The Great Pierpont Morgan Read Free

in him. He was denying that there was any way in which one man could get a monopoly of money, or control of it.
    Yet as the questioning persisted, it became apparent that these denials on the old man’s part were not merely tactics in his battle of wits with Untermyer; they came from somethingdeeper in his nature, something that commanded the audience’s respect. Morgan was insisting that what ruled the financial world was not money, but character.
    â€œIs not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?” asked Untermyer.
    â€œNo, sir,” said Morgan; “the first thing is character.”
    â€œBefore money or property?”
    â€œBefore money or 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.”
    How could anybody hear those words—so dubiously applicable to the facts of the business world in general, yet clearly so valid to the old gentleman in the witness chair—without wondering what manner of man this was, what principles had ruled his long career, and by what conjunction of circumstances and events he had come to a place where people could honestly believe that he was the ruler of America?

II
    THE MATERIALS OF A CAREER
    1
    Among the men who wielded far-reaching authority in American business at the beginning of the twentieth century, Morgan was unusual in his origins. John D. Rockefeller’s father had been a pitch man of uncertain repute—an itinerant salesman of patent medicines—and Rockefeller himself had begun his working life at sixteen as a $4-a-week clerk in a commission merchant’s office in Cleveland. Andrew Carnegie had been born in a weaver’s cottage at Dunfermline, Scotland, and after having been brought to the United States in his early childhood had gone to work at thirteen as a $1.20-a-week bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh cotton mill. Among the subsequently mighty bankers, George F. Baker, a country boy, had begun as a clerk in the New York State Banking Department at Albany; James Stillman’s father had been well-to-do but had suffered reverses, and young Stillman had entered business life at sixteen in a small position in the cotton business. And even the great railroad organizer, E. H. Harriman, though he had had wealthy friends and moderately prosperous relatives, had been unable to get to college and had been introduced to business by way of a job as a broker’s office boy at $5 a week. The prevailing pattern was of the sort prescribed by Horatio Alger: begin work as a boy, without benefit of higher education; work furiously, with a single eye to business; and thus rise to the top.
    There were to be sure other men, like the Astors and Vanderbilts, who had inherited wealth and were forces to be reckoned with at the turn of the century by reason of that wealth; but they represented a waning and undynamic authority compared with the Rockefellers and Carnegies and Harrimans. Morgan was unique. Nobody could call him undynamic. Yet by contrast with the Horatio Alger heroes of his timehe had been born to rising wealth and social position, and before he was twenty had enjoyed opportunities for travel, university education, and international acquaintance such as Rockefeller and Carnegie could hardly have dreamed of.
    Morgan’s grandfather, Joseph Morgan, came from a Massachusetts farm to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817; ran a coffee house or tavern, and then sold it to become the proprietor of the City Hotel in Hartford; prospered as a hotel-keeper, and invested on a considerable scale in Hartford real estate; helped to organize a canal company and steamboat lines and the new railroad which connected Hartford with Springfield; and finally became one of the founders of the Aetna Fire Insurance Company. A solid citizen, hearty, hardworking, shrewd in a bargain, and God-fearing withal, Joseph Morgan was the perfect pattern of the up-and-coming Yankee