The Great Pierpont Morgan (16 page)

As for Pierpont Morgan himself, presumably at the year's end he was credited with a goodly share of this profit—and also a share in the London profit, whatever that may have been.

To people outside the banking world, a profit (for the Morgan firm in New York) of a quarter of a million dollars on a single transaction looks large. But considering that it
amounted to less than one per cent of the value of the bonds which were being distributed, it was not large at all—especially when one took into account the duration and complexity of the operation and the risks involved in such an unprecedented undertaking. And to Morgan himself, who was accustomed to thinking in large sums, it undoubtedly seemed a modest recompense indeed for saving the credit of the United States.

VIII

TRIANGULATION

1

To fix precisely the size and shape and position of a natural object, such as a mountain peak, the surveyor triangulates, which is to say that he looks at the object from various points of view and compares the different observations which result. Sometimes triangulation is useful in biography as well. A biographer may try to reveal his subject's terrific personal force, the awe in which he was held by those about him, the weight of the few words he spoke; his curtness toward those upon whom he had not focused his sympathies, and especially toward those whom he regarded as interrupters or interferers; his tenderness toward those who engaged his friendship; the patrician limitations of his view of other men—yet all the time this biographer is conscious that the picture he is drawing is two-dimensional and flat, and that each of the qualities which he has recorded will leap into bolder relief when observed from another direction. So I propose now to show you Pierpont Morgan through the eyes of a few contemporaries, each of whom saw him from, as it were, a different point of the compass.

Let us begin with Lincoln Steffens, writing in his remarkable
Autobiography
about the days when he himself had not yet become a redoubtable chronicler of municipal corruption but was simply an energetic and observant young financial reporter for the New York
Evening Post
. He depicts Morgan at about the time when the banker was reorganizing railroads right and left and saving the gold reserve of the United States—and also, as his prestige grew, was becoming recognizably the man revealed in Steichen's great portrait photograph.

“In those days of the eighteen-nineties,” writes Steffens, “I had to do with the private bankers who are the constructive engineering financiers.

“Of these last, J. P. Morgan, Senior, was the greatest. I did not see much of him, of course; nobody did. He was in sight all the time. He sat alone in a back room with glass sides in his banking house with his door open, and it looked as if anyone could walk in upon him and ask any question. One heard stories of the payment of large sums for an introduction to him. I could not see why all the tippers with business did not come right in off the street and talk to him. They did not. My business was with his partners or associates, principally Samuel Spencer,
*
but I noticed that these, his partners, did not go near him unless he sent for them; and then they looked alarmed and darted in like officeboys. ‘Nobody can answer that question except Mr. Morgan,' they would tell me. Well, Mr. Morgan was there; why not go in and ask him? The answer I got was a smile or a shocked look of surprise. And once when I pressed the president of one of the Morgan banks to put to him a question we agreed deserved an answer, the banker said, ‘Not on your life,' and when I said, ‘But why not?' he said, ‘You try it yourself and see.' And I did.

“I went over to J. P. Morgan & Company, walked into his office, and stood before him at his flat, clean, clear desk. I stood while he examined a sheet of figures; I stood for two or three long minutes, while the whole bank seemed to stop work to watch me, and he did not look up; he was absorbed, he was sunk, in those figures. He was so alone with himself and his mind that when he did glance up he did not see me; his eyes were looking inward.… I thought … that he was doing a sum in mental arithmetic, and when he solved it he dropped his eyes back upon his sheet of figures and I slunk out.…”

But one afternoon Steffens' paper received a typewritten statement from J. P. Morgan & Company about some bonds, a statement that did not make sense as written. So, says Steffens, “ready for the explosion, I walked into Morgan's
office and right up to his desk. He saw me this time; he threw himself back in his chair so hard that I thought he would tip over.

“‘Mr. Morgan,' I said as brave as I was afraid, ‘what does this statement mean?' and I threw the paper down before him.

“‘Mean!' he exclaimed. His eyes glared, his great red nose seemed to me to flash and darken, flash and darken. Then he roared. ‘Mean! It means what it says. I wrote it myself, and it says what I mean.'

