by Jean Strouse
Members of the old Yankee gentry who did not simply fall back on sport and culture devised new ways of reinforcing social boundaries. They joined private clubs, founded patriotic and genealogical societies, sent their sons to exclusive schools,† drew up the Social Register, moved to restrictive suburban communities, and exhibited a newly virulent anti-Semitism. A few successful German Jews had already been accepted into Protestant society, but rising xenophobia suddenly turned them out of suburbs, hotels, resorts, and clubs: Joseph Seligman, who worked with the Morgans on the government refundings and had helped found New York’s Union League Club during the Civil War, was stunned to find himself refused admission to the Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga Springs in 1877.
Pierpont occupied a distinctive place on this shifting social ground, since he qualified for membership in both the old and new elites. Educated on two continents, fluent in two foreign languages, he had spent his life among wealthy, powerful people, lived in the best neighborhoods, joined the most prestigious clubs, earned a listing in the first Social Register, sent his son to St. Paul’s and Harvard, and felt equally at home in Manhattan, Boston, Newport, London, Paris, Cairo, and Rome. He had nothing to prove in the glittering drawing rooms of the nouveaux riches, and looked more to Europe than to old New York for models of behavior and style. Yet his professional drive and multiplying fortune were more characteristic of the arrivistes than of the Old Guard. Few men his age who assumed patrician status as a birthright spent their days trying to curb railroad wars or market government bonds.
A casual remark by professional socialite Ward McAllister to the effect that “only about 400 persons living in New York had any claim to be called ‘society’ ” produced a catalogue of the top “400” names (actually, counting spouses and adult children, about 550) running from Astor to Vanderbilt. McAllister announced in his introduction to the published list that he was including “only those … who are now prominently to the front, who have the means to maintain their position, either by gold, brains, or beauty, gold being always the most potent ‘open sesame,’ beauty the next in importance, while brains and ancestors count for very little.” The Morgans qualified, as did the Levi P. Mortons, William Butler Duncans, W. W. Shermans, Charles Laniers, August Belmonts, and several Vanderbilts.
Henry Adams, generously endowed with ancestors and brains, sneered at the stature accorded to mere gold: “Scarcely one of the very rich men held any position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been elected to an office, or even into a good Club,” he wrote in his Education. Yet Adams made an explicit exception of Morgan, “whose social position had little to do with greater or less wealth.”
Perhaps because of his prominent standing in both worlds—he had status in the old and power in the new—Morgan was less intent than many plutocrats on barricading the enclaves of privilege. He had refused in 1868 to leave the disheveled metropolis for tidy suburban New Jersey, and complained to his father a few years later about the dearth of brains on Wall Street. Drawn to talent, energy, and competence, he had rejected partners whose qualifications were only dynastic, and made unconventional choices in hiring Egisto Fabbri and backing Thomas Edison. About the “tight little citadel” of old New York, he might have said, with one of the most socially self-confident characters in The Age of Innocence, “we need new blood and new money.”
His meritocratic instincts did not lead him to Jews. Early in the next century he would decline participation in a deal that seemed “a little too Jewish,” and refer to his own house and that of Barings’ American representatives as the only “white” firms in New York. Yet his derogations of Jews were infrequent and offhand, common to the world he knew; they bore none of the personal venom expressed by other Anglo-Saxon patricians, including Henry Adams and his own son, Jack.‡ In 1904 Morgan offered the presidency of one of his major enterprises to the man who seemed most qualified for the job—a German Jew. (See Chapter 23.)
He made another unorthodox choice when it came time to find a new rector for St. George’s Church. He had remained devoted to the conservative Dr. Tyng for twenty years, but by 1878, when Tyng finally retired, the church was a shambles. Attendance and endowment had declined after the Civil War as immigrants, poverty, and “trade” encroached on the once fashionable neighborhood around Union Square, and the wealthy fled north. Only about twenty of the “old” families remained active at St. George’s, including the Tracys, still on East 17th Street, and the Morgans, even though they had moved uptown. Pierpont joined the St. George’s vestry, which was headed by Fanny’s father. Forty churches below 20th Street relocated north in the eighties and nineties, but Charles Tracy and his son-in-law refused to seek higher ground. The problems in this parish were emblematic of what was happening in cities throughout the Northeast, and though neither Tyng nor his immediate successor had been able to solve them, the St. George’s governors were determined to find someone who could.
