U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [324]
Electric, American Tel and Tel, five major industries; the interwoven cables of the Morgan Stil man
Baker combination held credit up like a suspension
bridge, thirteen percent of the banking resources of the world.
The first Morgan to make a pool was Joseph
Morgan, a hotelkeeper in Hartford Connecticut who
organized stagecoach lines and bought up AEtna Life Insurance stock in a time of panic caused by one of the big New York fires in the 1830's;
his son Junius fol owed in his footsteps, first in
the drygoods business, and then as partner to George Peabody, a Massachusetts banker who built up an enor-mous underwriting and mercantile business in London and became a friend of Queen Victoria;
Junius married the daughter of John Pierpont, a
Boston preacher, poet, eccentric, and abolitionist; and their eldest son, John Pierpont Morgan
arrived in New York to make his fortune
-336-after being trained in England, going to school at Vevey, proving himself a crack mathematician at the University of Göttingen,
a lanky morose young man of twenty,
just in time for the panic of '57.
(war and panics on the stock exchange, bank-ruptcies, warloans, good growing weather for the House of Morgan.)
When the guns started booming at Fort Sumter,
young Morgan turned some money over resel ing con-demned muskets to the U.S. army and began to make himself felt in the gold room in downtown New York; there was more in trading in gold than in trading in muskets; so much for the Civil War. During the Franco-Prussian war Junius Morgan
floated a huge bond issue for the French government at Tours.
At the same time young Morgan was fighting Jay
Cooke and the German-Jew bankers in Frankfort over
the funding of the American war debt (he never did
like the Germans or the Jews).
The panic of '75 ruined Jay Cooke and made J.
Pierpont Morgan the boss croupier of Wal Street; he united with the Philadelphia Drexels and built the
Drexel building where for thirty years he sat in his glassedin office, redfaced and insolent, writing at his desk, smoking great black cigars, or, if important issues were involved, playing solitaire in his inner office; he was famous for his few words, Yes or No, and for his way of suddenly blowing up in a visitor's face and for that special gesture of the arm that meant, What do I get out of it?
In '77 Junius Morgan retired; J. Pierpont got
himself made a member of the board of directors of the New York Central railroad and launched the first
-337- Corsair. He liked yachting and to have pretty actresses cal him Commodore. He founded the Lying-in Hospital on Stuyvesant
Square, and was fond of going into St. George's church and singing a hymn al alone in the afternoon quiet. In the panic of '93
at no inconsiderable profit to himself
Morgan saved the U.S. Treasury; gold was drain-ing out, the country was ruined, the farmers were howl-ing for a silver standard, Grover Cleveland and his cabinet were walking up and down in the blue room at the White House without being able to come to a
decision, in Congress they were making speeches while the gold reserves melted in the Subtreasuries; poor people were starving; Coxey's army was marching to Washington; for a long time Grover Cleveland couldn't bring himself to cal in the representative of the Wal Street moneymasters; Morgan sat in his suite at the Arlington smoking cigars and quietly playing solitaire until at last the president sent for him; he had a plan al ready for stopping the gold
hemorrhage.
After that what Morgan said went; when Carnegie
sold out he built the Steel Trust.
J. Pierpont Morgan was a bul necked irascible
man with smal black magpie's eyes and a growth on his nose; he let his partners work themselves to death over the detailed routine of banking, and sat in his back office smoking black cigars; when there was something to be decided he said Yes or No or just turned his back and went back to his solitaire.
Every Christmas his librarian read him Dickens'
A Christmas Carol from the original manuscript. He was fond of canarybirds