“‘It doesn't say anything—straight,' I blazed.

“He sat back there, flashing and rumbling; then he clutched the arms of his chair, and I thought he was going to leap at me. I was so scared that I defied him.

“‘Oh, come now, Mr. Morgan,' I said, ‘you may know a lot about figures and finance, but I'm a reporter, and I know as much as you do about English. And that statement isn't English.'

“That was the way to treat him, I was told afterward. And it was in that case. He glared at me a moment more, the fire went out of his face, and he leaned forward over the bit of paper and said very meekly, ‘What's the matter with it?'

“I said I thought it would be clearer in two sentences instead of one and I read it aloud so, with a few other verbal changes.

“‘Yes,' he agreed, ‘that is better. You fix it.'

“I fixed it under his eyes, he nodded and I, whisking it away, hurried back to the office. They told me in the bank afterward that J. P. sat watching me go out of the office, then rapped for Spencer and asked what my name was, where I came from, and said, ‘Knows what he wants, and—gets it.'”

2

So much for Steffens, the reporter. Let us now move our theodolite to another angle of observation and look at Pierpont Morgan through the eyes of the Reverend William Stephen Rainsford, rector of St. George's Church, the bold preacher and pioneer in church social work who, you may recall, had accepted the pulpit of St. George's in 1882 at a vestry meeting held in Morgan's house.

From that time on, Morgan had been Rainsford's devoted friend and backer. He had become senior warden of the
church on his father-in-law's death; had passed the plate every Sunday when he was in New York; and had had Rainsford to breakfast every Monday morning at No. 219 to discuss the affairs of the church over an after-breakfast cigar. When in 1889 Rainsford suffered a nervous breakdown from overwork, Morgan saw to it that he was well cared for, and during Rainsford's absence made a point of reaching St. George's each Sunday morning a half hour before the service began and standing at the church door, “welcoming those he knew and did not know,” and thus helping them to feel “that St. George's was a going concern.” Let Rainsford say in his own words what Morgan meant to him in the dark hour of that illness:

“Then it was I proved fortunate in my friends. I had no care. Others planned my life and saved me all expense and all trouble. Of course the strongest arm under me was that of my senior warden. He was ever a man to lean on in time of trouble. You differed with him, and he with you, but when a helper was needed you turned to him, you leaned on him, and you leaned hard. He had a great heart.…”

After Rainsford returned to the pulpit he found that something had gone out of him; he had lost vitality and was often tired. “Mr. Morgan saw most things he wanted to see,” writes Rainsford, “and he noticed the change in me. Soon after my return, in his quiet way, he drew me aside one day and, slipping a paper into my hand, said, ‘Don't work too hard; you ought not to have to worry about money. Don't thank me, and don't speak of it to anyone but your wife.' He had created a modest trust fund for me and mine. So he lifted from my shoulders a burden that has crushed the life out of many a good soldier.…”

Again, when Mrs. Rainsford was gravely ill for a long time at the Roosevelt Hospital, Morgan, “who at that time was carrying a load of responsibility heavier, perhaps, than any other man in the United States carried, except its President, found time again and again to bring roses to her sick room, and would wait outside her door till the nurse permitted him to lay them by her bed.”

The close association between these two men was a strange one. For Rainsford was by nature a radical reformer, a passionate democrat. He believed in the “social gospel”—
the pre-eminent importance, in Christ's teaching, of the duty of active neighborliness to all men. He wanted to make the church itself a friendly place to which men and women of every sort would come for companionship, enjoyment, solace, and practical help. To Morgan, the conservative and traditionalist, all this was strange. Morgan's religious faith, unquestioned and unchanged since his Hartford boyhood, was something set sacredly apart from daily conduct. As Rainsford interpreted him, “His mental qualities drew him strongly to the ecclesiastical side of the Episcopal Church's life. Its very archaic element, its atmosphere of withdrawal from the common everyday affairs of men, answered to some need of his soul.” Morgan regularly attended the triennial national Episcopal conventions, and according to Rainsford, “The floor of the convention, the association with men who were, by virtue of their office, guardians and exponents of a religious tradition, beautiful and venerable, had for him an attraction stronger than any other gathering afforded. He would cast all other duties aside and sit for hours, attentively following the details of the driest of debates, on subjects that could interest only an ecclesiastic.” How explain such a man's loyal partnership with a clergyman to whom the church was first of all an organization to energize and inspire a humble-hearted friendship among men?