In the autumn of 1882 they interviewed the Reverend William Stephen Rainsford for the job. The Irish-born son of an Anglican clergyman, Rainsford at thirty-two was a “deep-chested, broad-shouldered Christian athlete,” reported the New York Sun—over six feet tall, with rugged good looks that seemed more suited to the stage than the pulpit. He was also a charismatic preacher and a pronounced social radical.
He had moved from Dublin to London in the 1860s, when his father, Marcus, was appointed rector of a chapel in Belgrave Square. In the Church’s midcentury theological schism, the senior Rainsford sided with the Evangelical Revival against the Oxford Movement’s High Church Anglo-Catholics. The junior Rainsford earned a degree at Cambridge before taking holy orders, then emigrated to Canada in 1878. He started out preaching the Evangelical gospel and urging “New Birth” through faith in Christ, but his work with the urban poor in London and Toronto turned him violently against the doctrines of his father and Dr. Tyng. Their Low Church party had taken “the wrong side” in the great social struggle of the century, Rainsford later charged, when “it turned a deaf ear to the exceeding bitter cry of Labour” and supported “the tyranny of wealth.” While millions of people lived in squalid slums, their working hours “intolerably long,” their wages, diets, and living conditions appallingly inadequate, organized Christianity stood by arguing over dogma. Evangelicals in particular were so intent on “saving men’s souls from a distant Hell they left them to suffer in a very real present Hell.”
Rainsford soon gravitated to the reformist Social Gospel movement that grew out of English Christian socialism. Its leaders, sounding more like John Pierpont than Stephen Tyng, argued that Christianity was not a private pact between man and God but an active humanitarian ideal. They rejected popular Social Darwinist ideas about economic survival of the fittest, and organized community efforts in city slums to fight for legal justice, public health, and workers’ rights.
The St. George’s vestry invited Rainsford to come down from Canada in the late fall of 1882, and interviewed him in Morgan’s private study. The banker and the rector had not met before, but Morgan was familiar with Rainsford’s views, and the clergyman knew all about St. George’s decline. He had walked through the once elegant Stuyvesant Square, its dry fountains filled with dead cats and trash, and pronounced it “a dirty, neglected mockery of what a city park might be,” though “not so completely fallen from grace” as its neighbor, Tompkins Square—there “you took considerable chances if you walked across it at night.” Not in the least put off by these desolate prospects, he wanted to try out his ideas for social reform on a large city church.
In Morgan’s study that night, Rainsford outlined the conditions under which he would accept the job, certain (he said later) that his conservative hosts would not accept them. He would put all his energy into revitalizing St. George’s and making it stand for social reform; he would charge nothing for church membership, abolish all committees except the vestry, and appoint new committees himself; he wanted $10,000 a year for three years, in addition to his
salary, to spend as he chose on the church.
As soon as he finished speaking a voice said, “Done.” It was Morgan, who “wrung my hand, and said: ‘Come to us. We will stand by you.’ ”
Rainsford not only had a vision of what he wanted to do, he had specific plans and saw opportunity where other people saw only crisis. Reflecting later on Morgan’s swift decision, the clergyman said, “No man could more quickly or accurately size up a situation.… He was always looking for men fit to lead. He believed more in men than in measures. Once he found the man he was looking for, or thought he had found him, he … was willing to trust him far.”
Although many people considered Morgan a connoisseur of character, he once told his rector, “I am not a good judge of men. My first choice of a man is sometimes right; my second choice never is.” He chose people on instinct, for reasons he could not explain, and he made some big mistakes.
As promised, Dr. Rainsford turned St. George’s into a “hive of Christian activity.” Jack Morgan wrote home from boarding school in 1883, “Isn’t it splendid about the way Mr. Rainsford is making things move along after being so stagnant for so long? It must be a continual pleasure to go to the church now instead of a sad thing as it was last year.”
