Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [55]
Shortly afterward, all telecommunications with Washington were broken. A violent snowstorm descended over the Atlantic seaboard, coating the Northeastern grid with ice. Wires snapped by the thousand, hanging from their poles in tinkling festoons. By the time Hanna and Griggs reached the capital, Pennsylvania Avenue was muffled with snow.
BEFORE NIGHTFALL THE following day, seven representatives of the House of Morgan had arrived in town, including Morgan himself. He marched through the Arlington Hotel’s slushy entrance under a testudo of umbrellas. A spokesman announced that the chairman had come south to dine with his old friend Senator Depew and a group of mutual acquaintances prominent in politics, finance, and industry. Morgan called this occasional fraternity the “Corsair Club.” The name, taken from his yacht, had waggish associations with piracy, not to mention his image as captain of the United States economy.
If the purpose of the dinner was convivial, it failed miserably. Henry Adams described the general mood as “black,” and reported that “Pierpont sulked like a child.” When, at ten o’clock, a telephone call from the President invited Depew to bring his guests around for a visit, Morgan had to be coaxed to go along. Thirteen Corsairs piled into a series of hacks and automobiles and drove four blocks through the still-falling snow. Roosevelt received them with polite formality. Responding in kind, they stayed off the subject of Northern Securities.
He was intelligent enough to know they came only because a presidential invitation could not be declined. Until forty-eight hours before, these men had stood with him. Now they stood shoulder to shoulder against him, legionnaires of the established economic order, bristling with wealth, courteously hostile behind their breastplates of boiled cotton. Depew. Morgan. Perkins. Rockefeller. Steele. Hanna. Cassatt. Their very names spelled power. So did that of Elihu Root—a Corsair too, and no longer Roosevelt’s automatic ally.
The Secretary of War was a bitter man that night. It was humiliating for him to have been surprised by Wednesday’s announcement. The knowledge that other Cabinet colleagues had been surprised too only emphasized Knox’s sudden ascendancy. Root was convinced that Roosevelt must have “some personal reason” for eschewing his counsel.
Either that, or as Henry Adams put it, “Theodore betrays his friends for his own ambition.”
SURE ENOUGH, it was Knox, not Root, who sat at the President’s elbow when J. P. Morgan returned to the White House alone the next morning, Saturday, 22 February. Aware, perhaps, that lava was rolling his way, Roosevelt needed the protection of a cool, hard legal front.
There was something volcanic about Morgan. The hot glare and fiery complexion, flushing so deep that the engorged nose seemed about to burst, the smoldering cigar, the mountainous shoulders—merely to look at him was to register tremors.
Yet interlocutors soon discovered that Morgan’s sparks and smoke were a kind of screen, concealing someone essentially quiet and shy, almost clerical. As a youth, he had dreamed of becoming a professor of mathematics; he was equally attracted to the rituals of the Episcopal Church, in which he had served as a vestryman for forty years. But he was also the inheritor of a family bank, and had a lightning ability to figure large sums of money. These endowments, plus his involuntary power of domination, made him de ipse the nation’s financial leader. He sought relief from numbers by collecting indiscriminate quantities of great or ghastly art. His Madison Avenue library bulged with uncut volumes. Occasionally, in country homes, Morgan would fumble at a passing woman.
Whatever qualms the President may have had in granting an interview, he had little difficulty handling Morgan. Or at least Roosevelt chose not to remember any, when