Perhaps Morgan recalled how desperately his grandfather, the crusading John Pierpont of Boston, had missed the support of the congregation of the Hollis Street Church; perhaps he had resolved that he himself would never be so blindly obstructive as those Bostonians had been. More likely the chief reason was that when Morgan believed in a man he believed in backing him with full faith and with few questions; and Rainsford, a big, handsome, straightforward fellow who knew how to meet loyalty with loyalty, attracted his belief. At any rate, despite his misgivings over Rainsford's program of social work, he gave the clergyman his sustained support, and even went so far as to build for St. George's a parish house—Memorial House, given in memory of his wife's parents—which was the first building of its kind in New York. But the story of Morgan and Rainsford would not be complete if it omitted a rift between them which opened up in the middle eighteen-nineties
, not very far in time, probably, from Steffens' confrontation of Morgan at 23 Wall Street.

I draw my account of this episode directly from the one in Rainsford's autobiography,
The Story of a Varied Life
, abbreviating it somewhat but quoting from it lavishly and presenting the whole episode as Rainsford himself saw it.

3

The meetings of the vestry of St. George's Church were held at eight-thirty in the evening in the Corporation Room at the Parish House, with the rector as presiding officer. One night, out of a clear sky, Pierpont Morgan rose and read a motion that the vestry be reduced from two wardens and eight members to two wardens and six members, adding, “I think the vestry will agree with me that when I get a seconder it had better be passed without debate.”

Rainsford was stunned. He said that Morgan had given him no warning whatever of any intention to propose such a change. “Since I stood in your study that night when you called me to the church,” he went on, “I think you will bear witness that I have never advocated any important matter in this, our church's council, without first discussing it with you. Here now you spring this revolutionary proposition on me, and on the vestry, without any warning whatever; and you ask that we should proceed to pass it without any discussion. This I cannot agree to, and I must ask you, before you get a seconder, to explain to me and to this vestry your reasons for proposing so important a change. We have done good work together, constituted as we are. If a small vestry is for St. George's a better vestry, there must be some reasons for it. What are your reasons for it?”

Thereupon Morgan “very unwillingly” got on his feet and explained that the vestry's role in the church was different from that of the rector. The rector's part was to teach and inspire; the vestry's part was fiduciary and its obligations were financial. “I am its senior warden and responsible officer,” said Morgan. “I am aging. I want at times to have these vestry meetings held in my study. This vestry should be composed, in my judgment, of men whom I can invite to my study, and who can help me to carry the heavy financial
burden of the church.… The rector wants to democratize the church, and we agree with him and will help him as far as we can. But I do not want the vestry democratized. I want it to remain a body of gentlemen whom I can ask to meet me in my study.”

With dismay Rainsford realized that if Morgan had his patrician way, the vestry would cease to represent the congregation in any true sense; they—and the church—would inevitably fall under Morgan's control. (Perhaps what Morgan had chiefly in mind was that he wanted a group of men so well heeled that he could pass the hat among them to meet the church's needs without being embarrassed by the presence of men who could not contribute their share; but if so, either he failed to make this point clear or Rainsford thought that anyhow it involved a distortion of the vestry's function.) He reminded Morgan that he, Rainsford, had long believed that the vestry ought to be, not reduced, but enlarged. As a matter of fact he had expressed this idea more than once at their after-breakfast sessions, only to be met with the silence with which Morgan customarily greeted an idea which he was not then willing to accept. Rainsford argued that the vestry ought to include at least one representative of the increasing number of wage-earners in the congregation; and he also had in mind particularly one man, H. H. Pike, who was largely responsible for the growth of the Sunday School and thus had come to know well a great many of the younger members of the church.