The rector started on the problems of the neighborhood. With immigrants and Americans from rural areas pouring into the nation’s cities, New York’s population had multiplied eightfold between 1825 and 1875, and grew from less than 2 million in 1880 to nearly 3.5 million in 1900. By 1898, when the five boroughs incorporated as New York City, half its residents were foreign-born. Rainsford reached out to the immigrant occupants of Lower East Side tenements with social services, and sent his assistants and deacons to recruit in the shops around Union Square: he opened a Sunday school and kindergarten on Avenue A, set up clubs, a trade school, and athletic facilities for young people, and discussion groups and drama societies for adults. His heroes in urban missionary work were the Boston Episcopal activist Phillips Brooks and the Danish journalist/photographer Jacob Riis, who published his shocking documentary study of the slums, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890.
For all his attention to the “other” half, Rainsford also managed to bring socially prominent families back into the St. George’s fold—Laniers, Minturns, Ketchums, Oelrichs, Schieffelins, Patons, Jays. He did not convert them to radical social activism, but he enlisted their help. The men funded his projects; the women taught domestic skills to girls from the Lower East Side, visited poor families with food and gifts at holidays, and donated money of their own. Rainsford wanted the parish house to serve as a community center, and after Fanny’s father died in 1885, Pierpont paid for a Charles Tracy Memorial House, with a chapel, Sunday school rooms, offices, meeting rooms, public bathrooms, and a gym.
Once a week Rainsford came uptown to have breakfast at 219 Madison. Morgan stood behind him with moral support and an open checkbook—even when they disagreed, which was often—and stood beside him at the church doors every Sunday morning, greeting parishioners as co-host and guardian of the proceedings. One year during Lent Rainsford invited laymen and clergymen from other denominations to lecture at St. George’s. Morgan disliked this departure from tradition, but when it elicited public criticism he sent a letter to the press pointing out that the revitalization and “great work” going on at St. George’s had “no parallel in the United States”: there could be no disloyalty to the Episcopal Church and no conceivable harm, he went on, in the rector’s calling on “the best writers and thinkers he could secure, both clerical and lay,” to discuss subjects “which are engrossing the thought of the Christian world.”
This unlikely friendship lasted nearly thirty years, during which time Morgan’s liberality extended further than Rainsford knew. When the clergyman and his family left Toronto for New York at the beginning of 1883, the financier arranged with the railroads to pay for the move “so that Mr. Rainsford would not be aware but that it would be an act of courtesy on the part of the roads.” Rainsford suffered from depression, and in the mid-eighties Morgan sent him on camping expeditions in the Rocky Mountains with Jack, which gave the rector an extended vacation, and Jack outdoor experience with an athletic adult male. When Rainsford broke down completely in 1889, Morgan sent him away for six months of salaried travel and rest. At the end of this furlough, the banker set up a trust fund for the rector’s family, telling him: “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 any one but your wife.” Several years later he gave the Rainsfords money to build a house in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
After Morgan died, Rainsford wrote about him in two published memoirs and a private “Recollection.” He noted the contradictions in his patron’s character—a stubborn resistance to change combined with a “wide and deep tolerance” in religious matters: “I do not believe any of all of my teachings, in the pulpit or out of it, moved him by so much as one inch from the [Evangelical] ‘plan of salvation,’ the traditions of his youth which he held with vise-like tenacity,” recalled Rainsford. “Of every radical proposition I advanced—ecclesiastical, social, religious—he disapproved; yet back of me, ever and always, was his firm loyalty. Without it I couldn’t have accomplished what I did.”
The rector found the banker “intemperate and sometimes unjust in his oppositions,” but also “absolutely honest and patriotic.” Behind the autocratic demeanor he saw the qualities that won people’s trust: “When he chose to exercise it, there was an extraordinary and winning charm about J. Pierpont Morgan,” Rainsford wrote. “… I have never seen any eyes quite like his. They had penetration and kindliness combined to an extraordinary degree. When he said a thing, and looked full at you as he said it, to doubt him was impossible.”
