The Great Pierpont Morgan

by Allen, Frederick Lewis;

  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.

  The issue was joined, and a long, embarrassing, and vehement debate followed. It was a fight—a lacerating one. It lasted from a little after nine o’clock until nearly midnight. Rainsford asked Morgan to withdraw his motion. “Do not let us divide!” said Rainsford. “We never have had a division on any serious question in this vestry since I sat at your head.” Seth Low, subsequently Mayor of New York, who was among the vestrymen, joined Rainsford in asking that the motion be withdrawn. Morgan remained immovable.

  Then another vestryman, “one of his oldest friends, one to whom in these financially troublesome times through which we were then passing Mr. Morgan had been of immense service (I did not know this till later), slowly rose. He was white to the lips, and turning to Mr. Morgan he said, ‘Mr. Morgan, I am compelled to agree with our rector in this matter, and I move that this vestry be increased to eleven.’”

  Mayor Low seconded this motion. Morgan could get no seconder for his. Thereupon the motion to enlarge the vestry was put and carried, seven votes to one.

  For a moment the group of men sat very silent. Then Morgan got up and said slowly, “Rector, I will never sit in this vestry again,” and walked out of the room and out of the building.

  From this point on. I shall quote Rainsford verbatim:

  “Next day I had Mr. Morgan’s written resignation, with a request to submit it to the vestry without delay. I acknowledged his letter, and nothing more, going to breakfast next week at 219 Madison Avenue as usual. As I expected he was very grumpy, and at the breakfast table conversation was limited to the weather. Next week I went again to breakfast. He had nothing to say to me at the table.

  “As I asked for a cigar, in his study afterward, he said, ‘Have you submitted my resignation?’

  “‘I have not, and I will not.’

  “‘Why not?’

  “‘Because I will not now or ever put you in the position of going back on your pledge to the rector and the vestry of St. George’s Church.’

  “‘What do you mean?’

  “‘You know what I mean. When I first came to you I came because you gave me your hand and your promise to stand by me in the hard work that lay ahead. I told you I was a radical. I told you I would do all I could to democratize the church. I am only keeping my word. I certainly shall not now, nor at any time, do anything to help you break yours.’

  “Dead silence. So I lit my cigar and walked away.

  “I think after that I went to breakfast three times before Mr. Morgan sailed for Europe. He never made another allusion to his resignation, nor did he enter into any private conversation with me. The day he sailed, I did what I had not done before, I went to the dock to bid him good-bye. On this occasion, in the days I am writing of, the late nineties, a rather miscellaneous crowd was wont to gather to bid him good-bye. It had become quite a function, and I did not usually care to take part in it. As I went up the gangplank, I saw Mr. Morgan standing at some distance surrounded by his friends. At the same instant he saw me and, coming out of the group, signed to me to follow him. He made for his cabin, entered quickly, without saying a word, and shut and bolted the door behind us. We never had another falling out.”

  What was said in that cabin Rainsford would not divulge. But Morgan remained senior warden the rest of his life.

  4

  A financial reporter and a clergyman having testified, let us turn to another phase of Morgan’s life, introducing in due course other witnesses diverse in temperament and character. Morgan became the greatest collector of his time, and the way in which he did it throws light upon him from other points of the compass.

  There was, of course, nothing new about the collecting of works of art as a hobby for men of wealth and power. Conquering kings had long been wont to regard masterpieces as a superior form of loot; rich nobles and bankers and merchants, traveling to far places, had brought home with them all manner of lovely objects which had caught their eye; and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collecting had become one of the standard preoccupations of men of ample means both in England and on the Continent. Even in the United States, those who had been able to visit Europe or Asia and had been entranced by the exquisite workmanship achieved under older civilizations, had enjoyed bringing fine things back with them to their bleaker homeland, and many of these collectors had been men of real taste. All through the nineteenth century the auction notices in New York and other American cities had testified to the number and variety of private collections, whether of rare books, or of paintings, or of objets d’art, which had been accumulated by people of means. And when in the early eighteen-eighties William H. Vanderbilt installed in his new house on
Fifth Avenue an art gallery full of readily comprehended and sentimental paintings from Europe, and cluttered the hallways of the house with a remarkable jumble of statues and tapestries and curios from all over the world, and an admiring writer proclaimed that now “wealth is first consenting to act the Medicean part in America, to patronize the inventors, to create the arts, and to originate a form of civilization,” there was nothing especially new about what Vanderbilt did; he simply spent more money more grandly (and perhaps with less discrimination) than most of his American predecessors.

