushing responsibility and the direction of great affairs cannot live as he chooses. But if he is of the right temperament, he can come pretty close to it. Morgan does. He has four homes, all maintained fully staffed for his use at any time.
Mostly he lives at the great rambling house at Matinicock Point, Long Island. It stands on a point reached only by a bridge, and has its own private yacht landing where the Corsair may put in.
The Corsair, fourth of a line of Corsairs, cost $2,5000,000 when completed at Bath, Me., in 1930, and is certainly one of the largest and finest pleasure craft afloat.
The yacht’s graceful black hull is 343 feet long and she is, of course, fitted out in the utmost luxury, a triumph of American shipbuilding. Most American millionaires, it might be added, have their yachts built abroad, where they come cheaper.
There is an interesting sidelight on her building. The ship people wanted to fit her with gyroscopic stabilizers, like the new ocean greyhounds. Morgan said no, he liked the roll of the sea. And he does.
Yachting has been a sporting tradition in the family. J.P. rowed a good deal at Harvard, though he never made the crew. He has sailed small craft in competition, and his sons, Junius and Henry, are also yachtsmen, having been elected president, respectively, of the New York and Seawanahaka Corinthian Clubs. Both their father and grandfather had held these posts in their time.
But, of Course, the Corsair is for ocean trips. When J.P. is at Matinicock Point he commutes to New York in a smaller craft. He rises late, and often potters about in the garden of the estate in which his wife used to like to work. Then he boards ship for New York.
Arriving at the foot of Wall Street, he goes to his office, the forbidding, solid, squat stone structure that bears no name above the door and is known throughout the financial section simply as “The Corner.”
A low two or three story building here is the height of luxury, for land is so valuable that all around the Morgan corner skyscrapers loom above it.
Here in a great open room sit all of the Morgan partners, financial agents, each with a desk in rows like schoolboys. Morgan goes to his own desk at one side behind a glass partition, and sits before an open fire with the portrait in oils of his father looking down upon him. The present Morgan reveres his famous father with an almost Oriental devotion. Partners step informally to his desk for conference. There is never the slightest disorder in the room, nor sign of business beyond that of any ordinary well-conducted banking room.
At the break of the afternoon, Morgan takes tea in the English fashion, a habit acquired during four years of work and residence in London. It is a habit, by the way, to which his father, the elder Morgan, never became quite reconciled.
Then, the day over, Morgan slips out of the office and is gone. Comparatively few people ever see him at all. He is not a mixer, and sees few outside his own restricted circle.
The Morgan town house is a famous institution. Standing on the corner of Thirty-sixth street and Madison avenue just wher ethat once exclusive street rises in the gentle slope of Murray Hill, the Morgan house is a little dusty and old fashioned, and not nearly so magnificent as dozens of homes of New York’s wealthy.
Morgan has gradually acquired control of almost the entire block between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh, first for his own privacy, and second to protect the gemlike Italian Renaissance art gallery and library, which house the Morgan collection of art and manuscripts. These are open to students and all who have a legitimate interest.
Naturally, by temperament and connections, sympathetic with England, Morgan maintains two homes there. The more impressive of these is Wall Hall, in the village of Aldenham, just beyond the remoter northern suburbs of London.
There he is Squire Morgan. Wall Hall is not old, as English country places go, nor is Aldenham an especially ancient village. Both the village and Morgan’s estate are cheerfully modern. The squire likes to go goose shooting, and gets over every year or so.
In addition, he maintains a small, modern house in Grosvenor Square, London, which replaces the one he had in Princes Gate and which he turned over to the United States for use of the American Ambassador.
Intimate friends of Morgan (and there aren’t many) say he is rather warm and generous — natured at heart, but few people ever find that out if it is true. His “public-be-ignored” attitude prevents. But there are little incidents that are revealing.
Once when attending a Harvard class reunion, Morgan was named an overseer of the university, a post in which he took more pleasure, he said, than in any of his other multitude of jobs. Responding to a toast in which a class poet half humorously, half respectfully, referred to him as “The Great Lord Morgan,” the money master muttered, “Oh, hell, call me Jack.” That, by the way, is what his intimates do call him.
Being head of the house of Morgan is not all beer and skittles. It may involve danger and death. Twice Morgan has had narrow escapes.
Back in 1915 a madman forced his way into the library of the Matinicock Point house and confronted Morgan alone, a pistol wavering in his hand, muttering crazily. Morgan did not flinch, but rushed at the intruder, who fired. Badly wounded, Morgan stumbled, but rushed in and hurled his 200 pounds on the maniac, holding him until help arrived.
In 1923 a truck of explosives was driven up to the Corner and exploded in a second plot on his life. As building shook and dust and confusion filled the air, it was Morgan who stepped to the door to see what had happened, an who by his example of coolness reassured a frightened office staff.