As minister/confessor, Rainsford saw more of the private Morgan than most people did, and described his friend’s “extraordinarily emotional” side—the “flashes of insight, call it genius or call it prophetic fire.” Morgan was “more reserved than any man I ever knew,” with few inner resources in times of trouble: “no scholar, no reader, [he] had not learned to care for nature, or find any rest or companionship in her high company.” When the famous reserve broke down, the “profound emotionalism of his nature had its way with him. The great deeps were broken up, and to some near one he called aloud for help.” In these hours of “despairing despondency,” the banker “deeply doubted himself,” and “three times in thirty years all shadow of reserve between us was … swept aside. I do not know that as he thus clung to me, I was able to do him any good, but at least I told him what I thought was the truth; and if love and longing could help a man, he ought to have had some succor from me.”§
Many of Rainsford’s comments about Morgan sound a self-aggrandizing note. Retrospectively emphasizing the superiority of his own convictions, the rector suggests that he alone was able to meet the needs of this great, troubled soul; entirely dependent on his benefactor’s largesse, he admits to no self-interest. And though he claims exemption from the common response to power—“Many love to bow themselves before the strong. And so an environment of almost universal flattery and adulation, sometimes gross and fawning, moved with [Morgan] wherever he went”—he was not immune to this effect. Moral one-upmanship is aggressive first cousin to bowing before the strong.
Morgan’s support of Rainsford had only partly to do with his affinity for men of action. His own work, which he regarded as a noble calling, largely satisfied his patrician sense of obligation to provide for a society that afforded him great material privilege. After hours, he was neither inclined nor qualified to contend with the urgent social problems of the Gilded Age, but he could give his imprimatur to a moral crusader who wanted nothing more than to take those problems on—especially when the crusader was British, Anglican, good-looking, charismatic, and, like his patron, melancholic. Perhaps in his relations with Rainsford, Morgan was also salvaging broken fragments of his past, indirectly requiting the affection of an
other radical preacher.
New York in the decade surrounding the country’s centennial emerged as the center of U.S. commerce and culture, representing in concentrated form the conflicts and achievements of the “American Renaissance.” While Rainsford tended to urban poverty and the influx of immigrants at one end of the social scale, wealthy New Yorkers set out in an expansive, nationalist mood to turn their metropolis into one of the cultural capitals of the world.
Artistic and scientific enterprise has always flourished in great commercial cities—in ancient Athens, Alexandria, and Rome, Renaissance Florence, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, eighteenth-century Paris, nineteenth-century London—and the Yankee merchant princes regarded New York as next in line: it would be a uniquely American place, harnessing the energies and talents of democracy to the heritage and cultural standards of the past.
New Yorkers who could afford the latest technology in the early eighties learned to use telephones, experimented with Mr. Edison’s light, and rode for the first time in passenger elevators. Steam-driven elevated railroads altered the topography of the city for all social classes, and the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883—the longest span ever built—seemed a triumph of American science, ingenuity, and design.
Artists and writers were taking possession of the Old World’s legacy and inventing a vernacular of their own. Between November 1884 and April 1885 the illustrated Century Magazine ran articles on “Sculptors of the Early Italian Renaissance,” “Dutch Portraiture,” “The Worship of Shakespeare,” and the city of Florence—along with pieces on “Recent Architecture in America” and “American Painters in Pastel.” There was an essay on “The Poet Heine” by Emma Lazarus, and a review of illustrations by the American artist Elihu Vedder for a new edition of Omar Khayam’s twelfth-century Rubaiyat, translated by Edward FitzGerald (“an American artist has joined the Persian poet and the English translator,” wrote the Century’s critic, “and the result … presents the original strain in a richer, profounder harmony”). The magazine also published fiction by Mark Twain (“Huckleberry Finn”), Henry James (“The Bostonians”), William Dean Howells (“The Rise of Silas Lapham”), and Joel Chandler Harris (“Free Joe and the Rest of the World”), along with nonfiction about the Civil War (Ulysses S. Grant on “The Battle of Shiloh”), and essays on the Smithsonian, Daniel Webster, Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Phases of State Legislation” by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and postslavery issues of race—the “greatest social problem before the American people today.”