  But as the century drew to a close, and American fortunes multiplied, the collectors became not only more numerous but more knowing. And there began a new period in which a swarm of American millionaires ransacked Europe for masterpieces, near-masterpieces, and pseudo-masterpieces of painting, sculpture, architectural accessories, and fine workmanship in all sorts of materials. This new surge of the collectors gathered momentum during the eighteen-nineties, rushed at full tilt from 1900 to 1914, and continued, though at a less sensational pace, after the First World War. It resulted in such extraordinary concentrations of fine objects from abroad as the Gardner, Huntington, Mellon, and Frick collections, to say nothing of those of John G. Johnson, Folger, Freer, Altman, Havemeyer, Widener, Nelson, Lewisohn, Bliss, Hearst, Bache, and a cluster of others. At the head and front of the company of American purchasers was Morgan, the pace-setter for them all.

  This boom in collecting was a natural thing. The man who had accumulated great wealth sought both to establish or secure his place among the elect by indulging in those forms of “conspicuous waste”—to borrow Veblen’s term—which found favor among the privileged, and to enrich his own life according to whatever tastes he possessed or could acquire. He tended, in Western civilization, to want to have his womenfolk admirably attired and outfitted; to want to have a fine house full of luxurious appointments and rare and lovely things; and to want to give magnificent parties. If he was susceptible to the English county tradition, he enjoyed having a country estate with well-cut lawns, prize animals, and prize crops and flowers. He might add a yacht, the very symbol of luxury. He wanted, perhaps, to visit the approved watering places at the approved seasons, have his own quarters set apart for him there, and even to buy or build extra residences for himself in these select areas. If his tastes were sporting, he could now engage in those forms of sport which traditionally required the most retainers, such as grouse shooting, or were expensively speculative, as was the maintenance of a racing stable. But none of these exercises of his wealth quite satisfied his sensibilities, if he had any; were there not in life things finer in quality than these? There were the arts.

  In few cases could he practice the arts himself, even if this had occurred to him. But he could apply his money to them. In aiding contemporary artists? Not often did this occur to him either, especially if he were an American—for he supposed that there were almost no American artists worth supporting, and anyhow contemporary artists were reported to be absurd and troublesome people. But he could collect the well-certified art of the European past, thus simultaneously exercising the talent for acquisition that had made him rich, stimulating and satisfying his appetite for beauty, avoiding contact with the artistic temperament except through the medium of romantic legend, and appeasing his own sense of financial prudence (for what was he doing but investing in things which, if there came a rainy day, might be sold again?). And if he were an American, he could have as well the added inner satisfaction of bringing to American shores a treasure trove which he could vaguely dream of putting one day at the public disposal, for the enrichment of America’s all-too-meager cultural life.

  Of course the man of wealth could also give his money away, for the support of education, religion, or charity, thus putting into reverse, as it were, his acquisitive talent. And if it was hard for a man beset with suppliants for his cash to decide between them, he could set up a fund to be administered by special experts in giving. But it was not until after the turn of the century that the first great foundations were established by the two richest Americans, Carnegie and Rockefeller, and not until 1910 and 1911 that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation were respectively incorporated; and by that time the epidemic of collecting in Europe was already at its zenith.

  It is odd to trace the chronological parallel between two of the foremost collectors of those furious years. Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famous “Mrs. Jack” of Boston, had loved during the eighteen-seventies and early eighties to buy beautiful things for her Beacon Street house, but as late as 1884, when she fell in love with the glory of the Renaissance painting in Italy, she brought home with her merely photographs of masterpieces. It was about 1886 that she acquired the collecting mania—and then she began with old and rare books. In 1888 she really began assembling old paintings; in 1892 this pursuit became with her a ruling passion; in 1896 she began seriously to think of amassing a real museum collection; in 1899 she bought the land on which Fenway Court was presently built. Morgan’s time schedule was similar, with a slight lag at each point.

  Morgan had always enjoyed bringing home with him fine things that caught his fancy, whether in New York or on his annual trips to Europe. As a youngster he had picked up numerous fragments of old stained glass which he had found on the ground beneath cathedral windows, and had carted to New York a crate of them. He had occasionally bought paintings that seemed to him adequate. When he moved into 219 Madison Avenue at the age of forty-five he was sufficiently vain of his books to engage one J. F. Sabin to prepare a pamphlet Catalogue of the Library of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan: this was the sort of thing that a gentleman of taste and means did. But an examination of the catalogue shows that the books themselves were, with very few exceptions, nothing special. Not yet had the collecting virus entered his system. It was not until 1888, when he was fifty-one, that he bought his first manuscript, two years after Mrs. Gardner had embarked upon book collecting; not until 1891, when he was fifty-four, that he began to concentrate passionate attention, while abroad, on the purchase in quantity of manuscripts, first editions, and old and rare and fine volumes generally; and it was only gradually, in the years that followed, that like Mrs. Gardner he shifted part of his attention from books to other lovely relics of the past. The century had almost turned, and he was already in his sixties, before he became a major assembler of an immense and widening variety of beautiful things, which in due time were to include paintings, bronzes, terra cottas, jades, ivories, enamels, crystals, glass, tapestries, bas-reliefs, miniatures, snuffboxes, watches, Bibles, Church of England rituals, autographs, and of course books and manuscripts. The twentieth century had arrived before he began making serious plans to construct the Library building next to his house, and it was in 1904, when he was sixty-seven, that he became the president, wholesale benefactor, and supreme ruler of the Metropolitan Museum.

  How did he begin? Let us call as a witness his admiring son-in-law, Herbert L. Satterlee:

  It was really Pierpont’s nephew, Junius S. Morgan, who interested him in collecting manuscripts and rare editions. Junius knew that a young friend of his, F. Wheeler, had acquired a Thackeray manuscript, but he himself could not afford to buy it; so he introduced Wheeler to his uncle at the latter’s office. As far as we know, this is the first manuscript that Pierpont himself bought; and the interview (as Wheeler wrote it down) is characteristic.

  When young Wheeler was shown in, Pierpont asked, “What have you got to show me?”

  “A Thackeray manuscript which came to me from Thackeray’s daughter, Mrs. Ritchie.”

  Pierpont took it and turned over the leaves. In a moment he asked, “Are you sure that this is in Thackeray’s own handwriting?”

  “Quite certain.”

  “You are too young to be quite certain.”

  “I think not, sir, because I have been dealing in manuscripts since I was seventeen.”

  “Very well. What’s the price?”

  “One hundre
d pounds.”

  “Is that ‘cash’?”

  “No sir. Ninety pounds cash.”

  “Very well. My secretary will give you a check. Let me know if you get any more really good authors’ manuscripts.” That was the end of the interview.

  Pierpont carried this manuscript uptown to his house and showed it to his family and friends. Eventually he put it into the little room in the basement which gradually became the storage place of many of the manuscripts and books that he bought during the next eighteen years. Before the Morgan Library was built the room became so crowded that it was difficult to get into it to find anything; books, pictures, and manuscripts were piled on the floor, after every table and chair had been filled.

  There we have many of the elements of the Morgan collecting pattern: a chance beginning, through a family introduction; the briefest and sharpest of interviews; no haggling; and a satisfaction in acquisition even of an object that the purchaser could seldom if ever savor fully himself. But it throws little light upon either Morgan’s motive or his method. Let us return witness Satterlee to the stand, to tell about Morgan’s purchase, nineteen years later, of a Spanish painting, a “Portrait of a Child,” which was submitted to him, in London, as a Velasquez. Remember as you read the Satterlee account of this episode that it took place in 1907, when Morgan was almost as famous for his huge-scale collecting as he was for his financial operations and influence:

  At the time this picture was shown him he told the dealer to leave it until he could study it and consider the matter. This was quite according to his custom. The dealer left it on a chair at Prince’s Gate [the Morgan town house in London]. There was no documentary evidence that went with it, but it was a charming little picture, painted undoubtedly in Velasquez’s time.… Of course, when a picture like that was left for Mr. Morgan to consider, it was not hidden. The other dealers who came saw it in turn. One of them might say, “Oh, I know where that came from. I was offered that a year ago at such-and-such a price. It is not an original.” Another would remark: “That picture was sold at Christie’s ten years ago, but its authenticity is in question. I hope, Mr. Morgan, that you have not bought it as an original, nor paid much for it as a picture.” And so on. Mr. Morgan always listened to it all without comment. Before he made up his mind whether he wanted the picture or not he would get someone from the Berlin Museum who happened to be in London, or an expert connected with one of the great London public galleries, to stop in and look at the picture. If it was not documented and the preponderance of the best opinion was against it, he rejected it.